Sarab

by Raja Alem

  She pointed her machine gun at the broad chest and heard a sigh.

  “What use are weapons on a figment of your imagination?”

  It was difficult to judge whether the voice came from the body or if it was the darkness whispering inside her.

  “Even so, it would be a shame if the perfection of this body was marred by a bullet.”

  Sarab stayed silent; but she pointed the gun away from the man’s chest.

  “This is a body I have kept alive in these shadows for a hundred years and more; when I reached a hundred, I stopped counting. I might be older than any cloud or revolution that has settled or will settle over this mosque.” Sarab’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and she began to make out the features of the body that didn’t move. Its bottom half was dressed in black rags covered in writing that fluttered in a wave, until it appeared to Sarab that they were in perpetual, living motion.

  “Have you come to escape from the decay, girl?” His eyes glimmered like two stars, resting upon her face compassionately. “ Everything has its moment, even escape. But the time for that perhaps has not yet come.”

  Sarab trembled: he had read her intention.

  “Let me show you something.” He pointed. “Open that cupboard in the corner.”

  Sarab obeyed, feeling her way to the corner on the right, where she discovered a wooden cupboard reaching up to the ceiling. She opened it cautiously and was taken aback by a gust of perfume. Gleaming bottles of every color were lined up inside.

  “Since the house of God was established its blood has run pure red beneath its skin, but it soon turns black when exposed to human desires.”

  She didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her.

  “So, whenever the year changes, we wash the house, and we peel human desires away from its skin.”

  She didn’t move her gaze from the vials.

  “Those are the scents I collected for the ritual of washing the Kaaba, year after year.” Sarab couldn’t resist; she opened the first flask and inhaled the scent of sandalwood, and caught the rustle of wings in the air.

  “I am a eunuch, one of the oldest. I vowed to serve the Kaaba as long as I lived, until its perfumes ran in my veins. My fellow eunuchs respected my age and said that I was the same age as the Kaaba. They thought of me as Adam, devoted to this tent. My clothes are made from the covering of the Kaaba; whenever they removed a curtain from it they would place it on my body, which I have indulged so that only goodness has touched it. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t pollute my exterior with clothes of departure. With patience, the clothing will fall away and remove me from the void of my earthly existence.”

  He closed his eyes and light disappeared from the room.

  “Everyone who departs above is departing from a void of earthly existence,” he said.

  Sarab wondered what this strange being knew about the events taking place above.

  “You are carrying a machine gun,” he went on, “but even so, you are not one who kills, nor are you a murderer. Why should the disintegration of the clothing terrify you or cause you to doubt the inevitable journey?”

  Sarab contemplated the man, certain that if she fired at him, perfume would spray out instead of blood and the hue of peace on his perfectly round face would be undisturbed. Perhaps this was one of the souls that lived in the Grand Mosque forever, made incarnate now to battle wits with her and postpone her escape. He was not much like a body vulnerable to destruction; he seemed to be beyond it. What message was he giving her? That she should trust death?

  “Look at the truth: what is decay? What is perfume? Decay is nothing but a state of the body, of clothing. The soul remains untouched; that is perfume.”

  Sarab took a step back.

  “You people came here demanding death. When you summoned it, it terrified you, and you forgot that dying is not death. You, here—sooner or later, you will realize that there is no death.”

  She was frustrated by his speech, and disturbed by its untruth. She turned and left, sure that it was no more than a hallucination conjured up by her fear. His mysterious words followed her: “We are all the children of Adam; if your destiny is to live, the darkness itself will reach out to save you, even from the lion’s jaw. One day, in your darkest hour, you will hear the shadows roar and you will remember my words.”

  After that encounter, life for Sarab lost its gravity. The possibility of losing her life was no longer a source of horror, but of liberation. In facing death, Sarab felt that she had turned into the lightest of bubbles, freed from the weight of despair all around her. Suddenly, she no longer needed to embody what her brother emulated, nor what excited Mujan’s approval; rather, she aimed not to overstep the truth of what she was, to reveal this buried self; the self that accepted annihilation, without the sense that this fragility made her inferior to the others and their aspirations. And so she completely forgot about the dead machine gun dangling from her shoulder; she enjoyed unleashing the unsuspected recklessness springing up inside her like a wild seedling. She had disguised her depths for fear that someone might notice her or she might harm the people she loved. Now, the damage would fall from and onto herself alone; she was the one who would pay the price for her rashness, because in the Grand Mosque she had become a single individual. Freed from the fear of death that terrorized everyone else, she didn’t care whether or not she survived, as long as Sayf shut himself in the minaret till the end. Sarab allowed herself to be guided by her lightness, or her recklessness, which the others called “a sleepwalker’s courage.” They watched her pass nonchalantly through gunfire while moving the wounded to the cellars, where she helped the Sudanese doctor patch up whatever was left of their shattered limbs. She participated tirelessly in stitching and amputations, never losing sight of the irony of doing their best to save bodies destined inevitably for Hell. Sarab kept running through the dense bombardment, looking at the sky, imploring God to see her and accept her small acts. It was an offering, a way of cleansing a conscience weighed down with sin and exonerating herself from the ongoing fighting.

  When Ghosts Pray

  At midnight, an hour the rebels had begun to dread, the only source of light in the forest of pillars was the moon, which began to retreat as the siege entered its third week. Midnight turned the paralyzed mosque and the surrounding mountains into a gulf of ominous darkness, from which profound doubt bombarded the fighters. Wherever they looked, their comrades were falling, and what they had thought was merely an occupation had become a hell beyond anything they had planned; their Mahdi would lead them into the red death instead of dispelling it from the earth, and their dominance over the vast area of the Grand Mosque was shaken.

  That night, the houses around the mosque seemed to have become demonic eyes firing meteors, as the attackers focused their bombardment on the roof of the mosque. Mujan realized that the army’s strategy was to break his control over the rooftop. Machine gun after machine gun silenced his men and laid the courtyard bare; it wasn’t difficult for him to foresee that they were preparing a devastating attack.

  In a suicidal plan, Mujan began to move fifty of his best fighters from the arcades to fill the gaps between their comrades on the roof.

  From her hiding place in the arcade Sarab watched the men, their black clothes now hanging loose on them, leap up the stairs while total silence awaited them above. No sooner had the first fighter appeared than the silence was torn apart and he was felled by a government sniper. His vacant-eyed body rolled down to the bottom of the stairs. Another followed, and another, accompanied by a frantic volley from the rebels in the minarets, who began firing indiscriminately at the houses around the mosque.

  “They must have night-vision goggles!” Mujan cursed; fifty of his best fighters had been annihilated in ten minutes. He was forced to abandon his plan to cover the rooftops, and had no choice but to rely on the snipers in the minarets. He hurried to boost the morale of those stationed in the arcades, where he showed up like
a flash of lightning in the white robe he still wore in disdain of the attacking snipers. He moved among the pillars like a hundred ghosts, and could be found in multiple places at once, materializing among the men to fortify their resolve.

  “Stand by to defend; if it comes to it, we will fight them from pillar to pillar.” His words chilled the blood in their veins. “Don’t even blink. They might use the darkness to take us by surprise. We mustn’t let them.” Death no longer seemed glorious to the men, as they stood staring into their graves.

  Sarab didn’t usually sleep during the night. From time to time, whenever the snipers fell silent, terror wormed inside her and she craved reassurance that her brother was still alive. She would climb to the top of the minaret without breathing. Sitting on the edge of the narrow step, she’d watch Sayf’s back convulse over his machine gun with inhuman strength and, relieved, she’d doze off for a few moments. Then she’d get up and blindly stumble back into the nightmare below.

  That night, in despair at the thought of an imminent massacre, Sarab avoided climbing the minaret. She was kept reassured about her brother’s safety by his hysterical gunfire, which never abated. He alone howled in the sky over the Grand Mosque, making the darkness even blacker. She kept moving among the pillars, following the apparitions of Mujan and the Mahdi. Wherever she went, the Mahdi’s eyes seemed to follow her in perplexity; more than once they tempted her to reveal her true identity as a woman.

