by Raja Alem
All of a sudden, the pulsating energy in Yusuf’s head sputtered out, the crane ground to a standstill and he slumped back in the seat. His will to react had dried up, as had any desire to keep going. He sat pallidly in the cabin waiting for the guards to surround him and escort him away. But his pursuers had also frozen in position, their cars forming a wide circle around him. None of them dared to go nearer in case the madman who had stolen the crane caught them by surprise. Khalil took advantage of the suspense and drove closer to the cabin, opening the passenger door for Yusuf.
“Jump,” he urged, with the warmth of an older brother. “Let’s get you out of here.” Yusuf studied Khalil’s face. A current of electricity zipped around in his head. He was at a loss. Was Khalil laying a trap or genuinely offering a helping hand? The Khalil he knew excelled in bullying both Yusuf and Azza, especially on Saturdays when they’d get back from their sheep’s head picnic at the top of Mount Abu Qubays. Envious and spiteful, Khalil would greet them: “So? Feel better now? Now you’ve eaten our ancestor Adam’s head and drunk the aspirin of Abu Qubays?” Azza would stick her long tongue out at him before the refreshing cool of the alleyway swallowed her up. Yusuf thought Khalil, with that malicious look of his, was capable of swallowing Azza’s head whole. From the crane cabin, Yusuf scrutinized the face that his mother Halima had always likened to that of a broken-winged eagle.
From the corner of his eye, Yusuf could see that his pursuers had gotten out of their vehicles and were creeping toward the crane. His neighbor from the Lane was Yusuf’s only hope of escape, so without another glance over his shoulder he leapt out of the cabin and threw himself into the seat beside Khalil.
“Fool!” Khalil cackled as he sent the car shooting forward at cinematic speed. The brakes shrieked and the wheels spit dust into the faces of their pursuers. Yusuf just gazed pop-eyed at the bodies of Adam, Eve, and Seth, which hung fused together like an obelisk in the sky over Mecca.
Memories on a Shelf
WHY DO PEOPLE PUT MORE FAITH IN WHAT THEY READ ON PAPER THAN WHAT’S scrawled onto clay or talismans? Look at the filthy plastic bags muddying my unpaved surface and you’ll see what my many heads consume and reuse.
Nasser plowed on with Yusuf’s diaries, ignoring all the intersections and stop signs that I, the Lane of Many Heads, placed in his way, going through page after page of Yusuf’s memoirs, all of which pointed to the fact that Yusuf was Salih the foundling’s closest friend. Salih was also known as the Eunuchs’ Goat—but then, I don’t want to implicate any of my heads in that headache. To tell the truth, these young people and the schizophrenic crazes they go in for are driving a stake into my historical behind. This guy Nasser … How could he ever understand that the seemingly trivial apparitions in my fishing net of misery were rooted in history? Like that nickname “the Eunuchs’ Goat.” At some stage in history, the castrated chamberlains who’d consecrated their lives to serving the Sanctuary became famous for a virile billy goat they kept. Livestock owners used to get the billy goat, known to everyone as “the eunuchs’ goat,” to inseminate their flock, borrowing him for several days at a time and letting him loose among their goats so he could spread his exemplary genes. The only condition was that the borrower was responsible for feeding him for the duration of the loan, and the borrowers were indeed very generous, if only so as to ensure the quality and fecundity of his seed. Most of the city’s blessed stock were descended from the eunuchs’ goat.
Salih got the nickname on account of his rosy vigor when he when found, as a newborn, by al-Ashi the cook in the yard outside his kitchen. Al-Ashi and his wife Umm al-Sa’d adopted the baby. There’s more to the story than that, but Nasser likes to sit in the cafe, like he’s doing now sipping his coffee coolly, and flicking through the diaries, so I’ll have to pay attention, to find out what stories Yusuf has been inventing about the heads on my shoulders:
February 6, 2000
Just like every morning, I bumped into al-Ashi at the entrance to the grocer’s. He turned his head as if he were following the scent of something delicious cooking.
“Your ‘window’ was longer than usual today,” he commented. The shop boys and a customer stopped to hear what he had to say about my article. His verdict would determine the way they felt about me.
