by Raja Alem
“Can you hear the blood pumping through the veins of all these men I’ve lured here from the four corners of the earth with dreams of black gold? Men who left their families and children behind and swarmed here like lice to take up residence on my heads. Men who suck my blood while I devour their lives and their dreams in my shacks and squalid huts. I’m a spiteful old man: I take their youth in return for my putrid decay. There’s nothing like the dawn to awaken in men the anguish of what they’ve sacrificed in their lust for the illusion of fast food and easy riches.” Nasser tried to get up. “Why are you trying to catch one killer who killed one victim? Are you stupid enough to think that you’ll ever be able to keep an alley like me on the up and up in this ballistic age? I’m like the circle of toilets they erected, like a public fountain, at the entrances to Mina, Arafat, and Muzdalifa—innumerable toilets in adjacent square cement cubicles whose sole purpose is to receive the excrement of the faithful. I’m warning you, Nasser—don’t go digging around in my memory for a murderer. You’ll find yourself drowning in sewage and you’ll never make it out.”
In the ephemeral instant before prayers began, the universe fell silent in anticipation of the exaltation of God’s name, and in the furthest corner of his memory the Lane of Many Heads recalled with wicked pleasure the light footsteps that used to make their way across his every dawn before the body appeared—footsteps which stopped when the dove in Yusuf’s diary went wild at the sight of that body.
The neighborhood deceitfully hid the night that had replenished the charge of Yusuf’s mind from Nasser. That night, Yusuf’s sleep had been interrupted by those fleeting footsteps crossing the alley like a dove flying low to the ground. From his spot on the roof, he saw a young woman in an abaya running toward him. Although Yusuf wasn’t in the habit of looking in any detail at female bodies that suddenly appeared before him—out of loyalty to Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, Azza—something about this girl’s abaya caught his eye. He thought he knew her, but she didn’t give him the chance to work out who she was: by the time Imam Dawoud al-Habashi had called the dawn prayers in a hoarse, deeply pious voice, turning the alley into a lining of embroidered cotton, she’d disappeared. Yusuf tossed the papers upon which he was milking the dawn into a poem for Azza aside. In the blink of an eye, he’d crossed the flight of steps leading down past Azza’s bedroom door and followed in the girl’s footprints, moving in the opposite direction to the people heading to their prayers, led by those flying steps whose tiptoes skimmed the ground toward Mushabbab’s venerable old garden. What a devil that Mushabbab was, he thought to himself, tempting the girls of the neighborhood with his curiosities so early in the morning.
The Lane of Many Heads remembers that the gate to the garden was always open, as an invitation to passersby; just then, though, it had been closed. Yusuf pushed it open and went in, to find himself staring Mushabbab in the face. Mushabbab’s eyes glimmered in the darkness as he rinsed his mouth out with mastic-scented water from the Well of Zamzam. He then carried on what he was doing, averting his eyes from Yusuf’s searching, accusing gaze. Something in the air made Yusuf long for Azza, though he hid his love for her even from himself. He was seized by an urge to shock Mushabbab by telling him about her. But which words would he stun him with? Would he say that he was born to adore Azza, that she had bewitched him in a previous life? That she had propagated inside him like a vaccine? When Azza’s mother had died, and Sheikh Muzahim buried her in the darkness from which she’d never emerged after giving birth to Azza, Halima took her under her wing, and twinned her with Yusuf. Yusuf didn’t bottle-feed Azza out of joy so much as he did it out of a fine, insistent sadness, like the dull hum of a toothache. None of the epidemics that featured during the pilgrimage season—influenza, cholera, meningitis—had succeeded in raising Yusuf’s temperature for so long and without interruption, even though he’d caught them all and had barely made it through alive. Mecca’s epidemics were nature’s own beneficial vaccines: they killed thousands, but those who survived gained total immunity. Not even Mecca’s fabled bad knee, which crippled every woman and man it struck, could impair Yusuf’s joints, which, far from becoming eroded, were like iron. In Mecca, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is why the people of the city have always sent their children out into the pilgrim-thronged backstreets to crawl around, stumble over, and generally fraternize with all kinds of diseases and nationalities, or to peddle goods or work in the Sanctuary pushing aged pilgrims around for their obligatory circumambulations. That’s why death was forced to find more modern means of infiltrating the Lane of Many Heads—like the one that smashed Yusuf’s knee, for example, or the new habit Meccan youths had of going after their livelihoods on the backs of shaytan arawat—“Satan’s devices”—which is what the aged Bukharan woman in the neighborhood called motorbikes.
