by Raja Alem
“It is not the destiny of Eve’s sons to possess these doors, and it is a curse to try to break the locks preserved in the tablets,” he was warned, but Joseph ibn Nagrela slipped away from them and plunged his bare hands into the fire to save the doors, forgetting all about his newborn daughter who had disappeared with the rest of the village of Solomon’s Seal and forgotten the earthquake she’d been born into.
Joseph ibn Nagrela returned with a cargo of doors to Andalusia. In Toledo, he went to visit all the most famous blacksmiths whose skill in forging knives and swords and casting keys was incomparable, and wasted the last quarter-century of his life in its hills, casting key after key with the locksmiths, casting and re-casting in search of the one key that would open all those doors. The locksmiths said that he used all the songs, poems, dances, prayers, and charms he’d learned at the temple of Almaqa to help him, but none of the hundreds of keys that they cast was the ultimate key that could open those locks.
When Joseph ibn Nagrela was one hundred, they forged a key that opened door after door, until there was only one door left, but the excitement split Joseph’s heart in two and he dropped dead in this mosque. In the commotion surrounding the death of such a legend, the key was lost. When this apse was built, the doors were affixed around the walls, where they appeared only to those endowed with vision, inspiring creators like El Greco to search, in their own works, for the ultimate key that would open the door between humans and the divine.
A back window smashed and Rafi burst in. He was irate, but he stopped to see if Nora was alright. “Are you okay? You can’t imagine how scared I was,” he gasped. In the same breath he turned to the woman, yelling, “Are you insane? What the hell were you thinking?” The delicate touch of Nora’s fingers on his arm calmed him, and the strange gleam in her eyes struck his heart like a feverish glow, but with a queer luminosity; he felt her gaze restrain him.
“What a great bodyguard I am,” he muttered to himself. “Letting an old woman trick me!” He pushed forward into the dark mosque, shining all his suspicion at the corners to uncover the woman’s schemes, but she paid no attention to him and carried on telling Nora her story. Nora flopped back against the wall, suddenly tired, and ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden cracks.
“Now. Close your eyes and imagine your Arab ancestor: once, a man came here burdened with the same longing as is in your face now. He made the opposite journey to Joseph ibn Nagrela’s voyage to Aden in search of the door: your ancestor from the Shayba Tribe crossed the seas from Aden to here looking for a key that would open a single door, that of the house of God, but instead all he found was these doors and locks.” Nora was lost amidst those mirror-image journeys; one man went after a door and another came after a key.
“Here.” She pointed to a patch on the floor of the temple and pushed Nora toward it so she could receive the vision. “Al-Shaybi spent a quarter of a century in this spot looking after the mosque, tracing the steps of Joseph ibn Nagrela, and the key to the absolute.” Rafi lingered in the apse, looking fervently for the doors that had been revealed to Nora, but the woman dragged him out. It was then that they noticed the parchment in a wooden frame, studded with shimmering gold and tiny red and green flowers, which hung on a ravaged fresco as if guarding the entrance to the apse. The woman stopped to explain: “In this sheet, al-Shaybi recorded his faith; it always pointed toward his qibla, your city, Mecca.” The writing on the parchment captured Nora’s attention; it was an old form of writing that bore no dots, so each word could be any one of numerous words and its meaning any one of many meanings.
“It’s the first page of the Surah of the Night Journey,” Rafi explained in an attempt to break the magic the woman was spinning around Nora.
“I’ll tell you more about this al-Shaybi,” she went on. “Many people have come looking for him, but I’ve kept his story a secret, waiting for a sign.” She looked at Nora. “Follow me.” She set off out of the mosque, striding through the cold high Toledo night. Around them and at every corner as they climbed the hills they could hear unseen footsteps kindled by their thudding heartbeats. Nora shivered and clasped Rafi’s arm, and he pulled her to his ribs, placing his hand over her icy fingers.
