The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 8

  Time is a pit here.

  I stand on my bed so I can reach the window that’s blocked up with an air-conditioning unit.

  I look out at the neighborhood through a long aperture. It’s like a hedgehog covering its back with satellite dishes. It’s the communal longing to get away from here. We lose so much when we live and die in the same spot, the same alley, the same smell of the same breath, when we don’t get mixed up in the saliva of others. One oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms (forgive me if I get the proportions mixed up), that’s what water is made of. I haven’t made my own water yet.

  Attachment 1: photo.

  Is this Jameela? It’s hanging up beside the door of Sheikh Muzahim’s shop.

  Her clothes don’t change. They just get grimier at the chest and turn a pale yellow. If you chewed on Jameela, you’d smell turmeric. Saliva dribbles from the corner of her mouth. The girl’s mouth watered and her saliva washed away the ground beneath Sheikh Muzahim’s feet.

  Aisha

  P.S. Do you hear the singing coming from the hallway? That’s Mu’az, Imam Dawoud’s son. Every morning at dawn he comes to clean the hall. I stand at the top of the staircase with burning incense while he splashes songs of water and Danat against the stairs. For days I’ve been burning the same charred chunk even though you’re not supposed to re-use incense because it’ll smell of burning. The last thing he does is spray water in front of the house to “put the shadows to bed” like my father used to do.

  P.P.S. When Azza was a child, there were always ants swarming over her diaper, and my mother Halima would say “She’s got sweet pee” in a singsong voice. I wanted to ask her what she made of my urine.

  As soon as I reached puberty, I started spending long stretches in the bathroom. I looked warily at my body, this thing that was erupting out of control, the scandalous contours of my chest, the sloping of my torso toward what came next. Now when I confess these things to Azza, she laughs hysterically. “It’s weird but I was never embarrassed by my body.”

  Then I get defensive. “I had to monitor my body so that I could hide it. I was embarrassed to see it transforming into an adult woman. I didn’t want my teachers, who were all women, or my mother to see my shame.” Azza looked at me like there was something wrong with me. I can understand how she wasn’t embarrassed by the danger of her body: she was an innately alluring creature. Made of seduction but in its raw form, before it’s become self-aware. She used to augment the danger, too. She’d wear a rocket bra that pushed her breasts out for all to see. She’d add a belt to any skimpy thing she wore to cut her in half at the waist and accentuate her curves. Even without a belt, the way she stood was seductive: hands on her hips, as if she were re-sculpting the latent thrill of her body. Am I allowed to say that even her sweat was dew?

  P.P.P.S. Do you still smell of firewood and rosemary? Which parts of you should I lick to know what kind of mood you’re in today? Tell me which of your black parts is off-limits so that I can start there. There’s a lot for us to enjoy as we wait for the grill to heat up and we feed the moons and cats. Do you still walk barefoot in the garden? One day, when I’m rubbing your feet, you’ll see rose-water and damp spots in the places where your foot rests against my lap and in my hands. You look so much like me.

  Nowadays when I pray it’s like a door that opens for you to slip through, like a chatty conversation or one in which we tell each other our dreams. I wait impatiently for that moment when I’m standing before God and I make you stand next to me so we can replay our most intimate conversations. Just imagine!

  Apple Smoke

  DETECTIVE NASSER STEPPED OUT OF HIS APARTMENT BUILDING AND TOOK A LOOK at the empty space around him. For the first time, he actually wanted to see the place where he’d lived for two decades. This was one of the neighborhoods that had sprung up after the oil boom twenty years ago and although it was new, it had begun to decay. Buildings still under construction were sprinkled here and there, and between them lay wild and empty spaces. The neighborhood didn’t deserve a second look: all the buildings were copies of one another, the products of minds lacking any imagination. They had tiny windows, and all the columns were concrete pillars that ran up the entire length of the building. Three or four columns, sheathed in golden aluminum, covered each building’s main entrance. The street looked like a steaming corpse. There was no foot-traffic to give it life, just a row of cars on either side of the street, carrying ghost-like riders, unseen. One car disappears as another comes around the corner, both covered in dust so you can’t even see the windshield.

