by Raja Alem
From the bus stop Mu’az took a taxi to the exhibition venue. He flung himself into the car seat and let go, allowing his body to become a numb reflection of the nights he’d spent alone once Khalil was gone, and his feverish search for some battle of his own. With a hazy, wandering gaze, Mu’az absentmindedly sliced Jeddah, the Mermaid City, into mental images, ignoring the driver’s ploy to stimulate the meter by taking a diversion over Crown Prince Bridge to the new tunnels over Road 60, instead of the Andalusia Road shortcut to the Palestine junction then the short distance west toward the sea, thereby crossing the entire Mermaid from east to west, along the full length of Palestine Road. In one panoramic shot, Mu’az captured the whole road stretched out like a tightrope for circus clowns to walk across through the air: it began pulled tight with poverty and tumbledown buildings, then, as it approached Jeddah’s central nerve, known as al-Medina Road, the oil boom buildings and glass towers began to appear, leaning toward the sea, and it ended with the fountain of King Fahd’s palace, which sat right in the Red Sea, so famous for its rare coral. Between Road 60 and al-Medina Road, on both sides, was cellphone kingdom, where cars crawled slowly, horns honking, amidst the armies of workers buying and selling the latest cellphones, new and stolen. As they passed the almost-deserted U.S. consulate building with its cement security barrier, he couldn’t resist taking a mental wide-lens shot of the machine guns mounted on armored cars at the gates.
“Can all that protection hide images of peace and safety inside?” he wondered. Before him, the disc of the sun was a vivid orange, setting at the very end of Palestine Road. On both sides, clouds of crows gathered to roost in the trees of the villas’ gardens, and every time the wind blew or a car horn shrieked, a black torrent rained from the treetops, blotting the edges of the orange sun. Mu’az recalled one of Yusuf’s Windows, entitled “The Crow in History,” which had caused a storm—also sending al-Ashi into a bout of depression and doubt—and led to Yusuf’s column being banned for several months:
We once imported crows as a way to eliminate the rats that were multiplying with the increased garbage that our cities produced. Now, whenever the crows gather and rain down from the treetops, debate flares up in Mushabbab’s orchard, and many of his companions repeat the old saying that Arabs used to call crows “the one-eyed ones,” because they close one of their eyes and make do with looking out of the other since they’re so keen-sighted—so keen-sighted, in fact, that they can see a beak’s depth under the ground! But Mushabbab also moves the discussion on to portray crows as the one-eyed false Messiah who represents one-eyed Western civilization: with one eye on the material, it is blind to the spiritual!
The taxi passed Palestine Commercial Center, and women’s bodies captured Mu’az’s lens: one hurrying through the mall’s horseshoe-shaped parking lot, her face uncovered, and behind her another covered entirely in black, even her hands covered in black gloves, and behind them both a group of girls with their headscarves falling around their shoulders, the sea breezes sending locks of their brightly-dyed hair streaming behind them. Mu’az would have been gripped by the sense he’d touched down on some planet other than Earth had it not been for the wooden cart parked at the mall entrance, right in the shade of the ATM, and the African woman leaning against the blue logo of the Saudi American Bank, with an orange tiger-print scarf lazily covering her hair, three braids escaping to the right and the curve of her neck revealing her prominent collarbones. He took a quick snap of the girls sweeping by in fancy abayas decorated with frills, silver designs, and colored edging at the sleeves that matched their headscarves, and rings and bracelets made of all kinds of leather, beads, metal, and crystal. “Wallah, al-banat fallah!” thought Mu’az, remembering the ditty from his childhood: “Goodness, the girls are loose and free!” His finger was poised over the button inside his head as he sighed. “How could you forget your camera?!”
The Pakistani driver was watching Mu’az’s face the whole time, and his laugh brought Mu’az back from his surprised reverie.
“You are new in country?” asked the driver.
Mu’az shook his head. “Imagine!” he chuckled.
