The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  “‘God preserve you, sir!’

  “That was Bafaqih, the silk merchant, who was echoed by al-Fadl, the perfumer.

  “‘Us and you both, my man!’ Grandfather would reply. He had a booming voice that made me wide-eyed with pride.

  “Next we’d head north to al-Mudda’a Market where Sheikh al-Wazzan would always greet me with a ‘God bless you!’ The market was full of huge food and perfume storehouses, nut-and-sweet shops, and fabric stalls. ‘Oh generous Lord, a pot of gold and a righteous girl …’ the dervishes would cry as we walked past.

  “Those were the days,” sighed Yousriya. “We used to dip our bread in salt and that was enough to fill us up. I live off these memories here, and share what I have with my sisters. They take our minds off things. We don’t need a glowing TV to fall asleep in front of, just a little yellow lamp that won’t go out in the evening when there’s a power cut …”

  Her eyes shone at the memory of a distant yellow glow. “On the twelfth day of Rabi’ al-Awwal, our grandfather would take us on an outing that began at the Prophet’s birthplace, the house of Ibn Yusuf in an alley called Ali’s Path that lies at the foot of Abu Qubays, at the end of the Night Market. We’d imagine all the torches, candles, and lanterns gathering there after the early evening prayer, and he’d stop to tell us gravely: ‘Under the Kurdish bookshop here, in the earth right beneath this spot, is where our beloved Prophet was born. Remember this!’ He’d pinch my earlobe, pinching Khalil’s with the other hand, and repeat his words once more before shepherding us on toward the wonders of al-Jawdariah, the market of the cobblers and cotton merchants and quiltmakers. We’d stand for hours watching them card the cotton and watching the cobblers as they made shoes and other leather goods. We’d go next to al-Malah market where there were seed-sellers and piles of vegetables, clover, charcoal, and firewood. Finally, we’d end up at the Friday afternoon auction where they sold antique furniture. One Friday he bought me this Syrian-made inlaid chair. I rescued it from the fire, but I forgot my own mother! I was determined to bring it here with me. I used to sit on it just waiting for it to accompany me on this trip.”

  Nasser watched her. He was no longer a detective; she’d made him a witness. “Don’t you miss all that?” he murmured, but she didn’t hear him and she didn’t reply. All she did was ask him to wait a moment and then got up and disappeared inside the room. She returned with a bundle and unfolded it in her lap in silence, spreading her palms over the old satin fabric like a dove spreads its wings. Without looking up from the bundle, she said, “This contains everything that’s dear to me. Feast your eyes!”

  When she lifted her hands off of the bundle, there appeared four embroidered rose bushes, their pots at each corner of the fabric and their branches and flowers leaning toward the center, where a woman in a full skirt with rings on her fingers and bright red lips stood against the white background, clutching a bouquet, a foot in a black high-heeled shoe stepping gaily forward to present the green bouquet … To whom? Who was she stepping toward? Nasser felt prickles like fireflies glowing in his skin, the prickle of a single name and of letters emerging one on top of the other from the weave of the satin to announce its owner—

  Yousriya flipped open the bundle and took out a golden wing spread around a circle. “This is the lapel pin that Saudi Airlines pilots wear. And this is his hat, with the same logo—Khalil left it with me. He hasn’t needed it since that damned day when he was fired.”

  She was interrupted by someone knocking on the wall. “Sister,” called a voice, “are you talking to someone from one of the charities? Ask them why they haven’t delivered the bedpans yet. My sisters’ backs are broken from carrying me to and from the bathroom all night!” Yousriya tapped back to acknowledge she’d heard, but Aminah wailed again, “We were born in a box and we’ll die in a scrap of cloth! Give us some light! Help us pay the electricity bill, good Muslims!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure it’ll be sorted out, don’t worry,” said Nasser, getting up. He wasn’t quite sure what he was promising. The curtain that divided the room into two twitched and a dumpy face peered out. “Come back and visit us,” it implored. “I haven’t left this room for thirty years! Don’t forget us, son. No, don’t take photos! Not even of the curtain …”

  You ought to come back, Nasser, he thought to himself as he left. It won’t cost you anything. He thought about what he’d read on some website—the ideal charity menu: “a quarter-chicken, a handful of rice, one samosa, four dates, a bottle of water and a small pot of yogurt. 300 riyals can feed all twenty-seven residents.” Some local do-gooder had arranged for the set-menu meals to cost donors just six riyals by making up the rest himself.

  You really ought to come back to visit once a month, Nasser, and bring them a donation once a year. It wouldn’t cost you anything.

  From: Aisha

  Subject: Message 10

  I’m amazed by the battle you went through with your wife to try to give her what no other man had ever been able to. That constant, exhausting effort on the long road of insatiability … You two tried everything you could—specialist books, couples therapy, pornography—for four years, but by the end of it your morale as a virile man was totally destroyed.

  Looking back, though, I wonder if maybe that process wasn’t the hellfire that forged you into the person you are now. I don’t know what magic it is you do, but you make me soar. With your hand at the center. That’s real flying. A woman’s body is the storm’s slumbering eye. Do you know where to find the thing that gets it going? Spreading all over the world, and the wider you spread open, the higher you soar.

  Higher and higher, sharpening that lightning tongue, spreading in from the tips of the wings to touch the core, so close to the agony of death, a beating of wings between the ribs, the belly, and the legs.

  The eye of the storm opens up to swallow the whole world and still asks for more,

  The male body is nothing more than an ejaculator. The female body vacuums up the whole universe!

  An hour later, a muscle was still twitching involuntarily in my thigh—do I come off as an amateur to you? I could go on explaining forever—and I could still feel that branch of lightning cracking all around me.

  Yours,

  Aisha

  P.S. Do you remember that morning when we bumped into each other in the library? You were so surprised to see me. You stopped for a while to have a look at the research I was doing on the computer. It was about an extinguished star, which had a black hole at the center and a green halo around it, and had been discovered accidentally by some amateur. Your eyes kept flicking nervously to the door, however. You must have had a date with some girl. I felt sorry for you so I tried to distract you by saying, “There are black holes in space threatening the young stars that are trying to come fully to life, like this one.”

  “And was this one also discovered by an amateur like me?” you said, teasing me in turn and laughing.

  P. P. S. I just remembered that song my mom and Auntie Halima used to sing about how babies are made: “Water mixed with water …” They’d giggle and say, “Can you believe we used to sing that out loud when we were young?”

  An Eye and an Eye

  MU’AZ WAITED EAGERLY FOR HIS FREE MOMENTS SO HE COULD GO AND VISIT Yusuf. He knew he might attract people’s attention, but he couldn’t stay away from the treasure whose keys he’d given up willingly. He felt deprived; it pained him for that world to be taken from him.

  The moment he stepped into the hall, he sensed the profound change that had come over the house all of a sudden. It was as if the house was conspiring with Yusuf. It was giving him access to places Mu’az had never been to, showing him photos Mu’az had never seen.

  His first thought was to kick Yusuf out, then he calmed himself down and considered locking Yusuf into the central hallway and taking back the keys to the upper floors, but the kind soul within him, the one who’d memorized the Quran, intervened on Yusuf’s behalf. Nevertheless he was s
till possessed by a burning jealousy. What was it about Yusuf that exerted such power over the house in a way he never could?

  Yusuf avoided Mu’az’s accusing gaze, hiding a deep sense of guilt. Over the days he’d spent alone in the house, he’d fallen into an arid solitude, which had driven him to sneak into the parlor where all those faces were, impelled by a sudden urge to be among those Meccan features. There must be faces he knew or faces that knew him and could make him feel at home. Just one face might be enough to give him a sense of place and bring a sense of center to all the broken vignettes around him and the wholesale destruction of ancient landmarks. He stared at every photo; he didn’t pass a single patch of wall without interrogating every picture, looking for threads to tie him to Mecca or to the Lane of Many Heads, examining events that he hadn’t noticed at the time, which had brought him to this destitution. He’d known full well that Mu’az wouldn’t be happy, but the house was reeling him in like it wanted to prod and revive his memory.