A cat squeals, its tail caught in the closing shop door, and shatters Nasser’s concentration. I, the Lane of Many Heads, will have to intervene and continue the story from my point of view, to demonstrate just how peculiar al-Ashi is.
At exactly six in the morning, as precise as an hourglass, not a second before or after, al-Ashi went over, as he always did, to the newspaper stand that one of the shop boys had just wheeled into place outside the store, and stood at the side of the road, rifling through Umm al-Qura newspaper. Having enjoyed many gifts from his kitchen, the shop boys turned a blind eye, though they knew he was looking for Yusuf’s daily column, entitled “A Window,” that surveyed this, the Mother of Cities. He read the column slowly and with pleasure, and measured it with his handspan before closing the newspaper, returning it to the stand, and reaching automatically for the official newspaper, al-Riyadh. He handed over the money and turned his back on Yusuf’s window, secure in the knowledge that it was there behind him.
Tucking the newspaper under his arm, al-Ashi disappeared into the courtyard of his kitchen.
He pulled out his immortal chair, its tired iron legs screeching on the cement floor. The bare chair was cool in a way that made it seem as if it looked forward to his morning perusals. He extracted his glasses from the cloth tied around his middle like a sarong, then sat down, stretched his arms and legs out to the full length of the newspaper and lost himself in the front page of Al-Riyadh.
“Al-Ashi has connected the transmission wires,” the kitchen boys whispered. The courtyard door was open so no passerby or neighbor could fail to notice that the reading ritual had begun, and that the outside world had begun to flood into the neighborhood through that newspaper.
Umm al-Sa’d sent her stepson the Eunuchs’ Goat down with tea, in one of those tall collectible Kraft cheese glasses, which he placed on the floor to the right of al-Ashi, who let the tea vapors, infused with Umm al-Sa’d’s breaths, waft up to him as he began his second round of reading. “Umm al-Sa’d reads and writes.” I, the Lane of Many Heads, always made sure I kept my heads well out of reach of the deluge of that woman, who could sweep walls away and always cleaned up in the stock market. Nevertheless, I observed with interest the stupid morning assemblies she held for her acolytes in her apartment on the first floor of the apartment block that belonged to her father the milkman and was known as the Arab League building.
That morning, Umm al-Sa’d was tense as she greeted Kawthar, the wife of Yabis the sewage cleaner, whose oldest son Ahmad was married to Aisha the cripple and worked as a PA to some big shots. He had promised—
Nasser paused the action. He was taken aback by the word cripple.
Ahmad had promised he’d look for somebody who could take care of some papers for the Eunuchs’ Goat, who, having been left to grow up with the cats in al-Ashi’s backyard, had never been granted citizenship, and was now finding it nigh on impossible to get it. In my minds, Ahmad stood out for being a well-connected node: he built relationships with influential people, the kind of people who could turn the sea into tahini, as the saying went, who could fix all the intractable problems I faced when I tried to keep up with progress. He sold permits for music shops, for example, and allowed video games to be played in cafes in exchange for bribes that were peeled from my flesh. He guided me step by step through a series of cosmetic procedures—a total makeover, in fact—the complications of which transformed me into a monster like that woman who got plastic surgery to make herself look like a cat. Ahmad claimed he was doing it all as a favor to me, but the truth was he was sucking my blood on behalf of those people who were biting the flesh off my shoulders.
Umm al-Sa’d slumped regally on her throne in front of her com
puter. Her Internet browser was open at the website of the national stock exchange and the women from the neighborhood were arrayed around her, munching their way through roasted sunflower seeds and the latest news and rumors. They all watched her when she sat up straight and—with a heart like steel—clicked to confirm the purchase of a thousand shares in Shams Ltd., which had been losing value over the past few days. She reclined on her throne once more. The rim of her coffee cup was branded by her garish red lipstick. The numbers on the screen jumped about incessantly, never settling not even for a moment, and each tiny quiver brought new gains for market parasites like Umm al-Sa’d, who would jerk upright with a tremble whenever the value of her shares rose unexpectedly, and with a click, issue the order to sell.
“We’ve pulled it off! Out of the lion’s jaws, and we made a thousand!” The women gave a collective sigh of relief, filling the room with the smell of roasted watermelon seeds. They rallied under the banner of her stock market piracy. They entrusted her with what little wealth they had, giving her power of attorney so she could sell and buy on their behalf in the hope she would bring them unimaginable wealth. This fills me, the Lane of Many Heads, with an overpowering desire to crush that lone female head sprouting up like a parasitic weed among my male heads.
“Women like Umm al-Sa’d must have enormous vaginas that are capable of swallowing up the entire stock exchange, the Lane of Many Heads, and even death itself all in one go!” The idiotic thought took root in the women’s minds as they watched Umm al-Sa’d penetrate the market, leaning toward her computer without bothering to sit up. They called her “Steelballs” behind her back. I’m certain that if the women of the Lane of Many Heads were ever allowed to nominate their own candidate to chair the local council, there wasn’t a single man who’d dare challenge Steelballs. She could win all the women’s hearts with a mere flick of her index finger, which lay poised on the keyboard, and she’d have posed a very real threat if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with the problem of how to secure citizenship for her adopted son, the Eunuchs’ Goat.
“God knows Ahmad’s tried his very best,” Yabis’ wife Kawthar said, relaying her son Ahmad’s message, “but his contacts weren’t shy about putting a figure on it. They want eighty thousand up front and the same again once it’s taken care of.”
Umm al-Sa’d gasped. “Selling favors is like selling shade, or water from the Well of Zamzam. It was the downfall of earlier nations, you know. When the Amalekites lived in Mecca, they were as wealthy as could be but they got greedy. They started renting out the shade and selling water, so God expelled them from Mecca. He hit them with a plague of ants that chased them out of the Sanctuary, and then He drove them away with drought. He sent bountiful rain ahead of them and they followed it, and that’s how He was able to drive them back to Yemen, the birthplace of their forefathers. There they were dispersed and perished. God replaced them with the tribe of Jurhum, but they, too, eventually became greedy and so He exterminated them.”
The history lesson didn’t ruffle the satisfied look on Kawthar’s face. Umm al-Sa’d shifted in her seat, making her displeasure clear, and picked the bowl of red apples up off the side table. The women looked on anxiously as she peeled them methodically one by one, heaping the peels on a plate and chopping out the core and seeds. She then began feeding the slices to her guests, who chewed mechanically, as if carrying out a military order. Umm al-Sa’d herself pounced on the plate of peel. The women watched in disbelief as she wolfed down the entire heap, with inexplicable lust and a dripping red mouth. It only confirmed the legends about her past that the women had tried to put out of their minds. They couldn’t stop watching Umm al-Sa’d, who’d never eaten an apple in her entire life, just apple peels; to them the peels looked like a victory banner that she raised every time she’d fought and triumphed against the injustice of men, a banner bloodied by years of unconscionable imprisonment.
“Newspapers are al-Ashi’s drug. He reads but he doesn’t write. He’s half illiterate.”
The Eunuchs’ Goat liked to spread these kinds of rumors about his adoptive father, and no one knew for sure, or cared very much at all, whether or not al-Ashi really could write. He read closely, engrossed in the pages as if discovering great secrets, obsessively studying the photos of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abd Allah, and Crown Prince Sultan, with whom he was infatuated. He was always cutting their pictures out of the color photograph supplement, and then he’d hang them compulsively on the walls of his lean-to, like a barrier between himself and the greasy-smelling, bloodstained yard; between himself and the eye-shriveling ovens. The photos made him feel a sense of connection between his yard and the aspects of existence that remained out of reach, even for his imagination.
He studied the photos of the soccer players with a sport-obsessed child’s delight, and when he reached the sports supplement he’d always have to pause his reading to adjust his glasses, which had remained unchanged for a quarter-century. In fact, every surprising news item caused him to grab the corner of his sarong, exhale warm air from the depths of his soul, and polish the lenses.
Only then, confident that he could make out even the tiniest news items that lurked in corners almost beyond the reach of his lenses, would al-Ashi cry, “All is well in the world!” Then he’d lean over to take the first sip of the tea his wife, Umm al-Sa’d—the mother of his happiness—had prepared.
The moment the sun touched his feet, he folded up his arms, legs, and the newspaper in one decisive movement, and stood up, adding the paper to the stack on the shelf opposite the door.
As he did every morning, al-Ashi paused and stood with his back to the yard, sipping his tea and contemplating the trove of newspapers arranged according to date and compelling subject matter: he knew, for example, exactly which stack contained the beginning of the terror campaigns and the crackdowns and police raids that followed, and he kept pictures of the dead security forces officers and the list of the country’s thirty-six most wanted.
Al-Ashi cast an extra glance toward the stack of double-sized special editions announcing the deaths of kings—Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, al-Hasan, and Hussein—and news of who would succeed them. This pile contained the telegrams sent to congratulate them on the occasion of their investiture and to commiserate after their funerals.
Here, too, laid out horizontally, he kept the issues that contained special stories: the Lane of Many Heads made a rare appearance in the story about the miracle that was Aisha, the sole survivor of a bus accident that had killed three families from the neighborhood while on their way to Medina. This was followed by Prince Abd al-Aziz’s promise to cover the costs of her treatment in Germany at His Majesty’s personal expense.
Al-Ashi also held on to reports about the performance of the stock exchange and significant donations, and reports about the vast “economic cities” projects inaugurated by King Abd Allah. He stacked these horizontally so he could keep track of their claims.
Half a century’s worth of dust was lined up there neatly; Hamid al-Ashi knew that he was laying his memory out on that shelf: he could forget everything, become as senile as he liked, as long as the box of recollections stayed up there out of dementia’s reach; a standalone repository that he could link up to the void inside his head whenever he felt like it, to become a young man or a child once again—any age from six onward, in fact, because that was the age at which, in this very courtyard, his fascination with newspapers had begun. And just how old was he now? Whenever he was accosted by that question he would steal a furtive glance at the shelf and know that he was as old as that heap of the kingdom’s history, years of growth and plenty that had transformed the yard from the site of slave auctions into al-Ashi’s kitchen. And yet in reality they still hadn’t passed through my, the Lane’s, net of despair except for on that shelf, with its photos of monuments and galas and foundation stones being laid and ribbon-cutting ceremonies with little girls wearing coronets of flowers and clutching golden scissors. He care
fully organized and arranged even during the years after the boom had petered out, years that saw the music shops in the vicinity of his kitchen multiply, closely followed by the kingdom’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the first municipal elections in forty years. Al-Ashi scrutinized the short row near the end and picked out the first photo of a Saudi woman ever published in a local newspaper: it was a photo of the broadcaster Samar alongside Maha. Then he carefully picked out the first angry response to the photos of Saudi women appearing in the pages of newspapers, addressed to all the dailies and weeklies, and even the supplements which carried short news items. The photos became so commonplace after a while that it was almost impossible to continue collecting them one by one so he decided to make do with his archive of the earliest examples. Whenever al-Ashi looked at the row of papers, he had the sensation of a vast female army advancing. It had only just been detected, in the years from 2004 to 2006, but it was decisive and it was sweeping the country. Particularly notable was the news that a number of women had been elected to the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce. The most important photo of them all was the one of Hanadi, the first young woman to obtain a civilian pilot’s license, standing in front of a massive airplane with Prince al-Waleed bin Talal and her parents. This was to mark her joining his aviation firm, and it was accompanied by a two-page-long message of congratulation from the Prince. Al-Ashi took the flood of newspaper-ink faces in warily; perhaps one day Umm al-Sa’d would turn up in the middle of this forward march. There was no point trying to pin down exactly how he felt about that possibility, which would turn the Lane of Many Heads, me, upside down if it came to pass. What if she also decided to publish her memoirs? She would definitely make the front page of all the papers. She’d make a hell of a splash, and anybody who could afford the two riyals for a newspaper would get the chance to see her do it. Goodness knows how many people would read the newspaper that day. Would the readers sense the power of her strong thighs and the vortex that lay between them, a perfect copy of her bright red lacquered lips, which would become a craze every woman would imitate?