by Raja Alem
As he went past the first floor, he was careful not to make any noise that might wake up Umm al-Sa’d, al-Labban’s daughter, and her husband, al-Ashi. He slipped warily across the foyer to the basement vault where the Turkish seamstress was running her scissors over women’s bodies, making dolls, hiding defects. “No eunuch or Turkish seamstress is good enough at cutting or measuring or stuffing or lining to hide how ugly Ramziya is in that sticky mess I’ve just left her in,” thought Khalil gloomily.
As if he’d uttered the name of a genie, the Turkish woman suddenly appeared out of the darkness and blocked his path, her bright dyed-orange locks licking at him.
“How many times are you going to turn down my invitation and break my little heart?” she purred. “It’s the morning after your wedding! Let me read your coffee grounds for you.” Her demonic face tied his tongue. She carried on reading his mind. “There are demons frolicking over your face. It’s no wonder the prophecies were sent down to Mecca, to a cave. Let me tell you: the young men of the Valley of Abraham are like the very red fire of hell itself.”
Foolishly he tried to get around her, but she breathed her poison into his face. His movements were drowsy, drugged. She led him backward, toward her studio, and the doors parted, swallowing them both. Her eunuch servant disappeared on the other side of the partition, keeping watch.
“Your muscles are all so tense. Just a breath and they’ll snap!” Her voice was a cool salve, like the raw steak his boxing friends in the States used to put over their swollen eyes after a match. He’d almost become a pro, just because he loved pain so much. That was what always attracted him: pain. Maybe he got off on the torture of Azza being so impossibly out of reach. With dizzying torment, the salve spread over his skin, still swollen from Ramziya, and sucked up all his bruises and blood clots. For a moment, the world ceased to exist and he imagined all his internal wounds had risen to the surface because of the salve and its sucking. He imagined that the salve could spread to cover his breathing and take his soul away without his body noticing the theft. Rather than beginning to decompose, his body would go on for ages after his soul had left, and he would be embalmed in that salve like the most elegant of pharaohs. When she began to sway him, he didn’t even bother to open his eyes to see where his feet were landing, he just let her whirl him around, and it wasn’t until bliss began scaling his spinal cord that he realized he was dancing. He was dancing with the same hunger that had conquered the nightclubs of Miami.
But then when she lay him on the floor, he suddenly felt the need to be covered up, and he reached up to the hangers above his head, carelessly pulling the newly tailored clothes onto his body. He grabbed the finest and softest pieces, the silky, the ruffled, the fluttering. When he stood up, he slipped on the silk and fell. But there was no reason to ever move again; his body submitted to the will of the silk. All that time he’d spent chasing his father and the impossible beloved, and flying planes, and carrying strangers through the streets of Mecca aimlessly—the whole time, he now felt, he’d been chasing after this softness, this effortless body, which didn’t go after anything but had things come to it. There was a mirror in front of him; he peered into it. The figure looking back at him shocked him out of his reverie: the almost-naked woman draped in silk had his face. Behind her, a peal of Turkish laughter smelled of Turkish delight, halva, palaces, consolation. She was all over him like a young scorpion riding on its mother’s back. In panic he tore her clothes off his body and scrambled out. He found his own clothes, strewn like evidence of sin, across her doorstep. When he made it out onto the street, his clothes were on inside out and the pen in his breast pocket was digging into his chest, reminding him of his loyalty to pain. In the middle of the Lane of Many Heads, he stripped off and put his clothes back on the right way round without the slightest embarrassment.
From the alley, he shot a look back toward the Arab League behind him, his annoyance climbing from the Turkish seamstress in the basement vaults to the third floor, where he’d built his dreams for Azza but had installed Ramziya instead. He tried to summon up some affection for Ramziya, something like acceptance.
“There’s something invisible in Ramziya’s body that wants to expose itself. Something that won’t keep quiet, can’t be sated, refuses to behave itself. A base demon that fights any attempt at being dragged to a higher level. Her body is a storehouse of desires, driven not by passion but by disgusting appetite and excess.”
A monstrous morass; that perfect description was what he’d been desperately looking for. “Ramziya’s like the Well of Yakhour, enough to make my body erupt with warts and ulcers and pus if she gets her hands on it again. What else do you expect from a sewage cleaner’s daughter?”
That night, Khalil came face to face with the humiliation of his kinship with pain. He admitted he’d enjoyed that Turkish battleship that could take gunfire and incendiaries without sinking. She took the same pleasure in giving and receiving pain as he did. There was a rhythm that linked Khalil’s limbs to the Turkish woman’s flesh. In the blink of an eye, a bruise would appear here and then another there, lighting up like green bulbs with each of his blows. They drove him wild, adding to the pleasure he took in the silk clothing from her basement studio. When he’d put them on, his movements became pure femininity, which then soon became a ghoul that assaulted the Turkish woman’s shimmering rolls of fat.
Khalil flew down the Lane of Many Heads like a bat. He spat to his left and avoided the taxi parked outside the alley, which he slaved in day and night. He went ahead on foot, gathering up the desiccated neighborhood and pressing it to his own moisture; he knew that every step he took that night was a step away from himself. His good looks faded away, falling to the ground, their lines drooping and slackening, his face sagging like the houses around him. His heart twitched like the garbage heaps dotted here and there. All this trash filled his heart with misery.
“What is it, Khalil?” said the trash, addressing him directly. “Are you getting all high and mighty? No one’s bigger than the Lane of Many Heads. You might be strong and capable now, but what about in a decade? We all have a lifespan: you have yours and we have ours. Read the expiration date stamped on the back of your neck. You human beings are trash. You manage to stay on your feet for sixty or seventy years, or ninety or a hundred even, but in the end your legs give out and leave you here. You pile up beside us, and everyone who passes by curses how you stink. There won’t be any garbage trucks to cart you away; the municipality trucks can’t get down streets as narrow as this. Who cares if you have a pilot’s license or a driver’s license, how long did you think your eyesight was going to last? Look how your bald spot’s growing and your black hair’s graying. The veins on your hands are starting to bulge. The fire that used to run through your insides is flickering feebly over the surface now and in a little while it’s going to leave you for good. Today it’s anger and passion that make your hands tremble, but soon it will be decrepitude and diabetes. And just wait till you smell of piss and turn the stomach of anyone who tries to hand you a bite of food. No, don’t be scared. Don’t let the thought of that kind of ending stop you; just be gentle now while you’re stomping all over people and their joy. Be a little a bit kinder. You never know, maybe that little bit of compassion will come back around when you’re thrown on the heap.”
By the time Khalil got to the end of the lane, all the lights in the cafe had been turned off, except for one hanging from the roof of the shed where the Pakistani and Sri Lankan waiters slept. They rented out the corners to undocumented workers and exchanged smuggled pornographic photos, which they kept for company and used to sate their devils until they were interrupted by the dawn call to prayer. The Sudanese cashier, who was still awake and sitting behind his desk, scratching at his ledger, greeted Khalil, and absentmindedly Khalil raised a hand in return. He sat down on a chair that had been forgotten at the edge of the cafe, in limbo, one of his feet inside the cafe, the other in the street. He sat there like the em
bodiment of ruin: his arms lay slackly in his lap, his palms stacked one atop the other, his head drooping forward slightly, his eyes trained gravely on a spot of ground before him, the point of prostration in prayer. The mosque was in front of him. He knew, without even looking at his watch, that dawn was at the edges of the city, about to dissolve as the calls to prayer began and intermingled—“Prayer is better than sleep”—and then the single lightbulb hanging from a wire in the doorway of the mosque would flick on, Imam Dawoud’s silhouette would appear behind the barred window as he stood in front of the prayer niche, which was marked by an arrow drawn onto the wall, and he’d announce the dawn prayer.
