The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  So there they were, all of these heads bursting with apprehensions and suspicions—those of Mu’az and Nasser, for example—and they were completely out of my control.

  Nasser summoned Khalil for interrogation. On the day, however, Nasser clean forgot and left Khalil the pilot waiting outside his office while he rifled, utterly engrossed, through Aisha’s letters, looking for any mention of the Veil Monster.

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 10

  I asked you to grant me some faraway corner of yourself.

  The corner shouldn’t be a cellar, or a storeroom on the roof even. It should be more like a treehouse in a forgotten backyard, where you hid out as a child and pretended to be a pirate or an angel of revelation, where you hid your possessions, your little anxieties, your adventure comics.

  I hole up in there with you, and we spy through the bathroom windows of the surrounding buildings at the girls bathing directly across from the green almond tree with its round birds’ nests that fall to the ground every morning to wipe away the Lane of Many Heads’ fatigue … When a girl is washing herself, she will often pause for a moment, rooted to the spot, and stare into a golden mote, imagining a book, a man’s faraway hand, or that of an angel, or God even … Then she plunges herself beneath the fast-flowing stream. Or she scribbles a few words on paper in ink whose sighs bleed under the water pressure, their intimacy washing away… As unsuitable as ink might be for writing in water, it’s perfect for writing about the deepest secrets and sins and caresses …

  A nest of straw, no more … With you.

  Aisha

  P.S. I had a dream. This isn’t me speaking, it’s the voice of the Veil Monster, the Lane of Many Heads that’s forced its way into my mind. It was a silvery night, and I was crawling toward the darkened hallway, feeling my way along, led by the sound of muffled laughter from a spot at the bottom of the stairs. My mother and grandmother were there, squatting on the ground, flattening out a brown paper grocery bag between them, cackling wickedly as they slashed the shape of the Veil Monster’s hideous features onto it with a fat charcoal crayon. From my hiding place I could hear its flesh tearing, and the black abaya being eaten away by its own gluttony to the point that it was worn and frayed; the mouth was bared in shrieking anger. Topped off with that growling voice, it was the picture of torment. Suddenly, the Veil Monster was looking directly into my eyes, and then crawling toward me, its voice squeaking. I fled, but its strangled voice was licking my body, and it was only then that I realized I was naked.

  With its rasping voice, it caught me at the door to my cubbyhole, where any resistance I possessed left me, and I froze like a bare tree stump. The Veil Monster was bearing down on me; it wanted to drink my blood. Then my auntie Halima appeared, pretending she’d come to protect me, but she let it grab my leg, here, then my hand. Something hot and wet made my leg slippery, and the Veil Monster couldn’t manage to drag me away; I’d peed myself.

  I was woken by your index finger on my spine.

  The leg that the Veil Monster had taken hold of stayed numb for a whole week. The parts in that play had been masterfully shared out between my mother, grandmother, and Aunt Halima. In the course of it, they left behind fragments of our hearts broken off by the Veil Monster so they could be certain we’d be tamed. Having watched the Veil Monster being created didn’t lessen the terror he provoked in us in any way: he had only to make the slightest movement for a satanic spirit to rear its head within me, more frightening than my mother and grandmother could have calculated.

  I think it’s the Lane of Many Heads transforming himself into a fearsome creature to keep us under control, and I don’t think we’ll ever be strong enough to tear off his masks.

  The Veil Monster is the embodiment of a repressive urge hidden inside the women of the Lane of Many Heads, a chain of docility passed on from mother to daughter.

  Do you think that’s what sharpens and guides Azza’s charcoal when she draws? Or is it her passion?

  Azza has never taken fear seriously. Even love is just a flickering flame for her. “Why would you expect love to last forever? It’s just a feeling like any other feeling. Do you expect fear or upset or anger or sadness to last? They’re all temporary. They only come so they can go away again.”

  For Azza, love has always been more like flu than cancer, so she flutters from heart to heart, reveling in the fever of constantly falling in love and always emerging from it lighter in heart and soul, ready to take on another, more highly evolved virus. She doesn’t face life or men with grim seriousness.