  She walked until she couldn’t feel her legs and dozed as she walked. She didn’t notice when Mujan disappeared to inspect his snipers in the Minaret Tawfiq, or when the Mahdi went down to his fortifications in the holy well. Sarab swayed; she didn’t know if she was waking or sleeping as she observed her body moving of its own accord, leading her to the cellar. She avoided looking at the eunuch, who didn’t open his eyes and perhaps wasn’t even breathing, but went back up carrying vials of perfume and a long-handled spray. Her path took her across the middle of the courtyard toward the Kaaba. She stood in the darkness, spraying perfumes onto the coverings that were now scorched and stained with blood. The fragrance of sandalwood, musk, and oud mingled with the smell of burning, and for what seemed like an eternity she continued to sprinkle the perfumes in the hope they would summon the angels.

  When the flasks were empty, they fell from her hand, and the sound of them smashing against the ground roused her. She looked up, but no angel wings were fluttering around her, only an erratic hail of bullets, which knocked over the row of lanterns hung around the well. There was no longer a trace of the curtains, or the perfumes, on her hands. There was nothing but the heavy breathing below her feet, and she was filled with the conviction that the eunuch and his perfumes were only an illusion, and belowground there was no night, no day, no pleading. There was nothing but an uninterrupted slice of black tar with human bodies clinging to it like flies, dying slowly.

  Heedless of stray bullets, perhaps even welcoming the prospect of being hit, Sarab made her way back and climbed the steps to the balcony that had been erected over the courtyard to allow teams of television cameras to broadcast prayers from the mosque. It was after midnight now, the hours crawling by so slowly that every second seemed like an age to Sarab as she sat staring into the night, her eyes bulging in her effort to distinguish the outline of the Kaaba from the darkness surrounding it. She was horrified at the thought that the House of God had suddenly disappeared and abandoned them. She couldn’t see it no matter how she stared, but she didn’t despair. It suddenly became vital that the Kaaba reveal itself to her while she felt so forsaken, but she couldn’t go over to feel its existence for herself; she was convinced that if her feet trod on the ground, she would fall and be swallowed up by the bottomless tar underground. She sat and stared, hoping to see at least something of the gold girdle encircling it, hoping it would proclaim, with a small glimmer, just one of the names of God inscribed on its walls.

  But, unexpectedly, Sarab saw her father emerging from the shadow, his beard dripping water just as it had the only time she had dreamed of him. In the dream they were washing his dead body while Sarab, still a child, approached the table where he lay. Her father’s kind face seemed to turn to her. He smiled and encouraged her to come closer, and the men absorbed in washing his body didn’t notice the skinny child who ran like a bird toward her dead father. She stumbled and fell, and her face landed directly on the soaked, bushy beard. She was confident that she had seen this when she was awake, not while asleep, and now, from the depths of the shadows, that dream emerged vigorously alive, along with the touch of the soaking beard on her face and the taste of roses on her tongue, bitter as gunpowder, before they carried her away.

  Sarab closed her eyes, casting away the vision of her father. But the ghost of her mother followed, welling up and baring her teeth in a laugh, revealing her barren heart. There wasn’t a speck of emotion in those dark eyes; with a single, scornful look she ripped the peace from Sarab’s heart.

  “Ya heef! You disgrace!” It was the accusation Sarab was used to hearing from her mother, and it bore a handful of contemptuous meanings in one breath: you shame, you iniquity, you who aborted all my hopes.

  Her mother’s ghost rushed through the shadows of the Grand Mosque like a wave of fire. Evidently, death had only succeeded in calcifying her uncompromising nature, her resistance to brokering a truce. Sarab could see everything turning inside her mother’s head, all the wheels and twists and plans. At that moment, there was nothing in her mother’s head but a smoldering excitement at plunging into the hell they had established in the Grand Mosque.

  Sarab thought: If my mother could bargain for an additional day of life, and she chose today out of all days of the siege, then she would be truly a terrifying tool in the fight. Or perhaps she has struck a deal and has been sent to take up her share of the killing. The rage that had propelled her mother’s ghost from the grave was palpable; no doubt her mother had been infuriated by Sarab’s capitulation to her own unreliability, and her calm in the face of pandemonium. She had come with the aim of demolishing the surrender Sarab had discovered within herself; she had come to force Sarab to raise her moribund weapon to her shoulder, aim it in unison with her brother in the minaret, and shoot everything that moved. Nothing but blood would satisfy her mother, the descendant of heroes, whom the tribe had crowned with the description “the wolf-woman worth a thousand men.”

