The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  After a while, Yusuf began to sense the movement of the plants behind him. Sensing earthy fragrance, he got up to leave; he came to stand beside the Eunuchs’ Goat, shoulder to shoulder with the mountain rock; its body was wet and dripped on them. A strange-tasting bliss settled heavily over Yusuf’s limbs, a weighty feeling of belonging. He realized that proving his lineage meant he’d proved his responsibilities as well. Below them, Mecca spread out from the foot of their mountain, and in the center, a single ray comprising all human existence streamed up toward the heavens from the Kaaba.

  As Yusuf retraced his steps back toward Mecca’s giant glass monsters, he felt restless. He remembered when his mother had told him that anyone who entered Bull Cave would be relieved of all sadness forever. A tremor passed through the mountain’s stones and the moon blinked coolly, revealing Mecca naked before Yusuf’s eyes. She had discarded her eternal sadness, surrounded by grand mountains, preparing to cast off, without a shred of sadness, the old features that stood in the way of the new architects of her present.

  Bodily Reality

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 26

  With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation.

  And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him, and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.

  …

  He gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.

  (Women in Love)

  Dear ^,

  Would you translate this load for me?

  This sinful rendezvous with physical ambiguity.

  This unbearable morning knowledge.

  I won’t come back to re-read this passage unless, by some miracle, you and I should meet again.

  Unless the unknown should answer my pleas and put you back in my path once more, for another moment, if only for …

  Do you remember that night in Bonn? The night I left you and walked back on my own in the dark? I’ll admit I was frightened for the first few paces. Do you know what it means for a woman like me to walk somewhere by herself for the first time, on an unfamiliar street—or on any street? With every step forward I was expecting to drop dead, or to be attacked and have my head split open and my brains spilled everywhere. The Lane of Many Heads was walking with me in my head, watching and ready to poke around in there and tell all the locals what it had found.

  At one point, I was taken aback by the shadow limping beside me as I walked along the river. Then, instead of one shadow, there were five shadows pouring out of my body as I limped along. For a moment, I thought it was something inside of me coming out to attack me. To punish me for the strange scent that still clung to me, and for the desire that was renewed with every step I took away from you. But then suddenly, I could see those five shadows for what they actually were: happy ecstatics dancing around me. Those shadows knew something I could never even dream of knowing, sated to the point of yet more hunger. Some fear had snapped and released this multiple me. But still there’s more to this me that hasn’t been discovered yet. Every one of your looks releases another me that I had no idea about. I walked on—no, the five I’s walked on, with a sinful delight, back to the hospital. Somehow, though, I—and my other I’s too—hated you for leaving me to face this fear by myself, leaving me to bear this sin alone. Because sin’s not in your make-up, whereas for me, every charge of pleasure I experience releases an equal charge of guilt. Guilt about what sometimes gives pleasure so intense I can’t bear it. With every breath of love I took, I hated you, while you just kept asking me, “Are you okay? Is your conscience okay with this? Feeling any regrets?” And I just kept repeating, “I’m giving myself to this moment, no further. I’m floating along with the present, with life, with the deal we made.”

  I was too scared to say I was giving myself to God. I didn’t dare utter God’s name after what …

  Do you think I’m cursed now? No, you don’t think that. You believed what I said about giving myself up to life. But I was really just giving myself up to your taste. The taste that now poisons me even in my humblest prayers. I feel like I’ve lost something. Not my dedication, but rather the emptiness from life. Now, I’ve got indigestion from life. Indigestion from you. Can you call that a distraction?

  I owe you. I owe you for the joyful lightheartedness you brought to our brief connection. How long did it last? Three, four months?

  Every time my feelings ground me down, you made me fly. You massaged my sluggish conscience so that it could fly unencumbered.

  Did you say that my demon is the story of the fall from grace? Why do you deny the fact that there was one thing that caused us to fall from grace? When the body discovered its taste, and its secrets, it became too heavy for the heavens to support and its plunge to earth was inevitable. So that we could spend our lives looking for the self-respect we lost back in paradise. Now, ^^^, you made me wonder: can life be boiled down to regret? Regret over what? The apple? The fall? The loss of face?

  But you just laughed smugly and said, “Life’s all about avoiding abstraction!” Do you think this life of mine is an abstraction?

  Do you actually agree with me when I say that our fates are predetermined? We determined them. When God lifted us up in his palm like specks from Adam’s back, he made an oath. That was the day each of us had our fate determined and it was granted that we could plunge forward into it to reach the truth. We’re here on earth as an experiment to see if we can reach that truth.

  God, what a weird writer of fate I must be for choosing this story line as my experiment: Being torn between Mecca’s Lane of Many Heads and Bonn, Germany.

