by Raja Alem
As he made his way up the mountain, Mu’az imagined it was the last shot taken of a Mecca whose Kaaba then closed in its face—a shot burnt up with bleak white. The shots he’d taken during his time as a professional photographer, he thought to himself, could all be summed up in this image of Mount Hindi rising above the city for the last time. He clutched the bag in his hand tighter and continued on up, his mind’s eye seeing front doors marked with red Xs, which meant “unfit for habitation,” and houses that didn’t even have front doors. A lean dog regarded him wanly from one house, and on another crumbling house a dovecote still stood, doves cooing in every corner. When would the doves leave too? Mu’az felt like he’d been away from that mountain for an age, from that Barbie wrapped in a mangy red rag lying on a doorstep, from that broken water cooler with the leaky pipe sticking out and the seven kittens lapping at the water that pooled underneath it while their mother eyed Mu’az from a distance. The house above it, whose windows were all closed, bore a cornice of immaculately illuminated blue calligraphy, of which Mu’az could make out only two words of a verse by Abu l-Ala al-Ma’arri: “Tread softly.” Damp had caused the rest of the words to crumble.
His hand reached out to knock at the door of al-Lababidi’s house before his mind caught up with him, but when only silence yawned back at him despite repeated rapping, his heart was clutched in a cold grip. Only then did he notice the words FOR DEMOLITION daubed in red paint across the wall in front of him. The phrase was repeated the length of the facade, stretched out in places: DE—MOLI—TI—ON. The last letter was half cut off by the window of the downstairs sitting room. Mu’az stood staring at the repeated words. The meaning simply couldn’t penetrate his skull. He was there but not there—until he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder.
“At last.” The words plopped down with finality, accompanied by a victorious look on Nasser’s face, their full weight slumping onto Mu’az’s head. When Nasser reached for the bag in Mu’az’s hand, Mu’az didn’t attempt to resist. Nasser fingered the hard object inside the bag and his mouth went dry. They’d told him there was no case, but right away he’d solved it. They’d accused him of not reaching a satisfactory closure, but he’d found one. He didn’t give Mu’az any chance to object, but opened the bag to reveal the amulet right away. Their eyes were instantly drawn to its bright gleam. It was the shape of a half moon, pure silver, and decorated with the breathtaking engravings of the Jewish craftsmen of Yemen. Nasser could sense Mu’az’s stiffness and glanced around him, aware of the eye watching him.
“You were bringing it to Yusuf?”
It wasn’t a question, so Mu’az didn’t bother to confirm or deny. He felt drained of any will to move or speak, but finally managed to mumble, “This is a personal affair.”
“Don’t play games, Mu’az,” warned Nasser. “I know Muflih al-Ghatafani, and he told me. So just tell me where Yusuf is now.” It was a plea as much as it was an order. “I know he’s somewhere waiting for this amulet.”
Mu’az seemed caught off balance. After thinking for a moment, he replied, “We’re not doing anything illegal or anything that should concern the police.”
“And I’m not speaking as a police officer. I’m a private investigator, and I happen to know what you guys are up to.”
Mu’az made a sudden grab for the amulet and said, “If you’ll excuse me—”
Nasser was alert and ready for the movement. He kept a firm grip on what was in his hands and looked sharply at Mu’az, who just smiled. “You know I’ll find you,” said Nasser.
A loud crash interrupted them, and looking up in fright they saw that the wind had slammed open a line of windows above. Mu’az’s heart gaped with an arid abjection which turned his black skin an ashy gray. It was the first time a window in that house had opened; his earthly paradise was lost. His keys had gone, leaving him discarded in Mecca like a strip of film burning up under the glare of a torch. His shoulders slumped and he gave in to Nasser’s insistent pressing.
“Now that Yusuf’s not here it’s meant to go to Mushabbab.”
There was a silence, and the two men listened to the distant sound of bulldozers chewing up the mountain’s insides. Mu’az’s eyes were glued to the amulet in Nasser’s hands. Speaking over the strangled roar, Mu’az added reluctantly, “At the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. That’s where the circle that holds the secret of the amulet is.” At that, Mu’az turned and walked away, light as a mountain goat. Nasser watched him go, winding down the hillside between outcrops and houses.
Nasser was left standing there alone with the amulet, with the mass of mystery that had fallen into his hands. He suddenly got gooseflesh at the thought of opening it, and for the first time in his career—throughout which he’d never known any fear—his heart felt the touch of death’s grasping fingers when he imagined what might attack him from out of that amulet. His sense of security was all gone; he sensed an enemy was watching him. Everything around him threatened.
He stuffed the amulet into his breast pocket, folding his arms over it, and walked back to his Infiniti. In front of the car, he stopped for a few moments, not sure where he could go to stop this dreamlike series of events from turning into a nightmare. His eyes were closed; he longed to open them and find himself somewhere else. The city around him was as full as a balloon and wherever he drove, his car was soon surrounded by giant coaches and trucks and monster four-wheel drives and zipping motorcycles that shot in front of him, past him, and back and forth through all three mirrors. When he finally headed for the Jeddah road, he knew he wasn’t coming back. He drove as far as the first cafe on the highway, the Mahawi.
The same Pakistani waiter watched him sit down. Time dissolved around him into a dark gray and he couldn’t tell whether it was daytime or night, whether he was moving in his own internal time or the external time of the cafe and the city. There no longer existed a boundary within him that could prevent the things around him from melting into that indeterminate clump of gray time and being sucked into the ticking of the clock inside him: the cheap cafe chair was part of his body and the ground was threatening to be sucked in and subsumed into the mixture too.
He pulled up at the side of the highway and fingered the silver amulet in the dark. It came to life under his fingers: a semicircular box, hollow, the lid beautifully worked, smooth. The upper surface responded to his touch and slid back to reveal a dampish interior lined with red velvet and containing some yellowing, sooty-edged paper that had been tightly folded and stuffed inside. Nasser turned on the car’s interior light to see the delicate, discolored parchment properly. He took it out, taking care not to tear it, and eased apart the folded, moth-eaten edges as delicately as he could, not wanting to lose a single letter of what was written on them. In the dim light, he recognized the script. His feelings were conflicted.
A bus suddenly honked loudly and gave a squeal of brakes on the other side of the divider that separated the roads going into and out of Mecca. Nasser cursed. It had almost flattened a dented blue GMC, which pulled up suddenly half a kilometer further on. Just ready for someone to leap out and come after him, thought Nasser. He felt like he was being targeted, like he should get going. He suddenly heard the siren of a police car that had appeared out of nowhere on the road behind him, and hurriedly turned the engine on, but a voice over the police car’s loudspeaker instructed him, “Infiniti! Stop and park.”
His toes twitched over the gas pedal, but the sand around him was hostile wherever he looked. He pushed the parchment back inside the amulet, closed it then stuffed it into the folds of his clothes and pulled himself together.
“Driving license and vehicle registration please, sir.”
Nasser could see no option but to comply.
“Detective al-Qahtani? I’m so sorry.” His nervous laugh was louder than it needed to be. “I’m from the traffic police department. Can I help you at all?”
Nasser joined in his laugh. “That’s okay, thanks. I just stopped to look at
some papers.”
Her Footsteps
IT WAS AROUND FOUR IN THE MORNING WHEN SHE AWOKE TO FIND THAT EYE PEERING into her face. Like a marionette, she was tied by cords from her fingers and toes to the four corners of the room. A hand was moving back and forth over her body, clothing her in silk and draping her in jewels like a mannequin or an ancient idol. Hands washed her and oiled her limbs with aromatic substances; then she became aware of a dribbling sensation on her feet—grains of wheat? Milk? Every droplet on her nude body stormed through her every cell. She was swinging in the air and there was nothing she could hold onto to cut the strings or escape that unbearable touch. For a moment she left her body to the ransacking; recently her sleep had essentially become that swinging movement where nothing could pin her down, not even death. For the first time, she lost her fear of sleeping alone where death might manage to catch her unawares. Somehow, she’d become invincible.