  Mu’az bored into Yusuf’s face. The eyes, which evaded his own, worried him. Was Yusuf seeing the Mecca hidden in that place through the eyes of history? Whereas he, Mu’az, had only ever seen through the eyes of art and technique, like al-Lababidi? Art’s eye was restorative and healing, but history’s eye liked to pick at scabs. Why had he let that coarse eye in here to pick through Marie and al-Lababidi’s treasure? Without realizing what he was doing, Mu’az hurried to beat Yusuf to the biggest scab in the place.

  “It was off this very roof that I threw away my book of sins,” he said, pausing to see whether the words had any effect on Yusuf. Unlike Mu’az’s father, though, Yusuf wasn’t frantically obsessed with catalogues of sins, so Mu’az carried on. “Because I was so proud that Marie appointed me to be guardian of the house—even though she warned me never to go through any of the floors without her express permission.” He gazed down at the feather duster he was holding. Yusuf kept silent, having taken note of Mu’az’s tone of accusation, which was no doubt due to the temerity he’d shown by going into the parlor.

  “I used to dust Mecca’s every epoch with this peacock feather duster, making sure the pictures on the wall were straight, and I’d clean the developing baths and change the red lightbulb.” He pushed the switch a few times but the lamp didn’t come on. Yusuf felt sorry for him. “They must have cut the electricity off ages ago …”

  Mu’az stared at the floor in front of him in silence, unable to describe the part of himself he’d discovered in that house. “Do you know Verse 260 from the Surah of The Cow? When Abraham asks God to show him how he resurrects the dead. Do you remember how God responds? ‘Take four birds and tame them. Then put a part of them on each hill and call them and they will come flying to you.’ How he called them through his faith, and the parts came flying back to him whole? I’m those birds. I was scattered across Mecca’s mountains and scattered among you boys in the Lane of Many Heads, then along came this house and this camera, and it brought me together so I could fly whole …” He strove to impress all this upon Yusuf and to undermine his apparent affinity with the house.

  “It’s like a treasure hunt. We are—I mean, each one of us is—scattered about in caves and on mountaintops and in deserts, in places and in people all over the world. And we find—or at least the lucky ones find—a little piece of that treasure as we go along. I found a huge piece of my treasure in this house. Marie allowed me to discover it through a camera lens. I found another part by memorizing the Quran … No, the Quran is the power or the faith with which I called those parts together. They came ‘flying to me’ and made me whole.”

  After a pause, he went on, “You never saw me, Yusuf. I was just a shadow of you golden boys in the Lane of Many Heads. I was your negative. I was just a blank sheet for you to scrawl your heroism on. But here … I discovered the image of a black and white Mu’az, who wasn’t just programmed to record you. I develop this world. I am its continuity. All that time it had been waiting for my lens and my flash and my patience as an artist. Marie saw all that in me with her trained eye. She gave me this professional camera and told me, ‘It’s yours.’ It was like recovering a lost piece of myself—like some amputated part suddenly returned to my body to make it whole. When I wandered up and down all the floors, al-Lababidi took over my body. Took me out of the world. And Marie made time to teach me how to use the camera. The sound of the shutter made my entire body tremble! You know? When I was growing up my body could always sense the lost camera. It could sense its twin somewhere in that void—until the twin was embodied in this little light-sensitive contraption. Marie taught me what to see and how to see. The Quran taught me how to find light in the darkness, and Marie showed me how to capture and manifest it. I flew with my camera above the citadel, my heart racing, and I said to myself, ‘I’ll begin where al-Lababidi began. I’ll capture a beauty equal to, even rivaling, my own worth. But I could feel the difference in the camera from the very first shot; the truth hit me and it hurt. Al-Lababidi’s lens had captured growth and construction, mine captured destruction and decay. It could recognize the magnitude of the changes that were happening to the city, not only to its body but also to its spirit. A spirit that had once called out to the Hidden Imam was now preparing for the monster that would smack the ground with its tail and bury the city alive. My eye would flicker thousands of times a minute, following the rapid movements of the shutter leaves, before a wall of collapsing skylights, or a mirror retrieved from the splinters of a house, or the still-standing vaulted ceiling of a caved-in sitting room, or a beautiful doorway closing for the last time with panels bearing the fingerprints of old world craftsmen—wood and plaster panels that vied to out-exquisite the other. They shyly cast their verses of Quran and poetry onto forgotten courtyards, to wait under a layer of dust for resurrection, but they were threatened from both sides: on one side the grasping fist, and on the other the decay eating away at their sweat and blood.

  “I can feel Marie watching me now in silent pain. She wanted me to see this, to suffer as I realized how fast the encroaching sands of ignorance and fear were advancing, cementing over and obliterating everything in their path, and getting closer and closer to her heart too. She didn’t want to come too close to the worlds of my camera, but she taught me how to develop them and she used it to record her purification and her innocence for posterity. Straight away, my lost-cause creatures began appearing in al-Lababidi’s photo-worlds—forgotten, snatched, improvised—and Marie began to wilt slowly at the same time. The thought of beginning with death terrified me so I never picked up the camera on days when Marie had nothing to say. She eventually lapsed into total silence …”

  Mu’az told Yusuf how one day he’d woken up and found himself up in the little kitchen on the roof, lying on the ground, his head resting on the millstone. A revolution broke out inside of him: he would either bring the outside into the house so that it could become a new pulse for the city or he’d take that pulse out into the pulse of the modern street and let them blend together. He decided to begin with the latter.

  When he’d stood there, trying to choose between those worlds embodied in black and white, he’d found he didn’t dare. He just about managed to wrap up a few faces of pilgrims from the thirties in a folded sheet of ihram fabric he found, and leave.

  He hadn’t walked so much as been carried along by those old bodies, who were still tramping on their pilgrimage from the ends of the earth. He was overcome by the heroic urge to release those beings to resume their lives of spirituality in Mecca, but he didn’t know where he should take them to set them free. His feet had led him to the teacher at his old primary school, where all the kids in the Lane of Many Heads had been taught. He had a notion that the pupils should see those photos, that they should form part of the curriculum of handwriting and reading that they all went through, so that the photos and the children could grow up together.

  The teacher flicked through the stack of photos, then looked up at him and said, “All these peo
ple and stones and trees … You’ll be asked about them. Will you be able to breathe life into them on Judgment Day?” The teacher had recently been reading an eyewitness account of the end of days. The big red Xs that were slashed across the heads of animals in the drawings in science and reading textbooks crisscrossed in Mu’az’s mind. He pictured them advancing on the necks of his nobles and pilgrims, who’d run out of there.

  Realizing he wasn’t going to wait for Judgment Day, he grabbed the photos and dashed out. No second life for these faces.

  After that lengthy confession, Mu’az couldn’t stay away from the house. He hurried to the Lababidi house to see Yusuf whenever he could to continue telling the story, fearing that if he stopped, the house would surrender to Yusuf completely. It didn’t take long for Nasser to notice his routine.

  Making use of the lunch hour when the shop was closed, Mu’az hurried to catch the public minibus, and Nasser followed him on his trip to Mount Hindi. Beneath the building with the APARTMENTS TO LET sign, Nasser saw him with a tall young man, a skinny specter of a guy who reminded Nasser of the ghost in Yusuf’s diaries. His heart started beating faster as if he were about to come face to face with his adversary, and he jumped out of his car, slammed the door, and sprinted toward them. His rapid footsteps caught their attention right away, and the tall young man hurried away while Mu’az turned back toward Nasser and blocked his way.

  “Who was that you were just with?” Nasser asked, panting.