The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Tell me, am I still “beautiful and refreshing like a desert moon?” That’s what you said the day it snowed in Bonn. Has my attachment to you made me ugly?

  It was you who, with a pat on the shoulder, spoke my today, my yesterday, and my tomorrow. Dream-Words. Words of languor that put me to sleep under your hands, words like tiny thrones I sit on and hop between like a pampered child.

  Aisha

  Detective Nasser flung the message away, then moved Aisha’s name closer to the center of the circle. The hound in him said, “She ought to be put to death.” He resisted an urge to stick a finger down his throat and vomit up the bile brought on by Aisha’s email, the way she’d smuggled this stranger into the Lane of Many Heads. From her few words it was clear that Aisha had a ticking desire inside of her—accompanied by treacherous urges that, as he knew from his experience of criminal practices, were embedded inside every woman. Nevertheless, he couldn’t yank out the wire or predict when the timer was going to go off.

  Much as his inner hound was tensed, ready to pounce, it was actually the beating arousal of his inner man that spurred him on. He wanted to see this dissolute woman stripped naked before him. Detective Nasser found himself trailing after a short phrase in a message that wasn’t numbered like the others.

  FROM: Aisha

  You answered all my doubts about whether you still had feelings for me when you said “I see you!”

  This is my face. Are we the ones who carve these maps onto our own skin? Eastern faces like mine are heavy with sadness, while your faces are like plastic, without even a single wrinkle of suffering. I believe our souls are old. These are secondhand souls, encumbered with the weight of having known life and death.

  In my early adolescence, I read that pain was what scorched away our faults to reveal the gold beneath,

  I would often sit and experiment with pain, from a starting point of no pain,

  I had something deeper than pain, this need for something, for a hand, here,

  I had this photo of a tree trunk that had been gouged by ibexes, sharpening their horns for the mating season in spring,

  every time I looked at those marks on the trunk I felt that deeper-than-pain …

  It had never occurred to me that I’d ever say what I’m saying to you now, because I knew you couldn’t read my Arabic … But now … It’s caught up with me. I won’t say “pain,” it’s something deeper, what lies beneath all pain …

  Has my face turned into a tragic Kabuki mask?

  Aisha

  He couldn’t stop. Nasser flicked through page after page, racing against the German guy toward this brazen, naked woman. From the mental archive of crimes he’d seen, he knew that Meccan women were experts in unspoken love: in his interrogations he often had to rely on slips of the tongue, or otherwise use all kinds of “pressure” and even threats to extract their deepest secrets and use them to unravel the knots … This one, on the other hand, had written her love down; her own words had indicted her, even if they’d never left her drafts folder. Words weren’t supposed to be a striptease like this—certainly not those of a woman from the Holy City. If Aisha was the victim, this was the first time Nasser had ever come across a victim who insisted upon documenting her own improprieties from beyond the veil of death.

  Detective Nasser started when a cadet appeared in the doorway to tell him his shift was over, and wondered guiltily whether the cadet had been able to read the sinful thoughts on his face.

  “God spare us this nasty business,” the cadet began abruptly. “Did you hear? Officer Ali’s taken over the investigation into the theft of the key of the Kaaba. They found the thief dead and half-eaten by dogs in Umm al-Doud, outside Mecca.”

  “Seriously?!” Nasser was irritated by the junior officer’s lack of ceremony.

  “They should’ve assigned the case to you, sir. Everyone in the crime unit said that there was no choice but to give it to Nasser …”

  “That’s kind of you to say, but my hands are full at the moment.”

  “What a curse it’ll be if they can’t find the key! If I were handling the investigation, I wouldn’t be so sure that the young guy who attacked the thief isn’t an accomplice. What if he’s got the key? The maintenance company went through the drain and the pipes, but they couldn’t find anything.”

  “With a lively imagination like that, you could be a first-rate detective.” The cadet blushed. The police hound in Nasser perked up at the mention of the theft of the key to the Kaaba, but he ignored it. He was itching to get back to the naked emails in private.

