The Dove's Necklace
Page 29
Last night when I opened my eyes and found myself inside the Haram Mosque, circumambulating the Kaaba—and I don’t think it was a dream—I increased my pace and slipped in among the construction workers behind the wooden screens that had recently been erected around the Kaaba. We spent the whole night digging for the green gems at the foundation of the Kaaba, and when an emerald as big as a house was finally revealed, I fainted. I knew the workers were digging it up so as to remove it and dump it into the ocean. Every time they chipped at it, it would spark and Mecca would tremble. From where I lay on the ground, I tried to hold back one of the workers: “Why are you trying to get rid of the last remaining piece of heaven on earth?”
In the beginning, God sent down his house for Adam to live in, then Ishmael came to live in the Kaaba and took to using the unroofed part as a pen for his sheep and goats. Our journey away from divinity began when we led Ishmael’s animals out of the ruins and shut the Kaaba in our own faces.
Yusuf was annoyed by the emptiness in these words, knowing they were no match for the threat he felt in the air around him, but he couldn’t put a name to it.
At noon, Yusuf set out for the Lane of Many Heads, stealthily making his way to Mushabbab’s orchard. The sun had filled the sky and the temperature was over 49 degrees Celsius. Mirages formed over the surface of the lane as Yusuf walked along, joining the workers on their way to lunch, a wave that began after noon prayers and receded at half past two, leaving the neighborhood spotted with reeking plastic bags of rice and chicken, the eternal meal.
Yusuf moved warily, conscious of the eye that was following him carefully, but he was pretty sure Nasser wouldn’t be expecting him to show his face in the Lane of Many Heads in the middle of the day like this.
He sneaked in through a gap in the fence at the back of the orchard and made it to the stairs leading to the open sitting room. There on the mud stairs he collapsed. He couldn’t move. He surrendered totally to despair, not giving a damn what might happen to him. He felt that the last thread he could cling to had been cut. A stray cat appeared out of nowhere. It was missing its right eye and there was pus suppurating from where the eye should have been. It stared with its left eye, which was still intact, straight through to his heart. As he sat there, Yusuf lost all track of time. He was thinking back to the last time he’d sat there, when he’d watched as Mushabbab woke up.
Mushabbab doesn’t get up from the pile of dust he’s been lying on naked like a corpse, like a charcoal sculpture laid out on the ground of the orchard. Instead, still lying on the ground, he buries his head in green silk scraps from the covering of the grave of the Purest Prophet, peace be upon him, and breathes in the scents of three-quarters of a century’s worth of the Prophet’s tranquil sleep. He’s drunk on the sun so he begins to pick at the strings of his rebec with his left thumb, and sighs rise from his body. It’s a melody a woman sang to him on some occasion he can’t quite remember; nevertheless, he still passes it on in that singing, and it carries with it the weight of many souls. Some of the rebec’s strings do nothing but carry sighs:
“O Lord, you formed me out of the separation suffering soot of your creation.
I am your slave.
I long for nothing but to hear your voice.
I yearn for nothing but for you to reverberate through my body.
O Lord, I’ve left behind everything I used to carry except your echo.”
Mushabbab continues his secret conversation with that hidden melody until the sun lights up his still-high mop of hair. Then he knows it’s nine in the morning and time to cover up his nakedness.
He puts on his silver and white striped African robe to walk around the garden. He prepares for his daily ritual: reviewing the curvature of the arches created long ago by masterful hands, and examining the mosaic trees and their birds, and the decaying wooden carvings on what remains of the roof. He can sense the hands of the artisans and the adobe of the builders who mixed volcanic rock with mud and spread its warmth over the walls with the ancient crenellations they called “stone soldiers.” Like a snake that slithers along and feels the soil of the orchard against its belly, he can feel the vaults beneath his feet, full of fragrant oils and history. In the air in front of him, he thinks back on the travelers who passed through his orchard the day before, including the Bangladeshi man who left him a stone tablet the size of a man and told him it was one of the tablets of Seth, son of Adam, which contained the destinies and wisdom of man from the beginning of time to the end of days.
