by Raja Alem
Señora Mirano suddenly interrupted them. “Would you like to join our discussion of The English Patient?”
Rafi declined politely, echoing Nora. “Have you actually seen The English Patient?” she asked him as they made their way back to the hotel.
He nodded. “I thought it was wonderful, but there’s no way I could sit through it again. I’ve seen enough violence in real life, in the civil war, had enough shocks, experienced enough adrenaline rushes, that I’ve found I get pretty upset when I watch a sad film or read a sad poem. I think I’m getting worn out.”
“Maybe not—maybe you’re just learning to appreciate the value of a peaceful life.”
“Also, I can’t stomach this Western thing of watching real life through movies any more. Señora Mirano once told me that we’ve invented a duality, a second reality and I think I agree with her. Our mental world is a reflection of what we see around us, civilization is the shell that represents our inner spiritual selves. Without it, we’re just animals in search of food and sex. We want to exist on a higher plane, but we can’t get there or we can’t stay up there. Most of us never will. In the end, it’s just a dream …”
Reading Triangle
IN THE ENDLESS VOID OF THE CORRIDOR, AN EPOCH OF SAND STRETCHED BETWEEN the three men. The whole time they were in the corridor, Mushabbab had remained calm, and when at one point Nasser’s throat went dry, Mushabbab was poised and ready. Whenever Nasser’s doubts became too much for him and he looked like he was about to tumble from the nightmarish plane of reality they were exploring, Mushabbab quickly handed the will over to Yusuf so he could pick up where Nasser had stumbled:
EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN WE ENTERED the heart of Najd. We left the soft sands saturated with the Hijazi breeze. Even the air tasted dry and harsh and began to dig into our skin. My body must have become stiffer somehow, as well. I have no idea how long we climbed, teetering on our camels, as we followed our Ghatafani guide across the ribs of great sand dunes on the edge of the Nafud Desert. It took us a while before we realized that we’d been surrounded by a group of men riding bareback on massive camels. In the burning sunlight, it wasn’t entirely clear whether they were men or mirages or demons. The men, and the camels they were riding, were the color of sand, even their eyelashes. There was no way we could’ve gotten away from them; it was hard enough to figure out what direction they were headed in. They were kicking up a sandstorm that either lashed at your back, or blinded you, or suffocated you. They tied us to our saddles by the feet and forced us to follow them. At one desperate moment, I thought the horizon was a sheet of molten copper rising up to the sky, propelling us forward with flames until we finally reached the top of the copper wall, where the wind rose up and began pelting us with what felt like sandstones. “Locusts!” Ayif al-Ghatafani shouted.
We had to protect our eyes and faces from the locust attack. It was well known among the Bedouin that locusts were so vicious that they ate humans alive. I raised my abaya over my head like a tent, while the giants faced the onslaught head-on and didn’t seem at all bothered. They didn’t even cover their faces and they laughed at al-Ghatafani as he tried desperately to keep the locusts off the terrified camels. I don’t know what caused it but my camel bolted and I could do nothing to control it. It was all I could do to hold on to the reins as locusts buzzed all around me and inside my abaya. The camel didn’t stop until we’d made it out of the locust swarm. When I opened my eyes, I saw the other camels were outrunning the last of the locusts and the giants appeared around me, riding alongside. It was as though I hadn’t crossed the locusts and the desert, rather that the desert had receded. I could see gouges on my camel’s neck and around her eyes; the locusts had left what looked like a tattoo across the belly of al-Ghatafani’s camel.
“We’re lucky we made it out of there.”
An oasis in the Rimmah Valley lay before us, looking like a ruin. The palm trees were stripped bare, the locusts having decimated their crowns and clusters, and as we neared the village, we could see the uncovered graves of the children and the elderly done in by smallpox, which the locusts carried.
The camels instinctively gave that hell a wide berth, looping around toward the southeast. It was as if the giants were leading us from one disaster to another more horrific as our detour continued. Smallpox ran alongside us, borne by the locust swarm, leaving oases of death in its wake until it disappeared inside the bones of the desert.
