The Dove's Necklace
Page 63
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 77
I gave the baby to Azza.
It’s for her to bury, or bring back to life.
I’m tearing up the sheets of my mind one by one to see where he might have gone. Where he might end up. Can one jump with a baby in one’s heart?
Some nights, I hear him crawling up the staircase to my cubbyhole.
Some nights, I slither down to meet him.
I curl up in a ditch in the bare earth. Not a drop of rain. Oh, how the dead miss the rain!
I used up my entire stash of perfume bottles to get rid of his scent.
But he smells of my insides.
The scent stays hot, my every breath stokes it.
A
P. S. They found the apeman, whom they believe to be the missing link, frozen in a block of ice on the side of a mountain in North Carolina. When they melted the ice, they discovered he was nothing more than a rubber gorilla suit.
What will they find after we’ve melted? I would hate to die in a freezer. Don’t let them put my body on ice.
Aisha
Nora pushed those words to the back of her mind. Toward the hole into which she’d thrown all her memories. And took refuge in the only thing around her: in the autograph book that certified that she was the one who was still alive. Suddenly her eyes fell on a sentence in the book that she hadn’t seen before. The handwriting sent a shiver down her spine.
One day you’ll wake up and bury us all.
The phone rang. She picked up the receiver without thinking.
“It’s for you, ma’am.” The receptionist’s upbeat voice dispelled the gloom of that sentence, but then there was a second voice:
“Azza.” The word hung in the air, as if forever. “Azza.” Azza. The name echoed in her ears as though Yusuf were shouting to her from the roof. The name echoed around her bedroom, against the shut window. It fell on naked Aisha and Jameela at her father’s sink.
“Azza. Azza.” Nora was the name Khalid al-Sibaykhan had bestowed on her—the phone was still buzzing—after he stripped her of the name Azza so that he could own her by his mother’s name. He wanted her to understand the kindness he was doing her, wanted her to understand the name’s significance: “A powerful woman who was worn down by my father’s other wives.”
She couldn’t tell when the buzzing stopped and the knocking started. Was it the knocking of the distant past or the here and now? Not until she opened the door and saw him looking back at her.
“Azza.” His voice had always been warm, but now it trembled: frightened, desperate, cold. She reached for the phantom edge of her veil, to cover her head, to hide from his eyes. From that all-seeing familiarity she knew so well. His voice and his face matched the image she called up from the very depths of her lost memory. She came face to face with her own name: Azza. With that name’s burdened legacy. A burden he’d set on her shoulders. She fell. Yusuf fell down with her and they touched the ground at the exact same moment. She could hear nothing but the name she’d so longed to hear: Azza. A gaping void inside of her hungered for it. For the precise way Yusuf said it. He said it with gravity, like he said Mecca. It gave the name a formidable depth. He said it as though he were bashing against the Meccan ground to unearth the Well of Zamzam or Judgment Day. No one but Yusuf could do so much with just a name.
“Azza. Let’s go. Now.”
Pink
“DO YOU KNOW WHO KHALID AL-SIBAYKHAN IS? HE’S THE BULLDOZERS ON all our mountains. He’s the buyer, he’s the deeds that strip people of their properties, the one eliminating and demolishing. He’s your father, who contracted, annulled, and sold … Sold you, and your house. Al-Sibaykhan is the sin that has possessed us all. The Lane of Many Heads, you, and I are nothing but dots being erased on a map of genocide. We’re dots floating in the dust after a city has been ravaged. Dozing eyes, the moment before a city, many cities, are razed to the ground. Do you understand, Azza? You’re hanging in the air with a rope around your neck. You shouldn’t be on that side. It’s too dangerous. Jump to me, Azza.”
“Don’t talk to me about jumping!” she replied. “The only time I ever dared to open the window my father nailed shut, I saw my death, because her death was our collective death. What I saw made me jump right out of the alley, forever. Don’t you know me best, Yusuf? I can never jump, except to the wrong side.”
“We can change things, Azza. Help me expose all this!”
“You want exposure? More than this?”
“Help us get you out of this first, Azza of the Lane of Many Heads. Then we’ll expose what’s going on. Al-Sibaykhan is the reptile that will swipe its tail and cause the ground to swallow us all up.”
“Yusuf, please, make contact with the real world around you. Come out of your bubble of history and Doomsday. Who’s going to listen to all this?”
She steeled her heart and led Yusuf next door, into Khalid’s office. Adrenaline was pumping in her veins, and she tried to separate her mind from her shaking body. His maid or his coffee boy or his assistant could come in at any moment and see what she was doing, but she couldn’t back out now. They hurried to the desk, where they saw a safe underneath the drawers; when they knelt to open it, they found it unlocked.
Inside, the first thing they saw was the amulet, lying in the lower compartment. Yusuf’s hand shook as he picked it up and checked that the parchment was still folded carefully inside.
