The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  The only thing the Eunuchs’ Goat wanted was for the entire world to forget about him and leave him there with that woman. He fought off all Yusuf’s attempts to get him to go back to the yard. And his usual academic attempts to give them a date and time. He tried to tie it to modern history for him, calling it a flavor that had abandoned the city during the long, lonely years of religious sermons, which mirrored the jihadi campaigns in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Yusuf drew him a diagram in words of how the spiritual and financial capital reserves of the Arab World were depleted in the eighties and nineties, just before the incursion of satellite hegemony, which arrived in the period between the First and Second Gulf Wars, when the illustrated and sensory encyclopedias of real life were being rooted out and banished. During that time, the guardians of the encyclopedias turned their attention to denuding. At the portals to land, sea, and brains, they planted censors who pored over all printed materials, blotting out any form that resembled a woman, whether in advertisements or even in dress patterns drawn in Chinese ink. Mannequins suddenly disappeared from all the shops—except for in the lawless cities of Khobar and Jeddah—and were burned in secret. Yusuf summed up his theory in a single sentence:

  “After centuries, women want their revenge. This is what the harem of today looks like.” He pursued the economic liberalization plan that had been sketched out in bold. “At the dawn of the third millennium of democracy, promoted violently by the West, we found ourselves cresting a wave that would lay the encyclopedia of women bare: women in chamber of commerce elections, women in the arts, women in advertisements, in the journalists’ syndicate and in official delegations, women in politics and ministries, women educators and humanitarians, a woman leading the organization for human rights. The mannequins were attacking and they were about to overrun all our biggest cities.”

  As he went from clothing store to clothing store, the Eunuchs’ Goat was flabbergasted by the attention paid to a certain inconsequential Lebanese man who looked like a designer of cheap knock-off fashions. All the biggest clothing boutiques in the Gaza Market, in Street 60, in al-Awali would hire the man at a rate of three hundred dollars an hour to come and give life to their limbs of cork. All he had to do was play around with the fabrics to arouse the devils of temptation.

  For days, the Eunuchs’ Goat kept watch. He learned that the Lebanese man only ever turned up at closing time, and was astonished by the warm welcome all the boutique owners gave him. They would hand over the keys to their supply rooms, pile all the beauties around him, shut the door to their shops and walk off! Standing on the other side of those locked doors was true hell for the Eunuchs’ Goat, and he spent nights on end standing there, prey to his own wild imagination, wondering what that Lebanese jerk and those beauties were up to on the other side. Jealousy blinded him and left a bitter taste in his throat. He began stalking the Lebanese window designer, following his every move, recording, to the second, how long he spent on his own in the biggest boutiques, the ones with the most exquisite, most captivating, beauties. A desire for vengeance burned inside him. He spent night after night calling the office for the enforcement of public morals, begging them to come and break up these rendezvous.

  One night, he took advantage of the break for evening prayers to sneak into the stock room of the al-Ceyloni clothing store. He hid in there, waiting patiently for the store to shut after evening prayers. He bore the claustrophobia, the stifling feeling of all those bolts of cloth and cardboard boxes on top of him. He expected to be discovered at any moment by the stock boys, who kept coming in and out of the room to fetch more fabric. Finally, at exactly midnight, closing time, he heard that warm welcome ring out and a grimace settled on his face: his Lebanese lover had arrived.

  “Please, my dear, be sure to keep all the doors shut, just to be safe. We don’t want any problems with the authorities. They’re already not very pleased about our half-nude mannequins and the fact that you spend so much time alone with them!” With that, the manager, shut out the lights in the back of the store and left.