  “What will happen to the Muslims of the world if we don’t find the key? Does that mean that God has shut the door to His house in our faces? Are we cursed?”

  “They’ll just have to cast a new key until they can solve the puzzle of the stolen one,” replied Nasser in an attempt to end the conversation.

  “They’ve tried several times, sir, but all of the keys have broken in the lock. They might have to take the whole door off …”

  “They just need to find a specialist locksmith; that’s all there is to it.” Nasser moved toward the door so the cadet was obliged to leave. As he was leaving, Nasser paused and returned to his desk. He picked up the box of papers where he’d put the file of Aisha’s emails and then left without hesitation, as if he were simply leaving work at the end of the day with his things. When he got into his car, the hound growled: “You’ve really got yourself mixed up in it now.”

  Fragments

  HE CARRIED THE PAPERS TO HIS SMALL APARTMENT IN THE ZAHIR NEIGHBORhood. It wasn’t much more than a large bedroom with a table and hotplate in one corner and a small bathroom off to the left. Two whole decades of his prime had been chewed over by this place.

  Words from the letters and diaries he’d been reading had clung to his body, and they began to tickle him, arouse him. He reined in the eager police hound inside of him, letting the man take over. He dumped the papers on the bed and threw his work jacket over the back of a chair. Then he stripped off his pants and faced his own short, stocky body in the mirror. He ran a hand over his muscles, and as it sank lower, he asked himself: “How do you think a girl like Azza or Aisha would react to a body like this?” It took him some time to satisfy the eyes and hands gasping and spasming over his virility, to ride out their agonizing, ecstatic wave. He was sweating by the time he was finished.

  He looked around sheepishly as if apologizing to an imaginary audience. He felt as if the hound inside had been watching him through indifferent eyes. He walked to the bathroom, averting his gaze from the small mirror that reflected his body from the shoulders up, turned on the faucet and submitted to the gush of water, soaping and scrubbing away every trace of what he’d just done. Wrapped in a towel, he went back out into the room and quickly made himself a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich with cucumber and greens. His body was still alert and in no mood for clothes, so he lay back down on the bed naked, enjoying the sensuous touch of skin on soft sheets. He could feel the cotton of the pillowcase and covers all the way down his back to his legs as he lay half-watching the forty-five-inch television, which he’d paid for in installments over three years so as to give his cramped room a view of oceans and mountains and to allow him to play host to seductive women whose nubile company he could now enjoy every evening.

  He opened a file of letters that lay on his bedside table, ignoring the damp box on the floor below him—complete with his own personal signature across the cover of one of the diaries—and began to eat his sandwich. With one ear on the sports channel, he trained his eyes on Aisha’s emails and continued reading where he’d left off, letting every page and word trace its imprint on his naked body.

  From: Aisha

  Subject: Message 3

  Do you remember how many times you had to wake me up after a massage? You used to run the back of your finger up my cheek to my temple …

  Did you know that you were the first person to ever pat me on the back? At our house, love used t
o pause at the front door to stick out its spines like a hedgehog before crossing the threshold. Love could only be found in my father’s pockets and my mother’s pots and pans: if you wanted to know how much you were loved, you had to count how much money Dad spent and how many meals Mom cooked.

  My father couldn’t afford to be extravagant on a schoolteacher’s salary, but he did indulge us with little treats from time to time. On Friday evenings he used to take us out and buy us each a shawarma sandwich and a plain baguette, and we’d divide the meat between the two to fill us up. My grandmother used to like to say that we had snakes in our bellies eating our food, which is why we were always hungry. My father never stopped trying to trick those snakes into feeling full.

