That morning at dawn, there was someone searching for Yusuf amidst a sea of pilgrims, so he had to hurry through Mecca’s history in order to penetrate deeply enough that those pursuing him would be unable to strip him from its pages. The overpowering yearning for a page of al-Azraqi, where he could lie down never to wake up, drove him toward the steps of the Bab al-Salam minaret. There in the throng of pilgrims, the book fell from his hands and was lost. More than once, the book had nearly disappeared among those bodies, which had succumbed to a vague impulse to tear it away from him. The page, which the book had been open to, was torn by the crowd’s jostling. He’d read it before — like every page of the three-volume work — a thousand times and it was imprinted on his memory, and yet this most recent re-reading, as it was torn out of his hands, was like the very first. He learned that the historians and jurists used to call The Gate of Peace “the Shayba Clan’s Gate,” because it faced a door by that name inside the mosque, which had marked its eastern boundary in the Prophet’s time.
Yusuf stood there at a loss, searching for the missing piece of the puzzle that would connect the Shayba clan to the key and to the river of the booksellers. He himself was the link between the key and the river; at that moment, in his yearning for things to intersect, Yusuf realized that owing to all that he’d read, all the historical depths he’d plumbed out of love for Mecca, it was his destiny to stand there before the Gate of Peace, which cast the features of the last of the Shaybi key-holders over his seeking face. His passion and the strange resemblance he bore to the custodian was what drove his adversary to hunt him down, to tear him out of the puzzle of the city and create a new puzzle. Despite this realization, Yusuf was overcome with an old sadness; all the holy city’s discontent washed over his body. His shoulders hunched and he understood the true meaning of absence.
A woman’s soft laughter shook Yusuf from his thoughts of loss. He recognized that delicateness. When he turned to look, he was shocked to find the ancient idols moving around the Gate of Peace. Hubal raised his head from beneath the doorway of the bookstore where he’d lain buried for centuries, and peered into Yusuf’s eyes. He knocked the dust of ages and old books off his hideous body as he slowly got to his feet and began chasing after Yusuf. Yusuf was terrified; lightning tore through his brain. He took off running but almost instantly he crashed into two intertwined bodies, a man and woman embracing. Yusuf recognized the tender body of a woman making love, and from the photos in al-Lababidi’s house he knew this was Asaf and Nayla, the couple who’d been turned to stone for making love inside the Kaaba. When Yusuf appeared, the woman’s pliancy retreated from the man’s rigidity. Yusuf knew those light, hurried footsteps from somewhere deep in his memory. He tried desperately to see the present, but the past and the present were mixed into a single stream and that was all he could see at that moment. It no longer made any difference whether women in love had been turned to stone or stone had been turned to women in love. He ran after the woman Nayla. With every stride, he grew more certain that he was chasing after one of the Eunuchs’ Goat’s stolen mannequins, but a profound longing told him that she was in fact Azza. He moved, as softly as night, toward the courtyard of the mosque, past circles of worshippers keeping vigil, as the imam led prayers for the redemption of the believers and for the key to rain down from the sky and grant them entry to God’s house, lifting the curse hanging in the air. The soldiers had erected a cordon around the Kaaba, preventing worshippers from approaching; the mobile staircase stood forlornly by the impassable door in the same place it had been since the Emir of Mecca came to wash the Kaaba and failed. Yusuf imagined the staircase darkening and being transformed into the body of Hubal, with his one severed arm, shoving against the Kaaba with his dreadful body. Behind the rows of worshippers, one of the soldiers was telling his buddy about the first time he’d seen the Kaaba being cleaned.
“They told us we’d be accompanying the Emir of Mecca when he went to wash the Kaaba before the pilgrimage. I was new to the special security detail. I didn’t sleep at all the night before because I was so excited that I was going to get to see the holy object being cleaned up close. I soon realized that stones are just like us, though. They take off their clothes and wash in water to get clean and then they put on perfume. Me and the other guys quickly performed our ablutions so we could get down to the cleaning. I’ll never forget how the staircase looked, footsteps on incense. By the time the sun rose, the courtyard of the mosque was soaked in the most amazing scented oils: agarwood, sandalwood, and amber, brought by the mosque servants in buckets. I slipped under waterfalls of luxurious perfume and halfway up, I began to stagger out of dizziness. The crowd began its circumambulation, and I was carried around by the perfumes and then into the Kaaba itself. The inside of the Kaaba is as dark as a pupil. It looks straight at the Lord of the House. All I could hear was: ‘You are in His house. You’ve come to wash the threshold.’ If someone hadn’t pushed me deeper inside to the right of the entrance, I’d have been smashed in my fall to the courtyard below. My body floated on perfumes unlike any other inside that entrance, until the horns of the golden gazelle seized me and pierced my chest, lifting me out of the well without any movement. When the emir ascended, smiling sweetly, the doors opened wide, and we poured out our buckets full of perfumed water. As soon as the emir left, our commanding officer said, ‘Now pray!’ The order came as a surprise, like when a falconer takes off a falcon’s blinders and nudges it toward the sky. I rolled up the sleeves on my uniform and raised my hands up beside my ears to begin my prayers. My hands hung in the air as I turned my head; I didn’t know which direction to pray in. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know which direction to pray in, now that I was in the heart of the Kaaba itself. My commanding officer saw me hesitate. ‘Pray in any direction,’ he said. I said ‘God is Great’ and prayed in the direction I was standing, two cycles of standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting, and then I turned around and prayed another two cycles in the opposite direction, then two cycles to my right, and another two cycles to my left. I gathered all the directions of prayer into my heart and prayed toward it.”
Without disturbing prayers or attracting the guards’ attention, the female form snuck up the staircase as quickly and silently as night, luring Yusuf after her. Again he had the horrible feeling that the staircase was actually Hubal’s back, but he held his fear at bay and moved forward as the courtyard filled with incense smoke. Yusuf found himself on the staircase as the shocked guards looked on; some power that overpowered his will was leading him upward. It was as though he’d climbed those steps hundreds of times before, as though that ascent was in his genes. When he got to the top, all eyes were on him, from the birds in the sky to the people down below. To the desperate pilgrims below, he looked like the winged horse with a human face that carried the Prophet to heaven, like a black dot moving nearer the door decorated with Quranic verses in gold. The woman disappeared, and Yusuf found himself face to face with the door, profoundly black and profoundly enchanting. As the door drew him forward, the worshippers below noticed black moving against black and lurched forward. For a moment, Yusuf had no idea what he was doing up there. He could’ve pressed himself against the door and begged God to heal him of his ills. But then the black dot stirred and the key around Yusuf’s neck found its way into the keyhole. Instinctively it plunged forward and turned. Yusuf felt the door give, drawing him forward. It wasn’t the key that opened that figure of miracles, it was the touch of unmitigated impotence, unmitigated desire. He was completely soaked for a second, completely blinded, while below the evil presence was gathering its strength to transform the staircase into the body of Hubal, which began to recede from the doorway, tearing the key out of the lock and dragging his body from the Kaaba. Yusuf felt he was being ripped from the Kaaba; he suddenly understood the meaning of death: his entire being was sucked away while specters of universal life bled on the walls of his brain, flashing in the distance and disappearing like lightning bolts. He couldn’t get hold of anything, couldn’t lean forward to reinsert his stiff body into the sacred keyhole. His body was becoming one long wound and the key was weakening and slackening from the injury.