by Raja Alem
“You didn’t give me a chance. Are you going to let me go?”
“Give me your address in case I need to call you in. Then get out of here. This place is off-limits.”
Mu’az: An Occult Future
AT MID-MORNING, YUSUF MET MU’AZ AT THE FOOT OF MOUNT HINDI. THE SON of a hag’s store had closed, and in its place was a new building with a cheaply-finished glass frontage, and a vast sign proclaiming APARTMENTS TO LET. Yusuf snorted at the thought of how long the flimsy building would last.
They set off up the hill in silence, Mu’az leading and Yusuf following. Yusuf didn’t want to look around at the houses he used to see as a teenager when he passed by on one of the son of a hag’s bikes. He kept his eyes to the ground and his brows firmly knotted together, but sounds still filtered through: children cackling like mountain goats, clambering about and shrieking at one another. Like the call to prayer, the smell of cooking rose from each of the tiny houses at exactly the same time. Female voices spoke a jumble of foreign tongues and Meccan slang. Windows opened and closed quickly to catch the attention of passersby, their distant clatter mingling with radio quiz shows, the clink of spoons on plates, coughs, and songs. Rocks tumbled; the steps up the hill were clearly defined in some places, but in most crumbling away.
Mu’az’s voice brought them to a halt. “We’re here.” Yusuf looked up to see an old wooden door. A mihrab was engraved on each leaf, and the knocker, positioned where the inner niche would be, was shaped like a dove in flight, its beak striking a flat plate of copper. The graceful old house towered above Yusuf, reaching up the slopes of the mountain so that its roof was level with the foundations of the square Mount Hindi citadel. It was perhaps seven stories high—attempting to count them just got him lost amidst the solid volcanic stones, mined from Mount Abu Lahab, from which it was built. A bunch of keys in Mu’az’s hand suddenly caught his eye. They had appeared out of nowhere. Mu’az took the largest one, the handle of which was shaped like a mihrab, inserted it into the cavernous lock with a trembling hand, and opened the door. It creaked loudly and released a breath of cold air. Their skin crawled at the musty odor of dereliction and the motes of dust that billowed out.
“This is where my treasure’s buried, Yusuf,” said Mu’az. Yusuf’s mouth felt dry. He didn’t dare to look up at the endless ceiling as he stepped into the hall. On both sides of the hall, windows looked out from spacious sitting rooms, and toward the back, stairs descended to both left and right, no doubt leading to cellars below. In the center, a wide staircase led upward.
Mu’az led Yusuf to a room at the back of the hall on the right, as he himself had once been led by Marie, the owner of the house, when Mushabbab had taken him to see her. He thought he had seen a visitation of the Lord come to answer all his prayers when the woman had said she wanted him to work for her in place of the Pakistani who was leaving her service. “A servant in the Lababidi house on Mount Hindi,” recalled Mu’az. “It was just what I needed to convince my father the imam. The salary they offered was persuasive, and he let me leave high school. What I found here was something I would spend the rest of my life looking for.” He went first into the small room, Yusuf following. It was bare except for a bed on the floor.
“This was mine,” Mu’az gestured. “No one will look for you here.” He hesitated to give the whole bunch of keys to Yusuf—he was tempted to keep the key to the front door and the upper stories—but he couldn’t bring himself to separate the bundle of linked mihrabs. He reluctantly placed the bunch in Yusuf’s hand. Sighing, he looked around the austere room where he’d lived throughout the time he had worked in the service of Marie, the wife of al-Lababidi the photographer.
“God is great …” The first words of the noon call to prayer pierced the room. They cleared Mu’az’s indecision, and he took the keys back from Yusuf. “Come on, I’ll show you the house.” Yusuf followed him to the wide central stairs. The incline was so shallow—each step was no more than ten centimeters—it was more like a slope. They raced the call to prayer up to the top floor, so Mu’az could begin Yusuf’s tour there, just like his own first tour of the house had begun.
