by Raja Alem
Al-Malah is being extended upward to form a multi-story cemetery.
As fans of conceptual art we’re keen to see the cemetery remodeled as a tower. Our deaths will be truly modern—if not post-modern! A more creative contractor might even fashion the upper stories out of glass so our corpses can lie watching the more freshly dead decompose artistically above them.
I’m afraid to go on my morning stroll around al-Malah these days.
Here in Mecca we’ve become specialists in religious tourism and our mission is to deport our dead. The bodies who were disinterred from al-Shubbayka know all about that. Developers razed the cemetery and moved all its dead to make way for skyscrapers, parking lots, and five-star hotels.
Long corpses were stacked on giant trucks, their legs sticking off the end. Those of us who saw that sight as kids, still see them now, floating in midair down al-Misyal, following the drainage sewers to Majin Pool. Who knows where they took them from there.
The traffic suddenly started moving and a motorcycle roared past Nasser into a narrow gap ahead, belching fumes straight into Nasser’s face. He quickly closed the window and turned on the air-conditioning, laughing at himself for needing living, rather than mummified, air. He regarded the pate of the bike’s back passenger, which was shaved so closely it shone, and the ihram robes that fluttered as the motorbike sped along, contrasting with the driver’s tracksuit and helmet. He found the frivolity of motorbikes so irritating. They’d started to replace taxis as the main form of transport in the past few years since they were so much faster in traffic. A ride cost as little as fifty riyals, but the accidents were innumerable.
Nasser had lost his place when he’d stopped reading, and when he went back to it the word revolution caught his eye.
You could say the dead were the first to form an opposition movement because in Mecca death is the frontline. Meccan graves have a history of rebelling against extortionate taxes. The most famous instance was the Gravediggers’ Revolution in 1326 AH. When Sultan Mehmed V acceded to the throne and the Committee of Union and Progress got their way, the Ottoman constitution was reinstated throughout the empire, including in Mecca and the Hijaz. The Ottoman constitutionalists established a specific tax of five riyals for burial of the dead, which was allegedly to cover the cost of maintaining the graves. They summoned the leader of the gravediggers’ guild and instructed him to exact full payment from the relatives of every dead person, but he refused categorically and stormed out of the government palace with the famous words
People of al-Malah, rise up!
Death may well be free today
but tomorrow to die they’ll make you pay!
His cry roused the anger of the people of the Hijaz. No longer impressed by the constitutionalists’ principles, they lost what faith they’d had in the Young Turks’ revolution against the Sultan. Their crier called for a holy war, and young men from every neighborhood responded, coming out with their weapons and clamoring for a revolution against the Turks. They clashed with soldiers in markets around the city, and small numbers were killed and injured on both sides until the Turks managed, with the help of several Sharifs, to suppress the mutiny a few hours later. The Sharif of Mecca, Ali bin Abd Allah Pasha, was accused of fomenting and aiding the revolt and promptly deposed. Sharif Hussein bin Ali was installed in his place. A hardline conservative, he paid no attention whatsoever to the principles of the constitution that granted ordinary people a bare minimum of political rights because it went against the tradition of total separation between the ruler and the ruled, which was something he cherished.
The traffic finally eased when the troop of pilgrims crossed the road toward the Haram behind a young guide, chased by a little Afghan boy selling miniature prayer mats, decorated with glittery pictures of the Kaaba, out of a plastic bag. Nasser bore right, toward Hafayir, though he wasn’t planning to go anywhere in particular. Since he’d taken on the case, Mecca—the city he’d left his birthplace, Ta’if, for—had stirred in his heart; more than once, now, he’d driven around aimlessly at night, for no other reason than to check that his Mecca was still there and that the angels hadn’t carried it away to punish its unworthy residents.
As soon as he turned into al-Mansur Street he was surrounded by shining black faces. He felt safe in that narrow alley, which was named after the dervish who lived there, al-Sayyid al-Shanqiti, who was famous for materializing out of nowhere. He would wander the alley or sit down on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, perform some miracle, then suddenly disappear again. Nasser parked opposite al-Shanqiti Mosque and continued on foot, looking around him without knowing what he was looking for. People always hoped that some crisis would persuade al-Shanqiti to return from his occultation; Nasser could feel anticipation in the air, the hope that he would appear like he had once when a father had accidentally slammed a car door on his son’s hand. Al-Shanqiti materialized, read some verses from the Quran over the crushed hand, and then breathed on it. The boy’s hand had healed immediately. Or once when a motorcyclist had an accident with a car and his leg was smashed up; al-Shanqiti appeared, recited, and breathed, at which the wounds sealed themselves up and the bones set themselves. The young man got to his feet as good as new and set about collecting the broken bits of his motorbike and hauling them over to the nearest mechanic’s. The stories, Nasser thought, would be perfect for those shows on satellite where they read the stars, cure people’s problems with magic, and turn ugly ducklings into graceful swans through epic cosmetic surgery operations.
