The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  All around them women sent cries of supplication to God, begging Him to send down angels who would alight upon their amulets and the clouds of incense that clung to the Sanctuary’s colonnades.

  Hungrily, Yusuf submitted his body to the pull of the black stone and pressed his face into the worn-down surface set in a silver surround, seeking the taste of Azza’s lips among the millions that had imprinted their kisses there over the ages. His mother Halima had inscribed onto their memories what she’d been told by her grandfather: the stone was “one of the great sapphires of Paradise, over three cubits long, which if tossed into water would float—despite its awesome size! When God most exalted took the covenant from Adam’s descendants, He wrote out their destinies and fed them to the black stone. On Judgment Day, the stone will be resurrected with two eyes, a tongue, and lips, to testify to the loyalty of believers and denounce the heresies of infidels.” Azza would always take her time kissing the stone, by way of some secret agreement with the soldier who stood guard beside it. Azza’s tongue never tired of licking the stone, and after its blackness began to drip from her fingers, she started to draw. “We used to think she drew with charcoal,” Yusuf thought to himself, “but in reality she uses the black stone, which she sipped up in those lingering kisses.”

  “Recite the Surah of the Earthquake from the Quran and blow in their direction. They’ll get off your back then …”

  “The Fussilat Surah. If you recite it after evening prayer with the intention of resolving the problems between you, and making the truth known, even your bitterest enemies will be made to come to you, willingly or otherwise, and do right by you.” With hopes of splitting asunder or bringing together, illiterate women and those with enough learning to make out letters exchanged wisdom—both occult and commonsense—while their children listened, awestruck. Yusuf realized that the mystical tokens they shared with one another with the utmost discretion were capable of summoning the angels down from heaven and into a woman’s pocket. He began to understand that a wronged woman could tear open the doors of heaven and cause angels to rain down. These heads wrapped in black, these women prostrating fervently around him, they confirmed his suspicion that a woman’s tears were a dangerous thing, and that to women faith was a dough they baked into bread for food, warmth, and control over their husbands. By feeding her man, she gets her claws into him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the girl who was reciting verses from the Surah of the Jinn to make the future appear before her.

  He would pull Azza away and make her chase him through the colonnades where children played in the shade of the columns’ intertwining capitals under the watchful eyes of the affable sanctuary wardens. Sometimes Yusuf’s gaze would stray upward, and he would see the angels coming to life in the tulip-like adornments atop the columns and inside the gilded circlets that embroidered the ceiling with Quranic verses and the Names of God, angels for whom time stands still in the moment of their revelation. In those venerable colonnades, Yusuf came to understand that art and recitation were synonymous with the sacred. The angels would beckon to him, and he’d fly on his long legs, not stopping until he reached what little remained of Mount Marwa, where Azza would finally catch up with him, narrowly avoiding a collision with the girl who rented out scissors to the pilgrims wanting to cut their hair. Yusuf would stand rooted to the ground, absorbed in thought, in front of the great barrel where the hair piled up in layers, hair of all colors and textures, amassed into the form of a vast birdlike creature. It smelled like the very essence of human desire. A cipher that was shorn during the ritual circumambulation and the running between mountains, cut and brushed off of pilgrims’ napes; the Umrah washed away an entire year’s worth of sins. He’d stand there, enraptured, before the barrel of sins and desires.

  Now, with the awareness of his exile intensifying around him, Yusuf was seized by a sudden need to unburden himself, not only of his sin-drenched hair, but of the life that weighed so heavily upon his shoulders. Next to the doorway leading to the concourse between the mountains, he knelt and offered his head up to the razor of an Ethiopian adolescent, who denuded it in five strokes, leaving its surface smooth and gleaming with a greenish shine. He stood up feeling light, almost transparent, and allowed his toes to sink deep into the talismans and charms that accumulated in the courtyard of the house of God. Surely one of these contained his salvation from the bruising weight of this shadowy persecution.

  Evening prayer was over and night had long since fallen, turning Mecca into a great marble platter overflowing with a neon glow. It was rush hour in the Haram Mosque, with the weary workers coming to find refuge from the tribulations of their day. Wrapped in his ritual ihram, Yusuf walked out of the Sanctuary, stepping over the vast piles of worshippers’ shoes at the King Fahd Gate and crossing the exterior plaza, all beneath the glare of the Vegas-style spotlights trained permanently on the House of God. Yusuf turned around, his back to the shopping mall opposite, and looked at the whiteness of the Mosque, arranging the edge of his ihram so that it covered the side of his face to ward off the glances of curious passersby.