Mu’az’s recollections mingled with Yusuf’s observations. When they got to the roof, as Mu’az had done the first time, the stairs opened out into a room. Engraved wooden windows in all three walls looked out onto the expanse of the sky, and on the fourth side, splendid teak arches gave fully onto the roof. Neither of them looked toward the room, its door ajar, at the end of the roof; instead they looked at the damask floor cushions—now covered in dust and dove droppings and feathers—where he had first seen the Lebanese woman. She was so unlike the black-cloaked women of the neighborhood and his skinny cinnamon-stick sisters; no houri, certainly, but enchanting nonetheless with her thick cigars and smoke rings. That was how he’d seen her first.
Mu’az stopped Yusuf there, under the canopy where the stairs led up to the roof, as the second call to noon prayer exploded like a fountain from dozens of minarets below them. It was as if the roof was being lifted aloft by the voices. Mu’az wished Yusuf could see Marie as he’d seen her that day, when he and Mushabbab had followed the young Pakistani to the rooftop. Standing there at the top of the staircase, he was bewitched by the woman reclining with her legs crossed. She was perhaps in her sixties, though she could easily have been in her forties, and the adolescent Mu’az didn’t notice the flabbiness around her knees—only the shimmer of the silk stockings hugging her bare calves, which stood like two of heaven’s white-sugar columns. He had been startled for a moment, astonished to see a woman like her within the circle of the Haram Mosque. At the end of the roof the half-open door caught his eye; a washing line hung inside the darkroom beyond. He made out freshly developed photographs pegged up to dry on the line, but he couldn’t tell when or where they were taken.
He stood with Yusuf in front of a portrait of the lady of the house and introduced him to her, as Mushabbab had done with him. “Marie,” he said, with the same mix of deference and embarrassment that a real, living woman would occasion. “Mr. Lababidi’s wife. Al-Lababidi was the first Meccan photographer. He was taking photos from the beginning of the twentieth century right up until God took him away when he was nearly a hundred. That was in 1979, the year Juhayman al-Otaybi seized the Haram Mosque. Al-Lababidi left his photographic archive of Mecca to his wife.” Yusuf had no idea why Mushabbab should have been visiting this lady—Mu’az hadn’t understood either—an interloper among the women of Mecca with her Christian name and religion, which she gave up in exchange for the right to accompany her husband into the Muslim-only Haram compound. In fact, the only way she had actually entered was through the telescopic lens of the tripod-mounted camera that stood on their lofty rooftop next to the citadel, shaded by the minaret of the Turkish baths.
Al-Lababidi had met the fifteen-year-old Marie in Beirut when he was in his sixties. The girl born to a soundtrack of Hiroshima’s echoes had fallen inevitably, definitively in love with this Meccan born at the dawn of the twentieth century who had spent years moving back and forth with his merchant-fighter father between Syria and the Hijaz, his plans put on hold by two world wars that ended up turning him into a pro at photography, life, and faith in a soon-to-appear Hidden Imam who would end all wars and turn the deserts into Eden.
Mu’az was lost a while in the memories of his infatuation with the Marie he had seen the very first time he stood in this spot. He was fresh from the neighborhood back then, and his adolescent gaze just couldn’t put together all the contradictions, all the strokes of passion, struggle, and transformation that had gone into sculpting this female idol. He trembled involuntarily when she stood up in a single fluid movement, thinking to himself that if he’d taken her photo just then she would have appeared as a droplet of water falling from her bijou ruched muslin hat.
Marie walked ahead of them to lead the way downstairs into her vast old house, taking them into sitting room after splendid sitting room, hidden store rooms and
cozy parlors. Every time she led them down to the next floor, the servant scurried ahead, unlocking high-ceilinged reception rooms where sculpted doves crowned each arch and flanked tall mirrors that shunned reflection of the present and instead revealed a hundred years of the Holy City. Having stood empty since the beginning of this century, the three-hundred-year-old house was now inhabited not by people but by black-and-white photographs of all shapes and sizes that covered every wall, from the floor right up to the gilded cornicing of calligraphied poetry.
Mu’az wished he could draw Marie for Yusuf, not merely as she was but how she looked in motion; wished he could create a film so that she could walk before Yusuf, leading him as she’d once led Mu’az. On the upper floors he and Mushabbab had walked, as Yusuf was doing now, past photo after photo of the courtyard of the Holy Mosque where the pilgrims walked circles around the Kaaba: scenes of the whirlpool of human movement circumambulating the courtyard taken throughout the decades, showing infinite numbers of tiny dots sinking to kiss the black stone or prostrating en masse against the Hateem Wall or swaying, supplicating in front of the multazam or washing in foaming buckets of water from the Well of Zamzam or reciting their night prayers. The pattern was repeated and varied endlessly across the years. The thrill of seeing the old courtyard like this, when he’d thought it had been lost forever, had shaken him violently, just as it shook Yusuf now.
