And so the son of Qarara Hill sat with the son of the Ethiopian imam devouring movies like potato chips salted with the verses Mu’az never stopped reciting. Together they kept Khalil’s life going from one fight scene to the next, as the realities of life and death became a mere game on a TV screen. Mu’az was watching Khalil die and he was certain that his solitary fight against the disease was more heroic than anything Hollywood could ever produce. He was filled with a deep respect for the loneliness of that fighter. It did occasionally occur to him that he was spending his evenings with a dead man and he would be haunted by his father’s terrifying words: “We will be resurrected doing what we died doing … In the grave, we’ll relive the last moments of our lives, over and over until Judgment Day.” Would Khalil lie in his grave and be resurrected like this, watching American cinema? Was that fate worse than being resurrected driving his taxi through traffic in a sandstorm?
He was surprised, then, when on his way to deliver the call to prayer early one morning, he heard no sound at all coming from Khalil’s roof. He raced to the Arab League building and took the stairs three at a time, blinded by a single thought: Khalil had died behind his back. He reached the roof, panting, and was met, to his amazement, by an emaciated apparition kneeling naked against the sky, shoulder bones poking out as he pressed his shining forehead against the ground. Tears welled up in Mu’az’s eyes: was this Khalil praying for the first time? He didn’t stay to find out, but turned and hurried back downstairs, hoping with all his heart that Azrael would descend at that very moment to snatch Khalil’s soul as he was prostrate and record that he was praying, regardless of what for. With that fervent supplication, Mu’az intoned, “Come to prayer …”
In the early stages of his disease, Khalil continued to drive his taxi, except on Wednesdays when he went in for chemotherapy. He’d leave the taxi miles from the Lane of Many Heads and make his own way back to the Arab League, where he lay sweating and vomiting, turning a metallic blue. The next day, he’d wake up with a supernatural determination to get back in his taxi again, sometimes even driving past customers without stopping just to piss them off.
Khalil had taken up driving his taxi again during the past two weeks following a break after the doctors issued his death sentence. A chiseled-out skeleton swimming in a huge robe, maybe there was nothing left of him for the cancer to eat. What was certain was that Khalil had decided to go out to face the cancer. With sallow skin pulled taut over his bones, and reeking of garlic, he looked at the city with new eyes: the eyes of a dead man.
EVERY MORNING, KHALIL HESITATED AT THE JUNCTION BETWEEN AL-HUJOUN — left — and al-Zahir — right — but his hands would instinctively turn the steering wheel and he’d show up on time to his appointment with the stranger who had been appearing every day for the last ten days in front of the Martyrs’ Cemetery, always in the same white robes and gray waistcoat.
THE NIGHT BEFORE, THE SAME SMELL OF COFFEE HAD RISEN FROM THE WOUNDS THAT the Turkish woman had left on his impotent body. He’d hidden his illness from her — though she herself was more monstrous than cancer — but of course his frailty gave him away. Nothing satisfied her any more but a bite of his liver. He gasped in the silence of the taxi when his passenger’s eyes alighted on the bite-mark on his right forearm.
“She satisfied her hunger on you but now she’s sick of you, like everyone around you.” This man had been tyrannizing Khalil for days, asking again and again to be taken to addresses that they would then find had vanished from the map of Mecca. That day he’d gotten into the taxi without giving an address, leaving Khalil to drive in confusion; instead, he kept repeating, “This is a nightmare, Khalil. You’re dreaming. You’ll wake up soon. At the next bend in the road, or the next red light. You’ll wake up and this hallucination will go away, so will the dead body with the yellow beard in the seat behind you …”
Khalil tried to relax at the wheel and force his thoughts to submit to what was happening in his car, knowing intuitively that he’d soon wake up to a screech of brakes. That nightmarish situation called to mind the bad dreams that had plagued him since the body had appeared in the Lane of Many Heads along with Detective Nasser. Nasser often came to Khalil in his dreams and subjected him to the usual mockery and the same repeated question: “Did you ever eat a chicken breast, Khalil? Because people who eat chicken breast can’t keep secrets. Anything they’re told is soon blowing in the wind. So what is it you’ve been spreading about the Lane of Many Heads and Mecca, huh?” He’d interrogate him with a torture instrument that resembled the hands of a watch, letting it loose on his heart and leaving it to tick round, tearing the edges. Every time, he’d wake up choking on his own sweat in the Turkish seamstress’s bed, to the sight of her eyebrows arched in such annoyance that the previous night they’d jumped right off her forehead. One floating eyebrow told him that she’d lost her animality and that her magic had been discovered, and her features began to crumble; she turned into a gray-haired heap decaying in a grave of fat before his very eyes, and he knew that he’d have to pay the price for having stripped her naked.
“And the seal-dies, who did you give them to?” The word seal-dies punctured his front wheels like a nail and the car swerved violently, while a voice in his head warned him, “Whatever happens, don’t brake. The car will skid off the bridge.” As coolly as the most sophisticated airplane autopilot, Khalil stiffened his grip on the wheel and forced the metal structure around him back onto a straight path. All that remained was for his passenger to choose where he wanted to go.
“Stop anywhere and sniff. You know most of the ground in Mecca is graves, right? The ground where the pilgrims walk around the Kaaba — between the Hijr of Ibrahim, Abraham’s footprints, and the Well of Zamzam, ninety-nine prophets who came to Mecca on pilgrimage were buried there, and Ishmael’s virgin daughters — and the peaks of Mount Khunduma, where another seventy prophets were buried. Don’t ever think you can get rid of a grave. The ground is stuffed full of death — take a handful of earth from al-Shubbayka or The Martyrs and sniff it. That’s the smell of your ancestors. Death is a destination in Mecca; the ground and the sky never forget a dead body. Sniff your own corpse and you’ll smell your ancestor Uqayl ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami. He stole the seal-dies, and you took them as your inheritance to do whatever you felt like with them.”
He tried to claim innocence in vain. This time, the wheel didn’t wobble at the sound of the name; the ancestor, Uqayl ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami, was sitting in the car with them, naked and buried under the pile of rocks that had been thrown at his corpse, one hand still holding the dagger that had pierced his heart. In the speeding taxi, Khalil was stripped of the nickname “the Pilot” that the Lane of Many Heads had given him, and regained his family name, al-Hadrami.
“Both of you committed suicide — he with the dagger he was given as a present, and you with the gift of the seal-dies.” Khalil was frozen like stone, passively taking in this ransacking of the grave of his ancestor Ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami, the minister who’d ruled Mecca tyrannically in the final years of the first hijri millennium.
“They were inside that pillow you always keep in the trunk of this car of yours. They were the only thing you took from your inheritance and your sister. You didn’t rush into the fire to save your mother — you just grabbed the pillow that held the bundle of dies and got out of there.” Khalil saw he’d fallen into the trap his uncle Ismail had laid for him from beyond the grave. He’d been looking for Ismail’s musical instruments and songbooks when he stumbled across the seal-dies, which were hidden inside a large brass incense burner: six dies bearing a line drawing of a gold-plated key. The moment he set eyes on them, waiting silently in the enormous incense burner ready to be lit, some sixth sense warned him that they were dangerous, that they were a piece of Mecca’s very heart, and that he was the reason they’d lain there all those centuries since the end of the first hijri millennium, waiting. He was so impatient to possess them he didn’t want to check their date or owner, but picked them up in humble silence and stuffed them into the pillow he took with him everywhere — to Qarara Hill and Florida and back to the Lane of Many Heads, where they were saved from the fire that took his mother — until they finally disappeared inside the stuffing of the Turkish woman.