The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  In the Land Rover marked with its official badge, he briefly ruffled the fur of the dog inside him and reassured himself that last night’s weakness was simply part of the magic formula he’d been dreaming about since childhood: to show off like Superman in a comic book, performing heroic feats that would impress even the criminals. He’d always thought of criminals as being outside the spectrum of humanity. Rather than become one himself, he’d chosen to become the person to whom murder victims would first disclose their murderers’ brilliance. To train his ears to listen, even though his heart was full of the kind of stress that no heart—or ear for that matter—could ever bear. To be a friend to the truth in this exhausted, decrepit body. That was why he’d specialized in homicides, so that his heart would be as tough as the heart of al-Malah Cemetery. So that it would be a sanctuary for all those tableaux of violation, all those disowned corpses. He’d decided that he, too, would have to leave the spectrum of humanity behind.

  The Prince

  THE PAKISTANI ELECTRICIAN HAD BEEN STANDING AT THE SIDE OF THE UMRAH route for about an hour. The midday sun, directly above him, was fierce, and as soon as the bright yellow taxi pulled up he jogged toward it, pulled the door open, and threw himself into the front seat beside the driver in a halo of curry spice. When he took a look at the driver, his blood froze. Hoping there was still time to escape, his hand reached for the door handle, but the car sped away at a demented pace.

  “Excuse me, sir, this is a taxi?” The question rang out stupidly, which only tickled Khalil more.

  “Of course it’s a taxi. Where do you want to go?”

  The Pakistani stuttered before managing to reply, “Gaza Market, please, sir …” His hand fumbled comically with the door as he attempted to open the window.

  “It’s broken.” Khalil grinned spitefully.

  The Pakistani floundered, groping for the words that might save him. “Are you making joke? Excuse me, sir, you are … Same same Saudi prince?” Khalil’s delight doubled at the man’s agitation.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not on candid camera, I really am a prince and I’m driving you around. The world is finally smiling on you!”

  The Pakistani smiled back at him uncertainly. “Sir, you serious? This is why you wear fashion clothes?” He took in Khalil’s embroidered silk robe, the gray wool cloak trimmed with gold thread, the bright white Lomar branded headdress and the fancy black band that held it in place, coming to rest on the gleaming black Zimas dress shoes, one of which was pressed hard on the accelerator, keeping the car hurtling along at a diabolic speed.

  “Please, sir, slowly—”

  “Why? Don’t you like how princes drive?”

  “Please, sir … In Pakistan I am have six children, and my mother is sick, will die soon—”

  Khalil stamped on the brake. “Get out. May God shun you! And your six kids and your mother, too!”

  The Pakistani shoved open the door and leapt out, reeling. Khalil took a bottle of mineral water from under his seat, emptied it in one gulp, and sped off, thirsty for the next humiliation.

  His second victim was a woman with her teenage son. She looked like a tent of black in the abaya, which hung from her head right down to her feet, and the black knee-length socks and elbow-length gloves, which picked up where the abaya left off. She stuffed herself into the back seat with her son. At the decisive clunk of the doors being locked centrally and a foot slamming on the gas, the car—darting forward hysterically—was suddenly filled with panic.

  The boy attempted uselessly to open the door, then at his mother’s urging squeaked as loudly as he could, “Stop! Let us out here please!”

  “Brother—” Terror had induced even the mother to speak, “Let us out, for the love of God!”

  “Not until you take your socks and gloves off. Pretend like you’re making the pilgrimage!” Khalil laughed, abruptly and jarringly.

  “What?! Fear God!”

  “I’m a disturbed man,” replied Khalil baldly. “The color black upsets me. I could drive this car into a wall at any moment.” The car accelerated. “But as soon as you take your gloves off …” The boy frantically tugged his mother’s gloves from her hands.

  “See, we’re slowing down. As soon as you take your socks off we’ll stop and the doors will be unlocked.” The boy leaned down to take his mother’s socks off, and the moment he dropped them onto the front seat with the gloves, the brakes squealed.

