by Raja Alem
Azza couldn’t bring herself to ask whether a cellphone was the only thing he’d smuggled in that parcel. Instead she ventured, “May I ask how you got mixed up with this girl and this action movie plotline?”
“Her father’s one of my clients. I supply him with a traditional dance troupe whenever he wants to organize a showcase evening for his foreign guests.”
Azza regarded him sardonically. “Did you provide his daughter with the same service?”
Mushabbab was pleased to hear the jealousy in Azza’s voice.
“The whole thing started last month. The father asked me to go over there and he told me that his daughter was suffering from acute depression and that she’d tried to kill herself several times over the last ten years. She’d been taken to see the best psychiatrists but nothing worked, and since they’d heard that I practice healing through the Quran they wanted me to give it a shot. I’m always careful not to get involved with powerful people, but they wouldn’t accept any of my excuses; they just made an appointment for me to go see the girl.”
There was no sign of life at all anywhere around the sky-high walls, only the opening to the right of the gate from which the guard peered out. When Mushabbab presented the permission slip he’d been given, the red-checked headscarf vanished for a few minutes and then a door beside the gate opened and swallowed Mushabbab up. Amazed, he submitted himself to the secretary who’d come to receive him. He was shown to a car and driven through gateway after gateway until they reached a cluster of modern villas set amidst scattered palm trees. The place was an artificial tableau of lurid green. Nothing moved other than him and the palace secretary, two crows disturbing the plastic lushness of the scene as they headed toward what the secretary referred to as “the girls’ villa.”
He left Mushabbab alone in the reception room, some three hundred meters squared—another perfect tableau of luxuriant nothingness. A Filipina maid in a blue- and white-striped uniform appeared and asked him, “Anything to drink, sir?”
“Just water, please.” His voice came out muffled in the void. A tray bearing fresh orchids and a crystal tumbler of water was set before him and sat untouched as minutes stretched into an eternity. For nearly an hour he was left there, sitting by a coffee table weighed down with a variety of the finest dates, glazed nuts, and rich sweets. He was expecting somebody to pop up at any moment to inform him that the girl didn’t want to see him, and to show him the door. The furniture was exquisite—everything upholstered in pure silk—even the walls were covered in golden brocade. The entire space was freeze-dried by the powerful central air conditioning into a mummified tableau of grandeur.
Finally, a golden door at the end of the room opened with a faint sound, and a young woman appeared and padded barefoot toward him across the silk flowers of the Persian carpet. For the sake of her modesty, Mushabbab didn’t look up but the girl came so close that her feet came into view, and he could see the patterns of the carpet reflected on her pale crystalline skin, a sheen of blue and crimson.
“So you’re one of them? A charlatan who hasn’t got a shred of professionalism left?”
Mu’az didn’t say a word. She stamped on his foot, hard. “Apparently you’re a magician. You think I’m a child who likes magic tricks? Life’s just a broken toy.”
“There’s no magic involved, just your inner strength enhanced by my recitation. You could even try reading the Quran on your own to find inner peace.” Some sixth sense felt a tremor in the air. The call to prayer rang out in the silent emptiness around them, but it wasn’t that; Mushabbab felt like he was being watched. He ignored his apprehension.
“Next you’ll tell me to try the Surah of the Cow! My sisters already treat me like a mad cow that isn’t even good enough to make leather out of. I haven’t seen a street in ten years, apart from in video games and on TV. My mother left for the land of cuckoo clocks, chocolate, and secret bank accounts. Have you seen how they use remote-controlled robots to race camels now? Well I’m the camel. My sisters are the robots and my mother’s holding the remote control.” Having to listen to oppressive paranoia like that got under Mushabbab’s skin. “And when I don’t respond to the remote, they try to break me in with anesthetics—I had a suitcase full of every drug you can think of. First they got me addicted and then they took the suitcase away to keep me docile with pain. Now they’ve brought you along to annoy me.”
Mushabbab had just arrived back at the orchard when a messenger arrived. “Don’t come to the palace again. Your services are no longer required.”
I’d been videoed and they’d already screened me; apparently I’d been deemed unfit.
“Can’t you do anything?” asked Azza.
“Her father said he’d have me burned for practicing witchcraft! They said I should be grateful they let me go safely after I defied his orders and tried to smuggle that stupid package to her.”
Juhayman
TUESDAYS WERE MU’AZ’S DAY OFF FROM THE STUDIO, SO THAT MORNING HE headed for the Lababidi house, taking a roundabout route to be sure no one was following him. When Yusuf opened the door, he was preceded by the warm scent of shurayk bread, a local specialty made of mixed gram and wheat flour and fragranced with fennel, which he’d bought from Shaldoum’s bakery. Shaldoum always got that old-fashioned taste just right.
