The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  “Can’t you see this isn’t the right time for this sort of thing,” the son chided.

  “I’m very sorry, but your father’s name has cropped up in Yusuf al-Hujubi’s writings. He mentions that your father owns a lot of old maps and deeds. Can I see them?”

  The father cleared his throat and finally spoke. “Really, please don’t drag us into all this crime and terrorism stuff …” He was cut off by the nurse who came in with his discharge papers and a prescription. “Give this to the pharmacist before you leave,” she said.

  Nasser could see the man was slipping out of his grasp. The son frowned but said nothing as he helped his father into his wheelchair. He wanted to get away from the suspicious looks around them. He picked up their bag and set it in the old man’s lap, as if claiming innocence of the aspersions cast, knowing well that that booby-trapped word, terrorism, could blow up in their faces.

  “I’m begging you, sir. You’re not well enough for me to have you come to the precinct for questioning or to give a statement.” The only response he got was silence, so when they got out in the corridor, the detective caught up with them, unfolded a map showing a line graph and placed it over the bag on al-Ghatafani’s lap. “Have you seen this before?” he asked. Muflih’s wheelchair stopped suddenly and he answered.

  “We gave it to Yusuf al-Hujubi. He was doing research on forts in the rural Hijaz at the end of the pre-Islamic period. We gave all our evidence to the son of the slaves, that one with the orchard. This is my cellphone number. You can call and make an appointment any time.”

  Nasser followed them down the hospital’s long corridors, to the pharmacy and then out to the parking lot. He helped them into the car and before they shut the door, he leaned down next to Muflih al-Ghatafani and said, “Don’t worry. I’m just trying to gather information. I’m not accusing anyone of anything.”

  Muflih al-Ghatafani looked back at him, looked through him, and asked a question that caught him off guard. “Are you working for the police or for Bin al-—” Nasser didn’t catch the name; it had been drowned out by the noise of the engine that had been turned on at exactly the same time. The car moved away. Nasser stood stock still, desperately trying to work out what the sounds al-Ghatafani had uttered were: Bin al- …? The car was nearly out of sight by then. Nasser ran to his own car.

  Nasser started the engine distractedly. He was passing the guards at the hospital gate when a police car overtook him, siren blaring into the silence. When he reached the highway overpass where one exit led to Mecca and the other to Jeddah, a whole cluster of police cars and their sirens brought him back to reality. From the overpass, he could see a traffic jam below, cars queueing up to rubberneck, as well as the huge truck and beneath it, flattened like a pancake, a blue car. His heart began to pound before his mind had time to process the information.

  “Al-Ghatafani’s car!” He drove back down the bridge, into the oncoming traffic, toward the Jeddah exit. He parked his car and got out, zigzagging through the lines of cars. There was no sign of life in the crushed blue metal; the bag of possessions and medicine lay at the man’s feet. The truck driver wasn’t injured but was sitting stunned at the edge of the highway.

  Whiteness spread over Nasser’s skull. This was the death or the gloom that had driven him out of the morgue the day before, piling up everywhere around this case, streaming out icily from Aisha’s fingertips.

  Roundabout

  NASSER WAS LOOKING THROUGH YUSUF’S DIARY FOR ANYTHING LEADING BACK to Muflih al-Ghatafani when he came across overwrought, preposterous words:

  June 5, 2006

  I died today.

  Without any warning, lighting flashed over the neighborhood and a sandstorm covered the sky when Sheikh Muzahim took Azza over to Mushabbab’s orchard. They married her to him then and there. The registrar and Sheikh Muzahim took their leave as the angels pelted us all with dust.

  Damn this diary. Damn this place.

  Yusuf

  FROM: Aisha.

  SUBJECT: Urgent

  O God, what’s awaiting Azza in Mushabbab’s beautiful garden? Her father handed her straight over to the son of the Sharifs’ slaves when he saw the colossal amount of money he’d made in the stock market.