Nasser glanced around him, following the eye of the puzzle-master who supervised him and guided his investigations. He saw no trace of the glory that Yusuf had found in the history of al-Mansur Street, which used to be known as “the Chamomile.” In the early twentieth century it was easily the most fashionable area in the city, equivalent to Hyde Park, or Central Park, or the Champs-Élysées, where everyone who was anyone would promenade each afternoon to show off how elegant and radiant they were, their bejeweled rainbow-like costumes easily eclipsing the finery of their Turkish overlords.
On the other side of the alley, a black man stood up, drawing Nasser’s attention to a threadbare red couch, a water urn next to it, and a peeling Formica bookshelf whose three shelves bore a few leftover rounds of dry bread and a couple of open cans of food. A living room out in the street, on the bare earth. The man came over, arms outstretched to greet Nasser, and Nasser yielded to the hand, discovering too late its leechlike softness; it was as though his hand was encased completely in squelching clay. The man’s palm was firmly glued to his and he stared into Nasser’s eyes as he said, “Women! They come with knives. Some of us can read their sharp edges. You will. But take it slowly. Don’t read with your heart. We have nothing to do with it. Women are their own biggest problem.” The man let go of Nasser’s hand and vanished down the street.
Nasser’s feeling of annoyance mounted. He was sure he’d seen that face somewhere before, but he couldn’t recall where, and although he wanted to follow the man to find out, his inscrutable words stood like a barrier in Nasser’s way.
Nasser went back to the car and drove off in irritation. When he got to al-Rusayfa Street, the word “knives” resurfaced to prod him, and he remembered one of Yusuf’s old columns that had been published online was about knives.
June 20, 2000
The eighties began with a phone call from a woman to the office of the City of Mecca. She informed them of a peculiar phenomenon: “Firstly, I’m Meccan born and bred,” she said. “Now, my husband and I noticed a while ago that all the knives were disappearing from the markets. We asked around, and discovered that the cleavers and other sharp instruments were beginning to disappear too. We’ve found out that African workers are buying them in record numbers!”
The municipal employees naturally scoffed at the woman’s laughable conspiracy theory, but it brought to light a story that had been taking place silently under the surface of the city: the Emir’s deputy subsequently dis
covered that his undersecretary, Ba Ali, was in the process of embezzling a tract of land in al-Rusayfa belonging to the al-Qabuji family, who had been unable to evict the squatters who lived there and who had discreetly agreed with Ba Ali that the Public Security forces should be called in to remove them. They surrounded and attacked the rebel neighborhoods in total secrecy, so the news didn’t reach any other neighborhoods in the city. The residents resisted, fighting with blades and rocks in the hope of routing the soldiers, until the municipal authorities received the woman’s phone call and were alerted to the crisis. The Emir ordered an immediate end to the cleansing operation, and it was the end of the undersecretary Ba Ali’s career, but the luxury developments crept in anyway.
“Women!” snorted Nasser, remembering the letter preserved for twenty years in his boss’s archives. It was just one of a whole wave of letters that had flooded their office at the time, along with Public Security offices, research centers, universities, the municipal authority, and the Royal Court, all offering the exact same suggestion, the brainchild of a certain “Dr. Farida, Concerned Citizen”:
To confront the problem of the armies of illegal foreign workers who come to the kingdom to perform the pilgrimage and then go underground, we propose that the authorities consider taking the following steps:
Two camps should be constructed in the desert, the first for females in the Nafoud Desert, and the second for males in the desert of the Empty Quarter. Any foreign national who is unable to produce proper residence papers should be transferred to the appropriate camp immediately. If any criticism arises on the part of the so-called civilized world, as is to be expected, our official reply will be that the government that objects should open its own borders to the masses of immigrants currently hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, a portion of the state budget should be allocated to provide for the immigrants until their time is over (and it is highly unlikely their number would grow). There should also be a dedicated effort to disseminating news of these camps in order to counter the idyllic image that attracts immigrants from all over the world to come here and scrounge from our overburdened budget.
Nasser sniggered at the cruelty of the female imagination. He pictured scenes from a film he thought of making, entitled Transistor States. The plot would revolve around a world ruled by women. One character would head the inspectorate for the knife industry and she’d demand to see buyers’ entry visas before authorizing any sales, and the other would draw up plans to populate the world’s deserts with a new unisex subspecies of human.