On the next floor down, Mu’az waited at the door of a parlor, as he remembered Mushabbab had done, to allow Yusuf a few moments alone with some rare photographs of the architecture of the Haram Mosque taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, long before all the expansion and demolition projects. They showed the green-domed Well of Zamzam, the Gate of the Shayba Tribe, the spot where Abraham had stood, where Imam al-Shafi’i delivered his classes, the Hateem Wall around the Hijr of Ishmael, the outposts of the Hanafi, Maliki, and Hanbali schools of law, and the surrounding buildings that jostled for a view across the mosque’s central courtyard: the Ottoman governmental palace known as the Hamidiya, the triple-terraced Ajyad Fortress with its rear towers, and the Vali’s office with its twin minarets and three domes.
On the next floor down, Yusuf found photographs of Mecca and stepped forward to mingle with the people walking through its ancient neighborhoods: Mount Turk, Mount Hindi, the Sulaymaniya quarter where the Afghans lived, the Moroccans’ Alley, the Bukharans’ Alley, and the settlements of the Africans, the Jawanese, the Kurds, the Sindhis, the Syrians, the Yemenis and the Hadramawtis. A whole maze of alleys like the Lane of Many Heads, overflowing with faces with which Yusuf and Mu’az no longer crossed paths as they went about their daily business: black, white, and narrow-eyed children playing barefoot in the street, slave musicians beating drums and dancing with rattles, hoof castanets, and wood blocks, Indian merchants in black cloaks over white robes haggling with Turkish officers whose belts held inlaid swords and whose pedigree camels were adorned with silver brocade sashes, and madly grinning Sharif children—those descended from the Prophet, peace be upon him—in short gold- and silver-belted jubbahs that showed their booted feet and wrapped cloth turbans, similar to Ottoman fezzes, studded with starry pearls. The sons of the Vali and other dignitaries were more serious, wearing cloaks cinched with cartridge belts bearing jeweled daggers. Then there were the children of the Shayba Tribe, the custodians of the Kaaba, who exuded nobility and splendor in their brocade-trimmed robes, leaf-embroidered jubbahs, and gold egals. There were muezzins who traced their ancestry back to Ibn Zubayr, merchants with their Circassian slaves, women reclining in their gardens smoking hookahs or hurrying down dusty streets, wearing brocade-striped belts and airy, white embroidered burkas that framed their eyes with gleaming gold coins. There were Meccan brides drowning in layer after layer of pearls, and pilgrims from India, Baghdad, Kabul, Bahrain, Melaka, the Bacan Islands, Sambas, Jawa, Sumatra, and Zanzibar. Bukharan dervishes, in their wide-belted short coats and the fur-trimmed conical hats they wore even in the sweltering Meccan summer, held staffs and jangled bunches of keys that—so they claimed—unlocked paths and destinies before them wherever they went. Knowledge seekers busked their way from Yemen to the Great Mosque, drumming and dancing to earn their keep while they stayed in Mecca and were educated in religion.
Tentatively, imitating the Pakistani who had preceded him as guardian of this treasure, Mu’az locked every floor as they descended to the next, giving Yusuf no chance to go back and contemplate again the decades of Mecca’s history they had passed through. Each floor was a different face of the city’s existence. The lower they went, the more alienated Yusuf felt: as they moved into more recent years, Mecca’s immense spirituality receded into the distance. Floor by floor, the old alleys became wider, and their cobblestones, over which water once ran in rivulets to cool and refresh the city, were picked off, until they reached the ground floor where the houses had lost their teak-wood windows altogether. Poor squatters had taken over the old abandoned houses with their roof terraces, and the hillsides had been eaten away to make room for asphalt that bit through them. Yusuf got to the point where he couldn’t tell if he was still wandering among the photos of al-Lababidi and his wife Marie or if he had been booted back to the modern Mecca he knew.