“As children of the Sanctuary, Azza and Yusuf are twins, born from an egg that split in two,” Halima would say, laughing. “And if the day ever comes that eggs cease to split apart, Mecca will fall into the hands of demons …”
The One
DETECTIVE NASSER AL-QAHTANI FLICKED THROUGH THE PHOTOS OF DEATH piled up around his bed. He could almost feel the tingling sensation as it waited for him to doze off, ready to take over his hands from Yusuf’s memoirs and those emails of Aisha’s that overflowed with an urge for dissipation. He was confused, perturbed, desperate to smell her depravity. He picked up one of the emails.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 5
I turn on the webcam for Skype and throw myself onto the bed.
On the screen, movements envelop me like a wave, taking me to places I’d never dreamed of going.
I reach climaxes I never even got close to with Ahmad, the husband I paralyzed.
David, I’ll use this symbol to address you: ˆ. You need to be concealed in case someone discovers my messages.
And someone will. So please delete this message. It’s the only one that contains the key to your identity.
Your messages are beams of light, and soon there won’t even be a single word of them left in my veins.
I store your messages in a folder in my email called “The One.”
ˆ is like the smell of cigarettes on my breath that I cover up with lemon scent as the tar rattles in my lungs. You can hear me coughing all the time when I’m alone at night.
My auntie Halima asks me, “Is it a dry cough or is it wet?” and makes me swallow a spoonful of sesame oil.
How dare we leave our hearts at the end of the world and just return home, instead of dropping dead on the spot?
ˆ, I watch the firefly circle the lamp in my hand, I close my eyes and it grasps my hand and dances and spins me around, as you and I did in the physiotherapy room that morning.
I’ll pick out certain words that point to the things I love and write them in bold so that you trip over them like rocks in your path. Sometimes they’ll cause you to bleed. (I swear to you, I’ll leave rocks here and there and a scrape of what delights me). Am I talking too much? I used to always be so silent. I’d never let anyone get into my head. But then where’s my heart? Inside my chest, where it should be, there’s just a void.
Me and the sun—which I can’t actually see—have a lot to talk about. Can you imagine, ^, I’m a radiant woman in a country that they mark on maps with a sticker of a laughing sun.
Meanwhile, I know nothing about the sun except for that sentence that’s in all the grammar books, the sentence that’s supposed to explain the concept of subject and predicate adjective: “The sun is resplendent; the moon is radiant.” Inside my room, bits of it come at me from behind the veil: in dots and dashes so I can punctuate the sentences of the world outside. In my country, where the sun is ever-present, I treat my frailty with Vitamin D and Osteocare—manufactured in Britain and the U.S. from calcium extracted from seashells from the shores of the Far East.
So don’t tell me things like “Your sun brightens my room,” because active sentences
are beyond my experience.
The droplets of sweat on my upper lip are spreading, and even your face is damp, exactly as it was on the morning you said goodbye to me at the hospital door before the embassy car took me to the airport so I could return to my country.
“Her health has recovered,” said my hospital discharge papers, but to tell the truth it wasn’t just pain that I was smuggling back with me but a man, too: you were in my head and under my skin as I swept, without flinching, through the scanners at customs in the Jeddah airport.
The scent of your shaving soap still arouses my senses, tickling me awake each morning.
I turn to look at my back in the mirror and examine the long scar. It’s made red by the many stitches that look like a dove’s footprints. You continue to massage it with Vaseline, and I wonder to myself: how on earth are you able to touch a wound so gently? You apply yourself with nothing but tenderness to something so hideous, so disgusting, that even I’m revolted. You told me the tissue and muscles needed time to rebuild, fuse together and fill the cavity—but it took you no time at all to fuse together with me.