When they approached the King Fahd fountain in the sea, Mu’az’s lens widened in anticipation. The driver pointed to the left, announcing their arrival at the address. Mu’az could see a fancy-looking gallery with a throng of cars outside it; it was a quarter of an hour until the opening. He indicated to the taxi to stop outside the Jamjoum Mall and crossed Palestine Road on foot to get to the gallery.
He quietly slipped into the crowd and was enveloped in a cloud of perfume: heady Oriental spices for the men and cloying sweet essences for the women. At the entrance he could isolate the smell of his own sweat and the developing agents still clinging to him; the powerful developers that could reveal features out of nothingness in his darkroom were dwarfed by the presence of those bulldozing perfumes.
Mu’az found himself facing the final painting. In its emptiness he could make out a faint blue halo encircling two female figures whose backs were turned to the world. One, though, was looking back at him, with a mixture of pain and mockery in her face. Mu’az shuddered and closed his eyes, denying Azza and Aisha’s appearance on that blank canvas and ridiculing himself for his fanciful ideas. “You’re the son of an imam—you know nothing about the female sex except for Azza and Aisha, so you imagine every woman looks just like them!”
Someone was talking to the artist. “Picasso once said that art is the memory of sadness and pain. He saw pain as the backbone of life. He said, ‘I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas’ death.’ So what it is that makes you paint in this ashy gray, Nora?”
“Laziness!” she replied instantly, with a laugh, but her real answer was hidden from Mu’az by the Pakistani waiter holding a tray of appetizers who had moved in between Mu’az and the crowd. Mu’az snatched a glass of water and gulped it in one go to quench the sudden dryness in his throat.
“No, no—the truth of your art must be exhibited in Riyadh too. Just call me.”
Mu’az’s skin closed like a sheet of Polaroid film over the horse-like neck that arched back in response to the compliment. He craned to get a better look at the image of her face, framed in black silk. As he looked, the developing agents inside his head turned the artist into a picture of a filly, the finest of all of Solomon’s horses. The journalists’ cameras and eyes crowded out Mu’az’s lens, already misted with old images of another woman—but this one veiled—that overlapped with the gleaming face of the artist. Mu’az struggled to peel away the past’s layers of veils, so as to compare what was silenced underneath with today’s clarity. The fullness of the lips always gave away what was behind the veil, yesterday and today; so what was that contradiction he sensed inside his private archive?
Mu’az’s line of vision was blocked by the personality opening the exhibition, and the lengthy, simpering speech with which he attempted to capture the artist’s attention. “The art movement is booming at the moment, with the reform movement reaching all of our cultural institutions. The Association for Culture and Arts in Riyadh would be delighted to host an exhibition of your work at the Center …”
Mu’az was dazzled by the stark contrast between the men’s white robes and the blackness of the women’s silk abayas. In the margins between black and white Mu’az used his developing and editing skills to recreate the past of the artist’s face: peeling away the veneer of foundation and powder, enlarging the pixels, returning the eyebrows to their original untamed thickness, filling the cheeks out a bit, sharpening the eyes with a glint of expectation and desperation. The bodies in the canvases poured out of those pixels, all without legs, yet running. In one corner, in the penultimate painting, the artist had just managed to capture the back of a knee, but the body was still managing to flee. Mu’az’s entire memory was captured in the void of that delicate painting, his lens clouded by the movements of some invisible internal ghost who blurred into the shining figure of this
artist.
It was impossible for Mu’az to confirm his suspicions or identify the ghost; the disappearance of the veil and the figure polished by beautifying procedures and novelties had spoiled the delicate traces preserved in his archive as a reference point. The full parted lips were the same, that was certain. But the ears, each dotted with a diamond, were ready to flee. They didn’t match the ears in the archive. The biggest distortion was in the ankles: printed in his memory, they were crossing the Lane of Many Heads in the middle of the night, and he knew them well, but here they sat in high-heeled shoes, perfumed, oiled and manicured and stretched upward like a dancer’s. There was something vital missing: the dashing flight in pursuit of life, the will to escape. This ankle was fixed like a stake. It didn’t flee and it didn’t pursue life.