  Driving off, Khalil watched in the rearview mirror as the woman flapped about, her hands and feet suddenly exposed to the sun, struggling to cocoon herself and protect her skin from the light and people’s eyes. “A real-life Dracula!” Khalil cackled with glee.

  The third victim was a solidly-built man in his sixties wearing a robe, waistcoat, and snow-white skullcap, and a yellowed silk stole draped over his left shoulder.

  He climbed into the back seat and sat in silence. Khalil tried to provoke him: he drove fast and he made several sudden, violent stops that sent the car’s contents, including the passenger, crashing into the back of the front seat. He changed direction from west to east to south again, and stopped at every traffic light to rearrange his headdress in the rearview mirror, looking defiantly at the impassive face in the back seat as the cars trapped behind them released a torrent of indignant honks. Finally, in the isolated valley of Mina, he came to a stop. “Get out. I’m not going any further,” he ordered. The man gazed out at the bare mountains and the empty land sliced into asphalted plots in preparation for the construction of yet more accommodation for pilgrims.

  “What on earth am I supposed to do here? I told you to take me to al-Rusayfa.”

  “Yeah, and I say get out here.”

  “Take me back to where you picked me up, or else I’ll have to sit here till Judgment Day.”

  “Be my guest!” Khalil turned off the engine, and they settled into a silent standoff.

  “You’re out of your mind,” said the man. “If I knew how to drive, I’d kick you out and drive off myself.”

  “You have no choice but to get out.”

  “You want me to go out there with all the demons? They’re your tribe. You sure drive like one …”

  “How perceptive of you!” laughed Khalil. “You know, I almost like you!”

  “I bet you don’t even like yourself,” said the man, examining him. “Look at how you’re dressed! You’re making an ass out of yourself.”

  “Is that so? Just a few minutes ago, I managed to scare someone into taking off their clothes. Some passengers wet themselves all over that seat you’re sitting on. That’s why it’s got that plastic cover on it.”

  “You’re just a silly little boy in a man’s body.”

  “Yeah, and sometimes the little boy dresses up in a traditional Hijazi outfit like you’re wearing. I have all kinds of disguises in the trunk. I even dress up like cartoon characters to entertain the more mature customers like yourself.”

  “You’re pathetic, a lost soul, that’s my diagnosis.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. I don’t have a soul.”

  “Is that the only thing you have to be proud of? Listen”—the man straightened up in his seat and spat the words at the back of Khalil’s neck—“I have all the time in the world, even for blue demons like you. I buried my three sons in their prime. Azrael plucked them like fruit when they each turned twenty. I lost them all to car accidents, the plague of our age. Nothing fazes me any more. If you want to sit here until the crows peck out our eyeballs that’s fine by me. But if you try and drag me out of this car—I swear to you—all hell will break loose.”

  “You mean my inane little performance hasn’t shocked you?”

  “You know, if you need a shrink, I’m all ears. My wife and relatives actually tried to make me go see one when they felt they couldn’t get through to me any more.”

  “I’m looking for men like you,” said Khalil accusingly. “Men from the bowels of Mecca, like my father. You’re all alike: y
ou’re like fish out of water as soon as you leave the tiny circle around the Sanctuary. You’re all flapping around on the ground, getting further and further away, and crushing your children’s throats in the process. What were you going to do in a modern, plastic neighborhood like al-Rusayfa anyway?”

  “I was thinking of getting married again and having some more children for Azrael to feed on. My wife’s not interested in helping.”

  “Just like my father,” Khalil laughed bitterly.

  The man studied Khalil’s profile. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Sometimes I’m a respectable taxi driver and stick to the highways. But most of the time I drive into the guts of the city, entertaining myself by toying with all these nobodies.”

  “Nobodies? Listen, boy, one day you’re going to come face-to-face with death, and you’ll realize you can’t go around talking about human beings like that.”

  “You’ve almost convinced me”—Khalil turned round to look the man in the eye—“that you’re not as bad as you look.”

