The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  SUBJECT: Message 11

  The bird scrapes at the air-conditioning unit, with its stock of feathers and chicks, to build a nest. “Is it spring?” I ask out loud. He doesn’t answer. He disappears and then comes back again. Like you …

  Every Sunday since my back was introduced to scalpels and crow’s-foot stitches, my heart feels as if it’s been left here in this chair by the window to wait, and is reluctant to speak to me.

  You look out.

  You cover me with that heavy raincoat that smells of pine nuts!

  Your slender body kneels in front of me, you set my feet on the footrests of my wheelchair.

  Your lips graze my knee for the briefest moment.

  You jump up and come around behind me to push the wheelchair.

  All the stores on the sidewalk of that narrow lane are closed.

  Then we arrive at the river.

  In the small village, I let the wheelchair spin in whatever direction it pleased. I discovered that wheels are bolder, more curious than feet.

  The old woman who knits socks in the tiny shop and the red pair you gave me.

  No one ever spoiled me before you.

  Why is it that we never get the opportunity to spoil the ones we love and to be spoiled by them?

  Aisha

  Attachment: A photo of Aunt Halima’s samovar. Half the Haram Mosque have drunk from it.

  Also a photo of her drum.

  Aunt Halima always repeats her motto to me: “I’m my own woman. God have mercy on anyone who tries to tie me down!”

  Discovery signed this drum for me.

  Discovery is the Beyoncé of the Lane of Many Heads, ^. She and her whole band with all their instruments sit atop Aunt Halima’s heart. “She’s so beautiful, so sexy, so young. She’s one of a kind, she’s a star!”

  She was always waxing lyrical about Discovery and she’d go to all the weddings just to see her, Halima and all the other women who couldn’t get enough of joyous celebration.

  P. S. The first meal I ever ate with a strange man, alone, in the open air. It makes my body writhe with passion even now.

  P. P. S. Azza loved the bracelet that you and I picked out for her. That day you were surprised, ^, by my naive suggestion that we get our two initials, A & A, Azza and Aisha, engraved on it. I didn’t feel I had to justify anything, but then I said one “A” would be enough. Whenever I dream of life outside the Lane of Many Heads, I become Azza, who becomes me.

  Aisha

  Manumission

  ONE DAY, YUSUF DISCOVERED A SMALL STOREROOM BEHIND THE SITTING ROOM on the third floor, which al-Lababidi had devoted to pictures of Mecca’s largest cluster of papermakers and booksellers, the area between the Great al-Salam Gate and the Little al-Salam Gate on the left side of the incline leading from the Haram Mosque to the Mas’a. Booksellers’ and bookbinders’ stores were mixed with perfumers and kohl-sellers dating from the third and fourth centuries AH; it was a river of ink and perfume welling up from the Haram, flowing alongside the Mas’a.

  On the right-hand side of the storeroom were engraved the words: The Perfumers’ Market. Soul of books and soul of oils. Book lovers believe the words of books are what give the perfumes their wonderful scent, but the old fragrance connoisseurs believe that perfumes are what give the books their magic. The truth is, it’s the human spirit diffused in the air that does it.

  Yusuf spent the nights gazing at the pictures. He strolled in a waking dream from the Sidra dorms, which had been endowed as lodgings for seekers of knowledge, to the ranks of innumerable small bookstores like Fida, al-Baz, and Mirza, with their tiny dark interiors and traditional arched doorways at which Mecca’s great men—Fida, al-Baz, and Mirza themselves—sat surrounded by piles and piles of manuscripts. Yusuf gazed at a black and white photo of the founding bookseller, Fida bin Adam al-Kashmiri, a hundred years old with feet still dusty from traveling to Istanbul, Egypt, and India in search of books. He had scarcely to utter the first missing title that he noticed—Fath al-Qarib Ala Abi Shuja, say—when his grandson Abd al-Samad would throw him a small cotton cushion to put on the paved ground of the square while he went around to the neighboring stores to bring him the title Fath al-Qarib al-Mujib Ala l-Taqrib by Sheikh Abu Abd Allah al-Shafi’i. He’d come back, having fetched the book, repeating what he always said: “Price is final. Price is final.” Time was suspended and merged, allowing Yusuf to walk slowly and arrive in time for the audience at the bookshop after sunset prayers, where he was enveloped in the most beautiful Quran recitations, by sheikhs Qarut, Bahidra, Qari, Jambi, Ashi, Mirdad and al-Arba’in. Whenever one ended, another would start up somewhere in the twilight. Then, as soon as the evening prayers were over, the chanters would come—Jawa, Abu Khashaba, Bukhari—to salute the night with their hymns and folk songs. Yusuf wandered from bookshop to bookshop, stopping to see the calligraphers, disciples of Muhammad al-Farisi and his student al-Kutbi, who flung out lines of calligraphy to the cadences of the recitations. He stopped to read every one of the signs that were hung on the walls and over the arched doorways—QURANS AND THEOLOGY BOOKS, ARABIC LITERATURE—and witnessed an argument which broke out between some market traders in Sheikh Muhammad Salih Jamal’s bookstore. He stopped at the narrow frontage of the store owned by Abd al-Karim bin al-Baz, heir to the great dean of booksellers, which had become a center of intellectual activity under the auspices of Sheikh Abd Allah al-Urabi, and went in, joining the crowd of youths who were watching, entranced, the poetic duel taking place between al-Zamakhshari, al-Siba’i and Abd al-Jabbar.