The throngs of men and women chatting, laughing raucously and flashily competing for the attention of the media were getting unbearable, and Mu’az bolted outside, gulping for air. He crossed Palestine Road and immediately sat down on the bare sidewalk in the parking lot of the Jamjoum Mall.
Abstract Past
MUSHABBAB DECIDED TO LOOK FOR THE FORT IN THE HUMAN STRUCTURE OF the area. He dawdled in front of every building and store to chat to people, combing their words for a slip of the tongue that might lead him to it, while Nasser and Yusuf went back and forth over the square of land they’d identified. It looked like a tattered scrap of parchment. No matter where they looked, they found nothing but houses and palm orchards, to the point that they began to give up hope of ever finding any remains of the fort underneath the rubble of fourteen centuries of abandonment. There was nothing at all in that neighborhood of erratically built mud buildings to indicate that it might also house the ruins of an ancient stone fort. Again and again all they found were cement walls and trucks parked outside decrepit, box-like houses. Yusuf’s limp was getting worse.
NASSER SEEMED PRETTY CHEERFUL, AND SURE ENOUGH THEIR STUMBLING SEARCH finally led them to an old stone column. The remains of the fort were right there; they’d missed the spot more than once, because it was hidden behind a dense curtain of dry creepers and guarded by a line of palms, looking as if people and long abandonment had conspired to hide everything that remained of it.
As they pushed onward, they were amazed by the ancient stone building buried under wild plants in the backyard of an empty mud brick house. Through an opening in the wall that they assumed must have been the main gate, they managed to get inside the circle of the tower, where the dim light rooted them to the spot. Everywhere around them were dried droppings and the echoes of thoughts, military strategies, conspiracies, and noble-sounding words of peace that still slumbered in that stone temple, interweaving with the wild plants to veil the truth.
Yusuf and Nasser wandered in the small rooms that adjoined the main hall, some of which were buried in earth or had been incorporated into the mud house, or were blocked up by stacks of boxes covered with cobwebs and plants. They kept coming back to the main hall, and to the wall that looked like a mihrab covered up with plaster. The plaster was coming off in places near the base, revealing engraved letters here and there.
When Mushabbab caught up with them they’d already begun chipping it off. Together they entered a single, hazy dream, with no light save that of the flashlight whose batteries were rapidly running down. It was difficult to say which of them was awake and which dreaming, or which was guiding the dream that was carrying them all toward discovery.
Beginning from the base up, they worked in total secrecy, continuing for as long as the daylight lasted. Until the wall finally disappeared into absolute darkness, they carefully probed for where to scrape off the plaster, afraid to switch on a flashlight in case its light advertised their presence. They kept at it for days, and when night became day again they still hadn’t slept a wink. Yusuf limped energetically about on his steel knee, and they survived on dates and dry wheat bread, taking turns to go to the market to fetch bottled water and to empty their bowels behind the fort wall. Often, Mushabbab would lean silently like a dot on the wall opposite, summoning the will of the ancestors to help them continue in their excavation.
Sometimes, Nasser would lie down, taking up a position at the furthest end of the hall and feigning sleep, allowing the silence to spread over him until he might as well not have been there, so that nothing remained before the wall but Mushabbab and Yusuf’s breaths. The two were virtually joined together; it was essential to contract all the individual goals and wills in that hall into a single will, a single chisel to dig into that tree and pry the covering from its hidden roots. At the distant edge of Yusuf’s being, Mushabbab was breathing into him all the history and wisdom of the centenarians he had known, drowning in images he assembled from what they’d read in the writings on the wall, while Yusuf patiently continued scraping away at the layer of plaster.
As the will of that historical being pressed forward, the roots emerged bit by bit, and then its trunk: climbing it was the name Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf. The three went on for days, scraping rhythmically, until the wall finally surrendered the full spread of branches, bearing the names of well-known tribes, which it had been concealing all those centuries. At times, Yusuf became detached from the memory of the tree, and Mushabbab from Yusuf’s memory, and they both became detached from Nasser’s dream; then, the three would lose their direction, their sight growing weak in the darkness, their eye sockets contracting and their fingers trembling. They were like addicts isolated from the outside world. Nasser’s eyes widened as he imagined the hand that had engraved the tree, and evoked its strength of will; in that faint light it looked to him like a giant’s hand reaching to the sky.
