The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  Sheikh Muzahim paused for a moment and watched the effect his words were having on the detective. “Are you following?” he asked. “Do you see how these people strayed into sin? Do you care?” Nasser nodded, and the old man went on.

  “Al-Labban—the milkman—was nothing but bad news. He was one of the devil’s two horns. He was always making trouble. They used to call him “Full Cream” because he was so fat. His twin brother was as skinny and sparky as he was podgy and slow, so they used to call him “Son of the Night.” He never sat down and never got tired; he was the backbone of that dairy. He used to milk the cows before it got light, skim off the cream and fill the yogurt vats, ready to wish the neighborhood a good morning before anyone had even woken up. No one knew the truth until the religious folks raided the cellar of the milking yard at midnight one Monday and found him smoking with his friends. Having caught them unarmed, the attackers brought the cellar down on top of their heads, then dragged them in chains to Farewell Gate where they flogged them and beat them with sticks, leaving them for dead. Worshippers who’d come for morning prayers hurried to dress their bloody wounds and carried the dead to al-Shifa hall in the center of Mecca, on the side of the Haram Mosque facing Shamiya Hill, where all the perfumers and herbalists had their shops, while the injured were taken to Qubbaniya hospital, which stood on the site of the house that Abu Sufyan had bought from Khadija bint Khuwaylid. That was where Full Cream found the corpse of his twin, Son of the Night. His heart was consumed with rage. May God pardon them both.” Sheikh Muzahim fell silent so as to savor his own words in the silence of the shop, and such a long time went by he almost forgot his voice.

  “It was Full Cream who led the counterattack,” he picked up, “on the night of the Umm Kulthoum party in the orchard. He awoke from Umm Kulthoum’s sighing, which had stoked his pain at the loss of Son of the Night, and cursed the zealots—the same curses that had accompanied his twin’s bier during the funeral procession. Demons clamored in his breast, and suddenly with a leap he was possessed by Night, his dead twin. All his usual lethargy seemed to melt away and he snatched up his club and began thrashing every one of the attackers he could get his hands on. When the other men, both gentlemen and slaves, had gathered their energy they formed ranks behind him, and soon the beards and checked headscarves began to retreat. By the time they reached the gate of the orchard, they found themselves encircled and were forced to surrender. They were tied up and blindfolded and dragged to the desert near the road to the Umrah station, where they were beaten again and had their beards ripped out. Then they were thrown down a hole and left in the darkness …”

  “And what’s the link between Full Cream and the place they call al-Labban’s house here in the alley?”

  “He was their grandfather. He left his only son the milking yard and a wine press, and the son—Umm al-Sa’d’s father—sold the milking yard and used the proceeds to build the building they call the Arab League. The devil’s money, that was …”

  “How much did he get for it?”

  “I told you, there was a wine press in the milking yard, and al-Labban the milkman used to come out every dawn carrying three cans of milk on his right-hand side and three cans of wine on the left, distributing each to whoever requested it. There’s a very over-the-top story about how he died, now I come to think of it,” he added, spraying spit in excitement. “Are you interested in the hallucinations of devil worshippers?”

  “Of course,” replied Nasser. He felt like he was being pushed into the past; he wasn’t seeking out these memories but rather they were being inserted into his head whether he liked it or not, like external memory drives.

  “Some people say his children declared him mad and locked him up, so he ran away and was soon arrested by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue for selling “vice.” They escorted him to their leader, our sheikh. He was standing before the Kaaba and turned to the milkman to rebuke him. “Aren’t you ashamed?” he asked. “How will you face your Lord with these sins?” “Shall I show you?” replied al-Labban. He asked for some water so he could wash for prayer, and then began to pray. After two genuflections he remained prostrated on the ground for some time, and when they touched him they found he was dead. Death while praying, Detective, is the fastest route to Paradise. As you can see, these types grant themselves license to do whatever they want, claiming that they’re spiritual people, and even have the temerity to say they’re going to go to Heaven!”

  “So Umm al-Sa’d is this dervish al-Labban’s granddaughter?”

  “Her father kept the wine press in the hallway of the Arab League as a memento, God help us.” He whistled sarcastically. “The milkman’s depravity jinxed the whole family. See how viciously the grandsons fought over their inheritance and how they ended up turning on their father, and their sister too? She gave them away in the end, though, when she escaped from Azrael’s jaws and came back to wage her shameless war on men. Well, like father, like son!”

  “And what about Aisha? I heard she was friends with your daughter.”

  Sheikh Muzahim glared at Nasser as best he could through clouds of glaucoma.

  “Lord help us! She’s a weevil in the flour barrel, that one. She’s a curse: she corrupts the children first and then the adults. I was always careful not to let her near my daughter. Her marriage brought her and the whole lot of us bad luck. It was that crystal wedding dress that did it …” The mention of the dress surprised Nasser, and he sat up, hoping to hear more. “Ask that Turkish woman,” said the old man, but at that moment the sun must have set, because the call to sunset prayer sounded and he stood up to go and wash. “Are you coming to the mosque?”

  “Sure,” said Nasser. “Go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”

  He’d finally got to the dress. Soon, he’d get to the body underneath, too, and the moment he touched it, life would shoot through his veins.

  It was getting late, so Nasser went straight to the Arab League to deliver the Turkish seamstress’s eunuch assistant a summons for her to come in the following morning. On the wall of her cellar studio was daubed sloppily in red paint: THE DONKEY EMPRESS IS A BUTCHER.

  That night, the stories he’d been listening to brawled in Nasser’s head, leaving him with half a headache. Automatically, he opened his wardrobe and took out the shameful ripped sleeve, spread it out on his bed like he did every night, then lay down with his face buried in it and fell asleep. Yusuf’s surreal article about Ali Bao the lunatic ancestor was waiting for him in his dreams.

  Sharif Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Awn (1299–1323 AH) picked out one of Mecca’s madmen known as Ali Bao, who used to roam the streets naked, and brought him into his circle of intimates—once, of course, he’d ordered for the man to be washed and shined and dressed in finery befitting someone who was to sit in the parlors of noblemen. They became close companions, and the Sharif ordered Mecca’s gentry to kiss the man’s hand, and treated him as the most important gentleman of all. He wanted to build the madman a grand palace, so he bought several houses close to the mosque in al-Qushashiya—the most important street in Mecca, where the fanciest, snobbiest of its people lived, such that even a Turkish pasha would take care to pick out his best clothes if he were passing in that direction—and forced the owners to move out before demolishing them and building the palace in their place. Next, he selected a large area in front of the palace that was also full of houses, ordered their inhabitants to move out too, and demolished them to make way for a lush garden that would delight the madman’s eyes whenever he looked out from his palace. Then, he decided to demolish the whole adjacent area, up to the edge of the Gaza neighborhood, so as to give an unobstructed line of vision between the Emir’s palace and the madman’s palace. In the end, whether it was cleared so that the Sharif could plant an enormous garden, or to build lodgings for pilgrims in accordance with the wishes of the Caliph, Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, the land remained empty for some time, but Sharif Awn died before anything was built, and it was event
ually overrun by small houses and stores. Some like to believe that Sharif Awn associated with lunatics because he was wary of Sultan Abd al-Hamid—it was well-known that he was highly suspicious of the more precocious of his employees and servants—while others claim that Sharif Awn himself was a loony, as was patently clear from his approach to governance. They tell stories about the elephant he was given by a dignitary from India, which he used to let wander wherever it liked through the streets of Mecca, accompanied by a minder, and which he would take to summer in Ta’if with him. All this is to say that over the years, Mecca has become perfectly accustomed to madmen and elephants wandering around in the vicinity of the Haram Mosque …

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 19

  Ignorance is not in the head but in the hand and its nerve endings, and in the heart. The worst death is death of the hand.

  Under my clothes I was an electric toy that had lost its battery; all the wires that led to my senses and my heart had been cut.

  I envy Azza, Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, as I see her clearly now: Azza, when she glimpses a swarm of bees, doesn’t run away but walks right into the attack with a laugh, and comes out immune to their stings. Sometimes rashly, sometimes innocently. I always feel sad for her, but only so that sadness for myself doesn’t overwhelm me …

  If I had just a jot of her recklessness I’d probably be settling down in Casablanca with Ahmad now. As it is, he turned his back on me the second month after we got married, and threw those two words over his shoulder as he went: “You’re divorced.”

  I hid the blow, knowing my little father’s heart wouldn’t be able to take a third shock. I built a cocoon around the words, and everyone in the neighborhood just took it for granted that he’d left me; the Lane of Many Heads never imagined that the legendary crystal bride would end up divorced.

  So why’s Ahmad suddenly so keen to get me back? Is it your scent on me?

  He never actually filed for divorce—maybe he just totally forgot about me. When he was forced to accompany me to Bonn, his face floated in front of me for the brief duration of the flight then he fled, leaving me to an endless string of operations, no doubt scared he’d be trapped by my crushed pelvis.

  But now my cellphone rings at all hours, as if to say: what do you have left but me?

  Does our love have a smell? What was it that created it?

  Do you remember our last goodbye in the hospital room in Bonn? I skimmed you with my eyelashes, my chin, and the tip of my nose. I traced the pale whiteness of your belly with my features. Do you know what living flesh smells like? I can still smell it now.

  In bed now, the tip of my nose can still feel the contact, and my eyelashes. It brings you to life so vividly.

  Ahmad isn’t attracted to my scent; it’s your scent he’s sniffing for. Both the battery’s electrodes are connected, the energy is surging and the light has flicked on, luring the insects in …

  Attached: you asked for more old photos, ^ …

  This one’s from the first month, or rather the only month, of my marriage. Can you follow the plot of this psychological thriller, where all the characters are chopped to bits under the skin, but without guns, murders or ghastly diseases?

  Aisha

  Data Bank

  “THE WESTERN FOOD CORPORATION—A SUBSIDIARY OF ELAF HOLDINGS—HAS finalized a deal to purchase a plot of 50,000 square meters in the far south of Mecca. Vice President for Development Salim al-Muriti has said that the land purchase forms part of the company’s strategic plan for new factory development. Steps are being taken to build the most modern food-processing plant in the region, which will comprise six standalone factories as well as centralized storage facilities. It is understood that purchase agreements for the necessary equipment have already been signed. A spokesperson for the corporation said the new factory will help fulfill the growing demand for food, especially in the critical seasons of both greater and lesser pilgrimages, which have seen steady year-on-year growth in the numbers of pilgrims.”

  Yusuf was glued to the computer screen, even though there was a smell of stagnant sewers to the row of computers around him. Like every morning, Yusuf had snuck out of the Lababidi house and headed toward the nearest Internet cafe he could find. After handing over his five riyals for two hours’ use, he’d sat down in front of the last computer in the cramped room. Any hall of a house or corner of a shop that could fit two or three computers was enough to set up an Internet cafe that would bring in a steady stream of income for the owner.

  Another day had come and gone and there was still no news from Mushabbab. Yusuf typed Elaf Holdings into the search box and hit enter. He looked through the corporation’s website, local newspapers, and discussion boards, searching for information about their extensive, almost octopoid portfolio projects: factories that made cement, plastic, bottled water, and prayer rugs; meatpacking plants where they processed the animals slaughtered in the pilgrimage ritual; real-estate developments for both low-income and high-income housing.

  The Pakistani employee noticed the thick force field around Yusuf’s body and smiled as he set a cup of tea beside him by way of welcome, since he was a new customer. In an attempt to settle his nerves, Yusuf began writing an article. That morning he’d woken up to distorted images in his mind; he didn’t know whether they were the tail end of a nightmare or a reality about to befall the Lane of Many Heads. He paused to consider just how absurd what he’d written in his first article seemed compared to the destruction he could see from the roof of al-Lababidi’s house.

  God sent his angels down to Adam on earth with emeralds, plucked from the gems of paradise. These angels were the first to master the art of building in Mecca, so they built, and Adam learned the art from helping them. Then he circumambulated what they had built.

  Loud banging drums in his mind repeated the words that he chewed over constantly in all his articles:

  At the time, the earth was home to demons and beasts. The angels took up their positions before the Haram Mosque, their backs to God’s House, looking out over the wasteland beyond and preventing the demons and beasts from entering the Sanctuary. Eve had also been forbidden from entering the Sanctuary. When Adam wanted to beget a son, he would go out to see her and lie with her and then return to the hollowed-out gem the size of a tent that God had sent down to earth for him to live in, as a consolation for having been excluded from Paradise, and which was raised back up after he died.

  He searched for words that would neutralize last night’s nightmare and the sight of that adversary that was punishing them: faceless businessmen dressed in long, fine, gold-embroidered wool cloaks greeting men dressed in elegant black suit jackets and loud ties, individuals and groups, but all nameless. Faces and stars from the fifty states to the fifty-first and the fifty-second … Plus a woman with high heels and a facelift, standing for ruler of the world.

  Yusuf only got gloomier. Staying in the Lababidi house had added heft to his gait; he dragged the whole house behind him. “One day Mushabbab and I were crossing the alley beside our house and he said to me, ‘I never noticed those stones before.’ I looked and saw faces as if they were out of a picture inside the house. Distress had turned human faces to stone.” He scratched those lines out.

  He gave up on trying to finish the article, knowing that it would be censored—yet maybe it would provoke some reader or other, or throw up a key to Azza’s disappearance. As he was flipping through his old articles, he came across this:

  January 22, 2003