The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Even Yusuf’s heart quieted in the presence of those women. The light of the moon kindled the scent of the bed Yusuf was lying on—a mixture of blood and rancid cheap food. Yusuf had abandoned his books and begun working as an errand boy for the nearby kitchens, before submitting to depression, withdrawn and alone in that room. He himself smelled of food; he was too drowning in the intoxication of having discovered that world to bother feeling any guilt for having taken on the personality of his friend the Eunuchs’ Goat and invaded his plastic and cork harem. He was switching roles in my web of despair. That Mu’az always turns the pupils of my eyes back at me, to make me look inside my many heads, exposing faults that I wouldn’t allow one of my heads even a glimpse of. Mu’az was the first to notice that the Eunuchs’ Goat had possessed Yusuf when he interrupted prayers in the mosque and Imam Dawoud confronted him with the Verse of the Throne, which drives away the devil. That dawn, the Imam ordered the devil that had taken over Yusuf’s body to make himself known:

  “Which devil are you? What is your name?”

  A Satanic voice deep in Yusuf’s chest replied, “I am Salih.” The name literally meant “good.”

  “Salih son of whom?”

  “Salih till the end …” The answer frustrated them; the imam and the other sheikhs didn’t have a list of devils without expiration dates. Nor did they know what immortal devils like this one were capable of, nor how they could be resisted.

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT BY THE TIME NASSER GAVE UP IN DESPAIR AT THE LANE OF Many Heads’ red herrings, the diary’s hallucinations, and Aisha’s schizophrenic emails. Their predestined fates—no, the life decisions they’d made themselves—were an affront to a conservative man like him. He’d never even heard of this job of “DJ” that the boys of the Lane of Many Heads dreamed of becoming; when he Googled it he discovered it was a man who manipulated women’s bodies through music. It was basically like being a pimp. Nasser sensed the mocking eye that had been toying with him and directing his movements since the very beginning of the case. He pushed Aisha’s sleeve deeper underneath his pillow. His anger dissipated and he got up to look in his dresser, not for anything specific, but for any sign that he belonged. What did he know about this world around him? He went through all the trinkets he’d carried with him since he was a child, such as the bullet-adorned leather belt with a dagger sheath on one side. The leather smelled of his grandmother, the scent of banquets on nights gone by. When he looked through his dresser, there was no sign of Nasser, who like his father used to be smart enough to snatch kohl off an eyelid, but just a bunch of his uniforms: six, seven, eight, ten, forty uniforms, two for each year he’d served. He spread them out on the floor of his room. The uniforms started out as thin as the ghosts of a famine and got progressively wider. There was no mistaking the pot-belly that had filled out over the years. The jacket shoulders had begun to slacken around his shoulders like they belonged to someone else. He’d spent more on dry-cleaning these uniforms than he’d spent on his own body. These uniforms were lord of this room, and he was their servant. The bedroom floor looked like a graveyard of soldiers, for forty men in one.

  That night the room looked bigger with its wide-open window which paid no attention to the graveyard inside, its corpses each paler than the next. Nasser slept soundly amidst the clamor of the traffic below. He had no idea how many nights he spent in that cemetery of his; he’d lost all sensation. He was conscious only of Aisha’s eyelids stamping their silence over his entire body, and though time passed, he wasn’t aware how many times the sun had risen or set.

  He was rescued from between her eyelids by the smell of grilling meat from next door. He realized he was famished; he couldn’t remember when he’d eaten his last meal.

  “The wolves of this hunger are howling inside your mind, and it’s making you delirious.” He got up, dragging his feet over to the refrigerator and stood there, completely at a loss. Ever since he’d gone to the morgue, he’d been unable to stand the sight of the refrigerator or the thought of a morsel of food going down his throat. With a shudder, he reached for the tub of date biscuits beside the stove and started robotically stuffing them one after the other into his empty belly. The sugar rushed to his brain, waking him up. Through the haze over his eyes and the windows, he couldn’t tell what time it was, whether night or gloomy dawn. He took out his five bottles of Dunhill cologne, the last five remaining of a dozen he’d bought heavily discounted a year ago from a friend of his who smuggled goods into the country in a suitcase. He poured them down the toilet and flushed, and left the door closed until the sweaty, rank-smelling cloud had faded away.

  FROM: Aisha

  Message not numbered

  Don’t search, ^, for message number 1; we mustn’t write it yet. We’ll leave it for when we’ve stopped speaking and fallen silent so that our words can go on imagining us and waiting for us, impatiently, at the edge of every sigh, so that they can say what we’re not able to express in any language.

  I also skipped all the tens when numbering my messages. We’ve left them for the unknown, because we won’t consume everything—we’ll leave something secret. The important thing in our correspondence isn’t the search for freedom or love, but the puzzle. We lean toward it unaware, not translating, not even thinking. We don’t allow our consciousness to break it open, so we can stay clinging to the rope of its amazement, which could be severed at any time by anything, which relinquishes the reins so we can enter. There I find the dream that keeps me awake with thoughts of you, that keeps your dream company, and shares with it this sadness charged by us.

