by Raja Alem
The circle enveloped those present. They all breathed in time as the drums beat their praise, welcoming the Purest One who had been summoned and had arrived.
As though fire were as wet as water
in its grief, as though water itself were aflame.
The demons wail, the lights flash, and truth
in both word and meaning is made plain.
Then the entire group, in the painful throes of passion, prayed in one explosive voice: “Give us strength!”
“Give us strength!” I walked, I slapped the air, I was engulfed in al-Busiri’s Mantle Ode. “Give us strength!” I rose from the ground. My face breached the surface of a cool inundation, but Mushabbab’s voice brought me back:
“Yusuf. Yusuf, give blessings to the Prophet,” he whispered in my ear before splashing me with the poetry-foamed water of Zamzam from a pan, and I snapped out of it.
“The boy’s got a tender heart.” I smelled butter and milk mixed with the scent of agarwood and mastic. When I opened my eyes, I saw three thousand pairs of hands eating from massive trays of rice cooked with butter and milk. Some of the hands were spotted with warts, others are smooth and blemish-free.
I watched one grease-glimmering hand with a variety of the grimes of toil beneath its fingernails, as it scooped and squeezed rice alongside and in time with another hand with painted fingernails, wet and shining from the juice.
Hands, which in the light of day keep to separate spheres, came together, all of us, in passion and yearning and delight.
When I left Mushabbab, who was dressed in embroidered robes for the birthday celebration that hung loosely and smelled of fragrant oil, which meant it had been blessed to rub against part of the Kaaba’s covering, a sense of ecstasy had softened the corners of his mouth. I shut the orchard gate behind me. Behind it was Mushabbab; I don’t know what he got back. His private life is a well-kept secret, which he only occasionally gives me a peek of.
Azza, I carry you like the froth of that Mantle Ode. I once heard Mushabbab, raving that “We become orphans if the poem dies; we become naked if we allow it to disintegrate in our neglect.”
People say that al-Busiri was paralyzed, and that he saw the Purest Prophet in a dream and recited this poem for him. The Prophet, they say, gave him his mantle and when al-Busiri woke from his dream, he was cured of his ailment. I give you this mantle, Azza, so that you’ll be wrapped in the sweet black smell of it, so you’ll be bundled up so I can carry you around the Kaaba. I wash you and purify you and absolve you as if you were a sip of briny Zamzam water. Even if we both dissolve, its verses will drip honey on your tongue. Even in your shadowless room, you can hide inside of it.
Nasser was exhausted by all Yusuf’s effort. He’d nearly reached the conclusion that Yusuf didn’t care about Azza as a person, but simply considered her one of the spirits of the letters that he made submit to his will. He litters them here and there in his histories of Mecca, but in poems, he sets them out deliberately. He enlists them for his paranoia, but when they disobey him he goes on a rampage with his pen, crossing them out of the neighborhood. Why not?
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 11
“This novel, which Lawrence considered his best, tells the story of the lives and complicated relationships of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Ursula falls in love with Birkin, a stand-in for Lawrence the author, while Gudrun pursues a tragic and macabre affair with Gerald. These conflicts: intellectual, emotional, and doctrinal epitomize the course of love in modern society.”
Good lord, how much more shameless could I be?
I was reading Women in Love on the steps by the front door, as if just waiting for my father to come home.
Gudrun brought out the spitfire in me. I know now that I always wanted to be normal, to be Ursula, not Gudrun the rebel.
The passion of those two women was more than I could handle. More than I could take. Even now that I’ve been married and divorced. Perhaps your presence inside of me would allow me to reach those roiled heights. I was surprised tonight to read Gudrun saying on page ten: “If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”
What if what we have to do now is to jump? Jump to make things change? Jump to detach the Lane’s many heads? To put them back in place? As a first step toward changing the fate of the land we live in.
