by Raja Alem
The detective stood up suddenly, and as though he’d been sleepwalking, he saw the world Mu’az inhabited, took note, and left. He wouldn’t be returning to him as a potential suspect.
Nasser went back to some of Yusuf’s articles, which spanned two years. He read an article by Yusuf on the unprecedented and simultaneous rises in expenditure in three sectors (real estate, psychiatry and cosmetic surgery, and livestock, specifically camels and goats) in which he tried to uncover the links between them. He noted how Yusuf compared—in red ink—the disparity between the value of his friend the Eunuchs’ Goat and the market price for goats, which averaged as much as 160,000 riyals for a billy goat.
The detective rifled through, looking for mention of the kid Salih, known to all as the Eunuchs’ Goat. At Imam Daoud’s Quran memorization classes, the children had sat in a circle bisected by a blue curtain, the girls on one side and the boys on the other. The sweet little boy had fallen in love with the round protrusion in the curtain where the girl Sa’diya’s elbow poked through. He’d spent many evenings breathing in the smoke of his father’s cooking and the smoke of their ridicule for being head over heels for a girl’s elbow. Salih was tied to an invisible rope that ran between al-Ashi’s kitchen and the mosque to keep him from going out to the main road and falling into the hands of the immigration police.
A Window for Azza
August 16, 2005
It’s summer, you see, when everything around us dies. The Lane of Many Heads flops limply like a salted fish laid out in the sun to dry, and our burning hearts, desperate to escape the putrid stagnation, eat away at us.
Every summer I spend with you, Azza, brings such a conflict. The days stretch and my patience shrinks; I can’t stand you being hidden away from me, I can’t stand all these Meccan windows shutting in my face. When night comes, I happily tear off my clothes, knowing that I’m peeling away the barriers between us. That is, if you too shed your layers.
Our constant complaints had driven Mushabbab crazy so he decided to test us: “What are your greatest fears?” he asked. “Lay them out on the rug in front of me and I’ll squash them for you like bugs.”
“The immigration police,” said the Eunuchs’ Goat, retching with sour fear at the thought. “The deportation truck with the bars over the windows … It paralyzes me. I’m trapped in the alley, and if I do leave, I’m blinded by visions of plainclothes immigration police. At every bend in the road I expect them to pounce and drag me away. Where would they send me? Me, the one whose umbilical cord they cut in the dirt in the yard outside the kitchen, nameless, voiceless; I only learned to speak as an adolescent. Will I live and die without ever leaving the Lane of Many Heads?”
When it was my turn, the trump card I’d hoped for didn’t materialize. When I posed that prying question to myself, I realized that I, Yusuf, am the source of my own fear. My thin body is possessed by Awaj ibn Anaq, the giant of legend from the time of Noah. I am chained to the distant past, but I move around on a spaceship. Everything around me is automated, but my mind belongs to legends and the time before.
Maybe my fossilized body needs a quick renovation.
It occurred to me to surprise him by turning the question back on him: “So, Mushabbab, what’s your greatest fear?” But I chickened out. I knew Mushabbab was our axis: if he weakened or slipped, our entire circle would collapse.
It made perfect sense to us: no fear was so great that a woman’s abaya couldn’t fix it.
Mushabbab wrapped the Eunuchs’ Goat up in it carefully and we all bundled into Khalil the Pilot’s taxi. When we approached the checkpoint, Mushab bab instructed him to slump limply in the abaya. The indifference in the soldier’s gesture as he waved us through sent tingles down the Goat’s spine.
It was as if he’d turned feverish when he realized we’d crossed the sanctuary boundaries and were headed toward Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast. Tales of the mermaids there had burned holes in the imaginations of the young men in the Lane of Many Heads.
“The chicks in Jeddah, sweet lord…” We weren’t going there to check out God’s gifts, though. Mushabbab directed us along the ring road toward the old Jeddah airport.
The sun had risen by the time we got there. Stretching before us was an expanse half a kilometer wide, carpeted with men and women of all colors and races. The image of people assembled for the Day of Judgment came to mind.
“This is where everyone who wants to abandon the petroleum paradise flees to. Here in the open air is where workers take refuge when they’re waiting to be picked up by the immigration police. It’s the rapid delivery service back to the homeland,” said Mushabbab.
“Some people wait a week or even a month before someone comes along and picks them up,” added Khalil the Pilot. “Some even end up having to bribe soldiers to hurry the process along.”
“One man’s hell is another man’s heaven.”
Mushabbab’s proverb was directed at the Eunuchs’ Goat, who quickly asked, “You mean they don’t round up the people without papers here in Jeddah?”
“Nah, they round up bribes: one to get you a residence permit and another to deport you. Right, out.” Mushabbab gestured to the Goat to get out of the taxi. He left him there with those waiting people, while we stopped at a distance to observe.
