The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Yusuf stood there at a loss, searching for the missing piece of the puzzle that would connect the Shayba clan to the key and to the river of the booksellers. He himself was the link between the key and the river; at that moment, in his yearning for things to intersect, Yusuf realized that owing to all that he’d read, all the historical depths he’d plumbed out of love for Mecca, it was his destiny to stand there before the Gate of Peace, which cast the features of the last of the Shaybi key-holders over his seeking face. His passion and the strange resemblance he bore to the custodian was what drove his adversary to hunt him down, to tear him out of the puzzle of the city and create a new puzzle. Despite this realization, Yusuf was overcome with an old sadness; all the holy city’s discontent washed over his body. His shoulders hunched and he understood the true meaning of absence.

  A woman’s soft laughter shook Yusuf from his thoughts of loss. He recognized that delicateness. When he turned to look, he was shocked to find the ancient idols moving around the Gate of Peace. Hubal raised his head from beneath the doorway of the bookstore where he’d lain buried for centuries, and peered into Yusuf’s eyes. He knocked the dust of ages and old books off his hideous body as he slowly got to his feet and began chasing after Yusuf. Yusuf was terrified; lightning tore through his brain. He took off running but almost instantly he crashed into two intertwined bodies, a man and woman embracing. Yusuf recognized the tender body of a woman making love, and from the photos in al-Lababidi’s house he knew this was Asaf and Nayla, the couple who’d been turned to stone for making love inside the Kaaba. When Yusuf appeared, the woman’s pliancy retreated from the man’s rigidity. Yusuf knew those light, hurried footsteps from somewhere deep in his memory. He tried desperately to see the present, but the past and the present were mixed into a single stream and that was all he could see at that moment. It no longer made any difference whether women in love had been turned to stone or stone had been turned to women in love. He ran after the woman Nayla. With every stride, he grew more certain that he was chasing after one of the Eunuchs’ Goat’s stolen mannequins, but a profound longing told him that she was in fact Azza. He moved, as softly as night, toward the courtyard of the mosque, past circles of worshippers keeping vigil, as the imam led prayers for the redemption of the believers and for the key to rain down from the sky and grant them entry to God’s house, lifting the curse hanging in the air. The soldiers had erected a cordon around the Kaaba, preventing worshippers from approaching; the mobile staircase stood forlornly by the impassable door in the same place it had been since the Emir of Mecca came to wash the Kaaba and failed. Yusuf imagined the staircase darkening and being transformed into the body of Hubal, with his one severed arm, shoving against the Kaaba with his dreadful body. Behind the rows of worshippers, one of the soldiers was telling his buddy about the first time he’d seen the Kaaba being cleaned.

  “They told us we’d be accompanying the Emir of Mecca when he went to wash the Kaaba before the pilgrimage. I was new to the special security detail. I didn’t sleep at all the night before because I was so excited that I was going to get to see the holy object being cleaned up close. I soon realized that stones are just like us, though. They take off their clothes and wash in water to get clean and then they put on perfume. Me and the other guys quickly performed our ablutions so we could get down to the cleaning. I’ll never forget how the staircase looked, footsteps on incense. By the time the sun rose, the courtyard of the mosque was soaked in the most amazing scented oils: agarwood, sandalwood, and amber, brought by the mosque servants in buckets. I slipped under waterfalls of luxurious perfume and halfway up, I began to stagger out of dizziness. The crowd began its circumambulation, and I was carried around by the perfumes and then into the Kaaba itself. The inside of the Kaaba is as dark as a pupil. It looks straight at the Lord of the House. All I could hear was: ‘You are in His house. You’ve come to wash the threshold.’ If someone hadn’t pushed me deeper inside to the right of the entrance, I’d have been smashed in my fall to the courtyard below. My body floated on perfumes unlike any other inside that entrance, until the horns of the golden gazelle seized me and pierced my chest, lifting me out of the well without any movement. When the emir ascended, smiling sweetly, the doors opened wide, and we poured out our buckets full of perfumed water. As soon as the emir left, our commanding officer said, ‘Now pray!’ The order came as a surprise, like when a falconer takes off a falcon’s blinders and nudges it toward the sky. I rolled up the sleeves on my uniform and raised my hands up beside my ears to begin my prayers. My hands hung in the air as I turned my head; I didn’t know which direction to pray in. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know which direction to pray in, now that I was in the heart of the Kaaba itself. My commanding officer saw me hesitate. ‘Pray in any direction,’ he said. I said ‘God is Great’ and prayed in the direction I was standing, two cycles of standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting, and then I turned around and prayed another two cycles in the opposite direction, then two cycles to my right, and another two cycles to my left. I gathered all the directions of prayer into my heart and prayed toward it.”