They ended up at the boarding school where they’d first met the woman that morning. In the night, the building showed its bitterness; it looked ready to jump off into the abyss behind it.
“Come in. Shhhhhh—any movement might wake the building …”
Rafi hesitated, but Nora stepped through the short wooden door, clutching his arm. The woman led them into a narrow corridor and down the staircase at the end of it to a vaulted cellar that stank of damp paper and desertion. She turned to look at them. “I’ll take you to the refuge where I hide from every fear and weakness.” Her voice stumbled thickly as if fumbling its way through the darkened alleyways of the purplish night. Nora felt dizzy in the dim light and a shiver ran from her body to Rafi’s; they were now more certain than ever that this woman was deranged. She waved at the walls, which were covered in overflowing bookshelves. “We all have our own Mecca, where we take refuge from our fear and loneliness; this is my Mecca. I find solace here among the manuscripts of your Arab ancestors and my ancestors—who were Jews before they converted to Christianity out of fear of oppression and dispossession. Look …”
She began reading out the titles of the works and Rafi realized she was speaking Arabic. “The Incoherence of the Incoherence and The Long Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Both by Averroes, the twelfth-century Cordoban philosopher, physician, and theologian who wrote about the immortality of the human mind through its connection to the effective mind, and the effect of that mind upon it. We still hold to his belief that we will all be resurrected in a more perfect body. I like to sum it up by saying that our open minds and hearts are the gateway to absolute knowledge and absolute existence!” She took a breath then moved to the next shelf, reciting title after title.
“But I promised to tell you about al-Shaybi … He was kidnapped by a Portuguese pirate ship on the shores of the Red Sea and brought to Iberia, where he finally escaped and made his way to Toledo. Poor al-Shaybi spent his life here as a busking storyteller, recounting stories of Aden and the women of Solomon’s Seal, who were all born with an outline of the moon on their palms, to children. He acted the stories out again and again without ever getting tired, and if you listen carefully, you can still hear the echo of his stories in the city’s walls and hills …”
Rafi and Nora strained their ears; they could no longer tell whether it was the woman speaking or the echoes of al-Shaybi’s tales echoing off the walls: “My mother was descended from the line of King Solomon and Queen Bilqis, like everyone else in the village of Solomon’s Seal. The daughters of the Seal are born with a moon on their palm, which they never close in a stranger’s face, because they believe that if the moon ever falls or is crushed, a fire will spread northward from Aden to clutch the whole of the Arabian Peninsula in its fiery grip, heralding the Day of Judgment.” With his thin teenager’s voice, al-Shaybi continued his story as the woman flitted from book to book.
“My father was the great-great-grandson of the man who bore the key to God’s House on Earth, the Kaaba in Mecca, and he went to Solomon’s Seal to search for the stolen key to the Kaaba. He settled there after falling in love with the moon-shaped birthmark on my mother’s hand. I was born there, on the mountaintops of Happy Yemen.”
The woman interrupted the echoes of the past to continue in a hoarse voice. “Al-Shaybi spent his nights in the mosque, withdrawn into the apse drawing the doors that I showed you. He was about my age, and he used to visit me to ask me about my ancestor Joseph ibn Nagrela’s journey to Aden, and they’d both sing with the same magical voice, lamenting the love they had found in the hands that bore the moon, which meant they’d both come from the same Aden. Sometimes when I looked at al-Shaybi’s head bent over those doors, it felt like he and my ancestor were one and the same. Jos
eph ibn Nagrela was reincarnated in al-Shaybi …” She held her breath, listening to the echo of her voice.
“Al-Shaybi never stopped coming here. I used to think he was in love with me, but he was actually coming to sift through every single poem that Joseph ibn Nagrela had left behind, believing that the key had been smelted and cast in poetry, and that he would find it hidden in a single verse … He and I went through every poem Joseph ibn Nagrela brought back from the temple of Almaqa, hoping we might find an image of the key. Here, look.”
