by Raja Alem
Speeding through tunnel after tunnel that cuts through Mecca,
I start with the glass and steel towers that surround me. They’re solid but I find my way in; all it takes is a firm foot on the gas and they start unraveling and peeling off the city’s skin to reveal the hidden kernel underneath.
Azza, burn all your patience and come race me in this speed,
Can’t you feel that I’m light, for the first time in my life? All I need now is to touch you in the rushing air and be blown away with you.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 24
Dear ^,
Did you really paint me from memory???
Even my mirror doesn’t greet me with a face like this! And the lips, my God … What a scandal! And that nose, sticking itself up in the air to scorn me.
You shouldn’t make my face so open; otherwise my features won’t have anywhere to hide from you.
I can read even your faintest trembles in the photos you send me. I can even read the scent of your mood now.
You smell like me now.
You’re like Birkin, who doesn’t need to admit his excessive sensuality, his darkness. For him, that deep, piercing gaze is enough to terrify Ursula, for me to know, with a new sense in my body, what he’ll say and how he’ll wreck the scene.
I think your challenge is the same as Birkin’s—not to fall in love with an Ursula but to test your ability to be subsumed in another person, someone who will understand you not through words but through touch, to move slowly, to keep sex from burning her—sex devours handfuls of one’s innermost core, it ignores those places that long most to be heard, it fails to give them expression or to allow them to express themselves, but soft touches are like butterflies fluttering at the edges of edges where it wouldn’t even occur to you that there were any nerves.
Birkin might submit to desire, Birkin himself might even act out that desire and sweep away, but that non-desire, that hunger to reach oneness that went beyond sensuality, remains like a delicate butterfly fluttering at the edge of his soul, unconsciously, without a backward glance to spoil it, swiftly rubbing its wings and leaving behind a colored stain of wing-dust on the soul.
Attachment 1: Jameela covered head to toe in a red wrap, with a man on either side: her father to the left, the registrar to the right.
Mu’az took this shot for me. I didn’t show it to Azza. I was too scared.
Attachment 2: After some hesitation I’m sending this picture of Matuqa, Yabis the sewage cleaner’s mother.
As you can see, her bed is like Noah’s Ark, carrying Matuqa’s whole existence: there are rags and scraps laid out lengthwise which take up half the bed—so many that she’s lying twisted to make space for them—and scraps of dry bread hidden in readiness for the famines that are to come, you can see bits of them here and there, and there’s a plastic bag holding her eyebrow pencil and her silver engraved kohl container and applicator, incubating bacteria from Noah’s times; at her feet are the leftover clothes of a dead husband, reeking of lamb fat, and under her stiff, neck-breaking pillow there’s a copper plate that was one of her wedding gifts, a camel-leather shoe with broken straps, and a string of sandalwood prayer beads that Yabis brought back from Medina; at her left is a packet of stiff, moldy strawberry bubble gum to bribe passing children, and underneath that a half-eaten tube of cheese’n’chili flavor Pringles. Goodness knows what else is in there, but the main thing is she’s ready to set sail as soon as Israfel blows his horn.
Mu’az, Imam Dawoud’s son, managed to snap this picture of her spontaneously. He wanted to capture the flowers on her Shalky label dress, with the enormous fuchsia-colored flower across her chest and an orange and red one splashed across her pelvis.
I wonder: what does this ninety-something woman dream about? What are dreams like when we’re about to step over the threshold at the end of life? Do they care about us? Do they show us any bonus footage? Does life change position so that it always moves forward, not backward or toward the present? Do we think our beauty will still be there, waiting for us, on the other side of that threshold? At what age do our bodies retreat and stop dreaming, and our eyes begin to look ahead to what’s beyond the threshold?
Matuqa’s part gets wider and wider but not a single white hair invades it. A woman’s will to live resides in her hair, and a woman who shines her hair with coconut oil every morning and braids it around her head like a crown will surely never die. Aisha
P.S. When I woke up after the accident, my whole life seemed like just a moment, like it had passed me by, because my limbs weren’t responding and no mirror would face me.
For days I avoided looking them in the eye, certain I was somewhere else and that another life, which wouldn’t die, was waiting for me.
When the nurse exposed whatever part of me to wash it with a warm flannel and antiseptic soap, I didn’t care enough to cover it up, because the body that feels ashamed was somewhere up there, hovering in some spot above everyone’s heads, and focusing on some other point that was even further away. No matter how much I craned my neck I couldn’t quite see that point which comes after death. Who said I didn’t die? Even now, whenever I close my eyes, they look toward that point beyond pain, beyond humanity.
Who said they all died?
They made me undergo psychiatric treatment with the doctor with the Egyptian accent who was going to help me come to terms with my orphanhood.
He assured me that the anti-depressants were enough to bring my soul out of that emptiness and make it swallow their death, one in the morning and one at bedtime, like a glass of sugarcane juice.
My eyes bothered him. In between us were the lenses of his glasses and their heavy green frames, which framed and contained his every look.
I gave up nothing from the inside of my head but the bubble of fake everything’s-okay. He soaked it and starched it and ironed it and folded it to see if it was still crumpled, to repolish it with his tranquilizers.
All the while, my head’s central safe was still hovering in the air, where not even dynamite could get it, staying out of reach of all the questions aimed at figuring out the secret combination to its lock.
“Do you feel a sense of loss? Do you want to express your pain?” Are your dead relatives contributing to the problem of global warming?
His questions were like the endless pages of Chinese horoscopes or personal ads in women’s magazines.
I made it through all those questions without giving up a single digit of the secret combination.
When I got back from Bonn, I stuffed the safe under my bed. I avoided the room on the top floor where they still sleep …
In the middle of the night I can hear their dreams,
Once one of them woke me from a nightmare,
And once my dad came to the door and stared at me while I was sleeping, and said “Don’t forget to wear your nightguard!” The plastic mold that I have to put over my top teeth to stop me grinding and squeaking them all night.
P.P.S. Azza sleeps with her legs wide open …
I find that so disturbing.
Do you dream of having a woman like that in your bed?
P.P.P.S. I remember the first nights after Ahmad left me:
One night, while I was fast asleep, I sensed my father standing at the door of my cubbyhole watching me sleep—he came once at midnight, and then again around dawn,
He found me in exactly the same position: lying on my back with my hands one on top of the other in prayer position and my two long braids lying undisturbed on my chest,
He shook me violently, thinking in panic that I might be dead.
Do you think Azza sucked all my energy so that she could be extra open, extra free?
Can you hear the sound of the Muhammad Abdu song coming from the cafe? “Push me to my limit …” I tremble at the limitlessness you’ve opened up within me …
An Apology for Azza
April 6, 2006
How long has it been since the Yam
aha slept?
Tonight the Yamaha veered expertly to avoid the bus that had suddenly left its lane. It was the motorcycle’s sudden responsiveness that foiled the bus’s attack; it only managed to nick the back bumper of the bike, but that was still enough to send it skidding down Shamiya Hill. All the lights shining on me kept me from feeling the asphalt tearing up my legs. All I was aware of was the crushed metal and spilled gasoline. When the many lights became a single light shining into my face, I woke up to find myself in an operating room and then suddenly in an operating theater as long as a bus.
“As a trainee on his probation period, he is not party to the medical insurance benefits we make available to our permanent employees.” With that the advertising agency washed their hands of me, and I was forced to rely on the free medical services at the Nour Hospital.
Azza, don’t cry.
My mother brought me the cloth on which you’d drawn in chalk and charcoal. You’d written out an order on its tatters: “Stay alive!”
She also brought me your words: “No hope.”
And, “Get well soon.”
Are you actually angry?
Do you remember that day we were trying to save those black puppies on the roof of that abandoned building? When the walls collapsed on us, I broke my leg but you landed on your feet like a cat, if a bit dinged up. You started hitting me wildly when they brought me back later that day with my leg in a cast.
You didn’t speak to me for days.
I understood that you were a glance; as soon as you fall you fly off again. You amputate the damaged limb.
You strip off anything that slows you down.
They swapped my crushed knee for a metal knee. Mushabbab had to pay twenty thousand for them to perform a surgery that was meant to be free. I have no idea why he was so keen on investing in my misfortune or why he uttered prayers over my knee that it would be repaired.
It looks like I’m going to be laid up here for a while. At least until your anger runs out.
I promise you I won’t be a burden and that I’ll resume my plan for making inroads as soon as I get out of the hospital. As you can see I’m slowly turning into metal, starting with my knees.
Here I am, jettisoning all my limbs like the bodies you draw, so that I can escape this picture-frame.
Sitting cross-legged Gandhi-style on the floor so much means that the knee joints of most women in Mecca wear out eventually. And they all have to replace them with metal ones; the female sex is racing to be transformed into steel. Do I look like I’m changing sex, too? Let me talk nonsense … Don’t be mad.
Nasser made a note: Yusuf limps.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 25
‘Death is all right—nothing better.’
‘Yet you don’t want to die,’ she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change:
‘I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through with the death process.’
‘And aren’t you?’ asked Ursula nervously. They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:
‘There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death—our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.’
‘Why should love be like sleep?’ she asked sadly.
‘I don’t know. So that it is like death—I DO want to die from this life—and yet it is more than life itself.’
(Women in Love)
Dear ^,
In the mood for dying, I read Women in Love—a scandal—in the open air of the rooftop. The Lane of Many Heads took in the scent of a woman in love. And the down on the back of Ursula’s neck. It stood there, yearning, waiting for the musician who’d just then opened his mouth and begun to sing.
By reading it out in the open like that I knew I wasn’t just goading my father, I was challenging every one of the Lane of Many Heads’ many heads. Including my own.
We were raised to fear the outside world. You probably can’t believe that the woman you treated, and then invited out, had never been alone in a room with a strange man ever before. Had never walked in the street by herself before. Had never been alone before. Had never exited the bubble of fear to see what she was capable of.
The thing I feared most was waking up without an address. That I wouldn’t get off at the Lane of Many Heads one day. You’re the first address on the outside I’ve ever longed for.
That’s why I simply couldn’t die in Bonn. It was impossible. Not even when I was brought to the very precipice, more than once, as my lungs failed.
In my mind, moving will always be associated with a black-stuffed yellow cube. Can you guess what the cube is? The setting: Women’s Teacher Training Academy. Time: 1985.
I set the cube before you, and I warn: what is it?
The security guard shuts the door of the academy, locking it with a chain and padlock. On the other side of the door:
We girls, she-goats, sweating in the heat, stinking of adolescence.
We get ready in a hurry. Our heavy black: abayas.
Our translucent black: headscarves. We put on our abayas and lay our headscarves over our faces. One layer, a second, a third, a fourth … It makes us proud to break the record for how many layers of fabric can be worn without tripping up.
We crowd together and are crushed. There wasn’t space for a single hair to pass between one abaya and the other. There was even less room in our lungs for breath.
The door parts and spills us out. We take no notice of anything.
You didn’t know where your abaya ended and your friend’s headscarf began. You were carried between the two doors: the academy and the bus. Whatever part of you popped out in the bus would be your claim to infamy in the line-up the next morning.
When we reach the bus, you need to be a gymnast and up at the front of the crowd, if you want to score a seat.
Breathing was forbidden. Speaking was forbidden. There was no laughing. Girls’ Schools Transport. Most of us stood.
When you sat down, there was the chance that bodies would be pressed up in front of you where your feet should go. The chassis groaned and the bus was transformed into an utter blackness but for a single whiteness: the driver’s robes.
And a redness: the chaperone’s pen, writing down a list of any girl whose body parts were exposed or were made to be exposed.
I don’t remember ever being exposed. In the morning line-up my name was only ever mentioned under the section: “jostling” and “talking”.
I have no idea how the chaperone was able to tell whether we’d sneaked a peek at the opposite sex or not. And apparently with no difficulty at all.
The free transportation wiped Mecca’s streets, and the female students, clean.
Then when we reached the Lane of Many Heads the black mass dissipated.
You don’t know what the neighborhood boys are like. They never got bored. Every afternoon they waited at the top of the lane for our bus to arrive.
Look: this scar on my nose is from a stone hurled indiscriminately at a group of us by a young boy.
He wasn’t hoping to land himself a beautiful angel or anything, but perhaps only to touch one of those faces out of the mass of all those girls’ faces. Even if only with a rock.
Aisha
P. S. Just imagine how far I’ve come: from four layers and a headscarf to a Bonn hospital gown.
P. P. S. Have you noted that I’m most like Ursula? Well in that case what the hell are Gudrun’s socks doing on my legs?
Confidential Attachment: A photo of the black triangles, i.e. Imam Dawoud’s daughters, crowding behind the door, trying to steal a glance at the television in the cafe.
Attachment 2: The song of a turtledove (singing alone because the other birds were sud
denly alarmed by the sudden light).
The joy of that turtledove spread all the way through to my pillow and I cried.
After dawn prayers, I leave the birds to make supplications on my body.
It is the sound of healing and penetrates deeply into one’s mind.
The idea of death as a rebirth, which came up in that section of Women in Love, caught Nasser’s attention. Nasser was paying special attention to the death extracts that Aisha selected for her letters, and to the severed stumps that piled up in Yusuf’s diary, wondering to himself just what kind of deviancy he was dealing with. Nasser thought back to a particular expression from Yusuf’s diary entries that occurred over and over again like a cry for help:
December 12, 2005
I know women from books. And women know me in dreams. There they bring me to climaxes my waking body has never known. Because I’m a coward. And because I’m desperate to stay white, never to stray, never to mix with the darkness.
Every morning I wake up terrified by those female visions. I’m a deviant. I can’t enjoy a woman unless I write her. I can’t enjoy myself unless I write myself. Not even Mecca pleases me unless it comes in a window written for a newspaper that is destroyed day after day.
That day it felt to Nasser that Yusuf was using the darkness that ran through the heads of women like Azza and Aisha to get the better of him. The heads of these women, wrapped in abayas even darker, were primed, one way or another, for tragedy.
A Henna Half-Moon
I WOULD NEVER PRETEND—ME, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, DESERT LEECH THAT I am—that I wasn’t used to the 45-degree Celsius heat. The scorching middle-of-the-day heat is my favorite kind of high. Who would believe that my legendary senses have begun playing tricks on me lately? I lapped up the stink and the sweat and closed my eyes tightly to try to sleep, but the buzzing of Nasser’s curiosity kept me awake. He was standing by the side of the road chatting, and Halima was looking down on all my hustle and bustle from the rooftop. She made me feel self-conscious. Through the doorway she handed him the Arabic coffeepot and a tulip-shaped demitasse, and pressed a handful of dates into his palm.