Khalil looked to the sky: “Don’t cut me …” he said, trembling, his sister Yousriya speaking through him with the voice of a helpless, desperate woman. He sighed. “Kill me in an accident, God, crush me with metal so there’s not even a scrap left to rot, but don’t take away my strength, don’t take away my eyes. Those who are disemboweled or slandered die martyrs. Disembowel me and let me die a martyr! But before you kill me, kill her first, that—”
“God is the Greatest.” The call to prayer rang out from a distance like an “Amen” of assent to his own prayer. It was received by the first angels of the dawn. His soul trembled. He remembered that he hadn’t washed off what he’d done in the night so he avoided going into the mosque lest the angels turn his prayer into a black rag and slap him in the face with it, striking him dead in front of the men lining up to do their ablutions in front of the mosque.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 21
“‘Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’” (Women in Love).
The chameleon Birkin in my clothes.
Do you know what a miracle it is for the one you’ve prayed for to appear at the end of your prayers?
You popped up on my screen this morning—completely unexpectedly—just behind my left shoulder when I turned my head, exactly when I whispered my greeting to the angel Raqib, who perches there, noting down my sins. That angel is the embodiment of creativity, always ready to erase pages and pages and give us another chance to start writing afresh.
This is what you bring out in me: I woke up with a blast of energy, massaged my poor injured body then poured the energy into this message to you.
In the past few days, I’ve had trouble figuring out whether I’m praying or writing. Everything has melded together into a corner which I escape to.
Aisha
P. S. You said, “I don’t want you to miss waking up with the Lane of Many Heads, or with God for that matter. How many of us are there waking up in the same bed now? Four? Or forty?”
Do you realize how beautiful the melodrama was that played itself out on your stage?
In that scene, you, the Western man, appeared on stage as an individual, as the possessor of your own body. You took an entirely personal step, playful and carefree. For you it was just a treasure hunt. I, on the other hand, whenever I looked up, I locked eyes with my father and mother and my siblings and the Lane of Many Heads. They were all watching my every move, every flirtation; your every touch was felt by the body of that audience.
Do you see? Where can I find the words to explain it to you? I never came to you as an individual. I was a sheet of white paper covered in ciphers, the eyes of the Lane of Many Heads. You were an elephant stomping on the sheet.
I gave you what wasn’t mine to give. I couldn’t believe how much I smuggled into your arms with every single moment. No matter how hard you squeezed me in your arms to extricate only me, three bodies emerged: one starved and made thirsty, a second that had been encoded with years of “this is forbidden, that’s forbidden, that’s allowed,” and a third, a tiny, tiny body, which grew smaller and darker in the presence of God, despite my long-ago divorce and the verbal agreement you and I made that morning in the park beside the train station.
Try to imagine me like I was in that room. As you were being lashed by the waves, I was being buffeted, too, as I tried to excise a single body that could be yours and yours alone while they jostled and brawled with one another on my bare shoulders.
Aren’t you blown away by how spontaneously I performed in front of that unsympathetic audience?
Cyber Life
MU’AZ WENT INTO THE MOSQUE AND PRAYED. THEN HE LINGERED THERE UNTIL all the other worshippers had gone and only he and his father were left. His father watched him with pride as Mu’az prayed for forgiveness, tracing the chains of sin that were weighing him down. He asked for forgiveness a hundred times—a thousand times—for every photo he’d taken, every face he’d abused. He summoned all the angels that had abandoned him for his private abominations, and he apologized for the keys he’d burdened Yusuf with and the trouble he’d gotten him in. He begged for mercy and renounced everything except for the book he’d stolen from Mushabbab’s library. It was a sin that couldn’t be erased. He couldn’t bring himself to put it back or even part with it. He insisted on taking it with him everywhere, even into his dreams, constantly flipping through it in the studio or in the Lababidi house on Mount Hindi, which the angels had long since abandoned owing to the mass of photos stored there. Mu’az discovered that his dreams were the only place where he could enjoy privacy, the only place he could be alone with his intimate belongings, whether or not they were sinful. Like the desires he had, which were brought to life in the snapshots he took of girls’ bangs and legs, or this book, which was packed full of the work of the earliest photographers. They took him along with them, from the early 1860s all the way to the end of the 1950s, and he stood beside them as they snapped rare shots of Mecca and the Hijaz. He met the traveler Muhammad Sadiq Mirza and his sons in the photos of the supplication of pilgrims on Mount Arafat; Snouck Hurgronje, disguised as Abd al-Ghaffar, showed him what the pilgrimage looked like in 1889. He spent time alone with Ibrahim Rifaat, who’d taken some of the rarest photos of Mecca and Medina; Clemow and Hallajian at the turn of the twentieth century; Lawrence in 1916. In John Philby’s photos from the first quarter of the twentieth century, he saw the pilgrims alighting from their ships in the port of Jeddah, and then he moved with de Gaury, Rendel, and Thesiger into the 1930s and ’40s. In his dreams, they all became one: his genes climbed up the scaffolding of their genes, ascending through their genius, in-mixing. He woke to find that he was like Dolly the sheep: just a clone. No more, no less.
“Mu’az,” called his father, interrupting his pleas for forgiveness. “God bless you, my son. The Turkish seamstress—God reward her—sent us a sheep for the poor. We shall slaughter it and divide the meat among the people we know.” Mu’az folded up his prayer rug, his father’s voice following after him: “Mu’az, don’t forget to keep the head and the tripe for us … And the skin as well.” Mu’az nodded reluctantly.
“I’ll be late for work now.” Mu’az left the mosque, his father’s blessings following him out the door, and he left his own voice to hang in the air: “I hate slaughtering.”
Whenever Imam Dawoud sensed any weakness in Mu’az, he gave him an assignment like this to strengthen his constitution. “I’m going to become a vegetarian,” Mu’az thought to himself. “I hate meat.”
Mu’az had only ever seen meat that was covered in fat and veins and pericardium, and looked like the froth of death itself, from the charity they’d been raised on and celebrated with on feast days. “Are you too good for the meat that built your bones now, Mu’az?” Mu’az didn’t want to anger God by refusing His blessings. “In the Quran, heaven is said to be full of fruits,” he thought to himself. “Whenever meat is mentioned, it’s usually birds or fish. Okay, fine, it does mention livestock, but …” He pushed aside the thought.
He untied the Turkish woman’s sheep from their front door. This was what was going to do away with his weakness and sin. The sheep the Turkish woman had donated for slaughter was large and embodied all the mystery and desire rising up out of her basement; it even embodi
ed his own desires and sins too. He couldn’t bring himself to look into its tearful eyes; he couldn’t stand the sight of its tongue—still licking—or its teeth—still chewing. He didn’t know who it was who remarked, “They should’ve stopped giving it water last night so its veins would be ready to open.”
An idea occurred to Mu’az. He led the sheep to the spot between the two houses where the body had fallen. The ground there was dry. There was no trace of what had been. Facing the direction of prayer, he pushed the sheep onto its side and knelt down on its chest. He picked up the large knife and was instantly transported to that last attempt at toughening up his constitution. One Friday after night prayers, he and his father were sitting with al-Ibsi, the executioner. Al-Ibsi was a regular at the mosque and the other worshippers all regarded him with respect. He introduced himself to Mu’az with consummate modesty.
“I carry out executions in the western region—Mecca, Jeddah, and Ta’if,” he said. Then he introduced the delicate young man he’d brought with him. “This is my son, Mishari, my pride and joy. With God’s help, he’s going to inherit my trade. I’ve trained him well, now he just needs to be approved and examined.” Mu’az nerves were jangling. His father and al-Ibsi went off to speak in private, leaving Mu’az and Mishari to get to know each other.
“You chop people’s heads off? You’re an executioner?” Mu’az asked incredulously.
“My father’s heart is filled with nothing but care and concern when he’s removing people’s heads. That’s what he’s been teaching me during my apprenticeship. I can’t even count how many beheadings I’ve seen. I look right at the point where the sword should fall so the head comes off with one strike. The challenge is testing your fortitude—seeing whether you can keep your cool.”