  If only you knew how much fun it was to be around Azza! It’s like being in a patch of sunshine that never dries up, like being in an endless painting.

  Still, I pity those consumed by cancerous love for her, like Yusuf!

  Nasser was choked up with anger at Aisha. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason, but he felt a malicious satisfaction that she’d nicknamed the Lane of Many Heads “the Veil Monster.”

  When Nasser finally permitted Khalil to enter, the fortysomething threw himself nonchalantly onto a chair and relaxed into it, leaving Nasser to read his body language. His shiny black leather shoes clashed loudly with his bright white leper’s socks. His features were elongated; his eyes and mouth were rectangular and uniform, and his cropped-looking ears stuck out like airplane wings. Khalil didn’t let Nasser finish looking him over, but began abruptly:

  “My father continued to cover our expenses for years, even after I graduated from the Aviation Academy in Miami. He only cut us off after that Egyptian wife of his had a baby.” Suddenly Nasser’s suspicions about Khalil being the Veil Monster who’d escaped down Aisha’s corridor fell apart.

  “And the fire that burnt down your house in the Lane of Many Heads—was it really caused by faulty wiring?”

  “Oh yeah, thanks again for your efforts,” he drawled. “You and the firemen whose truck got stuck at the entrance to the alley and didn’t get anywhere near the fire at all.” The same devil goaded him to go further still: “You’re in the middle of an ocean of drug dealers and illegal migrants, fires that happen over and over, sewage floods, overcrowded, crumbling buildings that collapse here and there. The police and the fire department are a joke. Your emergency vehicles can’t even get down the Lane of Many Heads because there’s no suitable road, and now all you want to know about is a body? This neighborhood desperately needs an enema to be followed by several microsurgeries.”

  Nasser met his insolence with a question. “Do you realize that you’ve made a lot of people in the neighborhood feel very uneasy recently?”

  “That’s to be expected. This place is in one time zone and I’m in another,” he said, gesturing upward.

  “So then what’s keeping you here in an alleyway in the underbelly of the world?”

  “It’s temporary …” A drop of sweat formed on Khalil’s temple. If the detective had asked him “How long is temporary?” he wouldn’t have known what to say.

  Nasser didn’t think Khalil was giving away his real age. There wasn’t a single gray hair spoiling his youthful appearance. “I hear Saudi Airlines decided they could do get by without your services. Something to do with you hitting a female flight attendant?” The sweat on Khalil’s temples trembled, and he could feel the heroin, which had destroyed his dreams and ambitions and driven his life to the brink, flowing through his veins. He’d put too much faith in the brakes and in the autopilot inside himself. That day was the first time he’d flown without waiting for two days to let his system clear itself after a fix; he was still strung out six hours before takeoff. Everybody who looked at his eyes and dilated pupils during that flight could see that he’d crossed the red line.

  “You can’t mess around with the chain of command onboard a plane. A plane is like a kingdom in the air. The pilot is the king, and everyone else is a subject who must obey him blindly from the moment the plane doors are shut until they’re reopened after landing. If anyone has any kind of ob
jection, they have to present it in writing to the authorities after the flight because arguing with a pilot while airborne is a capital offense …” He didn’t want to mention what it was that had made him lose his better judgment on that flight just yet. Was it that the Turkish flight attendant had rebuffed him or that she’d upgraded that passenger to first-class without first checking with her supervisor? How was he supposed to know that that cursed Turkish woman with the faded eyes was one of Satan’s demons herself? With a single swipe of her paw, she knocked twenty years of service off his personnel file.

  Nasser seized the opportunity presented by the glimmer of arrogant lunacy in Khalil’s eyes to catch him off guard: “And Yusuf, what’s your connection to him?”

  Khalil exhaled derisively. “Yusuf comes from the time before Abbas ibn Firnas and the Wright Brothers. In the century he’s from they haven’t even discovered flight yet …” A note of malicious satisfaction in his voice left question marks in the air.

