The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there in silence when she was roused by the sound of a crow that had gotten stuck somehow in a forgotten water vat at the edge of the roof and was struggling to escape through the half-open lid. It burst out in a streak of black, followed by a sparrow.

  As soon as Halima lifted the decaying wooden lid, she could make out the papers that filled the vat. They were wrapped in trash bags. Her hand trembled, and the yellow of the papers nipped at her heart. “These aren’t drafts of my son Yusuf’s articles.” His rational, carefully indexed articles were piled up in the corner of their room. Halima scooped the papers out excitedly and pressed them to her cheeks and nose. The sweat of Yusuf’s hands, his unspoken passion, his madness wound its way through the words, from the first clipping at the top of the pile to the thick paper of a cement sack that bore a drawing of a pregnant woman. The charcoal line-drawing stopped her in her tracks: it showed a woman’s body from her waist to her knees, emphasizing her thighs and her round, pear-shaped stomach.

  Halima was illiterate so she couldn’t read any of the papers, all of which were dated, but still she memorized them: pages that spilled over with words fading away in the distance like a caravan of camels loaded with firewood, and others on which the camels had left marks where they’d kneeled. The words agitated her, bounding over the page like cats in heat, sniffing each other’s tails, scattering ink and meows left, right, and center, words, which were no more than a pit in the center of the page, a boulder poised to tumble off the bottom right-hand corner, a fishing net of tangles and runs.

  Halima realized that the papers she was clutching were her son’s insides. Her son, whom the body had driven away.

  She didn’t know what to think. There were dozens of pages fashioned out of cement sacks covered in tire tracks, blackened with charcoal drawings of creatures, a cross between humans and motorbikes, accompanied by signs—some bearing neon lights, others rusted and old—reminiscent of the shop fronts that lined the Lane of Many Heads. Halima knew they were Yusuf’s letters to Azza; once hidden in the broken radio, they must have been retrieved by Yusuf before he disappeared.

  Halima held the corner of her scarf over her nose as a cloud of dust rose from the charcoal; it was still moist. Her heart was beating hard. She put the lid firmly back on the vat and turned away.

  “If only I could read …”

  Angel Girls

  I SHUT MY EYES AS SOON AS THE STORM BROKE OVER MY ALLEYWAYS AND HOUSES. Everyone had to take his or her turn being questioned at the police precinct, and the raids, searches, and seizures went on endlessly. They confiscated all the most popular videotapes from the café. There were more crows circling over Mushabbab’s orchard than usual; he had taken off after the bank foreclosed on both house and orchard following a disastrous stock market venture that took place just a few days before the body appeared. Yusuf had disappeared along with Mushabbab, so no one was surprised when his mother Halima, the tea lady, was called in for questioning. A masterful mind-reader, I closely observed the features of those going into the precinct, and the ashen looks of those coming out, their index fingers stained with ink from marking witness statements. Halima, on the other hand, looked like she was on the way to one of her tea-pouring ceremonies. She’d even touched up the half-moon of henna on her palm, ready for the fingerprinting. When she stepped into Detective Nasser’s office, they were both surprised; she’d been expecting to see Ali, the officer who’d dealt with the body that morning. This Nasser lacked the air of indifference and flaccidity that Ali had affected as he strolled around the body, laughing flirtatiously at the feminine voice emanating from the cellphone that never left his ear, waving orders to his assistant before finally gesturing to him to move the body and clear the scene.

  “Aren’t you going to take fingerprints from the body first?!” Khalil the taxi driver’s voice boomed absurdly, as if straight out of a movie script. Everyone turned to look. The official smile on Ali’s face congealed suddenly in the heat. Without putting his phone down, he answered the challenge: “Is anyone here related to the deceased?” he demanded, staring defiantly into the eyes of the crowd around him. “If so, perhaps they’d care to come with us for a preliminary interrogation, so we can file charges and open a case. Then we can apply to the relevant authorities to take fingerprints. It’ll take some time, and, as you know, the victim’s relative will have to meet with us frequently over the course of our investigations. They’ll need to make sure they’re free for, let’s say, a month, maybe a year—who knows? Investigations take time. This isn’t a TV show, folks.” The crowd shrank back. Ali gestured to his assistant to clean up.