“I didn’t want to scare you,” he began. “But I’ve just escaped an ambush. There’s no doubt it was Khalid’s men. That’s when they took the amulet. I spent the night wandering around, hiding, looking for a way to get to you.” He spread the family tree in front of her, and quickly took her through it, skipping most of the lines, but the blood was pumping in her ears and a sudden thought occurred to her. She looked again in the safe, and there was the copy of the El Greco painting. She froze; how had it gotten there? And what had happened to Rafi? Was he one of them—or another of their victims? Had they used her as bait to get this drawing? She pushed the thoughts aside and opened the sketch for Yusuf, drawing his attention to the key held in the hand of the celestial creature reaching toward Mary’s lap. They stood motionless as he looked at the key; holding his breath, he took out the key hanging around his neck.
“It’s the same key,” breathed Nora, then told him about the man who had spent a quarter-century of his life in the peaks of Toledo, obsessively looking for that key, and left a copy of it fixed to his gravestone.
“Maybe you’re related to that guy—maybe he’s your lost father! Your mom Halima always talked about how Andalusia had kidnapped her husband …”
Nora went back to the safe and took out the drawing Khalid al-Sibaykhan had showed her one morning in Madrid, to compare it with the copied key stolen from the grave.
“All these are copies of that,” she said, pointing to the key around his neck. “It must be the key.” She emphasized the words the key. She looked around them, struck by the deafening, blinding discovery. Her ears were ringing and her saliva tasted like blood. Her mind was racing against time to create a bomb as big as this explosion Yusuf had caused in her blood.
“What do you think this is all about?”
An obscure instinct was honing in on that threat hung around Yusuf’s neck.
“You’re a Shaybi, Yusuf.”
They stood either side of the key, looking at the two interlinked mihrabs on the bow, and the third, bearing the verses of the Surah of Fidelity, in engraved gold, which watched over their embrace from above.
They returned to the safe to look for more clues, but there was nothing except for a DVD on the top shelf. Yusuf quickly played it on the computer: it was a promotional film, which opened with the logo of Elaf International Holdings. They couldn’t fathom the images of the Mecca of the future that rolled across the screen: everything around the Kaaba had been erased and replaced by a vast marble space that extended northwest from the Haram Mosque, rising in three tiers, like
a sundial, to another five tiers that led to a flat, paved plain stretching to the very edge of the city, sweeping away the Lane of Many Heads. Skyscrapers enclosed the horizon on three sides, a line of seventeen giants on the right and the same on the left, meeting in the center in a vast idol that looked like the Empire State Building and was flanked on each side by a miniature version of itself. Next came another ring of skyscrapers, seven to the right and seven to the left, and in the center two enormous creatures guarding the great idol. They all looked like spaceships that had landed on Earth to besiege the Kaaba in a postmodern metallic standoff. The whole lot was surrounded by an outer ring of inferior towers that stood like wretched guards protecting the backs of the giants against the assault of the sand and the poor who were massed like ants outside the massive conurbation. It looked like life itself had been chased outside the circle of the Holy Mosque.
“Look, these zones around the Kaaba are what gave Khalid al-Sibaykhan his nickname, Long Belt. He’s tying the whole city around his waist …”
When the promotional film ended, it took them some time to make sense of the idea that this what the Kaaba would look like in the future. The stone structure covered in black silk had been taken away, and in its place was a metal box of the same dimensions as the old one but elongated like an obelisk pointing to the sky, and around it were countless levels of walkways that would hold huge numbers of circumambulating pilgrims. The new Kaaba was like the shaft inside the grinding cogs of a huge mill.
Their hearts scarcely beat any longer. Their mouths felt dry. Yusuf was frozen in the desk chair and Azza stood motionless behind him, the scent of Medinan mud rising to her from his dirty hair, their eyes still fixed on that vision of the postmodern Kaaba. Azza could feel the emptiness behind her, the abyss brushing the back of her neck. At any moment, al-Sibaykhan could walk in and the hair-fine line would be broken, pushing them to some zone as extreme as the designs that had just left them speechless.
“Now I understand. It might sound like some crazy film plot, but I think the disappearance of the key, and all the rumors about their failure to cast a new one, were planned to make way for this … To redesign the Kaaba …”
“Would you really mind if it looked like this? Stone or metal, what difference does it make? The important thing is it’s a symbol.”
“Azza, this isn’t the Kaaba we know. This is Hubal. The idol, the same idol that’s worshipped by the Devil’s Horns tribes, is taking over the House of God, rising to the sky on the Kaaba’s foundations. Those foundations were built by Adam and the angels out of stones from heaven. It’s a human treasure …”
“But didn’t you say those emeralds from Heaven were dug up and thrown into the sea so nobody would worship them?”
“Not the foundations … I really hope they haven’t done anything with the foundations. Any attempt to dig up those foundations would destroy Mecca. The least we can do is expose these documents so the authorities can see what these people are planning to do!”
She stared at him in silence. He looked skinny and pale, but unshakably determined. “Expose them to who?”
“The organizations that protect cultural heritage in London and New York, the royal court, the Consultative Assembly, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice …” He sounded naive, even to himself. “But first, you have to come with me, we have to get you out of here.” He gathered the papers, ready to leave.