  “Do you think he has anything to do with the body?”

  “Don’t implicate me in other people’s accusations; I fear God …”

  Nasser wanted to be reckless, to give in to the rumors and search the trunk of Khalil’s taxi for the disguises the whole neighborhood was gossiping about.

  “What about Mushabbab?”

  “Myth.”

  “A myth?”

  “This whole web of tiny alleyways is built on myths.”

  Nasser was still waiting for an answer. He was well aware that Khalil was trying to distract him with that generalization.

  “So you’re married to Yabis the sewage cleaner’s daughter, and yet they say you proposed to Azza recently but were refused?”

  “Have you got a problem with that?”

  At that moment, Nasser caught sight of the madness that the neighborhood folks whispered about. Khalil retreated in the face of the detective’s attack, guarding himself with sarcasm. “The old man’s lost it. He believes in myths too. He told me not to ask for Azza’s hand during times of bad omen: I’m not allowed to propose to her in the month of Muharram, when bloodshed is forbidden, or in Safar, when it’s said that provisions are scarce, or in First or Second Jumada, during which our fortunes are fixed and unchanging, or in Ramadan because, as you know …” He winked at the detective. “Threads of piety and threads of desire woven together to make a web. I’m also supposed to refrain from asking for her hand in the months of Shawwal and Rajab, and abstain in Dhu’l-Qada, and then the old man goes on Hajj in Dhu’l-Hijja … What about you, Mr. Detective? You married? Or are you just planning to fast for eternity? Your breakfast’s on me: dates, halva, Turkish delight, Egyptian bonbons …”

  Veil Monster versus Siren Man

  NASSER LAY IN BED, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS. THE LANE of Many Heads’ unending, day-and-night torrent of odors and chaos assaulted his every sense, getting back at him for taking Aisha’s side and accusing The Lane of Many Heads of being The Veil Monster.

  Whenever Detective Nasser appeared, they shouted: “The siren man is here!”

  Naked, barefoot, and with dusty snotty faces, the children flocked around his official Land Rover. The rotating, flashing light on the roof was still on. Nasser left it on deliberately so that it would point its accusatory red finger all across the entrance to the alley. The ice-seller came running after him, begging him to move the vehicle just a little so that the indictment wouldn’t completely hide his fridge from the cars passing by in the fast lane. The children, meanwhile, ignored him and clambered up to the roof to turn their faces blood-red in the light, or sat on the hood tickling their cheeks with the windscreen wipers, leaving scratches across the Land Rover’s brilliant shine.

  Half asleep, Nasser could hear the voice mocking him: “Officer, you’re up to your eyeballs in pages and pages of the Lane’s faked memories. They’re luring you into that memory, and then they shut their eyes and stop up their ears to trap you inside the nightmare nesting in their heads. They aren’t even memories; they’re a counterattack against a disappointing reality …”

  Some of Yusuf’s phrases that he’d read that morning floated around in his mind:

  March 3, 1995

  Do you think we’ve sinned against the revelation that made its home in Mecca, the revelation whose battlefields and great men we’re reducing to mere legend by erasing every physical trace leading back to them?

  Hulagu Khan drowned the works of generations of scholars and thinkers in the Tigris so as to destroy the legacy of the Abbasid Dynasty and before them the Umayyads.

  And here, nothing remains of the Well of Zamzam now but a row of pipes and taps—who knows where the water actually comes from. A mere quarter-century ago, the froth of longevity and blessings used to drip directly from the bucket of the well into the hands of the nation of Muhammad. These days God’s gift, the water of Zamzam, is being sold. There’s no froth left any more. We’re up against risk factors like high cholesterol and premature death and we take anti-depressants to treat our delusions.

  Delusion 1: We used to think of the nation of Muhammad in a vague sort of way as something like a tall, alluring servant girl who lived in the desert and suckled all of humanity’s children from her vast breasts. She could never die because everyone we knew prayed to God every day for her longevity.