This time, when Mu’az led Yusuf upstairs, he kept going past the first rooftop and up to the tirama, the balustraded terrace elevated above the rest of the roof. “You could sleep up here on really hot nights,” he suggested. Yusuf sensed arrogance and superiority in the offer, as if Mu’az saw himself as the unchallenged sovereign of the domain and was deigning to toss Yusuf a few crumbs. He was letting Yusuf walk around in his kingdom and inviting him to enjoy a few fruits from the orchard of photos.
Suddenly, Mu’az noticed the metal gleam around Yusuf’s neck. “You devil!” he yelped, and without thinking leapt on Yusuf, who was caught unawares and crashed to the ground under Mu’az’s weight. He had no choice but to fight back, and the two bodies rolled and grappled on the bare summit of the roof. The only sounds that could be heard were their grunts and Yusuf’s attempts to block Mu’az’s blows. He finally managed to get on top of Mu’az and pinned him between his legs. “Are you nuts?” he panted. “What are you doing?”
Too furious to speak, Mu’az replied by spitting at Yusuf, spraying saliva uselessly into the air between them. He saw Cain in Yusuf’s face. “How dare you take it? Those keys are mine! You have no right!”
Yusuf realized he was talking about the key hanging round his neck. “This? It doesn’t even fit any of the doors! It’s bigger than all the locks!”
“You tried all of them?” hissed Mu’az in outrage.
“Of course not! It was obvious—this one’s all rusty. The three mihrabs on the bow reminded me of a key I saw once in a manuscript Mushabbab has about the Kaaba, so I thought I’d check if it had anything to do with that. I just took it off the bunch so I can compare it with the picture next time I get a chance to sneak back to Mushabbab’s orchard.”
“You had no right to polish it! It was a beauty, and you’ve gone and wiped years off it. You’ve erased the time! I never even dared photograph it. Now you’ve stolen it.”
“Don’t be dramatic. I just want to put it back into its context. I didn’t mean to take liberties—I thought I’d been allowed into this house for a reason. You know Mushabbab and I collect keys that’ve been retrieved from old houses and the Zamzam Well. When the time comes, the keys might unlock some of the mysteries we’re after.”
Yusuf didn’t mention what had really made him take the key: a feeling that it was meant for him. The first time he touched it, his hand recognized it—it was his key, he could feel it …
Mu’az pushed Yusuf’s weight off his body and crawled to the other side of the bare roof, where he sat in a sulk looking out over the city. He avoided looking toward Yusuf. Neither of them made any attempt to give or take the key back. It was a fait accompli.
/> To dispel the awkwardness, Mu’az went downstairs to the kitchen at the back of the roof and took out a jar of Nescafe. This had been his celebratory drink on the morning he’d first entered that world. He spooned out the coffee and added a share of milk powder to each cup as Marie used to do for him every morning. He took the two steaming cups back up to the tirama, and they sat down on the edge of the teak wall, beautifully engraved to look as if it were braided, where they sipped their Nescafe and dunked pieces of shurayk, tasting of ghee, fennel, cumin, and nigella; they cracked the coffee-soaked seeds between their teeth. They shared the intimacy of their truce meal in total silence.
Mu’az watched Yusuf like he used to watch Marie at her post in the shadow of the minaret of the Turkish baths, hunched over her camera lens spying on the Haram Mosque, and repeated what she’d said when she first invited him to look through the lens himself: “You’re not being invited into a house, you’re being invited into a dying world. The end of days …”
He could feel Marie staring at him intently; she could see in him what he couldn’t see, as if looking into a crystal ball. “Well, since you know the Quran by heart, do you know what this is?” She reached out and took his hand, opening it up like a piece of paper on which she was about to write her last will and testament. She pressed the big pile of keys, with their interlinked domed bows in the shape of interlinked mihrabs, firmly into the palm of his right hand, then took his left and placed it over the treasure. “You’re the closest person to these pictures,” she said. She released him with that entrusting gesture, and he knew then what he had to do; he still knew. He opened his senses as wide as he could and breathed in the motes of the past, which still hung in the air here. He was amazed by the fading faces he dusted, as he himself faded into a trance.
