The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  I leave you in God’s hands for He never neglects His charges. Please, don’t undo the small knot at the end of the prayer shawl. I made a vow that if you made it back safe, I’d give away coffee and almond sweets.

  Nasser could feel time catching up with him. He’d lost the nickname Siren Man since he’d stopped coming to the neighborhood in his official Land Rover and now came in plainclothes in his own Infiniti instead. As he walked back through the neighborhood that night, examining the crumbling houses, searching for what had passed him by in that plotline he’d now exited, a dog came running up to him. It was a Saluki, but bred in some poor neighborhood so it had lost its distinguishing features. It still looked beautiful to Nasser, though, with its long neck and cropped tail. When it got close to Nasser, it halted and began to sniff the air. He’d never usually stop to pet a stray, but this dog charmed him somehow, so he followed after it as the dog led him past various abandoned houses in the Lane of Many Heads. He saw houses that had fallen off the human map. They’d been abandoned by their owners and then squatted in by undocumented workers, who hid out there until they were to be torn down.

  It may have been a coincidence, but the dog led him over to the building known as the Arab League, which the court had awarded to al-Labban’s four sons, ordering the eviction of seven families, including their sister, Umm al-Sa’d, and her husband, al-Ashi. The sons had bribed judges and psychiatrists to get their late father ruled as not having been of sound mind when he’d drawn up the deeds, thereby invalidating them. As for the basement, they’d pretended not to notice that the Turkish seamstress was still there. He could see the broken collection box still hanging on one collapsed door. Nasser stopped to watch if anything was going on. Although there was hardly any movement around the basement at all, one or two women did go in then came out again after about an hour. Nasser was waiting for a sign.

  It was probably around ten at night when Nasser saw the begloved eunuch making a quick exit from the lobby on his way out of the neighborhood. He was carrying a black leather briefcase, which looked like something a lawyer would carry. The dog followed him, but Nasser just let him be. He summoned up his courage and went into the lobby himself. He didn’t hesitate to make for the door that led to the studio; it was ajar. He knocked and waited. He knocked again, more loudly this time. He entered, fearlessly, and hadn’t taken two steps forward before he was greeted by that hoarse laugh. He didn’t even have to guess who it was who’d just peeked her head out from behind the curtain that surrounded the gallery, which looked like a floating room up near the ceiling; she didn’t come down to greet him, or beckon to him to come toward her, but nevertheless he did. She was looking at him with an amused smile, trying to guess how far he’d go. And Nasser had nothing to lose. He felt like a dog lured by a bone. Her smile widened as he climbed the stairs to the balcony. She looked more like a lioness, now, than a wild bitch, waiting for a signal from him to pounce. Like an expert, she turned around, letting her curvy ass invite him further. By the time he got up to the balcony, she was leaning vulgarly on the bed, and Nasser’s cheeks flushed. All that time he’d spent pacing the alley, he’d never noticed this invitation, open to any and all passersby. He ignored the call to dissipation. His voice broke through the cloud of her heavy breathing like a plank of wood.

  “I want you to answer one question.”

  She raised her heavily penciled right eyebrow quizzically. “Is this an official inquiry?” she asked.

  “Do you know where Aisha is?”

  Her laughter shook him.

  “You’ll really give me the honor of letting me be your informant?” she whispered. “You want me to be the one to tell you?” He looked stupefied. When he said nothing, she added, with feigned sympathy: “Are you afraid of love?”

  “Can you answer my question?”

  “I’ve got an answer for anyone who asks, anyone in charge, anyone in need.”

  He was lost. The hound inside of him responded to this animalistic woman. He just had to close his eyes for events to call each other forth and for him to be transported somewhere else. Somewhere off this path he’d followed his entire life. He knew that if he shut his eyes, he’d cross light-years, toward places he’d never dreamed of before. But not before he had an answer to the question that had brought him here.

  “Answer me.”

  “I’ll say it again: you know the answer.” Despair tore through his insides when he heard that.

  “Azza’s dead,” he sighed. “Her father buried her yesterday.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” she mocked.

  “Give me an address where I can find Aisha,” Nasser insisted.

  “Only hyenas dig up graves, but … If that’s what you want, we can dig it up for you. You’re the king and I’m your humble servant.”

  NASSER WAS WALKING BACK THROUGH THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, BUT HE DIDN’T feel like he’d left the vaulted studio. It was beside him, inside him, as he walked along. He could smell it in his sweat. The end of his conversation with the Turkish woman was ringing in his head:

  “The Turkish seamstress has no limits. Let her indulge you, and you’ll relax and feel rested. If you please her, you’ll be pleased.”

  “I won’t rest until I find Aisha.”

  “I’ve got prettier ones, younger ones, freer and more fun …” She drew out her words, watching to see how he reacted. “My book of tricks has everything. Audio and visual. Fixed and moving. Live and pre-recorded. Automatic and manual. Home-grown and imported. Innocent and experienced. Soft and coarse. Silent and vibrating. Front and back … Oh, you poor thing. You’re no angel. You’re just flesh and blood, aren’t you?”

  From the gallery room where they were, he didn’t notice the sun come up. When he came to, the vaulted basement was full of people—and cameras. He tried to look away from the rows of women learning how to use the five sewing machines in front of the frosted window that was open out onto the street. In his confusion, he stumbled over the partition where finished orders on hangers were waiting to be picked up. Behind the partition he saw the basement’s true dimensions. Three hundred square meters soaked in blasting music, eastern and western, full of women, their faces covered with men’s headdresses, dancing wildly for the cameras in each of the room’s four corners.

  “Look, my girl used her tiny limp to invent a new style of hip-hop dancing. The fans went crazy, we got thousands of messages from fans aged eight to whatever God wills!”

  When he went back out into the neighborhood, Nasser filled his lungs with the dry air. The blur of glaucoma pooled in his corneas. When he got back to his apartment that afternoon, he sensed that its tempo had changed. He was desperate for the dose of security he got from the emails and the diary entries, but when he looked under his bed, he found nothing, not even a scrap. When he ran over to his wardrobe, there was no sign of Aisha’s sleeve, which he’d hidden there. The inside of the wardrobe hadn’t been tampered with but a void was spreading. The ground was receding beneath his feet. Someone was erasing his memory, leaving only white noise …

  Case Closed.

  The End.

  PART TWO

  Madrid 2007

  “NORA!” A TREMOR RAN THROUGH HER WHENEVER SOMEONE CALLED HER BY name. Her split-second hesitation made him doubt it was her real name. The potential of a concealed identity lent her an aura reminiscent of Andalusian women cloaked in mystery and passion. Whenever he finished his shift guarding her, something of her face would stay with him—that haughty look, the sense you had that her face was turned inward, like she was looking inward from a balcony folded around herself. She was totally unlike anyone else he’d ever had to guard: people who went about under pseudonyms or hid the skeletons of past professions or crimes. At the company he worked for, fellow bodyguards would come back with unbelievable stories—about complete nobodies who feigned importance by hiring bodyguards, or people who were never more than a hair’s breadth from death on account of their long involvement in
resistance movements or the criminal underworld. The recruitment agency that hired him took immense care in choosing among applicants: they only ever hired men with enormous physiques like his, they conducted thorough background checks—looking extra carefully for involvement in war crimes (hard to detect)—and on top of that they required a clean criminal record, proof of proficiency in martial arts and weapon handling, convoy and motorcade experience, and so on. He was an Arab migrant with a Master’s in philosophy that hadn’t helped him put food on the table in Beirut and wasn’t any good here either—his name was Rafi, but he went by “Rafa” here—just one of millions of Arabs who had to shed skin, blood, and name to meet the needs of the other.