  Nasser buried his head fast under his pillow, rubbing it against the sleeve of the robe he’d found and promptly hidden as if it were the limb of some woman he’d murdered. He didn’t want to return to her, but her scent filled the air. The robe with the missing sleeve appeared before him, called out to him to come. Detective Nasser al-Qahtani was trembling as he followed the scent, which pushed him toward the sleeve between the lines of Aisha’s writings. Lately his sleep had become fitful and troubled. He’d wake up and immediately begin recording every suspicious item in Aisha’s letters, marking a red X at every explosive spot and copying out some of the phrases that particularly took his fancy so he could carry them around with him and reread her secrets wherever he was. He felt like every word concealed some transgression or temptation, the silhouette of a man. By her own account, “getting caught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook.” Nasser searched for that man’s face, wondering if it resembled his own and wondering: how many men had she hidden so they could enjoy that scent in solitude?

  As soon as he’d woken from a night of troubled sleep, he picked up another of Aisha’s letters, and once he’d drunk its scent he added it to the pile of letters he’d read through next to his bed. He leapt out of bed—the damp morning air free to view his naked body, the air conditioner free to attack it. He was aware, for the first time, of his own body as he strutted about before the world in lazy arrogance. He liked the way it felt when his legs rubbed against the stove as he made himself a cup of instant coffee. Then he got back into bed, his mind preoccupied, and reread the same letter for the tenth time. He picked up a red pen, and after a moment’s hesitation, scribbled a title across the top of Aisha’s letter:

  Women in Love

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 6

  There are things that guide me to discover them.

  That book I’d forgotten about … When? Since my first year at the Teachers’ College. Stuffed in a nook under the stairs for years.

  My friend Leila had curves like creamy condensed milk. She stuck out her lips like a bird’s beak when she spoke; her voice was hoarse, but tinged with laughter, and she loved stealing glances. She’d smuggled the book out. She said she’d found it waiting for her in the corridor where it had fallen out of one of her uncle’s moving boxes. He was the director of Mecca’s famous Falah schools, and ordinarily his office was out of bounds to all. He was planning to bequeath it to his male offspring once his long life was over.

  “Do you want it or should we bury it?” she said. That was how the book’s destiny became tied to my own.

  Leila and I both risked expulsion: getting c
aught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook. I tucked it beneath my buxom chest, where the gray expanse of my school pinafore concealed it easily, and I yanked my abaya down slightly. That was a signal agreed on between the girls that meant your clothes were stained with period blood.

  Leila and I were like two bats. We spent the day in the bathroom reading the first lines. I came across the words “Lawrence ran away to Germany with his female tutor.” The words pricked me somewhere deep in my insides, and we both averted our eyes. A single word more would’ve stopped our hearts and given us away.

  Of all the books she’d smuggled out, this one seemed most like a sinful time bomb.

  Returning home with the book would have been suicide. I crept in, and without even looking at it I stuffed it into that hole under the stairs to the right of the door. It’s been there all these years. It was only tonight that the rain brought it out, wet around the edges, pages yellowed, binding falling apart. It still had the same sting of fear and awe, though …

  Leila and I didn’t even read the title. I just imprinted the cover image onto my memory: those long red stockings and the woman wearing them, a bundle of sketchbooks tucked under her arm.

  That’s how you saw me, ^: leaving the hospital wearing your long red socks and thereby fulfilling my legs’ oldest dream …

  Women in Love … Can you believe they were lying stuffed under the stairs—right under the nose of my mother, father, and Ahmad—and in love, too? Of all the books I managed to get my hands on and dared to read, this book (which I’d have preferred to call Women in Love in the Arabic translation rather than Lady Lovers) terrified me: from the moment I set eyes on those red stockings I knew that I was risking a lot—perhaps even my life. Do you understand why? One woman becomes two becomes three. Like rain. Drops of women in a downpour of love, like the battery acid that jealous men hurl at the women they love in the short items in the newspaper.