by Raja Alem
Only when she’s agitated does her left hand sweat. She’s left-handed: her lines take the shortest route from the heart.
She started creating a girl with open arms and a fluttering braid but short legs planted in the ground.
When the hand turned and twisted, and she wanted a hug, I realized with embarrassment that my darling had started to menstruate.
My darling’s foot freed itself from the earth’s gravity and entered the gravity of the facing body.
She started coursing with a desire for a body we cannot see.
SOMEBODY LEFT THOSE WORDS IN HER HEAD, AND WHEN THEY FELL SILENT, NORA realized she was totally alone. She’d spent most of her life pretending to be mute. She hadn’t uttered a word for months; was that pretense or really muteness of the heart? In that cemetery of outcasts she was able to stand outside herself and look back in on the forgotten head she carted around with her, on the words stacked carefully and infinitely on the walls of her skull. If she pulled one little word out, the whole stack would collapse. At the base of those shelves she found anger, like shards of glass inserted into the archive of her words. In her relationship with her father, anger had been the only spark that could ignite his attention and make him see her. One day, she’d awoken to find that her little face had lost its ability to make him angry, so she hurried to shove her body out of childhood, and freed her female hormones early one morning, alone, allowing her features to mature, her lips to fill out, and her eyes to shoot sparks. It happened in one night, with a single leap from childhood to the peak of femininity. She hoped he’d wake up to feel the threat of that femininity, resume his anger, and see her.
Without planning to, Nora stepped into a chic hair salon whose smart window featured pictures of androgynous, ultra-modern cuts. She pointed at a close-cropped head in the window and freed her long tresses from their braid. The stylist gave a sharp intake of breath. “No no, Señora—” he protested, and steered her to a mirror, explaining in a flow of Spanish how beautiful that thick cascade of hair was and what a shame it would be to sacrifice it. He stroked the ends of her hair lightly as he spoke, and hovered around her examining her like a precious artifact. She faced him in the mirror with a determined look and pulled her long locks from him.
The negotiations finally came to an end with a long sigh and the stylist took out his scissors. Decisively, like a sculptor bringing to life the image in his head, he cut a line upward from the back of Nora’s neck to the top of her head. Nora’s hair fell to the floor like a curtain. The cleaning lady hurried to gather it up and laid it on the table like a dead body. Nora had one sentence in her head: “Blocking the way back.” She scored it onto the forehead of the woman facing her in the mirror. A stylish French bob that fell over her left cheek to just below her chin and was almost shaved at the back. Dawdling outside the salon, Rafi was struck by her lightness when she emerged.
Rushing happily, almost hysterically, ahead of him, flying on her new bangs, she asked him to take her to the Reina Sofia; Rafi hid his pleasure at her response to the suggestion he’d made. Now and then he stole glances at the radical departure in her silhouette.
The first artwork to greet her when she entered was an installation: two lines of half-columns forming a colonnade like a tunnel, down which a figure in a black habit halfway between a monk’s and a clown’s was making his way. The artist had captured him in a hurry.
“Look at the eyes,” said a young man in English, embracing his girlfriend theatrically. Nora looked. At first glance they reminded her of a pair of eyes she knew well but whose name escaped her. Rafi followed her like a shadow. She submitted to the eyes of the monk, which were looking into another world, at beings other than the beings they knew, and for a moment she lost all sense of who she was and found herself in the place where he was looking.
“This is quite a well-known artist.” The voice speaking Arabic pulled her back. When she turned around discreetly, she saw a photographer, holding a camera, with his girlfriend. “He disappears in the Far East for months at a time, staying in forgotten, impoverished villages and up in the mountains, then reappears with eyes that say nothing, but tell hidden truths about us, ordinary people. With just one look into those eyes you see hidden truths inside yourself and in the outside world.”
In a desperate attempt to recover what she’d seen, Nora slipped between the columns and began walking down the colonnade toward the monk-clown, to look into his eyes, when one of the museum guards noticed her and intervened politely, “Excuse me, ma’am, no walking inside the installation, please.”