  Azza followed Sheikh Muzahim without blinking. Or maybe her eyes just got wider. Remember that day you told me, “Don’t pluck your eyebrows. It’ll make your eyes bigger and then they’ll swallow me.”

  Without any plucking, and despite the darkness of her eyebrows, Azza’s eyes were wider than all our eyes.

  Yusuf limps like a madman up and down the Lane of Many

  Heads.

  Aisha

  It was like a bomb had exploded inside Nasser’s head. He couldn’t believe it: Azza had been handed over to marry Mushabbab. Why hadn’t anyone from the neighborhood told him? Something as big as this, why would the neighborhood try to cover it up? Halima, Muzahim, Mu’az, Khalil—none of them had spelled it out for him: Muzahim had agreed to marry Azza to the son of the slaves of the Sharifs. It was a secret. They’d hidden this major event from him, here in these papers, left him to crawl around looking for it all this time, and only told him when they felt like it?

  Nasser was gripped by panic. Something had changed, there was no doubt about it. All he had to do was take another look at the case for all the masks to fall, right before his eyes. But right now they were clouded by a comfortable white noise; he wasn’t prepared for this game of pulling off masks.

  There was a bitter taste in the back of Nasser’s throat. He took Azza’s marriage as a personal betrayal. He rummaged through letters and diary entries to find out anything else he could about the story.

  June 8, 2006

  You say, “He covers me.

  Not with words, but with my abaya.”

  I don’t hear you.

  Starting from the bottom of your feet,

  the silk of your abaya flutters, brushes against your belly

  shivers against the tips of your breasts, the gap between your lips,

  finally the silk relaxes over the hair that’s come loose

  from your braids.

  A naked demon, that’s who Mushabbab is when he lays the silk of the abaya over your nakedness to cover you. The moment your face is covered up, every last drop of my strength and the voice that tortures me with that scene, both dry up.

  You’re cursed, Azza. I’m not writing you any more. Go die, and good riddance, from your face to your feet. God has no mercy for you.

  Yusuf

  Yusuf’s words tumbled over one another in rage:

  June 9, 2006

  That trivial speck of nothingness of a woman lies and says things like this:

  (“At dawn, lying in his arms, I woke up suddenly, burning for you, Yusuf.

  If, while sleepwalking, I’d rushed to the doorway of my bedroom, to our old radio, a note waiting for me would have woken me up.

  In your old handwriting. But didn’t you say, ‘the handwriting of Zayd ibn Thabit?’

  You’d be crazy to stop writing.

  Yusuf, if you were to write to me about lying here with him,

  ‘I read it and then re-read. To bring it to life …’ That’s from the lines you wrote, among whose capers I grew up; they lived for me more than I’ve lived myself.

  Who was it who said, ‘Nothing has any taste unless it’s written with your saliva’? Can’t you see my engine runs on your confused, impassioned words? My lips mutter with the pleasure of reading what you’ve written.

  At dawn, in his arms, I saw that you, Yusuf, were writing me more than you were writing the world or yourself. I was the page on which you would scrawl out your being. Drafting and revising your attempts, failures, and retries.

  I’m your ink, your scribblings.

  No matter how hard I tried, Yusuf, Mushabbab wouldn’t be written. This night is bigger than me. You’d have been better off writing it. If it had been you writing me, I’d at least feel pleasure.”)

  I�
�ve put the lies between parentheses.

  Yusuf or Azza

  Next were some huge scrawls that had been erased:

  June 12, 2006

  The fourth night.

  Should I write her or not?

  I can’t decide.

  I’ll stop writing so she can die in her sleep.

  Yusuf.

  This outpouring of naive sentimentality annoyed Nasser. He wanted to know what crime had been cooked up in that disastrous marriage. Nasser could find no other option but to race breathlessly between Aisha and Yusuf, who’d both fallen into a funk. Nasser sensed that Azza’s fall had happened at the same time as the loss of morale that came across in Aisha’s letters; Azza had taken a leap toward Mushabbab while Aisha was planning a cold end.

  The alliance between Azza and Mushabbab was the breaking point in this case and any detective worth their salt would have been skeptical about Nasser’s capabilities after seeing how late in the game he’d discovered it. Nasser began to read the diary entries and the letter as one, unbroken text. He came across this page in the diary in a strange hand:

  June 15, 2006

  Like a falling stone,

  It wasn’t in her, but in the well

  Lying between the three springs that feed it

  And he drinks, not just like a dove a cat or a beast, but also like a plant. Like a stone, with all its pores, with its skin and its heart all at the same time.

  It drinks saltiness and the taste of metal, from the ankles upward. Who’s that who can’t be in two places at once?

  Crowned with saltiness all the way down to his ankles,

  When he was inside her mud, all the jars in his bathroom fell, spilling their mud all over this cosmic flesh.

  In this volcanic landscape.

  The earth became salty, metallic, centered on his lap whenever he wanted to penetrate to her core.

  His body could only respond by collapsing. O God, how they’ve colluded against him: desire and its collapses!

  There was no one left in the Lane of Many Heads that didn’t celebrate the news: the devil in the orchard was impotent!

  I die and he’s reborn in the same lap. Where whatever’s watered dies.

  The Lane of Many Heads had no entertainment so it amused itself with Sheikh Muzahim’s beard, which was led to a Mercedes that took him out of the neighborhood on shady errands, dropping him at offices where men showed him statements from his bank accounts and those of his son-in-law, the descendant of the Sharifs’ slaves, alluding to possible solutions and get-outs; but these meetings soon ended definitively with the nullification of the invalid, impotent contract he’d concluded in the shack in the orchard between his daughter and Mushabbab. They produced a notarized document for him laying it all out.

  Even contracts can be nullified: marriage contracts, ownership contracts, sale contracts, rental contracts, The Unique Necklace (or Contract), your contract.

  Yusuf.

  FROM: Aisha

  SUBJECT: Message 27

  It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.

  (Women in Love)

  Isn’t it a strange thought that I could fail to develop and be replaced by my siblings!

  The Chinese write the character for crisis by combining two characters: danger and opportunity. It’s as if crisis equals danger with the possibility of resisting it, like a vaccine to induce the antibodies of change inside a body. This current is you.

  ^, I write to you with two words, with a hug that crushes my left rib as happened on that rainy day when my ribs were crushed by your embrace—you, the healer—and I don’t show the slightest sign of pain.

  An energy that prepares me for everything, anything, even death itself.

  Now even my voice has changed because of the painkillers, my face is swollen, even the breaths I take don’t taste like my breaths.

  Aisha

  P.S. Just now the loudspeakers of the mosque across the street announced the beginning of the eclipse prayer. They pray until the moon reappears. “It was He who created the heavens and the earth … so that He might determine who among you does most good,” Imam Dawoud recited. They believe that our sins blacken the surface of the moon and that prayers for repentance clear it.

  Which prayer can clear my face?

  P.P.S. You’ve helped fix my computer more than once through remote desktop access. Yesterday you simply said: “Click OK to give me access to your files, your heart, your soul. Let me see who you are, where you’ve come from, your wallpaper, the people who make you who you are.”

  I was trembling. Clicking OK seemed like tearing the veil off the Lane of Many Heads …

  Yusuf has lost his mind because of Azza, and attacked the people praying in the Lane of Many Heads Mosque. They beat him savagely and he was taken to Shihar hospital in Ta’if. For two weeks the Lane of Many Heads was as silent as a tomb, incredulous that they’d sent the only voice that wrote their dreams—Yusuf—to a psychiatric hospital.

  In the end it was al-Ashi who took the initiative to go to Shihar to get him released. We rarely see Yusuf now, though. Can you hear him limping about on the roof?

  He tore up all his papers; the alley outside my window is covered in his shredded words, his anger, his identity. Every dawn, the Lane of Many Heads awakes to find a new pile of his possessions on the ground: articles, diaries, personal pictures taken by Mu’az, his ID card, his emblazoned bachelor’s degree from Umm al-Qura University.

  Finally there was nothing left for him to tear up,

  And then he came out into the Lane of Many Heads, and flitted about collecting blackened bread from houses, trash dumps, the heaps outside bakeries, and cooking yards, taking them back to the roof to build a horrifying sculpture that smelled like fire. Even the pigeons stayed away from it. The people in the alley joked: that’s the Many Heads, being consumed in the fire of our sins, with the overflowing fountains of minds. And they named him “he who is not eaten, nor burned.”

  The name made me curious. I spied from the roof. Seeing it there in the sun gave me gooseflesh, like a glimpse at death leaking the yellow essence of a life that had once been.

  Mu’az was convinced that this was actually the unholy devil himself and that Yusuf had erected him on the roof so he could watch everyone coming and going.

  There was an emptiness inside Yusuf. I felt like it was himself he’d erected up there. He’d reassembled whichever pieces of his brain had survived the shock therapy they’d put him through, and then one day he’d ground them up like dust and left the result out for the hot sandstorm winds to blow in our faces.

  What’s he going to tear up next?

  He’s tearing Azza to shreds, he’s cut her off completely. He didn’t write a single word to her even after she was returned, defeated, to Sheikh Muzahim’s house. No one had any idea how they’d forced Mushabbab to divorce her. Yusuf kept to the Eunuchs’ Goat’s empty room above al-Ashi’s kitchen; God only knows what he’s doing in there. The Lane of Many Heads has gone topsy-turvy. Without Yusuf’s words, Azza can’t find her way.

  The handwriting in Yusuf’s journal began to alternate, and Nasser str
uggled to work out if someone else was planting entries in Yusuf’s journal. There was something that had him worried: some of the pages were written in splendid naskh script, of the kind often used in old manuscripts, and decorated with gold pointing and marbling. For a moment, he thought it was excerpts from the Quran, written in Mu’az’s handwriting, but Mu’az swore it wasn’t him: “Yusuf plays the part of the storyteller. He adopts our personalities so as to expose us to ourselves.”

  Could Nasser believe, alternatively, that an alleyway like me could have its own handwriting? The thing is, although I took Yusuf’s madness with good humor, it’s not like he managed to pull the wool over my eyes. His madness hit me like a stroke, a gray patch that spread instantly over each of my different heads, and if it hadn’t been for al-Ashi, savior of freaks, I’d have left him to rot in the loony bin at Shihar. That’s why, ever since he got back, I’ve spent my time following his every move. Look at that deep trench between his eyebrows; he spoils my nonchalance and sense of humor. Maybe I’m slowly losing my lust for life, but my foolproof cunning still has the power to outwit. I’m not going to let him trick me.

  The moonlight penetrated through the ripped-out window in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s bedroom, which overlooked the cooking yard. A patch of milky moonlight deepened even further the shadow over the faces of the heavenly maidens who gazed longingly at the dark body on the bed that occupied the narrow space along the wall behind the door. Yusuf hadn’t slept a wink for several nights on end. Like a worshipper he strained his eyes to read something in their pensive looks. He was fasting, surviving only on water from Zamzam and five dates per day, which Mu’az got him by sneaking a little money out of the mosque’s charity box. The whole time he spent lying there, Yusuf could feel Mu’az’s idolizing gaze keeping vigil over him through the slightly-open door, though he was careful not to open the door and go in. They spent several nights sitting on the narrow doorstep, leaning on the door. They looked like a photo and its negative, a young man on the inside and his dark shadow on the outside, leaning against the same door, each feeling the heat of the other’s body through the crumbling wood, one watching as the other performed a postmodern play for his audience of girls. Yusuf and Mu’az shared their hunger; they were both thin. They told themselves that the early believers had fought great battles and won, with only dates to keep them going.