  Around him, morning overflowed with warm sunshine and faces gathered in the garden and on the terrace of the Ritz Hotel. The white cane furniture in the garden made the sunshine brighter and the atmosphere more cheerful. Rafa sat at the table closest to the twin curved staircases which led up to the hotel lobby. From there he could see the whole area around his client, Nora, who was sitting opposite her female assistant, tasting the breakfast tapas, sipping a morning coffee and quietly watching the laughing customers mingle with the lush greenery. He examined her like he examined his own face in the mirror every morning: it too was masked, by a U.S. Marines–style crew cut and a gleam that hid the truth of forty years of life and disappointment. The name Nora was more than a veil, though: it almost gave away a past that hovered like a shadow at her temple and neck and covered her entire chest. Rafa felt like he was watching two people, one trying to peel the skin off the other. Nora’s perfection lay in her unawareness of that duality, the unconscious rebellion beneath an acquiescent surface. Nora, he felt, was outside of time, sitting there anachronistically in Madrid’s grandest hotel as if waiting for a sign that would allow her to slip back into the past.

  Rafa observed with wry amusement the interest that Nora aroused among the hotel guests. The beauty of Arab women is legendary, he thought to himself. The myth has crystalized over thousands of years of civilization, and yet still they seem exotic and ancient to most men. Out of reach. The kings and princes they deserve now only exist in fairy tales. There are no men like that for them today. And so they’re a doomed race. Most Arabs around the world have lost the special halo that once surrounded them; they’re like any other race now, ordinary or worse.

  Rafa looked away, attempting to resist the control she exerted over the whole scene. Sometimes for a brief moment, he’d stop being her bodyguard and she the object of threat. She’d become—in her absolute frailty—the threat itself. Like that morning two days before when she couldn’t wake up. She’d slipped straight from sleep into a coma and had to be rushed to the hospital where she lay unconscious for a whole twenty-four hours before waking up, as if nothing at all had happened, showing no signs of functional impairment or any other damage. She came back from the dead, the doctors said matter-of-factly. And now here she was sitting indomitably before his eyes, fresh out of the whirlpool bath, bearing no resemblance to the apparition he’d escorted to the hospital two days before.

  Without any warning, Nora got up to leave and Rafa jumped up to follow her. He performed his duty, like a shadow at her side, moving ahead and falling back to seek out any potential dangers that may have snuck into the lobby. She was a mere human being but she had an air of importance about her. He escorted her back to the royal suite where he cast an eye over the heaps of flowers. She was allergic to them all, but that didn’t stop them arriving, without cards, from her absent lover, who was nevertheless present in every glance she cast around her, in the pretty fullness of her lips and in the avidity of her gaze, whose fatal potential she was wholly ignorant of. This was a woman always on the brink of disappearing with the next look. He looked across at her; her eyes were closed. He’d almost memorized this strategy of hers: she would close her eyes sweetly, then after a moment’s lapse or retreat to somewhere inside herself where no one could reach her, she would surface with that look of loss in her eyes as she gazed around her, exposing how alienated she felt. Rafa thought the coma must have been an attempt to escape from that loss, a break from the piles of flowers that arrived in a steady stream and the servants and bodyguards who formed a cordon around her—around this girl in her twenties who was staying in a 5,000-euro-a-night suite in the fanciest hotel in the heart of old Madrid, a few steps from its most important museums—the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza—and the Teatro Español and Teatro Real.

  Rafa waited patiently in the corridor outside his room, which was adjacent to Nora’s suite, and then sprang to life again when she reappeared for her long morning walk around Madrid.

  He’d been working for her for two months. He came programmed to please and he was used to working for Gulf millionaires who drove around in convoys just to attract attention. He hardly had to look at the very young woman to know that he was there to play his part in another of those displays of status. He would sit in the front seat watching everything that moved, and then he’d jump out before the car had even stopped so he could open the back door for her, and accompany her as she headed off into Madrid’s streets, cafes, and squares, vigilant protector of her image. Until one morning, when a wry smile hovering at the corner of her lips unmasked him. She’d been perching on the banister at the side entrance to the Museo del Prado, which was already closed by the time they arrived. Sitting there, she was taller than him, and he’d taken a few steps backward into the plaza, so that the moving traffic of the Paseo del Prado was to his right and the calm greenery and Nora were to his left. He stole a few seconds to look at her. What was it he was supposed to be guarding? Jewelry? Another kind of valuable? She didn’t seem to be obsessed with jewelry like the other women he guarded for the sheikh, whom people called the Emperor of International Investment. He couldn’t make sense of the loneliness that enveloped her; she was a tiny gazelle trapped inside a glass paperweight.

  That day, she’d been in a flighty mood—every day was different, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver that could never be pinned down to a particular psychological state. As she sat on the bare flight of stairs leaning back against the wall of the museum that towered over her like the wall of a temple, Rafa tried to read what was beneath her faint smile. He could’ve sat down but he preferred to stand; some sixth sense had him in a state of alert. He was observing her delicate teenage face and the sharp contours of her eyebrows, when she broke her constant silence to ask him a question: “Rafa, you escaped the war to come and do what? Guard people like us?”

  “My name’s Rafi, not Rafa.” It wasn’t just his name that had changed over more than ten years in that job; when Rafi looked at Rafa these days he almost didn’t recognize him. “I didn’t escape the war,” he explained. “I left Lebanon when the last thing tying me to the country died.” He looked away; he’d said too much. It would have been a big professional no-no to expose himself like that, to confess that the death of his mother, whose cancer they’d fought side by side, was what caused those ties to be severed. Nora didn’t press him.

  After that brief exchange, they’d dropped the bodyguard ritual, tacitly agreeing that she didn’t really need a guard by her side the entire time. From then on he’d always left a few paces between himself and her, following and watching, giving her the space to wander around and mingle, so long as she remained in sight. Whenever she sat at a cafe, like she’d just been doing, he’d pick a table a little way away, at the back, where he could still see her.

  “You think you’re guarding me sitting back there?” He wasn’t expecting her to pounce again. He hadn’t even gotten over the shock of her first question when she hit him with the second. “What are you protecting me from, anyway?”

  “That depends. What are you scared of?”

  The look she gave him slammed against his face and slowly slid off, like a bird against a windshield. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his neck as he hurried to apologize, “I’m sorry, ma’am.” Sh
e looked away and his words trailed off on his lips.

  “What is it you usually guard in jobs like this?”

  “Mostly politicians, rich people, valuable objects.”

  “No gangsters?”

  “Sometimes.”

  That was the first time a client had mocked him. (Why aren’t you guarding me? And what from?) He was intrigued.

  “And what do you protect them from?”

  “Their own pasts usually.”

  How could he have let that answer slip out? Her wry smile became a sigh and he didn’t know what to make of it. Her mood had flipped and she stared blankly into space; it had dawned on her that a person couldn’t simply bump into their past, stop to say hello, and then part ways amicably; your past either sprays you in a hail of bullets or it blows you up with an explosive vest. Either that, or it looks the other way and hurries past before you even realize it was there.

  He felt like he might spend his whole morning apologizing for having allowed himself to speak. “I’m sorry—”

  She cut him off. “Do you have to be prepared to die for your clients in this job?”

  “The job doesn’t usually require you to do more than mount a respectable defense.” He continued after a brief silence: “You might say the only requirement is keeping yourself and the client alive.”

  “Against anything that could happen?”

  When his job was put under the microscope of that question he didn’t really know how to put what he actually did into words. “To be honest I think we’re just here to send a message—this person is surrounded by people who can respond to any kind of attack. That’s usually enough to stop any attempts being made in the first place.”

  “So you’re just there to prove that someone’s important?”

  He shrugged, thought for a moment, and then added, “Maybe also to prove that someone belongs to someone prestigious.”