  Next, leaving the books in the background, Yusuf went out to the square where entertainers and storytellers were narrating the adventures of Abu Zayd al-Hilali to circles of listeners. On his left, sermons still echoed from inside al-Sawlatiya School every Thursday, along with sighs rising up from all the other schools and the homes of the great scholars of Mecca who either taught, led prayers, or delivered sermons at the Haram Mosque. Yusuf examined old title deeds and leases, some of which granted just one side of a store to a bookseller, while another bookseller took the other side; such was the booksellers’ rush for victory in the honorable occupation of bringing books to life.

  As night wore on and the stores closed, Yusuf lingered alone, taking deep drafts of the night breeze, which was laden with the scent of ink, old paper, and perfumes, and echoes of the readings and recitations that were still going on. He stood amidst the network of stores, facing the awesome idol Hubal, who had been thrown out of the mosque, one of many idols that had stood in the area around the Kaaba in the pre-Islamic age and were removed after being smashed. Al-Lababidi’s shots were taken from angles that conveyed the vast might of the idol, which lay keeled over with its head, eyes, and nose squashed into the ground under one of the bookstores and its vast stone body stretched out. It was one-armed, because its arm, fashioned entirely out of gold, had been long since hacked off and melted down to make jewelry and gold bullion coins; the rest of the body had remained at the entrance of the Haram Mosque for worshippers to tread on or disdainfully leave their shoes on, until one night during the redevelopment, when it disappeared without warning.

  In the dim light of the storeroom, Yusuf examined all the bookstore signs, in particular the attractive sign advertising the services of ABBAS KARARA, MAS’A, MECCA: ANY TOOTH REMOVED COMPLETELY PAIN-FREE, ALL KINDS OF FALSE TEETH FITTED, HALLMARK-GRADE GOLD CROWNING, ALL AT REMARKABLE PRICES.

  Reliving his past in al-Lababidi’s photographs, Yusuf realized the danger he’d exposed Azza to. He had been fifteen when he’d dragged Azza to Sheikh Abd al-Razzaq Balila’s bookstore, which was a space of no more than four square meters where the air was laced with the aroma of books. The solemn old man in a white robe and matching muslin turban who greeted them didn’t lift his eyes from the parchment he was reading, part of a volume on mythical creatures that was bound in camel leather and stamped with gold leaf. The old man seemed to come from some immortal ancient time. Behind him were shelves loaded with
old manuscripts—Ibn Sirin’s Interpretation of Dreams, Jahiz’s Book of Animals, The Soul by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya, The Necklace of the Dove by Ibn Hazm—side by side with stacks of parchments written in the hand of such great Sufis as al-Suhrawardi, al-Niffari’s Stations, and Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Openings. Abd al-Razzaq Balila’s bookstore represented stages through which the knowledge-seeker had to progress: when the student arrived from the Haram Mosque, laden with protestations of God’s oneness, he would travel through the old Arabic manuscripts, the exoteric sciences dispersing into irrelevance as he learned the esoteric ones.

  When Yusuf had become engrossed in the Sufi section, Azza had gotten restless and tried to slip away, so he’d shaken off his abstraction and gone to hang out with her in the cartoon section.

