The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Today, I’m grateful for the innate prudence that made me understand, even at that young age, that I needed to bury Women in Love in that nook under the stairs.

  Now it’s popping back up.

  Good Lord, did you notice? That English writer’s name reveals your name, ^. Can these little voices, which lead us suddenly and unexpectedly to detours and forgotten secrets, really give us away like that?

  My body has suddenly started to tremble. Does it seem logical that the mere sight of a book should be able to slough off our scales? This book is scrubbing the prints off of the tips of my fingers so that they’re ready to be replaced with others. The book is chopping time up into cycles that spin me round like a cement mixer.

  I’m lost to the mystery—do you see what little sense any of this makes?

  Are you bored yet?

  One time I caught the Eunuchs’ Goat sneaking a mannequin into the backyard of his father’s kitchen. I was shocked. Not because of whatever he might be about to do with the mannequin, but because the plastic doll reminded me of me in my wedding dress. It reminded me of how Ahmad had carried me as if he were shouldering a bundle of firewood. If you ask me, these mannequins are invading the neighborhood, possessing our bodies, sowing tumors in men’s imaginations.

  I know that you can’t decipher Arabic letters yet, ^. It all looks like a painting to you. You still write to me in a mixture of pictures and English words. I sit on my over-the-top bed and allow the Aisha beneath my skin to pop her head out and flirt with you in a way that surprises even me—but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. She just flows on automatically, ready for you to receive her on your screen. And when I make you lose your cool, and the German words sigh out of you, I receive them with my body. I let them crush my ribs in their embrace, bite my chin and the edge of my cheeks, bore into my skull to reach the pressing need inside …

  I don’t know where all these violent temptations are coming from. I don’t want D. H. Lawrence’s loving women to steal your heart. I could become even blacker and more violent, because wherever I look in Lawrence’s analysis of love, I find the words blackness and black truth.

  What’s with all this blackness? Is this me? On top of all these red lines which surround the black smear of my abaya?

  I don’t know when they started coming to me in the alley with all these life-maps, demanding to bury them in my head as if I were a memory dumping-ground. Even I forget that they’ve come … And who were they anyway? Was it the anesthesia from the series of operations I had that left these sunspots in my memory? Who was just here? All I can hear is Mu’az singing in the corridor, and even that sounds like the echo of a memory someone left behind.

  “They want to undo the collars of death around my neck with their tragedies.”

  Release the weight against my neck and disappear. I can feel the cartilage in my neck weakening and snapping and pressing down on my spinal cord. Maybe I shouldn’t listen! I want to have fun with you, be entertaining. I want to tell light-hearted, trivial stories. You, on the other hand, want me to write long letters like my rigid old self used to do. My body’s my dictionary now, a dictionary of much more than language and phonetics: a dictionary of this delicious laziness, of all my new discoveries … With every movement I discover another forgotten part of my body, with every action I shed another husk of fear and another layer of material …

  The game of masks is over now.

  P.S. Me too … I’m also as light as a ghost.

  Piece by piece, we die after those we love.

  P.P.S. I dreamt of a newborn baby, its umbilical cord still intact, with the following dedication written on its forehead:

  To the tiny child who entered the world and left it in a violent termination …

  It came and went quietly, no one heard the womb tearing or the umbilical cord being cut.

  We neither repudiated it nor did we give it a name …

  P.P.P.S:

  ‘Do I look ugly?’ she said.

  And she blew her nose again.

  A small smile came round his eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘fortunately.’

  And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her […] Now; washed all clean by her tears, she was new […] made perfect by inner light […]

  But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. […]

  Even when he said, whispering with truth, ‘I love you, I love you,’ it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter. […]

  [T]here was no I and you, there was only the […] consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality.

  (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love)

  I sit down to pray and my heart dives … into deepest sleep to re-emerge, reciting. I can hear you reading Lawrence’s words to me.

  I return to bed, where I speak to God so that I don’t forget how to speak. Yesterday’s dream hovers around the edges of every word.

  Between consciousness and dreaming, I’m rocked gently by your call, ^. If I lean a little too far, I’ll fall back into yesterday.

  With the same sense of surprise.

  As long as I don’t turn the lights on, the room will hold its breath and remain in yesterday’s labor pains. Only the clock tells me when it’s daybreak.

  I leave my cubbyhole sunk in the delusion of night and savor Women in Love like the taste of coffee mixing with my saliva. Strong nicotine making my hands tremble.

  I shine the intimate yellow light of my wobbly lamp on the page and drink the words along with their pallid background. It increases my thirst.

  Do we cease to see when love calls on us to come out of ourselves? On the route between the I and the Other, is there some moment of blindness that you can occasionally pass through, but that occasionally stays with you, obliterating the whole universe around us?

  One sees and the other is blind; is that how love is put together?

  I speak out loud now to reassure the picture I took of myself with my cellphone: “I never said that Ahmad didn’t love me!”

  The picture refuses to respond, however.

  Maybe running away is love; even hate can be love … But I didn’t flee, I didn’t hate, did I?

  I guess that means that my send and receive function is faulty when it comes to love.

  When we renounce words, we shouldn’t complain that our interiors shatter into perplexing, repellent stutters.

  Maybe we need to train our words to be tender, to flow like water and sink like perfume into the body of an idol; maybe we ought to be born equipped with a dictionary for the words of worship … I don’t know …

  Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole where I sleep.

  My bedroom. We call it the cubbyhole because it’s between two floors, carved out like a tomb cut into the space of the dark room below. It weighs down on my chest. The house is just two rooms stacked one on top of the other, with my room in between. The upstairs room was where we slept as a family; downstairs was where my father sat and gave his private lessons.

  As you can see, there’s no room in the cubbyhole for a lover. Nevertheless I keep you crammed in here, in the empty space in my head. I stuff you under my fingernails, so I can slip you past them and smell you from time to time, like the body’s first, strongest scent.

  Aisha

  When Nasser reached Aisha’s
signature, he picked up a pen and paper and wrote down the name Ahmad. He repeated it in a long line and underlined it twice. “Another man in Aisha’s life. Let’s see where he fits into the puzzle of the Lane of Many Heads.” He ignored Birkin’s belief that there was “a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence” in taking the love of a woman to its furthest end. The sentiment irritated him. It set off warning signals in his head. It condemned his existence, which was beyond just “old.” It was the threadbare existence of someone who’d never experienced the kind of stormy exchange with another person that Aisha searched for in books and in real life, across an ocean, from Germany to a forgotten alley like the Lane of Many Heads. He put off facing up to that thought for some other time.

  X-Rays

  THE SHOPS THE LENGTH OF GATE LANE WERE OPENING UP, AND THE MUNICIpality workers were sweeping the gutters, making the most of the relative quiet to gather up the plastic bags and empty soda bottles littering the road. Nasser stood watching. Their fortitude seemed like a provocation. Faced with those mountains of trash, he would have lost his mind a long time ago, but they just carried on, earning only the meagerest salaries, shielding their heads from the Meccan sun that turned their uniforms to dust. They were there at their positions every morning, their patience solidifying with each movement until it became a layer that protected them from anything that might happen.

  Nasser laughed at the sight of the one worker who was using gloves and a gigantic claw grabber to pick up the trash while his colleagues worked with their bare hands. He turned and stepped into the tiny Studio Modern, surprising Mu’az, who had just opened the place and was polishing the front window. Mu’az tucked the cloth away and drew down the wooden counter, placing a barrier between himself and the detective.

  “You and I need to sit and talk a few things over,” said Nasser. Being a photographer had landed the young man firmly within the circle of suspicion. The detective had stumbled across a crumpled photo of the dead woman: a high-angle shot, taken from a rooftop through the lens of the imam’s son, whose photographic talents aroused whispers in the Lane of Many Heads (they were careful, however, never to let these whispers get back to his father the imam, so as not to endanger the boy’s chances in that profession in the future).

  “I didn’t want to call you in to the precinct this time. I just want to have a friendly chat.” Alarm flashed in Mu’az’s eyes. He led Nasser into the studio, where a backcloth painted as a forest scene covered an entire wall, and showed him to a seat directly beneath a waterfall. He left the door open so he could keep an eye on the shop entrance.

  “You’re a bright young guy—” At that opening, Mu’az folded his arms in front of him and hugged his body. Nasser clocked the defensive reaction but pressed on. “The people in the neighborhood say that you take sneaky pictures of the alley from a window halfway up the stairs of the minaret. Am I right in thinking that you’re the only one who has access to a view of the alley from above?”

  Mu’az hurried to correct the detective. “I don’t take pictures from above, I take pictures from within. The Lane of Many Heads has never taken me seriously enough to hide its secrets from me. Do you know what memorizing the Quran did to me? It’s like I swallowed a powerful flash that never goes off. It lights up everything I look at. I had this internal camera long before I knew anything about photography. And by the way, if my father knew what we were talking about, he’d throw me off the top of the minaret and you’d have another crime on your hands.”

  Nasser replied with a short, forced laugh, giving Mu’az a little room to relax so he could study his features more closely. His body was bunched up like a ball. He wore threadbare trousers and his hair was tucked into his scarf. He was a photomontage of modernity and ancient misery. Nasser glanced down at Mu’az’s feet and his huge Chinese-made imitation Nike sneakers, then raised his eyes once again to Mu’az’s dark face pierced only by the glimmer of his eyes. Mu’az was visibly uncomfortable under Nasser’s gaze. Nasser aimed his next question.