You should number your messages too—so that we keep an eye on time as it seeps away.
Isn’t it Time that keeps the dead company?
Aisha
The Lane sniggered at Nasser that night as he paced beneath its windows as he did every other night. Every evening as the smell of toasted bread poured out of their houses, the people of the neighborhood made jokes at the expense of this “Siren Man,” a reference to the police siren in which they all heard a finger of accusation pointed at each and every one of them.
The Lane of Many Heads was apprehensive all of a sudden and watched closely as Nasser pushed open the door of Aisha’s abandoned house and slipped into the dark hallway, where he halted in front of the dried-up faucet. The neighborhood didn’t attempt to stop him as he sought out her father the teacher’s cane, whose history had been recorded on their bodies. They decided to let it spill Aisha’s tragedies out into his narrow eyes, which reminded them of a bat’s. All those years of trying to pierce through into the hearts of the guilty and the suspicious had made them into drills.
Nasser went up to the roof, but no sooner had he set foot there than he forgot what he was doing. The sudden shock of open space had blinded him. He couldn’t remember why he was there, and he felt that the slightest movement, a breath even, would summon Aisha: sitting there, with the face of his sister Fatima, whom they’d nicknamed Dawn because she was so radiant. He could almost hear Aisha writing, asking him “Do the dead take Time with them for company?” Nasser pushed these delusions from his mind and walked to the edge of the roof to see how far it was from there to the place where the body had been discovered. “Could she have fallen off this roof?” There was no straight line between the two points, so unless the body’s trajectory changed as it was falling, it couldn’t possibly have landed in that spot, which was quite a way off and nearer the end of the alley.
Suddenly, he felt a crunch of glass underfoot, and when he stepped aside he saw fragments of crystal; he spotted other beads scattered about, glinting in disparate corners, and he trailed them to the pile of boxes to his left, where he found more crystals: twelve-millimeter gems. He picked through the pile of boxes and came across a sleeve torn off of a dress, the whiteness of its lace grimy with dust and the underarm thickly stained where deodorant had stewed in sweat. For a moment, Nasser lost himself in the feminine, yellowed scent, but the hound in him had already identified the smell: Aisha. He had no desire to complicate the matter by wondering who could’ve torn the sleeve from her arm, and when …
What’s the sweat of death like? If he knew anything about the chemistry of sweat, he could’ve reconstructed the moments that preceded that tearing: were they moments of passion or terror? He inhaled the scent deeply and staggered: life flared up inside of him. He stuffed the sleeve into his pocket and left. The hound inside him curled up inside the sleeve. It had discovered itself; it swooned.
Yusuf’s Rib
YUSUF LOWERED HIS EYES, SHIELDING HIMSELF FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD WITH his eyelids in an attempt to disappear among the Sanctuary’s many columns. His intervention in the theft of the Kaaba key meant that he was now not only being pursued by the killer but also by the police. The money he’d made from pushing elderly pilgrims around the Kaaba had dried up after the police confiscated his wheelchair, and he could no longer feign the weightlessness of the insanity that had sustained him during his refuge in the Sanctuary. He felt like his skeleton couldn’t bear the weight of his body any more. He moved around alone, crawling with his torso flat against the cool marble floor of the courtyard, listening to the ravenous emptiness inside of him. The body pursued him. For the first time, he began to miss the wretchedness of the Lane of Many Heads, a wretchedness he’d rebelled against ever since the day he’d opened his eyes to life. He raised his eyes to the Kaaba and prayed: “Dear God, free me of this corpse I bear and transform me into a man.” In the presence of God, he summoned Azza in the hope of working his way back to the point at which the rift between them had first begun. It would have been better if she’d been the one killed, for he would much rather have mourned her than have her despise him, and cause him to despise himself. But however hard he tried to identify it, the moment at which Azza first wished to exist outside of him eluded his memory. She was in his blood, an extension of his rib. She had the same big wide eyes, her legs had the same strong kick. It wasn’t his mother Halima’s face that had been the young Yusuf’s entire world but Azza’s tiny, soft-skinned body as she crawled, and later when she learned to walk even before he did. And then she began to grow up.