  Halima looked at Nasser; he didn’t have that naive, vacant look of authority that Ali had. Nasser looked like his pride had dried him out. The Sony air conditioner stiffened him; the ceiling fan whipped at his face and flaked the paint off the corners of the room; spiders had paved webs over the electrical wires and were working their way over the detective’s face as he examined the same grim, murderous mugs filing past, asking the same questions, dealing the same blows till his rough skin started to look like an extension of the brown camel-hair carpet on the floor. Detective Nasser al-Qahtani had interrogated thousands of people during his quarter century as head of the criminal investigation bureau, and they all left him feeling the same. Even though Nasser was not himself the human embodiment of Israfil, the archangel who will sound the trumpet on Judgment Day, he did derive his strength from him. The archangel worked as Nasser’s assistant, hiding in the beat-up Sony air conditioner and blowing at the faces of the accused.

  “This Nasser guy’s possessed,” Halima thought to herself, pity showing on her face. Nasser turned his swivel chair a half-turn to the right, stretching his shoulder across the width of the gray office, blocking her pleading look with the insignia on his uniform. She reminded him of his aunt Etra, queen of Wadi Mehrim in the Surat Mountains. Aunt Etra had married half a dozen men, each of them years younger than she was. She was famous for her snake-like ability to paralyze a man with a single look and make him crazy with desire. They said that she could peer right through a man down to his semen, that her eyes could pierce through to his spine, that she knew how to touch all the most vital points on a man’s body. They said that before she passed away, she’d leave the secrets of her wisdom to the wildest girls in Wadi Mehrim, but only if they could read and write, so that they could record her teachings about these special spots and one day publish them. The old men of Wadi Mehrim, though practically on their deathbeds, still fought over her, desperate to have her trace a map of vital points across their bodies, to breathe life back into them.

  Aunt Etra haunted his dreams. He always saw her in that final scene: she’d dared to stand up to his father at his sister Fatima’s funeral. The thought made color drain from Nasser’s face, and a smell of blood wafted into his office from the past, the same smell that his sister Fatima’s body gave off when it was wrapped in the white burial shroud. Denuded by that white shroud, all that could be seen of her body was the protrusion of her breasts, which bore into Nasser’s consciousness. He was five at the time and the events of that day had faded. He could remember little other than the smell of heat mixed with peril. Those breasts were engraved upon his memory. They were crowned with inch-wide dark circles that seemed to float on their surface in that dusty street in the Martyrs’ Quarter in Ta’if. Nasser had watched the astonished male eyes appearing, multiplying, orbiting those two dark circles. His father scrambled past them, pulling off his white robe as he ran, and threw it over Fatima’s naked body. As if possessed, he wrapped her up and dragged her into the house. He shoved her through the door, and with the same movement tore his robe off of her and flung it aside in disgust. Fatima was getting to her feet when his father seized the first thing he could find, a coffeepot: whack. Nasser had never been able to shake the sight of the coffeepot spout piercing Fatima’s forehead, the channel of blood that suddenly spurted out over her face a
nd neck, his father’s threatening finger: “Your sister died of an asthma attack …” His father burned that robe, the one he used to wear for holidays and Friday prayers.

  A doctor relative of theirs filled out the death certificate, his eyes lowered, embarrassed and sympathetic to the father’s plight. He’d had the story before coming: “The father who’d refused the neighbors’ son who was smitten with his daughter; the cousin who, as soon as he’d heard she had a love-interest, washed his hands of his betrothed; and the young woman herself and her giving, playful, thrumming heart that sent her, naked and crazy, out into the middle of the street.” The neighbors played their parts perfectly in burying the scandalous affair: they came to the house to mourn with the mother and father, telling countless stories of deaths caused by asthma, or insect bites and the like. You’d be forgiven for thinking the girl had simply forgotten to keep breathing. Their deeply sorrowful expressions and their commiseration ate at Nasser’s young sisters, for whom Fatima’s death might as well have been the death of their own reputations and any chance they might have had for a decent marriage or life. Only Nasser’s aunt Etra swore she’d never set foot in that house again. She marched down to the police station and reported what had happened with the coffeepot, but was met with nothing but pitying looks. She realized she’d have an easier time getting into the Guinness Book of World Records than penetrating those thick, almost armor-plated heads and their ideas about honor.