  I’m starting to think this plot’s more than I can handle.

  I spent the entire day today going about dumbfounded by the absurdity of our intercontinental relationship. The laughter and the bursts of affection. What is this cyber-relationship compared with real life on a city morning where you wake up to a woman of real flesh and blood? I am a woman made of thin air, amusing herself—unwisely—with a man made of solid stuff, surrounded by solid bodies and a concrete life. How long can ether and a solid hold together? Does eternity have a chance when it’s only made of thin air?

  Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole with the bed in the middle. I put the lavender coverlet on the bed, spread it out and try to reincarnate the dolphin you encouraged me to visualize in my spine.

  Nasser’s body tensed with those “fingers of silence upon silence” upon it. He stopped reading abruptly and got up, and like a sleepwalker drove magnetically to the morgue at the Zahir Hospital, where he was met by a chill silence lying over the refrigerators in the purplish light. His vision was filled with that purple and his fingers trembled—not out of fear, no, but out of the longing as huge as the fog that had accompanied him along the roads and down the hospital corridors to this place, to this drawer that the morgue supervisor opened for him, to this silent, swaddled body. He didn’t dare uncover her face but he was desperate to touch her fingertips, he was certain that those fingertips held a message for him. He sighed deep inside—I’m exhausted—he wanted her to reach into the depths of his exhaustion and erase it, to stamp her fingerprints onto
his lips. As soon as he’d pulled the cover down off the shoulder an indescribable scent rose up. A torrent of sadness spread through the morgue, blinding him. A pearly cloud enveloped him and he could feel his hair crackling and turning gray. The cloud dissipated, slipping through the doors to the corridor outside the morgue, leaving Nasser empty, hollowed out. Finally, and with effort, Nasser was able to get a hold of himself, his eyes having gone as rigid as the sculpture laid out before him. He entered into the perfection of death: “Death is the body of a woman.” He knew it for certain now. His clouded eyes floated over her chest, over the two dark peaks and back down to the triangle of darkness, and to … His eyes froze, his throat went dry, it felt like he was grinding glass between his teeth; he stood for a long while in that silence, searching for an equal silence inside himself (in all the silences that had swallowed his feelings, all the female bodies he’d silenced since his adolescence, wrapped in blackness of abayas), and for a moment he was one with her absolute silence, he penetrated as deep as the wound that killed her, to the floor of her abyss.

  It wasn’t he who moved to leave; his body simply slipped out the door in a frozen sadness born of silence.

  He didn’t know where he could go to escape this Meccan heat that swirled around him as if to melt her silence, which still enveloped him. The heat taunted him:

  “You poor bastard. It’s like you take pride in deceiving yourself. All you had to do was turn her over to look for scars from the surgery, or order an autopsy to find the metal in her pelvis. But no—it’s just another example of what a coward you are.”

  He stopped in his tracks. Am I really a coward or just greedy? You want to dissolve the truth of her into every woman so that nothing can break the bond of love you’ve clung to for the past quarter century, during which you’ve played the part of a man in the void that surrounds you.

  He returned to find the chill of death had beaten him back to his own bedroom. Was it death or some legendary sadness that was released when he uncovered that body? What was certain was that it had a woman’s voice, which took form in the night to whisper into his ear:

  Aisha

  P.S. Are you serious when you say you want to love a woman like me?

  Do you know how many men you’ve got to be? As many as the number of times a girl like me has fallen in love since puberty, as many as the number of teenagers who didn’t chase after me, whose eyes didn’t lust after me, as many as the number of men who weren’t kept awake at night by the thought of me, those who weren’t widowed by me or whom I didn’t cause to take their own lives, as many as … Can you love like that? As many as the nights my heart spent in agony, desperate to know why, and the nights I was supposed to spend sleepless in love that I spent sleeping beside my brothers instead. As many as the heartbeats my heart was supposed to beat if only I’d met the someone who could make it. As many as all those love scenes in books and movies and songs that I knew with all my heart were about me. Do you know how to love me with that kind of love? A love like a book of coupons I’m spending all at once to make up for the love I missed out on in the years I spent trundling back and forth between school and this cubbyhole in that yellow box of a school bus, blindfolded like a falcon so it doesn’t panic when it sees too much.

  Maybe it would be easier for you to love a woman who’d already cashed in all her coupons one by one by the time you came along, so she didn’t expect you to settle the debts of those who’d come before and those who hadn’t …

  Don’t laugh at me. I know I’m old-fashioned. I missed out on the era when people used to kill themselves for love.

  An era of hearts whence love would not sprout.

  P.P.S. Jameela the Yemeni girl’s mother left a gift for me. I found it on my bed: a set of lingerie woven out of fresh white jasmine flowers.

