Just then the cloud completed its revolution around the room, leaving all the photographs behind it a blank white. When it reached Hobba and her father, their color gradually drained, before they vanished into the air. Yusuf heard a crow caw, and when it flew up out of his mind into the room in front of him, he saw that it was no longer coal-black; it was white.
“What are you waiting for?” It chastised him.
“A sign. A message.”
“The messages are in everything around you. In your blood, even, and in that key around your neck.”
“But my eyesight is getting worse. I’m seeing double. How can I trust my vision when this concentration has clouded it?”
“Just shut your eyes and let the world come to you. Let it translate you. Let it define you. Choose a book and find your sign.” Yusuf picked a book at random off the bookshelf: al-Jahiz’s The Book of Living Creatures. “Now just pick a word.”
Yusuf opened the book at random to a long chapter and read the first word he saw: “Crow.”
“What connects the crow to Abd al-Mutallib?”
Yusuf flipped through the chapter to read the story of the Prophet’s grandfather and the crow. The crow showed him where to dig up the buried Well of Zamzam and bring Mecca to life again.”
“And what connects the crow to Cain?”
Yusuf didn’t need to read the Book of Living Creatures to answer the question, he already knew it: “The crow showed him how to bury Abel.”
“And what’s the connection with the Kaaba?”
“Dhu l-Suwayqatayn, the bow-legged, blue-eyed, broad-nosed, fat-bellied one who will appear at the end of time and dismantle the Kaaba brick by brick with his comrades and throw its remains into the sea.”
Yusuf wondered what could connect all those things: al-Jahiz, the crow, the universe, Mecca, the Kaaba …
“Now you understand the secret orbits of a single word and the power of resurrection that lies within it. The key that can unlock the entire universe lies within the most basic word. Don’t let locks and borders stop you. Gather your will and go forth.”
Yusuf obeyed the command that rose within him and stood up. He followed dutifully as it shone, like the crow before it had shone, from door to door, room to room, to the green marble and the silver ring. He dived down to the bottom of its shine. He washed like all those around him who were preparing to dress in pilgrim’s robes. Then he performed his ritual ablutions and unleashed the bright light of purity. In his pilgrim’s robes, he looked just like the perfectly white photos on the wall, just like the eternal pilgrims in them. As he stepped out of the Lababidi building, he joined the flood of pilgrims.
It was the seventh day of the month of Dhu l-Hijja, two days before the pilgrims would gather to stand on the Mount of Mercy at Arafat, where Adam and Eve met after they were banished from heaven. As he walked through the Haram Mosque, Yusuf saw that a storm was brewing. Soldiers were driving the masses of pilgrims away from the mosque and panic had turned the faces of everyone in the crowd monstrous.
“We’ve been cursed! God’s house cannot be opened. The Kaaba has shut us out.” They’d made this discovery when the Emir of Mecca, and other visiting grandees, had come to wash the inside of the Kaaba and wrap it in white cloth as was always done on the seventh day of the month of Dhu l-Hijja. Soldiers searched for Abd Allah al-Shaybi in the mosque’s colonnades so that he could come unlock the Kaaba, but they found neither the forty-something-year-old man nor the key, not in the mosque and not at his house.
It was then that a rumor spread about how a fire had raged through the houses of the Shayba family the year before, wiping them all out. All attempts to open the Kaaba with freshly cast keys failed. Outside the Farewell Gate, the sheikhs who specialized in Quranic recitation were searching for a verse that would drive away the curse, when a blind sheikh spoke up.
“The Kaaba will only open for a Shaybi. All of Mecca knows the story of when cholera struck the Shaybi family and nearly wiped out every last one of them. The only Shaybi left was an infant in diapers and when the Emir of Mecca failed to unlock the Kaaba, he had no choice but to call for the infant, place the key in his little hand, and turn the key in the lock. Only then did the Kaaba open.”
“What about now? Aren’t there even any infants left?”
Yusuf joined the flow of pilgrims, dissolving into the masses headed for Arafat. All the pilgrims could do was carry on with the rituals they’d come to perform. The sky was dark that day, not because of the clouds upon which the angels perched to hear the pilgrims’ prayers, but because of the terror caused by the curse that hung over their heads, threatening to wipe out the very earth from under their feet.
Yusuf flowed with the pilgrims flooding toward Mina, where the devil was trapped in three stone pillars. Each pillar of Satan was surrounded by circular galleries over eight levels, supporting the masses of pilgrims, who were delivered there by futuristic escalators and moving walkways. Three million pilgrims that year throwing seven pebbles before sunset at each of the three devils for three days equaled one hundred and eighty-nine million pebbles thrown at Satan from eight levels of modern engineering. They weren’t pebbles raining down on Satan, however, they were little pieces of living flesh, which the pilgrims tore off their bodies and sins to hurl onto Satan’s body, which grew larger. Yusuf stood in the middle of all the throwing hands so his flesh would be torn off and hurled down. He felt he’d been washed in that downpour, relieved of his every infirmity. For a moment, Yusuf was one with the devils being bombarded and the sins of the pilgrims and their dreams, one with the holy ground he stood on, with its geography and its history.
By sundown after the third day, Yusuf felt as light as could be, and he was carried by the masses of pilgrims back toward Mecca, arriving at the Holy Mosque by nightfall. He was guided by the minaret at Bab al-Salam, the Gate of Peace, the fourth oldest of the mosque’s minarets.
Purity opened Yusuf’s body up to a memory that began in the past and ended in the present. His senses were liberated. They could travel unimpeded, summoning that past into the present and moving within both simultaneously. He didn’t go through the modern marble entrance, but through the old gate, which had been implanted in his memory by everything he’d read, by al-Lababidi’s photos and by the detailed maps and drawings that Mushabbab had put together from the recollections of Mecca’s oldest inhabitants. The Gate of Peace consisted of three large arched doors, each five meters tall, divided by two two-meter-wide columns, topped by calligraphic decorations in naskh script, names written inside circular cells: God, Muhammad, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali, Sa’d, Said, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Abu Ubayda, Talha, al-Zubayr, Hasan, and Husayn, may God bless them all. Yusuf decided to go through the small opening inside the doorway that was cut out of the larger door, following in the footsteps of those who came to the mosque back when the doors used to be shut at night. He saw his grandfather, as he saw his father, as he saw himself there and then. He used to sit, every dawn, on the pebbled sections between the pathways of stone and marble, among the study circles of master reciters from Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, and Morocco. He would open the pages of al-Azraqi’s history of Mecca and begin to memorize its passages and copy them out.