The section editor at the Umm al-Qura newspaper had deliberately drawn a veil over that window onto the hell of deportation. “These ‘windows’ of yours are supposed to shine a light on Mecca. Not on the sea.” Before tossing the draft article into the wastebasket, he took a thick black marker and crossed out the following section:
In the first few hours, the Eunuchs’ Goat lost his ability to hear and speak. A flood of vehicles swept past in a flash; the humidity that clung to his nostrils prepped him for the question “What country?” With no homeland to be sent back to, he was sure he’d rot in detention.
A voice in the crowd kept repeating: “People who are forced to wait a long time get so hungry they eat their blankets!”
They were all telling their stories in broken Arabic that reeked of sour spices.
A Sri Lankan maid chattered non-stop about the lazy husband she’d been sending her wages home to for the last ten years, only to discover that he’d remarried and had children on her earnings. She was flying back home on the wings of a buraq to teach him a lesson.
He could barely fathom the Egyptian giant who’d left his waste disposal business and his shanty at the dump between al-Samir and al-Ajwad in East Jeddah in the hands of a relative, and come to turn himself in so that he’d be sent home for free to spend his holiday with his family. He claimed his first stop was going to be the sulfur baths in Helwan, where he’d scrub the layer of scabies off his body before going home and impregnating his wife with a son. This he’d follow with a new escape, courtesy of a pilgrim’s visa, and return to reclaim his trash heap. Or rather his gold mine, which yielded him 500 riyals a day! The Egyptian was full of stories of his adventures against attempts to regulate international money transfers, the sums he’d smuggled across international borders through the black market using devilish tricks, the tower block he’d had built in the smart Cairo district of Heliopolis, his position as economic consultant to shady African trash-heap moguls.
He was being watched with great interest by a tear-streaming African face that told the story of a dying mother and his race back home against the Angel of Death.
An Indonesian offered strong competition with a photo display of the women who vied for his heart: dozens of faces plastered with lime, followed by eye shadow, and lips painted a garish red. They struggled fiercely to make it into the top four whom he’d marry as soon as he touched down in Jakarta, returning as a newly crowned emperor bearing the wealth of a year and a half in exile. Obviously, to him, ten thousand riyals was the wealth of Croesus.
The Eunuchs’ Goat lost count of how many stories he swam through there.
As evening fell, the touch of a salty breeze reminded him he was alone. The
crowds had all disappeared, though to where he had no idea, and their place had been taken by the smells of human urine and desperation, a pungent odor rising from behind the trunks of ornamental Washington palms, in the blueness of the Saudi Airlines office across the way and the continuously replenished ATM with a camera’s eye to guard it.
The Eunuchs’ Goat felt like the ATM screen was following him as it repeated cheerfully, “Welcome to this automated teller service.”
Automated deportation service …
By midnight, his eyelids were drooping over a vast nothingness. He still didn’t know what he would say his country of origin was if he were to be detained.
At dawn the calls to prayer flocked on the horizon. He needed to empty his bowels, but his feet wouldn’t obey him. His entire being was tensed, erect, ready for the moment when the police vehicle and officers turned up. The moment of fear hung like a noose around his entire life. When it came, he might run, he might drop dead; the important thing was confronting that moment.
He didn’t know whether Mushabbab was serious about leaving him there or whether he himself was serious about persevering.
At first light, he awoke to find the eyes and stories thronging around him anew. Yesterday’s crowd had reappeared from nowhere and they seemed to be joined by a new body with every passing moment. The city dribbled fatigue and anticipation on them, drop after drop.
And that woman who kept nursing yellow water from a jerrycan, dozing and staring at him. At some point when the heat was at its fiercest, he imagined three women—blonde, raven-haired, and brunette—winking at him.
As the call to prayer rang out at noon, a bus with bars over its windows appeared, and the heaps of bodies suddenly pulsed with life. Conversations, jokes, complaints fell silent, and the mass surged toward the bus. The Goat’s eyes were glued to the bars over the windows. He noticed that as the bodies jostled to get onto the bus, hands attached to khaki uniforms pushed them back, and then grasped banknotes held out by other sweaty hands, which they then allowed to board the bus. It was soon full, the tires compressing under their weight, and then it heaved away, covering the remaining faces with dust.
The fit that seized the Eunuchs’ Goat left him bewildered; his body suddenly felt prepared and on edge—against what, he didn’t know. Around him, crestfallen faces lamented their missed chance at freedom.
His heart opened up like a cave that had been blocked up for centuries; the deep shadows of fear dyeing its walls dissolved and oxygen flooded in. He felt he could breathe again. No sooner had the fire entered him than his longing for Sa’diya al-Habashiya the Imam’s daughter became acute: hers was the only freedom he wished for any more.
He looked around him and still he couldn’t see Mushabbab, so he walked boldly to the road, in a strange city without knowing where he was headed, and continued down it over the bridge, which led to Road 60, amid the car horns’ shrieking. There, at the intersection, Khalil’s taxi caught up with him. Mushabbab opened the door for him wordlessly.
“If my mother knew what you did to me, she’d turn the whole neighborhood on your heads! She’d boil you in kerosene, no joke.” His mother Umm al-Sa’d’s stocky build and features were an exact copy of those of her father the milkman whose photo hung in her room beneath the caved-in red ceiling—like a sword above the neck of anyone who entered. She even had a mustache just like his, which she plucked every morning with her decorated red tweezers.
“They say angina’s the cool new birth control for 2005–2006.” That snide comment was characteristic of Khalil.
Mushabbab interjected, “In her capacity as mother to a goat, your loving mother has proclaimed a period of mourning for a herd of camels that were poisoned in Wadi l-Dawasir, and what with the snare of the stock market and the hundreds of thousands of the best she-camels being poisoned by fodder from the silos in the south, her liquid assets have been wiped out. As you can see, your mother’s busy with important things.” We were saying the first inanities that popped into our heads to celebrate the occasion of the Goat’s victory over his fear.
Disquiet
I, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, APPEAR TO BE THE ONLY ONE PAYING ANY ATTENTION to Nasser’s addiction. He’s become a very regular customer at the cafe, where he sits for hours reading Aisha’s emails. I personally never paid any attention to the schoolteacher’s emails, which she always crammed full of revolting emotion. In fact I’ve never once bothered myself with a female opponent, since I know women were created simply to submit to the status quo, my vile status quo. But there were her words, spreading cancer-like from Nasser’s head to my own.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 7
Did you notice I called you “sir” at the end of our conversation today?
I never knew my own father’s name; my mother always called him “sir.” The say she said it with such tenderness that he became the servant and she the queen.
Sir
If only my voice were as husky as my mother’s was, I could summon you here with that word.
I took Women in Love to bed with me this evening … My mouth was dry and I began to tremble—I’m still trembling.
How dare I bring that interloper into my bed?
The literal translation of the title brings me up short once more. Women in Love. In Love.
A fly dips its bitter wing and leaves its sweet wing breathing on the surface. The fly pauses on the surface of my cup of tea, with milk, perhaps drowning on its own, never to emerge again. I wonder: who will drink me?
I can feel my dead father’s eyes boring through the back of my head. I always leave the house to his darkness, and take refuge, with a flashlight, beneath the thick blankets to sneak a few words:
After the First World War, Lawrence began a savage pilgrimage in search of a lifestyle that was more fulfilling than what industrialized European society could offer him …
I still don’t feel safe so I read Women in Love again from beginning to end.
I steal a few words, a few passages,
Risking sleeplessness, I point the flashlight at certain words in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition that I feel speak to me personally:
Lawrence’s lover Frieda wrote upon his death in 1933 that ‘Lawrence’s writing conveyed to his fellow human everything he had seen, felt and known: the splendor of life and the hope for more and yet more life … that inestimably heroic gift.’
The flashlight goes out and I throw off my blanket and everything else.
Where can we get more of this more from life? What kind of more?
I review every detail of my life, searching for a droplet of that “more.”
Attachment: This is my Auntie Halima’s palm. It’s scary how small it is, lines running parallel and intersecting.
A “wounded palm” is a piece of gold jewelry that runs from around the ring finger down to the wrist forming a triangle. Auntie Halima couldn’t afford one so she traced the shape of one on the back of her hand.
Aisha
P.S. “Why don’t you buy red towels?” asked the fetus I miscarried in my dream last night (every night, in fact).
For two whole years I kept praying: Ahmad—please, God, let him sleep with me just once and release the collar of that dirty word divorce from around my neck. Just one thrust toward life, dear God: a child!
And now here’s Ahmad, reopening the hotline between us, pleading for us to pick up where we left off.
What would make a hunter return to the prey he’s left to rot for two whole years?!
Words like these were a challenge to Nasser. Whenever he stood at the entrance to the alley beneath Aisha’s window, which was taken up almost entirely by an air-conditioning unit, he felt a weight descend on his heart. It was the burden of her obsession with the things she called the “splendor of living” and “more and more life.” What could it be?
He was torn between Aisha and Azza: which one of them could he tie to the body? The wretched, crumbling houses arou
nd him defied him; Nasser felt he was being watched in that moment in which he was seeing through to my body and my many distracted heads.
At nightfall, he watched them as they slumped in front of their television screens. It was like looking through department store windows. They tore away the image so they could dive straight into the story. He disappointed them so much when they compared him to the detectives from CSI, whose science fiction plotlines were firmly stuck in all my heads. Nasser felt small and ignorant stacked up against those fictional detectives.
For all his horror at how uninhibited Aisha had been toward that German, he could still close his eyes and in an instant replace that annoying “^” with his own name, Nasser, pretending to himself that he was the one she was writing to. Why shouldn’t he be the object of that surge? He wanted to bash his head into hers so their thoughts would start to mingle.
“May God smash your heads together!”