She couldn’t go on. She rushed through the upper floors like a wind sweeping across those artistic visions, storing them. Her head was empty; she had to build new cultural reference points out of the mountains of knowledge around her, snatching handfuls of context. But the edifice she was building was so frail, and it didn’t bear the names of its creators, nor their biographies or dates, like the artwork she was looking at now. She didn’t know how to read the name of an artist and place them mentally, or glance at the production date and identify the movement they belonged to. She just looked and absorbed the spirit of the work, decontextualized. After all, she herself was fleeing from her context, and a fragile culture. Before leaving, Nora stopped in the museum bookshop to look; she bought a book called Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, which Rafi had hesitated over for quite a while before suggesting it to her. When she flicked through it quickly, she felt even less burdened, faced with that quantity of names and artistic movements. That map of knowledge, and the destruction of that knowledge in comparison with the one torn page that was the sum of her knowledge and which twisted and turned and ruminated like an isolated, veiled alley, busy with its veils, like women whose patience had deserted them. Defensively, Nora conjured in her heart her own vast spiritual map, which bore dates steeped in nobility and antiquity, but she couldn’t express it or turn it into a currency valid for any human exchange.
That night, alone in bed, Nora heard a faint sound, the sound of a shutter quickly opening and closing, coming from the edge of the pillow. When she looked round in her dream, she couldn’t see anyone, but there were light footsteps heading for her, the light footsteps of a threatening wind, so she began to run. The footsteps were chasing her. The world looked like theater curtains and paper backdrops showing scenes she knew, but she didn’t slow down to look at them or examine their details. Her body was pushing onward at high speed, bursting through the backdrops and leaving them torn behind her. Whenever she wanted to clutch at something in the furnishings or images, the footsteps chasing her sped up, her panic flared, and her lungs threatened to explode. She stopped to take a breath and glanced behind her, glimpsing the owner of the footsteps—a thin young man whose dark complexion contrasted with the bright white of his sneakers and his radiant smile. He didn’t say anything to her; she only had time to glimpse him before the scene froze and the backdrops suddenly lost their relevance, Nora falling in among them like an apparition. The young man came closer and squatted at her feet, pointing his camera and smile right at her. He snapped a shot then ran away again. He seemed to her to be crossing the earth by foot to return to his own remote country.
She awoke in the morning with an emptiness in her chest where the photographer boy had taken his shot.
Between Two Mosques
NASSER COULDN’T REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS HE’D LAST SLEPT. HE HALLUCINATED, eyes wide open, as he drove. He could hear a voice mocking him: “You’re addicted to medals, aren’t you?” He was driving through Bahra when toilet paper overwhelmed him suddenly. He was remembering the most important advancement in his career, which had been thanks to Bahra, this village on the old Mecca–Jeddah road. His investigation had grown out a rumor that was going around about an illegal recycling plant run by a gang of infidels, who were turning old school books and newspapers into toilet paper that was carcinogenic.
“You’re lying on my blood,” Aisha’s voice breathed directly into his ch
est. He woke, terrified, and found himself driving through the martyrs of the Battle of Badr. “I lay here waiting for an ambulance. I felt no pain. I looked at the bones protruding from my broken pelvis through torn flesh; it appeared and sat beside me for hours while I waited. There’s a delicate body that emerges from our bodies to save us if we experience a trauma: it gathers our broken limbs and sits with them, far from all pain—it chooses a spot as far as possible from the pain for us to sit together. It sat with me all through the night, and together we looked upon the spot where pain lay waiting, until we heard the ambulance sirens approaching and it handed me over to a paramedic, who plunged a needle into my artery. It was then the pain shot through me, but only for a moment, and then I lost consciousness. In that moment, I heard my pelvic bone smash. I could no longer differentiate between our two injuries.”
“Was it you who died?” His feet stamped on the gas, thrusting body and dream forward to catch up with her answer, but he’d woken himself up, and all that remained was the trace of an answer: “Death isn’t difficult. It’s life that’s so unwieldy.”