“I’ll repeat what a crazy woman once told me: this key, in the hand of the right man, can open all the doors to God’s houses, doors you’ve never even imagined …”
“But look at the metal Kaaba of the future … What key could open that contraption?”
“Even that,” she replied, touching the key around his neck. “This key is everything. You need to get it out of here, now.”
“No, Azza, you are everything,” he said desperately, hoping it would penetrate her head this time. “You and Mecca. I’m not leaving unless you come with me.”
Her head was spinning, so her body moved automatically. She put on her abaya and followed him out of the suite.
As the elevator door opened onto the lobby, they spotted al-Sibaykhan coming in through the main door with his assistant, his bodyguards spread around the entrance and the lobby. Yusuf yanked her back into the elevator and pressed a button, but the minutes it took to respond seemed like forever. Azza moved forward, lifting her abaya in an attempt to hide Yusuf from sight, but a man suddenly appeared in front of the elevator, his eyes meeting Yusuf’s. He was one of the ones who’d surprised them at the fort. The man’s hand shot out to stop the door closing, and like a flash across Azza’s line of vision, Yusuf’s hand struck the arm, pushing the man backward. With a grimace of pain, the man hit the floor just as the elevator doors slid closed.
They didn’t know what floor they were going to for a moment, but the elevator took them to the second floor, and the moment the doors opened they raced to the nearest emergency exit. Yusuf smashed the glass on the fire alarm, sending the hotel into an uproar. They bounded down the emergency stairs, pushing through endless doors until they finally burst out into the parking lot. In front of them, Nasser was just getting out of his Land Rover. He stood paralyzed at the sight of the two figures that had suddenly appeared in front of him, his eyes a waxy white as he stared agog at the woman. Azza retreated, while Yusuf rushed forward eagerly with a sigh of relief.
“Detective, thank God you managed to get away!”
The distance gaped between him and Azza. He glanced behind him, only to find her staring accusingly at him.
“You’re working with him?” she hissed.
“This is Detective Nasser! He knows everything …”
She retreated further. “I saw your father’s grave in Madrid. He traveled to all those countries looking for that key. He was probably the one who led me there so I could help you discover who you are—and now I find out you’re working with this guy?” Her voice had the fury of a person betrayed.
“Azza, listen—” Nasser stepped forward, into the space between them. “Wait, that’s not Azza!” he exclaimed in disbelief.
Azza was already moving back toward the hotel entrance.
“Hold it, where are you going?”
“There’s something I have to sort out,” she muttered to herself; they could barely make out what she said.
“There’s no one called Azza,” said Nasser desperately. “She was invented by Aisha the cripple! Aisha’s dreamt us all up …” Yusuf wanted to follow Azza, but Nasser stood in his way. He watched her retreat out of the corner of his eye. Was that a faint limp? Could it be the Aisha he’d always hated?”
The second the abaya vanished inside the hotel, Yusuf felt the same tearing of flesh from flesh he felt when they pulled him away from the Kaaba and ripped the key out of the lock. The same violent separation. He was in a trance, and when he felt the blow to his stomach he was unprepared, struggling uselessly to break free of his attacker and reach the door that had swallowed Azza, any door …
Click
THE ELEVATOR TOOK AGES TO REACH ITS DESTINATION. ONE CORNER OF HER HEAD was shouting, “Get to the door. Get out. Out!” But the other three were pushing her toward the other door, past the single purple orchid that reminded her of her mother’s dress stuffed into the window that had been nailed shut and of Aisha’s murmur in her ear:
The first time we were alone together you asked me, “Who is the man who’s touching you now? Who’s the one who makes you feel? Who brings you to life?”
I am black,
My eyes are black,
My hair is black,
My heart is black,
My blood is black. Does blackness come from too much touching?
Or from never being touched?
She opened the door to the suite slowly and walked in, coming face to face with him immediately. The only thing separating them was the wild purple of the orchid, and the brilliant green of those words:
A click: she felt it deep in her spine, like the sudden flowing feeling after a tooth’s been pulled out. Had the door clicked shut or had she snapped?
Lighter
AMIDST THE EXPECTANT SILENCE THAT LAY OVER THE INTERCONTINENTAL Hotel, Khalid al-Sibaykhan’s assistant stood in a room at the end of a corridor, feeling utterly lost. He tossed the envelope he’d received from al-Sibaykhan onto the bed, the bank transfer receipt still inside it. So many zeros his eyes got lost and his heart skipped a beat as he skimmed to the end of the figure, while al-Sibaykhan watched him mockingly, expecting him to cry. Yes, it was all tragic and overblown, but he was much too dry on the inside to wring tears from the veins beneath his skin.
Those zeros were beyond his wildest dreams. Not just that; there were also the promotions that would see him reach the highest ranks possible in the field of criminal investigation. With al-Sibaykhan, life was all elevators, and steel and glass structures soaring into the skies. Life was nothing but endless zeros—everyone recognized al-Sibaykhan’s zero-shaped logo—to the extent that you couldn’t even keep up with your account balances. Al-Sibaykhan’s word was an axis for the whole world to collapse and revolve around; he himself had spent his life revolving …