We ran past the tribes of Tayyi and Asad, and our captors drove us like a storm between the tribes of Hanifa and Tamim on the way to their oasis.
Delicacies
NIGHT FELL OVER MADRID AND THE ACTIVITY AROUND THE PRADO MUSEUM across the street began to die down. Nora listened closely as she’d grown used to doing in her distant alley:
She heard Nazik the Turkish woman emerging from the cluster of alleys and poverty. She was dressed in her navy blue coat, with embroidered sleeves, and she’d wrapped a white scarf around her head—she didn’t cover her face like the other women in the neighborhood. Her fiery locks fell over her forehead, attracting everyone’s gaze and quivering with every word she spoke to her companion the eunuch. He walked two steps behind her, following her every command like a loyal dog. Every Friday morning when Nazik appeared, the women of the lane would duck into entryways and teenage girls would bury their fingers inside their abayas.
“Nazik can capture a girl with just one finger!” The rumor came about because of how her eyes bulged and hovered above the girls’ hands like a hawk, examining them, picking out the finest, longest fingers. She was always negotiating with parents to get them to allow their daughters to work for her doing embroidery.
That Friday, the girl didn’t run away. She stood there among the pots of herbs, like a dove at rest, and watched the Turkish woman. When Nazik got closer, she walked out to the outer gate to get a whiff of her perfume, Paris Nights; it made the whole neighborhood sigh. Nazik had mummified that perfume bottle, which she’d inherited from her ancient grandfather, allowing herself only a single drop every Friday. Nazik didn’t waste a second. She grabbed the girl’s right hand and started checking out her fingers.
“These are good fingers. Real Turkish delight! If you send her to me, I’ll teach her how to sew, and trim, and fit, and drape, and pin … These fingers will feed you honey and ambergris.” The words wafted on ambergris into her father’s mind and the very next morning he lifted the siege under which she’d lived and sent her to Nazik’s workshop.
At the doorway, she was met by the scents of women. It was mostly sweat but there was a perfume which she couldn’t quite identify. It made the blood rush to her temples. There was nothing of Paris Nights about this place. For the first time in her life, she understood that she was an adult woman.
“Girl!”
Nazik greeted her like someone clinging to a lifesaver. It was a surprise to see the Turkish woman without her wig, her hair as white as a corpse-washer’s sponge. “Welcome to my kingdom, where the girls shake their asses but never break their backs!”
She led her to a row of sewing machines that faced the wall like schoolchildren being punished. A chubby girl sat there, engrossed in her sewing. Her arms were each the size of an infant. She was spinning the machine, a Singer, violently; it looked as if she might tear the wheel off at any moment.
Nazik handed Nora a heart-shaped embroidery hoop holding a piece of white cotton taut. “Should I teach you the fluffy satin stitch?” she asked. “We use it to embroider flowers on women’s dresses. A woman wearing a dress with that flower always turns heads …” When she said “flower,” it sounded like “flavor.”
Nazik began stabbing blindly, lewdly, at the fabric, creating the bright red heart of a flower out of her stitches; it was so suggestive that sweat broke out on Nora’s upper lip. Nazik watched her closely. When the girl tried to take the hoop and have a turn, Nazik tossed it aside. “Don’t waste your time with sweaty slaves’ work!” she cackled.
She walked No
ra over to a clothes rack with dresses of every color and shape. She grabbed a red and white head-covering like men wore and wrapped it around Nora’s head until only her eyes showed. She pushed Nora forward in her black dress to a section of the studio that was curtained off. Nora was shocked to see drumming and dancing. “Let yourself dance!” urged Nazik.
Swaying gracelessly ahead, she led the girl forward like water down a sluice. When sweat began to run down Nora’s neck to her chest, the head-covering gave off a scent that gripped her by the throat. Her body heaved with passion and desire. Something inside her took over. She tore herself away from Nazik and fled the dance floor. Nazik didn’t follow after her. The girl understood that they sewed together more than clothes, and that the snips went as deep as each of the chosen bodies dared allow. Some stopped at being stripped, while others were content to be consumed and recycled.
“I’m never going back there, no matter what,” Nora vowed to herself.
“NOTHING PROVIDES SECURITY LIKE LEARNING A TRADE. WITHOUT ME, YOUR daughter will starve!”
Her father fell for Nazik’s threats and pleas and allowed her to go up to his daughter’s bedroom alone, where she menaced her.
“Do as I say,” she said, pulling on the girl’s arm as if to make her understand. “You’re luckier than all my best girls, believe me. During that split-second appearance you made, the scepter fell into your hand. Do you understand me, girl? The scepter!” With every word Nazik spoke, the girl could smell the scent in the head-covering that had stirred an indomitable desire inside of her.
“JUST LIKE MY HAIR SMELLS NOW,” NORA SAID, SHRUGGING HER SHOULDERS AS SHE sat in the large bedroom she occupied in the Ritz Madrid. It was only now that she could get her head around the storm that she’d stirred up during her brief presence in that basement studio. “The scepter,” she repeated to herself. “The scepter you refused to take from Nazik all those years ago.”
In a city without any call to prayer, she woke every morning at dawn to the sound of a dove flapping its wings. She knew when it was time for prayer from the gust that rose up out of the silence, a dawn presence, which pulled her out of her deepest sleep. She knew he was coming. The man who loved her started his motorcycle in a faraway courtyard, startling the pigeons that took to the air to circle the length of her narrow alley, like a wave that pierced her and settled in the back of her neck, causing her entire body to quake in anticipation.
Getting There
AL-GHATAFANI WARNED US THAT we would be passing through hell and then suddenly we were being led into the southern simoom wind. The wind dug the sand out from beneath our feet and erected graves above our heads that reached the sky.
The look in al-Ghatafani’s eyes told me that he’d survived all those nightmares only to fall into my trap. It frightened me.
“Wherever they take us, let’s pretend that we’re brother and sister.” He closed his eyes in assent. The oases of the Hanifa tribe lay before us.
We made camp there, and for the first time since we’d set off, the hush of night combined with the exhaustion of hunger, thirst, and desperation knocked us out. We slept as if we were dead. I lay there until I was pulled back by a brutish growling and gurgling, and found the giants sitting in a circle, chewing on camel meat, tearing the limbs and the sandy insides to pieces. It was like they lived off sand. All around us the sand smelled of the previous night’s light rains, and the camels grazed on Eve plants, which had sprouted overnight like green spikes on the dunes. I realized that we had finally left hunger behind us and were now making our way through the heart of the Najd oases.
I LAY AWAKE, IMAGINING THE abyss we’d left behind. The only thing holding me was al-Ghatafani’s night-sculpted, wind-chiseled body lying beside me. I could hear wolves howling inside me, or out in the desert around us, demanding a drink of his blood. When I got up at dawn, he was standing, facing away from me, stroking his camel’s neck. I felt that persistent movement between my ribs. As I drew nearer to him, passionate dawn and the waking universe rose up inside of me. I interfered with his finely honed senses and ability to read the weather or the scent of a place. He was defenseless. He trembled like a slaughtered sand grouse when my body touched his, but he knew to surrender. Our careful calculations, the cause of our people, our mission were all betrayed because of a wolf’s howl. I heard my father Ka’b’s warning: “Choose the best lineage for us so that we may be resurrected!” and was suddenly terrified at what I’d got myself into. I pulled away. He could tell I meant it, so he kept his distance.
Drawing
THAT NIGHT WHEN SHE GOT INTO BED, SHE TUMBLED INTO A BOTTOMLESS WELL, hands that reeked of beer and garlic groping her body as she fell. She was woken by a metallic clatter against the marble floor, and a man’s voice. When Nora opened her eyes, she saw it was past midnight. She slipped across the marble floor in bare feet—a rude awakening—and peeked through a crack in the bedroom door. She saw a paunchy man who looked a little like a cartoon character: greasy, oozing evil, about to burst. He bent down to pick up a shiny object from the floor and when she focused, she immediately recognized the key that had been taken from the gravestone in the cemetery of outcasts. A sudden terror came over her and she could no longer breathe. She didn’t want him to see her. She knew he could hurt her and the thought made her hair stand on end. The man compared the key to a sketch on a piece of old parchment he was holding.
“A perfect copy,” he said. “The same wide teeth and a bow in the shape of three mihrabs. But you’re right. It’s obviously a fake.”
The man bit down on the thin layer of gold with his yellowed teeth to reveal the cheap metal underneath.
“Of course, it is, you idiot.” The icy look on the sheikh’s face sent a shiver through Nora’s bones. She could feel his rage on the other side of the door. “You’re a bunch of fuck-ups and you’re wasting my time. You brought me all the way out here to watch you screw everything up?” He snatched the parchment and the forged key and stuffed them into a white envelope before bundling the man out of the suite and walking out himself.
The next morning, Nora’s bags had already been taken to the private plane, which awaited her at the airport. The hotel corridors and basement were a beehive of activity in anticipation of their departure, which she’d been informed of the day before. When he opened the door to her bedroom to collect her, the emptiness hit him like a punch in the face and he fell back against the wall. Her silver earrings, the agarwood perfume he drank from her skin, her inhaler, small possessions were scattered here and there on the table beside her messy, empty bed.
A storm roared through the hotel, turning the entire place upside down in search of Nora, who’d disappeared without a trace.
IT WAS HER DEEP FEAR OF THE SHEIKH THAT HAD CAUSED HER TO SNEAK OUT OF THE hotel before dawn, but by the time she’d reached the Fountain of Neptune, Rafi had already caught up with her.
“Let me take you wherever it is you’re going,” he said, getting out of the car. He was tidying up his papers on the backseat so she’d have somewhere to sit, but she simply opened the passenger-side door and got in the front seat. He hesitated for a second before he got in next to her; it felt awkward to be that close to her.
“Where to?”
“Somewhere that isn’t Madrid. I don’t care where.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Either take me or let me out so I can get in a cab.”
He drove off, in no particular direction, until they found themselves at the highway that led south out of Madrid.
“Please, let me help you. What is it you’re running away from?”
She stared at him for a while and then she told him what she’d seen the night before. “You’re his bodyguard, I’m sure you know all about it. What’s he doing with that key and the man who nearly killed me?”
He was silent for a moment. “I’m glad that you trust me, but the only thing I know is that the sheikh was interested in that grave for some reason. Based on wha
t you just said, I can only assume that he was looking for that key.” She seemed dissatisfied so he elaborated: “A month before you two got here, he came here on his own and went to the cemetery, but he didn’t find what he was looking for. He also went to Toledo for the same reason, I think.”
“Let’s go to Toledo then.”
He hadn’t been expecting that. “Listen, if you think you’re in any danger, then the safest thing to do would be to go in the opposite direction.” He saw the stubborn look in her eye so he started the car.
They drove in total silence along the highway to Toledo, which lay seventy kilometers south of Madrid. They passed the line of fortresses erected by the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus as a barrier between themselves and the Kingdom of Castile.
“Come on, tell me something: something about art, or Andalusia, history, highways, anything.” She seemed amused. “At least we’re following Señora Mirano’s advice. Did you hear her telling me that I had to go to Toledo to see the painting by El Greco in the Church of Santo Tomé? It’s called The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, she said.” He felt for his pistol. “Don’t worry,” she said, laughing, “I’m not planning to do anything bad!” He didn’t say anything. “In any case, I don’t have anything to lose any more even if I do do something bad.”
He relaxed and allowed himself to speak. “If we’re not worried about losing something, that means we don’t deserve to have it in the first place. You’re young and full of life. That in itself is a miracle, and you should be afraid of losing it.”
“The only thing I can lose is the search itself, if I stop trying to find myself. You should have never gotten involved.”
“I’m here to protect you.” The stubborn furrow in his brow met her radiant, if enigmatic, smile; she needed to push things as far they could go: if not to break the monotony, then to test how determined he was to protect her.