  That was four decades ago now. The climax of the plot was his own father’s death: it wasn’t grief for his daughter that killed him, rather the tragedy of his lost reputation. Nasser grew up an orphan, hostage to that crippled reputation, and he seized the first chance he got to flee to Mecca, to escape the sour blood that stained the threshold of their house. Years later, when the Lane of Many Heads case came across his desk, he felt compelled to discover the identity of the body and the person who’d flung it out into the street. He wasted no time in getting down to the task.

  Halima’s affectionate gaze pierced through his insignia straight to his heart, to the cowering child still grieving the death of his sister. Sweat began to trickle between his shoulder-blades and down his temples.

  “Your son Yusuf is a suspect,” said Nasser hoarsely, trying to regain the menacing aura he’d always relied on for strength and protection. It didn’t stop her from pitying him. He needed one of her potent coffee blends, she thought sympathetically. She picked one out, and seeing that the samovar had boiled, she polished her tiny coffee cups, stirred up the soul of her copper coffeepot, and poured out her encyclopedia of the neighborhood:

  “Yusuf gets scared easily, that’s all. He caught a glimpse of death on his doorstep and ran away. My son eats, sleeps, and breathes history; he graduated from Umm al-Qura University with honors. Then they gave him an important writing job on the Umm al-Qura newspaper.” Nasser let her continue. He listened to the ceiling fan whirring softly above; the aroma of Halima’s coffee evoked the love he felt toward Mecca. “This is the sacred womb whose honor I swore I’d protect,” he thought to himself. A pinch of ginger, thought Halima.

  “Mushabbab’s one of his friends. That boy’s all about Mecca and its secrets. Ever since we’ve known him, he vanishes every so often and comes back with some discovery.” The coffee boiled over, and she moved the pot to where hot embers lay beneath a layer of ash.

  “As for the girls of the Lane of Many Heads, ‘O fire, be cool and gentle!’ The angels still smile on them. They each live in their own little world.

  “Aisha and Azza, goodness me. Whenever I visit Aisha, I see her sitting clammed up with her computer in that tiny room of hers—as if it’s her entire world! And Azza, if it weren’t for me distracting her with my fabrics from time to time, she’d have long since drowned in her paper and charcoal! None of the girls in the Lane of Many Heads has done anything to deserve murder or punishment. If you give me a Quran, I’ll swear to you that Yusuf wouldn’t hurt a fly. His entire life is paper and ink. The only legacy he’s going to leave is the stack of papers that’s rotting in the old vat on the roof, getting pecked at by crows …”

  Confiscated Documents

  April 6, 2000

  A Window for Azza

  Azza was the first of my miracles. I wrote to her, and she made me fall in love with her.

  Why do I love Azza?

  I watch her; she hides her secrets in an old radio at the bottom of the staircase that leads up to the roof. She takes out the very first scrap I ever sent her when I was nine years old. It was a drawing of a triangle-shaped girl with hair like seven violin strings, freshly cropped. That was the day Azza first picked up a charcoal stick and tried to talk to the girl. With three strokes, she turned out another girl just like the first, and I followed her with another, this time with shorter strokes for hair. The sheet of paper flew back and forth between us, but then she surprised me with a boy, breaking my stride. When she said his name was Yusuf, I felt her touch for the first time, felt there was nothing more to say. There was nothing that could express transgression and passion like the appearance of that boy.

  If it weren’t for Azza, I’d have never learned how to make love. I experienced my first orgasm at that precocious age. Azza was every woman, every girl I met.