Desires
MU’AZ SAT ON THE CURB IN THE JAMJOUM MALL PARKING LOT FOR A LONG while. The massive shopping center windows behind him were obscured by the sea air and the blue steel. He was aware of a fountain in the ocean spraying salty water into the damp air. This fountain, he thought to himself, was a challenge to the historical process of the eventual collapse of all nations and heroes. It hadn’t been switched off since the death of King Fahd, during whose reign it was installed. It still raised its plume dozens of meters skyward. He took several photos in succession of the spray spanning across the sky over the sea. He knew when the photos were developed that the spray of the fountain would look like men in white robes patchy against the sky like stains. He could have his own solo exhibition of his imaginings of these dissolved men. Mu’az realized that he’d been deceived by the artist’s face. He’d been so preoccupied he forgot to look at her body language, her walk, her voice, failed to compare her to the audiovisuals of his memory. From his hiding place on the minaret stairs, he used to watch Azza’s nightly escapes, cocooned in a black as black as the asphalt, which was what now separated him from the truth of her identity. All he had to do was cross over and take another look at her from far away. He’d ignore the face—cast a veil over it—then he’d know the truth of her. His feet failed him, though. No matter how hard he tried to stand, he couldn’t. The idea that this woman might be Azza frightened him. If she were Azza, it would destroy the Azza he’d built his photographic world around. The Azza of the Lane of Many Heads was an impossible creature, a being that reality couldn’t capture. As he sat there paralyzed he thanked God that she hadn’t seen him and that he hadn’t gone up to her. No matter who this artist was, she wasn’t Azza. Or, then, what if all women were Azza? The one he’d tried so hard to keep under wraps, like the first outlines of the human form on the walls of a cave. As soon as it is exposed to light and breath, its color fades and the flame, which has lasted for tens of thousands of years, is extinguished. Mu’az stubbornly closed his eyes in the face of that Azza, whom he’d preferred not to recognize at the moment, fearing he might go blind.
He still hadn’t recovered from his first shock when a specter appeared against the fog. When he looked up, he didn’t need to pause a second to think or to check his mental database of faces to know who it was who was speakin
g to him. The resigned look in his eyes was an invitation for the Eunuchs’ Goat to take a seat beside him, but he didn’t. Mu’az could barely hear what he was saying over the din of the cars:
“When the girls of the Lane of Many Heads died, our world died alongside them. What else are rats like us supposed to dream of? I heard they put up barriers around the Kaaba now since the key’s been lost.” He wasn’t speaking to Mu’az; he was preoccupied with his shopping cart, which carried a mannequin dressed in muslin and lace. It turned Mu’az’s stomach, and he was certain that he’d be struck with the disease if he so much as looked at the crazed, trembling fingers—like talons—running over the strips of velvet that covered the mannequin’s plastic waist, and at that dead marble face stuck onto a woman’s body, unsmiling, unable to look out on the world. For the first time, Mu’az noticed the feminine features of the Eunuchs’ Goat’s face, and his shiny shaved head, the red scar on his left cheek that cut through his onion beard down to his neck.
“I went inside.” Mu’az’s voice was almost sad. “I was careful not to let her see me, but I accomplished what I came to do. We—you and me and maybe the whole of the Lane of Many Heads—have no business being inside there. There are professional photographers in there. There are probably also newspaper editors in there and an army of reporters from international news outlets. Who could ever die with all those lights on them?” The Eunuchs’ Goat tried to ignore the signs of age in Mu’az’s face. He’d been a mere teenager, mimicking the adults, when he’d last seen him back in the Lane of Many Heads. Now he was more like a mannequin who’d suddenly come to life, the signs of the past twenty years becoming instantly etched into his face in the process. A mannequin that was being subjected to an acid peel of time gone by and specific doses of light therapy.