  They’d lurked there until the old man headed out to perform his afternoon prayer in the Haram Mosque, then Yusuf grabbed Azza’s hand and pulled her down the steps into a storeroom tucked between the houses in the Hajla neighborhood, where the modern-day mind could journey across the continents and see inside the minds of men, from The Courts of Great Men to Hugo’s Les Misérables as translated by the poet Hafiz Ibrahim. He pulled Azza in between the shelves. To their right, were Marx’s Capital, Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment, Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and The Union of Soul and Matter and his idealism based on the capacity of thesis and antithesis to create synthesis, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and his ill-fated war on windmills—books that had inspired many of the great up-heavals that changed the path of humanity. To their left were the world wars—Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother—and the intellectual trials that had shaped humankind, from Asia to Europe to America—the Bustani translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, prophet of the Greeks, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Sartre’s The Flies and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Goethe’s repurposing of Sophocles’ model of tragedy, Orwell’s Animal Farm—along with a smattering of the works of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Foucault, Chekhov, Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Prévert, Balzac, Camus, and finally Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.

  The yellowing pages of those old minds had made Azza cough, so Yusuf had distracted her with stories of wide-eyed young girls who ventured beyond the limited world of reality: Thumbelina, scarcely as tall as a thumb, who was nearly married to a mole, Rapunzel who let down her long hair from her prison at the top of a tower so her lover could visit her, Alice in Wonderland whose one teardrop flooded the underworld, and Cinderella with the fairy godmother who turned insects into horses and rags into jewels and silk so she could escape from the soot of her kitchen …

  In the silence of al-Lababidi’s house, Yusuf’s soul peeled away and floated alone through time and space, wandering through a black and white world where Mecca’s past and present bled into one another on the walls. There was nothing to separate the photographs from the things that could be seen out of the windows. There was no longer any link to reality other than the diaries, which Nasser was as addicted to reading as Yusuf was to those photographs; the pair blended together in their shared addiction.

  Nasser read on:

  June 6, 1995

  Azza, your addiction to comics—particularly Batman issue 135, where Batman meets Batwoman—shocked me. The jealousy killed me. I was jealous of your obsession with that superhuman being. I realize now that Batman’s surprise attacks were your model for all those fleeing bodies in your sketches …

  Aisha was my unbeatable competitor. That secret conflict with Aisha robbed me of two decades of my life, though maybe she was never aware of it. She had her brothers working as emissaries who’d race me to the bookstores at the Salam Gate and buy books for her, hunting out titles I’d never even heard of, then sneaking them in plastic bags past their father the schoolteacher who’d forbidden the termites that books put into people’s heads.

  Aisha, whose weak sight got ever weaker, always read in bed after her family had all gone to sleep. I always imagined her like that, curled up in their reinforced concrete pressure-cooker house, while I sat on our mud roof and we competed to get as much light as we could from the municipal street lamps. I’d finish off a whole book in one night. But where she hid her habit from her parents, I, the fatherless, would read, and love what I read, in the open, because my mother Halima believed that my demon was made of paper—and anyway my book obsession kept me away from smoking, sniffing glue, and sneaking around harassing women, which was what all the other boys my age did.

  My greatest loss to Aisha was Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the only available copy of which she’d managed, by some inexplicable miracle, to get hold of. She beat me to that lost time, which remained a hole in my heart like a keyhole through which my time trickled out, and sometimes it seemed to me that if I’d managed to get my own copy of that Lost Time then I might have lived a totally different life, might not have been betrayed like I have been.

  ON THE ROOF OF AL-LABABIDI’S HOUSE, YUSUF REALIZED JUST WHAT A DAMAGING effect Aisha had had on his life, and realized that it was she, not Azza, who’d betrayed him. The one he’d excised from his diaries, the one he hated, even—he saw now what she’d stolen from him.

  Yusuf was tempted to break into Aisha’s room right then to look for Proust’s Lost Time. He trembled a little at the thought. But he was pretty sure that she was sneaky and daring enough to have taken that Time with her.

  He thought about Batman, wondering if Batman could have stolen Azza. Did Batman remind Azza of him, Yusuf? Or of some nocturnal creature that penetrated the darkness and avoided obstacles using sonar?