She opened a yellowed manuscript in front of them. “This is a collection of the poems of Joseph ibn Nagrela, who was moved to write poetry by love.”
The room got darker as the woman continued talking. The two tried to focus on what she was saying, hoping that she might finally get to the point of all this. Nora felt lost amidst the cascade of words; she imagined figures in nuns habits slipping into the cellar and watching them surreptitiously from behind the shelves.
“I buried half my life in these poems, and ruined my sight. I remember one night, the night of my fifteenth birthday, when al-Shaybi and I were leaning over our work with our foreheads touching, we were so tired after hours of reading and re-reading a single line of a long poem in search of the key that we fell asleep right there. The line was: Exile is the ink in the book of God with which every straying soul is written and in which every soul searches for a mouthful of bread. That poem and the promise it carries returned to me when I saw your face this morning, Nora.” The deranged gleam in her eyes shone on Nora’s face.
“I dreamed of your face. When they introduced you, they said ‘This is the one who fled from the ink of doves and pigeons, the one who was delivered from the greed that surrounds the House of God.’” She brought the lamp closer to Nora’s face. “In my dream, a war waged around you and over you. That’s what brought you here. As if you were kidnapped.”
Frozen as if made of marble, each squeezing themself against the other’s ribs, Nora and Rafi stared aghast at the face that wouldn’t stop talking.
“I spent half a decade dreaming of you. Your face harassed me every single night, and then you suddenly disappeared. You were absent from my dreams for another half-decade. How naive was I to think that I could ever forget your face. I did forget it, but this morning, your features looked familiar to me. It just goes to show that even the lucky ones in our midst scarcely notice when they meet their dreams walking down the street.”
Her gaze bored through Nora as she repeated her words, slower this time and with a crazed edge. “I dreamed you in war.” Nora’s face was drenched in the purplish glow from the old building’s night-soaked stone walls. “In fact, the whole world awaits war …” She shifted her warning gaze back and forth between them, impressing her fear on them.
“In our books we call him the Savior, the one who will appear to lead us into the war that will open the door between the four rivers of Heaven and allow them to flow on earth, running together as one, purifying the earth before the descent of the Messiah, peace and glory be upon him, who will unite humanity in peace and the word of God, the word that will resurrect the dead and transform your deserts into a Cordoban paradise.” She took Nora’s hand, spreading it against her own left hand, and closed her right hand over the poems.
“We’re all hiding our faces behind other faces, but not all faces are burdened with as many contradictions as yours. I see fortune and death in yours. I’ve dreamed about you so often—too often. So often that your features became tattered and worn.” She said it like an accusation.
Rafi and Nora looked like wax figurines in the dim light of the cellar, like the miniature models of sheep clustered around the infant Christ on the shelf. The air moved thickly when the woman reached out for a book on the table and opened it. It was about the gardens of the Alhambra.
“I knew you by your smell. The measure of a garden in al-Andalus was always its sound and its scent. That’s why our ancestors always made sure to plant great beds of scented flowers where nightingales, peacocks and doves would roam. Soon, your deserts will flow with perfumes and songs, as one body from one word.”
She stared piercingly at them, urging them to say something. Rafi shook his head. “The fall of Cordoba was the fall of the whole world’s dream.”
The woman looked toward the door in surprise; this time, Nora was sure there was a figure in a nun’s habit moving about, watching them through the shelves. The woman raised a trembling hand and picked up a small book, which she handed to them.
“Take a little of me with you in this book, even though you’ll never be able to read it because it’s in Hebrew. It’s a copy from a manuscript of Ibn Hazm’s book The Necklace of the Dove, a book about love: love as a door that opens at first sight onto the heart of the other, love as a place of being, as a race, as blood that flows through us, bringing all bloodlines together, giving us an eternal, heavenly body … A look of love is magic capable of transcending masks and veils. It is the key or the door to a supernatural creature hiding forgotten inside of us.” She fell silent for a moment, listening to the darkness as if straining to follow the sound of footsteps.
