The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  My adolescence began in distress. For three whole days, a feverish grape of menstrual blood, my first, grew between my legs. The doctor came to our house with a nurse in tow and rendered a diagnosis as unmitigated as his scalpel. You see, David, I have a history with scalpels. They laid me down in that same bedroom and shut the door. I could sense tiny, shining, curious eyes that turned dull when a needle was stuck in my vein. The world began to recede as a voice ordered me to “clench.” I was clenching and my mother was spreading my legs farther apart when the cold scalpel hit, and the world was blown open in that red bubble between my legs.

  I was twelve years old, and when I came to nothing was left except for the pan, which our neighbor Halima could attest to. The blood that had stored up in my womb for three days burned as it poured out of me.

  And thus my father handed Ahmad, who felt duped, that piece of paper. He looked at it blankly.

  “A medical certificate signed and sealed.” The conversation was one-sided. It was only then that I noticed the knife in the inside breast pocket of my father’s coat. A knife?! What’s a knife doing on the morning after my wedding?! The room was suddenly calm now that Ahmad had surrendered completely to silence. Even now when I think back on that knife—in the pocket of that small man of many slogans, my father—and the sealed certificate, it still seems like a border between life and death. Ahmad had no idea that even just a glance, whether mocking or incredulous, in the face of that piece of paper would have been enough to make one of us cross that border.

  The certificate wasn’t on my father’s mind that morning. It was my mother who’d got it out and slipped it into his pocket. He’d picked up the knife! Was it Ahmad, the doctor, the nurse, or was it me? Who had my father been planning to stab before chickening out at the last minute?

  “Rubber hymens.” I was the first person to introduce that novelty to the Lane of Many Heads. And Ahmad nearly bought it.

  My father took his rage out on what he understood a honeymoon to mean. “He’s going to take her somewhere and mull it over? No fucking way.” It was the nightmare he’d feared.

  Even now my menstrual blood burns, between my legs and his.

  Aisha

  P. S. The scalpel, the cleaving between my legs, propelled the blood all the way up to my nose. I can still taste it in the back of my throat. All that to be rid of a rubber barrier. But that wasn’t all. There were more barriers, devious barriers that no scalpel, no doctor, could tear down. Ahmad failed as well. And yet two years later, you came and you conquered.

  The Bundle Girl and the Dinosaur Age

  VAGUE RUMORS HAD BEGUN TO SPREAD ABOUT THE MASQUERADE GAME KHALIL liked to stage in his taxi, but Nasser did his best to ignore them—in part because his only meeting with Khalil had caused him so much consternation—but the puzzle-master was prodding his suspicions about that skittish, agitated character. Likewise the police hound inside Nasser wouldn’t let him pretend not to know that Khalil was capable of suicide. He’d already committed career suicide, so what was he capable of now that he was about to turn fifty? It’s a turning point in a man’s life that causes him to start making calculations and the thought of how to regain what he’s lost consumes him. How could he pursue a man who was in his prime and yet so full of anger, defiant?

  In any case, tracking Khalil down in the neighborhood wasn’t going to be easy any more. This was perhaps partly because his backstory had taken place outside the Lane of Many Heads, but more than anything it was due to the dispute over al-Labban’s building, the Arab League, and the forced evictions. Khalil had simply left his wife Ramziya on her father the sewage cleaner’s doorstep and disappeared. Nasser worried he’d never be able to find him again, but Halima had some advice for him: “Your best bet now is his sister Yousriya. Ask her and she’ll lead you to him. She lives in Hajj Silahdar’s home for the destitute. The Pilot’s well known there. No matter where he’s hidden himself or how long he stays away, he’s bound to go back to Yousriya. He adores her and she adores him.” It never occurred to Khalil that I, the Lane of Many Heads, could be the reason he had to burrow down into the network of banishment places that eroded my perimeter.