If I were to throw myself from here to Bonn, I would still end up here. My passport is temporary, for one trip only: I need a close male relative or guardian to renew it for me. Not having any male relatives left, I won’t bother looking for a miracle if I’m going to be stopped by a piece of paper in the airport. Guardian’s consent: “I allow this woman to travel and vouch that she will return.” That form gets men’s blood pumping with visions of rulership and regalia. Try asking your father or husband or brother to sign that form and you’ll understand what’s meant by the phrase, “The sky shut in on itself.” Without it, I can’t even choose to jump.
Can words be thrown out after they’ve been used? Where does a word end up after it’s been read? There are two kinds of words: poisonous and not. Certain words make my mouth taste differently after I read them.
My skin changes colors. At the moment, I’m bluish. Poisoned by anger and these desires, which only grow the more I chew on toxic words.
I occasionally burst in on the passage at the end of the book when Halliday is reading Birkin’s letter about the union of darkness and multitudes of corruption: “There is a phase in every race […] when the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire. In the individual, this desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the self […] a reducing back to the original, a return along the Flux of Corruption.”
What if the souls of the dead were to merge with our own souls and expose our thoughts? Will my desire for destruction poison my father?
P. S. I shut down my computer. I turned off all the lights in my cubby-hole. Darkness everywhere. I closed my eyes and when I re-opened them, I noticed that even in darkness the light streams and crowds.
It occurred to me that this is what the grave will be like. After they’ve shut you in and you know with full certainty that no artificial light can penetrate, light will come up out of the depths of darkness. It will illuminate for your eyes what lies beyond.
There is life in the darkness.
Aisha
Nasser didn’t pay any attention to what Aisha had written about “jumping” and “self-destruction.” He spent the entire evening thinking back on Aisha and what she’d said about “merging with the souls of the dead.” He knew deep down that the puzzle-master was using the pieces to move him, using Aisha’s emails to read him. He was laying bare Nasser’s inner thoughts, laying bare the end of his conversation that morning with Yabis the sewage cleaner. He still couldn’t get over the fact that he’d voiced those delusions of his after he’d sprung the question on Yabis.
“Your wife, Umm Ahmad”—he didn’t dare say Kawthar, her name—“Yusuf wrote somewhere that she can detect the souls of the dead.” That was his question, and when all he got from Yabis was a blank look, he continued, “I’ve spent two decades around crime scenes and corpses. I know what it means when a woman can make out the souls of the departed in the air.” Yabis still wore that blank look; he was simply waiting for the detective to spill everything out. Nasser had never spoken these ludicrous imaginings out loud before. “Most of the time, when we get to the scene, the body’s already decaying, but on the occasions when we make it there while things are still happening and a victim dies in your arms, I swear you can make out the outline of their soul in the air right in front of you. Sometimes the person tries to whisper their last words into your ear, but their soul slips in instead. Do you know what that’s like? It’s like a blast of heat straight through to your brain. For a second you feel like another being has come over you and that you’re living two lives, with two souls, just for a fleeting second before the being slips out of you and its soul rises to the sk
y.”
The Donkey Empress
THE TURKISH WOMAN CHARGED INTO HIS OFFICE IN A BURST OF COLOR: VIVID red and yellow, white skin, a streak of blue eyeshadow and a ruby the size of a pigeon egg sitting between her enormous breasts, framed by the low neckline of her robe. She adjusted her loose headscarf, which had slipped to reveal a shimmer-dusted forehead and a peroxide mane sculpted to show off her fine ears and shoulder-length chandelier earrings—amidst all this glitz Nasser scarcely noticed the jubbah she was wearing instead of the usual abaya, and the green sequins and red studs that adorned it. He and the puzzle-master sensed a heat radiating from her that defied Israfel’s icy blasts from across the small office, and her glowing locks coiled into his throat and around the words they exchanged. Nasser spluttered and began abruptly, “You’re the Empress?”