The road stretched black before him. He fingered the amulet resting against his chest, and resisted the urge to take it out. He’d have to postpone reading the papers inside till he reached somewhere safe. He clutched at Yusuf’s Window:
When Mecca’s dreams thicken in the world, they flee to Medina. The historian al-Azraqi, who catalogued the marvelous qualities of Medina, noted the strange fact that wolves in pursuit of gazelles would stop in their tracks if the gazelles crossed into the city limits!
After Bahra, the road stretching ahead to Medina was empty but for a smattering of cars, all going way over the speed limit despite the camels roaming freely in the dunes on either side of the road; Azrael urged drivers to hurtle through the thin wire fence on the median, smash into the cars going the other way, and wrench out the souls of their passengers.
He had no idea how he made it to Medina or where he parked his car. He found himself in front of the Mosque of the Prophet, loitering near the main entrance, where he had a good view of everyone going in and out, and he scanned their faces for either Yusuf or Mushabbab. He remembered that he didn’t know either of them, but so long as he had the amulet they would find him. He was certain of that. Or perhaps they’d been in touch with Mu’az. His knees trembled as he made his way forward. The night prayer was underway, and worshippers were kneeling for the closing tashahhud. He waited until the moment of absolute silence that followed their final greeting before entering the mosque compound through the Gate of Gabriel, walking past the bench where the eunuchs who’d devoted themselves to serving the mosque sat. He leaned against the Column of Repentance and fell asleep; he was exhausted. As he dozed, he could hear one of the eunuchs explaining something to an Egyptian pilgrim:
“—the Column of Repentance. When Abu Lubaba tied himself to this column to atone for giving away the Prophet’s plan to attack the tribe of Qurayza, he nearly lost both his sight and hearing. His daughter would only untie him when he needed to pray or relieve himself, and when he was done she’d tie him back up again. He swore his bonds should remain fast until they were untied by the Apostle of God himself. And that’s what happened, after forgiveness was granted by a verse of the Holy Quran. The Prophet used to receive at the same spot the weak and the wretched and those who had no home but the mosque, and he would speak with them and comfort them.”
Nasser wasn’t sure if it was the eunuch’s voice he was hearing, or a message directed solely at him. He opened his eyes and looked at the white lines that divided the women from the men, they were like the calcareous lines that ran from his heart to the hearts of those seeking the Rawdah, the section of Paradise that lay between the Prophet’s pulpit and his grave. He didn’t dare go over to the grave, but from where he sat he offered up a small prayer: God, even though I’ve resorted to evil so that I might reach You, by standing here in Your Rawdah I return to You all power to choose, and from this moment I am guided by nothing but You.
Emptied of choice, he slumped back against the Column of Repentance, feeling light and translucent, as if he were fusing to the gossamer ground beneath him that held the bodies of the Prophet’s companions. He began to see the foot of Omar, may God be pleased with him, taking shape in the dust before him—just as it had once come out of the ground long ago, and had had to be reburied—and he realized that the dead were buried not in the ground but in the hereafter, which was all around him, and that he could look at them and marvel at how their bodies resisted decay even in torment. He felt that he was a part of the luminous existence that stretched into future centuries and emanated from distant eras, from the original hijra to the end of all things, its path to resurrection. He eased the parchment from its amulet with a feverish hand and began to read:
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF SARAH to her son Marid, sheikh of the tribes of Sabkha, written in the year six hundred and twenty-six AD.
It had been two days since we left Khaybar, and we had spent them in silence, smelling like desert wolves. I was wrapped in an abaya of coarse camel-hair that hid my femininity and protected my body with a moist layer of sweat. The burning sun was tyrannical as we headed north up Wadi Himd to avoid the routes the caravans took, but our hearts remained among the cool waters and palms that gave Khaybar the nickname “Garden of the Hijaz.” The taste of your father is still in my mouth. When he let me leave, he said, “The whole Land of Canaan awaits the child in your womb, while Khaybar is destined to fall and we, Abraham’s chosen descendants, are fated to be destitute, because of the rebellion in Moses’s tale, to change and blend different nations and religions endlessly before we finally reach our eternal home.” That man, who so longed to be your father, placed on my shoulders a very momentous responsibility: the fate of the Jews and their return to Canaan, as promised them in the Arabian Peninsula.
