The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, God has blessed me. I’m a newlywed.”

  “And what does your bride think?”

  “She married me when I was still a soldier, but when I told her about my ambitions, she didn’t object. She just asked me to think it over for a while. When I told her I was certain, she supported me.”

  “Isn’t she scared of you?”

  “No. She knows I’m carrying out God’s law. At home, I’m like my father: gentle. We were never scared of him, not before he’d carried out a punishment and not after. He does his ritual ablutions first and goes to a beheading in a state of purity as if he’s going to the mosque. In clean robes, with a headscarf and igal. Last time, he took off seven heads in seven seconds. Each head popped right off and he didn’t once need to strike a second blow.”

  “Doesn’t he have nightmares?”

  “No, because he’s a very pious man.”

  “What heads do you train on?”

  “The training is abstract, but the actual procedure is carried out in the square. Tomorrow’s going to be my first actual beheading assignment. You can come watch if you want.” If it weren’t for his father, Mu’az would’ve run screaming from the invitation.

  “You’re going to use a real sword tomorrow?”

  “God willing, the government will provide me with one. They’re very expensive. They’re usually around twenty thousand riyals. My brothers and I always sanitize my father’s after he gets back from a beheading.”

  Mu’az remembered that early the next morning he and his father, the prayer leader, had taken up their spots in the square outside the Haram Mosque by the King Abd al-Aziz Gate. They saw the police shut the streets leading to the square before the execution, but Mu’az didn’t even notice the crowds that encircled them. All he could see was a man surrounded by military guards. He had no idea where he’d come from. The brute was dressed in white and his head had been shaved bald. From where he was standing, it looked to Mu’az like the man had no eyebrows or eyelashes or eyelids, or mustache, even. Mu’az knew he was one of the thirty-six terrorists who’d been sentenced. Photos of their arrest had filled every newspaper. The danger he’d once posed had been completely stripped off him now, though. He was nothing more than the vibrant quintessence of his audience’s voyeuristic impulse.

  Al-Ibsi appeared beside the condemned, and Mishari quickly tied the man’s hands behind his back and blindfolded him. The scene was so horrific that Mu’az didn’t catch a word of the sentence as it was being read out by the official in the square. There was a collective shiver around Mu’az as Mishari recited the profession of the faith three times, the convict repeating after him. Mishari’s father al-Ibsi was standing nearby, watching nervously, in case his son botched his first assignment. He was ready to step in if Mishari’s nerves failed him and he was unable to carry out the procedure. For a split second, Mu’az sensed that Mishari was on edge because of the huge crowd, and remembered what he’d heard him say the day before: “My father’s determination is so immense it dwarfs even the crowd in the square.” At the exact same moment, the same words ran through Mishari’s own mind, and when the official signaled to him to proceed, he lowered the convict to his knees facing the direction of prayer, though he wasn’t in a posture of prayer but halfway between prostration and standing. The flash of the sword cut through the scene, eliciting a sigh from everyone watching, and then the slightest nick on the back of the convict’s neck. The head reared back, a blade of sunshine fell across the bend of his neck, and the man’s head was separated. The blow was so light his blood didn’t even spill out. The body remained kneeling, solid and strong, while Mishari turned away, wiping his sword with a cloth he produced from his pocket. Mu’az’s eyes were trained on something in the background, though. He watched al-Ibsi’s enchanted eyes as he traced the head falling in an arc and landing nearby; he could hear the head fall at his feet.

  MU’AZ FLINCHED WHEN THE SHEEP TURNED ITS HEAD TO LOOK BACK AT HIM; IT WAS as if he’d heard the exact same sound. “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” He ran the knife across and the same old blood came spurting out, but not from the severed neck. It came bubbling up from the ground beneath his feet. Mu’az dropped the slaughtered sheep and ran. No doubt about it: he didn’t have Mishari’s mettle.

  “Mu’az chickened out! Mu’az is a chicken, Mu’az is a chicken!” The taunts of the neighborhood children pursued him until he disappeared into the maze of the Lane of Many Heads. At midday, his brother Yaqub went to finish the task of butchering and picking out the parts their father had asked for.

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 22

  ‘No,’ said Ursula, ‘it isn’t. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love. It isn’t so merely HUMAN.’

  Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! … ‘Well, I’ve got no further than love, yet.’

  Over Ursula’s mind flashed the thought: ‘Because you never HAVE loved, you can’t get beyond it.’

  (Women in Love)

  I wonder whether I’m Gudrun, but at the same time, there’s some Ursula in me, I find.

  Your cruelty comes so unexpectedly; sometimes you cut me off for one night, sometimes more.

  I know you’re always pursuing new victims for your massage table, but what I can’t stand is how much I depend on you. And how I burden you with my feelings, which change from one second to the next. I can’t help but feel my feelings have wiped you out. I pity you sometimes.

  But you put up with me, unless there’s a new body on your massage table. You were up-front about everything from the beginning, you sounded a little martyr-like when you said “My passion in life is healing the injured. I want to help by giving them a little pleasure in the midst of all that pain.” But when you help one body by giving it pleasure, you put all the leeches, which are stuck to your flesh, on hiatus.

  I’ve been a leech for the past two days in a row. I drink serenely from the cruelty of your cold shoulder. I know you won’t leave me waiting for long. You’ll come back to me. And you’ll say, “You’re a sex bomb.” It wouldn’t be wise of you to detonate me from afar.

  A sex bomb?! Is that what you’ve been blowing up in my face every time you turn up or disappear without warning like this?

  I remember when Azza was only five she used to sleepwalk—or, at least, she used to pretend she was sleepwalking when anyone caught her—across the alley into our house, through the door that we always left ajar, up the stairs, across the six laid-out sleeping rolls where my brothers slept, and into my bed. I could feel her tiny body squatting there beside my sleeping head. “Aisha,” she whispered. “I hate sleeping.” Without opening my eyes, I’d lift up the edge of the blanket for her to crawl in. When she settled in the bed, she wouldn’t press her body up against mine, rather she brushed against me lightly where it mattered. Making her body into a crescent, she left space between us: her forehead against my lips, her left hand tucked in my armpit, her toes between my thighs. Our bodies connected at three points, we’d both fall into a deep sleep. I felt my heart go out to this child who’d abandoned sleep to come find me.

  There was a time when I thought I could bring you into my bed-covers like a child, but you shattered the parts of that child inside of me.

  Aisha

  The Mahmal

  AN ANCIENT SILENCE LAY OVER THE LABABIDI HOUSE. YUSUF COULD SENSE IT IN all the rooms, the narrow passages and the open spaces of the parlors, and inside the mirrors that lay on either side of the arched doorways. Yusuf sat in the silence on his own, eyes watching him out of the photos. In the silence, his life came to him out of corners he’d never noticed before. Everything he’d missed came to visit him in al-Lababidi’s house.

  One night, he was dozi
ng on the floor of one of the sitting rooms, surrounded by photos of the people of Mecca, and when he woke up with a start at midnight, he’d realized he’d been thrown back into the same dream he’d had on the night the body was found, when he was nodding off on their rooftop in the Lane of Many Heads.

  He’d been watching the neighborhood that night from the rooftop. The book Saudi Arabia by the First Photographers by William Facey and Gillian Grant lay in his lap. Mu’az had brought it to show him, opening it to the page with a picture by an anonymous photographer found in a file on the First World War. “You need to see this for yourself,” Mu’az said, raking up a circle of fear around Yusuf. “I fear God’s wrath! I won’t be the one to expose people’s secrets.” Then he disappeared.

  Yusuf spent the entire night examining that photo, but he couldn’t figure out the secret Mu’az had tried to get him to see. It was a photo of the mahmal, the procession of the kiswa, moving through the Meccan streets having arrived from Egypt. The mahmal was always occasion for celebration; those gifts were like a yearly revival for the poor Hijaz. Between glances at the photo and down at the alley, Yusuf was nodding off, and at one point the photo and the alley infiltrated his dreams. He dreamed of them both as one and the same. All of a sudden the mahmal was passing through the Lane of Many Heads, guarded by soldiers at the front holding their swords pointed toward the ground. In front of them were the down-and-outs of the Lane of Many Heads, mingling with the great men of Mecca who walked behind the Sharif in decorated headdresses, the religious scholars in white turbans and the Bedouin in headscarves and igals. The women were dressed in black abayas and white yashmaks, diaphanous veils that covered their mouths but left their eyes and foreheads bare for all to behold. A single tree recurred in the image; military drummers girded the procession. Women peeked enviously at the procession from behind screened windows and cracks in the wall. Yusuf’s heart stopped when he spotted the men on the roof at the left of the picture. Half-hidden behind the minaret on the roof, a man dressed in white traditional clothes seemed almost to be waving at him; another man had turned toward the wall so Yusuf couldn’t see him; Mu’az was watching the scene surreptitiously from behind the minaret with the two other men. The houses in the Lane of Many Heads looked like they’d been patched up. Some parts bespoke great past wealth and others had been fixed with new pockmarked bricks or cement or wood, or even mud. It was a mix of planks and patches, through which the mahmal passed on its way to Mushabbab’s orchard, where the camels would rest.

  Yusuf came right up close to the decorated canopy on the back of a camel in which the covering of the Holy Kaaba lay. It looked like the kind of cage they put over a woman’s coffin to conceal her post-mortem allure. “Who’s under that cage?” wondered Yusuf.

  “Azza,” said a voice inside him.

  “Aisha,” said another.

  Yet another said, “Yousriya. Salma. Maymuna. Sa’diya …” It couldn’t decide on a name. Some presentiment was telling him to decipher the designs and words embroidered in gold on the kiswa and the canopy of the litter … When they got to the orchard, the men began lowering down the magical-looking mass of the kiswa. Yusuf was expecting the girl wrapped up in there to appear. But the men weren’t taking down the cloth, but rather the writing itself. Word by word they decorated the orchard, the pride and joy of the Lane of Many Heads. When the silver- and gold-couched words had all been hung up on the walls of the orchard, a young woman in trailing black appeared all at once out of the writing-denuded camel howdah into the orchard. Yusuf’s heart was pounding; it told him he knew her. In that instant, the trumpets and drums, the ruler and notables, all the celebrants, disappeared as if they’d never been there, and in their place was a huge fire. The neighborhood people were adding firewood. They said it was to melt down the gold and silver in the orchard’s decorations so it could be donated to the people of the neighborhood. The fire raged and smoked, and the walls began to melt from the heat; the girl was melting too. When she had melted down completely into a puddle, a giant reared up out of the puddle and with a single flick of its tail knocked the alley upside down.

  When Yusuf woke up, a certain tranquility had settled over the lane, but it was almost instantly shattered by a scream: the body had been found.

  Alone in the Lababidi house, Yusuf pored over the photo of the camel litter. He spread it out in front of him; for days and nights he examined its every last detail. He looked at all the men’s faces, searching for the man responsible for withdrawal. Among the people celebrating, he noticed a face he recognized. It was one of the notables; he was dressed in modern-looking robes and surrounded by lackeys. He’d seen him before. With his driver and PA. All those faces had actually been through the Lane of Many Heads a month before the body was found. He tried to find a way to blow the photo up, so he could see the features better, to find that man and find out who he was. He knew that if he could just put a name to the guy, he’d have discovered who the killer was. Or who the kidnapper was, or who the woman was. He replayed the image in his dream in slow motion to get a better look at the young woman as the curtains of the litter parted and she made her way toward the orchard, or leaving the alley in the magma of the giant …

  Subconsciously, Yusuf knew the woman who had snuck out of the Lane of Many Heads. Who was she? Azza or Aisha? Or just another daughter? A sister? A woman who couldn’t bear the neighborhood any more? He looked back and forth from the photo of the camel howdah to the image of the event in his mind. The events of that night were impressed on his subconscious. Although he’d been sleeping, he’d still been aware of that quick rustling movement: the body that fell and the other that ran from it.

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 23

  I sank into the deepest of deep sleeps last night. I missed the dawn prayers, and waking up this morning was like having my soul torn out.

  If death turns out to be a deep revival like that, I long for it. After all, the Quran does tell us that sleep is a minor death.

  Do you ever ask yourself, “When is she going to give up and stop writing to me?”

  A single word from you is enough to wipe out my darkest thoughts.

  “Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.” Lawrence says toward the end of Women in Love.

  Imagine if you only had one local channel, then the signal was cut, and then suddenly you were reconnected and plugged into all the cutting-edge channels we have today. My father’s death was like that. Whenever I look at the channels Azza is plugged into, I can’t help but pity myself.

  There was a sour taste to the yeast in our bread this morning. Do you think that Azza is coming up with all those channels herself? She says there’s nothing to the world but portals, and there are too many for her to cross. “Just close your eyes and spin around and start bouncing from doorway to doorway. The important thing is not to let any doors close on you.” That’s her mantra.

  The photo of you standing in your kitchen is making me hungry. Remember how I tore at the bag of shopping you brought home that Sunday? I had no idea what I was going to make with leeks in that modern kitchen of yours. One day I’ll make a meat and leek pie for you. It’s not an easy dish to make and it must have eaten up so many of my mother’s days.

  Don’t be surprised by the amount of leeks it uses. Leeks warm the blood. Did you know that? They’re related to green onions. Our grandmothers used to mellow them out by adding ground meat, tahini, and pastry.

  I look back and I see the leeks of my childhood. Strange, exciting images whose focal point is the Yemeni porters. They were literally the backbone of the Lane of Many Heads. Their backs had witnessed all our homes coming into being. Their backs, half bent under the crushing weight, had seen our furniture move up and down the floors of our building, sometimes during pilgrimage, and for the last time when I settled in my cubbyhole for good. They left their heavy vests on even when they slept and they would sit in the corner of the lane, out of the sun, each with a bunch of leeks
, which they ate with rounds of white bread.

  My father was irritated that the strong, well-built Yemeni who’d appeared in our narrow neighborhood had chosen to sit leaning against the nude brick wall of our house, the smell of his white, leek-steeped undershirts reaching up to me as plainly as anything. I would peek out at his green loincloth, which changed color like a sunflower, rising and loosening as a reptile crawled inside it. Every time a woman walked past, she’d screech like a crow and crash into walls as she tried to flee.

  “A Yemeni got up, his compass pointing north, he needs a nest to stick it in but he hasn’t got a dime!”

  I wait for the children’s rhyme. They sing it as loud as they can and smiles break through the frowns of windows quivering to open.

  I could never bring myself to say those raw, naked words. Words like that stick in my throat and send blood rushing to my face, because they don’t come out level and neatly cut, but take me by surprise, their bodies appearing out of nowhere on my tongue.

  The Lane of Many Heads doesn’t sing those songs in the middle of the day any more. Perhaps their giant has left.

  If the Yemeni man were still alive, I’d have sent you his picture. The rumor was that he’d been magicked into a bunch of leeks and devoured by the female crows in the impenetrable hideaways of the Lane of Many Heads.

  We the girls of the Lane of Many Heads grew up with all these dreams and all these things we’d read. We were raised to think the world revolved around love and that love would save a girl from suffocation. I know now that the world revolves around sex and food.

  I finished last in that race—it took me thirty years to have my first orgasm. The whole world is built around two bodily orifices.

  Everything else is just padding that disappears at first contact.

  Aisha