With dilated pupils, Mu’az turned to Yusuf, wanting to convey in his look that he had seen—and wanting Yusuf too to see—the transformation of the world around him into an ugly rectangular box, the blade that had sliced through old stone houses leaving staircases and footsteps dangling in mid-air and reminiscences of wooden windows teetering, about to crumble into nothingness or fall into a deep dream; that had unceremoniously chopped up sitting rooms mid-soirée so that half a divan still stood in its place here, perhaps the leg of an evening guest still resting on it, and eager oud strings or laughter still echoed there, only to be chewed up by bulldozers and paved over with asphalt, cement and aluminum punched through with narrow windows where air-conditioning units crowded out most of the light.
Mu’az and Yusuf stood in front of a room on the ground floor that was stuffed with al-Lababidi’s photos of the Mecca he’d continued photographing until his last breath, taken during the period when Mu’az had worked at the house; to these, Marie had permitted Mu’az to add his own black and white photos. Standing there, Yusuf could see how Mu’az had raced to take those pictures, panting to keep up with the pace of the changes sweeping the city. As the photos progressed, they seemed to drag Mu’az and Yusuf into a hole. Around them, the heart of Mecca was transformed into a courtyard paved with marble slabs that erased the Small Market, the Mas’a Market, the Mudda’i Market, the Night Market, and al-Salam Gate Square to the southeast where pilgrims entered the Haram Mosque. Nothing whatsoever remained of the two public squares at al-Salam Gate, only the great courtyard like a crater left by a meteor, overshadowed by glass towers that ate into what flesh remained of the bare mountains. In that pit, gone were the faces of the Meccans who had sought wisdom and proximity to the Great Mosque, and in their place were the faces of mercenary salesmen, infiltrating from every side, and their stores, uninterrupted like prayer beads, which confronted the approaching visitor to Mecca upon his arrival at the gate that opened onto the graves of the martyrs and Umm al-Doud and covered the city’s peaks and depressions. Holes had been drilled in the façades of old houses where parlor windows had once been, and protruding glass vitrines now displayed clothes made in Taiwan, China, and Korea. The makeshift stalls selling caps and robes dyed with saffron and embroidered by Meccan fingers had disappeared, while new restaurants, stores, and stands, more of which were opening all the time, sold every kind of fast food under the sun amidst stacked-up white plastic jerrycans of Zamzam water for wholesale purchase.
Standing in that cold hall, Yusuf realized—as Mu’az had also realized—that he was moving in a condemned space, in a holy sanctuary where Old Mecca had come with its history, its people, and its stone houses to take refuge. Here, in al-Lababidi’s house. A beggar, he had come to take refuge
with them.
Yusuf knew that Mu’az had arrived before him to the world that he’d spent his life trying chaotically to sum up in a word. He was seeing it now summed up in a picture.
Abraj al-Bait Towers
SINCE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, NASSER HAD BEEN UNEASY. HE FELT NOT ONLY LIKE he was being watched, but like someone was directing his movements, as if by remote control. Thinking for him, impelling him to go poking around after events and faces that even the Lane of Many Heads itself had forgotten. It wasn’t just Yusuf’s diaries or Aisha’s letters—there was something else. Nasser was trapped inside a puzzle, and the puzzle-master was moving him—the central piece—back and forth, either to build or to destroy the case.
That morning, the player had him follow the thread that wove Thursdays together through Yusuf’s “Window” in Umm al-Qura newspaper. Yusuf had become a ghost who surprised them by peering out of his newspaper column, corresponding with his editors from the many Internet cafes scattered about Mecca. His last piece had been banned, but Nasser had managed to find it on al-Sahat, a dissident website, using a personal proxy server. It gave him a great sense of superiority; he could reach everything blocked by the National Anti-SPAM Firewall—Electronic Crimes Division—with their bland message: “This website is unavailable. If you think this website should be available, please click here. For more information on Internet services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, please visit www.internet.gov.sa.”
Nasser read:
Yesterday when I entered the courtyard of the Haram Mosque, I couldn’t see the Kaaba. I looked around, wondering for a moment if David Copperfield—famous for making the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty disappear—had come to play his tricks on the circumambulating worshippers, but by feeling my way ahead, my fingers finally made contact with it, having penetrated the thick vapor of pilgrims’ breaths, which there was no mountain breeze left to dissipate.