I was thus entrusted with taking you to a mighty tribe where no one could uproot you so that you could continue the miracle of transformation. And so I had to continue onward, never looking back, shedding with every step my identity, my religion, my father Ka’b, my husband al-Nidr, and my family, and exchanging the sweet waters of Yathrib for the bitterness of the wells we stopped at along the way, crossing the eternal sands, toward the oases of Najd and Wadi Bani Hanifa and the tribe known as the Suns, in the hope that they would accept me into their invincible protection and their fate, which had been divined by our seers: it had been ordained that at the end of time, they would inherit the Peninsula and ride the steeds of history and take up the reins of many nations, for wherever their hooves touched the ground, gold sprang forth, kindling fires in lands that the sun could not reach. At a certain point in the journey, I looked ahead of me and saw a blur of darkness: black horses covered the horizon of those wastelands your mother crossed so that she could place you at the mane of the lead horse.
Nasser realized the significance of that ancient parchment he was holding. He wasn’t meant to open it and read it, but he refused to be a donkey, carrying a load of books he couldn’t read. From now on, he’d have to watch where he stepped, and with whom. These exaggeratedly crumbling and moth-eaten, tangled and untangled letters: it was no longer clear whether he was reading what he read from the parchment or from breaths imprisoned in his chest or from white birds concealed in the sky above the mosque, which had flown out of a fire raging in the past to intercept a bolt of lightning before it struck the Prophet’s resting place. The flavor of the words and the old parchment forced him to keep reading; he was curious to know where the will would break off. The anonymous author had given all the faces around him the aspect of the divineress Turayfa, who had predicted the collapse of the Ma’rib dam and led the nations of Arabs to spread outward in waves: one wave to birth and spilt blood in Mesopotamia, another to papyrus and writing in the valley of the Nile, another to stone and building with the angels in Mecca, another to prosperity and palm trees in Yathrib, and another to passion and poetry in the Fertile
Crescent.
Ishmael
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. SCREAMS OF TERROR AND DESTRUCTION ISSUED FROM THE roof of the Arab League, where bloody scenes filled the TV screen and poured out over the neighboring rooftops. The dawn prayer would soon burst through the endless fog of violence that Jaws, which was nearing the end, had brought. Mu’az shuddered at the thought of the dawn angels descending for prayer and seeing all that violence, but as soon as the shark had been exterminated and the TV faded to black, he got up to put on another video all the same.
Khalil sat facing his silhouette reflected in the black screen. His hair—thin, receding, and increasingly wispy—was pitiable, but it had valiantly resisted every dose of chemotherapy. He raised his hand in a salute of bulging green veins and perspiration to the band of brave soldiers who appeared as the opening scene of Mission Impossible 2 wiped his face from the screen.
Once again the sound of gunfire filled the air and dead bodies were strewn everywhere for the dawn angels to wade through. This was the tenth movie Mu’az and Khalil had watched in the last fifteen hours. Mu’az was sitting at the top of the stairs, resting against the bare mud wall, which had been warmed by the sandstorm wind. He looked at Khalil’s profile: it was growing longer and thinner, like the nose of an airplane waiting until air resistance was at its lowest to take off. Khalil was sitting in his permanent spot on a sponge mattress on the bare floor of the roof, facing the TV. It had been two weeks since his last chemo session; the doctors had halted his treatment and sent him home to die.
“We can’t ignore this low white blood cell count any more. His body can’t take the treatment; it’s doing him more harm than good …” That was their way of saying nothing was working. “The shortness of breath you’re experiencing isn’t just a side effect of the chemotherapy,” they explained. “The cancer has spread to your lungs and is now moving toward your heart, which, as you know, is already in critical condition.” Theirs was less a diagnosis than the description of a battle in which the massed ranks of cancer advanced on his heart and no counterattack was in the offing.