  That was one of our sacred rituals; fruit was another. My father did everything he could to make sure we each had an orange a day and one peach a week, and a bunch of grapes in summertime. My youngest brother, who was the apple of my father’s eye, used to get a peach every day during the summer, and we’d all watch him eat it, hovering about like crows for him to throw away the stone because he never figured out how to strip it right down to the pit and we were more than happy to see to the task.

  You said you grew up feeling like you’d been pushed away, isolated, after your parents sent you to that boarding school when you were six years old. That you graduated at eighteen without ever having felt the touch of another heart. You told me you’d been born tough, but not tough enough to swallow your mother’s cold heart at breakfast. I think you’re alienated and untamed, that you’ve come to me now looking for the jungle. You’re chasing after crumbled bridges that lead into the void with no route back, not even a glimpse of what you’ve left behind, should you look over your shoulder …

  In your hands I began again, starting from nothingness, nothing but pain, like someone weighed down by a twin around their neck.

  While your hands massage and dig into the hidden pain, I suddenly wake to find my heart halfway round the racetrack, doing eighty miles a minute. It slipped away from me somehow while I was distracted, leaving my mouth dry and my lips cracked and salty.

  Your hands must have felt its first kick, its acceleration and the willfulness of its first shot, before my head even noticed you or it.

  My heart took me by surprise that day and slipped away to alert my body, as your hand massaged this shattered pelvis of mine. I no longer know which bits of me are metal and which are living bone. I imagine that now, in the heat, it’s becoming acutely sensitive, that it burns at the touch of your large hand, those fingers. “My hands are beyond all standards of human beauty,” you said sheepishly.

  I imagine that they’re long and slender and stretch from Bonn to Mecca, that they were created in a single, smooth movement out of clay that’s still fresh and dripping. After all these months, I can feel your fingers, clay-like and soft, against my spine, kneading into it a suppleness I hardly recognize in my own body.

  That hand of yours kneaded my back. You cared. Your palm was gentle, as though you were touching a child. When I received your email I understood that you believed—though I most certainly do not—that our paths may cross again somewhere down the line.

  I need to stop writing. As you know, before the light forces my eyes open and my body surges with an uncanny energy, just at that moment, I feel I could fall in love every dawn, or drop dead.

  For years, before I met you, I used to stand at the door waiting for Khalil to arrive in his taxi to take me to school, and when the light burst through, the inexplicable eruption always made me nervous. The accident had put me on the shelf, useless and neglected, but I couldn’t shake off the wakefulness and the early-morning bursts of energy. To be honest with you, I was relieved to be done with the gloom of being a teacher. Did I say “teacher”? What a joke! I was just one of the neighborhood’s many tentacles; one of a countless many who wage war against fate, stifling young girls.

  I was essentially a timekeeper. My only duty was to ring the bell to signal the end of one class and the beginning of the next. The poor spinster headmistress and I fought a minor war over that bell.

  But I also mastered the art of catharsis. I used to stand as still as an idol in the schoolyard in the mornings in front of the lines of students—two-hundred lungs burning with life, arrayed before me like mummies—for a whole hour as the morning radio program was broadcast. They feigned interest in the antiquated parables and didactic poems in classical Arabic, and the stories that had failed to make anyone laugh since the beginning of the last century. Two hundred granite faces. Any hint of a smile, any meaningful glance, any simple string of beads, any colored hair ribbon or trace of nail polish, any attempt at self-expression at all was enough to get a girl dragged up to the stage where I stood. There I would slowly, carefully—and in front of two hundred pairs of horrified eyes—rip out and crush this self-expression before it could blossom.

  I was the executioner in the doll factory. Their bodies were our private property and my job was to color them, head to toe, in a drab gray moderated only by black shoes and white hair ribbons.

  It was for this instinctive sternness that I earned the headmistress’s confidence and the right to ring the bell now and then without having to wait for a nod from her or a jerk of her finger.

  Does the Lane of Many Heads have a problem with girls? Maybe it’s this: life is a scorpion’s egg that emerges from its mother’s back and then, as soon as it hatches, fatally stings its mother.