“Rock candy, narcissus and wild thyme, ginger …” He squats by his stove and mixes up his secret preparation. “Sweetens the breath in the chest, helps the breath flow … When air finds a capacious emptiness inside of you, it speaks and comes out clearly, and takes inspiration from the rhythm of your diaphragm.” He drinks the mixture and it makes him feel full. He sets the cup down on the base of the mosaic and a hovering bird lands and drinks the last few drops. He heads for the only closed door in the orchard, to the left of the sitting area. As he turns the ancient key, the sun crowds against him on the threshold before he enters the bathroom. Only once has Mushabbab let Yusuf into that mysterious vaulted bath, which is the object of the curiosity of every young man and boy in the Lane of Many Heads. Yusuf was blown away when he saw it; it was a masterpiece. The floor was made of ceramic tile that looked like it had just come out of the oven; it was the color of fire. The walls were covered in blue mosaic up to Yusuf’s head, but above that they were bare adobe and the ceiling was cement, its dinginess contrasting with the turquoise hint in the blue. Mushabbab had brought this bathroom to life out of rubble. He himself had mixed the cement and laid out the tiles, arranging them according to how much fire they’d absorbed. He himself had laid the pipes that fed the wide pool.
Mushabbab closes the door in the sun’s face and drops his robe on the doorstep. He continues his daily ritual, ignoring anything higher than his head. He pulls up a tile to the right of the door and extracts his cigarettes, hand-rolled from darkened reddish weed, picking up his lighter, too, and walks to the brimming pool in the middle of the room, where he plunges his entire body into the water, hissing and bubbling like a burning piece of coal. The water soaks every bit of him, sending up bubbles of thyme and ginger and the sweetness of the rock candy. He lies back, lights his joint, and the drug spreads through his limbs.
The earthenware jars lined up along the sides of the pool are filled with mud from the Well of Zamzam and plants from the sacred circle of Mecca’s deserts. He reaches toward the jars and picks a few leaves, dunking and swirling them into the water next to him.
Time stops while Mushabbab is lying there, hidden behind clouds of smoke and listening so he can tell his disciples how he was reborn out of the bottom of the Well of Zamzam.
“I had the chance to touch like a truly living, waking person touches, and stagger like a dreaming person staggers more than a quarter-century ago, in 1979 or ’80, when I dove to the bottom of the Well of Zamzam in diving gear, in shifts with several other divers. They were hired to deepen the well, while I dove down to deepen its springs in my chest.
“I dove down—just as Yaqut al-Hamawi says in his Encyclopedia of the Lands—from the top of the well to the bottom, sixty cubits, half of it through solid rock.
“I was in a rush to get to the bottom of the well and the three springs there: one coming from the corner of the Kaaba, one from Mount Abu Qubays and Mount Safa, and one from Mount Marwa.
“Good God, when the vapors hit me: the smell of the beginning of death, the beginning of hell, the beginning of paradise, the beginning—Amen … Suddenly its gasp, or my gasp, dissolved my wetsuit, and those springs flowing from the Black Stone compressed my body into a crevice even more violent, baring me to their powerful flow.
When the two divers dredged the well, it was actually my breast they were dredging,
when they picked up pieces of pottery, and keys, and metal, and mud, and brought them up to the surface,
when I came to on the floor of the Haram,
I was as sad as Adam, who moved the angels to tears. To this day, the grooves worn by the water still run across my chest.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 20
Dear ^^^^,
A cat was run over on the asphalt. That’s me. Crushed under my own loneliness this morning.
If you don’t reach out to me through the screen, through the air, I’ll …
I’m erasing everything I’ve just said.
From the Lane of Many Heads to Bonn in one fell swoop. From the sublime to the ridiculous, as my Aunt Halima would say.
I found a young Aisha laid out on a stretcher, heavily drugged, suddenly among all those white, ruddy European faces. Their language, not just their speech but their body language too, locked me out.
