The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  “When the cursing crowds had finally dissipated, Khidr Effendi remained there devotedly, unperturbed by the frenzied crows that circled over the burial mound. He sat patiently among the cawing and the smells of decay to record the sessions of the angels of torment who, over long ages, counted every seal he’d faked and every one of the hundreds of orphans he’d cast into destitution. All the land he’d expropriated was weighed as sins on their scales of justice, not discounting a single handful of the dust he’d arrogated to himself. The scales groaned under the weight—not of earth and masonry, but of the tears and suffering of those whom he’d wronged. It seemed as if it would all be too much for Khidr Effendi’s handwritten historical record to bear. Khidr Effendi remained there, faithfully documenting the fate of his persecutor al-Hadrami, until his hair, even his eyelashes, had turned white. With his final trembles, he recorded the cries of anguish that issued incessantly from the heap of rubble: they always got louder and more intense toward the last portion of night, when God descended to the sky of this world. He never cast a single glance of mercy toward that mound and al-Hadrami, the buried wretch, could never find the words with which to beseech Him. The knot in al-Hadrami’s tongue was the last thing Khidr recorded in his history, before the burial mound was swallowed up by Mecca’s dust. The angels dug channels so his story could seep into the city’s groundwater and never be forgotten.”

  The silence and air of mystery that Khalil had come to expect from that passenger had been exploded with that story. All the darkness in Khalil’s features appeared to him for the first time that morning, and he saw himself in the rear mirror: when he glanced at the passenger in the reflection, he saw in the man’s eyes his own face. He was an identical copy of al-Hadrami, his ancestor. The passenger wasn’t relating a history, he was teaching Khalil to read the engravings on the wall of his own head and discover that he, Khalil, was the ancestor just risen from the grave beneath his ignominious burial mound, and that he was coursing with the will of that corpse.

  In the rear mirror, the entire page of Khalil’s life was out clearly for him to read:

  Night after night, Khalil had hemorrhaged everything into that cursed woman’s ears: everything he knew about the Lane of Many Heads, his mother and father, Mecca, its weak points, neighborhoods where the people were so worn down by poverty they could easily be cleared and the land taken from them, endowed properties whose heirs had died … He’d poured all that information into the ears of the Turkish woman and who knows who she’d sold it to? He’d left the seals there in her possession all that time, allowing most of Mecca’s old houses and endowed properties to be stolen from their unsuspecting heirs.

  Khalil had lost his magic touch and his ability to keep time with the pain at around three one morning, when the Turkish woman had finally thrown him out into the alley.

  “Don’t try to come back.” With those words her eunuch pushed him out the door, brandishing a pair of blunt dressmaking scissors and leaving a swerving line of cold metal on Khalil’s temple. He then tossed all his belongings out after him: heap after heap of smashed video tapes …

  When Khalil regained consciousness, he didn’t move but stayed where he was, prostrate in the dust of the Lane of Many Heads, watching everything from the superman-like perch his cancer had elevated him to. He was always a degree above the alley, looking down on its simple people from above, the only hero on the scene, with deeds to all those endowed properties that the passenger had taken him to. He—with his naïveté and the seal-dies stuffed into his pillow, was the tool that had given all those documents credence, and now the cancer had eaten Mecca.

  Khalil needed time to regain his balance; by some miracle, he was able to drive his car. After the first bend in the road, he wanted to stop and get out to check the contents of the trunk: a bunch of Hollywood movies (among them the mangled reel of the dinosaur film), three yellowed robes, and a pillow in shreds, but not a single pair of shoes amidst those tattered disguises (though his own face was a better disguise sadly) …

  Was he really leaving with all his belongings and taking this path? And under the gaze of this ghost-like being … “This is a nightmare, isn’t it?” he wanted to ask the passenger, but his voice was coming out a weak croak. “Of course it is,” he muttered to himself. “What do you expect? Best be careful. Make a wrong turn or doze off at the wheel and you and this creature you’re driving will be sent to oblivion …”

  The car suddenly sped up, and even though he was stamping on the brakes with the full weight of his foot, it refused to slow down, screeching through a stream of cars and buses headed to al-Rusayfa. Khalil hoped he could make it to the ring road, where he could drive at full speed without any danger; a voice was urging him to get to Mount Mercy, in Arafat, where Eve had met Adam after their descent from Paradise, in the hope that the game this ghost was playing would lose its danger in Arafat’s empty, never-ending roads. But the car took the old Mecca–Jeddah road, making for the site of the denouement of al-Hadrami’s history, and nothing could stand in its way.

  “You were planted in the Lane of Many Heads to torture me. You’re the cancer that was brought to life to toy with me … But you know I’ll defeat you. You can’t kill me—I’ll simply race you and beat you to my own death.”

  When he reached Umm al-Joud, a neighborhood of munificence, which had once been Umm al-Doud, a neighborhood of worms, Khalil began to miss his father’s voice, his words uttered with care and affection. Love opened up in all directions and pulled him in, and at the spot where the rocks were piled over the corpse of his ancestor, at that very millisecond, a huge tanker appeared, a dinosaur, making a turn across the road; it was met by a splatter of blood on Khalil’s lips as he coughed. The cancer had finally penetrated his heart at that exact same millisecond, clutching both ventricles in its claws; Khalil the pilot’s body flew—with four engines, autopilot, and manual—into the body of the petrol tanker, which stretched out like a screen showing a dinosaur made of fire, while Ismail’s singing face filled the rearview mirror: “Meccan folks are doves, Medinans turtledoves, and the people of Jeddah are all gazelles …” An obelisk of white flame leapt up, penetrating the impassive, watchful sky.

  Death of a Prophet

  THE EUNUCH WATCHED HIM FROM BEHIND THE COLUMN OF REPENTANCE. The more he stared, the more he felt the lines of age creeping over his own smooth face, which hadn’t aged a day since he was castrated. Emptied of all desire, he was removed from the cycle of time; his body grew larger but his face remained that of a child, and his mind was filled with the memories of childhood. Nothing that entered his head ever faded; it was a patch of childhood innocence. But his face was being reflected in the face of the man leaning against the Column of Repentance, turning it into a frown, so the eunuch turned away, and moved toward the old man who was reciting from the Quran, tossing his head from side to side as he read, and allowed the old man’s gentle movements to smooth the frown from his face.

  Nasser stumbled over obstacles in the worn parchment, especially those places where the ink had faded completely. Whether he was a waking reader or a dreaming one, he could feel the changes in tempo caused by the interrupted sentences, and he had to skip over lines with the agility of a gazelle so as not to let the thread of meaning disappear before his eyes, like sand dunes shifting constantly across the page:

  THE PEAKS OF MOUNT BATHA appeared in front of us, looking like ghouls’ heads in the darkness of the dawn twilight. It was there that our guide, Ayif al-Ghatafani, left us and went to track the troops of Ghatafan, who we were expecting would march to our aid; the Jews of Khaybar were their allies. We used to give the sheikh of the Ghatafan tribe, Uyinah ibn Hisn, half of our date harvest in exchange for his protection.

  In the shade of a rock I sank into a pile of sand to rest, hoping to calm the ache that gnawed at my bones after the long ride, but I was so eager to see our guide return with news of victory, news that would mean we could return to Khaybar, that I couldn’t close my eyes.r />
  Instead when he did return, the guide confirmed our worst fears. Ayif al-Ghatafani told us he’d seen no sign of any Ghatafani troops coming to our assistance, and that Khaybar would have to defend itself against the onslaught. No one he’d met along the way expected Khaybar to hold out long against two hundred Muslim warriors who were eager to be martyred and who’d already proven their strength with the victories they had won at Badr and the Trench and the truce they’d concluded with the Quraysh in Hudaybiya.