  Every move we make taunts the Lane, its many heads and its octopoid tentacles. Do you know how many heads have sprung up in the spot where we dared to sever just one? With one of its heads, the Lane of Many Heads imagines us as untouched virgins, and with another, as lascivious sex dolls.

  The challenge we face is how to be superwomen, a cross between our Bedouin grandmothers who never raised their face-veils, not even when eating with their husbands, and the pop stars and dancers who writhe and moan in music videos.

  I feel like there’s a woman made of stone inside of me.

  My salvation lies in writing to her.

  Your bird,

  Aisha.

  P.S. This reminds me of my father’s cane. My father died, but the cane remained, beyond the reach of death.

  We, the children of the Lane of Many Heads, grew up, every last one of us, in the shadow of a cane, stored inside a water tank to keep it supple, ready to spill and drink our blood.

  When I first got back from Bonn, alone with the weight of the empty house and the death of my family pressing down on me, I was stopped short by the sight of the cane resting in the water tank in the hallway that was connected by a pipe to the drinking fountain, which stood in the alley for the benefit of passersby. My father hoped that the chilled water of that public drinking fountain in which his cane lay would clear his path to heaven; my mother used to clean the tap diligently so as to make sure she would slip in along with him.

  Maybe the cane gave me a frightful look (or maybe it recited the Fatiha for my father’s soul) as I walked over, picked it up out of the water, and set it on the shelf to the right of the entrance, leaving it panting with thirst.

  P.P.S. The first time I felt you, and I closed my hand around your stem, you surprised me by saying “This is what I wanted to give my mother!” Something about what you said made me ache deep inside, but I was absent. Do you know how old I am now? I’m in my thirties, and I was even married once, but still I’d never uprooted a man before. Taking a man’s very being in your grasp. Now I know that our hands were made for this, to hold this root of life, to feel this erection from head to toe. You had no idea how new it all was to me, the shock of discovery. You were absent, lost in your past and your mother:

  “Recently my mother confessed that she loved me more than any of my brothers. But I was born stubborn, a heavenly creature, while my mother is a peasant, the salt of the earth. Already when I was three, I used to go exploring in the woods near our farm, and they would come looking for me at sund
own. I’d spend the whole day as far away from human contact as I could; the plants of the forest fed me. My mother, on the other hand, lost her heart growing up an orphan. There was a big bundle of fear where her heart should have been: a fear of life and the thought of giving in to its joys.”

  You kept talking while I, Aisha, usually so sober, was absent, crazy, trying to shake you out of your depression.

  “Aisha, let me explain it to you. The sun was in Gemini when I was born, you see. We Geminis have a problem with either-ors. We see all the choices that life offers us as possible. Nothing’s forbidden to us. As far as we’re concerned, we can accept every proposal without having to discriminate. But sunlight brings some clarity to this problem of either-ors, allowing us to see past multiplicity to the singularity beyond.”

  Am I allowed to say that all of you Westerners are Geminis, while here we’re all handcuffed Libras?

  You once said to me, “You’re a bird, Aisha. I’ll be your stretch of sky so long as you promise to never stop soaring joyfully.”

  Reading these words, Nasser suddenly felt like his body had been buried alive in an endless pit for the past thirty years. Buried beneath stacks of investigations, murders, betrayals, clues. Now Aisha’s words taunted him; they dared him to jump up and discover that he was still alive.

  She wasn’t the only one who submitted to the hand of a healer against her back. No, Nasser al-Qahtani was also lying down and baring his back for her to massage his eternally tense muscles and finally loosen up their toughness.

  Nasser peeled himself from his victim’s repose and stood up, angry with himself. When he went to take off the dog’s collar, he found it sound asleep. He turned out the lights and lay back down. He was still tossing and turning when the sun came up. He didn’t bother with breakfast, just put on his uniform, drawing the sturdy khaki fabric around him tightly, and left the house.