  Nasser brought some tinned food and a couple of bags of rice with him. He parked his car at my entrance, by the cafe, and followed behind some children who’d promised to show him the way. They bounded ahead, racing and sparring with one another—with the shadows they cast on the crumbling walls even—each trying to kick up the biggest cloud of dust, while Nasser followed passively, surrendering himself to a map that was beyond his control. They took him down alleys within alleys, beneath decaying buildings, which Nasser feared might collapse on their heads at any moment, until they came face-to-face with a hundred-year-old house. Nasser read the inscription over the door: ENDOWED BY HAJJ MUHAMMAD AL-SILAHDAR. The excited children tossed pebbles at the Yemeni guard lying on a bench to the right of the door, and he in turn gleefully opened his mouth as wide as it would go, revealing a tongueless cavity, blackened by licorice and rotting gums. Nasser tried talking to him, but quickly realized he was simple. Delighted by the children’s shrieks of laughter, the guard repeated his grimace with a throaty gurgle, but when he noticed that Nasser was holding a bag of donations he went ahead to the door and knocked. There was scuffling and murmuring on the other side. Three loud claps came by way of reply and then a woman’s voice barked: “Media or charity?”

  “I’ve brought some provisions for Yousriya on behalf of her brother Khalil the Pilot,” Nasser replied without looking inside.

  The door clove open and a damp smell gushed out as the women scurried to hide behind the doors to their rooms. As lonely and forlorn as the Seven Sleepers, they eavesdropped on the newcomer and peeped at what he was carrying from behind the doors. A tall, broad-shouldered woman in a blue and white floral prayer shawl came toward him, yanking one corner of it across her lower face so that only her eyes, which studied him carefully with every step she took, could be seen. Slipping back off her forehead, the shawl revealed a few white locks poking out of the tight green kerchief she’d tied around her hair. She surprised him with an elegant gesture of greeting—a remote handshake formed by a thumb pressed to the palm, three fingers swept through the air and the littlest extended gracefully outward—and then she led him to Yousriya’s room, the first of several doors along either side of a dark corridor on the first-floor.

  “Has Khalil visited you recently?” Nasser asked her immediately.

  “You from the press?” she asked anxiously.

  “No, no,” he reassured her. But she didn’t appear to be listening.

  She didn’t stop for his answer, just plowed on: “because we’re not allowed to talk to the media.” Then she added, “Khalil said there was something he had to sort out in Ta’if.”

  “Ta’if?” echoed Nasser in surprise. They were separated by the doorway, but she pushed a chair out into the hall so that he could sit down as she sat facing him on an ornate chair just inside her bedroom. Yousriya began speaking, her lips writhing like a chrysalis behind her shawl. Every time Nasser asked a question, seasoned memories poured out of her, unrestrained. For a moment it seemed to him that it wasn’t even Yousriya speaking but the puzzle-master, unlocking women’s heads so he could peer inside and leading him into storerooms full of their memories, which were crumbling like the walls of the home they inhabited, atrophying like their forgotten bodies. Nasser was amazed by her closely and vividly sketched memories, which seemed trivial now and sluggish compared to how much had changed so quickly. Details, details, details; he listened intently.

  She began, “Khalil is possessed by a black and white dinosaur. He will tell you in great detail about how our father used to take him to the ravine in the South Martyrs’ neighborhood in Ta’if, to the cinema where our father himself went to watch films with his grandfather and his friends in the sixties. Such a shame they always repeated the same movie—the one about the dinosaur that tramples cities with his enormous feet. Would
you believe that, in the sixties, our father was able to buy a ticket to the cinema and go and watch a movie with other people? That would be an impossible luxury nowadays, even in a modern city like Jeddah, or in Dhahran or al-Khubar in the land of oil. Our father was a furnace of money, or rather like a pumpjack that spewed money like crude and pumped Khalil into the finest aviation school in the USA. He used to always say that we could fly, and that we pissed all over those barefoot naked shepherds with our constitution that dated from the time of the Sharifs. A load of good those words did him—he ended up a broken man in Egypt and he had to cut us off. The money he used to give us stopped at the banks of the Nile, and the old man retired and flew away. I left the world to them, and Khalil started to say, ‘Embrace evil …’ Khalil’s been shaken by two earthquakes in his life: coming back from America, and losing his job at the airline. Returning to Mecca from the other side of the Atlantic was like being placed on a road between heaven and hell. Khalil was like a lion in a cage, traveling from Mecca to Jeddah to attend movie screenings organized by the British Council on the invitation of the son of the last sultan of Hadramawt, who’d taken refuge in Jeddah with his family. Khalil had met the man at Heathrow on one of his stopovers on the way to Florida, and they became good friends, until the guy moved to live permanently in London. With the sultan’s son gone, the cinema was closed in Khalil’s face, just like all the concerts and art exhibitions were closed in everyone’s faces by various embassies when terrorists began threatening the expat communities.”