  Nasser gave The Lane of Many Heads his undivided attention in an attempt to become part of that neighborhood: the old ghosts, the buzz and din, the vivaciousness that threatened a quarter-century-long routine of robotic discipline, robotic lifelessness.

  Nasser sat at the cafe in the Lane of Many Heads, engrossed in the soap opera, a favorite among housewives who were perpetually depressed because of it: The Happy One. He took a deep drag on his water-pipe, relishing the burnt apple taste. He’d become addicted to that type of flavored tobacco, and he’d smoke constantly as he interviewed people. He took a look at Mu’az, who’d always stop by when he saw Nasser sitting there. He’d come up and take a seat beside him, silently joining the television viewing. I, the Lane of Many Heads, was never comfortable with the way Nasser toyed with my younger heads. Ever since Mu’az’s latest confession, the two of them had built upon their flimsy trust. Nasser had the feeling that Mu’az wanted to tell him something but was unsure, and so he resorted to telling Nasser about himself. He wasn’t embarrassed about telling him the details of his home life:

  “It took us fifteen minutes to get through the Dawn Prayers this morning. My father the Imam got confused when he was reciting the verses. I was standing behind him in a row with the other worshippers. The voices of the men who knew the Quran by heart rose to correct him, and he struggled to pull himself together. He sat down and read from the text. My mind drifted during the pause. I thought of my sisters. They, like me, were frightened that the Quran would begin to slip away from him. I heard his own frightened voice in my head: ‘They’re not going to let me lead the prayers any more if I start forgetting the Quran’.

  “‘Years of raising children and looking after the mosque have turned my hair gray.’ I watched him run his fingers through my mother’s gray hair.

  “He reassured her: ‘This grayness won’t last forever, God willing. Consider it the price you pay to be thirty-three in heaven.’

  “‘Thirty-three?’

  “‘Yes, it’s the best age for a human being. It’s the age Jesus was, peace be upon him, when he was raised up to the sky. It’s the age at which we’re reborn when we enter heaven.’

  “My sister Maymuna went to answer the early-morning knock before the rest of us could, so that, as my father would say, blessings would be revealed to her. Before decline beset The Lane of Many Heads we were used to the Eunuchs’ Goat coming to our door in the early morning: ‘From my father al-Ashi of the cooking courtyard. Empty the pot out and give it back.’ The Eunuchs’ Goat was always disappointed to find Maymuna’s hand snake past the door to take the pot he’d brought over so early, hoping to hand it to Sa’diya. The Eunuchs’ Goat was quite the devil. He’d try to nudge the door open slightly with the side of his foot to get a look at Sa’diya, who was rubbing her sleep-puffed eyes with one hand and with the other emptying the pot into a bowl, adroitly avoiding the layer of burnt rice at the bottom of the pot. She could no longer distinguish between her dark hands and the blackened pot, scraping here and there. These morning handouts irritated her no end. When she’s asleep, she dreams of throwing rice-missiles at the do-gooders who never think of them until their food’s about to go rotten. Gaining blessings for a new day with yesterday’s inedible leftovers. She sleeps with one eye closed and one eye on the worms clustered around the streaks of filth on the floor of their concrete bathr
oom. Bunched up in a line between her feet, she had no idea where they were headed.

  “‘Those are the worms that are going to feed on you in the grave if you don’t shield yourself with faith.’ My mother almost tore the worms open with her finger.

  “Sa’diya handed the still-wet pot back to the Eunuchs’ Goat, but it did nothing to extinguish his passion. ‘God bless you and may He count this among your good deeds on Judgment Day,’ she said softly. Her smile is special, it plays on the corners of her lips when she pictures the scales of their good deeds crawling with worms depending on how stale their charitable offering is.”

