by Raja Alem
“You, people of the alley, whom I cherish and whose lost causes I’ve defended tirelessly in my column …” His eyes bored into the alarmed faces arrayed before him. “You’ve stolen my life. You’ve suffocated every youthful spirit in the neighborhood. You’re nothing but a bunch of hypocrites and liars who’ve banded together to fight life itself. You poison the minds of young people in the Lane of Many Heads. You’ve turned this place into a den of spies who pry into our most profound desires, our most intimate dreams. You’ve managed to turn the most private moments in our lives into a living hell. And you still have the nerve to stand in a house of God, blasting your prayers over the loudspeaker five times a day! You pray to ingratiate your way into heaven after you’ve gone and made our lives unbearable.” Yusuf avoided the sympathetic look in the cook Abd al-Hamid al-Ashi’s eyes and directed his rage at Sheikh Muzahim. “You. You build prisons with your left hand and mosques with your right. You’re always preaching about faith, but what faith? The faith of burying your daughter alive every day? The Lord knows you’ll be held to account on Judgment Day for all these prayers and prostrations. And you—” Yusuf turned to Yabis the sewage cleaner. “You dream of making it to heaven by cleaning up our shit! You’re killing yourself day in and day out, but you think that our excrement’s going to win you God’s favor. What kind of role model are you for us and your own children? What if we all followed your lead and became cockroaches living off the neighborhood’s waste? Of course, I’m a hypocrite, too. None of us knows what it means to live next door to God’s holiest sanctuary, what it requires of us. Are we supposed to celebrate life? Or to fight against it?”
The loudspeakers carried an explosion of anger from inside the mosque. “That’s the voice of Satan himself speaking!”
“The kid’s crazy, look at his eyes …”
The speakers had drawn an audience. A cloud of dust rose in the alley as people poured in from the fringes of the Lane of Many Heads, rushing to see the spectacle. Even those who didn’t usually get up early enough for dawn prayers couldn’t miss the appearance of the devil himself in their neighborhood mosque.
Some of the young men came forward warily, hoping to wrest the microphone from Yusuf’s trembling hands. At the other end of the Lane of Many Heads, Azza burst out of nowhere and ran down the length of the alley in her abaya to the door of the mosque, where she hesitated. She wanted—no, yearned—to push past the men and get to Yusuf, to calm him down, but some fear, like the fluttering of a dove’s wings, stopped her.
“What kind of believers are you? What are you doing here, bowing and kneeling like robots, when true religion is out there, in the streets and in people’s homes, in the good deeds you do, whether great or small!” A cloud of heat settled over the mosque and the neat lines of prayer rugs began to sway and overlap; sweat trickled between men’s shoulders, daubing wet patches onto their shirts, sliding into the scene. A group of young men had Yusuf surrounded. Yusuf sent his first assailant flying through the rest of the circle with a forceful shove.
“God give you strength! Don’t be frightened by the devil. Don’t let him weaken your faith!” shouted a voice somewhere in the back, cheering the attackers on. Raising his voice, Yusuf answered him, “Have faith in life, in the breath of life His spirit gave us! Don’t fight the breath which brought us into this world. Know its many blessings. Heaven begins in the street and ends at the threshold of the mosque!”
“Muslim brothers, block your ears to Satan’s blasphemy! Repeat God’s name and attack him. This is the devil himself speaking to you through Yusuf, an angel of hell!”
That morning Halima woke from a deep sleep to the sound of her son’s rage booming out through the mosque’s loudspeakers. She leapt up, grabbed her abaya, and raced out into the alley. The air exploded as Yusuf, now cornered by the men, screamed at the top of his lungs, “Look at the deal you’ve made!” Amplified by the loudspeaker, his shriek tore through every breast in the Lane of Many Heads. “A prison in life and a paradise in death!” he yelled, as fists pounded him and feet smashed into his face and his ribs, not even sparing his broken knee. They were beating Satan himself. They beat Yusuf until he collapsed, crushed under the weight of their rage, until even his breath fell silent.
Halima broke through the ring of bodies to find her son had been tied up with cables and his head wrapped in a red scarf so as to hide the face of the devil.