  Without disturbing prayers or attracting the guards’ attention, the female form snuck up the staircase as quickly and silently as night, luring Yusuf after her. Again he had the horrible feeling that the staircase was actually Hubal’s back, but he held his fear at bay and moved forward as the courtyard filled with incense smoke. Yusuf found himself on the staircase as the shocked guards looked on; some power that overpowered his will was leading him upward. It was as though he’d climbed those steps hundreds of times before, as though that ascent was in his genes. When he got to the top, all eyes were on him, from the birds in the sky to the people down below. To the desperate pilgrims below, he looked like the winged horse with a human face that carried the Prophet to heaven, like a black dot moving nearer the door decorated with Quranic verses in gold. The woman disappeared, and Yusuf found himself face to face with the door, profoundly black and profoundly enchanting. As the door drew him forward, the worshippers below noticed black moving against black and lurched forward. For a moment, Yusuf had no idea what he was doing up there. He could’ve pressed himself against the door and begged God to heal him of his ills. But then the black dot stirred and the key around Yusuf’s neck found its way into the keyhole. Instinctively it plunged forward and turned. Yusuf felt the door give, drawing him forward. It wasn’t the key that opened that figure of miracles, it was the touch of unmitigated impotence, unmitigated desire. He was completely soaked for a second, completely blinded, while below the evil presence was gathering its strength to transform the staircase into the body of Hubal, which began to recede from the doorway, tearing the key out of the lock and dragging his body from the Kaaba. Yusuf felt he was being ripped from the Kaaba; he suddenly understood the meaning of death: his entire being was sucked away while specters of universal life bled on the walls of his brain, flashing in the distance and disappearing like lightning bolts. He couldn’t get hold of anything, couldn’t lean forward to reinsert his stiff body into the sacred keyhole. His body was becoming one long wound and the key was weakening and slackening from the injury.

  The crowd below surged and the minarets of the Gate of Peace suddenly sprang to life. Night prayers for mercy rang out from the minaret windows: “Praise be to God, the Most Compassionate. Bless and preserve our Prophet Muhammad, O Most Forgiving and Most Merciful Lord.” The voices of aged muezzins filled the sky over Mecca with prayers for mercy and forgiveness.

  At the sound of tearing and the key turning in the lock as the Kaaba was about to open, the soldiers ran forward. They didn’t care about catching the trespasser, they just wanted to get up close to the door, so they found themselves chasing after the moving staircase as if it were a missile with Yusuf at the top. It moved so gently that Yusuf wasn’t aware of any danger or indeed of who was abducting him by pushing the staircase past the rows of worshippers across the courtyard of the mosque toward the colonnades
. Yusuf felt he was floating on the sweet tones of the nighttime supplications. Some of the soldiers chased after the staircase while others looked back at the Kaaba to see if it had indeed been opened so that they might steal a glimpse of the inside.