In one swift move, Nora leapt out of bed, breaking all the strings. In the same movement, she pulled on her jeans and a tight sweater, and then, seeing the spots on the window, a raincoat too. The moment she went out into the sitting room, her assistant jumped up out of her sleep—“Good morning, Ma’am,”—and hurried to call Rafi, who appeared from out of nowhere like a phantom to open the elevator door for her. Are you watching out for me or just watching me? She pushed the provocative question to the far corner of her mind so it would fall off the edge.
When she emerged into the reception hall, the receptionist’s gaze followed her from one end to the other. They always put the most inexperienced ones on the night shift, either trainees or foreigners, to fill the void of the dark hours. Nora left the hotel followed by her suited-and-booted shadow. She’d decided to take photos of the places she liked going, to grasp hold of the life she’d gotten to know in this city, that had pulled her out of her old loneliness.
In the park to the left of the hotel she stopped and waited. She wanted to sit, unnoticed, on a bench looking out on the street as it slowly woke—just sitting at a bench on the sidewalk was enough to awaken in her the momentum of freedom—but the only two benches were occupied by homeless people in dusty sleeping bags patched up with all kinds of scraps and leftovers, and they were both fast asleep. All you could see were their faces, exposed to the gently drizzling sky. Nora walked along one of the paths into a flock of ring-necked doves, which took to the air and scattered, then descended and settled somewhere else. They danced on the ground, pecking at seeds and pointing their tails into the air like arrows; when the arrows poked into the frame of the picture Nora was just getting ready to take, something she’d read long ago floated back in flashes so she couldn’t distinguish between the photo she was taking now and the one in her head:
Ring-necked doves are in the courtyard of the Holy Mosque, too,
They wrap a dark towel around their neck before going off to wash.
Until evening comes
When they put on a smart scarf, to attend a wedding.
We grew up with those dark gray collared doves who fly in circles over the Holy Mosque: they’re holy.
We watch their courtship dances as they tussle over females, and their droppings on our heads and on rooftops bring good fortune.
Because when we were little, we were told: these are the doves of the house of God. They live nowhere and serve nobody but the Holy Mosque of Mecca.
So don’t hurt them.
But yesterday I saw the same ring-necked doves everywhere in Hollywood films. Are the doves migrating and spreading, or is there now a house of God everywhere? In Jonah and Moses’ whale, Moses’ pleasing yellow cow, Ishmael’s ram, David and Jacob’s sheep, Joseph’s brothers’ wolf, Solomon’s horses, the monkey and the pigs: they’re all animals of the holy books, so what harm would it do if I squeezed us all into these words, and then squeezed all the words into a book, and then brought that book to life?
The streets of Madrid seized on Nora’s loneliness, enticing her to respond to those endless alleyways and their unceasing clamor. Like every other morning, she’d rushed straight out into the street before eating anything at all or even washing her face, letting the morning cold peel the sleep from her face. Nora walked faster than she breathed, her footsteps racing the air in her chest, as if the ground was about to be stolen from beneath her feet before her next step.
It was five in the morning when Nora stumbled across the Chocolatería San Ginés in the very heart of Madrid. It was famous for its churros with Spanish hot chocolate.
The young waiter swiftly and gracefully led them to a table in the far corner, all the while eyeing Nora approvingly. With an imperious look, Nora indicated that Rafi should join her at the table, and he had no choice but to comply, seeing that she needed him as a shield. He observed how she was aware of her reflection repeated in the surrounding mirrors as she sat down. The waiter returned with a tray of small appetizers and chocolates wrapped in brightly colored paper, leaving it on the table with a flirtatious wink at Nora.