“Move, woman. Stand back or Satan will get you!” Halima paid no attention to the warning and pushed her way through the crowd of men to her son’s unconscious body. Her abaya slipped as she knelt down to cradle Yusuf’s crumpled frame in her lap and the men retreated at the sight of her bare chest. As soon as the ambulance appeared at the end of the alley, they surged around her again and shoved her aside. She found herself stumbling feebly into Azza’s arms outside the mosque. Meanwhile, Sheikh Muzahim and his bright orange beard stepped forward to fan the men’s rage:
“Fear for your religion! The devil has taken over the body of this cursed boy. Cast him into hell! Show him no mercy!” His hand trembled as he grasped his black prayer beads, urging the paramedics and policemen to expunge the satanic presence.
“He is an angel of hell,” echoed Imam Dawoud. “Who is more wicked than he who seeks to destroy God’s mosques and prevent worshippers mentioning His name therein? Only disgrace awaits such people …” His son Mu’az went to turn on the air conditioner to end the disgrace Yusuf had caused.
Yusuf was taken to Ta’if and booked into Shihar psychiatric hospital. He was strapped to the bed in a crowded ward where six patients lay immersed in their own feces, spraying everything around them with putrid froth every time they shrieked at the orderlies or at Yusuf when he tried to escape. He was unimaginably furious: to end up in Shihar hospital was a fate worse than death. Shihar … The name alone was considered an insult back in the Lane of Many Heads in Mecca; it was where disturbed girls, who were virgins, suddenly gave birth, where the healthy dropped dead by morning, where sanity trickled away down drainpipes and heads were emptied slowly of their identities, where a person’s human qualities would be washed away by the surging onset of idiocy and stupefaction.
“My mind’s never been in such a shockingly pure state before! Please, you must listen to me. You can’t just run away from me! We’re all hypocrites and liars!” It was Yusuf’s eyes, not his words, that gripped the nurses and doctors. Two popping eyes that shot sparks and never clouded over, not even when he was pumped full of enough tranquilizers to floor a camel. His body would go limp and his tongue would become tied, but his eyes still pierced the faces around him with burning rays, all day and all night.
The technician fixed wires to Yusuf’s head, while avoiding that gaze, which streaked through the heads gathered around him like a shooting star. The first charge tore through the whorls of Yusuf’s brain and lifted his convulsed body several centimeters into the air, but it didn’t succeed in forcing those eyelids shut. The technician doubled the voltage. He could almost smell the unblinking eyes burning.
The sessions continued for a week, but they couldn’t put Yusuf to sleep. His memory exploded into fragments that caused wounds, which looked like dove’s footprints, to appear across different parts of his body. They placed him in isolation, in a cell resembling a metal box, to monitor these symptoms. The shocks increased, but they did nothing to crack open the store of rage that was pumping poison straight into his bloodstream, turning his skin a dark purple.
Just when Yusuf had finally managed to subdue the poison and pull a mask of calm over his features, it was time for him to be examined by the chief consultant supervising his case. Yusuf mustered every mask he had and pleaded to be allowed to make one phone call.
On Yusuf’s seventh day in Shihar, al-Ashi appeared, accompanying Yusuf’s mother on her visit. “I’m no less crazy than any of you,” said Yusuf. Al-Ashi contemplated Yusuf, who was sitting strapped to a bare white chair—patches of untrimmed beard, features contorted from i
nhuman pain, pleading with an incandescent glow—in the starkness of the visiting room and the chill of the air-conditioning, which iced their faces. Despite the cold, sweat ran in little rivulets from Halima’s temples down to her chin and dripped onto her great chest. Something about that sweat made Yusuf’s gaze even glassier; his blackened body seemed dried-out and wide-awake, burning with some internal fire. The voice hissing out of his chest sprayed them with coarse splinters:
“You’re my only hope of escaping this wretchedness. I’m strapped to the bed, I lie in my own shit like an animal, in a paddock with other animals pissing and shitting in their sleep.” Al-Ashi turned to look at Halima questioningly.
“Crazy or not, this place isn’t fit for human beings,” Halima answered, and for the first time in her life there was a bitter edge to her words.
“Just take me to the Sanctuary and leave me there,” Yusuf begged.
“The electrical activity in his brain has reached ninety-five microvolts. Five more and this young man loses any chance of getting his mind back,” the doctor said, attempting to convey the gravity of Yusuf’s condition to Halima and al-Ashi. “Usually, when the mind is active, the frequency of beta waves should be between fifteen and forty waves per second. But your relative’s mind”—the doctor scrutinized al-Ashi carefully for any indication that he understood this bombardment of medical information—“is registering a constant rate of thirty-two hertz, sometimes even more than forty. The mind needs deep, dreamless sleep in order to produce the delta waves that help the body recuperate and regain its natural internal balance, but not even the strongest tranquillizers we’ve got have managed to put your son to sleep. He’s hanging on to his sanity by a single thread, and I can assure you if he leaves the hospital now, it will be severed.” The only thing al-Ashi and Halima got out of all the jargon was that Yusuf needed to be taken to the house of God to be rid of his beta, delta, and satanic waves. His attempt to intimidate them having failed, the doctor could do nothing but sign the discharge papers and order that Yusuf be tightly bound and strapped into Khalil’s waiting car.
The moment they were off the hospital grounds, al-Ashi undid the restraints and Yusuf immediately—and for the first time in a week—closed his eyes and fell asleep in the back seat. Khalil’s usual acerbic comments deserted him when he laid eyes on the pitiful sight in the rearview mirror. The car went through Ta’if and headed in the direction of al-Hada and the Kara mountains, and down to the Plain of Arafat. Halima, al-Ashi, and Khalil listened the whole time to the remote sound of Yusuf’s breathing. It sounded like he was trying to breathe life itself into his lungs, to breathe in the sanity that had been taken from him at Shihar. But no sooner had they reached the Sanctuary in Mecca—the car hadn’t even stopped—than Yusuf shoved the car door open, leapt out, and disappeared into the crowd. Halima grabbed al-Ashi’s arm to stop him from chasing after him.
“He’s in God’s hands now.” Indeed, she didn’t attempt to look for him at all but merely sent Mu’az to check on him later and make sure that he was still remembering to sleep. For three days straight he didn’t leave the Sanctuary, not even to use the bathroom. He was like an empty shell, living off handfuls of holy Zamzam water, feeling ever more weightless and transparent. He would stand purposefully in the great courtyard of the mosque, in the middle of one of the marble passageways that led to the Kaaba, and block the path of the people entering. People walked straight through him as though they were walking through a sunbeam. His body no longer had any solid, substantial presence, and people could penetrate through it now. Instead, his body functioned as an X-ray, revealing their innermost essences.
Each day Mu’az would stand watching Yusuf from a distance as he took up his position at one of the mosque’s doors. When the call to prayer sounded, Yusuf would greet those entering, grabbing the hands of strangers and clasping them with childlike joy in a gesture of welcome: “You’re a good man! I salute you!”
Sometimes he would chase someone maniacally through the colonnades, as he did to one toothpick-seller. “You’re evil!” he screeched. “I see the devil in you!”
People would run to get away from him, and they took care to avoid crossing his path, terrified by this man who might equally welcome them or condemn them. It pained Mu’az to see Yusuf slipping like a phantom in and out of the colonnades in pursuit of visions that eluded him. Perhaps the only place they existed was inside his head. He gathered his strength and approached Yusuf, who seized his hand eagerly.
“It makes me so happy to see you through these new, insightful eyes of mine. I see you’re an extension of my body, Mu’az, like a third knee that nothing can break. I know you’re not shocked by what I’m doing to the worshippers, because I can see right through you just like I can see through them.”
“I don’t know if what you’re doing is right, Yusuf. Why are you just repeating the stuff Sheikh Muzahim always says, dividing people into angels or devils?!”
“No no, Mu’az, it’s not me who’s dividing people up. I’m no longer a body. I’m weightless like a beam of light. Try to catch me!” Mu’az retreated; he thought he was going to walk straight through him.
When Yusuf returned to the Lane of Many Heads several days later, he was as silent as the grave. The neighbors watched as he spent his nights wide-awake, his eyelids never even drooping for a moment. He was in a state of such terrible animation that he couldn’t lie or sit down. He would pace back and forth, tearing up his papers: he started with his identity papers, went on to his signed diploma from Umm al-Qura University, then drafts of unpublished articles from Umm-al-Qura newspaper, his memoirs of Mecca, personal photos taken by his university classmates.
“I’m not going to leave a single word behind. I’ve got to free myself from this deceitful sham of a life that’s taken everything from me,” he repeated agitatedly to his mother Halima, who watched him wordlessly as he tossed scraps of his innocent past out into the alley. The people of the Lane of Many Heads awoke each morning to find themselves treading on fresh piles of Yusuf’s shredded-up life.
All that came after Azza’s first betrayal.