  When he moved past the steps of the Gate of Peace, Yusuf felt the nighttime chill against his skin. All around him voices screamed at him to wake up and flee his captors. He became aware of some ancient presence in the air and all of a sudden the famous witnesses of the Gate of Peace from his history books came to life. They used to follow the Chief Judge of the Shafi’i Law School up Mount Abu Qubays to verify the appearance of the crescent moon that marked the beginning of the fast and the two Eid festivals. These men delivered all of Mecca’s feasts and they were now stretching their arms out to Yusuf, who grasped them tightly and leaped into the crowd. He had the feeling that the key, the gate, the Shayba family, the river of books, the prayers, and he were nothing but a plot dreamed up in those men’s heads—those men who’d dreamed of a being greater than themselves, an all-encompassing being; or rather perhaps it was Mecca that had conjured itself inside their minds.

  Yusuf moved within that dream. He knew where to find Mushabbab now. Mushabbab had warned him not to come looking for him until he was ready for the final move. He snuck onto the back of a truck hauling the pilgrims’ tents down from Arafat and Mina and squeezed himself in between the rolls of tents. He remained there until they arrived at the al-Labani Tent Company’s warehouse on the Jeddah Road. Mushabbab had once told him that some people he knew had given him a temporary job there as a guard. As he stood there in front of the building, he recognized a familiar scent. He didn’t even look at the waiting figure who’d peeked out of a small side entrance. He jumped down from the truck and slipped into the warehouse. The guard didn’t seem to have noticed him. All around him in the warehouse, heaps of tents lay like weary travelers who’d just arrived after a long journey. Yusuf walked through an ocean of tents as the workers began unloading the still warm, still smelling of pilgrim tents off the trucks.

  As night wore on, activity in the warehouse dwindled; that was when Yusuf spotted Mushabbab, sitting in a corner on top of a pile of 125-year-old tent thread, one of the al-Labani family’s heirlooms. The family had grown famous in Mecca for their craft. Their ancient grandfather used to sign his name on the tents in black and white: Ahmad Abd Allah al-Labani, and his descendants later added the man’s lifetime—“1307–1382 AH”—beneath his signature.

  When Yusuf surrendered to the pile, flopping down beside Mushabbab, he forgot all about their rivalry and disagreements. They breathed in the same breath from those flowing beneath them: three quarters of a century of a man’s life, and those of countless pilgrims, were stored in those seams. The stacked-up lives of sons and grandsons stretched out before them, starting with Abd al-Rahim (1350–1411 AH), who modified the tradition by sewing the tents with blue and white thread and signing his own name.

  He was followed by the Nigerian tentmakers whom Abd al-Rahim had brought over to sew the tents. The journey taken by the tents and thread surrounding them was like the journey taken by the people of Mecca: forced out from the Shamiya district in the heart of Mecca to areas like al-Shisha and Hawd al-Baqr on the outskirts and eventually to the road out of Mecca. Just like Mushabbab and Yusuf as they caught a ride on a truck, this time sitting beside the driver in the cab, headed toward Medina. Mu’az would follow after them with the amulet.

  As they drove away, the warehouse grew smaller and smaller until it eventually disappeared from view. The blue and the black and the white all vanished, as did those threads and that history. There was a bulletin in the newspaper the following day: “The heirs of the al-Labani Company announce that they have decided to sell their family’s warehouse and have ceased renting tents to pilgrimage agencies. For further inquiries please contact—————. Sale filed with Records Office, year 1428 AH.”

  Not a Patch of Shade Left

  THE NEWS, WHICH HAD PASSED YUSUF BY ON THE MORNING HE LEFT MECCA, came below a bold headline on the back page of Umm al-Qura, January 1, 2008:

  Following extensive planning with world-renowned consultants, Elaf International Holdings Real Estate Division has announced plans for the creation of a mixed-use site at Darb al-Nour (formerly known as the Lane of Many Heads) on the Umrah Road, as part of its development strategy for the area. The company has released plans for two towers, one boasting 123,000 sq m of commercial office space and a 30,000 sq m five-star hotel, and the other offering 77sq m luxury apartments. The area between the towers will house a 36,000sq m luxury mall and parking for approximately four thousand vehicles. Developers say the project’s proximity to the central commercial and historical district will give strategic value to the project in the form of distinctive design features. The multi-billion riyal project is expected to be completed in 2011. Among the companies contracted to work on the scheme by Elaf International Holdings Real Estate Division are MZ Global Consultancy Ltd., who will be responsible for designing the site, and international consultants GP Ma.