  From Mount Batha we made our way eastward. That turn to the east was the end of our entire existence, like a death to be followed only by a rebirth. We had to move in secrecy, and we also had to forget: we had to hide everything that could tie us to Khaybar and its Jews. We dressed like Bedouin of Ghatafan, in attire our guide had given us; I could sense a warning in his gaze—until then, I had only known men’s looks of lust, and I attributed it to the miserable shape I was in from the journey. We were forced to walk through the night, only resting for a short while at the hottest hours of the day. Behind us, the defeat of besieged Khaybar became fact, and it didn’t take long for a flood of Jewish survivors, who’d been expelled from Khaybar and Medina, to cover these deserts, seeping into other tribes. I had to keep my distance from the survivors, to carry you into a new existence and a religion that would reign over Canaan and spread far beyond it.

  I spent the first nights of my flight defending images of my rapidly receding childhood, of the girl who was carried in a solid gold howdah in the procession of her marriage to the knight chosen to impregnate the most beautiful girl in all Khaybar and ennoble its Jewish blood. I was the girl who succeeded in claiming that honor; it happened one day when he saw me racing grown men up the trunks of palm trees. He spotted that mixture of animal, ghoul, and bird in the mound of my breasts and in my nose, which pointed to the darkest springs lying underground. The gurgling streams of basil-scented forest in my laughter delighted him.

  To the rhythm of the camel’s footfalls, I recalled every face and beard that came out to greet the wedding procession and shower us with Medinan roses. Every last fortress we passed on our journey came out to congratulate and bless us. And with every step we took, the caravan—with the camel of my father Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf at the head, and the howdah of my Ghatafani servant bringing up the rear—grew bigger. We crossed the plains, passing the citadels of the tribes of Qurayza, Qayniqa, and Waqif, who all blessed my marriage to Khaybar’s spiritual leader. Throughout the journey, I was haunted with doubts about the sudden change in my life and my dreams: I’d been plucked from the plains that were my home and sent to live in my husband’s fort, the all-powerful nucleus of the rural Hijaz where, my nanny assured me, I would not be treated merely as mistress of the fort, but as a prophetess. As a fifteen-year-old, the thought terrified me and my terror came to a head when a horseman with a short robe and long beard appeared, cutting through the ranks of the caravan, and headed straight for my howdah as our men did nothing to stop him. He snatched me from my howdah in his strong arms and put me in front of him on his saddle; we made it to Khaybar in the blink of an eye, my heart thumping wildly. There, he lay me back on the white cotton sheets of his bed and crushed roses on my neck, drinking me through their petals. His breath smelled of grease and firewood, and he roused whirlpools in my body to receive him; I opened and contracted with unflagging violence, until it was night and the cotton sheets around us began to unravel. It wasn’t until the following morning that I became sure of his identity—he was my husband, the man who would plant the seed of you inside me—up until the moment you were born, I wasn’t sure whether you came from his loins or from the sandstorms that would later receive me in my flight.

  It was he who sent me on this path; I had no choice but to obey and depart with this Ghatafani, who’d served in the temples of the Persians and Byzantines and learned the secrets of Petra and the Valley of the Kings in his search for immortality, and ended up an ascetic among the sand dunes.

  “The mosque closes at ten,” the eunuch said, interrupting Nasser as he was reading.

  Nasser looked up at the large green-belted body and effeminate face; he could hear the thin voice but he couldn’t understand. “On your way, please, the doors of the mosque will now be closing.”

  Nasser folded the parchment into the amulet and got up stiffly. Seeing the distress in Nasser’s face, the eunuch added sympathetically, “Starting tomorrow, they’re going to break the tradition of closing the mosque, even though it’s been this way for fourteen centuries. They plan to keep the doors open all night.” He searched Nasser’s eyes for a reaction, then went on, “At the end of the day, this mosque is the Prophet’s house, and we eunuchs have sacrificed our bodies to guard the tranquility of this honored site so that the dead, peace be upon them, may sleep in peace until the dawn prayers are called and the doors are opened to worshippers who may stay until the night prayers are over.”

  The eunuch contemplated the iron fence and the many barriers between them and the Prophet’s grave. He thought about his Ottoman-era predecessor, who would hurry, with due reverence, to open the door leading to the grave when the dawn prayer was called. He would place a pitcher full of water and a bowl polished with perfume and the Surah of Prostration on the edge of the stone so the Prophet and his companions could perform their ablutions. The young eunuch sighed, and Nasser echoed him, saluting and praying for the Prophet and his companions, and sensing the Prophet’s soul, which was resurrected to return his greeting, just as when any worshipper, be they at the very end of the earth, greeted the Prophet and said a prayer for him; a million thousand thousand thousand thousand resurrections took place inside that grave every second, not allowing the buried Prophet’s eyes to close for a moment’s death, even though he lay in his grave. The eunuch hid a shiver deep in the folds of his jubbah, beneath his wide belt, so that the reason for it wouldn’t offend the beloved Prophet to whom he’d devoted his life, and whose Rawdah, the area between his grave in Aisha’s house to his pulpit, he served. The eunuch gazed tenderly down at his palms, and then spread them out to show Nasser. They were yellowed with perfume.

  “They exude a never-ending perfume. The more I wipe the grave, the more they perspire. I’ve grown lighter, too. I was a child in 1971, when I snuck in behind my father one morning before dawn, my teeth chattering from the cold, and hid behind the curtains to watch the workers replace the cloth hangings in the sacred burial room. As long as I live, dawn for me will always be associated with those layers of pure green silk lined with heavy cotton and crowned with a band of dark red embroidered with bright cotton threads and gold and silver wire, Quranic verses covering a quarter of the surface. Just from looking at it, you could hear the Surah of the Conquest being recited in the dim light of the noble chamber, where yellow decorated weavings showed the locations of the three graves. It was the first time I’d snuck into the burial room, among the scent of ancient prayers. I did it again on several consecutive nights to watch the workers who’d been chosen to carry out the renovations in secret.”

  “They change the cloth on the sixth of Dhu l-Hijja every year, don’t they?” Nasser asked, but the young eunuch was too lost in his memories to reply. It was as though he could only hear and see what was before his mind’s eye.

  “The cloth they took down was seventy-five years old, according to the date woven into the fabric—unchanged for three quarters of a century. I trembled in the dawn twilight when I looked toward the fourth, empty, grave. My father told me afterward that the prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, was to be buried in it when he descended to earth in his second coming. My father, the head eunuch, stood reverently under the shimmering star that appeared on the wall of the room that faced the Kaaba, above the head of the noble Prophet. He replaced the silver nail with a diamond the size of a pigeon egg, and beneath it another gem larger still; both were set in gold and silver. I seem to remember—whether I was awake or dreaming—a skinny young architect approaching the cloth that lined th
e room. He went round folding up the heavy, embroidered, perfumed fabric, then threw the bundle onto his shoulder and left the venerable chamber, placing it on the ground of the Rawdah outside, just a few steps from where I’m standing now. As I watched, the workers gathered around it to carry it to the truck; it was so heavy they couldn’t even lift it!” The eunuch sighed, looking Nasser in the face, then went on.

  “The chamber stands over one of the rivulets that water the gardens of Paradise. The inside of the chamber belongs to a different time, bodies exist with a different energy, and whoever enters that chamber over the rivulet and pool is relieved of all infirmity and stripped of everything but their true nature, becoming a new species formed of all the prayers and salutations ever said over the noble grave of the beloved Prophet. As children, my predecessors slept on pillows that their parents had covered with a piece of that cloth, breathing in the scent of all those prayers, so our souls are connected with that immortal inner soul.”