  From his hiding place beneath all that cloth, the Eunuchs’ Goat felt he’d been stripped bare, now that he was finally going to confront his adversary. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to announce his presence or raise his head to check out what was happening, let alone to pounce on the guy as he’d planned. Minutes passed like epochs and the Eunuchs’ Goat was convinced that he’d die right there in his hiding place, that they’d find his bloated body in the morning under piles of imported cloth. But then as the temperature rose in the store, he knew that what he’d been expecting to happen was actually happening. He flew into a blind rage. He got up and headed toward the front of the store, guided by the faint purple light, to where the Lebanese designer was standing face to face with a blonde female figure. Crouching to watch, he could feel her breathing grow faster as the man bent over her, his shiny, dyed-blond hair grazing her breasts. He was fumbling with her silk trousers, undoing the belt then the two pearl buttons. There was a flash of panties and a glimpse of her slender waist topped by a perfectly round navel. The Eunuchs’ Goat’s heart leapt into his throat, and he experienced a thirst unlike any he’d ever known before. The Lebanese stopped to contemplate that creamy torso for a moment and then, slipping one hand between her legs and another between her shoulder blades, he lifted her up off the ground. The way he grabbed her made the Eunuchs’ Goat’s blood run cold. His entire body, including his face, was transformed into shards of dark-red glowing glass. He lost all feeling in his limbs and fought to stay upright, gripping at bolts of cloth that fell with him to the floor, causing a racket. The Lebanese was in thrall, however, and didn’t even bother to look to see what was happening. He carried the beauty over to one of the low display tables, which was padded with layers of bright fabric. The body was laid out plainly, trembling at the thought of the touch to come. With unexpected force, the Lebanese decorator stripped off her trousers, exposing her bare legs, and flapped them about like a hot silk cloud to air them out. He placed his left knee between her legs, spreading them apart roughly and with a second thrust, separated her left leg from her body, which crashed onto the ground, hitting the Eunuchs’ Goat. When the beauty’s toes pushed against his belly, the devil overtook him. For an instant, the Eunuchs’ Goat surrendered to the tempting pleasure, but then he simply stood up and walked, breathlessly, forward into the pool of purple light where neither adversary really existed any longer.

  As he was busy struggling with the body, the Lebanese window designer didn’t seem the least bit taken aback. He looked at the Eunuchs’ Goat like he was just another red mannequin, and allowed him to reach out and help. In silence and harmony, they worked together, stripping her, piece by piece, greeting her nudity warmly. The Eunuchs’ Goat didn’t dare bring his body closer, touching her only with his fingertips, which turned red hot anytime he felt her shoulder or her arm, as his body grew as stiff as an actual mannequin. Only then did he notice the wound around the woman’s left eye, it was like a torture scar, which wrapped around her eye and down to her neck beneath her left ear. His tongue yearned to lick the laceration, to cleanse it. Another scar appeared across her waist as he wrapped it in satin, another torture scar slicing her body in two. The Eunuchs’ Goat thought back on the Indonesian woman who was married to his father’s kitchen helper. The woman entertained every hidden desire in the Lane of Many Heads, and her motto was famous. “This,” she said, pointing from her waist to her head, “is for my Lord, and this,” she said, pointing from her waist to her feet, “is for my lover.” The Eunuchs’ Goat fought the designer’s attempts to reattach her leg; all he wanted to do was to grab the leg and run. But then, when the designer turned to him and placed one of his hands between his legs and the other between his shoulder-blades and picked him up and carried him out of the shop, throwing him into the street, the Eunuchs’ Goat said nothing. He fell onto the sidewalk where he lay for hours on the floor of the market, completely drained, having lost the first
woman he’d ever laid his hands on to his adversary, who wrapped her neck and waist with coarse crimson fabric to exaggerate the contrast between her modern jeans and the striped silk across her torso.

