“Was it you who died?” His feet stamped on the gas, thrusting body and dream forward to catch up with her answer, but he’d woken himself up, and all that remained was the trace of an answer: “Death isn’t difficult. It’s life that’s so unwieldy.”
The road stretched black before him. He fingered the amulet resting against his chest, and resisted the urge to take it out. He’d have to postpone reading the papers inside till he reached somewhere safe. He clutched at Yusuf’s Window:
When Mecca’s dreams thicken in the world, they flee to Medina. The historian al-Azraqi, who catalogued the marvelous qualities of Medina, noted the strange fact that wolves in pursuit of gazelles would stop in their tracks if the gazelles crossed into the city limits!
After Bahra, the road stretching ahead to Medina was empty but for a smattering of cars, all going way over the speed limit despite the camels roaming freely in the dunes on either side of the road; Azrael urged drivers to hurtle through the thin wire fence on the median, smash into the cars going the other way, and wrench out the souls of their passengers.
He had no idea how he made it to Medina or where he parked his car. He found himself in front of the Mosque of the Prophet, loitering near the main entrance, where he had a good view of everyone going in and out, and he scanned their faces for either Yusuf or Mushabbab. He remembered that he didn’t know either of them, but so long as he had the amulet they would find him. He was certain of that. Or perhaps they’d been in touch with Mu’az. His knees trembled as he made his way forward. The night prayer was underway, and worshippers were kneeling for the closing tashahhud. He waited until the moment of absolute silence that followed their final greeting before entering the mosque compound through the Gate of Gabriel, walking past the bench where the eunuchs who’d devoted themselves to serving the mosque sat. He leaned against the Column of Repentance and fell asleep; he was exhausted. As he dozed, he could hear one of the eunuchs explaining something to an Egyptian pilgrim:
“—the Column of Repentance. When Abu Lubaba tied himself to this column to atone for giving away the Prophet’s plan to attack the tribe of Qurayza, he nearly lost both his sight and hearing. His daughter would only untie him when he needed to pray or relieve himself, and when he was done she’d tie him back up again. He swore his bonds should remain fast until they were untied by the Apostle of God himself. And that’s what happened, after forgiveness was granted by a verse of the Holy Quran. The Prophet used to receive at the same spot the weak and the wretched and those who had no home but the mosque, and he would speak with them and comfort them.”
Nasser wasn’t sure if it was the eunuch’s voice he was hearing, or a message directed solely at him. He opened his eyes and looked at the white lines that divided the women from the men, they were like the calcareous lines that ran from his heart to the hearts of those seeking the Rawdah, the section of Paradise that lay between the Prophet’s pulpit and his grave. He didn’t dare go over to the grave, but from where he sat he offered up a small prayer: God, even though I’ve resorted to evil so that I might reach You, by standing here in Your Rawdah I return to You all power to choose, and from this moment I am guided by nothing but You.
Emptied of choice, he slumped back against the Column of Repentance, feeling light and translucent, as if he were fusing to the gossamer ground beneath him that held the bodies of the Prophet’s companions. He began to see the foot of Omar, may God be pleased with him, taking shape in the dust before him — just as it had once come out of the ground long ago, and had had to be reburied — and he realized that the dead were buried not in the ground but in the hereafter, which was all around him, and that he could look at them and marvel at how their bodies resisted decay even in torment. He felt that he was a part of the luminous existence that stretched into future centuries and emanated from distant eras, from the original hijra to the end of all things, its path to resurrection. He eased the parchment from its amulet with a feverish hand and began to read:
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF SARAH to her son Marid, sheikh of the tribes of Sabkha, written in the year six hundred and twenty-six AD.
It had been two days since we left Khaybar, and we had spent them in silence, smelling like desert wolves. I was wrapped in an abaya of coarse camel-hair that hid my femininity and protected my body with a moist layer of sweat. The burning sun was tyrannical as we headed north up Wadi Himd to avoid the routes the caravans took, but our hearts remained among the cool waters and palms that gave Khaybar the nickname “Garden of the Hijaz.” The taste of your father is still in my mouth. When he let me leave, he said, “The whole Land of Canaan awaits the child in your womb, while Khaybar is destined to fall and we, Abraham’s chosen descendants, are fated to be destitute, because of the rebellion in Moses’s tale, to change and blend different nations and religions endlessly before we finally reach our eternal home.” That man, who so longed to be your father, placed on my shoulders a very momentous responsibility: the fate of the Jews and their return to Canaan, as promised them in the Arabian Peninsula.
I was thus entrusted with taking you to a mighty tribe where no one could uproot you so that you could continue the miracle of transformation. And so I had to continue onward, never looking back, shedding with every step my identity, my religion, my father Ka’b, my husband al-Nidr, and my family, and exchanging the sweet waters of Yathrib for the bitterness of the wells we stopped at along the way, crossing the eternal sands, toward the oases of Najd and Wadi Bani Hanifa and the tribe known as the Suns, in the hope that they would accept me into their invincible protection and their fate, which had been divined by our seers: it had been ordained that at the end of time, they would inherit the Peninsula and ride the steeds of history and take up the reins of many nations, for wherever their hooves touched the ground, gold sprang forth, kindling fires in lands that the sun could not reach. At a certain point in the journey, I looked ahead of me and saw a blur of darkness: black horses covered the horizon of those wastelands your mother crossed so that she could place you at the mane of the lead horse.
Nasser realized the significance of that ancient parchment he was holding. He wasn’t meant to open it and read it, but he refused to be a donkey, carrying a load of books he couldn’t read. From now on, he’d have to watch where he stepped, and with whom. These exaggeratedly crumbling and moth-eaten, tangled and untangled letters: it was no longer clear whether he was reading what he read from the parchment or from breaths imprisoned in his chest or from white birds concealed in the sky above the mosque, which had flown out of a fire raging in the past to intercept a bolt of lightning before it struck the Prophet’s resting place. The flavor of the words and the old parchment forced him to keep reading; he was curious to know where the will would break off. The anonymous author had given all the faces around him the aspect of the divineress Turayfa, who had predicted the collapse of the Ma’rib dam and led the nations of Arabs to spread outward in waves: one wave to birth and spilt blood in Mesopotamia, another to papyrus and writing in the valley of the Nile, another to stone and building with the angels in Mecca, another to prosperity and palm trees in Yathrib, and another to passion and poetry in the Fertile Crescent.
Ishmael
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. SCREAMS OF TERROR AND DESTRUCTION ISSUED FROM THE roof of the Arab League, where bloody scenes filled the TV screen and poured out over the neighboring rooftops. The dawn prayer would soon burst through the endless fog of violence that Jaws, which was nearing the end, had brought. Mu’az shuddered at the thought of the dawn angels descending for prayer and seeing all that violence, but as soon as the shark had been exterminated and the TV faded to black, he got up to put on another video all the same.