  “And what about your father?” Nasser asked.

  “My father has his daily routine down to a T. Every morning after dawn prayers, he exhorts the angels of good fortune with his chanting, and after night prayers he chants that the followers of Muhammad will grow and multiply. Every year brought my father another child. With each of them, he increased the number of the poor and the blind. The people in the Lane of Many Heads used to make fun of him with stealthy glances, but they also envied him the number of sons of his who’d become Quran reciters. The burden he bore wasn’t because of all these mouths that needed feeding, but because of the forehead-splitting sadness that came from knowing what punishments awaited man. Sa’diya was convinced that our father had memorized all the Quranic verses about perdition and the various punishments that awaited unbelievers. ‘Diabetes has put out the light in my eyes,’ he complained. ‘Diabetes is like disbelief. One takes away your ability to see with your eyes—may God have mercy on us—and the other takes away your ability to see with you heart.’

  “Whenever he slipped deeper into infirmity and thus nearer to death, he’d brace himself by filling his heart with the fear of the torments that awaited him after death and filling his mind with visions of the angels of paradise. Then he would recite the Quran in that sweet voice of his as though to line his grave, making it more comfortable, in preparation to receive his body.”

  From where they were sitting, Nasser saw the imam going into the mosque. Mu’az turned his back to hide from his father because he didn’t want to be spotted loitering with the rest of the cafe crowd. Once his father was out of sight, Mu’az carried on:

  “My father is constantly frowning. The only time his features relax is when he’s standing in front of the shelf of Qurans that people have donated to the mosque. Then he gives in. At sunset, he stands there patiently going through the donated Qurans, smelling their ink and leather binding. He bides his time till he can pick out a rare one and add it to his shelf, which is brimming with Qurans of all different dimensions. My oldest brother Yaqub, who wears glasses as thick as the bottom of a tea glass and is the Quran reciter at the Umm al-Joud Mosque, will come over and take a Quran off the shelf to the right of the door and sit down across from my father. Then the rest of us, boys and girls, are expected to fill out the arcs of the study-circle, to connect their two poles.

  “When a man dies, his good deeds end with him except for three things: an upright child who prays for him … Whenever we sat down to memorize the Quran, our father’s blind eye would be there, pleading with us: ‘When you feel the flocks of the Quran slipping away from you, gather them up against your chest and bring them to me in my grave.’ My siblings would shut their eyes and begin swaying as they recited. The recitation would begin at the bottom of their spines and work its way up, causing their bodies to sway until it reached their tongues. My father’s cane was hot on their heels, though:

  “‘Don’t read with your eyes closed! You were blessed with sight so you might as well keep your eyes on the verse as you’re reciting.’ We trained our eyes on our Qurans in a pathetic attempt to follow the verses, but it didn’t take long for our eyes to shut once more, causing us to sway again; miniature copies of my father.”

  “The Eunuchs’ Goat used to attend the memorization classes at your house. He said he was in love with Sa’diya.”

  Mu’az laughed. “In love with her elbow, more like it. I was the first person to notice. I sat there paying attention to all of them. I took the largest share of my father’s caning: whenever I’d sit on the outside breaking the circle, whenever I’d look in the direction of the door, whenever I’d play with the mat or the pools of light in the middle of the circle, or when I’d lay my voice out over the circle, soaking up the rhythm, training my voice, or when my father would sense that I wasn’t reciting the verses, rather floating and bobbing on the surface of the music, dipping my vocal cords in its sweetness. His cane and his shouting both stung: ‘Recite properly, boy!’”

  Nasser cut him off, laughing: “Do you sing, Mu’az?”

  “No, I cry … I pin a recitation on the scales of a melody. I uncover new horizons for my voice in the rules of Quranic recitation.” A light flickered in Mu’az’s eyes and he carried on:

  “Whenever my eldest sister, Maymuna, begins to recite, her tears begin to stream but only out of her right eye. We never know what to think. Her tears don’t just stream down over her cheek, they spill out of her eye into the air and fall on her chest and onto my younger sister Sa’diya’s shoulder. Sa’diya says that there’s an angel with a watering can who sits in Maymuna’s eye and sprays us with her sweet tears. As soon as the first tear falls onto my father’s hand, he swells up with joy and says, ‘Praise be! An eye that cries for the sweetness of the Quran won’t be touched by hellfire. The fire won’t come near your eyes, Maymuna. God willing.’ Sa’diya would leave the tears where they landed across her neck as shield against the fire.

  The detective was surprised by how nonchalantly Mu’az mentioned his sisters’ names in conversation; that wasn’t how things were done. Mu’az watched the television in front of him in silence for a while and then went on with his story. “Sometimes I ask myself, what’s life like for my sisters? Even television is a novelty to them. Look …” Nasser looked over at the black triangles huddled in the doorway of the Imam’s house: Mu’az’s sisters dressed in abayas that covered them from tip to toe, cones of black crowding one another to peek through the narrow crack in the door at the television in the cafe.

  “When they’re sleeping sometimes I wish I could see beneath their eyelids. I want to see how they make dreams without the help of a satellite dish. I hear them whispering: ‘Which of the boys in the neighborhood are we going to marry? Who should we recite the chapter of Ya Sin forty times for?’

  “‘The Eunuchs’ Goat?’

  “‘His name’s Salih, don’t call him the Eunuchs’ Goat.’

  “‘Yusuf?’

  “‘Yusuf’s disappeared.’

  “‘Mushabbab?’

  “‘Our father says he’s no good.’

  “To get Yusuf to come back to the neighborhood, Maymuna recited the Ya Sin Chapter of the Quran forty-one times, as though it were a raft that would carry her to him.”

  “You’re talking about when a girl recites Ya Sin forty times?” Nasser asked.

  Mu’az looked at him, shocked that police officers knew anything about occult rituals. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Ever since I was a kid, that ritual scared me. I was worried that a ghoul-girl would cast a spell on me so she could marry me.” He could tell that Mu’az had suddenly stopped listening to him. He’d turned his head to look at the thin old man dressed in blue wool robes and a red-checked head-covering who’d appeared at the end of the alley. Nasser followed Mu’az’s line of sight. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “That’s sheikh Muflah al-Ghatafani, Mushabbab’s friend.”

  Nasser threw a fifty riyal note on the table and ran after the sheikh, leaving a bemused Mu’az in his wake. He followed close behind him until he reached Mushabbab’s orchard. He slowed for a moment before charging in after him. When he entered the orchard, he found the old man rummaging through the shelves and beneath the cushions.

  “What did you come here to look for when you know full well the owner’s gone missing?”

  The old man
was clearly embarrassed. “I’m looking for something that belongs to me.”

  “My name is Detective Nasser al-Qahtani and I’m investigating a murder. The owner of this orchard is wanted for questioning as a potential suspect in the crime. The fact that you’ve turned up here is enough to make you a person of interest in the case.”

  “Listen, detective sir, I don’t have anything to do with this neighborhood or the people in it. I left an amulet with Mushabbab and I’ve come to take it back.”

  “An amulet?”

  “Yes, it’s an antique silver amulet that’s hollow on the inside and can be worn on a belt. I inherited it from my grandfather but I had to sell it to be able to buy a gold ring for the mother of my children.”

  “So how did it end up here?”

  There was a flash in the old man’s eyes and there was scorn in his voice. “Mushabbab collects antiques and he wanted the amulet, so he asked me to leave it with him so he could examine it closely. Didn’t you say he was gone?”

  There was something cunning and ill-tempered about the way the old man looked at him and Nasser just knew that he was only giving him part of the truth. Nasser looked the man up and down; he wasn’t carrying anything other than that menacing smile.

  “And did you find what you were looking for?”