The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  A room eyed him from the middle of the storage area. It had to be Azza’s. When he pushed open the door, the room surprised him with its starkness, mocking his uniform and eavesdropping on his cement-muffled footsteps. There was no trace of life in the room: no personal belongings, no clothes, no forgotten handprints on the walls. A plastic wardrobe stood there, thin and split; a broken drawer poked out of it as if Azza’s entire life had been rent open. A hard cotton-stuffed mattress lay on a slightly elevated section of floor beneath the window. Nasser couldn’t catch his breath all of a sudden. The room was totally bare. It didn’t give off any feminine scent whatsoever. Nasser, who could sniff out a drop of sweat on a corpse, couldn’t detect the slightest whiff of perspiration, not even a stray hair fallen in a corner or stuck to the mattress. It was a stock scene wiped clean of any feminine traces. But even so, it aroused him: he dropped onto the bed, imagining Azza tied to its hard surface, and was immediately blinded by his erection. He closed his eyes, cursing himself. He forced his legs to heave his trembling body up off the bed and his mind to focus on the facts around him. The second call had sounded and the early afternoon prayers had begun; after just four cycles of standing, bowing, prostrating, and kneeling, Sheikh Muzahim would return to his shop. Nasser examined the window again. Someone had ripped out the wooden crossbeams in the window, leaving only the rusty nails behind. Yusuf had written in his diary that the window was nailed shut and was never opened. Had Azza been killed and thrown out of this broken window?

  Nasser knelt down and lifted the edge of the thick cotton mattress to find a hollow storage area underneath. From inside the hollow, Batman stared back at him from the cover of an old comic, yellowed from having to hear the desolation in that room and the alley outside for such a long time.

  Nasser heaved the mattress onto his shoulder and bent down to see what else the drawer contained. Suddenly, a body landed on top of the mattress, burying him beneath it. Nasser’s face was slammed up against Batman’s, and he felt a pair of sticky knees ram into his back before the attacker fled, yanking the door open with a bang and making off like a flash into the storehouse outside. The taste of blood filled Nasser’s throat and nose. For a moment he felt like his neck had been wrung like a chicken’s, that his face was covered in blood like Batman’s mask. Terror rooted him to the spot. Looking around him, he could see no trace of anyone, only the unsettled air in the room and the open door. Too late, he bolted after his attacker, and had to stop, confused, surrounded by the different storage rooms, all of whose doors were open and whose dusty thresholds bore no footprints. Small prints like those of goats’ hooves led Nasser to the last room, which looked like an old bathroom. The door was ajar, strengthening Nasser’s suspicions. He attempted to squeeze through the opening, into the fetid darkness of the room, but the door was blocked by a pile of sacks behind it, and the opening was too narrow for a human to pass through.

  A hubbub from the mosque speakers suggested that prayers had ended, and that Nasser ought to leave right away, but a sudden movement in the deepest dark of one corner of the room caught his attention. It came from behind some sacks of coal. He thrust his head through the narrow opening in the door, half-expecting a blow to knock it right off his shoulders, but the eye peering fierily out at him was only that of an enormous rat, a Lane of Many Heads rat, which began nibbling hysterically at something. Nasser’s eyes widened in disgust as a mocking laugh filtered into the shop from the alley outside. It was only Imam Dawoud’s salutation announcing the end of prayers that finally forced Nasser to extricate himself from Sheikh Muzahim’s storeroom. The Sudanese cashier at the cafe gave the detective a derisive look as he burst out into the afternoon sun, his face bloodied and his eyes chasing a specter.

  Hurrying down the alley, Nasser was no longer certain what had happened inside Muzahim’s shop. Had Azza stashed Batman under her mattress so as to distract the police dog inside of him with a hunk of poisoned meat?

  Over the two decades that Nasser had toiled away to earn and keep his reputation as a first-class criminal detective, he had developed his own theories about how to analyze negative phenomena encountered in investigating crime scenes and how to put seemingly illogical clues to use.

  Like a police dog, Nasser had trained his intuition to seek out the characters who left no trace. For him, a blank spot where there should have been fingerprints merely confirmed the existence of a killer. He felt that a criminal’s sweat and breath were like weathering agents that always left a faint trace, and that he could read those traces. This led to rumors among his colleagues that he sought the assistance of genies to help him solve tricky cases, as some intelligence agencies were known to do. Their proof was the circle that presided over his noticeboard. He began every investigation by drawing a circle: a dot in the center represented the victim, and concentric circles spiraled out around it. He would usually begin with the characters who had fled to the furthest points on the periphery, and his excitement would grow as he searched for the hidden threads that linked them back to the center and thus to the victim. It was just a plain old circle, but it amazed his staff: they were convinced it was magic.

  Nasser could have sat in the cafe forever, going back and forth over that magic circle. What perplexed him in this case was that the center was missing; it goaded all his police instincts. He couldn’t leave it empty so in the center he wrote “Lane of Many Heads”—me, the victim! And on the periphery, the spot furthest from any suspicion, he was again at a loss so he put “Lane of Many Heads” there too! Nasser leaned back and surveyed his ingenuity: the criminal and the dead woman were both me, the Lane of Many Heads. Though the symmetry of it invited ridicule, I must admit I was flattered nonetheless. I felt it meant something that I’d succeeded in adding a little spice to the stifling lethargy around this Nasser fellow.

  Nasser distributed dots around the concentric circles, which represented the people and houses he would rely on to reconstruct the Lane of Many Heads case. He built his case around the eternal axis of Eve’s role in the fall from Paradise: he paid special attention, therefore, to women and their involvement in the issue at hand. Azza and Aisha, for example, he left floating between the center of the circle and the area of suspicion, owing to the secrecy and denial that surrounded their simultaneous disappearance from the neighborhood—not to mention the abundance of documents written about both these women. Detective Nasser began a mental list of the various small signs that pointed to them, and he added these to the copious amount of information linking them to the other concentric circles and to the center of the crime. A passing reference in Yusuf’s diaries brought him up short: Yusuf had described Aisha as being “cold.”

  What made her cold? Being “cold,” to Nasser, meant something sexual: a woman who couldn’t even charm her own reflection in a mirror. Nasser’s canine instincts warned him not to get distracted, but for the man inside him it was too late. He began searching Yusuf’s diaries for evidence of the coldness he’d mentioned:

  October 12, 2004

  I’m dropping Aisha. I’m kicking her out of my diary. I’m not going to write about her, because she’s cold. For me, she is dead, was dead, long before the rest of her family. Sometimes I imagine that she’s reached the age that tightens around people like a snare. I doubt she reads, despite all the books she beat me to, or that she even writes, although she used to be a teacher. Aisha’s like a box of words. Aisha is obsessed with cleanliness these days, but she’s still engraved upon the mind of the neighborhood as the fish-girl: we would wait, barefoot, for her to get off the schoolgirls’ bus and follow the odor of dried fish emanating from her. We would watch the heel of her left foot carefully, looking for the fine thread of blood we’d noticed one day staining her socks red. We all knew she’d got her period before the other girls in the Lane of Many Heads, who eventually turned the school bus into a can of dried fish.

  “Let Aisha write herself into thin air! I’m not going anywhere near her.”

  The ex
pressions “cold” and “already dead” stuck in Nasser’s head. He hurried to the file containing all of Aisha’s emails addressed to an unknown German man, which they’d found on her computer in a drafts folder entitled “The One.” Nasser took out the first page and began to read:

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 2

  You said that you were twenty-four when you got a job at the hospital carrying corpses from the morgue out to their relatives. You had nightmares, you said, until one day the old-timer who worked there said to you, “Is a human body really so different from a plank of wood? Just imagine that’s what it is.”

  When you touch me, do I feel like a plank?

  During those three months of accompanying the dead, were you ever able to turn one of those planks into trembling softness at the mere touch of your hands? When did you acquire that skill?

  Can you believe that we’re writing messages back and forth between a hospital in Germany and a backstreet in the Arabian Peninsula?

  Is this simply another symptom of the disease that’s had me in its grips for the past year—am I just raving deliriously?

  Why do we feel so small and lost when we lie alone like this in bed? Is this what the solitude of coffins is like?

  If I close my eyes, I can hear the fat as it bubbles inside the folds of my stomach.

  Six of us used to sleep in a space three meters squared.

  They say there are microscopic creatures that can’t be seen by the naked eye, and can’t be wiped out by cleaning or sterilization; they hide in our blankets and beds waiting to eat our flesh. They can eat us alive. Can you bear that thought?

  Away from you, I lie alone in my bed carrying the torsos of dead bodies back and forth through the operating theater in my head.

  Have I told you? In Arabic, Aisha means “alive,” not “living.”

  The tea tasted strange to Nasser, and all the sugar he’d added—four teaspoons—coagulated on his tongue at this woman’s talk about the body and flesh-eating mites. All his police instincts, indeed his entire body, reacted to this message: what sort of coldness was this that was being eaten by mites? Mites are attracted to decomposition, heat. Suddenly the air conditioner and the fan were no longer enough to cool the room. He continued reading:

  The universe is swarming with messages sent back and forth. In the virtual world, borders have been shattered and people in every corner of the globe are engaged in an exhausting quest for love, desperate to exchange a laugh or share a little company …

  My words mingle with throngs of other desperate voices searching for a way out.

  I’m on the Internet because I want to learn how to talk to a man. Does that make me sound naive? A divorced girlfriend of mine once said to me, “How was I supposed to know what to do with men’s clothes? How was I supposed to know that you have to starch a man’s headscarf in a specific way to keep it sitting at just the right angle on his forehead like a nest? I grew up an orphan surrounded by a bunch of women. I’d never even looked at a man face-to-face. What was the big deal about this nest thing anyway? How was I supposed to know what temperature to wash a robe at to keep it soft? Men’s robes, like their bodies and minds, are toys I don’t know how to care for or keep looking shiny. I didn’t know that men were obsessed with cars and football and sexy dancers in music videos. I’m on the outside of that world.”

  That day, I felt a sense of superiority toward the divorcée, because I knew no headdress was plotting my divorce. Ironing men’s robes was right up my alley—I had six brothers, whose robes were as smooth as paper and whose headdresses hung down as rigid as drainpipes, not even buckling when they knelt to pray.

  But the other masculine languages, the language of actually living with a man, had passed me by. When the time comes that I have to interact with a man’s body, I freeze up. There’s a story from somewhere back in the mists of time about the little girl who’s born to a man obsessed with chastity. From the moment she was born, the man imprisoned his daughter in a world he’d built himself in the basement of his house, with not even a skylight to the outside, and he erased from that world every last trace of masculinity. He didn’t even let words that were grammatically masculine enter the space, so instead of sending her food on a masculine “plate” he sent it to her on a feminine “saucer.” He never fed his daughter lamb, but the meat of female cows. The girl didn’t sleep on a bed—which was masculine—but on a feminine chaise longue. He didn’t adorn her with masculine necklaces or earrings, but with feminine bracelets, and so on. He entrusted her to a wicked old lady to bring her up in that feminine environment. The world in which the young girl grew up wasn’t merely devoid of masculine elements; they’d never existed in the first place. It was an indestructible, impenetrable world of unadulterated femininity. Then one day, a pair of scissors somehow found their way into the basement and fell in the hands of the young girl. The masculinity of the object shocked her and she immediately hid them, aware of the danger they posed. Of course, she then used the scissors to dig a tunnel through the wall of the basement so she could look out upon the outside world. One day when she was contemplating the outside, she heard someone talking about the handsome prince Harj ibn Marj, who’d never been defeated in battle and whose hair was so long that it had to be pleated seventy times and piled up on the back of his saddle when he rode his horse. Needless to say, that single masculine instrument was all the girl needed to escape, and then to fight and vanquish Harj ibn Marj. An escape that we, the women of the Lane of Many Heads in the twentieth century, had failed to achieve. We were raised in similar subterranean worlds, and when the time came for us to be allowed out, our faces had to be effaced with black—an invisibility cloak that makes us a non-existence—so the masculine world would not notice us. We’ve been trained so that we’re blinded to masculinity, this castrated masculinity that’s lost its ability to extend any kind of salvation to us as it did in the story of Harj ibn Marj. The weird thing was that this regime of effacement was a sign of modernity in the Lane of Many Heads, for throughout the neighborhood’s history, right up until the early twentieth century, women’s faces had remained uncovered for all the world to see, for the sun to shine on.

  On mornings when nothing can get me to open my eyes, I just have to imagine the taste of dates and then I can get out of bed. Throughout the history of the Hijaz, dates were idols; they were worshipped but they were also eaten without any feelings of guilt. With the utmost piety, in fact.

  I’m in thrall to the date paste they make in Medina; it’s dark and it looks desiccated, but it melts in your mouth. Medinan dates transmit all the desires of a city that calls upon one to travel in pursuit of one’s faith—follow your faith no matter where it takes you—and that’s why they taste twice as sweet.

  The date paste on your tongue is me: you have to chew it for the flavor to come out. The paintings you send me, with their vivid colors, soak my face in splashes of spring morning. My God, how is it that a few simple paragraphs can bring so much intimacy and joy?

  Tell me, why do you insist we find our own private language? Does my Arabic not get through to you? Do I not understand your German? That leaves us with broken English. Thank God you can chalk up my incoherence to the language and not a limited intellect.

  But let’s turn our backs on this talk and chatter. Let’s talk like people lost in a forest: don’t pretend that you can understand the forest that’s taken hold of you, but carry on walking; your feet plunge into rain-soaked earth, branches laden with last night’s dew graze your forehead, you bask in the scents of untouched blossom and greenery and submit to the forest’s entreaties, its gentle breezes.

  This is the language I want us to use to get to know each other. Talk to me like you talk to a trail; walk over me, walk over me and through me, in silence or chaos; run or tiptoe or crawl so that every muscle of your torso brushes over me; allow me to extend my tongue and devour you as you pass over me.

  If you were here in front me—like you
were the whole time I was being treated at your hospital—your hand could grasp mine, could be my confusion and my guide. You would name the trees growing in my head and the darkness that spreads over me whenever I want to give free rein to my dreams, and this dew that spreads out from my core whenever I see your face reflecting mine, seducing me. Have you become my mirror so I can check to see how I look? To see how your passion shows around my eyes? How your desire has become a scattering of pimples across my forehead?