by Raja Alem
“It’s just a little water from the well,” she stammered, trying to exonerate herself from a charge of smuggling. “He’s dying.”
Muhammad’s face radiated an unearthly translucency. The angels’ compassion must be reflected on the face of the Mahdi, she thought.
“Yes. And who, in your belief, bears the sin of annihilating this soul?”
Was it him speaking these words and pointing at his chest? Sarab doubted her hearing; had he really said, “God knows it is a battle to establish the truth, and we implore God to accept our sacrifices on the path to do so"?
Hastily, he helped her bind the wounds. They were both certain that it was just a farce; nothing could save that giant from dying of wounds at such a late stage of gangrene.
Sarab drew strength from Muhammad, who began to crystallize into a true redeemer. Something godlike radiated from his gaze when it settled on her or the other fighters; it was a look of encouraging faith that dispensed goodness. As silent death grew alarmingly all around them, so did her conviction that he was without doubt one of the heavenly envoys. The fighters were looking to the Mahdi and Mujan, entreating them to shore up their faith, and both moved tirelessly among the fighters scattered throughout the vast expanse of the mosque. Both demonstrated superhuman strength in scaling the minarets and the roof of the Grand Mosque, and in moving among the arcades and the vaults. They were everywhere, encouraging the fighters’ stamina and affirming that victory was near. Whenever a fighter was weary, Muhammad sprang from nowhere to massage his shoulders; whenever a fighter allowed his weapon to droop, Mujan materialized to restore his aim. One look into their eyes would kindle the embers in the fighter’s soul.
Mujan and his fighters were certain, in a way that surpassed Sarab’s simple understanding, that they were winning the battle thanks to the attackers’ reluctance to use lethal force inside the Grand Mosque, in case it exposed hundreds of hostages to danger.
“Time is on our side. We will achieve our goal if we succeed in regulating our consumption of resources, and if we avoid dissension within our ranks and defeat from within.” With this phrase, Mujan made his cruelest decision.
Sarab stood paralyzed, watching Mujan supervise the implementation of an order that chilled the blood in her veins. Her comrades hurried to herd the healthy and unharmed hostages to the prayer cells at the farthest point of the cellars, where they were locked inside.
These unharmed hostages were the potential defeat from within, and they were imprisoned in darkness in order to stymie any potential rebellion. She, like everyone, was aware that the prayer cells intended for worship had been turned into rooms of slow, silent death. None of those hostages would the leave the room alive.
That night seemed the darkest. She couldn’t lie down to relax or sleep; she couldn’t bear the touch of the earth underneath her. For hours she wandered like a caged lion, preyed on by nightmares of people buried alive, their bodies slowly decomposing, unseen in the shadows. Her feet drove her to the Shahada Gallery, where she had heard the hostage reciting the Chapter of the Most Gracious. She expected him to have disappeared into the cellar along with the other hostages, but to her surprise she saw he was still there, shaking with his recitation. She approached cautiously so as not to interrupt the sweetness of his verses, but when she was a few footsteps away, she was halted by doubt. In his gray robe and white keffiyeh the man seemed no more than a wisp of smoke, something she had dreamed up in her need for peace. As soon as she took another step, the gallery filled with the susurrations of numberless Qurans, their pages turned as quickly as lightning by dozens of unseen reciters as they delivered their verses in interweaving whispers. Sarab stood stock still, not daring to draw closer in case she dispersed the comforting vision. But she was surprised when the reciter in the gray robe paused at the verse of Cain’s murder of Abel in the Chapter of the Repast: Thereupon God sent forth a raven which scratched the earth, to show him how he might conceal the nakedness of his brother’s body. And the darkness of the arcades intensified to the blackness of a raven.
As a meager form of penance, she went back to the woman in the lemon-yellow dress and found she had mummified in her position. She hadn’t moved a finger, still leaning against the wall in a state of clotted horror, still facing the Kaaba.
Sarab stood watching her with a mixture of fascination and dismay. Her face was so pale it was almost transparent, the sweat dripping on her face had dried, and the red rose of blood on her right shoulder had turned black. Her right arm was completely immobile, and her left arm clutched the body of her baby, which was rapidly beginning to rot. A stream of maggots crawled in a chain from the infant’s broken skull to the mother’s chest. The woman’s breathing was labored and her crazed face leaned over, absorbed in watching the maggots. Sarab thoughtlessly reached out to take the infant’s corpse, but the arm clung on fiercely with an inhuman grip; it was impossible to extract the body, which seemed like an extension of the mother.
Sarab stood there at a loss. The mother froze, terrified, not allowing her to get near her shoulder. Sarab backed away, aware that she was delirious. The dryness in her eyes caused the arcades around her to widen and splinter. She chose a remote corner where she could hide away and sleep a little. With some difficulty, she forced her eyelids to close, but no sooner had she closed her eyes than a lemon-yellow blaze erupted over her body. She noticed that she was wearing the same dress as the woman, but this one was decorated with prints of the stiffened body of her child, and whenever she moved the edges of the bodies printed on the dress clacked against one another. Suddenly all the faces of the printed corpses wheeled around and revealed the same face to her—the face of her brother Sayf. She woke up, horrified, and rushed to the courtyard, hoping that a stray bullet would peel the nightmare from her skin. Wherever she turned, behind every pillar, a lemony blaze outwitted her, bringing out the decomposed body of the baby with her brother’s face. She began to wander, aware that she was embracing death of some kind, and that she had to relax her grip on it.
Sarab moved away from her comrades, pursued by the choking feeling of falling into a trap. Suddenly, a hidden desire to keep living pushed her to review the maps of the Grand Mosque buried in her memory. Without realizing it, with an aim she couldn’t define, she strove to follow the details of those maps over the real terrain in an attempt to locate the secret tunnels leading outside the mosque, and the passages leading from the roof to the vaults. It wasn’t easy but she kept going, determined to discover the entrance that led to the sewers.
Her memory of the absent maps led her at last to a narrow cell in a far-flung and abandoned part of the cellars, used to store broken minbars. There was no source of light in the cell, and Sarab groped around in total darkness. Patiently, she continued to feel her way over the walls and the ground. But it was in vain; however much she tried, there was no trace of an opening or a secret door, just the touch of cold dampness and the utter silence of the grave. She wasn’t prepared to give up yet, however, and repeated her secret visits to that cell over the next three days.
On her fourth visit, she concluded that she had wasted her time and energy in a delusion of escape when she should have dedicated all her energy to helping the wounded.
She was about to give up when a mysterious intuition caused her to pause next to what felt like an old minbar; she had ignored it in her previous search, believing it was the last place an exit would be hidden. Squeezing herself beneath it, she began to search the ground, which was covered with spiderwebs. Almost immediately, her hand found a small metal circle. She gasped; this must be the secret entrance to the sewers she had been looking for. Sarab was flooded with a feeling of victory, and she felt giddy at the mere promise of escape. She sat there, her outspread hands clutching the metal door. She didn’t dare raise it and confirm there was an opening underneath. Suddenly her heart stopped as she realized the implicit betrayal of having discovered a way out. She stood up and backed away, and as she left the cell she vowe
d to forget this door existed.
Falling Demons, Fleeing Angels
A loud explosion rocked the Grand Mosque and Sarab’s heart. It was the moment they had been waiting for. A terrifying quantity of dynamite had succeeded in blasting open the Riyada Gate in the gallery on the eastern side of the mosque, and a throng of soldiers rushed through the breach. At the same moment, the sky over the mosque was suddenly covered with helicopters dispatching armed paratroopers into the courtyard like a heavy shower of rain. Everything seemed to happen in the blink of an eye, and rage and terror exploded in the arcades around the courtyard. The rebels emerged from their stagnant state of anticipation; their machine guns broke out with fierce intensity, discharging all the doubt and loss that had accumulated over the interminable hours of watching and waiting.
Sarab looked around. All of a sudden the courtyard behind her had been surrounded by a ring of flames, and the occupiers’ hand grenades flew through the air, reaping harvest from that human rain.
With reckless courage Muhammad bin Abdullah was positioned at the heart of that hellfire, totally exposed in the shade of the Kaaba and mowing down paratroopers with machine gunfire. Like a sleepwalker, Sarab broke through the ring of fire to take up a position next to him. She didn’t fire, but with the same rash courage as his, she circled the doors of the Kaaba, abandoning her wounded comrades as she watched the Mahdi. Although it was illogical, she was convinced that her all-encompassing gaze was guaranteed to keep him alive.
In less than an hour, the marble floor of the courtyard was covered with red and khaki stains, an absurd tableau of attackers’ bodies, lifeless and staring at the Kaaba. Stray bullets had hit some of the wounded hostages and rescued them from the unendurable torture of a slow death.
Sarab woke from her ardent protection of the Mahdi to find herself mired in a deluge of blood. Jubilant cries of “La ilaha illa Allah!” and “Allahu akbar!” rent the chests of her comrades, pricked by the same doubt regarding the legitimacy of their war that had troubled her since the beginning. A second loud explosion interrupted the victory cry; all of a sudden, the minaret overlooking the suq collapsed; it had been bombed by a circling helicopter. Sarab’s heart throbbed, and she offered a prayer of thankfulness that it wasn’t the minaret where Sayfullah was positioned.
Despite the loss of the snipers in the collapsed minaret, the rebels were bursting with zeal; the Holy City had fallen under their control. Wherever Mujan appeared in order to examine his troops, the rebels rushed toward him, congratulating him, kissing the Mahdi’s hand, and cheering the bloody result of the ambush.
“Now those who have strayed from the true path know that we have a response for every trick of their armies, and they have no choice but to surrender to our demands.” Mujan congratulated himself, readying his forces for the next massacre and ignoring the fact that they had passed the point of demands; there was no path forward but blood.
Sarab kneeled in the Kaaba’s shade, besieged by the staring eyes of the corpses littering the courtyard. “It’s a real war, a plague of locusts and lice and frogs and blood.” With chattering teeth, Sarab feverishly repeated that peculiar phrase; she didn’t know why it had possessed her. She stood, creaking from the icy cold she felt, facing the shattered, still-bleeding bodies. The human body bereft of life left ice in the soul, and she could hear rustling coming from these bodies. She finished her monologue, perhaps freed from her greatest fear. A column of smoke, swollen to gigantic proportions, rose from the spot where the ghost of the reciter had stammered the verse of Cain and Abel and overpowered the noises coming from the bodies.
“If anyone slays a human being . . . it shall be as though he had slain all mankind.”
Sarab felt that they had all died in this massacre, had all committed suicide. Something inside her had died even if she was still breathing. This was more abhorrent than any hunting trip, or any battle plan worked out on paper.
At the same time, Sarab battled with a feverish bitterness that pulled her out of her kneeling position. She was consumed by an obsessive thought: You are too wretched to prostrate yourself in the presence of God.
She raised her head and suddenly saw a skinny black ghost springing out of the courtyard. For a moment she was positive it was Azrael come to claim her, but the flash of white teeth in the bellowing mouth restored her to reality. It was Kasir, Masrour’s teenage son.
Kasir was holding his machine gun in his right hand and a machete in his left. She saw that he was bending over a body. He clamped his thighs over its torso and plunged his cleaver into its lifeless chest. He continued to stab lustily until the chest was ripped open and its ribs exposed; crazed elation split his face and he carried on hacking, savoring the sound of the ribs shattering with each thrust. His hunger escalated until it could no longer be satiated by that lump, and he rose and began to stalk the bodies. A torrent of bullets finished off the weakened soul of a soldier, another burst tore at a pile of bodies and turned them into shredded flesh. Kasir couldn’t believe his luck when he saw a wounded soldier trying to crawl away. He let out a whoop of savage joy and pounced on him, stabbing him in the neck and hacking at the back of the man, who was still writhing to escape. Sarab was more shocked by the sight of the knife plunging into living flesh than she had been by all the bullets. She felt as though her own arms were plunging into that human flesh, and she began to retch. Kasir was aghast and turned toward her with a roar. The fire in his eyes warned her that he would plunge his knife into her guts.
“Phtu! Son of Baroud!” He spat contemptuously.
“You should fear God. What pleasure do you get from killing the dead?” Her voice came out weakly, anointed with bile.
“What does a weasel like you know about it?” It was the first time she had heard Kasir speak. His voice was high-pitched, like a knife blade boring into her ear. He turned his back on her and began to roam among the bodies in the courtyard, butchering the wounded and mutilating the dead.
She followed him and pushed him. “Stop this! You’re just an imbecile boy.”
“And I’ve been watching you. You carry your weapon like a lady in her panties.”
Sarab was stupefied by this malice.
“You’re the son of a sheikh and a slave to your fear and cowardice,” he said. “I’m the son of a slave but I’m a master thanks to this.” He waved his machine gun in her face. “Here, the gun separates the slave from the master.”
“Master over the dead?”
“Anyone who saw me now would spit on that stupid question.”
“Where does a boy like you get all this rage?”
“When we wipe out these infidels and start a new state, a boy like me will be minister of war, while a spineless nothing like you will find something at the bottom of the ministry of health; somewhere boring just like you.” Whenever Kasir spoke he silenced her with an unexpected torrent. He bent down, mounted the body of a soldier and wrenched at the corpse’s neck, shearing it off with evident satisfaction and a stupefying smoothness. He seemed drunk as he joined in the victory cries coming from the rebels’ fortifications in the arcades.
The breach in the Riyada gate gaped like a wound in Mujan’s guts. He was clearly furious, and moved restlessly while he supervised his men as they reinforced the door with anything they could find, mostly the Grand Mosque’s furniture and bookshelves. He appointed the most zealous of his fighters, and the most suicidal, to take up position around the door in readiness for any renewed attempt to break through.
Sarab fled, withdrawing from her comrades’ celebrations of this nightmare. She took refuge in the shadows of the cellars and stood there shaking, her back to the piles of dates that formed their provisions. Suddenly, she felt something sticky around her neck. Fumbling at it cautiously, her fingers touched a bloated worm. She threw it away in horror and wheeled around to find maggots squirming through the bags of dates, leaving blood trails behind them. The sight of the maggots was as horrifying as the bullets. A Bedouin saying rang i
n her ears: “Dates are determined. Scorpions and snakes and time pass over them and they don’t spoil. Dates are eternity.” What had corrupted this eternity?
She closed her eyes and felt the maggots swell to the same size as the bags. She realized the futility of feeding the fighters, when they were merely soon-to-be-rotting corpses. The massacre she had left behind her gave her the feeling that Judgment Day would soon swallow up everyone. The moans of her wounded comrades made her incapable of forgetting the hideousness of the scene above her. But she couldn’t retreat. The voice that obsessed her with survival had fallen mute, and so she hurried to help the Sudanese doctor who was moving in a flurry among her suicidal comrades, amputating limbs and plunging into guts in an attempt to save whomever he could.
Only a week had passed since they first occupied the Grand Mosque, and it was the first real attack they had faced. They soon realized the grave mistake of not bringing medical supplies, which would at least have guaranteed that those terrible wounds wouldn’t fester. The doctor was extracting shrapnel and amputating extremities and dressing them with holy water.
“Mujan, prepared for everything, wasn’t prepared at all for this many wounded fighters,” Sarab thought while she was struggling to dam the blood fountaining from the stump of an Egyptian fighter’s leg. His constant howling had made her pulse race wildly ever since they carried him in, and when he suddenly fell silent from the shock of the amputation, her heart almost stopped. She staggered, and the world would have blurred had the scalpel not sunk into her hand and woken her.
*
That night a red shadow descended over the Grand Mosque. Sarab was facing the minaret where her brother was positioned when suddenly, from the pit of darkness, she spotted a gleam creeping through the arcades. She watched it closely and made out the face of Masrour glistening with sweat. It was the first time she had seen Kasir’s father since they entered the mosque.