Sarab

by Raja Alem

  Even Sarab hadn’t realized the truth of what it meant to accompany that deranged leader. It was the first time she had seen or set foot in that sacred place, and she had instantly been cowed by its vastness, its sanctity. Even though she was a just a simple girl from Wajir, she realized the enormity of the place. They were no more than five hundred fighters, and despite the weapons waiting for them in the cellars and in those fifty coffins, they were lost in this space like a handful of sand. It covered perhaps five hundred thousand square meters, had more than thirty doors, and contained a forest of hundreds of marble pillars interspersed with 244 pillars of red sandstone; more than enough to swallow four hundred thousand men. Even so, Mujan had brought them here in their puny numbers and with their primitive weapons, confident and ready for a siege in the Grand Mosque, which might last till God alone knew; and now, added to their own feebleness were hundreds of hostages, all besieged with horror. The rebels were destined to stay with these hostages until the end, which seemed to Sarab to have been determined from the first instant when the venerable imam stared at her sternly and said, “Fear God. Let us pray for the dead.”

  The prayer had been for them; they were the dead, and the empty coffins their own, ready for them in the unknown future.

  Mujan seemed to have finished spitting out the flame of his demands and had now relaxed, assured that his words would circulate through the crowds. He leaped down and roamed among his men, inspecting their capacity for dealing with the siege now it had become a reality. He moved like a black cloud and his wide eyes seemed bottomless, exposing the battle he had plunged his entire soul into, as he aimed to bolster his men’s belief that the dawn of the empire of truth was breaking at their hands.

  Mujan concentrated his men around the doors and all over the roof of the mosque, and he distributed groups to keep watch on the courtyard and the open sky above it, anticipating an air attack by countering forces. At a glance, the five hundred fighters seemed like grains of dust swallowed up by the infinite house of God.

  Snipers

  Bullets poured intermittently from the nine minarets in response to shots from outside, where the police had initially rushed in, desperate to break through the doors, break the siege, and regain control of the Grand Mosque; but they had underestimated the scale of the armaments of inside. Bullets thudded savagely, covering the sky with an apprehensive silence that deafened fighters, hostages, and nearby residents alike. The mountains and the stone houses of the Holy City resounded with the echoes of that unexpected horror; no one could believe that death was emanating from the house of God instead of the melodious call to prayer.

  Sarab retreated to the darkness under the arcades and took up position behind a marble pillar, aiming her automatic rifle and preparing herself to shoot any attackers. Behind her, she heard a recitation of the Quran in a soft, lilting tone. It seemed to her that an angel had descended to pray, to remind them of God in this house of worship. She didn’t dare to turn around for fear that the enchanting recitation would disappear.

  "But for those who of their Sustainer’s Presence stand in fear, two gardens of paradise are readied—which, then, of your Sustainer’s powers can you disavow?”

  It was the Chapter of the Most Gracious, its soothing rustle echoing throughout the arcades. When at last she was brave enough to turn around, she saw a hostage. The small, thin man had the look of an Azhari scholar; his eyes were entirely white, blinded to the things of this world, and he was absorbed in his recitation. The sweetness of his voice gave the impression he was floating in midair, untouched by the murder all around.

  For a moment Sarab slipped into the melodious lilt. Closing her eyes, she felt her body uplifted up when he recited, ”But forever will abide thy Sustainer’s Self, full of majesty and glory.”

  Suddenly a giant body fell from the sky in front of her, slamming into the earth like a bomb. She froze, staring at the open wound ripped through the stomach wall. The man’s chest rose and fell in a rattle. Without thinking, she reached out a hand to him and was scorched by heat. Something exploded in her head and she hurtled away like a missile, blinded by the sight of the hostage’s bowels snaking toward her.

  She was still running when her foot struck a shinbone. She looked down and saw the bare foot of a plump woman leaning against a marble pillar, facing the Kaaba.

