Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Aisha

P. S. I was like a stonethrown through the air that day. I shook at the thought of that inevitable moment when it would crash to earth.

Yusuf had successfully managed to change Nasser’s perception of Mecca. He’d begun to see the city as a woman. Nasser was robbed of the Mecca he’d known and had sacrificed his life protecting. He had fallen into a spider’s web of contracts sealed and broken in the Lane of Many Heads. Yusuf’s words were making him dizzy: “every time Mecca was on the brink of dying of thirst, a woman brought it something to drink: Hagar, Zubayda, Fatima.” Aisha took the complete opposite position:

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message zero

Can you hear?

I’m possessed by the doves’ cooing.

I don’t know why I’m haunted by the events of the day I came back from Germany.

It was during the last ten days of Ramadan, and the clock showed eleven at night when I came out of King Abd al-Aziz Airport in Jeddah with my small suitcase. On the highway, the driver missed the exit for the Mecca road, so we had to take the Medina road that runs through Jeddah, north — south, and found ourselves stuck in celebrating crowds and traffic: it was the 23rd of September, National Day. It took us five hours to get across the city — a journey that normally took a quarter of an hour. I was somewhere between ecstatic and fearful as our car was swallowed up by a sea of cars of all different types — you couldn’t even imagine — fancy cars, beaters, wrecks, all draped with the green flag with its sword and the profession of faith — there is no god but God — faces painted green, green clothes of every kind, green scarves, green hats, fluttering from car windows and boys’ and girls’ bodies as they hung out of windows or popped up through sunroofs, dancing, exchanging victory cries, blocking all the city’s main arteries, or congregating around the main roundabouts and monuments to join dance circles where crazy hip-hop mixed with dignified traditional Gulf dances.

In Mecca, we’d often heard the rumors about Jeddah’s fanatic nationalism, but we never took it seriously. In a country leery of any kind of celebratory motorcades, this was the one day in the year when the streets were given over to public celebration. There was no official sanction, but laws were bent and young people took advantage of the blind eye that the religious police turned to that holiday in particular. Headscarves slipped off girls’ heads and every street was a party.

I rolled down the car window with trepidation, a strange mixture of intimidation and utter abandon as the driver weaved in and out of traffic James Bond — style, taking every unannounced shortcut he could to rescue us from the storm we’d found ourselves in the middle of.

A strange dreamworld in which car radio speakers blasting Gulf dance music vied with mosque loudspeakers broadcasting verses from the Quran during vigil prayers in the Ramadan night.

You should’ve been here, ^^^, to taste the Saudi hodgepodge for yourself. Sow-Dee Champagne cocktail!

Aisha

P. S. We grew up hearing mother Halima’s words: “All the demons are chained up in Ramadan, so any sin we commit during that month stems from our own impulses. It’s ours and ours alone and we’ll be held accountable for it. No help from the devil.” Azza always laughed at that, muddying up the gravity of those words.

When I look through the emails I’ve sent you, I wonder: Do you think I’m making up for Satan’s absence? Adding enough of his flavor? Or are they boring, the lines I write you?

It isn’t Ramadan at the moment but my stomach’s completely empty. Not a bite of food or a drop of water in twenty-four hours. I weigh almost nothing right now. It was so windy at sunset today, the air-conditioning unit almost flew out the window.

With people starving like we are now, it’s no trouble at all for the wind to pick us up and blow us through the air like it does all those plastic bags.

P. P. S. What will it take to break the bond between us?

I tried to do it a few times, but I was too fragile to send us both on our way.

And yet the whole time it would’ve been so simple:

Just a stepin the air.

P. P. P. S. There’s something I haven’t been able to bring myself to say to you. If Azzajumps, there won’t be anything left for me to hold on to.

“Jumps?” Nasser leafed frantically through the emails, in hot pursuit.

Bad Is Good

You once enchanted me by saying “Love is sharing our normality … Taking pleasure in our normality, without magic or charms.”

Why do I complain? Isn’t that the essence of living?

To deepen the pain, I listen again to the tape you gave me of music by de Falla. I told you one day how I adored Don Quixote, so you got me this tape of his ballet about Don Quixote but told me that you liked the other piece, about the nighttime secrets of the gardens of Andalusia … You told me more about Don Quixote and explained that Sancho Panza had spent years creating Don Quixote, honing him with every forbidden dream he didn’t dare to carry out himself, and every adventure he’d always wanted to embark on, till he finally got Don Quixote to bring them to life …

Azza and I wonder now: which one of us is Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza?

I have to be honest with you — I can’t keep living in my computer screen like this …

Aisha

P.S. I was reading about Prize for Oddest Title of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and apparently the book that won this year was called If You Want Closurein Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs .

I think that I probably need to start by letting go of Azza …

And you, I know you’re bringing me down from the sky bit by bit, and you feel guilty — don’t …

After seeing your last photo, with veins bulging at your temples and fatigue dripping from your nose, which looks so long now, I felt like a creature of a totally different caliber, from a whole other world, maybe of light …

You, on the other hand, are a hole, whose emptiness no passion or pain can fill, and you’ll carry on swallowing us all one after the other …

Just now, at this moment, I was appalled to realize that I don’t love you any more. In fact, I never loved you! You were nothing but a placebo whose narcotic effect I willed my body to imagine … To end up, now, faced with your pitiable baldness and the way your hips start to hurt when you try to get into certain positions. The first time you pushed me onto a bed, you slumped heavily like a bear, your face distorted by panting, oblivious to my fear and my body, from which you proceeded to strip every illusion of passion. I put up with it just to get to the end of the tunnel, whenever and wherever it would come. I have this ability to close my eyes to things, even when my body’s all eyes …

There’s something dead about you, can’t you smell the stench? There’s something missing in the look of a man who has lost his virility. You confided in me once that your idol was Federico Fellini, because despite his own impotence, he attempted to feed off his friends’ sexual glories and turn them into artistic masterpieces.

I understand, you can’t believe this is happening to you; you go after every new face in the hope they can give you back that electric shock — don’t you get it? Your wires have been cut.

That’s it.

The current flowed again once with me, but it was just a fluke. It isn’t going to happen every day. That day, you called me a “sex bomb”!

I wonder if it’s you I’m talking to or Ahmad. Whichever one shook the kaleidoscope of my head, tangling my wires and electrodes so I can’t tell who’s who or what’s what any more …