  The detective followed the story on comment forums on the Internet, where supporters and detractors were coming to blows over the dramatic rise in land prices to the north and northwest of the Holy Mosque—from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand riyals per square meter—since the announcement of the decision to expand the mosque complex northward. The expansion would push settlement and amenities northward toward Mount Shahid and al-Tan’im—and who would benefit from this but Elaf Holdings, who owned most of the land in those areas, and who based on this had just released their plans for the five coming years?

  Having been so preoccupied with the Lane of Many Heads, Nasser hadn’t been aware of the deluge that had swept the Holy Mosque, or the apocalyptic rumor that accompanied it: the Shayba clan were on the brink of extinction. He carried on reading the comments appended to the article:

  —The direction of the Holy Mosque’s expansion is like a magic finger: wherever it points, a square meter of soil suddenly becomes more valuable than a cubic meter of solid diamond. And it’s a lucky fellow who can predict the direction it’ll point before the official announcement comes out!

  —More than 300 of Mecca’s historical sites and monuments have been destroyed so far. It isn’t the authorities who are destroying them, but some shady third party. It started right after the end of King Abd al-Aziz’s reign, God rest his soul.

  —The Arabs used to demolish any building taller than the Kaaba, like Qusayy, for example. They also used to demolish any which imitated the Kaaba with a cuboid shape. But we’re like Las Vegas now, huge towers and imitation cubes all over the place.

  Suddenly, sitting on his chair in front of the screen that morning, Nasser stopped reading, sucked in by a huge void. He sensed a change in the rhythm of the city; a seventh sense was telling him Yusuf wasn’t in Mecca any more, as if Yusuf’s departure from the environs of the Haram Mosque right then had sucked the vitality out of the air around him. He felt drawn, as if to a black hole in the universe that centered around Yusuf’s movements, drawn to follow. He didn’t finish reading the rest of the comments. He got up to leave, not wanting to waste any more time.

  The moment he left, another comment popped up about a news item on the planned demolition of houses on Mount Hindi, in preparation for the removal of the entire mountain by early 2011 at the latest.

  Tread Softly

  MU’AZ SET OFF UP MOUNT HINDI CARRYING THE BURDEN HE’D BEEN ENtrusted with. After he’d gotten hold of the amulet, he’d had to wait a while before Mushabbab’s instructions reached him. At first he simply attributed the silence to the weight of three million pilgrims slowing Mecca down, and waited for the city to shed its human scurf so Mushabbab would be free to devote time to the task; the doubts in his mind grew, though, when he started hearing the rumors about the extinction of the Shaybas and the story people were repeating about the attempted break-in at the Kaaba.

  When Mu’az ha
d woken up that morning, it had been to a silence which called to mind the silence before Israfel blew his trumpet to announce the Day of Resurrection. He’d lain frozen on his mattress on the floor in a corner of the studio, waiting for the trumpet to sound and for those in their graves to be resurrected. When nothing happened after a while, he got up, denied the sense of resurrection that was in the air. He headed for the Holy Mosque, to see for himself what had happened to the Kaaba, dawdling beneath the lofty door while he circumambulated as if he expected it to creak open at any moment, refusing to stay closed and revealing the interior to the circumambulating worshippers. According to the story doing the rounds, there had definitely been an audible click, the sound of a key turning in the lock; the door had submitted to that strange young man who’d slipped past the soldiers and climbed up the stairs. Mu’az wanted to get closer to see if the door was still slightly ajar, but the soldiers had formed a tight cordon around the Kaaba so nobody could get anywhere near it. The vague threat of a curse still hung in the air.