Nasser was left standing there alone with the amulet, with the mass of mystery that had fallen into his hands. He suddenly got gooseflesh at the thought of opening it, and for the first time in his career — throughout which he’d never known any fear — his heart felt the touch of death’s grasping fingers when he imagined what might attack him from out of that amulet. His sense of security was all gone; he sensed an enemy was watching him. Everything around him threatened.
He stuffed the amulet into his breast pocket, folding his arms over it, and walked back to his Infiniti. In front of the car, he stopped for a few moments, not sure where he could go to stop this dreamlike series of events from turning into a nightmare. His eyes were closed; he longed to open them and find himself somewhere else. The city around him was as full as a balloon and wherever he drove, his car was soon surrounded by giant coaches and trucks and monster four-wheel drives and zipping motorcycles that shot in front of him, past him, and back and forth through all three mirrors. When he finally headed for the Jeddah road, he knew he wasn’t coming back. He drove as far as the first cafe on the highway, the Mahawi.
The same Pakistani waiter watched him sit down. Time dissolved around him into a dark gray and he couldn’t tell whether it was daytime or night, whether he was moving in his own internal time or the external time of the cafe and the city. There no longer existed a boundary within him that could prevent the things around him from melting into that indeterminate clump of gray time and being sucked into the ticking of the clock inside him: the cheap cafe chair was part of his body and the ground was threatening to be sucked in and subsumed into the mixture too.
He pulled up at the side of the highway and fingered the silver amulet in the dark. It came to life under his fingers: a semicircular box, hollow, the lid beautifully worked, smooth. The upper surface responded to his touch and slid back to reveal a dampish interior lined with red velvet and containing some yellowing, sooty-edged paper that had been tightly folded and stuffed inside. Nasser turned on the car’s interior light to see the delicate, discolored parchment properly. He took it out, taking care not to tear it, and eased apart the folded, moth-eaten edges as delicately as he could, not wanting to lose a single letter of what was written on them. In the dim light, he recognized the script. His feelings were conflicted.
A bus suddenly honked loudly and gave a squeal of brakes on the other side of the divider that separated the roads going into and out of Mecca. Nasser cursed. It had almost flattened a dented blue GMC, which pulled up suddenly half a kilometer further on. Just ready for someone to leap out and come after him, thought Nasser. He felt like he was being targeted, like he should get going. He suddenly heard the siren of a police car that had appeared out of nowhere on the road behind him, and hurriedly turned the engine on, but a voice over the police car’s loudspeaker instructed him, “Infiniti! Stop and park.”
His toes twitched over the gas pedal, but the sand around him was hostile wherever he looked. He pushed the parchment back inside the amulet, closed it then stuffed it into the folds of his clothes and pulled himself together.
“Driving license and vehicle registration please, sir.”
Nasser could see no option but to comply.
“Detective al-Qahtani? I’m so sorry.” His nervous laugh was louder than it needed to be. “I’m from the traffic police department. Can I help you at all?”
Nasser joined in his laugh. “That’s okay, thanks. I just stopped to look at some papers.”
Her Footsteps
IT WAS AROUND FOUR IN THE MORNING WHEN SHE AWOKE TO FIND THAT EYE PEERING into her face. Like a marionette, she was tied by cords from her fingers and toes to the four corners of the room. A hand was moving back and forth over her body, clothing her in silk and draping her in jewels like a mannequin or an ancient idol. Hands washed her and oiled her limbs with aromatic substances; then she became aware of a dribbling sensation on her feet — grains of wheat? Milk? Every droplet on her nude body stormed through her every cell. She was swinging in the air and there was nothing she could hold onto to cut the strings or escape that unbearable touch. For a moment she left her body to the ransacking; recently her sleep had essentially become that swinging movement where nothing could pin her down, not even death. For the first time, she lost her fear of sleeping alone where death might manage to catch her unawares. Somehow, she’d become invincible.
In one swift move, Nora leapt out of bed, breaking all the strings. In the same movement, she pulled on her jeans and a tight sweater, and then, seeing the spots on the window, a raincoat too. The moment she went out into the sitting room, her assistant jumped up out of her sleep—“Good morning, Ma’am,”—and hurried to call Rafi, who appeared from out of nowhere like a phantom to open the elevator door for her. Are you watching out for me or just watching me? She pushed the provocative question to the far corner of her mind so it would fall off the edge.
When she emerged into the reception hall, the receptionist’s gaze followed her from one end to the other. They always put the most inexperienced ones on the night shift, either trainees or foreigners, to fill the void of the dark hours. Nora left the hotel followed by her suited-and-booted shadow. She’d decided to take photos of the places she liked going, to grasp hold of the life she’d gotten to know in this city, that had pulled her out of her old loneliness.
In the park to the left of the hotel she stopped and waited. She wanted to sit, unnoticed, on a bench looking out on the street as it slowly woke — just sitting at a bench on the sidewalk was enough to awaken in her the momentum of freedom — but the only two benches were occupied by homeless people in dusty sleeping bags patched up with all kinds of scraps and leftovers, and they were both fast asleep. All you could see were their faces, exposed to the gently drizzling sky. Nora walked along one of the paths into a flock of ring-necked doves, which took to the air and scattered, then descended and settled somewhere else. They danced on the ground, pecking at seeds and pointing their tails into the air like arrows; when the arrows poked into the frame of the picture Nora was just getting ready to take, something she’d read long ago floated back in flashes so she couldn’t distinguish between the photo she was taking now and the one in her head:
Ring-necked doves are in the courtyard of the Holy Mosque, too,
They wrap a dark towel around their neck before going off to wash.
Until evening comes
When they put on a smart scarf, to attend a wedding.
We grew up with those dark gray collared doves who fly in circles over the Holy Mosque: they’re holy.
We watch their courtship dances as they tussle over females, and their droppings on our heads and on rooftops bring good fortune.
Because when we were little, we were told: these are the doves of the house of God. They live nowhere and serve nobody but the Holy Mosque of Mecca.
So don’t hurt them.
But yesterday I saw the same ring-necked doves everywhere in Hollywood films. Are the doves migrating and spreading, or is there now a house of God everywhere? In Jonah and Moses’ whale, Moses’ pleasing yellow cow, Ishmael’s ram, David and Jacob’s sheep, Joseph’s brothers’ wolf, Solomon’s horses, the monkey and the pigs: they’re all animals of the holy books, so what harm would it do if I squeezed us all into these words, and then squeezed all the words into a book, and then brought that book to life?