“Don’t forget that love, like life, begins as a game but ends gravely. It’s contagious, it can be passed on by voices and scents, so there’s no point in us fighting it. We must open our senses and hone them to receive its assault. We must surrender when it remolds and transforms us …”
A minute that felt like an age passed slowly before the woman led them up the stairs and out. She took a good look around in the doorway to check there was no one spying on them and then leafed through The Necklace of the Dove and took out a sheet of canvas showing a small charcoal drawing of the El Greco painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.
“This is a copy of a real sketch.”
Darkness ran in a shiver from the woman’s touch to Nora, and they sensed even more strongly the stir of watching figures around them.
“As I told you, al-Shaybi spent a quarter-century in the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, communing with our ancestors in his dreams and his waking hours, hoping they would show him the key. They accused him of disturbing the dead. He used to dream about El Greco. He fell entirely under the artist’s spell and claimed that he was a Don Quixote fighting windmills so as to open doorways to eternity in these peaks. Al-Shaybi spent entire days making copies of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, looking for the door. He made countless sketches, including this one. He added many details to the scene, but what comes up most often is this.” She looked around, checking again that no one was listening, and then raised her lamp beside the sketch. She traced the strokes of charcoal. “He inserted this key into many of his drawings, perfecting it over time. He would place it on a shoulder, or tuck it into the folds of a gown or the curls of a cloud. But—look—here the key’s in a very prominent position, and it’s almost the size of a man, it dominates the whole scene. See, in the outstretched right hand of the celestial figure reaching up to Mary’s lap. They said the Meccan was possessed by what he called the ‘master of all keys,’ whose bow was shaped like three interlocking mihrabs. It pursued him in his dreams, but he never managed to find it when he was awake; and yet, al-Shaybi never stopped predicting that soon there would come a time when God would close His house and His mercy in the face of erring believers, and no treaty or war could open them back up. Only that key, in the hand of the right man, could re-open the doors of heaven, and the doors between life and death … They say that al-Shaybi was on his way back to Mecca when he was found dead outside the gate of the outcasts’ cemetery in Madrid, completely naked, clutching a forged key to his chest. It had been cast for him by the most famous blacksmith in Toledo to fit the description revealed to him in a dream by Joseph. Al-Shaybi was forty-three or fifty-three when they buried his body in that same cemetery without epitaph or name—without anything at all but a forged key that was fixed to the tombstone right above his heart. That was seventeen years ago now.
Nora kn
ew she was talking about the key that had been stolen from the tombstone in the British Cemetery. But how had the sheikh got his hands on it? Was he connected to the Shayba Clan of keyholders in some way? She remembered the drawing on a piece of paper, which the two men had compared with the key from al-Shaybi’s grave.
“I found this drawing right here inside this book, The Necklace of the Dove, the last thing al-Shaybi was reading before he left.”
Suddenly the woman seemed tired, and she snapped The Necklace of the Dove firmly closed on the drawing and handed it to Nora. With the same firmness she propelled them out the door and closed it silently behind them, but not before pointing a warning finger at Nora: “It’s been waiting for you all these years.”
The moment the door closed and they heard the finality of the key turning in the lock, they woke up with a start. They stood, amazed, in front of the desolate-looking door; the copy of The Necklace of the Dove in Nora’s hand was the only evidence that what had just happened to them hadn’t been a product of their imagination.
They were driving aimlessly when they glimpsed a column of smoke rising from Toledo. Nora felt a tug at her heart. Up in Toledo, crowds were watching the fire consuming the old school and its large library.
She placed a hand on the steering wheel and turned to Rafi. “Listen,” she said urgently, “I’m not interested in war of any kind, not even for the sake of a key that will unlock the four rivers of Paradise. Let’s forget about that story. It doesn’t concern me. Just take me back to Madrid, please.”