  The most beautiful sadness is this moon.

  You’re the most beautiful moon.

  When the nurse was distracted, you seized the opportunity to whisper to me, “This is our secret …” Of course, you and I have to have a secret. Some kind of feverish sadness, so that we can cling to it.

  “Do you give yourself to me in marriage?”

  “I give myself to you in marriage.”

  I made sure my words could be heard by the two witnesses, who for their part broke out in grins, rather taken aback and desperate not to miss a detail, when I surprised them by adding, “On the condition that I have the right to initiate divorce proceedings.” They applauded in delight, thinking themselves extras in a rehearsal for some comedy on that bright morning.

  “Bear witness to this contract before God …” They shook our hands enthusiastically as the sunny garden paths fell silent, and signed our verbal marriage contract with an impromptu violin duet, making the morning seem even more gilded.

  “This is my second wife. I’m still married to my other wife as well and she lives in the same city. I’m Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph,” you said, laughing, to shock them and make their performance even friskier.

  All along, you were performing that ceremony as a joke. You never did believe me when I told you “all it takes to get married is an offer and an answer in front of two witnesses. A divorced woman like me doesn’t even need a male guardian to be present.”

  “God, life is so wonderful without papers! May God strike me dead if I violate this ethereal contract.”

  All the people enjoying themselves in the park turned to look when you started shouting, and then you grabbed me and held me so tightly you might have broken a rib, or three, and they grinned encouragingly. I soared on those smiles; even though you didn’t sense any change, I felt like a mountain of sin had been lifted off my neck.

  Aisha

  P. S. I was like a stone thrown through the air that day. I shook at the thought of that inevitable moment when it would crash to earth.

  Yusuf had successfully managed to change Nasser’s perception of Mecca. He’d begun to see the city as a woman. Nasser was robbed of the Mecca he’d known and had sacrificed his life protecting. He had fallen into a spider’s web of contracts sealed and broken in the Lane of Many Heads. Yusuf’s words were making him dizzy: “every time Mecca was on the brink of dying of thirst, a woman brough
t it something to drink: Hagar, Zubayda, Fatima.” Aisha took the complete opposite position:

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message zero

  Can you hear?

  I’m possessed by the doves’ cooing.

  I don’t know why I’m haunted by the events of the day I came back from Germany.

  It was during the last ten days of Ramadan, and the clock showed eleven at night when I came out of King Abd al-Aziz Airport in Jeddah with my small suitcase. On the highway, the driver missed the exit for the Mecca road, so we had to take the Medina road that runs through Jeddah, north–south, and found ourselves stuck in celebrating crowds and traffic: it was the 23rd of September, National Day. It took us five hours to get across the city—a journey that normally took a quarter of an hour. I was somewhere between ecstatic and fearful as our car was swallowed up by a sea of cars of all different types—you couldn’t even imagine—fancy cars, beaters, wrecks, all draped with the green flag with its sword and the profession of faith—there is no god but God—faces painted green, green clothes of every kind, green scarves, green hats, fluttering from car windows and boys’ and girls’ bodies as they hung out of windows or popped up through sunroofs, dancing, exchanging victory cries, blocking all the city’s main arteries, or congregating around the main roundabouts and monuments to join dance circles where crazy hip-hop mixed with dignified traditional Gulf dances.

  In Mecca, we’d often heard the rumors about Jeddah’s fanatic nationalism, but we never took it seriously. In a country leery of any kind of celebratory motorcades, this was the one day in the year when the streets were given over to public celebration. There was no official sanction, but laws were bent and young people took advantage of the blind eye that the religious police turned to that holiday in particular. Headscarves slipped off girls’ heads and every street was a party.

  I rolled down the car window with trepidation, a strange mixture of intimidation and utter abandon as the driver weaved in and out of traffic James Bond–style, taking every unannounced shortcut he could to rescue us from the storm we’d found ourselves in the middle of.

  A strange dreamworld in which car radio speakers blasting Gulf dance music vied with mosque loudspeakers broadcasting verses from the Quran during vigil prayers in the Ramadan night.

  You should’ve been here, ^^^, to taste the Saudi hodgepodge for yourself. Sow-Dee Champagne cocktail!

  Aisha

  P. S. We grew up hearing mother Halima’s words: “All the demons are chained up in Ramadan, so any sin we commit during that month stems from our own impulses. It’s ours and ours alone and we’ll be held accountable for it. No help from the devil.” Azza always laughed at that, muddying up the gravity of those words.

  When I look through the emails I’ve sent you, I wonder: Do you think I’m making up for Satan’s absence? Adding enough of his flavor? Or are they boring, the lines I write you?

  It isn’t Ramadan at the moment but my stomach’s completely empty. Not a bite of food or a drop of water in twenty-four hours. I weigh almost nothing right now. It was so windy at sunset today, the air-conditioning unit almost flew out the window.