She gave an unintelligible laugh. “The Donkey Empress!” she corrected. Nasser flinched. “‘The Donkey Empress is a butcher,’ that’s what was written on the wall of my atelier after the corpse appeared. It wasn’t hard to figure out that the accusation was meant to smear my professional reputation. The Turkish Empress of Fashion. I vowed to make up for everything my Ottoman ancestors inflicted on the women of this country, to get rid of the seclusion and the black masks, the head-to-toe black tents covering their bodies and the white veils over their faces. And beneath all that lie the forgotten spots: the sad kurtas and sirwals and Jawan sarongs. I came to the Lane of Many Heads bringing joy, modernity—and a good few conflicts too, what with all the men complaining “That Turkish woman’s turning them all into vamps!” She looked at him with her world-weary gaze. “I won’t deny,” she continued, “that Aisha’s dress was my breakthrough in the Lane of Many Heads. Before that, I’d had my big break in the city: I was the one who got the first bride ever to ditch the Hijazi get-up. If it weren’t for me, the Lane of Many Heads would still be stuck in the eleventh century and brides would still be suffocating from all that padding they stick under the traditional dresses, weighed down with necklaces made from fruit and silver-dipped cardamom pods. A stuffy dress with a million clasps can’t compete with the carefree present!” She paused to let her words fill the room, then carried on with a wink: “And Azza? Those rags I strung together for her to pull her out of her father’s spider web? Who knows where they took her! The Lane of Many Heads is so ungrateful. So ungrateful! There’s no pleasing it no matter how hard you try.”
Daughters’ Dowers
NASSER CORNERED HER WITH A DIRECT QUESTION: “TELL ME ABOUT THE DRESS.” The Turkish woman looked up. An instinct for seduction lifted one corner of her smile, and she arched one tattooed eyebrow so high it almost reached her hairline. “The dress?” she cackled. “Let me tell you: hems keep climbing up and necklines keep falling down.” She shook with laughter. Nasser was so surprised that his question had missed the mark that he didn’t notice the innuendo.
“Aisha the schoolteacher. Her wedding dress, everyone says you designed and made it.”
She raised her head proudly and snorted. “She and I picked that style out together. It was the embodiment of everything she’d read about the French and Russian courts! A flower on each shoulder, elbow-length taffeta, and lace gloves, and pearls all over the bodice. We kept the details a secret so the girl could make a grand entrance. I staked my reputation and talent on making her a masterpiece of a dress. She arrived at my atelier for the first fitting in a procession. Her parents came with her, and the whole neighborhood was watching them. I had to close the shop to customers so as to keep the party out, and I managed to prize her away from her parents and get her in the fitting room with me alone. I locked the door and had her stand on the little stage I use for fittings—it’s not much bigger than a cake stand really, just a few feet across and one foot off the floor—anyway, I plunked her up there like a fruit on a plate, and the first thing I did was take off the drab gray robe she was wearing. I made sure she knew that I was unraveling a cocoon of her ugliness, picking her locks, peeling her, turning her into a beautiful sliced peach.” She said it with lust, and a steamy patch of humidity began to spread on the ceiling above her in the otherwise bone-dry room. “I was getting her ready to be presented to a husband; I knew what I had to stoke and what I had better leave, cooking gently among the coals, waiting to be consumed with care. The poor girl didn’t know what to think about all the ruffles and fish scales and layers I poured all over her, rustling and cruel, like a dead-end tunnel, and yet still as light as a cloud against her trembling, newborn body. I artfully arranged the lace to rub and excite her budding breasts, let the taffeta lick her legs, layered stiff net and starched cotton into a petticoat that pecked at her ass and nibbled her silky thighs. By covering her here and uncovering her there, with only air and ruffled fabric, I was able to replenish desire where it waned and reshape her so that she’d catch her husband’s eye, make him pant and salivate—” Suddenly, mischievously, the Turkish woman stopped speaking and just stared at Nasser. She enjoyed handing him this forbidden fruit naked on a tray, and then she burst out laughing, knocking him out of his trance. He realized she was choosing and polishing her words aggressively before she poured them into his ears, molten, the steam sizzling, to clothe the demons inside his mind. Nasser looked back toward her to find her staring impudently back. He could see that she’d opened up a route ahead of him and was urging him to take it; she left him with that realization and continued to stitch together her story:
“Then the door flew open, tearing Aisha’s flower-strewn tulle and pearl veil and baring her shoulders to her father the teacher’s face. He was brought up short by the snow-white starburst that clasped his daughter and revealed that divine body like a blossoming lily. Next to her he looked comically short, hopping about energetically like one of the seven dwarves, thunderstruck by her femininity, honed and rearing. I laughed, because that’s my game! He began to complain, ‘Where are the jewels? It needs more—more …’ More flesh or more fabric? I couldn’t tell. But his words summed up everything I’d known about the Lane of Many Heads. You know, I’m where excitement gets its start. I’m the one who sparks the desire to get through to the flesh, to the sheath; to the wound beneath, and to the surface, raven-black.
