by Raja Alem
In record time she announced her victory with a vivid red sheen upon her lips, giving away her bloody methods. The other women imitated her style; it was open rebellion.
“The women see her as a symbol of perseverance in the struggle against men. The men, on the other hand, can’t stop fantasizing about her savage vagina. They are drawn there compulsively, only to drown. That’s why they’re so keen, so passionate, about donating their hard gold to her famous box. Following, in a waking dream, as the donations take shelter in her vagina and never come back out.”
“Don’t be deceived by her flat boylike chest. Look further down, at her pelvis. That will always be the source of devilish pleasure …”
“Some might envy her husband, al-Ashi, but mostly he’s pitied. Just think about that teenage girl excavating her womb with her own fingers. That means she wasn’t a virgin when they got married. What kind of a fool agrees to that? They’ve both been cursed for it. Now al-Ashi’s paying the price for having been a jackass: the orphan they adopted, the Eunuchs’ Goat, is a jackass in human form.”
Yabis the Sewage Cleaner
IT WAS MU’AZ WHO SENT NASSER LISTS OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE GOING TO heaven and those who were going to hell. In studying these lists, the detective found that the sewage cleaner Yabis was the only person to be excluded, to be left off of both the contradictory rosters.
The children of the lane ran on ahead, leading Nasser to the sewage cleaner who was clearing out the Arab League building’s septic tank. His burly body came into view; he was naked from the waist up and his bottom half was covered by a garbage-colored apron that stretched to mid-calf. The sewage cleaner was busy pulling the hose up out of the tank, disconnecting it, and wrapping it up the length of the tanker truck. Before Nasser could catch up with him, he’d flipped the tank over, ninety percent of which had been cleaned out by the pump, and in the space of a moment, he was swallowed up by clouds of methane. Nasser hesitated for a brief second, but he could see through the gas to the kids pointing to the center of the tank: “It’s Pokemon!”
Nasser was blinded by the methane fumes, his eyes watering so hard he could hardly follow what the man was doing down at the bottom, up to his knees in solid human waste and reptiles, barefoot and without any gloves or a mask for protection. It was as though he’d been made out of this primordial soup as he dug through layers of waste, preparing it for his colleague who scooped it up into a bucket, which was hauled up by the assistant at the surface. He in turn piled it up at the edge of the lane, unleashing a cloud of terrified, terrifying cockroaches in every direction. That’s the truth; it happened before our very eyes. But Nasser’s focus waned. I wondered if he’d begun to doubt whether the entire investigation was worth it, whether it was worth trying to save a neighborhood that kneaded and fermented its excrement so that they could get drunk on methane.
Nasser couldn’t linger at the cafe: he was running away from the eye-stinging, hallucination-causing methane cloud that had washed over my every corner. He felt he’d fallen into some space outside of known time.
When Nasser came back, he was determined to catch Yabis when he wasn’t at work. He headed to the two rooms with planks for a ceiling at the end of one of my narrow alleys. He was surprised to find the front door a half-meter off the ground and open to the alley but for a curtain drawn across it. The green flowers on the curtain reminded him of the violet hem of Azza’s mother’s dress, which was stuffed in the bars of Azza’s window. He could sense Kawthar, Yabis’ wife, moving behind the curtain, which was swaying in the wind. He knocked and waited. Nasser ignored the blank space where Yabis’ mother Matuqa used to sleep. Yabis had kept her bedroll folded up on a shelf beside the bathroom, which was the source of the most horrible odor ever to have blocked Nasser’s nostrils, the smell of human excrement. The curtain was pulled back first to reveal the edges of the sewage cleaner’s new purple sarong, and then the man himself. Nasser tried to ignore the hole in the shoulder of the man’s threadbare tank top—just how much use and sweat that must have seen. There was a smell of camphor in the air, as if a body had recently been washed on the other side of that curtain in preparation for burial. Resignedly, Yabis led him away from the room back toward his tanker truck at the top of the alley. Nasser looked at the end of the hose, which was covered in something disgusting. They sat on a crumbled doorstep, looking out toward the Lane of Many Heads, and without any preliminaries Nasser said: “Aisha was your daughter-in-law? Tell me about her.”