Nora waited, avoiding looking at her reflection mingled with the reflected crowds. When the waiter reappeared, he spread his palms on the marble table with obvious pleasure and leaned shamelessly toward Nora. “We don’t have a menu,” he purred, taking a thick card out of his back pocket. “Just this.” It showed a photo of their specialty churros con chocolate. “Hot chocolate and fried dough fingers are an inseparable pair. You dip one in the other for a taste of Spanish pleasure unlike anything you’ll ever try again. So, heh, want to try? Spanish stallions like me feed this to their lovers for breakfast … Heh, so? Don’t miss the chance, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience!” He went on flirting until he managed to get Nora’s smile to become a grin.
The chocolate finally came, in a ceramic bowl almost as big as a soup bowl with a row of droplets, like melted chocolate, drawn around the rim. The thick, not-too-sweet liquid sent a delightful charge through Nora’s body and burnt her tongue—she insisted on drinking it straight from the bowl, leaving a chocolate smear across her upper lip. Only at the end did she dip the fried fingers into the liquid and crunch on them with enjoyment, as Rafi sipped his coffee in silence.
When she stood up, ready to leave, Rafi stopped to pay the bill. He always paid for everything she needed, small or large. “This is a woman whose bills are paid for her,” he thought. “She picks what she wants, and they settle the bill and carry the stuff. Her purchases are lined up in her hotel suite or stacked in her bags, which are always packed ready to leave.” She seemed bored of shopping; she rarely stopped to buy anything but ice cream—usually passion fruit flavor. Whenever she had one she was reminded of those words from somewhere in the recesses of her mind:
For you, this herbal shampoo, with chamomile, aloe vera and flower of pain
That was how the import company chose to translate passionflower: flower of pain!
RAFA FOLLOWED NORA’S ATTEMPTS TO PENETRATE THE LIFE AROUND HER, SLIDING through scenes and occurrences, mingling with people and groups who seemed happy and engrossed in their own stories: kids on school daytrips running around, spinning and shrieking all at once, while one skinny child sat alone on a bench at the entrance to the Prado, scribbling trees on a piece of paper. The sight awoke a longing in her fingers for the blankness of paper or walls. Then there was a group of six people—three men and three plump women wrapped in headscarves, popping kisses on the face of a groom in his flowing morning suit while the bride’s short improvised veil flapped in the wind like a fountain on top of her head. Inside her own head, two veils and two brides chased Nora and her heart began to pound. She stood alone in the street, watching, while Rafi watched her; cars and motorbikes sped by aimlessly without stopping or glancing back. Nora couldn’t stand looking back. She fought off a headache. She wanted to plunge into life and the depth of its currents, but could only manage to float on the surface of the endless waves of that city. She’d lost no time in getting to know the place but she remained bobbing like a cork, trying to catch up, b
ecause when she returned to her own city—which had plenty of time, or rather froze its time—she’d find herself on hold, like those houses left as charitable endowments whose name, awqaf, suggested they’d been paused—waqafa, to halt—until who knows when. Nora chased away the word desperation and walked on.
Her story featured lots of departures. Her sheikh had moved her from a zone of heat to a zone of frozen waiting. After each temporary departure of his she would always return to her hotel, to the emptiness, then go out to face the world once more, buy a stack of paper, and sit for hours in the cemetery trying to write (what a strange relationship she had with pen and paper!) and extract something comprehensible from what was happening to her and around her. Rafi felt the stuttering of the words, which suddenly became long lines stretching the length of the page. He thought, if he was meant to be guarding her from her past, then at moments like these he was failing abysmally, moments when she disappeared off his radar with the same calm as that faint smile of hers, which floated over the world, never engaging.
One morning he found out she was left-handed. He allowed himself to go a little closer to her, and from three meters away, he watched her sketch.
“You’re really good at that,” he marveled. “You draw like you’re digging up treasure, or like you’re writing in braille. I could close my eyes and follow your lines with my fingers.”
She looked back at him impassively.
“You know, there are lots of cultural events in Madrid. If you want, you could start by going to see the big modern art collection in the Reina Sofia.”
Nora didn’t reply. Her hand moved rapidly back and forth over the paper, inking words that became bodies, speaking into the paper. Her left hand didn’t stop chasing the words.