You know, ^, I went into a succession of operations “the way the Lord created me,” in only that shirt that came down to my knees and had the hospital insignia over my heart and was open all the way down the back. I had no sister or mother there to cover up my rear when I turned around. And that female nurse who weighed me at the last minute to determine the dosage of anesthetic.
Arab and non-Arab alike, our bodies share different kinds of surgical stitches, ingenious ways of splitting us open, whether longways or crossways or laparoscopically, and with radiation: sedative, inductive, tumor-destroying. There were more than a few Gulf, African, and Asian faces in casts or bandages. The waiting rooms were crammed full of relatives. They read books to pass the pains of their ill loved ones, or listened to their iPods through earbuds, blocking out the sounds of the world, or passed cookies and cups of instant, vending-machine coffee back and forth. A universe of faces flashed past as my gurney was carted into the operating theater, with no face to follow after it with a concerned look, or muttered prayers, or even a trembling lip.
I passed by like a ghost: Patient Nobody. I was received by the elevators which waited silently in corners or suddenly appeared in empty sections of hallway. A single warning was repeated over and over: it might as well have read “Elevator to Outer Space: Return Not Guaranteed.” The elevator was as big as our bedroom in the Lane of Many Heads, but made of a metal to which no emotions could stick, metal burnished with pains unknown to humans. No matter how much I hurt, it outdid me. With a single, definitive “ping!,” it spit me out into the next unknown. I got the feeling that the elevator wasn’t expecting me to return from the operating room or the post-operative care unit, but it didn’t stop to shed a tear.
How much time went by while I was in your hospital? If you asked me, I’d tell you the first day lasted forever. In the three months that followed, I regained my sense of time. The six months after that went by like the blink of an eye—the blink of an eye is a lifetime—with you.
I’m just getting it back now.
Calendars are a deceptive invention.
They exist so we won’t measure time with the units of our hearts (the units of existence).
Dividing time into years and months and weeks and days and hours extends the void. Or it limits eternity.
Ahmad was always working for some big shot or other. Before his most recent job, he was PA to a Gulf millionaire in Cairo for years, and having to keep the man’s many secrets turned him gray.
Who was crying on the phone last night?
The fog of Rovinac clouded most of Ahmad’s call. His fear pressed into my cubbyhole bedroom: “My friend the military attaché died alone in his kitchen. It was days before someone by chance found his body. Promise me you’ll be at my sickbed, my deathbed! Aisha, do you understand? Life here … The women aren’t like in our neighborhood; they just want you to be virile and strong with a functioning credit card …”
Under the shower this morning, my mother’s soap gave off the smell of aloe vera, and I heard his voice again. “You’re the shroud I’ll be buried in!” I didn’t catch the single tear that burned my left breast.
In its faint saltiness, I made a promise to myself that I’d never get ill or old and infirm. Not in the Lane of Many Heads and not elsewhere.
Aisha
P. S. You scared me when you said, “We used to have a poultry farm, and when one of the chickens died, we wouldn’t notice it in the middle of that vast sea of chickens. We would only realize one had died when the putrid odor spread through the farm. You have no idea how rank a dead chicken smells! It was my job to clear up that rotten mess, including the worms crawling all over it, with my bare hands—I’d act like it was no big deal to impress my mother. At times like that, the distance from the farm to the woods, where I had to dispose of it, seemed so endless. My only hope was to block my sense of smell, and my sense of touch.” You added, “I pretty much can’t smell anything any more.” How can I leave my scent behind me when you can’t smell?!