“Aisha was soaked up to here,” he said pointing to the top of his forehead. “A bunch of the kids here learn to read and write, but for Aisha it was like her mom and dad were books. She spent her whole life chasing books. I mean, for a lady. A lady isn’t a lady unless she’s like good soil, willing to receive her man. Aisha wasn’t soil. Lord knows she wasn’t. She was just dust. That’s what made my son’s guts get scattered here and there.” There was no bitterness or blame in Yabis’ response. “And of course she was the only member of her family to survive the accident.” Nasser was filled with a sudden delight that Aisha had been spared. “Would you believe she used to sleep on top of her books? She had an ocean of books hidden under her bed.” The man was sitting directly beside Nasser, unaware of the halo of putridity that surrounded him. Something in Nasser’s insides reacted to the latent smell.
“Did your wife Umm Ahmad happen to see the body?” The sewage cleaner looked at him. It was like he could detect something rotten in his question, the sour smell of an imminent accusation, but he answered anyway.
“My better half Umm Ahmad, the teacher’s mother-in-law, washes the dead. She attends to all the bodies. May God grant you that blessing.” Nasser was stumped. He could only stare at Yabis, holding back his laughter at the thought of a sewage cleaner marrying a corpse washer. It was a case of what you might call self-sufficiency, or self-cleaning, or self-recycling even. The hysterical synonyms swirled in Nasser’s head. A city could try to get by without tradespeople of all stripes except for these two—it would drown in its own disease and dissolution otherwise.
“Men are weak …” The sewage cleaner scanned the two sides of the alley, the people and the shops loaded up with food and toys and products. “All this is going to end up on the bench for washing corpses or down the sewer.” He stretched his hand out to secure the hose against the clip on the end of the truck, and then he wiped his hand on his new towel as a reflex. He left a smear on the purple fabric covering his thigh. “This is all just the earth’s manure,” he said, indicating his entire body. Nasser sensed there was some invisible blemish deforming Yabis’ body despite his good looks. The jet-black hair that fell over his forehead looked like a hump he’d put on, like the torturers who appear to the dead to swallow them up! Nasser drove the thought from his mind and wondered instead what would induce a man to take up a job like that in a time of technology and sewer systems, and in the holy capital, too. Nasser was drenched in sweat, but the sewage cleaner, who said he’d answered the official call for people to perform the job, wasn’t affected by the heat and carried on talking. They discussed the government buildings he serviced without going into great detail, and then he gave Nasser detailed information about how often he serviced the major residences in the Lane of Many Heads. Al-Labban’s house, better known as the Arab League building: “We clean it out every other day. That means, at a hundred riyals for the tanker, it comes to fifteen hundred riyals per month. I knock off two hundred riyals for them so their monthly excrement ends up costing them thirteen hundred riyals a month. You know, it costs a man money whether it’s going in or coming out.” Nasser was embarrassed that the sewage cleaner expected him to record these filthy details in his case notes.
“I told them they should get a separate tank for the cellar. God commands us to hide our shame. You know, nothing’s going to hide the shame of their tenant, the Turkish seamstress, and her guests, except a proper sewer.”
He had no idea what Yabis was getting at with his repeated
“You knows.” From where they were seated on the doorstep, he examined the Labban building. The fight over who owned it started up at exactly the same time that the body was found. The windows of the cellar were open like the eyes of a genie traveling down a road. There was a toddler lying on the ground in front of the building, sneaking over to the cellar, spying on the ghosts who still played the role of girls sitting beneath those windows, their coconut-oiled locks falling down over the style patterns, taking lessons in the art of preening from the Turkish seamstress. The sewage cleaner felt that his body didn’t suit clothes, or a burial shroud even. That he was at his best when he was alone, half-naked, in the darkness cleaning out a septic tank. The true scents of the body and its excrement reaching his senses. Now that his mother, Matuqa, was dead, his loneliness had become complete.
“I may not have anything useful to give you for your investigation. Look at my sons. Yusuf was right when he attacked me in a fit of craziness. So far every son I’ve had has run away. Musfir most recently, and before him Ahmad, the oldest. They were adopted by a relative of mine who wanted to give them a clean life, far away from septic tanks.” He thought he’d strayed away from the case at hand, but the detective’s eyes sparkled at the mention of another lead: Ahmad. There were plenty of witnesses who’d seen him scurrying down the alley the night the body was found. It would be easy to accuse him of murder. He wanted to ask Yabis whether his wife Kawthar had seen her daughter-in-law in the corpse, but he was afraid of the answer.
Instead, he said, “Ahmad lives abroad. He left Aisha two years ago, two months after they’d got married. People in the neighborhood say he used to hit her. That makes him a suspect in the murder and it makes Aisha the victim, potentially.”
“Aisha and Ahmad went away together. She had to go with him. He came to see us before they found the body. I let him have it. I was so angry he’d abandoned Aisha. He told me he’d put an end to their separation. When my son says he’s going to do something, he does it.”
What really complicated things was that there was a disappearance larger than death. The crux of the issue wasn’t the murder victim, it was mistaken identity. Whether Azza, Aisha, or the body. There was a mass of crushed woman in front of him, and he had no hope of making out the murdered from the insane from the one who’d slammed the door in the face of the Many Heads and run off. Nasser was faced with the challenge of teasing out that spiritual DNA from the mass, so that he could absolve Azza of the stain of suicide, passing it on to some other girl in the Lane of Many Heads, and so that he could exclude Aisha, as well, and thereby not draw attention to the woman sitting in his own heart, speaking to him with an intimacy he’d never experienced from a woman—or another person—before.
“And Azza, Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, where did she go? Any ideas?” The detective traced Yabis’ glance as he looked up at Azza’s empty bedroom and her father’s shop, as a male pigeon danced, courting two females, among the clay soldiers on the roof. He was flying out from his wooden coop to the ruined building and back.
A laughing Yabis interrupted his train of thought. “They only ask me to come clean for them once or maybe twice a year.”
“Is that because Sheikh Muzahim’s a tightwad?”
“It’s ’cause their output is so meager. The only people in that house are a girl who’s buried in her papers and charcoal drawings, and Yusuf’s mother, who’s in her fifties and spends half her life at weddings, serving and drinking tea. That woman’s whole life is wrapped up in tea leaves and mint leaves and the leaves of her son Yusuf’s notebook. In the case of Sheikh Muzahim, what comes out isn’t even a tenth of what goes in. He lives off of dates and unsweetened coffee. In short: those people are vegetarians … That’s beyond the scope of the kind of work I do.” Nasser looked at the sewage cleaner as if he were something beyond the scope of life. A parasite subsisting on life’s rituals, like aging and decay, like an illness that removes the weakest elements from the human mass; he was like the kind of death that scrapes the surface of the earth clean so it can celebrate new births and deaths.
“You’re not curious about who the victim is?”
“I didn’t even lay eyes on her.” Suddenly Nasser was filled with shame. “We’re talking about our women. We look down at our feet when we sense a woman walking past.” A sandstorm wind blew toward them; Yabis waved his hand in the air as if to drive it away. “What with this stifling air and sandstorms, what’s so weird about a boil swelling up and exploding one night in the Lane of Many Heads?” A moment later, he said, “People are strange.” Nasser kept quiet so as to let him carry on. “During the holidays, people defecate twice as much. And I make twice as much money. I don’t mind going out to empty tanks during the holidays. That’s celebratory excrement even if it’s a bit gluttonous.”
The detective couldn’t bring himself to continue down this path any longer so he brought the conversation back around to Ahmad. “People say your son Ahmad has close ties to a lot of important people.”
“For example, I would never want to empty the septic tank of a building where Ahmad lives. Ahmad’s crazy about wheeling and dealing. Everything he expels reeks of the same odor: rotting food the likes of which has never been seen in the Lane of Many Heads. That might not matter much to you, but I’m picky about my customers.”
“What if we need you to come empty the tank at the criminal investigation unit?”
The sewage cleaner laughed. “Your unit doesn’t really suit me, no offense. The walls of your septic tank are probably covered in all kinds of nuclear, chemical, and conventional weapons.” Nasser laughed, and then they both fell silent. The detective’s silence puzzled the sewage cleaner somehow. He continued, “You should’ve seen the fast food invasion. You can clean a septic tank a thousand times, but you’ll never get rid of that smell of fast food, especially hamburgers—”
The detective cut him off. “Who would have a motive to kill someone in the neighborhood? Who could the murderer be?”
“Have you heard about depression? I just heard about it recently in the Labban building. Umm al-Sa’d, al-Ashi’s wife, took her adopted son the Eunuchs’ Goat to a shrink. ‘He’s depressed,’ she said. And she said we shouldn’t be ashamed of psychological problems. A month later when we went to empty the septic tank, it smelled like colocynth incense. Painkillers turn the bowels sour. It knocks the bugs out without any insecticide. Even we sewage cleaners, as soon as we breathe that stuff in, our tongues get tied up and our faces and limbs begin to twitch.”
Nasser asked Yabis about the state of his own mental excretions. Yabis looked into Nasser’s eyes. Apropos of nothing, he said, “You seem like an enlightened man, detective. Ever since Yusuf left I don’t have anybody to talk to. Yusuf was the most educated person in the Lane of Many Heads. He understood how we spoke, and he spoke for all of us, every last one. He was our reflection. When we lost our minds, he was the one who went to the Shihar Hospital and received electric shocks. Shocks straight to the brain.” The sewage cleaner was desperate to talk, so Nasser just let him, pulling on the thread that led to Yusuf.
“Yusuf’s like me. He’s digging his way through the Lane of Many Heads, you know? Some people’s heads are filled with the same stuff you find in people’s stomachs. Then he’d publish the remains in the newspaper and call it the history of man. He told us, and he was talking to me the whole time, about the revolt of the army and the common people during the rule of the Sherif Muhammad bin Abd Allah, when they forced the mufti and the wazir to expel the Shiites from Mecca in 1732, because they accused them of sullying the Kaaba, because according to their rites the pilgrimage doesn’t count unless the pilgrim dirties the Kaaba. What they thought was filth was actually lentils mixed with oil, which had gone runny in the Meccan sun. Detective, what’s all this waste if it’s not the thing that gets us drooling, makes us pay any price—high or low—to fill our bellies with it so that it comes out of our orifices, the superior and the inferior.”
Yabis
’ youngest son, the one-year-old, ran up to them and clung to his father’s knee. He pressed his wet mouth against the dirty patch of his father’s purple loincloth. The child peered at Nasser and then suddenly raced down the alley, toddling in his worn-out tank top and orange tracksuit bottoms. He dodged the Mitsubishi motorcycle carrying sugar cane as it zoomed toward the space between the two shops where the sugarcane-juice seller had set up his extractor and lined up his yellow plastic cups on a shelf beneath the counter. Behind the counter, he hid the bucket he used to wash the cups after every customer. The motorcycle sped past him, trailed by a bunch of children who, if it had slowed down, would’ve have nabbed a sugarcane and run off. The little boy hesitated for a moment—he didn’t know whether to follow the sugarcane or the scent of the roasted chicken one of the cafe patrons was eating. By the time he’d made up his mind, one of the cafe staff was clearing the table, and when the boy appeared beneath the table, he threw him a wing. Like a cat he scurried off as he chewed. Yabis watched him lovingly. He swallowed. He was silent for a while and then he said, “Sometimes I wonder—what’s the use of a job like mine at a time like this?”
“You mean because of the sewer system?” The sewage cleaner looked up at him and then he nodded. Face to face with those severe features, Nasser chose not to speak the conclusion that had suddenly occurred to him: there’s no need for sewage cleaners in heaven. Waste ceases to mean anything in that paradisiacal realm where nothing can be consumed, or digested, or go rotten and decay. Is that because the only thing left behind is light?
Corruption
“NOTHING ROTS IN HEAVEN.” THOSE WERE NASSER’S PARTING WORDS. THE detective chose not to return to his office. He felt an overwhelming need to go back to his tiny apartment, where he shut the door behind him, took a deep breath, and headed to the bathroom. He stripped off all his clothes and laid them in the laundry basket. Then he sat down to relieve himself. He laughed. After the day he’d had, he felt he could now appreciate what was coming out of him. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” He was sure to wash his hands with Dettol before he took up his lover’s letters. Therein lay his humanity, his paradise.