  The scarf fell from her face, exposing her dark lips. Yousriya coughed and fanned the air around her mouth with an elegant, practiced wave followed by three light raps on her ample chest. She continued with her face uncovered, chewing every word with pleasure:

  “Khalil considers himself part of the generation who were taken to the sea and came home thirsty—the generation who fled to American movies to escape the image of the belly dancer—it was either Taheya Carioca or Samia Gamal, I can’t remember—pouring champagne into her shiny stiletto for some Pasha who’s crawling around her on all fours like a dog. Khalil felt like he’d been transformed, as they say—into a monster. A cross between a Pasha, a dog, and the Incredible Hulk. Just to make it absolutely clear to us that he was made of different stuff than ordinary people, that he was a modern-day combination of movie hero and space explorer who belonged to a world of science fiction, they took away his pilot’s license—what a shame—and let him loose in the streets of Mecca, to make the rounds with his taxi … He would say that inside an airplane he always became a silent drop of night, gliding transparently, searching inside himself for the young woman who made him fall in love after thirty years of liberty.

  “I used to tell him, ‘Khalil, you’ve only ever seen the shadow of her abaya!’ But he’d say, ‘Yes, but still my mind is licked!’ He’d captivated and conquered nightclubs in Florida and Los Angeles, he had adventures to his name like those of Abu Nuwas and dervishes and hashish smokers. He was excessive in everything he did, even in his daydreams, apparently, which all revolved around that cunning temptress, Azza the idiot, who was half his age. Khalil’s philosophy was absolute: he was looking for an odorless woman, and he thought he’d found her in Azza. He thought she was a different species from the kind he’d tried on his airplanes. The thing that terrified him most about those women was how promiscuous they were. His stomach would be whisked away and turned upside down in disgust; he’d lose control and become violent, and say he was the dinosaur and that he’d awoken to go on a pitiless rampage. I remember the night after the first screening of the dinosaur film: Khalil’s body was taken over by the dinosaur, which was something he’d inherited from our father when he was only nine years old. He stepped out of the house at noon to find a Thai man had spread his watermelon stall out on our doorstep. Suddenly Khalil was throwing watermelons left and right, hurling them down Qarara hill where they exploded like bombs. The Thai man’s shrieks brought our mother to the window. Her loud, forceful clap was enough to rein us in, and she tied us up with the firm rope of a threat: ‘Wait till your father wakes up and sees what you’ve done!’”

  Yousriya laughed, quickly covering her mouth to stifle it. “The dinosaur was suddenly a mouse cowering, paralyzed in a corner, waiting for the stick. When our father got up from his seat to descend upon us he really warmed us up with those lashes. Fresh welts across our shoulders, feet, and behinds, ready to have salt rubbed in. The marks that that stick left on our bodies were the only words we exchanged with our father. ‘Miserable bastard’ was how Khalil eloquently put it when the subject of our father Nuri’s severity arose. The language had been handed down from the time of Ottoman rule in Mecca, to our grandfather Ateeq, then Sulayman, and from him to our father Nuri, and now it had reached Khalil. Prophets of torment, all of them. People would say they ‘stood on the doorstep weathering necks,’ which meant the mere sight of one of them was enough to crack a person’s neck with fright.

  “After weeks of not talking, and tormenting each other, their moods would relax and our father would take Khalil out on trips to look for Uncle Ismail—whom we didn’t know and never had known and never would know.

