by Raja Alem
“It’s your daughter’s decision. If she wants to have children, then it would be unjust to tie her down to a man like me. The doctors robbed me of that option. They could’ve frozen some of my sperm before they put me through the chemotherapy, to give me the chance to have kids in the future, but they gave me the treatment without letting me know what the side effects were.” The light shining through his thinning, almost glowing, hair gave him a boyish air, a vulnerability that played on the heartstrings. It was a miracle when his hair started to grow back after the chemotherapy and he started treating his hair as if it were a child. He would oil it and comb Minoxidil through it every night. He was as careful as he possibly could be and he never suffocated it under a headscarf. He spent more on that desiccated chaff than he did on his entire body—the body that had already betrayed him once and given life to that dinosaur, cancer. That day, standing in the alley in front of the sewage cleaner’s house, he could be heard as he explained, in detail, how the doctors had failed to freeze a portion of his sperm. As he delivered his scientific exposition to Yabis, the look on the man’s face reminded him of a cow drinking happily from a muddy puddle. His response was entirely unexpected:
“I know my daughter. Who are we to question God’s wisdom? Who knows? Did you hear about the Indian lady who got pregnant in her seventies? When the Lord wills it, milk will pour from stone udders.” Their blind faith was almost defiant and Khalil decided to punish them for it by going through with the marriage.
On their wedding night, that same inner demon goaded him. As she walked toward him resignedly, he stretched his arm out, blocking the doorway to of their bedroom. “You’re going to walk out of here just like you walked in, childless, all the way to your grave. Nothing but burnt firewood. There’s no point to anything you do in there. It’s pointless. You’re just a toy for me to play with.” His idiotic talk pained even his own ears.
“Leave it to God,” Ramziya had said, sighing, emitting a faint whiff of something rotten. She defied him by replaying the same pious tune her father had. “Don’t reject God’s blessings. When you get to the bottom, say, ‘Praise be,’ before you say, ‘It’s tar.’”
Halima’s probing questions made him uncomfortable and in an effort to distract her he nodded toward the mass of white buildings that had come up on their right.
“Those are the Sayf buildings. There are forty-four of them in total. They’re kitted out like spaceships and all lit up. They were built over where the mountain and citadel of the Dabba used to be.”
“Yusuf’s obsessed with that mountain,” Mu’az chimed in. “Those are the rocks from which horses first emerged in the beginning of time and it’s where the Dabba will appear at the end of time. It will wipe the earth out with its tail and then comes the resurrection. He still writes about how they destroyed the citadel, which was more than a century old, despite Turkey’s objections and their pleas for UNESCO and the heritage protection bodies to get involved.”
Khalil shot to life as if he’d been stung by a scorpion. “You still see Yusuf, you son of—an imam?”
Mu’az brushed off the insult. “Don’t you follow his column in the paper? He said that they’d promised to rebuild it on a different mountain farther away, complete with all its original underground vaults and secret passages. Including the Ottoman chests that are still shut up with great big padlocks on chains and the old guns and cannons that are breeding-grounds for rats now and haven’t been fired in more than three-quarters of a century.”
Khalil stared at Mu’az for a long while, irritated by his idle chattering. He was looking for his point of attack and then he said, “Is Azza with him?”
The accusation riled Halima. “God protect us from your devilry, Khalil. Don’t go making trouble. And keep us out of your twisted obsessions.” Halima turned to look at Mu’az. She wanted to get into his head to know the truth. Why hadn’t it occurred to her?
Mu’az broke through the apprehension that had settled over the three of them. “Apparently the princess is still lying there in a sandalwood coffin at the top of the citadel. People say she still winks and braids her hair with camphor and rose perfume.”
“Camphor makes you infertile,” Halima interjected.
“No, camphor comes from one of the springs in paradise. And the princess is still waiting for the Turkish pasha who locked her up in there until he could defeat her father the Sharif of Mecca.”
“Mankind has had free will ever since it was a speck of cells on our ancestor Adam’s back. You can go look for what you want in the citadels of the Turks, developers’ high-rises, dovecotes, wherever,” said Halima, making Khalil wonder whether she was hinting at what he’d gotten up to in the Turkish seamstress’s basement. “But it’s pointless vanity,” she continued. “All Eve’s daughters are the same in the end. Deep by night and sweet by day. As for the ones in coffins, God knows best.”
Khalil looked back and shot Mu’az a disdainful look. “You still digging up graves? Huh? Has your camera flash got any bones to fess up to yet?” He was trying his hardest to irritate him.
Mu’az was defiant. “They told me that human waste has been piling up and that it attracts crows. They said we’ve become the biggest crow colony on earth.”
Halima cut through the tension between the two men. “That detective’s getting more and more suspicious. He’s chasing down every single thing in the neighborhood, his own shadow even. You two know he’s been asking about you both.” As soon as she said that, she regretted it. She felt sorry for Khalil and she didn’t want to give him something else to worry about. He was gloomy enough as it was! She couldn’t imagine either one of them being involved with the body in any way. She was quick to add, as if to apologize, “Never mind the Seven Wonders of the World, these days there are two thousand and seven! There’s a murder on every TV screen—and all for entertainment. Men stay up all night in cafes, smoking shisha, to watch that stuff.”
The look of worry in Khalil’s eyes only intensified. Everywhere he turned, the phrase “He’s been asking about you both” followed. The cab was filled with a glum silence as they each followed the course of their own private apprehensions. The night outside the window was less heavy. Mu’az thought about the meanings pregnant with meanings that lay behind words. They felt like thick honey on his lips.
Khalil took them up Hafayir Hill in silence. He felt as empty on the inside as the top of Mount Omar to his right, which had been shorn of all its houses and leveled. Thoughts ate at his black insides, which were exposed to the elements. He saw the neon yellow bulldozers that were parked, waiting for morning, waiting for flying saucers to land atop the spacescrapers.
“God help me. Not a day passes without another mountain in Mecca disappearing. Where are the houses at the top of Mount Omar that we’ve always known?”
“Their misery was wiped out in the name of progress! The land they used to occupy is called Ground Billion now. They’re planning to build the tallest buildings in the world on Mecca’s mountaintops.”
“Taller than the minarets of the Holy Mosque?”
Mu’az saw Mecca through Halima’s eyes. “The development here is out of this world, Auntie. They’re pouring billions into it every day. The massive corporations are like their own world order. They don’t answer to the laws of any one country. The last deal they signed was with Elaf Holdings for three billion dollars to develop one mountain here and another one in a different area. Not even Manhattan’s like this! The Valley of Abraham is lit up like a Christmas tree. I swear if the Many Heads went out for a stroll in Mecca, they’d think they’d been resurrected in New York City.”
“God help us. Why are they trying to make the holiest city into George W. Bush Land? Turn here.”
Khalil veered right toward al-Misfala and Abraham the Friend of God Avenue, in the direction of the royal palace. “That’s globalization for you,” he said sarcastically. “I’ve got a pilot’s license from America, Auntie. But I married into a sewage cleaner�
��s family, I’m tied down to a convent full of old women and I drive around all day in a taxi. My only hope is in the private airlines, Sama, Ama, and Nas. But they’re not hiring. May God let us die believers!” Khalil sped up as he veered left toward the tunnel that led to Ajyad.
Mu’az thought that if he took a shot of Khalil the pilot’s head it would come out all blown up. Khalil still felt he was too big for the neighborhood. He’d decided that the skill required to switch on a commercial airplane’s computer system was greater than all the locals’ brainpower put together. Khalil was weighed down by his frighteningly heavy technical know-how in a neighborhood of illiterates who had no interest in books and no idea about the power of neutrons and atoms. And they all called Khalil “The Cabbie.” You can pound the earth and pierce the sky, but you’re still a cabbie.
“So who’s singing at the wedding tonight? Discovery? Or Qamari al-Hafayir?”
His question took Halima by surprise. He was trying to drive the phantoms from his mind.