A dove alighted by their feet in the Mosque of the Sanctuary, bringing Halima back to the present. The dove hopped about in little circles, cooing and fixing its red gaze on Yusuf. In front of them, a blind Quran reciter chanted invocations in a low tone, his white eyes rolling. The Quran on his lap was open to the Verse of the Light: “God is the light of heaven and earth. His light is like a niche and within it a lamp …” His eyes grew whiter as he recited.
“It won’t last for long. Just until they find out what really happened with the body, and then, gracious Lord, let this adversity pass.”
They were suddenly interrupted by a great crash that tore through the tranquility of the courtyard. The worshippers around the Kaaba scattered and the crowds retreated. Glass smashed somewhere in front of them, and Yusuf instantly understood what had happened: a man, his face covered, had pulled the dome off the case covering the Prophet Abraham’s footprints and was now circling around it, threatening the guards with a chainsaw. People were shrieking in panic: “He’s stolen the key to the Kaaba! Stop that infidel!”
The terrified guards hesitated, keeping out of reach of the chainsaw, and the man darted toward the Mas’a gallery, a passage spanning the two holy mountains. In a split second, Yusuf took off after him, taking a shortcut around the Well of Zamzam, where he’d left his wheelchair by a row of taps. The thief was making for the outside gate of the Mas’a when the wheelchair hurtled into him, sending the chainsaw flying through the air. It crashed to the ground right in front of Halima, who had come running after Yusuf: “The thief! Watch out, Yus—” The hoarse cry had barely left her chest when the two bodies connected and went rolling across the floor. As the crowd watched the struggle between the two mismatched forms—skinny Yusuf battling a giant with mad, supernatural strength—the key shot out and went skimming across the marble floor. Yusuf dived after it. The crowd gasped
as the key spun toward the drain beneath the rows of taps and was swallowed up. Yusuf plunged his hand into the drain vainly while behind him, the thief vanished into thin air. By the time the police arrived and the cleaning company had been called to open up the drain, there was little trace of what had happened except for Yusuf and the lost key. Even those who’d witnessed it happen doubted they’d really seen the key fall into the drain.
A heavy silence lay over the mosque, and flocks of doves settled motionless on the tops of the colonnades. The smashed dome gaped open over the plinth where Abraham’s footprints, after their calamity, lay bare in the Meccan night. The two prophetic feet seemed desperate to continue their eternal journey.
Aisha: Potential Identification of the Deceased (preliminary)
I, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, PLAYED DEAD AS DETECTIVE NASSER AL-QAHTANI, a cold cup of coffee on the table before him, sat fiddling with a few date pits in the protective shade of a cafe at the entrance to my alley. He waited patiently, sheltering from the blaze of the sun, which his heavy uniform seemed to suck right up, leaving him dripping with sweat. He watched Sheikh Muzahim in his shop until the sun was halfway across the sky and Imam Dawoud sounded the call to prayer. When Sheikh Muzahim picked up his cane and headed over to the mosque to pray, Nasser leapt up, crossed the alley, and slipped easily through the shop to the small door at the back. He went through to the storage area beyond, where he was swallowed up by a maze of tiny rooms, each stuffed to the ceiling with sacks of produce, leaving scarcely enough room to set a single foot inside. Nasser crept forward, urged on by the obvious emptiness of the place and the smell of foodstuffs long past their sell-by date. He spotted the huge old-fashioned radio set that had been hollowed out and concealed under the staircase leading to the roof where Halima and her son Yusuf lived. This was the radio set in which Azza hid Yusuf’s letters. Nasser headed past the furthest aisles of the storage area to the back, where Azza’s kitchen was. Before him was a small stove placed on a low table, and next to it were copper pots and non-breakable melamine plates drying in the sun under a wide skylight in the roof. A rusty hosepipe, still dripping, poked out of the bathroom, with its squat toilet and peeling walls. Nasser looked up at the narrow window close to the ceiling and saw, on the bars of the window, the offcuts of fabric that Azza used to signal to Yusuf to inform him of her father’s whereabouts. Most of the scraps were black; in the middle there was a single piece of red fabric. Nasser couldn’t translate the message. His attention was drawn to some pieces of fabric used as sanitary towels. They’d been washed and hung out to dry, they’d stiffened but they still bore the faint scent and outline of impossible-to-remove bloodstains. Was it safe to sneak into Azza’s room? Standing in that narrow space, looking at those scraps of fabric, Nasser felt like he was the one being watched.