As he was waiting for the light to turn green, Nasser suddenly—and apropos of nothing—remembered a black and white photo of Mushabbab that hung on the wall to the right of Mushabbab’s couch. The face in the photo was identical to the dervish al-Shanqiti. The light went green and Nasser accelerated then made an abrupt U-turn, brakes screeching, to head back toward the orchard in the Lane of Many Heads.
He ran the last stretch to the orchard, rousing all the neighborhood cats and dogs, threw the gate open, and rushed into the yard. On the wall to the right of the couch there was a patch of yellow brighter than the paint surrounding it; someone had taken the picture. Nasser felt like he’d been tricked. He drove back to al-Mansur Street, only to find that the little living room in the street had also disappeared. All the alarms in his head were going off at once: someone was messing with him. The dervish he’d shaken hands with was Mushabbab. How could he have been so stupid as to fail to confiscate the only photo of his antagonist?
Nasser hurried to his office to look for a case from a while back involving the dervish al-Shanqiti. The file he found recounted that a black man had escaped arrest after being caught smuggling cannabis to the daughter of a prominent personality, Sheikh Khalid al-Sibaykhan. The man had apparently disappeared without a trace, and the report went so far as to claim that he possessed magical powers, which allowed him to hide from his pursuers!
Nasser pieced the information together with something he’d read in one of Aisha’s emails.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 18
Dear ^,
You want to know: am I consumed by guilt? Does what’s going on between us make me feel schizophrenic? By which you mean, do I ever compare this to how I grew up? You asked me if the Lane of Many Heads was a threat to me somehow, or to you, and I assured you that the only threat to you was me! This construction called “me” …
It WILL be amusing to take part in German Bohemian life … I don’t delude myself that I shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan’t. But I shall get away from people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that. I shall be among people who DON’T own things and who HAVEN’T got a home and a domestic servant in the background, who haven’t got a standing and a status and a degree and a circle of friends of the same. Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness. How I HATE life, how I hate it. How I hate the Geralds, that they can offer one nothing else.”
The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, AD INFINITUM, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness.
Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his life—it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack.
Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white. She had FELT it turning white so often, under the intolerable burden of her thoughts, and her sensations. Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health.
Perhaps it was only her unabateable health that left her so exposed to the truth. If she were sickly she would have her illusions, imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She must always see and know and never escape.
(Women in Love)
Gudrun puts me in this disturbed mood. I can’t stand this emptiness that Gudrun opens up for her men, opens up inside her men.
How I laughed at your naïveté in secret! If only you knew what girls’ bodies were made of in the Lane of Many Heads. The dough of little liars, digging with lies, daily digging to get through the layers upon layers of warnings, restrictions on movement and restrictions on existence, to penetrate into life lightly …
Aisha
P.S. “I’m hanging on one,” meaning her husband has said the divorce formula once.
“I’m hanging on two.”
“I’m on three.” The third time means the irrevocable end of the marriage.
“I’m on four, but looking for a fatwa to erase two.”
“I’m on five, and we’ve exhausted our options with sheikhs and fatwas. Now we’re looking for a third party who’ll marry and divorce me without touching me so my counter will be reset to zero.”
“How about you, Aisha, what are you on?”
“I’m an outcast, I don’t fit in anywhere in this musical scale of divorce…”
Correction: Azza’s in a state. There’s a rumor that Mushabbab was arrested for dealing hashish to the daughter of someone important.
P.P.S. Here’s the story as Mushabbab told it to Azza:
Mushabbab went up to the gate of a palatial house, looking with awe at the sky-high walls, more than eight meters high. From a window in his post adjoining the gate the guard watched him, knowing that the young miss had been expecting the man and had left orders at the gate for them to receive the parcel. Seeing the name on the parcel, the guard took it without questioning, and immediately, from the evasive look on the poor man’s face, Mushabbab realized it was a trap, even before the gate slid open and the police car appeared, and a circle of policemen closed in on him. They sh
oved him up against the car, and from there he watched, as if in slow motion, the parcel being transferred from hand to hand. No one even bothered to look inside. They kicked him unconscious on the spot, and by the time he regained consciousness he found himself lying by the side of the Mecca-Jeddah highway. He struggled back home and hid out in his orchard for more than a month, but his attackers saw no need to pursue him afterward. Apparently the broken ribs had simply been a warning to Mushabbab to forget whatever he’d seen in that palace.
“But how?” asked Azza, touching the makeshift bandage wrapped around his broken ribs. “How could you be so reckless?”
“If only you could’ve seen the poor girl … She can’t be older than twenty-four, and she has no life. She lives in harsher conditions than the prisoners in Guantanamo. Her father’s an international business tycoon, but she’s not even allowed access to a cellphone—even the maids are allowed that much. She’s under round-the-clock supervision and all she can do is sit there and watch while her life slips between her fingers.”