The Dove's Necklace

by Raja Alem

  “Anywhere but Madrid, I’m begging you.”

  “Madrid.” She was desperate.

  “I’m sure I can—”

  She interrupted him softly. “The sheikh is the only way I’ll get back.”

  Amulet

  YUSUF PUT DOWN THE SHEETS OF PARCHMENT HE’D BEEN READING AND HANDED them to Nasser. He walked away, limping slightly as he always did, while Nasser eagerly picked up where he’d left off:

  THE VOICE OF THEIR AGED PRIESTESS rose up from the very bottom of my fever to confirm that I was pregnant with you. Once they heard that, they took me to the hidden springs where my body was washed and soaked for days before they placed me in the shadow of their tar idol. My skin was humanly supple once more.

  When al-Ghatafani appeared, leading my still-saddled camel, I didn’t bat an eyelid; I supposed he was just another one of the hallucinations rising up from my delirium. No one stopped us when we rode past the wall in the mountains by the Devil’s Horns.

  “They’re sending you away to give birth in the bed of a chief from an influential tribe.” Neither one of us knew whether I was carrying his seed or that of the Devil’s Horns.

  We were received by ecstatic dogs wagging their tails, girls dressed in red, and the gurgle of running water as we approached the Sabkha tribe.

  “Sheikh Sa’d is the chief of the most powerful tribe in the desert. They’re descended from Wa’il and Rabi’a ibn Nizar,” al-Ghatafani said to reassure me. The palm trees stirred a longing for Khaybar in my heart. It had been an age since I’d been bathed in the sight of green. Sheikh Sa’d ibn Ibrahim ibn Ka’b’s men came out to meet us and make sure that we were safe and in good health. Najd was in uproar. There were reports that Muhammad ibn Abd Allah’s followers were planning to seize the Najd trade route. Ayif al-Ghatafani and I were taken to the sheikh’s house, which was surrounded by his loyal servants, and we stood by the mud-brick door, which was always open. Sheikh Sa’d was on his way out when our eyes met; a falcon fell from his eyes straight into the trap in my eyes. For nights on end, I’d been gathering my magical powers to carve a cradle for you in the arms of that peerless knight of the desert. I didn’t fail you. The tribe lit torches and married me to their sheikh. I lay in his bed and gave him my body, though he had no idea that you were already inside of me. In seven months, I would give birth to you in that bed and you would carry his pedigree.

  Don Quixote

  OUTSIDE THE HOTEL, AS THEY WERE SAYING GOODBYE, RAFI HANDED HER TWO CDs. “This is de Falla’s Don Quixote, and this is the one I promised you, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.” She took the CDs from him and put them in her large pocket. She smiled.

  “We need to listen to things we can’t comprehend so we can learn to comprehend the things we can’t hear.” She reminded him of Señora Mirano, and he suddenly heard her voice in his mind:

  “I once read that people consider St. Matthew Passion to be the most beautiful piece in the history of Western music. They say that Bach was as strict about music as a rabbi is about the Halacha. That’s the law that Jewish philosophers like Spinoza rebelled against because they felt it was too concerned with outward behavior, instead of the faith in one’s heart. They said it made a robot of man and a façade of religion. Bach’s music exists within harsh tradition; an act of obedience, a deep study of pleasure. Through his pure orthodoxy, he builds something greater than orthodoxy, which allows us to plumb aesthetic depths that we can discover within forms themselves. It allows us to find the source within the solid construction. He recreates exhausted possibilities.”

  Without thinking, he brushed her hair out of her eyes with his shaky hand and tucked it behind her ear. Her forehead tingled.

  “Don’t listen to things you can’t comprehend, just listen to the joy in the music. Don’t try to examine every drop of water, the important thing is for our bodies to be exposed to the pleasure of the rain.” She wanted to laugh. Whenever a man was sweet to her, she giggled like a child. She listened to him, patronizing, protective. She knew he could tell how inexperienced she was the entire time. The shame in her blushing temples receded when he looked as if he were about to say goodbye.

  “Don’t force yourself to think about what could never happen. I can’t remember who it was who said: in the limitlessness surrounded by walls on four sides, and within the thick fortification of nuclear reactors, there is a being about to come to life and rise up. The great transformation happens through the greatest of explosions.” The sound of his own words annoyed him as they listened to what sounded like last words, like goodbye.

  A little girl got loose of the hand of her mother, a beggar, and ran ahead. She stopped a few steps away from Nora and stared with big eyes. The girl was encouraged by Nora’s smile and came closer. Shyly and in her sweet Spanish, the girl asked Nora, “What’s your name?”

  Rafi could sense her hesitation, but he had no intention of translating it for her. He was certain that Nora had understood the question. He watched as a tear rose up out of Nora’s hesitation and slid down her cheek. The name Nora was like a dam keeping the story of her past and present at bay. Rafi didn’t know what to do. He said, “Her name is Bella,” to the girl in Spanish to smooth things over. Nora took off her black leather bracelet and wrapped it around the wrist of the little girl, who surprised her with a quick kiss on her wrist and a “gracias” before running off to show it to her mother. Rafi noticed there was a strip of metal on the bracelet, but he wasn’t sure what was engraved on it. It looked like the peaks of some towers or maybe it was just a brand: A&A.

  He caught up to Nora and handed her the two books: the one about El Greco, and Ibn Hazm’s The Necklace of the Dove, between the pages of which she’d slipped the drawing of El Greco’s painting, a gift from the Toledan woman.

  “These are yours. Don’t forget them.” His finger stretched out to trace the course of the tear that had run down her cheek; she looked away.

  “I’m not sure there’s room for these here.”

  His outstretched hand trembled in the air between them. “Maybe for the girl who looks like you?” From the distraught expression she wore as they walked into the lobby of the hotel, he could tell that there was no room there for that girl, nor for him either.

  “You know that woman was crazy, don’t you?” His throat felt tight as they rode in the elevator together, feeling like strangers. He knew this was the last time they’d ride in an elevator together and that the doors would soon open and that she would disappear as if she’d been nothing but a mirage all along.

  “Nora,” he whispered, stirring the air in the elevator. “Would it shock you to hear that I can’t stop thinking about making love to you? About connecting with you physically? It’s a riddle that occupies the space between imagination and geography. Maybe our imaginations are actually a part of our real physical existence. Something more like a necessity. Without our dreams, we’re left with nothing but our existence to keep us company. And that’s something we can’t get our heads around. We don’t even understand the reasons behind it. Life has no meaning unless we can hone it with our dreams.” Her eyes were fixed on the elevator doors and she was holding her breath.

  “You’re a woman now. You don’t have to go back to the sheikh. You can just turn your back on everything that’s happened and come with me. It doesn’t even have to be with me. But … Just get yourself away from all this. Embrace your freedom.”

  Not again, said the look she gave him. They parted outside the door of her suite and she disappeared behind it, going to face what awaited her.

  Wallpaper Tree

  NASSER HURRIEDLY EXAMINED THE WORN SECTIONS OF THE PARCHMENT. Mushabbab could no longer fill the gaps with what he’d heard the elders say. He could do nothing. He handed the worn parchment to Yusuf, who skipped to the end:

  I COULDN’T COAX SLEEP TO COME to me there in the soft mud. Whenever I managed to doze off, I was swept up in a storm. A storm with you at the head, riding on a horse of fire, black. It shot u
p out of the sand and into the sky, carrying you and your men back from Khaybar. My dreams felt like I was skipping lines and pages in the book of destiny, looking ahead to what awaits you.

  Labor came to me. Hand in hand with death. I was in agony for days and eventually I realized that I only had enough life left in me to save one of us. That’s why I sent for al-Ghatafani. I used up the very last sparks of my life writing this testament for you—in the blood of my labor—so that you would know everything there was to know about the truth of your lineage and origin. I slipped it inside my amulet, a silver half-moon that my father gave me when I married. It was made by our best silversmith to symbolize how the moon secretly penetrates our minds and even the rocks around us.

  In the morning, al-Ghatafani visited me in my birthbed and deathbed beneath the palm trees. He looked like a ghost. Like one of the sand ghosts we defeated on our journey.

  “I’m going to give you this testament, but you must first swear to me that you will protect it, you and your descendants. They must memorize my family tree and all its branches in the different tribes until my people return to Khaybar. Until they regain the Hijazi countryside, which is rightfully theirs.”

  Glancing possessively at my round belly, where I was carrying you, he took the silver amulet and promised to store the family tree inside it. He also swore to engrave my lineage on the walls of the fort of my father Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf at Khaybar so that my descendants would be able to recover it even if the amulet were lost or destroyed.

  The parchment ended there. The three of them had no way of knowing how al-Ghatafani and his descendants had served Sarah’s son and his descendants over the next fourteen centuries as the amulet was passed from one generation to the next.

  Nighttime Arrival

  THE CLOCK READ TEN P.M. AS NORA OPENED THE DOOR TO HER SUITE AND stepped into the gaze that examined her from her damp hair all the way down to her sports shoes. It was as if she’d walked into a cloud; an electrical storm, emanating from where he was reclining on the sofa, battered her face. He was dressed in a suit and he was still wearing his tie, his overcoat even. He’d been in the exact same position since the morning he discovered she was gone and no one had dared to disturb him.

  She had no idea how long she’d been standing there, besieged, when he eventually stood up and walked toward her in silence. She froze as he reached out to her and tore off her white cotton dress, buttons flying in every direction. She didn’t so much as blink, not even when the window that overlooked the gardens came into his line of vision and he pushed her toward it, cold and menacing like the sky in one of El Greco’s paintings. He showed her body to the people passing below, her entire torso exposed to the road. Neither of them said a word. There was nothing to hear but his heavy breathing and screaming rage. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to resist, the game stopped being fun. He shoved her toward the door of the suite and then dragged her into the corridor, which stretched before them, holding its breath. She followed passively all the way to the elevator doors. He pressed the button. As they waited for the elevator to ascend, she gritted her teeth and racked her brain. She was trying to think up some way she could defend herself when he threw her out onto the street, naked. She found some steely determination within: she decided she’d pretend to be dead and allow her naked body to be discovered by anyone who chose to. The elevator opened and the brutal air cloaked her naked body. He pushed her into the chilly elevator and she ceased to see. He pressed the button for the ground floor. He seemed to have lost the ability to think—like an animal frozen in headlights. Only one instinct controlled him now: revenge, the need to humiliate her.

  “In case you’re finally tired of acting solo, I’ll choose the audience from now on.” When the elevator reached the ground floor, the air inside was thick, tense, then the doors parted with a cinematic flourish to reveal the reception desk and every eye in the lobby. Piano music drifted toward them from the end of the corridor. As the door opened—it felt like it was taking ages—he stripped off his overcoat roughly. She didn’t make a move; her arms were pressed firmly against her sides so he wrapped it around her tightly and growled, “Keep defying me and you won’t even find a rag to cover yourself with.”

  His voice was colder than the wind that pummeled them when they walked out of the hotel. She saw a darkness in his face that reminded her of Death in the background of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. She looked away, provoking the resentment that held him in its thrall. He grabbed the back of her head and kissed her hard and when she opened her eyes again she found herself in the back of his large Mercedes. As soon as the door was shut, they were off. Rafa could taste the blood in her throat all the way from where he was standing, out of sight, in a pool of yellow beneath a streetlight.

  Paper Tree

  NASSER WAS EXAMINING THE LAST SHEET OF PARCHMENT FOR A TRACE OF THE family tree when Yusuf grabbed it out of his hands. “Don’t waste your time looking for the family tree. It isn’t here. You should be helping me look for the remains of the fort.”

  “What kind of fort do you think could survive centuries of erosion?”