  “What a fate, to be born as Tafla.” Sarab’s mother had earned that name when she was born, the eleventh child of a man renowned for fathering only sons. By being a girl, she had destroyed his reputation. So she was called Tafla, “spittle,” because, through her, time had spat in his face.

  From that name sprang her mother’s fierce struggle to surpass the men in cruelty, to erase the shame she had handed to her father for having been born female. Tafla was fourteen years old when her father died and left her as a burden on her brothers. The seventy-year-old hero Sheikh Baroud volunteered to take her as a wife; it was the final heroic act of the old warrior, to take on the liability of this spittle. Tafla felt that Heaven was smiling on her at last, to end up the wife of an admired sheikh in the Qutayba tribe; he had earned the name Baroud, or “gunpowder,” in recognition of his legendary heroism in the ruler’s army when it subdued the Jazira and unified it under his command in 1902.

  No sooner had Tafla moved under the old warrior’s protection when her penetrating intelligence led her to realize where to invest the ardor that would never be destined for the sheikh. Despite his heroic past her passions scorned his person. Instead, she focused on the collection of rare rifles given to him when he retired from the army in recognition for his service. Tafla convinced the aged warrior to train her to use them, and at once her fierce eagerness for the weapons kindled the sheikh’s memories of his past deeds. In record time, Tafla became a miraculous shot. She never missed a target and could effortlessly shoot down whole flocks of birds on their daily hunting trips. People quickly forgot about “Tafla” and inst
ead began to refer to her by a new name, Bunduqa—the rifle hunter.

  The elderly hero’s bed was kept alight by the she-wolf’s ferocity, which stemmed from her bloodlust. He succeeded in discharging the last of his gunpowder into her and fathered two children, despite her self-contempt for being female. When the second child turned out to be a girl it was an unexpected defeat, inconsistent with the legend of Bunduqa.

  “That’s the price for opening our bodies to moldy gunpowder.” Bunduqa never forgave herself or her husband for this blow, and in revenge she named the girl Sarab, “mirage,” in the hope she too might disappear. But when it appeared that the newborn would keep on kicking vigorously, Bunduqa made a decision: she would ignore the sex of this baby and would raise her as a male. It would be easy to disguise her sex in her brother’s clothes.

  “My two sons—God in his mercy has bestowed these two boys on me.” This phrase was repeated without the slightest restraint or twinge of conscience, and it carved the maleness of her two children in the heads of everyone, including her husband, whose great deeds were enhanced by having fathered two sons. At last, at the age of seventy-five, perhaps because her will to keep him alive had run out, or perhaps because it was inevitable that the curtain would close on his great performance, Baroud passed away and left Bunduqa a widow.

  Her husband’s death shattered Bunduqa, the eighteen-year-old girl who had avoided considering even the possibility of his absence. She no longer benefited from his status as a hero of near-mythical renown; once again, fate had defeated her and she was no one, left alone with two children, one of doubtful quality. So she pledged to herself that her husband’s death would not touch his legend. The elegy for her husband on the day of his burial came as a flash of inspiration to Bunduqa; she was arrested by the word controversy, which brought her husband’s legend to an abrupt end. At once, Bunduqa seized on it as a revelation and a message. She clung to the word jihad, and it took the place of her broken spine; she swore to employ the soul and the child in the service of that abstract goal. As there was no actual enemy threatening them, Bunduqa went to great lengths to create its specter. She breathed life into it and it remained in the background wherever she and her children went, even in their bedrooms. Bunduqa created a freakish monster, ready to swoop down on their creed and lead them to perdition. She instilled terror in her children, making their lives full of dread in order to keep them safe from the sinful heedlessness that sank its fangs into the other children others. She implanted in their heads the fact that they had been dedicated to waging war on Dajjal, which lived in the stories she told them before they went to sleep and in the dread they awoke to every morning.