  From that night on, that Lebanese joker became his one and only obsession. He’d stand outside the doors they shut behind him and bark, imagining him on the other side of those doors stripping them and redressing them in even more seductive outfits. He knew which bits to touch, what to cover and what to lay bare so as to drive the Eunuchs’ Goat’s senses wild. Love was challenging all his primal urges. He was suddenly, bitterly desperate to exterminate this infatuation that was polished with lotions and make-up. His hair grew longer every time he saw the Lebanese decorator’s pony-tail bouncing between his shoulders. The pretty boy went to the barber every Friday afternoon for an hour to have his hair combed, conditioned, and straightened, but when he went into a working-class neighborhood he’d stuff his ponytail into a cap bearing the insignia NY. A deeply despairing Eunuchs’ Goat planned his attack for Saturday. It took him a whole week to coordinate the movements of his enemy with those of the General Motors SUV belonging to the public morals enforcers. When the mirage appeared on al-Rusayfa Street at two o’clock in the afternoon, the boys from the Lane of Many Heads–led by the Eunuchs’ Goat—pounced on the Lebanese designer and the poor guy took off running. The stones they threw at him forced him to run in the direction of al-Rusayfa Street’s main intersection where, just as he got there, a Public Morals Authority SUV drove past, patrolling for high school students on their way home. The man had no time to grasp what was happening, or to understand why these demons were chasing him and pelting him with stones, because he instantly came face to face with the gray SUV, which appeared out of nowhere, as if from the folds of the earth. A policeman and three bearded sheikhs jumped out of the SUV, surrounded him, and ordered him to remove his baseball cap.

  The Eunuchs’ Goat was pleased to see that the man’s ponytail caused a flash of anger in the eyes of his captors, who immediately forced him to his knees roughly right there on Street 50 in the midst of crowds of white-collar employees and schoolchildren on their way home at two o’clock in the afternoon. They shaved off his hair (and dignity) in broad daylight, making an example out of him. People say that the Pashtun barber the authorities brought with them on their raids was actually an expert sheep-shearer who used wool shears, but when the Lebanese designer stood up and walked off, he held his head as high as Yul Brynner.

  Last month, the Eunuchs’ Goat lost the last of his patience and good sense, and it didn’t take much courage or forethought for him to carry out his next reckless move. He suddenly found himself with his arms wrapped, shivering, around the torso and legs of his beloved—passion and fear have driven you mad, Eunuchs’ Goat, look at you, your fingers are colder than a dead fish in a supermarket freezer! He calmly covered her with her wine-colored muslin and smuggled her out through the narrow alleyways of the Gaza Market till he reached the Mas’a, where he boarded a bus that was just pulling away from the stop. He couldn’t believe how easy it had been for him to steal the body. By the time he got it back to his bedroom above the kitchen, evening prayers were over. He lay down at her magical feet and let out a deep sigh. “This is the fragrance of feet that have never once touched the soil. Virginal feet. Nothing has ever spread these toes apart before.”

  He was in seventh heaven, and for days the Eunuchs’ Goat had to fight the desire to dip into that wine-colored cloth, to strip away its many layers and reveal its amazing truth. For days he kept to his room, constantly parched, ignoring his foster father al-Ashi’s calls and foregoing lunches with his foster mother Umm al-Sa’d. When his resistance finally crumbled and he knelt down between her feet, all his limbs were numb. He shivered as he lifted up the hem of her dress, and he was shocked to find a hard wooden pedestal instead of her feet and cold metal columns where there should have been calves and thighs. His blood sugar dropped suddenly and his ears began to ring. With his teeth he tore the straps off her shoulders and ripped the wine-colored muslin to shreds, exposing the woman’s torso. It was perfect and sealed; nothing had split it open, neither scalpel nor desire. The feeling of encountering this woman before her body had even been formed was frightening. She was the mold of a woman, the body of woman before the Fall, before opening up, before extending her limbs.

  The Eunuchs’ Goat was frantic but he carefully avoided the al-Ceyloni store and headed instead for its large competitor, the massive Bin Siddiq Outlets. While the security guard was watching, he bent down at the feet of the woman nearest the door. He wanted to make sure they were delicate and when he revealed her calves and saw how perfectly they were executed, his mouth went dry. Without any hesitation, he picked the woman up, wrapping her left arm around his shoulders and walked out. The security guard sitting at the other end of the shop simply finished his tea and said nothing. No one would try to pull something like that unless they were the rightful owner.

