The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

The eunuch turned to leave, and Nasser followed him silently. He was thinking about Sarah, the Jewish woman, and her wedding, and how she had lain with her husband on those cotton sheets but had never eaten with him or approached him, how she’d been hidden away from strangers, fasting from everything but the food of her people. In his mind, he could see a long reel of images of extremists from the histories of the many religions: those who call anything that they don’t believe in “heresy,” those who declare themselves God’s chosen people, those who worship gold and accumulate vast wealth, who corner the market and determine people’s livelihoods, all so that they can take over the world some day and make everyone else their slave.

  Nasser contemplated the fourteen centuries that separated him from that time. The grand plaza outside the Mosque of the Prophet opened out before him, and he lingered there in the hope that Yusuf or Mushabbab might seek him out. He had no idea how long he spent in that wide square in front of the mosque, but he began to feel hungry. A black woman was selling drinking yogurt from a mat spread on the ground at the edge of the plaza, ladling it from a large bowl into small clay ones. She was watching him, and when he approached her she immediately filled a clay bowl and held it out to him.

  “Good health! That’s the last of today’s prosperity, with the Prophet’s blessings. Drink up, say grace, and send him your salutations.”

  “God’s prayers, salutations and blessings be on our Prophet Muhammad.”

  “And his family and companions,” she concluded.

  Nasser thanked her, thrusting a hundred-riyal bill into her hand. Her hand trembled as she grasped the bill. He drank the bowlful in one go, and was deliriously filled with the faint but rich flavor of sweet woodruff. When he raised his eyes from the bowl, they fell upon a muscled back, and he felt as light as the short robe that covered it, the white waistcoat, the yellowish scarf thrown over the shoulder and the wide belt. Nasser felt like he was watching a character from a novel wandering, carefree, in his sleep; the man was headed to the market, and without hesitating Nasser followed him. He vanished into the covered market, with Nasser just behind him. Around them, the stores were saying goodbye to their last customers of the day and closing up, and the stalls were lowering their awnings over rows of prayer beads, prayer rugs, and cheap imported clothes. The man was in no hurry, and neither was Nasser, since any movement might have roused the man from his torpor; from a distance, it looked as if they were walking with a fine thread stretched between them, in their own sphere parallel to that of the people around them. They passed a Pakistani man with a straggly beard sitting at a stall selling prayer beads, miswak toothbrushes, and folded keffiyehs in bundles of three in boxes of cardboard, then an African woman standing propped against the damp, peeling wall. In front of her was a huge wooden cart laden with rows of small plastic bags containing red chili powder and deep scarlet hibiscus, and stacks of soft, but bitter, baobab fruit hiding inside white quartz-like exteriors. The woman didn’t look up as Nasser passed; she was dozing on her feet, hardly expecting customers. She was simply waiting the last short while until night came and she could say she’d made it through another day. The man Nasser was following seemed to be on an endless journey into the depths of sleep, until he took a sharp right into an alleyway next to a man selling sugarcane. Nasser had scarcely entered the alley when a body hit him with the weight of a rock. He hit the floor, crushed under his attacker’s weight; there was no use resisting. When he opened his eyes, he was in a hallway, and in front of him was a slim, dark face, watching him. Nasser didn’t need to ask to be certain it was Yusuf, and Yusuf’s words confirmed it.

  “You’ve taken an amulet that belongs to me, Detective.”

  Nasser resolved then and there that he wasn’t going to let anyone rob him of his dream of getting a medal for solving this case. But in the darkness of the cold corridor he felt an eye watching him and reading his thoughts, and without turning to look he realized who the man who’d led him to that spot must be. The faint smell of mastic strengthened his suspicion that it was Mushabbab. Just hearing the name in his head pulled him out of the cloud he’d been floating in. In a panic, he patted his clothes, but he couldn’t find the amulet anywhere, and his heart sank at the thought he’d lost it. Suddenly, Yusuf tossed the amulet onto the ground in front of him. “No need to look very far,” he taunted, then snatched it up again.

  “So how far did you get with your reading?” he went on mockingly, holding up the parchment as if to read aloud. “It’s pretty easy following you, by the way. I was right next to you in the mosque. The state you were in and the way you were so engrossed in reading had everyone staring at you.”

  Connections

  RAFI FOLLOWED NORA AND HER ASSISTANT AS THEY APPROACHED THE TINY restaurant, Casa Gades. None of its three floors was more than a single room, and all were filled with small tables, cigarette smoke, and conversation. Diners greeted Rafi left and right as he led Nora straight to the cellar room. Before they’d got out the car, he’d explained to her, “This brilliant restaurant was Señora Mirano’s idea. She runs it for a group of art patrons; she’s very respected in Madrid’s young art circles. She puts on exhibitions here of unusual experimental work by up-and-coming artists.” Over the past several days, Rafi had ventured to suggest several places Nora could go to get to know the real Madrid, and this restaurant was one of them.

  The cellar was a small room with niches in the walls for paintings, and it led to a small office where an eclectic collection of contemporary artwork was exhibited, abstract paintings and stone and bronze sculptures. Nora felt totally out of place, though she in fact did fit in with the clashing incongruity of the collection, and felt a kind of tacit mutual comprehension with its dissonance. It was like walking through an artist’s brain amidst the crackling static of their visions.

  Señora Mirano, the ninety-something restaurant owner, was thin with short platinum hair, and she overflowed with energy. She led them up to the third floor, which was the quietest, drawing Nora’s attention as they climbed the wooden stairs to the strange works of art that hung on the walls. “Young artists regard this as a place many different trends and movements can meet and interact,” she explained. “It’s vital for a developing artist to spend time in a place where debate is encouraged.” She pointed out the photos of the celebrities who’d dined in her art den. “That’s Joan Miró … And Picasso, and a Russian ballerino …”

  The top room looked over the room below it. Nora chose the furthest table for herself and her assistant, while Rafi made for a seat in the corner. On one side of them was a window looking onto the street below and on the other a wooden screen separated them from the other diners. When the owner reappeared, stopping at Rafi’s table, he murmured to her, “Señora Mirano, this is the woman whose sketches I showed you …” From where she stood, Señora Mirano gestured at a drawing on the wall, which looked like a Picasso nude. “Your sketches bear some of Picasso’s influence,” she said, directing her words at Nora.

  Nora almost laughed out loud. What would this art lover say if she found out that in the twenty-first century there were people who’d never heard of Picasso? “The lines convey a charged energy,” the woman went on, oblivious to Nora’s self-deprecating expression. “You speak to the world through these lines.”

  Nora felt uncomfortable under the woman’s gaze. “You’ve only seen one or two sketches.”

  “That may be so, but they are interesting,” Señora Mirano replied. “And I say this with some authority, since I was born into the art world and I’ve spent nearly a century around artists by this point. It isn’t just my personal opinion—” she came closer to Nora, and leaned over the table. “I showed the sketches Rafa gave me to my critic friend at the Fundació Joan Miró. She was very taken with them. You’re what, twenty-four? Twenty-six? You could go on to achieve a lot from where you are now. Did you study art?”

  Nora was caught off balance, tongue-tied. Rafi took the spotlight off her by drawing Señora Mir
ano into a conversation in Spanish. By the time the waiter arrived with the Italian salad she’d ordered, Nora had regained her composure. The four looked like any other group of friends out to dinner. “Bon appetit!” Señora Mirano said.

  Nora reveled in the rhythm of the artworks on the wall, the conversations of the regulars around them, each with their distinct, individual features, and in the fragrance of herbs, the taste of thyme, virgin olive oil, bread freshly baked in a wood-fired oven, and seafood. When the plates were cleared, and cups of coffee and Nora’s chamomile tea appeared, Nora took her folder of papers out of her bag. Señora Mirano found her glasses and began to look through the papers with interest; Rafi translated for Nora.

  “Your lines are very mature, it’s like you’ve spent a lifetime struggling with these greedy pen strokes, almost tearing the paper. Look at this violence, Rafa, how the lines dig and scratch… The force of the retreat, the spontaneity of the movement. This is lust, appetite, desire, veils being torn off all over the place! The human torso is spread out here like a thunder-filled sky, exploding as if in lovemaking …” Rafi was too embarrassed to translate the last part for Nora. The woman eventually stopped exulting, but a look of surprise remained on her face.

  A gypsy appeared on the narrow street, playing the violin in a red dress that was partly covered by her black shawl, its tassels trembling every time her bow slid over the strings.

  “Ah! Madrid’s night moves in time with the ebb and flow of the second movement of Bach’s violin concerto … Music is like Arabic: poetic but highly disciplined. The structure of harmony is like the system of patterns in Arabic, like the verbs composed of three letters which form the roots of the whole language. Chords are made up of either three or four notes, you know, and they can be arranged to create infinite variations, just like Arabic letters. The mysterious secret behind Bach’s compositions is just like alif-lam-ha, the letters that make up the word ‘God’; Bach thought his compositions proved God’s very existence …” Sinatra, Picasso, Bach: these were names that struggled desperately to steady themselves, but could find no foothold on the slippery walls of the empty water tank that was her mind.

  “Bach wrote forty-eight preludes and fugues, using all twenty-four major and minor keys, just to prove that it could be done. He wrote so much, and for so much, like a real Sufi, convinced that numbers mattered. The Goldberg Variations were written for an insomniac prince who wanted Bach to compose a piece that he’d never get bored of listening to on nights when he couldn’t sleep …” Nora realized at that moment that her own insomnia was not the product of an overburdened memory but an empty one. It stemmed from the aridity of the place she came from, a place that was becoming amnesiac even though it knew that the rest of the world was testing and examining and rebuilding itself through debate and criticism, that there were places like Madrid where arts and sciences and architecture and music collided with people going about their everyday business in a civilization that had managed to retain its noble exterior. All those names and their achievements, of which she knew nothing, caused Nora to feel a sense of loss.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by Señora Mirano’s laughter. “It’s no wonder, is it, that they included his Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 on the ‘golden record’ that they sent into outer space on one of the Voyager probes along with other examples of sounds, languages, and music from Earth.” If they’d sent that record to the city where she was born, would the people there recognize it as the sound of their Earth, Nora wondered.

  “This is Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major, the Spring Sonata. The difference between him and Bach is that Beethoven broke the rules, though that doesn’t mean that Bach wasn’t one of the most important rule-abiding composers.”

  Nora knew that it would be a huge undertaking for her to absorb this encyclopedia of human achievements, and that she was embarking upon it at a relatively late age. The gypsy violinist outside had dropped a coin and was groping for it on the ground. It was only then that Nora had realized she was blind. Nora was blinded by her own pity.

  “How do you feel about preparing for an exhibition? Not necessarily here—maybe in your own country?” Nervously, Nora fingered the edge of her scarf, looking at the gypsy woman’s tasseled shawl as the ninety-something Señora Mirano went on, “I came from a nomadic gypsy background too, and I learned that art in all its varieties can make the world a safer place for us. Art’s like a planet that grants us citizenship and gives us papers of its own, different from those of real nations.” Nora felt naked; the more this woman looked at her drawings, the more her internal life, which she herself didn’t dare confront, would be uncovered.

  “But I don’t have the knowledge to produce anything that could match that kind of art,” murmured Nora, surprising even herself. “I didn’t learn to create art by studying it. I drew this”—she fingered her sketches—“because I needed to push the walls away and create some space. To create balance.”

  “That might be the best description of what art is that I’ve ever heard: opening a place up into infinite spaces in the total creative consciousness! Maybe this need is what compels primitive peoples and children to create the art that has always been such an important part of human creativity. After he became famous, Picasso said he wished he could go back to drawing like a child. You must break through and exhibit something. Open up your innermost self to audiences and let them walk around in it, examining your deepest secrets …”

  “I appreciate the suggestion. I’ll think about it,” she whispered into the corner of her scarf, and without thinking she tied the corner for the promise she’d made, twisting the fabric into a knot the size of a pigeon’s eye.

  “Where did you learn this gypsy magic?” asked Rafi affectionately. Nora’s face shone. The features of the three people around her looked like part of the clay and ceramic tableau behind them, illuminated by the magic of the dim lights floating over the violin strings mixed with the longing of lute strings, which night drew toward the depths of the soul; there was her second mother’s hoarse voice and her headscarf with knots in each corner like a rabbit’s teats.

  “The woman who raised me taught me to tie a knot in my scarf for each wish I made. We were supposed to make big wishes, and tie a knot for each one, and only undo the knot when the wish came true, as our joyous ululations rang out across the rooftops. The bigger the wish, the wider the votive knot and the more people who’d benefit from your offering. Never leave your headscarf without a knot, she said.”

  There were so many knots in her second mother’s scarf, every one representing a different joy awaiting her down the road: Nora’s graduation from primary school, her first period, finally managing to memorize the Surah of Sovereignty, which warded off the approach of hell as one slept, learning to sew properly.

  “Like this gypsy’s shawl, with hundreds of knots,” she observed. “Do you think each one of them is for a wish or a dream?”

  “Sometimes one dream is enough,” ventured Rafi.

  “One dream?!” she exclaimed. She thought for a moment, and then she added, “Yes, maybe—maybe even one would be too much.”

  Señora Mirano stood up, excusing herself, “The question is how much space we create for the audience within the dream that consumes our life.”

  A burst of music sent a flock of pigeons flapping down the alley and away into another alley in the distant basin of her memory; they returned like a wave of night directing the rhythm of her body.

  “I came from an alley like this. Two walls …” Rafi listened as Nora’s mind wandered to the night when she’d been woken by an almighty gasping, banging, and scraping beneath her window. For a moment she’d thought someone was trying to break through the barred window, but then her consciousness began to distinguish the sounds, and a deep instinct impelled her to peep out of the window. She saw a man’s head below her window; he was unconscious, his eyes were closed, his head was rolling back and forth against the wall. She leaned further f
orward, thrusting her nose between the bars of the window, and was able to make out the black mass between his legs: it was a head in an abaya, glued mercilessly to the spot, gorging itself. When the epileptic spasms ebbed, the head detached from the body and out of the black appeared the face of a woman with dribbling lips. The epileptic man bent forward to kiss them quickly. “You cursed woman …” he murmured hoarsely.

  The woman’s eyes widened, anticipating an equally epileptic response, but the man began to move away, cautiously tidying himself up before he left the secluded alley. The man’s face disappeared and Nora saw Rafi’s face again. “At night, our alley was a theater where the actors never got tired, a strange shadow play. I used to lie in my bed and listen, hearing but never seeing the actors—footsteps bursting out of nowhere and running, voices walking the length of the alley acting out angry or debauched amateur dramatics, spurred on by the sense of privacy that the narrow alley lent their performance. They all played their roles safe in the sense of secrecy that surrounded their climaxes and exhibitions. The voices of men arguing or talking with drunken slurring tongues or sharp angry tones; mumbles and pants, women clapping in upper-story windows to catch the attention of those lower down; in the background, laughter or crying, or the hurried footsteps of that woman coming home at dawn from her shift in the hospital. The only thing I knew about her was the smell of a day’s sweat, Dettol, and strong disinfectants as she dragged her exhausted body onward to the sweat-drenched future. I never saw her but I could picture her with her white gloves raised in the face of our alley’s indifference. The alley always picked itself up and kept going, never stopping save for the cries of women, or the call to prayer, or fathers, indoors mixing with outdoors in that unique mixture that was our daily bread, interrupted now and again by the applause of the audience outside …” Nora’s gaze shifted from the gypsy across the street to her assistant and from there to Rafi’s heavily lined face. Everything that was yet to come was also part of that obscure map of life.