The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Suddenly he recognized the black and white, most of which had been erased: those were Azza’s charcoal drawings, which a terrified Jameela had destroyed. The edges, which had been spared erasure, were enough to remind him of the body. He stood by the door, paralyzed. The need to live slapped him across the face. To strip off his clothes and walk out into the middle of the Lane of Many Heads, raving about a sin that no outburst of repentance could wipe out.

  Sheikh Muzahim slammed the door on that threatening creature, gnawing, monstrously fat, scratching about in Azza’s charcoal, and lay down in his shop, despairing and alone. Tears began to stream down his face, grooving his puffy cheeks. He hadn’t cried since he was a child in diapers, but he’d stopped caring now. He began searching for Azza under every single sack in his shop. They ended up piled outside in the street, most of them bearing long-past expiration dates, and he slumped disheveled between them, his head uncovered and his beard long undyed.

  As night fell over the Lane of Many Heads, Sheikh Muzahim was left on his own. Insomnia ate away at his eyelids and he couldn’t sleep. “Did she spot Jameela in the shop when we were signing the marriage contract? God, please tell me Azza didn’t run away because she saw her.” The thought of Jameela, that rat, skittering around in Azza’s place burned him up inside. “Who can bear this pain, Lord?”

  In deepest night, he sharpened his senses, waiting for Azza’s footsteps, but all his finely tuned senses could hear was Jameela’s gnawing, which was constant, night and day. She paced and munched and grew. Her canines had started on his bedding and his dreams of drought. He didn’t dare stir from his bed in case he should startle her, worried that she’d tear open his belly and consume him alive. All that time he spent listening, he never once heard her go into the bathroom to expel what she’d devoured. It all just rotted inside her, surfacing as pallor on her skin.

  “Did Azza see her? Did this rat make you run away, Azza? My darling. She chased you away so she could have this old man, your father, all to herself!”

  Pepsi Can

  SHEIKH MUZAHIM WOKE UP THAT MORNING AT DAWN WITH THE REALIZATION that he’d had enough. He got out of bed, and for the first time in ages he wasn’t limping. He was determined to put an end to his agony. He performed his ritual ablutions quickly and announced the dawn prayer from the mosque, as Imam Dawoud had overslept.

  “Every stone that’s ever heard me call for prayer will testify on my behalf on judgment day,” he thought to himself. He was hoping that the stones and the soil itself would help him with the day’s mission. They watched him march toward his house, his beard faded, and with huge effort unlock the storeroom, and venture toward the ratty animal within. When she saw him, her jaw dropped, spraying chewed-up wheat, and she went goggle-eyed. He led her into the shop and emptied the whole shelf of sweets into a burlap sack for her. He handed her the bag and said, “Okay, you get going now. Back to your parents’.”

  She fumbled with the buttons of her abaya, one flying here, the other there, stubbornly determined to cover herself up modestly; she was a married woman now and her husband was the biggest merchant in the Lane of Many Heads! But he stuffed a coffin-like stack of five hundred riyal notes into her cleavage and pushed her into the street. With one eye on her buttons and another on the fading henna dye in his beard, she grabbed her bag and walked out. It was her job to soak some Aden henna and re-dye his beard for him, she thought. She’d steal some of that henna from her mother’s bag—after all it was her own grandmother who went up into the mountains above Sanaa and picked the leaves, drying them and sending her family bags of the stuff.

  He watched her roll away from him, her abaya jutting out over her balloonedup belly and breasts. He had no idea when he’d chase her down with the word divorce. He should’ve wrapped the word divorce up in that bag for her so she could chow down on it greedily along with the candy.

  For a second, he thought about throwing the word at her from behind, but he hesitated, worried that she’d trip on her own weight, that she’d explode in the street, her fat spraying everywhere like Azza’s blood, sullying the road in front of his home for the rest of his life.

  He watched her until she disappeared, and then, as silent as before, he leaned on his cane and walked to the entrance of the Lane of Many Heads. There he got into the municipality sewage tanker that was waiting for him.

  “Are you sure about this, Sheikh Muzahim?” Yabis asked him.

  “May God help us, and may He forgive me.”

  Neither of them spoke of what lay before them as the truck got moving, leaving the Lane of Many Heads behind. A pack of children caught his eye; they were running after a bright yellow bulldozer that was carving its way from the top of the Lane of Many Heads, wiping out the empty sheds and shacks in its way as it rolled along, plowing into Sheikh Muzahim’s chest, which was hollowed out like a grave. The tanker slowed for the two men to watch the bulldozers in the rearview mirror. They sank their teeth into Mushabbab’s orchard and bit hard, tearing up the vaults concealed beneath. With a single stroke, clouds of dust and smoke and leaves and old stones flew out in every direction, causing sparks where they landed on the Lane of Many Heads. Sheikh Muzahim didn’t turn to look when the bulldozers smashed old mosaics and crushed antique books beneath them, ink mixing with dirt. The neighborhood kids skipped about, grabbing any chunks of engraved wood, old artefacts, and musical instruments they could get their hands on. The vaults beneath the orchard, which were filled to the brim with treasures, caved in. Furniture, jewelry, house signs, salvaged pieces of inlaid wood, everything Mushabbab had spent a lifetime collecting, heard a single crash and was churned up in the dirt. The jewel of the Lane of Many Heads was torn to pieces and left strewn over the crumbled ground.

  When Sheikh Muzahim arrived at the police station, a bunch of officers and sergeants were sitting in a semi-circle watching a single computer screen, which was showing stock market trades. The police officer sitting closest was selling stocks one minute and buying others the next. He seemed to be an expert in timing his deals; with every successful tap of the keyboard, he sighed a sigh of relief.

  “Pardon me. The profits are nothing major, I know, but I’m going carefully. Little by little here and there to rescue what I can.”

  An officer patted him gratefully on the shoulder. “We’d be in serious trouble without your help.”

  “These small stocks are like stocks in magical companies. A total blessing. If it weren’t for these, we’d all be bankrupt. The big corporations are in free-fall. The market is swinging like mad and we’re liable to fall off into hell. What’s up with you, Qahtani? Have you stopped breathing?”

  “I got offered half a million for my she-camel, but I didn’t want to sell. Then I watched her die because of that rotten feed from the south.”

  “Only a deranged person would invest in stocks or camels, I’m telling you.”

  Sheikh Muzahim was leaning against the door frame, propped on his cane, adrift in a sea of hesitation and shame. He tapped his cane against the ground.

  “Are you alright?” asked one of the officers, his words tinged with impatience. Cigarette smoke hung in the air over the trades being executed. Their lips were faintly stained around the edges; Sheikh Muzahim felt like they’d all been dipped in some kind of ink. Their smiles were strained and the smell of tea coming off their crimson-tinged lips soured to the air. The moment Sheikh Muzahim opened his mouth to speak again, he had a coughing fit.

  “The girl in the morgue is my daughter,” he hissed, his eyes watering.

  He’d armored his heart and his head with that fear, without which he’d never have allowed an unidentified corpse in a morgue to drag him out of his comfort and respectability. The terror of that single phrase had shocked the Lane of Many Heads and turned all its heads gray. He didn’t know who it was who by chance had thrust that terror into his heart: “They send all the unidentified bodies to the medical school. The students lean on their breasts and drink Pepsi.”


  Fourth Move: Direction of the Qibla

  THE DARKNESS MELTED AWAY AT MIDNIGHT. SHE MOVED AMONG BEINGS OF both sexes, and words and actions and reactions dissolved.

  This young girl was flying for the first time, and she could define the course of her journey in colors:

  Red: the inside of the black car that picked her up, starting from an unopened point in time, which she left behind like a sealed tin can tucked on a shelf.

  Veined marble: the transitory tower overlooking the courtyard of the Sanctuary, a last glimpse as she was leaving Mecca.

  Gold: everything in the villa where she stayed temporarily in Jeddah: a transition point.

  Silver: the color of adrenaline, pumping in huge doses, blinding her along with the water pressure of the jacuzzi on her body—no matter how vigorously she was scrubbed and churned, that skin didn’t dissolve or peel off.

  Three points of black: the eyes of the Filipina servant who took her ripped black abaya from the bathroom floor and pushed it into the trash can, and then immediately removed the bag so as not to dirty even the gold rim of the trash can.

  Mustard: the seats of the private airplane, which smelled of new leather and were whisking her through the air right now.

  Navy: the silhouette of the VIP air hostess to whom she’d been entrusted, who fastened her seatbelt, checked the pillow behind her neck, poking at her new identity and picking curiously over the tidied-away clutter of yesterday—of the time before the adjustment.

  “Welcome on board today’s direct flight to Marbella. We will be flying above giant cities, maxi-cities, super-cities, hyper-cities, at a cruising altitude of 1,000,000 feet. In the seat pocket in front of you, you will find a list of the in-flight entertainment available today and a menu of our snacks and hot meals. You will also find paper bags should you feel unwell during any periods of turbulence. The journey might take a long time … But it often flies by… No need to fasten your seatbelts!”

  Large chignon: the hair she’d embarked with now cascaded down her back and all over the seat, as thick as a horse’s tail.

  Translucent white: the outline of her arms hugging her chest tightly in that silky white shirt. She didn’t look up in response to the inquisitive glances around her, or even raise her eyes once: an entity practicing total self-erasure, total absentia.

  Cold mercury: the mirror in the villa on the Red Sea that played games with the face she knew. Slippery metal whose eye she evaded, though she knew it, knew its secrets.

  Brown: the wide, frightened eye that took her by surprise through the crack in the storeroom door that dawn. A look of fear that stripped her body of its previous obedience and launched her away with an illiteracy beyond illiteracy: no suitcase, no name, not even an outline of what might be ahead.

  Red: the knee-length socks that her memory had managed to save and were floating in a ball over her complimentary plate of fruit.

  Transparent: Zamzam and all those ills of hers for which it had been prescribed: bitterness, sickness, hair between the eyebrows … Her right eye was the prey and the left was the hunter, wall-eyed; everything they looked at dissolved.

  Her scent no longer had any hope of drawing her back to what she was before that dawn.

  Envious eyes: somewhere in her memory.

  Hot flashes: for the heart she left behind under a stone in the alley, a heart crushed beneath a stone, erasing a criminal record in that smashed-up face. She locked it up and left, capable of—anything? Everything.

  The pans of a weighing scales: a woman’s eye on one side and another woman’s eye on the other. Which one fell and which one gave up?

  The musk of conclusion: darkness, with which she wiped her forehead, erasing her dumb, uncovered face—which didn’t know and didn’t want to know—entirely. She wiped behind her ears, she didn’t want to hear the clink of metal inside herself, she wiped under her chin with the palm of her hand like she was following the water of her prayer ablutions; she bent her head forward and placed her index finger on her lips and silently, silenced, realized what was happening, became aware of the separation in the kernel within the lips closed tight on a secret. Her finger slid upward and touched the point between her nostrils. She threw her head backward and sighed: “Everything becomes flexible when we leave territorial airspace …”

  In her head the clock was still showing twelve, the time of takeoff. She felt like the airplane was propelling time before it, pushing that first split second of twelve o’clock forward, leaving open-ended time behind it. On the screen in front of her a diagram showed the direction of the qibla: a miniature airplane linked by a black thread to a miniature black cube representing the Kaaba. She watched the airplane in front of her plow westward, pulling the thread to the black cube tighter and tighter. The airplane tugged and the cube tugged back, until she felt the thread snap and the cube tumbled backward into the void while the airplane shot forward toward its destination.

  Vibration

  HE OPENED HIS EYES. IT WAS MORNING. SOMEONE HAD PAINTED THE AUTUMN morning bright yellow, and the hot sandstorm wind was blowing, howling across Mecca’s mountains and its high-rise buildings, the migrant laborers’ bitterness seeping out of the fissures in those haphazard, cheaply finished tower blocks. Nasser knew it was the season of palm tree pollination, and the sandy wind made him wonder: are there any palm trees left in Mecca to be pollinated? This was the land that Abraham had made sacred, forbidding that any trees be cut down here or any animals be hunted. All these transformations that were taking place now, did they not deserve God’s curses, and those of the angels and mankind, too?

  He started his car and headed over to Mu’az’s studio. He didn’t bother to look to his right or his left. He’d stopped double-guessing and double-checking all the details now.

  “Do you have a photo of Azza?” he asked without any preliminaries. It surprised them both.

  “Of course not!”

  Nasser drove to the Lane of Many Heads for a final visit. When he got there, he hardly recognized the place. Nearly everyone had left and the cafe was the only building still standing. The Sudanese cashier explained to him what had happened:

  “The neighborhood didn’t fall silent all at once. The houses were knocked down gradually, one at a time, like teeth falling out. Last week, the last of the residents received notices that they had to move out within a month.”

  “What about you?” Nasser fought to keep his guilty feelings at bay. Had that fatal melancholy he’d let out of the morgue begun to slowly spread through Mecca?

  “So long as the cafe’s still standing, I’ll be here. It might take a while. The whole neighborhood got rich overnight. They took their compensation money and got out of Mecca.”

  “Even Imam Dawoud?”

  “He’s lodging with the Imam of al-Malah mosque until they find him another mosque to serve.” Nasser felt like someone had pulled the entire scene out from under his feet, leaving him suspended in a void. The neighborhood had emptied out right under his nose. Maybe the next time he came looking for it, he’d find a big hole instead.

  “What about Yusuf’s mother? Where did she go?”

  “She came by and told me she was going to stay with Haniya, right after Sheikh Muzahim went to live with his relatives in Ta’if. She left a note for Yusuf in case he came looking for her.”

  “Did Yusuf come by to get it? Can I see it?”

  No, I can’t give it to you, but she did leave another copy. She said she tied it to her window on the roof.”

  Nasser ran over to Sheikh Muzahim’s abandoned house and up the crumbling stairs to where Halima had her room on the rooftop. It was the first time he’d seen the place devoid of Halima’s sunny presence. The window of her bedroom, which looked out over the roof, was directly in front of him. Her prayer shawl was tied to the bars of the window and at one end of it there was a knot in which she’d tucked her note. He undid it and began to read:

  Yusuf, I didn’t go to the home. You were right. May God give me
the blessing of faith as death draws near, and surround me with people. Tala helped me write this note for you. God bless her. She gave me her time even though she’s really got to study hard to get good grades so she can get a scholarship to study abroad. Life here isn’t the same as in the Lane of Many Heads. Tala writes stories like you. She’s only seventeen and I tell her to dream. I tell her that every girl should write her dreams. Otherwise they’ll just pass her by, or get ground into the dust and chaff …

  Tala was the one who suggested I could come live here with her grandmother Haniya. Haniya’s a joy to be around. She loves life and she can get drunk on a single grape. She welcomed me with open arms. When I lived with them, it was the first time I’d ever seen a house without a man, except for their Indonesian driver. She has two unmarried daughters who have no children. They have jobs like you: all papers and trips abroad. I thought that maybe if you traveled, you’d find the world you were looking for. And don’t worry about me, Yusuf. I’ve been to Jeddah and seen the world! Haniya takes me to the seaside every Friday. We eat chili chickpeas and ice cream from snack vans. People put up windbreakers and spend their whole vacations by the sea. They fly plastic kites and pay a little money for pony rides. They swim until sunset and then they pray right on the salty sand. We go to the Pyramid department store, too. The whole world’s there buying their clothes, and everything’s five riyals. No one goes without. Life here is easy. We only knew it was pilgrimage season because she took me for meningitis and flu jabs yesterday. So, your mother is doing just fine. When you settle down, give your address to the Sudanese cashier. Haniya’s going to send her driver once a month to check. You can call me on 0559722147.