  He was waiting for Mu’az, Dawoud the Imam’s son, who was bouncing like a tennis ball when he arrived. He was a bundle of contradictions—a mixture of pious and modern stuffed into a white Chinese-made tracksuit and sneakers, crowned by an unkempt chest-length beard that looked more like a costume accessory than the real thing. He stood there looking around him for a moment; he obviously hadn’t recognized Yusuf.

  “Mu’az!” Yusuf hissed, causing him to jump.

  “I didn’t recognize you with all the pilgrims here! With your hair completely shaved like that, and that ihram on …”

  “I’m so tired, Mu’az. I’m living like a hobo, and the marble floor’s crushing my bones …” After so much time spent by himself, Yusuf’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “I’d give my life for a soft bed and a pillow.”

  Mu’az gazed at Yusuf’s ghost-like form. “I know somewhere you can stay. Meet me Friday afternoon by the bike shop at the beginning of Mount Hindi …” A clueless look crossed Yusuf’s face for a moment. “You know, the guy we used to call ‘Son of a Hag?’ When he wasn’t watching you used to steal a bike for a ride around the block …” Yusuf nodded, remembering.

  “Take this for now,” Mu’az went on, thrusting two hundred-riyal notes—a generous share of what remained of this month’s wages—into Yusuf’s hesitant hands. To dispel the sudden awkwardness, Mu’az hurriedly began his update from the neighborhood.

  “The Lane of Many Heads is undergoing cosmetic surgery. The sound of strangers’ footsteps in the neighborhood never dies down. They’re digging up Mushabbab’s orchard in search of the amulet. They’ve begun a cleansing campaign to drive the squatters out of their shanties and huts. We went into hovels we never even knew existed. They’ve evicted women and children and beggars who have no one to go to, people living in cellars and beneath roofs made of a few rags strung between two crumbling walls, hordes of people without papers … The Mercedes 4x4s park at the entrance to the alley and out come the surveyors … It’s all so strange. Mutairi the oud seller sold his shop, loaded his instruments onto the back of a truck, and left the Lane of Many Heads … What do you think’s happening? Is this all because of one body?!” Yusuf looked around them. A dozen or so Afghan children were sniffing about, looking for pockets full of booty and soliciting pilgrims’ charity with heaps of prayer beads, prayer rugs, and cheap hats. They carefully skirted around Yusuf, remembering all too well his history of madness.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine what you’re saying …” He fell silent for a moment, then continued. “If we were the kind of people who thought like Mushabbab, I’d say the body was simply a full stop at the end of the last chapter, and that this is the beginning of a new one… Maybe this is how progress is meant to happen …”

  After Mu’az had faded away, Yusuf stayed facing the Sanctuary, absentmindedly watching the doves ascend the clouds of incense, t
racing circles in the sky above the house of God as if to guard it through the night.

  It was midnight by the time Yusuf returned to the Sanctuary. He stopped to take a last look out at Mecca and his gaze settled on Mount Abu Qubays, the home of many legends. Its peaks were swathed in darkness, with not even a window from which light might trickle out to passersby or a lantern carelessly left on a doorstep. The mountaintop had been completely shorn of its houses and left to sink into ravenous emptiness. All of a sudden, there was a light. That oughtn’t to have been unusual, but a jolt of electricity tore through Yusuf’s mind, sparking the dry tinder of his insanity. To him the hesitant flicker of light was like a shriek of death or a desperate cry for help. Yusuf ran back to the pillar in the colonnade next to al-Salam Gate where he stashed his bundle of clothes, and quickly changed out of his ritual ihram into an ordinary robe whose aged cotton had yellowed slightly, wrapping his headscarf around his face. Then he left his hideout and ran—on a mission to save something, whatever it was—in the heights of Abu Qubays.