“Tonight’s the crème de la crème! It’s at the Scepter Hotel, at the top of the towers. It’s the wedding of Sheikh al-Sibaykhan’s secretary.”
“That Sheikh al-Sibaykhan is chairman of the board of Elaf Holdings, which owns three-quarters of Mecca. It has investments everywhere, like an octopus, and the right to requisition private property within belts one and two in the perimeter of the Holy Mosque in the name of development.” When Mu’az heard the name Sheikh al-Sibaykhan, he knew his decision to come was the right one.
“They’ve brought the singer Ahlam and her band all the way from Bahrain for the occasion!”
“And why do you think they requested an old-fashioned tea-lady like you, Auntie?”
“Nothing looks prettier than when you mix the local and the exotic! Your Auntie Halima ties it all together, boys. Among all those chefs and waiters from the eight-star hotel, I’ll be the local color.”
Khalil pulled up in front of the entrance to the hotel at the Baraka Tower. Halima stepped out of the cab and walked toward the entrance, her abaya open over the peacock-like outfit they’d had made for her. Mu’az followed her. She breathed in before stepping into the elevator, to allow the attendant in his red and white uniform who pressed the button to share the confined space as they ascended. Mu’az noticed how little attention the attendant actually paid them. The golden walls inside the elevator stripped Khalil’s bitterness off his face, and the golden glow of life returned to his dark cheeks. He was keenly aware that they were on their way to a place that people like him never got to see, not even in the afterlife. Suite after suite overlooking the masses praying in the courtyard of the Haram Mosque. The prices ranged from fifteen million to fifty to a hundred.
They reached the ballroom near the top of the building.
Halima crossed to the other side of the partition that separated the hall, shooting Mu’az a look that warned him not to follow. On the other side lay a forbidden world. It occurred to him that he could get his hands on one of his sister’s abayas and cross over to the other side—like those gatecrashers who came to weddings firmly wrapped up in abayas and veils so no one could see who they were—if only he wasn’t afraid of Halima’s wrath. He stood there as if standing outside heaven’s gates. Dancing and music and makeup and beauties.
His heart wouldn’t obey his commands to leave. The female guests were walking through to the other side and Mu’az was dawdling by the entrance, ignoring the abaya-clad female bouncer standing nearby. He retreated slightly to a spot where he could still watch the women as they entered. You could see their hair was piled elegantly on the top of their heads underneath their headscarves, and they shone like crystal dolls.
He checked them all out. He wasn’t looking for a face so much as he was looking for a body whose language he knew. The language that permits a man to read a woman’s body beneath her abaya. He could’ve picked Sa’diya out of a crowd of a thousand abayas, and he knew Azza’s fleeting black form, though he’d never told anyone about her little nighttime outings. He simply memorized how her pinky stuck out while she was drawing, guarding the surrounding area like a scorpion’s tail. He often crossed her flitting nighttime path, and followed her form, which emerged more often than not out of his imagination rather than Sheikh Muzahim’s house. Her disappearance would forever be a rupture in the ties that bound the neighborhood together. From within that rupture, he tried to guess where she might have gone. There were a billion stopping points between the morgue and the wide world. He thought back on the dawn the body was found. The black Cadillac that belonged to the social insurance employee. How much blackness on wheels had stopped at the entrance to the alley that day?
Mu’az was mesmerized by the drums and the colored glass and the jewels all around him. Where did luxury like this even come from? Even Mushabbab’s orchard, the neighborhood’s pride and joy, would feel embarrassed by these riches. Where did Mecca hide all these nude-clothed women? They were unreal. They were woven from cyber-fantasies and science fiction and grandmothers’ fairytales: “Beauty sculpted by hand or by God Himself?” Even the old legends were dumbstruck by the beauty of these women.
