by Raja Alem
I ran outside and stopped the first Mitsubishi pick-up, then went back in to get the boxes. I wasn’t sure about giving them to the library at Umm al-Qura; I knew they’d set up a whole load of committees to examine the books before accepting them, and then end up destroying most of them, so I took the liberty of taking most of them to the library of the Literature Club.
One last confession: right in the fast lane, in the middle of all the cars, I made the Mitsubishi stop, and started going through the boxes like a crazy person. I checked them page by page, title by title, but I couldn’t find a trace of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I slumped against the books in dismay as the truck drove on. She’s mocking me, mocking all of us, by keeping that Time locked up in her room …
Yusuf
Closure
“I COULD CLOSE THIS CASE WITH THE SNAP OF A FINGER.”
Nasser was stunned to find that the Lane of Many Heads case had been taken out of his hands and transferred, without any notice whatsoever, to the counter-terrorism unit, and that he’d been summoned to explain himself. Facing that staring eye, Nasser felt unreal.
“The Lane of Many Heads is leagues ahead of you,” the cold, sardonic voice lashed at him.
“I arrested Khalil, but he was released … Some force behind the scenes is working against me. But you have the means to correct that, sir. Believe me, we’re letting a real criminal loose in Mecca with that Khal—”
“Khalil is pathetic, that dinosaur of his makes him an easy target … Concentrate on the armies of vermin who make up the very soil in the Lane of Many Heads … You can’t expect to succeed in a plague-ridden environment like that unless you examine it microscopically.”
The air in the luxurious office chilled tangibly.
“I picked you specially for this case based on your life choices. For a quarter century you’ve had the option of living or being promoted, and you’ve always chosen to leave life behind, without hesitation or regret. That’s why I gave you free rein in this case, but you’ve disappointed me. Your twenty-five-year career looks like a joke. You’re broken, letting yourself be taken in by words. I carefully chose you, to polish and powder like a fine billiard cue, but you’ve turned out to be just another ball rolling around on the table with the others. And you’re taking the case like it’s like a personal tragedy—look at your hair, it’s gone white in less than a week!!
“Give me another chance … Please … Just one last chance!” beseeched Nasser, dying to be that favorite billiard cue again.
“History moves like a wave, all ebbs and flows, and you can never ride the same wave twice.” Both men listened appreciatively to the hollow echo of those words. “That said, I’ll be even more generous than I usually am and give you a head start in the second round with the Lane of Many Heads. So you can be in control of the game, I’ll let you see from above what happened before the corpse was discovered, and show you the four moves that you missed when you were drawing that circle of suspicion.
“Come here, take a look … Focus on those four steps in the air …”
First Move: Cadillac
AROUND SUNSET, THE PURRING BLACK CADILLAC PARKED AT THE MOUTH OF THE Lane of Many Heads, blocking the alley. It was carrying a female social worker, come to conduct a study of the socioeconomic conditions of the neighborhood, whose rickety old houses heaved and jostled, flaunting their poverty to catch her attention. The driver stepped out followed by a woman fully armored in black from her head to her socks and her elbow-length black gloves, and the pair walked the length of the alley, followed by eyes peering surreptitiously out of windows, until they reached Sheikh Muzahim’s place.
“Good evening, sir. This lady’s come to visit you from Social Security. She’d like to have a chat with your family and find out how things are for you.”
The Sheikh’s face lit up and he gestured toward the door in welcome. “God bless her,” he murmured.
The woman knocked lightly at the door. No sooner had Azza opened than the abaya pushed her back into her room and clamped a hand firmly over her mouth, the veil slipping away to reveal the face of a man. Azza recognized him; he’d gotten in her way several times before, but she froze in shock and he yanked her toward him easily. She scattered like a broken string of prayer beads; she was deep in his abaya, which reeked of agarwood oil; she couldn’t hear or see, wasn’t conscious of how she tore him away or how he left.
She leaned against the wall, her stunned eyes fixed on her father Muzahim. She wasn’t sure at what point she stuffed the envelope full of money into his hands and rushed to her bathroom. As she stood under the shower, the man’s smell surged back with the warm water, along with the words he’d bored into her head.
“K.S. is security itself. His miracles make the miracles of Moses and Joseph in the court of the Pharaohs look pitiful. You don’t need to read about him, just look at what he has planned and his dazzling smile … Soon he’ll write a book: K.S.: Making Billions … He’s got his eye on a satellite network. His commercials and his conquests will be everywhere—East and West, from the North Pole to the South in bold face—taking the financial supplements by storm, disproving every theory, engineering new global relationships. K.S. is an economic empire, above states and political borders, above passports, above obstacles, above fingerprinting and retina scans. Just watch him. He can tear down mountains and rebuild them. We’re immortal, we run the universe with our satellites, we’re a race above humans, prepared to mate with demons if that’s what it takes to inherit the earth and everything on it.”
Outside, an earthquake had struck the neighborhood, and the Lane of Many Heads was a commotion of competing voices. Someone could be heard yelling: “The Lane of Many Heads is on Al Jazeera!”
“Halima, Matuqa, Aisha and Jameela, Mushabbab and Dawoud, Yabis the sewage cleaner, and the Yemeni and Ahmad, and Amina and Bakhta and Noon… All of us, we’re all on there!”
“The Lane of Many Heads and all its dirty laundry is on screen! We’re all on TV!”
“The Lane of Many Heads is on the news! We’ll be making money soon!”
A viral video that was posted to YouTube has caused controversy recently. The video, which is less than ten minutes long, shows photos of one of Mecca’s poorest neighborhoods, the Lane of Many Heads, against a cartoon backdrop. Presenting a satirical portrayal of the life of women in that neighborhood, the short film attempts to show some comic aspects of poverty as well as shed light on the criminal networks that operate in the neighborhood. The video has provoked a huge range of responses and the number of comments on one site had already reached an estimated 60 million. The video has prompted renewed debate on the ethical implications of the totally free exchange of information as well as the negative impact on the individuals who appear in the video who were photographed without their consent …
“They’ve disgraced us!”
“Who was it?”
“Has to be someone from here, one of us.”
“Who?”
“That spiderweb Internet, God curse it,” marveled Halima with a wry smile. “We’ve all become international celebrities now!” The way she pronounced it, the word international sounded less harsh.
In the Lane of Many Heads, feelings toward the scandal were mixed.
Second Move: Desperation
AN HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN OF THE BODY:
He turned the key in the lock. The door slid aside like a curtain to ease him into the silence inside. His suitcase sloughed away from him in the hallway. He took a single step and was paralyzed by a clear peal of laughter, deep and satisfied like velvet. A shiver attacked him at the joy in that laugh, the abandon, the vigor, the recklessness—he didn’t recognize them, though it was definitely her voice. That joy, so full of life and death. Who was making her laugh like that?
Blending into the dim light, he held his breath at the half-open door to the room where he and Aisha had slept. His bones were groaning from the six-hour flight. The air was trapped in his che
st at the sight of the cubbyhole, which was getting smaller as time went by. Like in a Pharaonic temple where farmers engraved their annals and their gods, he’d succeeded in engraving his history onto the oily paint of the walls, though it didn’t give him any sense of pride. He’d left scars on the room’s memory. The deepest of his engravings had been the word divorce, which, in his carelessness, had formed a layer of armor over her body, giving her voice that poisonous tone when they spoke on the phone.
He watched Aisha lying peacefully by herself, illuminated by the light of her computer screen, stretched out across her entire bed, nude but for her red knee socks that drew his eyes toward her dark triangle like a flame. With him she’d never been definable or had any substance; she had no surface and no relief; she always reduced herself to an ink spot washed a thousand times; she contracted and withdrew in his hands and let him drill into her so he could create his own fantasies. Now, her neck was arched on the pillow for a kiss or a droplet of saliva, that neck which had never arched for him to kiss. He didn’t even know what it tasted or smelled like. He always identified women with their smells; for him a smell could embody a woman. One onion was enough to reincarnate the aunt who’d brought him up, while the smell of bleach and Dettol always brought back his mother. At the beginning of his marriage, whenever he beat Aisha, he’d soak her in Dettol out of regret and say, “Lie and rest on my mother’s chest, and lie me down too!” He’d ladle it out and feel safe. Even the women who consoled him in Casablanca strutted about with bodies made of rotten smells—sweat, or a garlic mixed with perfume. The garlic bodies were huge, inducing tyranny and control, inducing murder; when a garlic breast descended upon him, he’d be convinced that he’d come out ripped limb from limb and carted off as booty. Those bodies shrieked and scandalized with every touch. Aisha was the only bodiless woman; he’d still never manage to grasp her scent.
“Maybe now, stretching on the silky bedclothes and the fluff of her dreams, she’ll give off an animal smell or the warmth of new satin.” That lavender-colored satin coverlet—whenever he was there she’d be careful to fold it and keep it out of his reach in her closet, and in the two years since their marriage and divorce he’d never touched it, as if his touch on its uncovered body would leave a stain or a burn! This lavender coverlet, which she’d taken out in his absence, was the one thing Aisha brought to the marriage from her teenage closet of dreams, and was probably also the only piece he’d let her add to the furnishings he’d chosen, and then only grudgingly. He felt drawn to it, wanted to touch the forbidden item and leave his mark on it, if only for the last time.
“Aisha gets out her hidden scents and lies in them, dreaming and flirting with her dreams …”
He was struck by a sigh at that reserve of passion that he’d never experienced, and swift as a reptile he was on that altar-bed; he didn’t know how his body managed to execute that entry: it was as if a second flowed like a drop of water and let him flow into her, he spread the length of Aisha’s body, violating that satin, and suddenly his body was satin and Aisha’s fluff. The moan that heaved through her body came up through his lips. The moment kneaded the room into a single dough: somewhere in a dream, he grasped it or it grasped him. Suddenly his body was being crushed, returning to what it was, the sob that came out tore through the dough, and Aisha was torn too, in a flash she awoke, saw who he was, and he was outside her. This woman’s eyes were popping in wrath and a coldness harder than death; he the ever-absent repudiated usurper had returned, and he was unbearable. A monstrous anger and need to possess erupted out of his chest and he reached for her, to destroy that coldness and those red socks, and again she was in his hands, under him. He didn’t know when her hand began hitting, not wanting to know him let alone love him, he was a rejected nobody on that blank sheet of a non-body, he was despicable, he was outside of everything, alone.
Suddenly the house felt empty, apart from the text-filled computer screen and the book, which had tumbled to the floor, open and face down, beneath his feet. On the front cover was a woman, and on the back a man. The woman, standing there with her red kerchief and bold red knee-length socks, and the blackness of her woolly hat, and a sketchbook under her arm, didn’t pay any attention to him. The man facing her, to her left, had sleek hair parted over his forehead like a curtain and sleepy, half-open turquoise eyes. He felt them closing on him. He felt menaced by the man’s beard; it reminded him of the sheikhs from the Haram Mosque, though this beard was nothing like theirs.
In a final, resigned gesture he picked up the book, and on the open page read the lines highlighted red:
Birkin watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of the living man … Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second—then let go again, let go for ever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved
(Women in Love)
When Ahmad left the cubbyhole and the house and her deadly silence, the Lane of Many Heads didn’t know where to hide him with his suitcase. Her features floated at his heel on every wall and bend in the alley, she was screaming at him to notice the red sock crumpled in a ball and hung on the cafe’s satellite dish. How come it was there, watching him? He avoided his father the sewage cleaner’s house and the cafe, where the doors were still shut and the workers still asleep in the shacks round the back. He ended up, dragging his suitcase behind him, at the old-style Mahawi Cafe at the entrance to the city, which was open 24/7 to receive the eternal flow of pilgrims. He stared blankly at the Pakistani waiter for an age, he didn’t know how long, and then suddenly realized he was supposed to order a drink—to add taste and smell to her silence …
“Apple shisha … No, wait—just plain Persian tobacco.” The waiter smiled, understanding his need for the strong tobacco. “Some bread? Stewed beans? Masoub? Tea? Liver and kidney? Dough balls with honey or cheese?”
“No.” A single breath expressed the void in his wide, staring eyes. An hour went by while he watched the glowing embers turn gray in the bowl of the shisha pipe, which he hadn’t even taken one puff of. The forgotten mouthpiece sat like a corpse in his hand, like his own body, which groaned as if it had been crushed under the wheels of a car.
“That cursed woman is my scourge. She’s like a cat—she has seven souls …”
Third Move: Jaws
DAYS AFTER THE BODY APPEARED AND AZZA DISAPPEARED, THE CLOUDS OF senility settled over Sheikh Muzahim’s shop. He’d woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of gnawing canines. He listened intently, unable to believe what he was hearing. He followed the sound to the room at the very back of the storage space and opened the door. The sight of Jameela, lying there gnawing a corn cob between her hands, hit him like a ton of bricks. She simply stared back at him, and for a moment he didn’t recognize her. Who stuck her in here, he wondered. Then he suddenly remembered how they’d married her to him that very night.
“Did you really marry Jameela, you gray-beard?” he asked himself.
He recalled how it had all taken place mere hours before the body was found nearby. Her father, Hasan the Yemeni, had brought a registrar from the Hafayir neighborhood.
“Don’t worry about it, Sheikh, it’s all in accordance with the customs of God and His prophet. People told me about this guy. He may work outside the law, but it’s to serve people who live outside the law, illegals.”
When the father returned, Jameela was trailing behind him dutifully, dressed in a faded abaya. He pushed her forward at the entrance to Sheikh Muzahim’s shop, her back to the street, and stuffed the five thousand, a whole stack of bills, into his pocket. He disappeared without a word. Sheikh Muzahim didn’t even look at him, he was so entranced by Jameela. The words stuck in his throat, gagging his lust. He was so enamored, he couldn’t bring himself to utter even a breath. He had n
o idea how much time passed as he just sat there staring at her. He heard the door at the back of the shop swing open and he saw a look of terror on Jameela’s face as she stared at the doorway. He was too scared to stand up lest his passion flood the room. He wanted to gather up everything he had for her, to enjoy her pumpkin plumpness, to store her up and consume her in small portions or maybe squander her entirely in one go. He didn’t know what greed it would take to possess her. He got up, limping, and she followed him, submitting to a flick of his wrist. They walked through the door at the back of the shop into the storeroom.
He laid his desire out, crushed like a scorpion beneath a stone, and covered it with the dome of Jameela’s body. It wasn’t enough. He was in a frenzy. He wanted to spend eternity watching her from below and he would have if it hadn’t been for the commotion outside in the lane. He left her there and went to see what this storm was that was brewing in the neighborhood. On her wedding day, he shut her up in a storeroom.
In the days that followed, she broke through doors into the depths of his storeroom. She lived off her fear, her loneliness. She made her way to the sacks of dates, starting with the ones nearest to her, leaving gouges wherever her fingers had dug.
Sheikh Muzahim was terrified that his lust had betrayed him with Jameela, and then he woke up and found her gnawing. In the doorway of the storeroom, he watched her; saw what days of neglect had done to her. She’d fattened up, and left a sticky trail on the floor, which led him to her. Just below her chin, her neck had grown fatter, like a cushion for her little head. Her waist had filled out, and fat bulged from her chest and hips, weighing down her short frame. His eyes, which had been wild and hungry for her, were suddenly repulsed. His eyes cut her down to the bone, laying bare the hungry child standing before him. Where had this monster come from?