“The last thing al-Lababidi photographed was the courtyard of the Haram Mosque on the first day of Muharram, 1400 AH, or 1979 AD, the day that Juhayman al-Otaybi barricaded the doors after dawn prayer, he and his fighters on the inside, preventing the masses outside from coming in to pray. We have rare photos of the funeral processions that al-Otaybi used to smuggle weapons into the mosque …” Mu’az wasn’t sure where her words began and ended. “They smuggled a whole arsenal of weapons into the mosque’s recesses under the cages of women’s funeral biers, along with sacks of dates as provisions for the rebels’ long occupation of the House of God.” Yusuf and Mu’az went downstairs, guided by Marie’s ghost, and followed her to a staircase that led from behind the rooftop kitchen down to a hidden room. It was from there that Marie had witnessed al-Otaybi’s attack. The walls were covered in photos of weapons, dates, and decaying bodies strewn around the Kaaba. Mu’az channeled Marie’s deep, grief-stricken voice as he repeated her words for Yusuf. Yusuf didn’t know if it was Marie speaking or his own apprehension as he listened to her explaining to Mu’az that day:
“We were photographing what we thought was the beginning of a new hijri century, during which the Mahdi would appear, when suddenly we heard gunshots and a flock of pigeons taking off in terror and fluttering around the mosque’s minarets. Al-Lababidi was killed by the first shot fired from the courtyard. Thank goodness he didn’t live to witness what happened after that. Al-Lababidi wasn’t a photographer, he was a hermit, and he gathered Mecca’s spirit into his photos as though he were reciting the ninety-nine names of God on a string of prayer beads. His lens faithfully followed his subjects—scholars, people who came to the city just to be near the House of God, its custodians, the Shayba Tribe—and in their faces he reverently awaited the coming of the Mahdi. I was al-Lababidi’s constant companion, this man whose heart was connected to Mecca, who took photos like he was pumping his own blood into the city. It was like his veins ran through the House of God, so when those shots were fired in the heart of the city, he had to die. On the same day the Haram Mosque was broken into. We weren’t able to parade his bier through the city as is the Meccan tradition. His funeral procession couldn’t pass through the Haram Mosque’s Funeral Gate, or cross the Mas’a to the covered market of al-Mudda’a and the Night Market so that the locals could ask God to have mercy on the deceased. He died with his spirit intact. He hadn’t been broken: neither by his rivals nor by the frequent spells in prison he had to endure whenever he was caught sneaking forbidden shots of the Mount of Mercy in Arafat or the courtyard of the Haram Mosque because, they claimed, photography stole the spirit and desecrated the sacred. When he was deprived of a proper funeral they said the Haram had shunned him on account of his temerity, and that his burial was cursed because the people hadn’t prayed over him and he hadn’t been admitted into al-Malah. What with the curfew and the heavy sniper presence on all the city’s minarets, we had to bury him here, behind the house, at the top of Mount Hindi. It was Doomsday on the Arabian Peninsula then …” Her voice was still there with them, and in the half-light the photos watched them. Before them was the Haram courtyard stained with blood and corpses, trucks piled carelessly with bodies streaming in from Ajyad Gate, Abraham Gate, Farewell Gate, Funeral Gate, and King Abd al-Aziz Gate; the last of these had been added during the expansion.
“Those bodies are the rebels. Marie took these shots of the destruction—or perhaps it really was the end times—which descended upon us at the turn of the century instead of the Mahdi we’d been hoping for.”
The eyes around them had begun to move, and came out of the photos in a huge procession, streaming from every corner of the house and from the fearmisted camera lens—Say: There is no god but God!—to pay their last respects at the funeral processions of those who departed during those final days of the old times.
Umm Kulthoum’s Sighs
SITTING AT THE ENTRANCE OF SHEIKH MUZAHIM’S STORE, NASSER RESEMBLED A wormlike appendage. The neighborhood stared at him with open dislike, and he was totally ignored by Sheikh Muzahim, who looked drained and hadn’t bothered to reach over to his tray and upturn a cup to welcome Nasser with coffee, or even refill his own cup, which was encrusted with desiccated grounds. He’d been getting the man at the cafe to prepare his routine morning coffee for him since Azza’s disappearance, but the man boiled it to death, spoiling the aroma of the blend with his slapdash approach and leaving a bitter taste in the Sheikh’s mouth. He’d left a plate of dry, half-eaten dates unfinished, and a fly was hovering loudly around a pile of pits that had been tossed into one corner of the shop. A fly was hovering around his whole life. Day after day since the body had been found, Sheikh Muzahim sat in his store staring into the void Azza had left behind in his heart. It wasn’t the pain of love or of missing Azza—sitting there, he couldn’t remember ever missing Azza or ever allowing her to forge any bond between them at all; he’d never had a thought to spare for her and so she’d closed in on herself and pushed him over the edge of her heart and down into the abyss of his store, where he could rot alone for all she cared. Just like her mother: he’d hated every morsel of food she’d ever cooked for him and would try to escape through the storeroom to go sit in the store, but she’d still reach through the door with an arm like a slippery snake to leave a tray of food a meter in front of the chair where he always sat, as though she were feeding some kind of feral cat. But the food dripped with cold resentment and would sink silently down his throat to choke his intestines like heavy stones. Azza was exactly like her mother, who’d died of childbed fever just to provoke him. “That’s what a woman does to you when you let her into your heart, she sticks her muzzle in and drinks your blood.” Thus he was careful to keep a safe distance between Azza and himself.