  The Eunuchs’ Goat took off running, blindly, the fiery satin stinging his tongue. His entire body was propelled toward the Lane of Many Heads with his treasure in tow, deaf to the horns and screeching brakes around him, and it wasn’t until a flash of yellow crossed his path that he was awoken from his trance. A massive blow knocked him sideways and the muslin-covered beauty was mangled under the taxi’s wheel. The mocking laughter was like a slap in the face, but he ignored it and bent down, yanking and pulling, trying in vain to free the woman’s torso from beneath the tire. He lost it. He started beating the door of the taxi with both his hands. Khalil got out and grabbed the Eunuchs’ Goat by the collar. He shoved him against the bent metal of the car’s body and penned him in with his superior size. “Want me to show you the woman trapped inside that doll’s body of yours?” he said, mocking him for being a pretty Turk. The Eunuchs’ Goat kicked and punched him hysterically, but Khalil was enjoying the violence. He then suddenly shoved him to the side, got back in the cab, and reversed a few feet.

  “When I was a king in heaven, I knew exactly what this country needed. I used to use my connections with the airlines to smuggle in dolls like you for seamstresses and tailoring workshops.” Khalil was getting off on insulting the object of his infatuation, this boy. “I’d bring in one or two dolls each time, disassembled and laid out in my suitcase, and I’d put them back together as soon as I made it past customs. The cheapest mannequins you can get abroad are priceless in this country. Maybe you should try Afghanistan, you’d probably be worth millions there.” The Eunuchs’ Goat took off his robe, which had been torn to shreds during the altercation, and knelt down to gather the pieces of his beauty up in it. Then he walked off, not once looking back, and Khalil, who was back behind the steering wheel, watched him sneeringly, appreciating the cute young man’s curves under his long white trousers. There was a smell of poison, mixed in with a hint of yellow satin, in the air.

  Alone in his bedroom, the Eunuchs’ Goat confronted the frightening perfection of thighs and knees. His eyes weren’t aware that the torso was shattered; he’d never once imagined that his heart could be so enthralled by two knees and the silence that separated them.

  It was then that he realized that he’d fallen under the control of women with closed fists, closed mouths, closed—impenetrable women! No matter how hard he tried, his saliva didn’t soften the cork, his touch couldn’t knead it. The first time he looked into her eyes to beg with his own, he saw there was no eye there, no head.

  “God curse American democracy! It can’t even give the beauties in shop-windows their heads or severed limbs back. A democracy of cork arms and legs that can’t wrap around men’s necks and waists and make the blood flow back through them.”

  He became addicted to those bodies. He no longer had any qualms about stealing them from wherever he could find them. He was consumed by his conflicted feelings about those beautiful women; their skin that never sweated and thus left him craving. Every morning he woke up disgusted with himself. The on
ly thing that he could hope for was that Sa’diya, Imam Dawoud’s daughter, would save him. Sa’diya who was wrapped from her head to her toes in black, who had never been programmed by a fashion designer or by love scenes seen on TV. Sa’diya was his “Surah of the Cow.” Her heart contained the “Throne Verse,” where he would stretch out and be loved like no man had ever been loved before. The Eunuchs’ Goat swore to himself that he would be the recipient of that tiny flame’s love. That he would surrender himself to her completely. That she would make up for all the rejections he was getting from the beauties that were cluttering his bedroom.

  From where he was standing in the doorway, Nasser could see the delicate arm, its palm stretched flat and index finger pointed in his direction. In the light coming through the tiny window, the mannequin’s subtle gesture brought him nearer to her. He shut his eyes and the taste of blood overcame all his senses … This was the Eunuchs’ Goat’s blood; there was no doubting that. Nasser fought his attraction to the Eunuchs’ Goat, whom he called to mind through the mannequin’s body, though hers was more feminine.

  Discovery

  FROM: Aisha