  Sarab was shocked by the inhuman whiteness of that female hostage. Her face was round as a snowball, drooping over her huge chest. Her head was shaved at the back and sides, the locks remaining on top were disheveled and soaked with sweat, and a thick, nest-like clump of hair was gathered on her forehead. Her silky black abaya had slipped to her waist, revealing the shock of a lemon-yellow dress. Bloodstains blossomed on her right shoulder from the bullet that had left her arm dangling at her side like a dead branch. Her left arm gripped the body of her baby. Sarab’s eyes fell on the smashed skull of the child, and the shock sent her off running again, blinded by pain. Wherever she went she was greeted by a pitiless scene of death, the work of her comrades’ bullets during their dawn assault on the mosque. The brutality magnified the innocence of these hostages caught in their trap.

  She ran, racing against the thudding of her heart until her breathing was labored. It offered her no relief, as once again the sound of bullets and explosions thundered, seemingly even more dangerous. She heard the roar but didn’t realize that, this time, a massacre was taking place outside the walls of the Grand Mosque. A squadron of soldiers had charged and were being driven back by the rebel snipers in the minarets before they got anywhere near the huge, heavy doors of the mosque. Bullets and explosives rained down on them from her comrades inside, and the soldiers were mown down without exception. The circles of peace around the mosque were soiled with blood, the manifestation of a desecration that had never occurred to anyone before.

  All at once, an unexpected silence descended while the stench of blood settled over the scene.

  “Allahu akbar!” A ragged victory cry broke the silence, and Mujan moved along the arcades, carrying the news of the victory won by his snipers.

  “Our snipers have succeeded in mowing down an entire battalion of the police and Special Forces.” At once, this early success eliminated their horror at the reality of the language of weapons, and the rebels’ morale was boosted afresh. From their positions, most were unable to see what was happening outside the mosque, but their blind faith in Mujan made them capable of imagining and justifying the massacre.

  Sarab stumbled when the cry of “Allahu akbar” informed her of the news. She suddenly stopped running, realizing there was no escape. We’re trapped. The phrase pounded inside her head like a hammer, but the only thing she cared about was her brother.

  Now Sayf has achieved the aim of his existence: war. Bitter tears sprang from her eyes, welling up out of the fear she had repressed for months. And it will be impossible to wean him off the taste of blood.

  The Holy City was torn between terror and excitement, unsure whether or not the Mahdi had really appeared. It could hardly believe the murder, which had begun to spread out from the minarets until it reached the houses surrounding the Grand Mosque, and random victims began falling victim to rebel sniper bullets.

  Hundreds of hostages were led to form an audience in the courtyard, and Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Qahtani, the long-awaited Mahdi, was brought to stand in front of them. He rested his back against the Black Stone in the corner of the Kaaba, while the hostages were driven forward one by one to kiss his hand and repeat after Mujan, “We pledge allegiance to you, O Mahdi, sent by the mercy of God, and we swear obedience to you.”

  Simple men clustered in deference to the weapons leading them to slaughter. They kissed the hand with its long fingers, murmured the words unheedingly, and were herded back to their seats in the northern arcades, paralyzed with fear. They were not in the least interested in the inauguration of a new empire, or in the declaration of war on the present age; they merely crouched down to wait for the miracle th
at would save them and restore the peace the mosque was renowned for.

  While the fighters were wandering among the hostages, a spiritual void had settled on the Grand Mosque. Time was paused, like the gap between one second and another when everything could be heard draining away, and in this gap, ravens were speaking; they had come from nowhere to circle over the Grand Mosque. In that ignominious silence, Mujan stood behind his Mahdi, watching the hostages’ submissive masks. He realized the stupidity of forcing them to pledge their allegiance. Doubt about what exactly was lurking behind those masks made it impossible to recruit even those hostages who had exhibited enthusiasm for him and his followers; putting weapons in these hands could mean the definitive end, should they revolt against him.

  He contemplated the ten men he had appointed to guard the hostages. If these faces began to stir, they would be dealt with summarily. He issued an order to his assistant: “Double the guards on the hostages.”

  All the same, he was aware that sacrificing this number to guard them was a risk. Meanwhile, a fiercer enemy presented itself in the terrain of the mosque; it defied the maps he had pored over and had easily swallowed up the five hundred fighters he had brought. It wouldn’t be long before this enemy took shape outside in the resourceful authorities who would soon regain their equilibrium and try to attack. The blood of so many had declared: There’s no way back.

  “But Sheikh Mujan . . .” The assistant suppressed his caution and drew Mujan’s attention to the huge number of hostages. “How are we going to feed them?” This question circulated in everyone’s heads—how were they going to prolong the limited supplies they had smuggled into the Grand Mosque?

  Before long they realized the authorities had cut off all water and electricity to the mosque and the surrounding areas, muting the loudspeakers in the minarets so the rebels couldn’t use them to call for allegiance to the Mahdi.

  Amid all this chaos, time flew by and they didn’t realize they had missed the afternoon prayer. Time had shut behind them, and in front of them was a void. The calls to prayer, which had wooed the sky of the Holy City five times a day, had suddenly fallen silent.

  A mute city without a call to prayer was like a true curse. It seemed as if the angels had fled the Holy City. Mujan realized this suddenly, and so he ordered the muezzin of the jamaa to raise the call for the evening prayer. The man stood by the curtains of the Kaaba, holding his rifle to his mouth like a microphone, and he embarked on a powerful call to prayer, protesting against the chaos. It inflated into the dense silence enveloping the Grand Mosque.

  “Hayy ala al-salaat—"A stray bullet from an unknown source struck the muezzin dead. Uproar broke out around his body, and Sarab wondered whether the confusion and bloodshed of their first prayer in the Grand Mosque was a reflection of the true essence of the jamaa.

  Mujan collected himself. He covered the body with his red-striped pilgrim’s garment and stood behind the Mahdi, who hurriedly congregated a group of fighters in the northern arcades. They recited the prayer for the dead over the muezzin and all the casualties of that day. One group after another embarked on prayers in different locations within the arcades, remaining alert for any reaction.

  The dead and wounded are working against us. The truth hit Mujan as the sun rose on the third day of the occupation, when he began the morning with an inspection of his men in the different quarters of the mosque. Before long, he was struck by the stench. He lifted his head and carried on, unwilling to wrap his pilgrim’s robe around his nose to block the smell. The corpses of hostages and fighters were scattered about indiscriminately and had begun to decompose in the extreme heat, dispersing unbearable waves of decay and besieging his men with nightmares of the battles awaiting them. He had issued a command on the first day that all medical efforts were to be devoted to his own men, and another command forbidding the fighters from communicating with the hostages.

  “Get rid of these bodies,” he ordered hoarsely. Under the eyes of the terrified hostages, the men began to drag the bodies away. They piled them up at the entrance to the sewer tunnel and left them there to finish rotting.

  Mujan contemplated his men, who were marooned in sluggishness as they waited for a reaction from outside. Everything seemed silent, as if their existence had been forgotten. They couldn’t guess what was planned for them, or whether or how the authorities would assent to their demands.

  After the first attack, anticipation had a detrimental effect on the men’s morale. Even Mujan found it difficult to concentrate; he could only focus on his men who were still living; the dead were out of his control.

  The fourth day passed, then the fifth, and nothing happened other than the continued decay of a new batch of casualties, the wounded who had breathed their last during the night. The men’s thirst for battle found its only gratification in the courage of the snipers in the minarets, who were firing on unseen targets, firing at nothing, firing at time itself to move it along, firing at silence, and at the endless waiting. Nothing bolstered the resolve of the insurgents apart from those random shots. Even the call to prayer was absent after the muezzin was killed. Guilt settled over the fighters at every prayer time; each group began to mumble their prayers, the words lost in the abyss of the arcades.

  Sarab would select the dawn and sunset prayers to face the Kaaba, gazing at the sky, wondering whether there was any angel who would care to descend and move time and assist them with the miserable hostages.

  On the sixth day, the fumes of putrefaction intensified. Eyes began to grow a film of doubt, and they avoided Mujan’s so he wouldn’t see the betrayal lurking within.

  Even the urine and excrement are fighting us. No one dared to voice this trifling omission from the plans, an oversight discovered to be dreadful in reality: Mujan had failed to consider the most basic functions of the human body. Due to the limited number of fighters in that atmosphere of charged suspense, it was no longer possible to spare any of them to accompany the hostages to the bathrooms at the edges of the mosques. And so it wasn’t long before the large number of hostages became factories expelling waste, which began to silently accumulate—something Mujan hadn’t expected would be a deciding factor in the scales of battle. It was not merely urine and feces; it was urine and feces in a sacred place of worship. That inescapable violation of the mosque’s sanctity began to silently crumble the men’s faith in the value of their fight. The waste lying everywhere became an obsession for them; wherever they turned, they were hounded by the echoes of God’s call to Ibrahim and Ismail: Purify My temple for those who will walk around it, and those who will abide near it in meditation, and those who will bow down and prostrate themselves in prayer. Here, there was no one circling the Kaaba, no bowing, and no prostration in prayer—just open graves and human waste and flies drunk on their feast; belowground there were no devoted worshipers on retreat in the prayer cells, just a sea of weapons.

  From the first week, Sarab was no longer able to ignore the widening gulf between herself and the other fighters. She froze whenever an order came to fire on a living target, and in the first attack she hadn’t succeeded in firing a single bullet. That day she had stood holding her machine gun like it was her own broken spine, and her mother’s perpetual complaints reverberated around her head.

  “We hear of twins born with one skull but I—praise God, we thank you for our troubles—I was suffered by my Lord to bear two children with one spine. Sayf is our backbone. Perhaps God is making him strong enough to live long and be victorious in all his battles.”

  For the first time, Sarab didn’t resent her mother’s description of her as a spineless freak. She accepted it humbly. Despite her highly developed combat skills, she had withdrawn to work in the supply lines, moving between the cellar vaults and the fighters on the frontlines. She was careful to stay close to Muhammad, inclining toward the human weakness that had begun to reveal itself with perplexing brilliance. She avoided Mujan, who seemed imprisoned in a constricting coat of armor called “vi
ctory at whatever cost,” trying to force the rest of the world inside with him. From Sarab’s infatuated and heavily biased vantage point, the tacit division between the two leaders grew deeper by the day. Muhammad seemed inclined to peace and, in a state of semi-surrender, lacked the will to complete their goal. He answered the description given in the texts of the divine envoy, and could be excused as bewitched by his faith, while Mujan was the vengeful, intolerant sorcerer. Muhammad’s surrender to divine commandment equaled Mujan’s resolve to impose surrender on the world around him.

  Sarab profited from her observation post to steal moments where she could offer help to the wounded hostages. She knew it was against orders, but she couldn’t ignore the increasingly grim suffering all around her.

  One night she finally succeeded in gathering her courage to return to the giant with the ripped-open belly. She shuddered as she knelt beside him and helped him sip some water. She was careful not to look at the gaping wounds in his abdomen; his guts were pouring out of his belly onto the ground beside him, and they gleamed a nauseating, phosphorescent blue.

  In a burst of unthinking heroism, she fought her revulsion and reached out for those intestines. She was paralyzed by their cold, sticky touch, but kept trying to gather them up with trembling fingers. She strove desperately to push the leathery guts back into the abdominal cavity, while they resisted her like muscular snakes. At last she succeeded in vanquishing them, and buried them deep inside until she felt her fingers brushing his spine.

  Sarab sank down on the ground there and then, her shoulders spreading out over the cold, congealed blood. The gelatinous intestines were bulging out of the belly walls and the open wounds, and she didn’t know how to keep everything closed. She tore a strip from the giant’s white robe and was trying to tie it over the stomach when she felt a shadow hovering over her. She froze, expecting a bullet to burst her skull. When a few seconds had ticked by and she was still alive, she plucked up courage and looked up, terrified, to find Muhammad, the supposed Mahdi, looking down on her, watching her struggle to keep the bandages on the wounds that were impossible to close.