“Since we came under Ibn Saud’s leadership, after Mecca surrendered to his army and was then followed by all of the Hijaz—since he founded the Kingdom of Najd and Hijaz—no one’s been able to escape his dominion except for that devil the radio and now these satellite dishes too …” He only said it to fill the silence brought by Nasser’s arrival.
“Where’s your daughter? Is Azza dead? Who do you think killed her? Did Azza kill herself to escape y
our cruelty?” Those were the questions the detective had prepared, but Sheikh Muzahim grabbed the reins and beat him to it.
“Have you found the devil yet? Satan’s been throwing the rotting flesh of his followers in our neighborhood. They chose the alley right in front of my storeroom so as to trash my business, to get revenge on me; they want to hurt me and my daughter, because I’m the only one fighting back against their depravity! They’re walking all over us and herding us like livestock with their fiendish media and God knows what else!”
Sheikh Muzahim was foaming with rage. Nasser struggled to keep up with him as he went back in time—to long before this most recent crime—reciting a litany of Satan’s offenses he himself had witnessed.
“Satan has many faces, God help us. The main one is the accursed radio, an evil that wormed its way here in the sixties via Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s speeches. It snuck into his followers’ houses in secret, through balconies all over the city, and into the palm groves between al-Abtah and al-Hujoun, to Wadi l-Zahir and the gardens of al-Misfala and the foot of the mountains overlooking the Majin Pool. Then, when the Lane of Many Heads came to life, it was accompanied by that demon singing out of a box in the Sharif’s garden, which was given to Mushabbab’s halfwit grandfather, Ali Bao. Sharif Awn singled him out for preferential treatment to humiliate the people of the Hijaz. Don’t ask me about his story, ask one of Mushabbab’s acolytes, like Yusuf—God help him—that guardian of history. I wonder what he has to tell you about that despicable family? Mushabbab’s father, who was the Sharifs’ protégé, was a dissolute wretch. He used to hold monthly parties in his orchard for that witch who’d enslaved Mecca’s men, Umm Kulthoum. They’d listen to her concerts live on Radio Cairo—Heaven help us—and they were all head over heels; her sighs drove them wild. I only witnessed it once, when I was a teenager. It was just after the pilgrimage season and that wicked old man’s pockets were stuffed with what he’d made off the pilgrims, so without even a thought to the sanctity of the holy months, he held a party to celebrate the coming of the month of Muharram and invited everyone who was anyone in Mecca—but he left the gate open to passersby too, to all the dervishes, lowlifes, and travelers staying in the adobe houses around the orchard. That night after evening prayers, zealots like me flocked there along with Mecca’s rich and famous, but we kept to one side and watched, expecting the sky to fall on their heads at any moment. It wasn’t long before we began to see arrogance, dissolution, and poison stuffed inside the baklava, fried doughballs, and Turkish delight along with ground pistachio, rose petals, and honey. Our blood boiled at the sight of the hordes of men in their Hijazi waistcoats and cloth caps, but that was nothing compared with those degenerate women, who we could see shaking their rumps behind the curtain which separated them from the men while they waited for the music to begin. Suddenly, the huge wireless began to shake with singing and sighing, and all ears and hearts were glued to it, drinking in that satanic voice. I remember how we begged God’s forgiveness, sensing the disturbance to the column of light rising from the roof of the Kaaba to its counterpart in the Heavens. Suddenly the Sharif’s green parrot squawked its favorite warning—“Bala bakash, bala bakash! Don’t joke with me!”—and the lanterns hanging on the orchard gate flickered in a sudden breeze, and at that moment our sheikhs burst in with their hennaed beards, night air trembling in the rustle of their black cloaks, short white robes and red checkered headscarves. They made straight for the radio at the edge of the open sitting room; the men reclining on Persian carpets and the youths sitting around on the orchard’s earthy ground had no time to react. The sigh emanating from Umm Kulthoum’s bosom seemed strained and lengthened under the weight of that first rock as the beards surged forward and attacked the men dancing to the pipe music with coarse wooden sticks—thin, strong ones that left marks all over the shoulders and split the foreheads of more than a few children, including those of Mushabbab and his friends, who were too frightened to burst into tears even. They concluded their raid by finally silencing the radio with a boulder, but then, equally suddenly, they began to lose ground. Al-Labban, Umm al-Sa’d’s grandfather, spearheaded the resistance.”