  For a moment, Yusuf was a child again on a regular Saturday morning outing. When they were little, his mother Halima would walk them both from the Lane of Many Heads out to Mount Abu Qubays, passing through the Small Market just outside the Sanctuary’s Farewell Gate on the way; it was the gateway through which anyone leaving Mecca had to pass. As they walked through the market, they were awash in the laughs and cries of vendors. Their eyes gorged themselves on the vivid greens that vied for the attention of their senses. Pyramids of dew-dappled tomatoes were ringed by rows of parsley bunches, fragrant mint and radishes, and the pumpkins, stacked on the ground in a pyramid, toppled over and rolled about at shoppers’ feet. Every morning, camels who’d started their journey at dawn would deliver the succulent bounty of the orchards and gardens of Ta’if: al-Shafa, al-Hada, Wadi Mihrim, and Wadi Fatma, to market.

  Yusuf’s hunger—a hunger for Azza and Azza alone—would surge as he watched her surrender her senses to the scents of the Small Market. She would dash to the stalls that sold miro kebab, where she’d score one of the deep-fried balls of meat mixed with millet. The doughnut vendor was generous too, drenching his fried creations in sugar or seasoning them liberally with pepper. They’d stop to look at the great pots of fava beans cooking in homemade ghee and listen to the tune of the wooden pestles grinding up bread in big vats and mixing it with honey or banana to make ma’soub, until finally Halima would take them to the King of Heads. The King of Heads sold the finest sheep’s head meat in Mecca. Like a sculptor he would hew out the choicest morsels for Halima, wrap the lot up in brown paper and hand it to Yusuf, saying: “Here you go, my man. Carry this for your dear ladies.”

  With the paper package tucked under Yusuf’s arm, Halima would lead the two children up the steep slope of Mount Abu Qubays. Their ascent was easy and spontaneous, without any formalities, at the start. They followed along dusty tracks lined with old houses bearing roofs decorated with perforated gypsum. Collapsed skylights had left many houses open to the elements; they’d been replaced with a layer of bare wood, like a cry of “Lord help us!” Halima encouraged the children to be tough as they continued on their journey upward. Planted on the rooftops around them, elderly men betrayed by their crippled knees sat watching, stinking of Vicks and chicken fat—the prescription of choice for arthritis—their legs stretched out in front of them like flayed rabbits. In their stiff white cloth caps and faded colored waistcoats, they sat there like a collective memory going stale, watching passersby walking up and down the hill, watching what took place and what didn’t on the benches out in front of the houses—nothing ever did happen, in fact, except for the wait until the next prayer, when they would join their families and pray, looking out over the rows of devotees in the Sanctuary below.

  The young Yusuf’s body memorized the benches outside each of the houses on the mountains around the Sanctuary—which lay like a navel below, as if Mecca were a big crater, its four sides plunging down toward the House of God and the Kaaba at its center—and the lines of innate wisdom etched onto the foreheads of the old men. They, too, were crumbling, dilapidated. Halima would urge the two on, and they’d continue upward toward the open summit, nearer and nearer to God. As he climbed, the blood would pump more violently in Yusuf’s temples and he’d lose the ability to see out of his left eye, seeing only with the right, which was trained on the sky, while Mecca and its Sanctuary, the corners where the four Sunni schools of law were taught, and the domed roof over the Well of Zamzam, lay down to his left.

  As they ascended, little Azza’s eyes would pop out like an insect’s so she could see in all directions, and her skin would lose color as her blood drained out into the well below them until they eventually made it to the Cave of Treasures. The opening received them like an iwan set into the rocks. Goat droppings and traces of previous visitors gave the place some life. From the clearing in front of the cave, it looked like it was just a crevice in the mountain, its mouth blocked by stones stacked up like a puzzle without any mortar. According to Yusuf’s many historical reference works, it was built by Noah, peace be upon him, to cover the final resting-place of Adam and Eve and their son Seth, who had been given ninety tablets of divine secrets and knowledge of humanity’s destiny from on high and had hidden them in that spot where they lay in wait for the person who would discover them. Yusuf and Azza’s imaginations were piqued by the cracks in that stone curtain, which must have been there to allow a little light to filter into where the three lay, but they never dared to steal a glance into the cavern. In Yusuf’s history books, it said that the rocks had been softened by the flood and that Noah’s feet had sunk into them as he strode across the eastern cliffs, leaving footprints a meter long. Visitors would gather around them every Saturday morning, tracing the steps of the Prophet Noah as he came to return Adam’s coffin, which he’d carried on the Ark, after the great flood receded. Only today did Yusuf realize that the stone on which they’d always had their picnic was a pool of water left over from the flood, the depression left by Noah’s foot as he went to bid his final farewell to Adam. There, Halima would lay out their picnic and divide up the sheep’s head, picking out the tapered end of the tongue meat for her son to spear and butcher, and the three of them would devour their snack by the graveside of Seth, son of Adam. Yusuf would be overcome by a manic urge to write, his pen quivering at the thought of those ninety tablets Seth had left to him, which held the secret to his nine hundred years, and to humanity’s longevity—a secret that Seth buried before he was buried himself beside his father in the cave on Abu Qubays.