  “What do you know about Azza?” Nasser could see he’d hit his target: he was well acquainted with that involuntary twitch of the eyelashes that meant the person being questioned was hiding something. Mu’az stared at Nasser’s face: it was predatory, like the face of one of those falcons trained to hunt bustards. The unexpected response exploded in Nasser’s face:

  “Azza was like a time bomb in the Lane of Many Heads.” The exchange of fire eased the tensions between them. Mu’az spread his palms on his knees, and silence fell. The sounds of that morning were still streaming through Mu’az’s head. He had dozed off, sitting by the window on the stairs inside the minaret, and was awoken by a loud thud, which he was now certain was the sound of the body hitting the ground. He didn’t open his eyes for a little while, however, not until he heard the sound of hurrying, frightened footsteps, almost inaudible, because the alley was sucking them up like a sponge. He thought they were part of a dream at first—yet his keen hearing, even from that height, could sense their fear. By the time he opened his eyes, it was too late: he only just glimpsed the black Cadillac at the head of the alley, a small foot poking out from a hem before it disappeared into the back seat, the head of the black driver covered with a spotted scarf, as he leaned down, closing the door behind her, before the car sped away and the noise of the engine receded into the distance. Whose foot was it? He didn’t know.

  The hound sensed these images whirling around in Mu’az’s head and broke in, “You think she’s the victim?” No sooner had he asked the question than Nasser sensed the pungent smell of denial radiating from Mu’az’s body.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Her face was totally smashed up. My lens had never captured anything so hideous. Beneath her veil, Azza had a golden face that dazzled anyone who saw it; you know the sweet scent of paradise that they say the true believers can smell? Azza went places they didn’t want her to go to.”

  Detective Nasser was really no different from the street cleaners outside; he had to rake through all these layers of rotten deceit, tossing bones to his hound to chew on, until he arrived at the truth.

  “So you’re sure you didn’t see anything suspicious? A strange person hanging around? A thief that could have snuck into one of the two houses?” A chill emanated from the studio walls.

  “All I heard was a loud noise,” said Mu’az. “But I didn’t look. It never occurred to me that someone could strip a person naked and throw them down into the street like that.”

  “You said you’ve memorized the Quran …”

  Mu’az nodded. The threat implicit in the detective’s question hadn’t escaped him.

  “You’re not doing anyone any good by hiding information, you know. You might be helping a murderer walk free when that girl’s lying dead in the morgue,” Nasser warned. “I’m told you also work for Aisha the schoolteacher? Is there anything you want to tell me about that?”

  Mu’az was terrified that the finger of suspicion might suddenly turn to point at him. “No, no, don’t accuse me of covering something up. I’m a hard worker, Detective. My father sent me to help the schoolteacher out after she came back from Germany. I used to run errands for her once a week and sweep the hallway. A week before the body, she told me to stop coming because she was leaving the Lane of Many Heads to move in with one of her relatives.”

  “Did you see her leave?” asked the detective.

  “Aisha?” Mu’az snorted. “She might be the only person who could never leave. Detective, Aisha lives behind her computer screen in a world of images like me. When I worked for her I got used to hearing that same sound from my spot in the corridor. I’d stop sweeping when I heard her tapping the keys on that old computer of hers. Actually, to be honest, I got addicted to that sound. It sounded like it was coming from some incomprehensible faraway world. Often, the clicking would come thick and fast with no intervals whatsoever, so I’d hold my breath and try to move gingerly and quietly so I wouldn’
t disturb her reverie. Her fingers would chase one another to a world where she’d withdraw into nothingness, so much so that I’d risk creeping up the stairs and even sneaking a look at that unearthly creature with her back turned to the door of her cubbyhole. Her hair shone with an ethereal blue light. It was twisted into a bun, always messy and listing to the right, toward the door, with a pencil stuck through it to stop it coming undone. I never felt uncomfortable nor did I restrain myself; I just stared at God’s exquisite creation, draped atop that neck. I’d follow the nape of her neck, which was craned forward, looking for some weakness in the curvature the crash had left her with. But there’s nothing weak about it, in fact it’s more like a miracle. I envy her; I wish I could run my finger over my lens shutter at that speed. I wish I could photograph worlds like the one I could hear in her fingers tapping on the keyboard.”

  The hound began to salivate, but Nasser’s mouth went dry at the cipher. “There you go,” Mu’az continued. “I’ve laid out everything I know for you, like a film that burns up when exposed to light.”

  Nasser felt vindicated in his decision to lure Mu’az out of the Lane of Many Heads; he felt like that trickster of an alleyway was urging them all to mislead him. Mu’az continued, revealing yet more: “You should charge me, or understand how weak I was in the face of that being—I don’t want to call her a woman. She’s a feminine miracle just in herself … I could never do harm to such a symbol … Can you imagine? She—out of all the women in the Lane of Many Heads—saved herself and made it out. I try to figure out what’s stored in her memory. The worlds she must have seen to set her fingers loose on the keyboard with such—” He paused, searching for the right description: “lust.” His mind offered nothing but the image of one of the springs in Paradise. “Aisha’s fingers are the spring of Salsabil, flowing over the keys, setting her apart from the rest of the lane’s lifeless living. Do you know the Verse of Light? That verse, from the Chapter of the Cow, lives in my heart. Aisha was lucky enough to be cast from the energy of pure light. I line my little sisters up, one after the other, with their skinny bodies and their wrapped hair, like links in a chain. Try to understand me … Understand what my life’s been like. I’m a self-made man. I taught myself photography. I memorized the Quran. I earn the money I need to support the children of the imam, who doesn’t believe in birth control.”