  “Khalil’s a good boy. He never once fell out with me. Even now he comes every Thursday to pour his heart out into my hands. The two of us got on like a house on fire, but sometimes during the punishments the fire would go out. The cracks of the cane brought our bodies closer together.

  “Khalil was ground down hard. He’s severe in his affection, too, though. Even at that age, he wanted to imprison me hot cold, but after the fire I forswore this new world—I just couldn’t endure it. I decided I’d kneel and pray and serve my sisters instead. I look after the aged and sick, and when their time comes, I shut their eyes and pray over them … I know my path: it’s here with my isolated sisters, here with these twenty-seven women who are trapped between two darknesses, the darkness of glaucoma and the darkness of these rooms they haven’t left for thirty or maybe even fifty years.”

  Yousriya’s eyes settled on Nasser’s form as if awaiting sentence, but quickly relaxed into a knowing smile. “And you, what’s your story?”

  “I haven’t got a story!” he answered quickly, embarrassed, but he found himself adding, “I’m also being pursued by nightmarish dreams about a woman.” He had to repeat his words for Yousriya like an echo, but she was completely deaf and still couldn’t hear him. She must have been able to read his features, though. “The same one?!” she asked.

  “No, a friend of hers.” She gave him a look of surprise, which soon turned into pity.

  “Same thing,” she said, before retreating to her memories. “Khalil and I found refuge from our father’s harshness with our grandfather, our mother’s father. His house looked over al-Malah Cemetery so we got to watch all the funeral processions in Mecca. We played a game where we’d try to tell the different kinds of dead people apart: the elderly were covered in gray, which was very different from the green draped over those who’d died when they were still young; the biers of children could be distinguished by the bright, embellished drapes, and then there were the cages laid over women’s bodies which our grandfather explained to us.

  “These cages were first widely used in the time of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, peace be upon him. She was the first Muslim woman whose bier was covered in this way, having been told about the tradition by Asma bint Amees, who had said to her, ‘Shall I tell you about something I saw in Ethiopia?’ She asked for some pliant palm-frond stalks, bent them and covered them with cloth, making a canopy like a bridal howdah. We used to imagine how Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, had ordered that nobody be allowed to see her dead body and how it emerged in that bridal litter. Khalil used to terrorize me by saying, ‘I can picture you as a silent bride in one of those cages for dead women!’ And here I am, a spinster. I never married and never even went out into the world, and I’m waiting here in my cage for my funeral procession to set off. Death and I know e
ach other pretty well after all this time.

  “From a window in my grandfather’s house, Khalil and I used to watch the Yemeni gravedigger. We’d watch him eating his flatbread and leek with one hand, while the whole time using his other to collect bones from fresh graves, which were only a month or so old, and transferring them to a mass grave at the far end of the cemetery. We knew all about that pit of bones and it hardened our hearts. That was where all the skulls of Mecca got to know one another, teeth chattering in the cold. In summer, we’d see him come out in his red sarong and light white headscarf, barefoot on the death-molded, sun-fired earth, walking across the plots in the blazing sun, sprinkling water to cool the dead, stopping at the freshly-dug graves to take a hit of the strong rot.

  “We spent our childhood between death and my severe father, coming and going through the carnival of Mecca’s old markets in the vicinity of the Holy Mosque. We knew all the traders at the Night Market and the Mudda’i Market because we were the grandchildren of the Sheikh of al-Malah—the biggest Wihda fan in Mecca.

  “Khalil used to always wear the red and white Wihda uniform at Grandad’s. We were eternal rivals for our grandfather’s pride and affection, but Grandfather called me ‘top of the bundle,’ meaning the choice bit that’s placed on the very top of a bundle of surprises, and he always took me out to show me off. He’d take me by the hand and we’d head out to the Mas’a and all the neighboring markets; starting from the house of Abu Sufyan at the Turkish Qubbaniya Hospital, we’d enter ‘Egg Alley’ where there were stalls displaying handicrafts and caged pets—we always stopped to look at the red-eyed rabbits—and then move on to the auction at the Night Market and the goldsmiths’ alley, then turning east toward the Gaza Market where we’d stroll past the masterpieces of joiners and wood-turners, met on both sides by greetings: