by Raja Alem
“Who are you talking about?” Mu’az asked, answering the accusation with total calm.
“The guy you were just talking to.” The man had disappeared, swallowed up by the mountain, and there was no sign of which path he’d taken.
“Oh, he just stopped me to ask how to get to al-Salam Hotel.”
Nasser was at a loss. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.
“Buying sweet dates for my dad,” replied Mu’az, nodding at the shopping bag he was holding.
His silencing stare bored into Nasser long after he’d left. Nasser’s police nose could smell the prey he’d been searching for all this time, and the heat in his temples agreed. He spent the searing midday hours walking back and forth on the mountainside, peering into people’s houses and faces, sneaking into corridors wherever he found a door ajar and investigating ruined buildings, looking for that tall specter. He knew his target was somewhere in this labyrinth.
That evening, Mu’az tried to find a way to go back. He had to make it absolutely clear to both Yusuf and the house that they couldn’t get rid of him, even if they started making deals with external forces like this Nasser, whom he’d only just managed to stop from uncovering his treasure.
The mountains ceased to tremble when they were both shut up in the Lababidi house together. Mu’az sat sulking on the roof in the shadow of the minaret of the Turkish bath, where he could keep an eye on Yusuf and the house. He wanted to be enveloped by the restful sunset over the rooftops like usual. The old pain attacked him during his long silence. But suddenly, he didn’t need to be jealous any more—didn’t need to possess or to tire himself out. After they had both performed the evening prayer on the roof, he told Yusuf the most important of his secrets. Still facing the Kaaba, he began:
“The day we discovered the corpse in the Lane of Many Heads, I came here to escape everything. Marie was sitting like she usually was, one leg over the other, leaning on those damask cushions and resting her head to the left-hand side, where she had a diamond flower-shaped brooch pinned on her chest—a moon hovering over a flower—and her muslin hat was sitting on her chignon of black and gray hair. My lens was still shaken from seeing the body in the lane so I sat on the floor in front of her, still trembling a bit. We sat there for hours, maybe days, and she said nothing the entire time, so finally I looked up at her. I realized that I’d seen yet another loss. I’d witnessed the death of a whole century. I didn’t dare touch her!
“I still don’t know whether it was me who killed her or not. Did I bring the germ of death with me when I came, destroying her world?
“That evening, the Meccan sky looked like an empty, colorless mirror that didn’t reflect the person looking into it. It was splintered by paths leading into and out of the Holy Mosque like ant trails around a nest, and you could no longer see the inside from the outside. I felt like I’d entered into her moment and I realized that she wanted to be left where she was, looking out over the Haram Mosque, which she’d spent half a century photographing. I was worried it would be disrespectful to the body, though, so I pulled her seat, just as it was, to the darkroom over there, read the Surah of Sovereignty over her, and closed the door. I gathered up my sinful, intimate photos, went down the stairs, locked al-Lababidi’s front door safely on all those heads that had been threatened with decapitation, and left. I buried the set of keys with the interlocking prayer-niches under the top step of the staircase in the minaret in the Lane of Many Heads. And covered them up with my father’s calls to prayers and recitations of the Quran, and I left them undisturbed until you, Yusuf, needed somewhere to escape to. I locked myself out of there; that was as far as I was going to get: shop assistant to the owner of Studio Modern in Gate Lane. Two simultaneous deaths made for a great ending, don’t you think?”
The air around them trembled. The desire for his approval, the desire to please him, held Yusuf in its hot thrall. Could Mu’az have possibly had a hand in—he quashed that train of thought, ignored it. “I know how difficult it is for you to get here.”
“It’s not as bad as going there.”
“Have they found the Kaaba key yet?” Yusuf asked, as a way of distracting him from his sadness.
“No,” sighed Mu’az, “but they’re casting a new one in Turkey and they say it’ll be ready for the next pilgrimage season, in time for the ritual cleaning of the Kaaba …”
Mannequin
DETECTIVE NASSER TOOK NOTE OF WHAT YUSUF HAD WRITTEN IN HIS WINDOW about the Eunuchs’ Goat, the character who slaughtered sheep every day. He wanted to ascertain whether what Yusuf had written in his window could be a possible alibi for why he wasn’t in the neighborhood when the crime took place.
I doubt you’ll know me when I call to you with this voice: “Azza.”
I’ve lost my most important face in the mirror; I’ve lost the Eunuchs’ Goat.
No one can see me the way the Eunuchs’ Goat sees me. Every time he looks at me it’s like he’s saying, You exist, you’re a citizen, you belong, you’re a historian.
They caught him selling black-market carcasses to the restaurants in the Lane of Many Heads! You should’ve seen it, Azza. It was a parade of photos and titles in the pages of Umm al-Qura newspaper: the brave men of the municipal government and the Holy Capital’s licensing bureaus who’d performed the early morning raid against unregulated slaughterhouses.
I read out loud by your window while the finger of charcoal rattles between your fingers. Are the torsos you draw still fleeing a massacre? Did you make sure to get them marked them with veterinary certification stamps? I can’t stop reading and re-reading it.
“140 tons of spoiled meat intended for distribution and human consumption were seized today, along with the culprits who slaughtered camel mares, sheep, and goats. Authorities stressed that camel mares must be slaughtered systematically under the supervision of veterinarians … Several experts warned in their testimonies of the danger posed by careless treatment of sick animals, pointing to more than 200 diseases common to both animals and humans. Some of these include Malta fever, valley fever, anthrax, tuberculosis, rabies, tapeworm, which can be transferred to humans through contact with a slaughtered camel mare, and there may even be other diseases that are more dangerous.”
Most of them are here this very moment, living side by side with the people of the lane in perfect harmony, sharing their viruses generously. As you can see from the experts’ testimonies, Azza, the Eunuchs’ Goat is a vector for no less than two hundred epidemics. What’s worse, though, is the lie they’re spreading that the Eunuchs’ Goat stole the donation box, “The Bribe Box,” and embezzled all the donations that were meant to help him get his papers.
“Do you agree with me that this is all just a rotten plot, timed suspiciously to coincide with the recent news about changes in the stock market and the reports of Iran’s nuclear reactors?”
In the Lane of Many Heads, people joke that the Eunuchs’ Goat has fallen victim to the vagina of the woman who took him in, Umm al-Sa’d. Surely you noticed the fire. When al-Ashi heard the news, he burned all his records, and Umm al-Sa’d left without her loud red lipstick. She had a nervous breakdown and bailed. She hailed a taxi on the main road and abandoned the neighborhood.
The sun overhead was exactly perpendicular, not unlike his doubts, when Nasser left the police deportation center in Umm al-Joud. He’d actually taken note of these sleights of naming that were considered a form of municipal beautification: The Lane of Many Heads became Alley of Light; Umm al-Doud, Mother of Worms, they changed to Umm al-Joud, Mother of Munificence. He knew that if he spent any more time there—in that den of forgery, deportation, passports, and nationalities—the worms of the massacre that was taking place there would begin penetrating his bones.
He drove off with uncharacteristic calm as images of sweaty-faced men in khaki uniforms holding endless lists of deportees—none of which contained the name Salih, the Eunuchs’ Goat—floated through his mind. Unless he’d used a pseud
onym, this meant that the Eunuchs’ Goat had escaped after his arrest. Either he paid a bribe, or seduced a soldier with his good humor and good looks, or maybe fate just gave him a lucky break. He was stuck with that nickname, the Eunuchs’ Goat. Could you really tell an officer or government official that that was your name?
What were the official documents that were being processed by the Interior Ministry? The ones that al-Ashi and his wife had drawn up and gotten notarized. The ones they’d paid bribes for so that their middleman, Ahmad, the sewage cleaner’s oldest son and Aisha’s husband, would make sure they got through? No matter how many favors he called in at Civil Affairs, or the Passport Authority, or the Interior Ministry itself, Nasser could find no trace of anyone who’d been naturalized with the name “the Eunuchs’ Goat” or “Turk” or “Salih” or “Defiler” or “Marbleskin.” Those were all nicknames by which the handsome Turkish boy was known in the Lane of Many Heads. He was the one, people said, who’d be getting all the girls in the lane pregnant on account of his good looks and fair complexion!
Nasser made a note: Questions remain re: Eunuchs’ Goat. Still a potential suspect.
Nasser drove to the Lane of Many Heads. He snuck through the window at the back of al-Ashi’s courtyard kitchen into the firewood store and then into the chilly courtyard. The walls were covered in foul-smelling grease, cooking pots lay silently on their stoves, cats inhabited the pits in which the lamb was roasted for mandi. It was as though the kitchen had been in disuse for ages, not just since Umm al-Sa’d’s recent trouble. Her nervous breakdown, which everyone in the neighborhood made allowances for. “Who could cope with three shocks like that? The arrest of the Eunuchs’ Goat, the stock market crash, and losing the share in the Arab League Building she’d inherited?”
“Umm al-Sa’d had survived the clutches of death but the boy she raised was her downfall.”
There was nothing of interest in the yard except for the buried remains of newspaper in the pits, which served as a pen for the cats and whatever overflowed from the sewers. He picked up a pile of ashes that bore the headline “Mile Tower”; it looked like a spear or a pen stuck into the sands on the Red Sea coast. It towered in the sky over Jeddah at a height of sixteen-hundred meters and had been built at a cost of fifty billion riyals in cooperation with Bechtel Corp. The wind blew pieces of other headlines around him in the yard:
Rattles Saber
Market Crash
World Silent Despite Rising Death
Women Driving: External Pressure, Interior Funda—
Food Inflation 30–50%, Affects Milk, Sugar, Rice
Barrel of Crude Breaks $100 Mark
3 Billion to Expand the Haram Mosque Complex Toward
These were just meaningless scraps, which the wind would use to supplement its own historical archive. Nasser suddenly noticed something at the bottom of the cooking pits. He reached down into the nearest pit to examine the base. It felt strange. It didn’t feel like soil, it felt like something thick. Nasser touched something prickly; it was like plastic covered with real hair, as if the bottom of the pit had been coated with a half-plastic, half-animal skin layer. He had no idea what could have made for a substance like that.
Nasser hadn’t come to rifle through al-Ashi’s memory. He’d wanted to make sure that no one, especially the Eunuchs’ Goat, would be able to come hide out here in the yard. He could have spent hours there, and still not made head or tail of those sooty memories.
Detective Nasser carried on upstairs to where, according to Yusuf’s diary, the Eunuchs’ Goat’s room should have been. The door was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder, knocking it out of place and tumbling into the room, where he landed on a heap of women’s bodies. They were all in pieces and rigor mortis had long since set in, but they were still wrapped in evening dresses of lace and tulle and satin, embroidered with beads and crystals, girded in velvet and silk. What kind of a sicko had dreamt up this cocktail party massacre? Nasser was still half-blinded by the searing pain in his head, but when he regained his composure, he realized that he was surrounded by a phalanx of life-sized cork dummies, mannequins. Nasser sat there, staring at those amazing imitations of women. It had simply never occurred to him. What could these mannequins add to the case? What could the Lane of Many Heads know about the fetishes of a man with no identity who’d disappeared without a trace as if he’d never existed.
That evening, Nasser found something Yusuf had written about the mannequins in his diary.
March 2, 2004
After Mushabbab had liberated him from the terror of being deported, the Eunuchs’ Goat underwent a complete transformation. He started following his whims through Mecca. He stopped making furtive escapes, stopped always keeping an eye out for the deportation vans. His body tasted freedom for the first time: it was like biting into a peppercorn, or a cinnamon stick, or a clove; the sweet aroma stung.
I receded. It was like I was just recording the life of the Eunuchs’ Goat, who now had a feel for Mecca that I never had. The thing that most made him want to take his body outside the neighborhood and into the world of the markets outside was his love for the traffic and the way it pulsed. He discovered that he wanted nothing more than to surrender his body to the crush, to bump into and be carried along by the masses, never raising his eyes to look anyone in the face. He understood that parts of his body became parts of other bodies. Don’t laugh, Azza. He works in a kitchen. He enjoys slaughtering animals and butchering them, preparing them for the oven, slicing them up into pots. All his senses have been trained to slice, and to relish the act of taking bodies apart and cutting them up. When he sees someone’s leg or their rear or even their back, he feels like his leg is being summoned, that his own rear end wants to join all the others, that his back is unconsciously falling in line with all the backs of man. To him, these are just separate parts ready to join whatever body calls on them.