  I realized then that the boy had liberated the girl—as if she were a dove—so he could massage her neck and break into the world of women that lay behind closed doors. The dove never looked back, not even on the day I took it out from its nest inside the busted radio and wrote “Azza has the eyes of an angel” between its eyes with my finger.

  At these words of romance, the sheet crumpled and the girl’s heart shrank back, and I could hear her laughing as she said, “If I could undo the collar and cut the girl’s hair that’s tied to my tail, I’d have swallowed the boy and flown away.”

  Yusuf’s enigmatic diary was laid out in a pile in front of Detective Nasser, who was slowly making his way through it. Part of it dated from 1987 onward, but another part covered the period from 355–1120 AH (966–1708 AD). They’d recovered it from inside the water vat on Halima’s roof. It was prefaced with a report by the expert who’d examined all the episodes and their arrangement. The report ended, “The defendant Yusuf refers to his memoirs as ‘windows,’ and he divides them into two sections: ‘windows for Azza,’ in which he describes the alley to his beloved, and ‘windows for Umm al-Qura,’ in which he dredges up incidents from history.”

  It was almost midnight, but detective Nasser al-Qahtani was still at his desk, going over stacks of interrogation transcripts and back down the deadend where his investigation had stalled. Each day brought dozens of cases like this one—sealed by murder, or torn open by rape—that would eventually go cold, pinned on SUSPECT UNIDENTIFIED. But the Lane of Many Heads case was different: this many-headed alley knew exactly who the murder victim was. It was just daring him to figure it out, thumbing its nose at his storied career as a detective. He could’ve ignored the Lane of Many Heads case. He could’ve let the archives swallow it up along with hundreds of pages of Yusuf’s diary and all of Aisha the schoolteacher’s emails, but something in those stacks of paper—something hidden—was taunting him. He couldn’t even tell the difference any more between what was real and what was a delusion brought on by the high blood sugar and cholesterol he’d developed after all those sleepless nights and fast-food meals eaten hurriedly at his desk.

  Nasser put off looking into the folder labeled “Emails from Aisha,” which his men had downloaded and printed out from a folder named “The One” on the missing teacher’s computer. The report stated that they “were sent from one party to an unidentified second party over the Internet.” What dormant cell lurked in those emails? Who was going to rouse it? And to what explosive end?

  August 30, 2001

  A Shroud for Azza

  If the earth were a bolt of fabric, how many meters would you need to wrap yourself up warm? What if there were a child or two, and Azza, to wrap up with you?
I already know what size the shroud has to be: it’s a cotton weave, white, eight to ten meters long, with strips to cover our genitalia, and drapes over our faces like a head-cloth in case our mouths fall open. “Mouths do nothing but bring shame. They’re never sated, not even in death.” To me, a shroud represents the ultimate act of shedding whatever the world might try to do to us. Do I have your permission to dream of making a home for you inside it, somewhere where we can have a child?

  I look around the cardboard room on your father Sheikh Muzahim’s roof, where my mother and I live. He lets us have it out of the kindness of his heart. I am twenty-eight years old. I’ve got a fiftieth of a square meter for each year of my life: fifty-six hundred square centimeters for me, and about twice that for my mother the tea lady. That includes everything: the bedroom, the roof, and the bathroom in the far corner. And yet we don’t pity ourselves either. We live on the gone-off leftovers from Sheikh Muzahim’s storeroom and whatever the tea money brings in, touching the sky like angels.

  I sit at my mother’s tea stall in the midst of her samovars and glistening teacups, which distort my face, reflecting it back at me mixed with the faces of angels. It’s a little game I play to make myself feel better. I’m obsessed with it.

  I’m going to write about veils as I watch your apparition reflected in my mother’s samovar. Do you mind if I write about death? You see, I got my start by corresponding with my father, who was veiled by death at the very moment I announced my existence in my mother’s belly. I corresponded with him so that I could reach you, Azza, so that I could pierce the even greater veil that separates us and falls over me like the night.

  I try to write with the simplicity of the dress I remember you wearing as a young teenager: black, with slits at the chest and the wrists.