  Halima would explain to Azza’s father, Sheikh Muzahim, that the aim of these trips to Abu Qubays was to seek healing—to cure Azza of her terror of falling asleep and Yusuf of his headaches. Meccans believed that eating sheep’s head there strengthened the heart and cured congenital headaches. Yusuf thought back to Azza’s heart when she was a little girl, squeezing an eyeball between her molars, biting into it, causing the white of the eye to spurt out onto her tongue. The thought of what she was doing would seize her suddenly and she’d spit the white fat out.

  “Don’t spit out God’s blessing. He’ll strike you blind!”

  So then she’d bite into the head of a spring onion and her eyes would water. He would watch her and wait for the sunset, which signaled it was time to head home, hoping that the moon would rise and break upon her face in the same place that people claim it broke upon the Prophet’s face—peace be upon him—and Yusuf’s pounding headache would make the scene at the top of the mountain wobble and blur. It occurred to him that when he stood at Azza’s side, holding her tiny melting cotton-candy hand as they gazed down on the dizzying sight of the pilgrims circumambulating the Kaaba, they must have appeared taller than Noah’s ark and the graves of Adam, Eve, and their son Seth with their long-destroyed tombstones. In Yusuf’s history, it wasn’t just the Kaaba that was sacred. Mecca’s mountains were existential secrets and healing.

  A great rum
bling noise tore Yusuf back from his past to the hungry, empty present. The night was pitch-black with no moon to relieve its agony. When he opened his eyes, he found himself facing an imposingly high wooden barrier, which protected a construction site on that same mountain peak. He could feel the rock beneath his feet tremble: under cover of night, colossal machines were grinding away. Yusuf leapt over the fence, landing on his bad knee inside the construction site. Just a few meters away from where he’d landed, a bulldozer sank its teeth into the stone wall around Adam, Eve and Seth’s final restingplace. Rock after rock fell from the painstakingly stacked wall. The puzzle was disintegrating into chaos. Letters, black and white, piled up and rolled away, tracing out scattered lines of poetry and proverbs. Yusuf was too worried to take too close a look at the destiny that he imagined was written upon the ninety tablets Seth had received from the Lord at the dawn of creation.

  Behind the bulldozer, the hoist of an enormous crane rose up, its fangs closed around a shrouded bundle shaped like a pointed obelisk. Each side of the obelisk was a body. Yusuf shook with terror: those were the bodies of Adam, Eve, and Seth, huddled together defensively as the crane wrenched them out of Abu Qubays and hauled them into the air for eviction. In the blink of an eye, Yusuf too sprung into the air, propelled by his good knee, stupefying the Ethiopian crane-driver who was suddenly shoved out of his seat as Yusuf took the controls. Sirens ripped through the night at Abu Qubays and glaring headlights surged at the crane. Yusuf struggled to control the machine, which lurched forward, swinging the pyramid-shaped bier through the air and smashing into the oncoming attackers. He had no choice but to save this ancient treasure from the construction—or rather, destruction—site. As the crane crashed through the site’s main gate, Yusuf was startled by a streak of yellow and a squeal of brakes off to his right. The taxi driver who’d nearly hurtled into him stuck his head out of the window to curse at him. For all the pandemonium and the fizzing, popping madness in his brain, Yusuf was fully lucid and recognized the driver. He could see it was Khalil, who’d once been a pilot and also his rival for Azza, though he was several years older. The contrast suddenly appeared absurd to Yusuf: to fight for Azza in the Lane of Many Heads was surely more worthwhile than fighting over stones in the House of God!