Wedding Night
KHALIL DROVE ON WITHOUT STOPPING. ANYONE WHO GOT INTO HIS CAB GOT in with a stomach churning, knowing that this guy was trying to escape from his own shadow. Wherever he stopped, Ramziya’s shadow would catch up with him and be all over him like a rash. A car with tinted windows raced ahead of him in a pack of other honking cars, decorated with scraps of tulle and white flowers. Out of the corner of a back window the bride’s white veil flapped in the wind. He hadn’t even given Ramziya a wedding procession, Khalil thought to himself. He didn’t give her a wedding at all except for the primitive ceremony called the khamsha, which was when, without any preliminaries at all, her female relatives chased after her like a frightened animal, threw a sheet over her, wrapped her up like a corpse, and bundled her behind a screen they’d erected to keep her secluded. For a week, she was excused from doing any housework and fed constantly, so that she’d plump up and her complexion would be rosy. In the end, Khalil didn’t notice the brightness to her features. They married on a moonless night, a night without any light at all, nothing except for the blood of the sheep they’d sacrificed and invited the neighbors to partake of. She was handed to him in a basket without any effort on his part. The feelings of guilt gnawed at him. He replayed the night over in his mind: the first night he spent with Ramziya, the pilot woke up drenched in his own sweat. In the dark he looked at the body wrapped in a cheap wedding dress and white veil, which was still clipped to her hair, one end undone and dangling down, the pin that held it in place lying neglected on her cheek like a wound. He stared into the smell surrounding them. Her body smelled like fertilized soil when it’s moistened by nighttime dew. He withdrew into his dreams of Azza, slipped into sleep, and began to snore.
In his wedding night dream, he followed Azza until he pinned her against a wall. She didn’t mind when her abaya slipped but she clung on tight to her face veil. He was having sex with a faceless entity. He couldn’t visualize its features at all—only the features of Azza as an eight-year-old, which was when he’d last seen her face. He worried that the child’s features would kill his desire and impatiently undid her braids, which cascaded black water into which he dove down, only to surface terrified and agitated, his body soaked. He hurried to get rid of that wetness by throwing his underwear into the heap of ruins behind their house, but the heap of manure lying beside him was still stinking of methane, an odor like blinding snuff, making his eyes and nose run. He remembered suddenly that he’d married her to spite himself, as if to cauterize his heart, which had been paralyzed by Azza. When he loomed over Ramziya, her eyes burst open in terror, arousing him so much he lost all control. His body even forgot how it had refused her the night before when the door to their bedroom had been shut behind them. Suddenly he was no longer Khalil with the invalid pilot’s license. He was a slave like the slaves out of the Thousand and One Nights, where the evil queen parades their virility in front of her husband, whom she’d turned to stone from the waist down with a wicked spell. He had an absence ins
ide him that devoured both the tender and the desiccated, and it was met by her hunger, digging away in the simple room on that narrow wooden bed decorated with cheap, now tattered lace, and those rock-hard cotton-stuffed pillows that gave the neck a permanent crick. When they rolled onto the floor, the rough Afghan wool carpet, from the area near the border with Turkmenistan, lacerated her elbows. Two patches of blood spread out and the rug became greedier, taking bites out of her shoulders and the edge of her pelvis as blood poured from her knees and Khalil’s groans filled the room.
In a sudden moment of disgust, Khalil wrenched himself out of Ramziya and crashed backward into the door, panting. The oily touch of its glossy blue paint stung his nakedness. His disgust was directed inward: how could his body have submitted to this woman when his mind was preoccupied with another? He forced his clammy body into his old clothes, ignoring his wedding outfit with the starched and embroidered collar. The Turkish seamstress in the basement had made it for him, designing it specially to resemble some of the embroidered robes her grandfather had inherited from Ottoman governors, which she had on display in her workshop. She’d presented him with the replica as a wedding present. The Turkish woman was laying her hands on the Lane of Many Heads; with her little gifts and her recipes for beauty, doors in the neighborhood were opening, and daughters were being entrusted to her basement, where she taught them embroidery.
Without even turning to look at the red-splotched body on the woolen rug, Khalil rushed out of the apartment and down the stairs of the Arab League, which was awaiting a final settlement in the matter of its inheritance. “This marriage of yours is an insult,” he said to himself, “from the bride herself down to the cheap furniture that’s going to be thrown out into the street when the male heirs rob you and all the other tenants of the deeds that dead al-Labban made out for you.” He bit his tongue to refrain from adding “May he rest in peace” about a man who’d hatched and raised four greedy vultures who felt no compunction about undoing their dead father’s final good deed.