  With people starving like we are now, it’s no trouble at all for the wind to pick us up and blow us through the air like it does all those plastic bags.

  P. P. S. What will it take to break the bond between us?

  I tried to do it a few times, but I was too fragile to send us both on our way.

  And yet the whole time it would’ve been so simple:

  Just a step in the air.

  P. P. P. S. There’s something I haven’t been able to bring myself to say to you. If Azza jumps, there won’t be anything left for me to hold on to.

  “Jumps?” Nasser leafed frantically through the emails, in hot pursuit.

  Bad Is Good

  You once enchanted me by saying “Love is sharing our normality … Taking pleasure in our normality, without magic or charms.”

  Why do I complain? Isn’t that the essence of living?

  To deepen the pain, I listen again to the tape you gave me of music by de Falla. I told you one day how I adored Don Quixote, so you got me this tape of his ballet about Don Quixote but told me that you liked the other piece, about the nighttime secrets of the gardens of Andalusia … You told me more about Don Quixote and explained that Sancho Panza had spent years creating Don Quixote, honing him with every forbidden dream he didn’t dare to carry out himself, and every adventure he’d always wanted to embark on, till he finally got Don Quixote to bring them to life …

  Azza and I wonder now: which one of us is Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza?

  I have to be honest with you—I can’t keep living in my computer screen like this …

  Aisha

  P.S. I was reading about Prize for Oddest Title of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and apparently the book that won this year was called If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs.

  I think that I probably need to start by letting go of Azza …

  And you, I know you’re bringing me down from the sky bit by bit, and you feel guilty—don’t …

  After seeing your last photo, with veins bulging at your temples and fatigue dripping from your nose, which looks so long now, I felt like a creature of a totally different caliber, from a whole other world, maybe of light …

  You, on the other hand, are a hole, whose emptiness no passion or pain can fill, and you’ll carry on swallowing us all one after the other …

  Just now, at this moment, I was appalled to realize that I don’t love you any more. In fact, I never loved you! You were nothing but a placebo whose narcotic effect I willed my body to imagine … To end up, now, faced with your pitiable baldness and the way your hips start to hurt when you try to get into certain positions. The first time you pushed me onto a bed, you slumped heavily like a bear, your face distorted by panting, oblivious to my fear and my body, from which you proceeded to strip every illusion of passion. I put up with it just to get to the end of the tunnel, whenever and wherever it would come. I have this ability to close my eyes to things, even when my body’s all eyes …

  There’s something dead about you, can’t you smell the stench? There’s something missing in the look of a man who has lost his virility. You confided in me once that your idol was Federico Fellini, because despite his own impotence, he attempted to feed off his friends’ sexual glories and turn them into artistic masterpieces.

  I understand, you can’t believe this is happening to you; you go after every new face in the hope they can give you back that electric shock—don’t you get it? Your wires have been cut.

  That’s it.

  The current flowed again once with me, but it was just a fluke. It isn’t going to happen every day. That day, you called me a “sex bomb”!

  I wonder if it’s you I’m talking to or Ahmad. Whichever one shook the kaleidoscope of my head, tangling my wires and electrodes so I can’t tell who’s who or what’s what any more …

  Now, how far can I limp without an idol to worship that’ll distract my body from this pain?

  I wonder: can an impotent man fall in love? Can his heart thrash with passion or skip a beat? What is love? Just a physical reaction? In that case, according to your theory of existence, you’re finished!

  Intelligent young men rush headlong, blinded by love, and then as they age, their virility betrays them and they take refuge in clinging to that slim alternative, the thing they call sensuality, going totally overboard in their obsession with the senses and their desperation to satisfy them. Who was it who said that?

  June 30, 2006

  Aisha, that thieving script-writer—why did I let her write the last act?

  She called out to me. I was going past her house when I noticed her hand signaling to me from the doorway. My mouth went dry … But no, it’s not true that her hand reminded me of Azza’s.

  Despite my resentment, I went closer, scarcely believing I’d find that it r
eally was Aisha. She addressed me from behind the door in a whisper: “Come in, take them to … There are minds who could live off these books; maybe you’re one of them.” I could hardly make out where it was she wanted me to take them.

  I confess I was shaken to hear her hoarse voice for the first time in my life. It was as if she were really saying “these books should be saved from the Lane of Many Heads.” Rats are the first to leave a sinking ship, I felt like retorting nastily, but I didn’t dare, and instead went into the dim hall to find a row of cardboard boxes, overflowing with books, waiting for me. The dizzying smell of damp paper and ancient minds poured out of the boxes … I wanted to lie down and inhale to death.

  When I looked up to catch a glimpse of Aisha, she’d already gone, leaving a patch of darkness on the wall of the stairs after disappearing upward. She didn’t wait to see if I’d carry out her instructions—she knew my weakness. A faceless woman; I’ll never know what she looks like.