When Yusuf returned to the Lane of Many Heads several days later, he was as silent as the grave. The neighbors watched as he spent his nights wide-awake, his eyelids never even drooping for a moment. He was in a state of such terrible animation that he couldn’t lie or sit down. He would pace back and forth, tearing up his papers: he started with his identity papers, went on to his signed diploma from Umm al-Qura University, then drafts of unpublished articles from Umm-al-Qura newspaper, his memoirs of Mecca, personal photos taken by his university classmates.
“I’m not going to leave a single word behind. I’ve got to free myself from this deceitful sham of a life that’s taken everything from me,” he repeated agitatedly to his mother Halima, who watched him wordlessly as he tossed scraps of his innocent past out into the alley. The people of the Lane of Many Heads awoke each morning to find themselves treading on fresh piles of Yusuf’s shredded-up life.
All that came after Azza’s first betrayal.
A dove alighted by their feet in the Mosque of the Sanctuary, bringing Halima back to the present. The dove hopped about in little circles, cooing and fixing its red gaze on Yusuf. In front of them, a blind Quran reciter chanted invocations in a low tone, his white eyes rolling. The Quran on his lap was open to the Verse of the Light: “God is the light of heaven and earth. His light is like a niche and within it a lamp …” His eyes grew whiter as he recited.
“It won’t last for long. Just until they find out what really happened with the body, and then, gracious Lord, let this adversity pass.”
They were suddenly interrupted by a great crash that tore through the tranquility of the courtyard. The worshippers around the Kaaba scattered and the crowds retreated. Glass smashed somewhere in front of them, and Yusuf instantly understood what had happened: a man, his face covered, had pulled the dome off the case covering the Prophet Abraham’s footprints and was now circling around it, threatening the guards with a chainsaw. People were shrieking in panic: “He’s stolen the key to the Kaaba! Stop that infidel!”
The terrified guards hesitated, keeping out of reach of the chainsaw, and the man darted toward the Mas’a gallery, a passage spanning the two holy mountains. In a split second, Yusuf took off after him, taking a shortcut around the Well of Zamzam, where he’d left his wheelchair by a row of taps. The thief was making for the outside gate of the Mas’a when the wheelchair hurtled into him, sending the chainsaw flying through the air. It crashed to the ground right in front of Halima, who had come running after Yusuf: “The thief! Watch out, Yus—” The hoarse cry had barely left her chest when the two bodies connected and went rolling across the floor. As the crowd watched the struggle between the two mismatched forms — skinny Yusuf battling a giant with mad, supernatural strength — the key shot out and went skimming across the marble floor. Yusuf dived after it. The crowd gasped as the key spun toward the drain beneath the rows of taps and was swallowed up. Yusuf plunged his hand into the drain vainly while behind him, the thief vanished into thin air. By the time the police arrived and the cleaning company had been called to open up the drain, there was little trace of what had happened except for Yusuf and the lost key. Even those who’d witnessed it happen doubted they’d really seen the key fall into the drain.
A heavy silence lay over the mosque, and flocks of doves settled motionless on the tops of the colonnades. The smashed dome gaped open over the plinth where Abraham’s footprints, after their calamity, lay bare in the Meccan night. The two prophetic feet seemed desperate to continue their eternal journey.
Aisha: Potential Identification of the Deceased (preliminary)
I, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, PLAYED DEAD AS DETECTIVE NASSER AL-QAHTANI, a cold cup of coffee on the table before him, sat fiddling with a few date pits in the protective shade of a cafe at the entrance to my alley. He waited patiently, sheltering from the blaze of the sun, which his heavy uniform seemed to suck right up, leaving him dripping with sweat. He watched Sheikh Muzahim in his shop until the sun was halfway across the sky and Imam Dawoud sounded the call to prayer. When Sheikh Muzahim picked up his cane and headed over to the mosque to pray, Nasser leapt up, crossed the alley, and slipped easily through the shop to the small door at the back. He went through to the storage area beyond, where he was swallowed up by a maze of tiny rooms, each stuffed to the ceiling with sacks of produce, leaving scarcely enough room to set a single foot inside. Nasser crept forward, urged on by the obvious emptiness of the place and the smell of foodstuffs long past their sell-by date. He spotted the huge old-fashioned radio set that had been hollowed out and concealed under the staircase leading to the roof where Halima and her son Yusuf lived. This was the radio set in which Azza hid Yusuf’s letters. Nasser headed past the furthest aisles of the storage area to the back, where Azza’s kitchen was. Before him was a small stove placed on a low table, and next to it were copper pots and non-breakable melamine plates drying in the sun under a wide skylight in the roof. A rusty hosepipe, still dripping, poked out of the bathroom, with its squat toilet and peeling walls. Nasser looked up at the narrow window close to the ceiling and saw, on the bars of the window, the offcuts of fabric that Azza used to signal to Yusuf to inform him of her father’s whereabouts. Most of the scraps were black; in the middle there was a single piece of red fabric. Nasser couldn’t translate the message. His attention was drawn to some pieces of fabric used as sanitary towels. They’d been washed and hung out to dry, they’d stiffened but they still bore the faint scent and outline of impossible-to-remove bloodstains. Was it safe to sneak into Azza’s room? Standing in that narrow space, looking at those scraps of fabric, Nasser felt like he was the one being watched.
A room eyed him from the middle of the storage area. It had to be Azza’s. When he pushed open the door, the room surprised him with its starkness, mocking his uniform and eavesdropping on his cement-muffled footsteps. There was no trace of life in the room: no personal belongings, no clothes, no forgotten handprints on the walls. A plastic wardrobe stood there, thin and split; a broken drawer poked out of it as if Azza’s entire life had been rent open. A hard cotton-stuffed mattress lay on a slightly elevated section of floor beneath the window. Nasser couldn’t catch his breath all of a sudden. The room was totally bare. It didn’t give off any feminine scent whatsoever. Nasser, who could sniff out a drop of sweat on a corpse, couldn’t detect the slightest whiff of perspiration, not even a stray hair fallen in a corner or stuck to the mattress. It was a stock scene wiped clean of any feminine traces. But even so, it aroused him: he dropped onto the bed, imagining Azza tied to its hard surface, and was immediately blinded by his erection. He closed his eyes, cursing himself. He forced his legs to heave his trembling body up off the bed and his mind to focus on the facts around him. The second call had sounded and the early afternoon prayers had begun; after just four cycles of standing, bowing, prostrating, and kneeling, Sheikh Muzahim would return to his shop. Nasser examined the window again. Someone had ripped out the wooden crossbeams in the window, leaving only the rusty nails behind. Yusuf had written in his diary that the window was nailed shut and was never opened. Had Azza been killed and thrown out of this broken window?
Nasser knelt down and lifted the edge of the thick cotton mattress to find a hollow storage area underneath. From inside the hollow, Batman stared back at him from the cover of an old comic, yellowed from having to hear the desolation in that room and the alley outside for such a long time.