by Raja Alem
P. S. Dear ^,
‘Do you love me?’ she asked.
‘Too much,’ he answered quietly.
She clung a little closer.
‘Not too much,’ she pleaded.
‘Far too much,’ he said, almost sadly.
‘And does it make you sad, that I am everything to you?’ she asked, wistful. He held her close to him, kissing her, and saying, scarcely audible:
‘No, but I feel like a beggar—I feel poor.’
She was silent, looking at the stars now. Then she kissed him.
‘Don’t be a beggar,’ she pleaded, wistfully. ‘It isn’t ignominious that you love me.’
‘It is ignominious to feel poor, isn’t it?’ he replied.
‘Why? Why should it be?’ she asked. He only stood still, in the terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round with his arms.
‘I couldn’t bear this cold, eternal place without you,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it, it would kill the quick of my life.’
(Women in Love)
Every time I read this conversation, I find something new.
Is this what I’ve been missing all along? Begging?
And what comes before begging: poverty. A hunger you would steal to sate?
It takes another person to make a beggar out of you. Because if your indigence becomes paranoia it will chase him away and you’ll be left hungry.
P. P. S. My computer crashed all of a sudden.
Don’t ask what made me download this cutting-edge program. This program excels at testing our curiosities and whims. Sometimes it opens us up onto a world in which a single click makes magic happen and other times it wipes your entire hard drive. Just like a human relationship.
I was in a coma for hours. Without our computers, we cease to live, I thought. And why? Because we are removed from the digital truth.
I’m out of order now, but still this list of commands is penetrating deep into my memory. It took me a couple of tries to get this service to work. These are the steps:
All Programs —> Supplementary —> System Controls —> Reset or Restore
Renew System Time or Revert to an Earlier Point in Time
All of a sudden you find yourself in front of this calendar and you can choose to go back one day, or a whole month, and with a single click you can delete the whole intervening epoch from your system. You can go back in time to when things were still working perfectly.
Should I look into my head to find the virus that disabled this service?
Should I think about which time it makes sense to restore to? Which periods to delete so I can go back in time?
Maybe I should start by erasing my name
Aisha
Maybe I should change it to
Hayah.
Aisha
P. P. S. 1. You said you like the digital photos I send you. It amazes me that though they come from this muddy darkness, they’re light when they reach you (and museum-worthy!).
2. A photo of Umm al-Sa’d? None exists.
Attachment 2: Hamid al-Ashi: this is his yard and his shelves of paper.
Attachment 3: This is a sheep tied up in a fire-pit. The Madbi cooking yard is never without a feast being prepared for the fortunate people who can afford it—people from outside the Lane of Many Heads, of course. The aroma makes its way to us.
You can’t smell.
Nasser turned up at my, the Lane of Many Heads’, entrance tonight. And he uttered these words, as if they were an oath: “I wasn’t made for this poverty and I won’t let the Lane of Many Heads ruin my career. Not now, and not even when I’m old and feeble.” And yet I still draw him in deeper and deeper. The dark circles under his eyes and his hollow cheeks tell me he hasn’t slept in ages. I notice everything. I watched him sneak over to Aisha’s house for the second time. I knew he was looking for Women in Love this time. It was vital for him to find that red sock, anything that represented Aisha, any snippet of her dreams. The smell hit him as soon as he walked into the hall. The whole building smelled like the inside of his undershirt. Nasser felt like he was walking through his own personal paranoia. He felt his way up the stairs, which were enveloped in darkness. Every door in the building was wide open. None of them had been shut except for the door to the cubbyhole. He knew it was the room squeezed in between two floors. He did try the lock, but in the end he had to break it. As soon as he took his first step into the room, his eyes ceased to see the world around him. In front of him, he saw only her bed, looking like a battleship. He fought the desperate urge to throw himself onto that space that had been inhabited by her body, her suffering, by the German demon who accumulated in her loneliness.
“Aisha is the very devil. But what, Nasser—you think you’re a holy sheikh? And you’ve come to exorcize the demon from inside her? You want to extract it from her eye and blind her? Or from her toe and doom her to a wheelchair? Which body part are you going to have to sever to get him out and punish her?”
He didn’t dare go forward. There was a satin sheet covering the bed—it was the color of lavender, light purple—and it was ruffled and twisted like a body in love. He scanned the entire room, looking for Women in Love. Wherever he looked, the scent of lavender lured him on. He moved forward. He dug through the drawers in the dressing table. He looked in all four corners, but he didn’t dare touch the bed or the balled up sheet. There was no trace of the book. Everything in that house was stretched out; it was as though the people who lived there had left the place very, very slowly, with plans to return. Everything except for the cubbyhole, which looked tapped out. As if it had had enough of waiting for the women who loved to return. They’d been gone a long while.
He shut the door quietly behind him and left.
He would definitely have chosen to go from her lips downward. The opposite direction to the German. The thought turned his stomach.
Jameela
BETWEEN YUSUF AND AISHA’S PAPERS, NASSER FELT LIKE HE WAS MOVING AROUND in a fantasy Mecca. It wasn’t the Mecca he knew from his usual beat. That night, he stopped over some pages of Yusuf’s entitled “Sheikh Muzahim’s Biggest Secret: A Farce”:
January 1, 2005
Jameela was like butter stuffed into her black abaya. It was open all the way down the front, concealing nothing. The beautiful Yemeni girl’s headscarf lay nonchalantly on her shoulders, leaving her black braids uncovered. Sheikh Muzahim’s heart leapt into his throat at the sight of her. She was a luscious round pumpkin dripping with butter. Sheikh Muzahim’s right eye, less afflicted by glaucoma than the other, dived into her lap and buried itself there.
“Welcome, priceless ornament, exquisite face, may the Hijazi earth welcome the beauty of al-Mukalla!”
“I’d like a Galaxy.” Her voice echoed in the empty depths inside Sheikh Muzahim. He nodded.
“Your Sheikh Muzahim, his store, and all his sweets are at your feet. I have every kind of candy: lollipops, lemon bonbons, Mars with caramel, Kit-Kat, coconut Bounty … But your choice is the sultan of chocolate, Galaxy!”
Sheikh Muzahim believed that Yemeni workers were the best at all trades and it was good luck, too, that their lust for life made them reproduce more.
Jameela had spotted the Galaxy bars in a dark blue tin and was instantly hypnotized by the rancid cacao. He held out a bar for her, making sure to brush the edges of her fingers; his eyes practically popped out and the blue clouds of glaucoma roiled at the touch. No snuff, qat, or mahaleb cherry could compare with the electricity that crackled between him and the soft-skinned beauty.
At the first simmering of femininity, the scent would shoot through him to the very tip of the big toe on his right foot. In that smell glimmered the Bedouin charcoal-seller who had hidden him under her dress when his tribe came under attack, as happened constantly in the desert. He was seven at the time. The girls in his tribe started embroidering their dresses when they were still children, then got married in the dress, and never took it off for th
e rest of their lives. It secreted away every memory of every moment of passion and sadness until it passed on with them. All that wrapped itself around him inside the dress of the Bedouin charcoal-seller; he got an instant erection the size of Mount Tuwayq and ejaculated a flood bountiful enough to irrigate an orchard.
The same mountain reared up now whenever he saw fifteen-year-old Jameela. She brought back the moan that echoed in the the well inside him that he’d turned his back on long ago, along with the dream of a male heir. Jameela’s gaze had the placidity of a cow’s; what was it that was absent from her face? Disgust and defiance. There was none of that in Jameela’s sweet, animal gaze; she gave him back what Azza’s mother had taken from him.
A Hair
“NASSER, SON!” HIS MOTHER’S VOICE ON HIS CELLPHONE CUT SHORT THE NAGGING of that phrase from Women in Love in his head, “best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.” It was the middle of the night. “I’ve found you a bride! She’s rich, pretty, and respectable.” The Lane of Many Heads roared with derision inside Nasser’s skull.
“Oh God, Mom, not this again …”
“You bury yourself in work! You’ll be the end of the family line and you’ll never have the chance to have a kid who has your name.”
Nasser fidgeted with some paper. His bed was covered with Yusuf’s diaries, and Azza’s sweat was leaking out of the pages onto the bedclothes. He couldn’t even close his eyes against it; the smell seeped out anyhow. Going back to his mother’s ways was inconceivable. He struggled to focus on what she was saying. “She’s an orphan. Her uncles are very modern and would be happy for you to meet her, with a chaperone and so on, of course. Please, Nasser, make me happy before I die!”
“God keep you here for us, Mom … Can we chat about this tomorrow? It’s pretty late.”
“Son, don’t go to your grave a dried-out stick!” Her words darkened the already-dim room. He hung up. He closed his eyes and tried to slow himself down, fleeing to that remote spot in the corner of his heart, where no murder or misery could sneak in. There, he’d hidden the image of a girl: a girl whose veil he’d never dared to even tug on, so that throughout his adolescence and maturity she’d remained wrapped head to toe in her abaya, though she was still as light and joyful as a shadow.
Tonight, though, he reached out a feverish hand to that cloud of black he’d concealed throughout his adolescence, and began pulling off layer after layer of the endless blackness. But when he at last got to the center of the cloud he didn’t find the women he’d been collecting—glimpsed through the windows of cars speeding past him in the traffic, or the windows of his neighbors in Ta’if. Back then, whenever he looked up at a girl’s bedroom window, he’d find a sandal dangled out the window, sole facing him, in a rude rejection of his presumptuous advance. In the mirrors of those dirty soles, Nasser saw his own lonely face waiting for a female face to inhabit it.
He took his memory tin out of the bottom of his wardrobe. All there was inside was a single long hair and a hairclip decorated with a tiny red diamanté apple. He remembered how he’d found it on a side table in his friend’s house, how the blood had rushed to his temples when he’d picked it up and stuffed it quickly into his breast pocket. His hand hadn’t stopped trembling for days; the apple next to his heart was a fully formed girl and she had captivated him for years. He never said she was imaginary, the Apple Girl. He’d spent his prime obsessed by that apple and the single long hair that he’d wrapped in velvet and laid in a long thin box like a precious, jewel-studded sword in its sheath, as if waiting for great men with jet-black beards and glittering eyes to uncover it and forge its blackness into the path of their destiny.
Vague scenes haunted him; he thought they were from that film starring the famous Bedouin singer Samira Tawfiq. What was it called …? Amira, Daughter of the Arabs? Maybe … The one where the handsome prince falls madly in love with a black hair that he finds in the middle of the vast desert, and abandons his tribe and kingdom to travel the land searching for the woman it belongs to.
Nasser felt like all the men of his generation could have been that Arab prince, capable of falling in love with a nameless hair. A name is a woman—it’s a woman’s self, her honor—and could be enough to kill a man out of passion. He remembered his mom’s trips to find a bride for his older brother. The whole family used to join in the offensives she led on houses where she’d heard there were available daughters. There was an African woman, Hajja Hawwa, who used to go round the houses helping families out with their laundry and ironing and would bring back descriptions of the girls wherever she’d been: “Al-Mukharrij’s daughter, her braids are as thick as a palm trunk and reach down to her ankles … The al-Asiri girl is as curvy as a moringa branch and has breasts like home-grown pomegranates … Al-Zahraniya’s eyes are fatally seductive … Al-Ghamidi’s girl is quicksilver, whoever gets her’ll be a lucky man …”
Her usual trade was smuggling forbidden features, but one time, she came with just a name. She breathed the name like she was breathing a spirit into his brother’s body: Salma. It was love.
The name started a hurricane inside Nasser’s brother. Like our ancestor Adam when God breathed the names of all creatures into his back so we could be created, his brother built an idol on the foundation of that name, Salma, molding her out of the breasts of the most gorgeous movie actresses, Umm Kulthoum’s deepest sighs, and the loveliest kidnapped brides out of Fairuz’s plays … He prepared a dower of twenty thousand riyals, a neckpiece of pure gold rashrash-work like a shimmering cascade, bottles of rose, musk, and ambergris, and a set of make-up with bright turquoise eye-shadow, pink rouge, and blood-red lipsticks, and he furnished the splendid open sitting room in the Qarawa Gardens in Ta’if, where he worked as a supervisor at the Bugariya orchards. But when he finally met Salma on the night of the wedding, she turned out to be a demon, and he fell into a terrible depression.
Nasser recalled the pall that marriage had cast over his brother’s life. He’d drawn his lot from a bundle of names three times, and every time, she turned out to be either a demon, or just a “woman with no salt,” as they say, meaning unremarkable and insignificant. He finally settled on the fourth: his Filipina maid. Every time, Nasser used to live off the crumbs that fell from the names and descriptions of his brother’s dreams, just like he was feeding now off David’s leftovers from Aisha’s letters, which had shattered all his teenage fantasies and replaced them with women like herself, women capable of penetrating his mind with their words, of desire and fruition. “Nasser, you’ve stolen a sleeve from that cheap flesh and now you’re worshiping it!”
Dogs barked in the distance, and Nasser thought to himself that the municipality should go back to culling them using meat mixed with broken glass. It would mean dog corpses filling the horizon with their rotting smells, though. He put his hand under his shirt and felt for his heart, which he’d never faced up to before. Bringing it out into the air, he could tell from the cracks all over it that there was a gaping hole inside of him like a cage, for a lover like Aisha or a wild bird like Azza, and that it was still beating and capable of loving Azza’s bare feet padding up the stairs to the roof as she crept out in her sleep to visit Mushabbab, or sinking into the sandy ground of Mushabbab’s orchard, or even when Mushabbab knelt down humbly to cover the tips of her toes. Nasser knew that all the men who’d had those two women had left cracks in his heart where oxygen was seeping in, feeding his infatuation, and teaching him how to outdo all of them in courtship. If either Azza or Aisha fell into his cage, he’d show no mercy: he’d starve her to make her eat his live flesh, he’d interrogate her and wring out her femininity, he’d tear away all the pages that Yusuf or the German had imprisoned her with, he’d wash her long hair with his hands and wipe everything she’d said from behind her ears with fragrant kewra water, and rest his own ear on her lips to break her fast … She, the one Yusuf’s diaries described as fasting from words.
“But Nasser, she’s half your age, and be
sides—you’ve been fasting all these years and now you’re falling for a dead woman!”
A Window for Azza
December 2, 2005
From California, USA, a motorbike has been imported to the Lane of Many Heads … You must have heard the roar of its engine.
Note all the details on the delivery slip, Azza:
Make: Yamaha, imported 2004
Color: red gloss
License: Florida 946248, 01/06143234
Owner name: Mushabbab Ateeq Al Nayib
Order name: al-Sheikh Khalid al-Sibaykhan
Notes: With thanks for your assistance in organizing private events.
Mushabbab was as happy as a child, saying that at last he could cross the whole city now and get out of the Lane of Many Heads.
Nasser couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw al-Sibaykhan’s name. He circled it in red several times before carrying on reading.
That Mushabbab is a rocket launcher. He’s thrust me out of the manual age and into the petroleum age with this motorbike of his.
“Life’s like gas, you burn it or you get burnt!” My hands respond to Mushabbab’s motto, pumping another shot of gas into the motorcycle, and I shoot like a screeching arrow along the Mecca ring road on my way back from Ajyad to Sittin, heading for the masses of people in the crowded neighborhoods where I drive around displaying the Starbucks logo on my T-shirt. Don’t laugh, Azza. I can’t be deformed, not even by a dubious logo on the back of my green shirt. I was hired by the advertising company on the condition I provided my own motorbike, so I’m using Mushabbab’s.
I fling off the logo behind my back. We won’t waste gas by stopping to look behind us; you’re here with me, the speedometer is showing “Azza,” you’re the point I was naively aiming for in my history studies.
Yes, this motorbike is the real me.