  “Meeting people like you is a lot like looking in the mirror.”

  “Now you’re boring me.”

  “Get rid of me then, take me to the nearest place where I can find another taxi. There’s no way I’m going to let you abandon me here in the wilderness.”

  Khalil turned the engine on. “Maybe I’ll take you where you wanted to go.”

  “No, thanks,” the man said quickly. “I’ve decided I don’t want to bring any more children into the world now that Azrael has turned taxis into race cars. Sooner or later this life of yours is going to fall to pieces in your hands. You’ll see.”

  A Window for a Window

  WITH THE EXPERT MALICE OF EACH OF MY—THE LANE’S—MANY HEADS, I MADE Nasser spend his morning between two windows: Azza’s, which was nailed shut, and Aisha’s, which was blocked by an air-conditioning unit. In the end he retreated to his seat in the cafe to see which of my secrets he could unearth by comparing my geography to the information contained in Aisha’s messages. He read:

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 4

  Dear ˆ

  Like a sip of coffee on a cold morning, your name revives me.

  Do you remember the day you took out your encyclopedia because you wanted to learn more about Mecca, my city?

  “Wow …” You were amazed that it was the center of the universe.

  The Mecca of books is beyond the internal geography of our neighborhood.

  The Lane of Many Heads is a scandal just waiting to be exposed.

  I once dreamed that the Lane of Many Heads was a woman’s body dumped by the side of the road.

  The sky over her was clear but for the clouds over the only neutral space: a jewel-like garden that was nestled in the navel of Wadi Ibrahim. It belonged to Mushabbab, a descendant of the freed slaves of the Sharifs and a lover of music and water. To the right was Radwa Mosque, and to the left the house of Sheikh Muzahim the wholesaler, where Auntie Halima lived on the roof. In the shadow of these lay our house. Aside from all that, from head to toe it was a down-home but cosmopolitan body that prayed and would stop dancing at prayer times, and during the pilgrimage season would cater to the pilgrims with improvised clothing stalls, hide away its musical instruments, empty its rooms to rent them out, and give over its kitchens (even though “the devil pisses in their food,” according to the old ladies in the neighborhood, who’d long since surrendered to the cooking of strangers).

  If you investigate the history of our neighborhood, the Lane of Many Heads (“Abu r-Ru’us” or, the way we say it, flouting the rules of correct pronunciation, “Aboorroos”), you’ll find that it emerged as people began settling here. The municipality made it official when they gave the neighborhood a major makeover and excised its name and history. They changed the name of the street to Radiant Passage, but the Lane of Many Heads remained fuzzily in our memories, intimating some warmth whose origin we couldn’t put a finger on. Then Sheikh Muzahim came along to blast it away and shove his own memory into that spot instead:

  “We never hear a single voice in the Lane of Many Heads praising God. Even the angels have washed their hands of you!”

  There was no one as obsessed with perdition as the wholesaler Sheikh Muzahim. He shoved it under our noses so we could smell nothing else when we went to bed and when we rose with the birds’ hymns. Sheikh Muzahim gathered up all the original melodies, while the discordant notes gathered like a murder of crows over the Lane of Many Heads, warning us of hell.

  Nasser stopped reading for a moment to hate Aisha, then continued:

  “You’re driving the angels out of our neighborhood with this nudity!” he exclaimed, cursing their screens. But then the neighborhood dared to fight back:

  “Land in Mecca is worth its weight in gold, but Sheikh Muzahim got his piece of paradise just by laying claim to it. He claimed this piece of land as his reward for building a mosque, a house in heaven at a discount price. Then he installed Dawoud al-Habashi as imam of the mosque, but left his salary to be paid for out of the neighborhood’s charity.”

  The minaret sprouts more and more loudspeakers by the day, and neighborhood gatherings overflow with improvised sermons, trapping in their corners genetically modified rats of heresy and other unidentifiable rodents.

  Why am I being so hard on the Lane of Many Heads? Have I begun to see it through your eyes?