  The people of Jazan weave their underwear out of jasmine …

  I slipped out of all my clothes to try it on. I pranced around my room caressed by the jasmine petals as they were crushed against my petals. The perfume seeped down into my veins.

  One day, I’m going to leave a pair of trousers made out of jasmine for you. Just so you can experience the pleasurable suffering of that sweet-smelling freshness for yourself. The dew of the deepest, gentlest touch. I imagined that I was clinging to your back, that the petals were smashed against your solid frame.

  I spent the whole night tossing and turning. I couldn’t sleep properly for the disintegrating jasmine and the perfume it released every time I rolled over.

  In the morning when I put on my jeans, the jasmine was crushed even further. Imagine what it’s like to face the world in a skin of jasmine.

  Attachment: Photo of an amulet the shape of a half-moon, which Mu’az pilfered from somewhere, having taken a shine to the special trinket, and which then made its way into Mushabbab’s possession. Look at the silver half-moon, one of those old hollow charms which Bedouin women stuff with handwritten scrolls, talismans that can attract, or repel, or make fertile.

  For the first time ever, Nasser didn’t shave. He didn’t stare worriedly at the damp patch that was forming on the ceiling above the shower, and the dirty drips from the ceiling didn’t break his train of thought. The gray-haired figure in the bathroom mirror surprised him. That unexpected whiteness was the only evidence of what he’d nearly done the day before: he’d wanted to have sex with a dead woman. Nasser stood there for a long time contemplating that face in the mirror, lost in the truth about himself that had been revealed the day before. Nasser felt a bleak whiteness plundering the Meccan air around him. Was this some disfigurement in the city or was it part of his own body?

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a face appeared in his memory. That old man Mu’az had pointed out, whom Nasser had then followed into Mushabbab’s garden where the man was searching for a silver amulet!

  Nasser wiped the steam off the mirror then quickly went over to his noticeboard. He found the name and phone number, but then another business card bearing the same name caught his eye. How could he not have noticed that they shared the same last name and phone number? Muflih al-Ghatafani and Son, Research and Investigation, Pilgrimage Research Center. He ran over to his phone to dial the number, not noticing how late it was. It rang and rang, and Nasser thought the number must be out of service, when suddenly a woman’s voice, sluggish and drowsy, picked up: “He’s not in.”

  Nothing could daunt the detective. “Where can I find him?” he asked.

  He’d woken her up now. “Lying in the National Guard Hospital.”

  It was only after Nasser had got dressed and was about to leave the house that he noticed the time.

  A Layer of Tar

  “THE NEAREST NATIONAL GUARD HOSPITAL IS IN UMM AL-SALAM, ON THE Jeddah road.” This time he didn’t wait for the elevator that was always dawdling somewhere between floors so that even the attendant could never locate it no matter how much he banged against the door on the ground floor. To Nasser it felt like everything around him was slipping on a thin layer of tar, skidding, still not keeping out a leak of damp. Without hesitating, he scurried down the dark staircase, which was covered in the yellow of the last sandstorm that had blown through Mecca a week before. Nasser headed for the Jeddah road, passing through the Barbie-like facade at the entrance to Mecca in the direction of al-Rusayfa and Road 60. He drove past the cafes and amusement parks and brightly-lit new fish restaurants, finally coming onto the bleak asceticism of the highway that wended between the sand dunes, getting narrower from time to time around volcanic mountains, the expanse only broken by billboards advertising the Sawa and Mobiley cellphone networks or tourism in Malaysia. Nasser felt like he was a long way away from the Lane of Many Heads now, but he wondered whether some stranger was leading him back to the lane and its secrets, which had come to matter more to him than finding out the identity of the murdered woman or her killer.

  “Do you have a patient by the name of Muflih al-Ghatafani?” The receptionist’s eyes flicked impassively between Nasser
’s face and his police ID a few times, and then consulted the computer:

  “Urology ward, room 7.” A moment later, he added, “His doctor signed his discharge papers today.”

  Nasser followed the signs until he reached the door of the crowded room with its seven beds. He sighed when he saw the man’s frail body and aged, sunken face. “Mr. al-Ghatafani. We’ve met before. Do you remember me?” The whole row of patients turned to look at him except for the old man, whose eyes were as piercing as a hawk’s.

  “Are you from the police? I hope nothing’s the matter,” said a voice behind Nasser, taking him by surprise. He turned around, to discover it was the man’s son.

  “We’re still investigating the murder that took place in the Lane of Many Heads, sir. I’ll cut to the chase so I don’t waste your time and mine.” Everyone’s ears perked up. “I know this isn’t a good time, but I wanted to ask you about the silver talisman, uncle.”