“The poor guy kept yelling, ‘What about the sequins? What about the glitter?’
“So I asked him, ‘Would you like me to add a few crystals?’
“‘A few?!’ he spluttered. ‘Listen, sister, do you know who the groom is? Ahmad the sewage cleaner’s son! He works for some seriously important people,’ he bragged by way of explanation, ‘and he gave us the best dower the neighborhood’s ever seen. So we need to be up to standard!’
“He gave some instructions and left. Aisha was deserted, robbed of her lovely gloves, and we had to add shoulders, a chestpiece, and sleeves sturdy enough to hold all the crystals her father had demanded. They nearly broke her neck with their weight, and brashly outshone her lucky stars, which dropped out of the sky one by one.
“The day of her wedding, of course, the women were awestruck, craning their necks enviously to get a better look at that glittering vision. Poor thing. He left her two months later. The whole neighborhood blamed me for ruining the marriage from afar, and for the death of her family in that crash … They said it was all because of that unlucky dress! Any time anything bad happens to you guys in the Middle East, you always blame me, me and the Ottomans. When we brought those black robes and face veils you shouted, ‘You’ve brought the Black Death!’ and now when I design revealing dresses you scream, ‘You’ve unloosed the Evil Eye!’ At least our veils had slits for women to see and breathe out of; when the hurricane blew out of your desert it sealed them all up!
“Anyway,” she finished with a wink, “I’m beyond all of that.” Nasser hoped that wink wouldn’t drag him into another snare.
That night, he went through Aisha’s emails looking for the dress.
Dear ^,
I freed the dress. I spent a whole night snipping crystals off the fin
e lace, and ripped off the sleeves, and when I stood in front of the mirror with bare shoulders I felt such ecstasy. I went up to the roof and stood on a barrel to recreate that first fitting, and let the Meccan night and the lace take turns licking my breasts. I wore it directly on my skin and raised my weightless arms to the sky, ready to fly like I do in my sleep.
Aisha
Rubber Membrane
David,
The sentence I’d read in Yusuf’s Window in Umm al-Qura floated around in my head: “The Kaaba refused the first covering that was placed on it by the king of the Himyarites: he had it covered in skins and hessian but the House rose up and shook them off, and then it did the same when he had it covered in woven palm fronds. But when he clothed it in water and patchwork Yemeni silk, the Kaaba assented.”
Believe me, there are clothes that torture.
I recall the coat my father was wearing when he turned up unexpectedly in my bedroom the day after my wedding. The heat was stifling and there was no reason to be wearing such a heavy coat over the crumpled robe he’d been wearing since the celebration the night before. I was still lying where Ahmad had left me, barely able even to bend my legs. I’d heard the door slam when he’d left in fury at midnight, and then again when he returned at dawn, about an hour before my father appeared. These details are chiseled into my memory. I try to find an explanation for the scene that’s stuck in my mind, but I don’t dare face the knife he hid there. I remember my father came in without knocking and leaned against the doorjamb; he looked as if he were wavering between two possible decisions. It was as though he’d cornered Ahmad in my bedroom cubbyhole, in the bed that filled the entire space. Without uttering a single word, he handed over a piece of paper, and I knew, I knew exactly what it was. I remember how my father’s face was flush with blood. This was his second heart attack, and it cast a bloody shadow over the bedroom. The first was when he saw the pan of still-warm blood that had come from between my legs and his face turned the color of raw liver. I was twelve at the time.