As night fell, Nasser’s body surrendered to the putrid smell giving form to the mannequins around him and I, the Lane of Many Heads, found it a perfect opportunity to perch on the threshold and whisper to him in Yusuf’s voice, “I am the Eunuchs’ Goat, one of the many heads opening up for you so that you may walk across the stage …”
Nasser carried on reading.
March 11, 2004
That Friday evening, he was meandering through the Gaza Market when he was blinded by a cacophony of lights in a store window he’d walked past dozens of time before. He’d never seen it like this before: it was like a planet with human life! Then came his epiphany: for twenty-eight whole years, his life had been nothing but a massive encyclopedia of black, from cover to cover, entitled Women: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Every time he opened it looking for page X, he found a smear of black, or a photo of Y: also black, or—God forbid!—Z: black, again. His entire adolescence, his every waking dream about a woman’s arm or leg or shoulder: black. He used to try to conjure up some tender image, but the encyclopedia would always blot it out with blackness before he could.
Then as Soviet expansion brought on more and more Jihadist groups, the blackness veritably poured out from the pages of the encyclopedia, layers of black were pasted over other layers of black, shrouds sewn onto other shrouds, till the whole world was covered over. The only female reference the Eunuchs’ Goat knew was the woman who raised him, Umm al-Sa’d—broad-shouldered, flat-chested, with narrow hips—and if he tried really hard, he could add to that Sa’diya’s delicate wrist from behind the curtain.
Then suddenly, and without any prior notice, those women fell out of the sky to land before him: garish travelers preserved behind glass. He stood there for hours, in a daze. His encyclopedia absorbed the woman in the apple-colored muslin top with the lace décolletage and the embroidered leaves, which wound their way up from her left breast to her shoulder, leaving the top of her right breast and shoulder bare. Her flat belly was wrapped in pomegranate-colored silk, and chiffon hung from her waist—like a waterfall—down between her thighs and ov
er her rear. The pain of desire pressed on his kidneys as he stood there like a taut string planted in the sin of that nearly transparent layer that ran from her navel to the top of her breasts. And those drops of bead falling over to touch her delicate toes and forming a long train followed him all the way into his dreams. A cart full of bolts of cloth swung past, knocking him unceremoniously to the ground and out of his own body. He didn’t bother to get up. He just stared up at the soft chest, twisting every last drop out of his body as it was rocked by wave after wave. He understood then that the female body is the secret we never dare expose. It is the intention that precedes movement. He knew that if he stayed there looking at it his body would pass through any solid barrier and that his desire would carry him over any distance, no matter how far. This was the secret behind the black covers of his encyclopedia.
An Afghan boy selling bundles of jasmine walked by, trailing the flowers across the Eunuchs’ Goat’s nose and giving him a knowing look as he followed the Eunuchs’ Goat’s gaze toward the shop window. The Afghan boy’s smile spread across his red cheeks before he walked off down one of the brightly lit market’s many aisles, followed only by a faint trace of jasmine. The sadness of the flowers revived the Goat’s desperate need to be touched.
The next day, when the Eunuchs’ Goat had mustered up the courage to go into the clothing store, he started having seizures. He could’ve sworn that he’d died and been resurrected in heaven, surrounded by all those beauties. Their bodies with the tiny exposed gaps and the mere suggestion of slight curves. He put up with the kicking from the Pakistani security guard in the blue uniform who threw him out onto the street. He disappeared from his father’s kitchen and scrubbed himself clean of the layer of rot that had settled on his skin. He didn’t eat for days as he wandered from clothing store to clothing store: paradises like al-Ceyloni, al-Bajiri, and Bin Siddiq. He knew that he would grow senile but that these women of his harem would never suffer the touch of old age or headscarves. Clothing stores became his entire focus. He derived more pleasure from going into a clothes store than from all the victories over all the devils that haunted his dreams. There among those silks was the greenery that would cover the entire peninsula, the rivers, the freely grazing ostriches alongside the night, and the beauties, whom he’d fight to liberate from their hell. You see when we, children of the lane, dream, we don’t dream about fairy godmothers, we dream about the war of the Hidden Imam who will come to earth and transform the Arabian Peninsula into heaven. We dream of death so that we can give life to the beauties in the peninsula’s rivers.