Mu’az had no idea where this particular woman had appeared from. She came from behind the partition, rushing against the tide of the other women, lifting the hem of her headscarf to cover her mouth as she went. She turned around and in that sudden movement her hair came loose and cascaded over her cheek. She reminded him of a dove laying its neck against its mate’s. The woman was gone again suddenly. She hid herself away in the image she kindled in his mind so she could disappear. Another bouncer, who was standing beside the elevator, nudged him, so he turned toward the elevator to make his escape—and that was when he spotted a slender foot disappearing behind a narrow door at the end of the hallway. He headed straight for the door without thinking. Every part of him was being pulled toward that crystal-studded shoe. When he opened the door, there was nothing to greet him but silence. He walked down the short corridor to another door, opened it, and walked through. This time he was met by the hush of an empty ballroom. He walked toward the faint light in the direction of the red-satin padded elevator; there was that alluring scent he couldn’t name. When he stepped forward, his footsteps sunk into the shiny redness and it enveloped him entirely. When the elevator launched him upward, his breath caught in his throat. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples. His blood was rushing as if it were about to burst out. When the elevator doors opened, he was hit by the scent of an orchid in the center of the hall. An icy draft leeched the energy from his body and the sluggish pulse of everything around him made him feel as if he were walking not through a room, but through the inside of that woman, who’d lured him here into this suite. Pale and trembling, he proceeded down the corridor, which led to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the rows upon rows of worshippers making their rounds in the courtyard of the Haram. The door he’d thought was a side exit opened up onto a large study. He instantly zeroed in on the table where a silver amulet lay beside several ornate antique perfume bottles—as if it had been waiting for him all along. It was hollow, in the shape of a half-moon, engraved with tiny diamond shapes. He recognized that amulet instantly. Mushabbab had once asked him to store it in locker number twenty-seven in the cloakroom next to the Holy Mosque.
Mu’az was dumbfounded that the amulet had found its way to this tower; perhaps—as Mushabbab had suspected all along—the centerpiece of a great conspiracy. Perhaps it was just a copy of the original, and yet Mu’az was completely mesmerized by it just as he’d been the first time he saw it. It was a suicidal idea, but he grabbed the amulet and ran. He crashed through doors and hallways until he made it into the elevator and began slowly descending the many floors. When the doors opened, he walked out into the lobby, which was silent and frozen by the central air conditioning, squeezing the half-moon in his hand.
Loss of Sadness
THAT NIGHT—IN THE HUSHED AL-LABABIDI HOUSE—YUSUF STOOD FOR A LONG while
in front of a picture of Bull Cave. He could see his life in that photo: the day he turned eighteen, the time he took a visit to that cave where the Prophet had hidden from the polytheists of Mecca on his escape to Medina. Yusuf went to Bull Cave to subject his lineage to the oldest test in Mecca: to go up to the cave and try to squeeze himself past its narrow opening, for if it was too narrow, you were a bastard, and if you made it through to the cave, your lineage was legitimate. It wasn’t Khalil’s repeated taunts and aspersions about his lineage that made him go; he was motivated by something inside himself—he needed Mecca to accept him. He needed to be able to present his true self to this city, as if he were presenting his credentials, to put himself on the table without any character witnesses, save the Eunuchs’ Goat, who went with him everywhere, like his shadow.
The moon came out as they were climbing up Bull Mountain. When they got to Bull Cave, the Eunuchs’ Goat held back and let Yusuf go ahead on his own to submit to the test. Yusuf felt like he was facing death head-on. The crevice looked too narrow for a human body to pass through. Yusuf held his breath; leading with his skull, he plunged himself into the heart of the mountain. His animality, his femininity emerged in the pains of that labor. The moon surrounded his body thickly, kneading it into the whorls of the crevice, and as he shut his eyes and mustered all his animal strength to push himself deeper, his body was sucked in, as if by a whirlpool that he was powerless to resist, and came out into that animal womb. When the Eunuchs’ Goat came in through the cave’s wide main entrance, he saw Yusuf naked before him, his clothes having been torn off in the ordeal. He looked like a leech born backward and returned to the womb. Yusuf had not only been proven to be his father’s son but also son of this mountain, and this sanctuary, and the prophecy it had hosted, and of God, who was incarnate in the weakest of his creatures so there was no room left for weakness, aggression, or sadness. The Eunuchs’ Goat turned around and walked out silently.