Her black abaya swallowed her up, and she was told that she would have to amputate that extension of her body. Azza had suddenly become something shameful, ripe for being buried alive.
Now, at twenty-eight, Yusuf finally knew what it meant to be down and out. Azza’s absence had driven him to the streets, not because he was afraid that he’d be accused of murder, but because he was afraid of being implicated in the scandal that the woman’s murder had brought to light. They say that twins can sense when their other twin is near death; so far, Yusuf’s senses assured him that Azza was alive.
And yet, ever since the theft of the key Yusuf had felt a watchful presence pursuing him, lying in wait, holding off before it pounced so it could use him as bait. Mushabbab had warned him: “The body’s just one element in a big conspiracy against us. Lay low until things blow over. Go take refuge in the House of God and don’t come out until you hear from me.”
Yusuf mocked him at the time: “The whole of the third world suffers from conspiracy theory paranoia. Anybody who can’t get their wife pregnant says it’s a global conspiracy!”
“I have a theory,” Mushabbab said, ignoring his mockery. “I think they need you to lead them to something. That’s the only possible explanation for what’s about to happen in the neighborhood. That corpse signifies far more than we think we know. As soon as it appeared in the Lane of Many Heads, everything went topsy-turvy.”
Mushabbab was full of nonsense, no doubt, but the message imprinted upon the body smoldered in Yusuf’s mind. Could taking refuge in the Sanctuary save him? What other choice did he have?
There Yusuf was, constantly moving, never stopping in one place … If he stopped, his pursuer would catch up with him. But whenever he looked around him, all he could see were the pillars in the Sanctuary’s many colonnades beginning at Victory Gate and stretching, dizzyingly, all the way to Farewell Gate and Cemetery Gate. How on earth could someone hope to disguise themselves within the House of God?
Yusuf would wrap his yellowed headscarf around his head and then adjust it in case his veiled face looked too conspicuous and gave him away. He blended in during the prayers. Whenever he listened to the worshippers praying around him he heard them muttering litanies of requests and supplications; some even dared to offer up a list of curses. Yusuf trained his senses to
conjure up the angels he used to see when he came to the Sanctuary—the playground of angels—as a child. Every Friday, his mother Halima would perfume herself and accompany him and Azza to the Sanctuary Mosque, leading them in through the Ajyad Gate, which stood in a spot that faced the oldest mountains on earth, from which the very first horses had sprung to life at the beginning of time. From there the three would enter the Sanctuary courtyard surrounding the Kaaba. It was like a cake cut into slices: marble walkways crisscrossed the courtyard between the areas where pilgrims prayed, which were covered in fine pebbles washed in musk, agarwood, and ambergris. The pebbles had long since been replaced by slabs of white marble, yet when Yusuf walked barefoot his feet still tingled with delight at the rough touch of those ancient stones.
Yusuf pressed his head to the marble floor, listening for the conspiratorial female voices in the courtyard of those childhood Fridays.
Directly after Friday afternoon prayers, Halima would go over to the same stone slab to the right of the Well of Zamzam, spread out a rug, and take her seat at center stage. The black abayas multiplied around them as women with their little ones spread out brightly colored rugs. Mopping the perspiration from their temples, they sipped tea from tiny gold-rimmed cups and devoured roasted almonds and watermelon seeds. They played their roles masterfully. Each circle of abayas was its own stage in which the husband played the starring role in a boisterous drama seasoned with ennui.
“Don’t worry, Wadoud. Count out four thousand prayers on your prayer beads over water and then give it to him to drink. That’ll have a troublesome lover wrapped around your little finger in no time …” This tried and true advice was punctuated by the disconsolate sobs of a woman who’d been abandoned, bursting into tears at stage right; to the left a mother prostrated twice before God, pleading to join her young son, to whose green funeral procession, headed for al-Malah Cemetery, she had just bid farewell.