  Mushabbab made them go back over the testament from the beginning, but no matter how much they searched they couldn’t identify where the ruins of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf’s fort should be. Mushabbab pulled out a bunch of maps for Yusuf. “My friends went to great pains to produce these maps and they were reviewed for accuracy by the Center for Hajj Studies and Muflih al-Ghatafani, may he rest in peace. They give us a rough idea of the fort’s location. It was the fourth side of a square formed on three sides by the Mudhaynib Valley, Ranuna Valley, and the Qaba Mosque.” There were some rough schematic drawings, which showed the fort at the intersection of the line running south from Baqi Cemetery and the line running northeast from the Qaba Mosque at a proportion of two to one. That is, the distance between the cemetery and the fort was twice the distance between the fort and the mosque. The two of them combed the entire area, though the city had begun to encroach, spreading out in every direction. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack of fourteen hundred years.

  Bundug

  THE AIRPLANE MADE A HALF-CIRCLE OVER THE MOUNTAINS THAT BLOCKED OUT the horizon as it prepared to land. Nora looked out over the peaks, which pointed menacingly into the sky like devil horns. Her heartbeat quickened and she began to tremble, as though she was expecting something horrible to happen.

  The plane touched down lightly on the primitive airstrip in the middle of the empty desert. From the ground, the mountains blocked any view of the horizon and Nora felt like she was being held captive behind the devil’s cloak. She looked around as she descended the steps to the runway; there was no sign of life anywhere. The only thing she could see was a pair of signs in the road: one pointed to Khamis Mushayt and the other to Najran. On the six-hour journey, Nora had listened as the sheikh talked to his assistant about maps and plans and budgets for a deal they were about to sign. He was ignoring her on purpose. He was still angry, and he wore his anger was like a layer of fire immediately beneath the skin. It singed her even though he was focused elsewhere. As soon as she stepped onto the plane, everything about Madrid disappeared. Nora was used to it. Every time she hit the ground she was born anew, her memory wiped clean.

  What she gleaned from their conversation was that they were about to meet someone very important. Someone they called the Building Crow. She was half-asleep when she heard the sheikh mocking the man, though he obviously envied him. “Our competitor’s a beast. You know he has several different citizenships. He’s a multinational citizen and he’s out of any one nation’s reach. He could get his hands on Satan’s property if he wanted to.”

  “Well they don’t call him the Building Crow for nothing.”

  “We need to think like devils to get him on board so we can complete this stage of the project. We can use his greed to get our hands on the whole world. Whatever property he wants, he gets. He could shake the ground beneath us. He’s t
his century’s King Shahriyar. He always gets the most beautiful women: he marries them and then when he divorces them, he gives them a house to be heartbroken in. If we want him to get on board, we have to go to him, all the way out to the Devil’s Horns where he’s hunting and camping.”

  “Don’t worry, sir. We’ve made sure to bring him a mouthwatering bit of prey,” the assistant said, winking at the two female flight attendants waiting on them. “He has a soft spot for Egyptian sweets.”

  Human falcon eyes tracked the motorcade of Mercedes as they entered the small, nameless village, disappearing between the run-down two-story buildings at the side of a pothole-ridden asphalt road. Nora shut her eyes in the face of all that decay, which had the power to revive buried fantasies. As far as she could see, the fruit orchards and beautiful mud-brick houses had given way entirely to soulless cement cubes, but the few orchards that remained at least gave the town a familiar feel.

  By ten p.m., the town was dead and the only sounds they could hear were the rush of the river and the creeping thick night. She wouldn’t see the sheikh for three days; her assistant told her that he had to stay with the Crow at his camp. This was confirmed by a train of Land Rovers that drove into town, kicking up a dust storm against the evening sky and carrying her sheikh along with the Crow’s son to a nighttime hunt. A cacophonous show of walkie-talkies, blindfolded falcons and their trainers whistling, clanking rifles, and reckless driving. The women ate the party up with wheat bread and butter and the procession of Land Rovers invaded the dreams of the children sleeping inside the town’s dark houses.

  It was clear to Nora that she would be spending the evening alone in the midst of that silence. After a long shower, she went back to her room, barefoot, a red bath towel wrapped around her. She’d been getting ready for bed when she heard a few soft knocks at the door. So soft she felt the knocking must’ve risen up from her distant memories. She turned away from the door and faced the bed: a five-star hotel in a village, it was clean but without an ounce of taste. Everything smelled like abandonment. The knocking got louder and she forgot she’d ever been sleepy. “Who’s there?”