  Aisha

  Azza: Potential Identification of the Deceased

  IT WAS THAT SILENT TIME OF NIGHT THAT ONLY COMES HOURS AFTER MIDNIGHT. Nasser’s imagination sprang up from the silence and crept out alone to survey the Lane of Many Heads, listening carefully to how the heaps of filth on the ground sucked up his footfalls, investigating forbidding doorways barely wide enough for a human to pass through and backyards where stray horses, donkeys, and demons lived; he wanted to catch the Lane of Many Heads red-handed. He walked for hours, unaware that the Lane of Many Heads was baiting him, leading him to an old man slumbering on a low platform by the door of a beat-up old house. The neighborhood sensed Nasser’s footsteps as his bleary eyes drew him drew closer. Nasser spun round, looking for a way out, but the neighborhood had him surrounded. Like a hedgehog, it puffed out the spines of satellite dishes, which bristled from every tumbledown house, ruined backyard, and cheap prefab home of people who hawked ice or home-made food.

  “Nothing’s new to an old neighborhood like me.”

  Nasser’s shoulders slumped suddenly, and a feeling of immense fatigue overcame him. He collapsed onto the bench beside the ageless body, who spoke as if the voice of the alley itself were rising from beneath the bench.

  “Today’s loaf comes from yesterday’s leaven: learn this lesson from my history. At first, I was inhabited by devils who helped Eve tempt Adam to leave the Sanctuary. That was back when Mecca was one of the pearls of Paradise nestled in the heart of remote Wadi Ibrahim, which I think was nothing more than the lap of a woman—first Eve, then Hagar—who spread her legs from Mount Safa all the way to the end of Mount Marwa: from the peak of splendor to the depths of beauty. Hearts were broken, and thus began the ritual of walking between the two peaks.”

  The Lane snorted at Nasser’s sudden tiredness and went on with his history lesson. “You see, when God created Adam and put him in paradise, the only thing missing from this distillation of perfection was death. That’s why He cleft Adam’s breast and tore out a bone and then rolled it up into a ball, stretched it out, and made it writhe in front of Him. Adam was anxious to get his bone back, but when he grabbed it and pushed it back into place between his other bones, it was death he’d picked up. A bone outside of Adam’s breast is death itself …” The voice of the Lane of Many Heads hissed from inside Nasser’s chest. “We must bury all Eve’s daughters alive and put an end to the rift they tore open in our breasts. We must restore our bones.” Women, women: Nasser felt uneasy. The alley had hypnotized him. He was surrounded by the specters of old sheikhs, who echoed in chor
us the Lane’s voice as it rose up from underfoot.

  “How can you cook up the present moment without a measure of the past or a hint of the future? Allow me to reveal the key to this riddle you’re trying to solve: death is a ram that will be made manifest on Judgment Day, and life will be embodied in a towering mare with a million transparent wings that rustle sweetly as they beat. When the terrors of Judgment Day are over, after the hell-bound have betaken themselves to their hell and the heaven-bound to their heaven, the ram will be brought out and slaughtered, and the mare will be released to go forth in boundless freedom. You, Nasser—” The old man directed the accusation straight at Nasser, who couldn’t be sure whether the voice was coming from in front of him or behind him, or raining down like a curse from above. “You could collect all these stories and discover that the ram and the mare were merely a fantasy that came out of Adam’s breast. That is, that Adam overcame his imagination so he could commit suicide. It’s exactly like this case you’re investigating. It’ll never go further than the slaughter of the ram and the release of the mare, which is also Adam’s mount, incidentally, and his bone. All you have to do is ask yourself: who in the neighborhood is most likely to kill themselves, like our ancestor Adam? Believe me, there’s only Yusuf—but who’s the mare?”

  The seven minarets of the Sanctuary sounded briefly, then paused to take a deep breath. As the minarets rested between calling worshippers to the dawn prayer and announcing that the prayer was about to begin, Mecca’s backstreets purified themselves in the waters of their ritual ablutions, and in that moment of stillness, the Lane of Many Heads grabbed Nasser by the throat.