  Yusuf was turning into the remnants of a bat, crashing into the remnants of her. He understood for the first time the meaning of all those red lines he drew as a teenager under Kant’s words: space and time are both finite and infinite; matter in itself is both finitely divisible and infinitely divisible; will was both constrained and free. He called out from the roof, “Azza! You’re all of those contradictions. Finiteness and divisibility of the infinite go beyond the surface. I mustn’t give up hope that you’re still there. I’ll search for you wherever you are, even in death, because your death means my death too …”

  Yusuf missed bringing Aisha to life in his diaries, but he knew that fate had consigned those days to the past. There was no place for them in the present.

  Ring Road

  CHECKING THE PASSENGER LISTS OF ALL OUTBOUND SAUDI AIRLINES FLIGHTS for that Thursday and Friday, Nasser discovered Aisha’s husband Ahmad’s name on a dawn flight to Casablanca on the day the body had been found. His sudden appearance and disappearance made it look pretty likely that it was Aisha who was dead, but Nasser shuddered at the thought of going down that line of investigation.

  That day, he was trapped for hours at the Gate Lane exit, which led to the Haram Mosque. The engines of all four lanes of cars groaned, pumping fumes into the Meccan heat in competition with public buses, refrigerated vans transporting foodstuffs, trucks piled high with live sheep, and tourist buses whose drivers stood on the gas and zoomed through the traffic, terrorizing the little cars that shoehorned themselves into the tiniest gaps in attempts to escape the creeping paralysis of the traffic. In seasons like this, and especially in the Umrah season during Ramadan, those buses played a leading role on the roads. They looked like mythical monsters, with the dense rows of pilgrims’ heads peering out of their darkened windows, and they mercilessly sliced paths through the masses of humanity before them, which is why Meccans simply vacated the center of their city and left it to the pilgrims, crossing the ring road around the Haram and heading for anywhere outside the first or second belts that encircled the heart of the city and from which all the main trade arteries branched off.

  Nasser left the car running to go and buy some laddu balls, a specialty sweet made from yellow gram flour, raisins, a
nd a hint of cardamom, which he stuffed—all six of them, each the size of a golf ball—into a sandwich under the amused eyes of the sweetseller. He’d eat that sweet for breakfast and lunch if he could, without a thought for the risk of diabetes that loomed over him like it did all the children of the Gulf’s oil boom. He enjoyed the greasy snack at the wheel, the car idling in the same spot thanks to a bus that had stopped in the middle of the road to offload pilgrims—Saudis from other cities whose cars were kept in designated spots at the outskirts of the city while they were loaded onto public buses to be dropped right in front of the Haram Mosque, then loaded back on and returned once they had performed their Umrah obligations.

  Nasser looked at the bare shoulders of the male pilgrims and the unveiled faces of the women. If so much as a corner of cloth brushed one of those faces, a sheep had to be slaughtered in recompense. He thought it was weird that a woman’s face had to be uncovered for religious rituals, but sealed up again for life—he was an active participant in that contradictory habit, of course—and he realized that his heart wasn’t racing, his mouth hadn’t gone dry, the sight of those female pilgrims didn’t cause his body to stiffen—he looked at them as if they were some kind of non-masculine, non-feminine third sex—whereas the mere glimpse of a local woman was enough to nail him to the spot! The thought of meeting an unveiled Azza or Aisha in the courtyard of the Haram and stepping on the marble that their feet had touched caused his body to seize. Suddenly he had no appetite and he wrapped the uneaten half of his sandwich up and placed it on the seat next to him.

  Ahead of him, the river of cars was dammed between banks of shops: Nour Grocery, Nour Valley, Nour Bakery, Nour Shawarma, Nour Juices … Harra Supplies and Salam Beverages were the only two names that interrupted the broken record repetition of the word Nour, light, over every sign. The repetition resumed a little way down the road, where the offices of the pilgrims’ guides were loudly decorated with lights trained on pictures of the two Holy Mosques and their custodian, the King, which hovered over the heads of the men sitting on long couches, waiting to receive visitors. By one of the offices, Nasser spotted a copy of Umm al-Qura sitting on a rack in front of a small bookstore stuffed with Qurans and biographies of the Prophet, so for the second time he left the car running and went over, paid the three-riyal cover price and grabbed his copy. Back in the driver’s seat, the traffic was still motionless, so he opened up the paper and flicked through in search of Yusuf’s Window, which caught him unawares with the headline “A View Over al-Malah.” He read: