“Your ancestor al-Hadrami, who served as the minister of the Sharif Hasan ibn Abi Nama, was highly adept at forging identities. He could impersonate a dead judge by using the man’s personal seal, and get him to sign any deed he wanted from beyond the grave, or proofs of debt owed by deceased people, so as to rob people of their inheritance. In your ancestor’s hands, dates became mere masks that he placed on papers to lend them historicity and respectability, or to deny events that had happened or loans that had been taken out; he had the power to fast-forward and rewind dates at will. Those six dies, or whoever possessed them, owned Mecca’s heart.”
Just the previous day, when the Turkish woman’s disguise had fallen in front of his eyes, taking his good fortune with it, and he realized that his downfall had already happened, and at her hands, he took refuge in that pillow, burying his face into its soft stuffing looking for the reassuring weight of the dies whose ink never dried up. The pillow’s unfamiliar lightness woke him from his nightmare; in a frenzy he tore through the pillow’s insides, ferreting through the damp cotton but finding only a terrifying nothing. He began to punch the fat form lying around him and on top of him; the seals’ disappearance had unmasked her and revealed the animal within. The battle that raged between him and the Turkish seamstress wasn’t a fair fight by any means; still, he left her with a broken arm hanging limply, though she didn’t even whimper, and she left him with bite-marks showing the imprint of every one of her teeth all over his body, stripping him like a tortoise ripped out of its shell.
“When Abu Talib came to power, Ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami was thrown in prison and there he began to scratch his memoirs onto the walls, confessing details of all the inheritances he’d misappropriated, all the witnesses he’d forced to sign his forgeries, and all the dates that he’d faked, explaining at length the secrets behind his power to manipulate time. He also recounted the stories of the old deeds he possessed, how he’d given them the authentic flavor of age and made denying them as impossible as denying the existence of Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction to History or al-Tabari’s History of Prophets and Kings. Your ancestor al-Hadrami didn’t close his eyes once during the weeks he spent chiseling his biography on those walls, as though purging his insides of sin onto the walls of Mecca. He told the story of his involvement with Khidr Effendi in full, scratching the details with such fervor that Khidr rose up out of the grave where he was buried in exile outside Mecca to join al-Hadrami on the walls of his prison cell. Together they remembered the certificate Khidr had refused to forge and the vitriol that al-Hadrami had poured on him, the houses that al-Hadrami had expropriated and the furniture he’d auctioned off before the last of Khidr Effendi’s footsteps, disappearing into exile, had even faded from Mecca. Khidr Effendi mocked al-Hadrami’s attempts at suicide, pronouncing that ‘suicide means you never wore the right mask to fool the Sharif into doing what you want. The right mask is more effective than all the judges’ seals; a seal imprinted on the eye of a prince is like the lost seal of Solomon himself!’ On one line on the wall, Khidr Effendi wrote, ‘Do not hurry, for it will come to you: the demand of a wronged person cannot be resisted.’
“Together, they watched his end. The Sharif, Abu Talib, sent a dagger to al-Hadrami as a gift, together with a letter that read, ‘If you want to kill yourself, here is my dagger: take it and send your soul to hell!’ Khidr Effendi helped al-Hadrami engrave a copy of the letter onto the wall, and when al-Hadrami picked up the dagger, Khidr promised him he would record his death in all its detail, as befitted a legend; when al-Hadrami stabbed himself, Khidr made a note of the spot where the dagger had entered — just below the fourth rib and straight into the heart — and described how it remained there, stopping the blood from spilling out, and when they carried him away, Khidr Effendi walked with them like a devoted servant and composed a description of the mangy donkey and the cart that bore his corpse, the water nobody bothered to wash the body with, the prayer that wasn’t said over his soul, the patch of earth in Umm al-Doud, the neighborhood of worms, where they tossed his body, the crowds of commoners who gathered to bid him farewell with a hail of stones, the angle of the sun over the heap of rubble they piled on top of him, the halitosis of the curses that steamed around him like a cortege for his soul.
“When the cursing crowds had finally dissipated, Khidr Effendi remained there devotedly, unperturbed by the frenzied crows that circled over the burial mound. He sat patiently among the cawing and the smells of decay to record the sessions of the angels of torment who, over long ages, counted every seal he’d faked and every one of the hundreds of orphans he’d cast into destitution. All the land he’d expropriated was weighed as sins on their scales of justice, not discounting a single handful of the dust he’d arrogated to himself. The scales groaned under the weight — not of earth and masonry, but of the tears and suffering of those whom he’d wronged. It seemed as if it would all be too much for Khidr Effendi’s handwritten historical record to bear. Khidr Effendi remained there, faithfully documenting the fate of his persecutor al-Hadrami, until his hair, even his eyelashes, had turned white. With his final trembles, he recorded the cries of anguish that issued incessantly from the heap of rubble: they always got louder and more intense toward the last portion of night, when God descended to the sky of this world. He never cast a single glance of mercy toward that mound and al-Hadrami, the buried wretch, could never find the words with which to beseech Him. The knot in al-Hadrami’s tongue was the last thing Khidr recorded in his history, before the burial mound was swallowed up by Mecca’s dust. The angels dug channels so his story could seep into the city’s groundwater and never be forgotten.”
The silence and air of mystery that Khalil had come to expect from that passenger had been exploded with that story. All the darkness in Khalil’s features appeared to him for the first time that morning, and he saw himself in the rear mirror: when he glanced at the passenger in the reflection, he saw in the man’s eyes his own face. He was an identical copy of al-Hadrami, his ancestor. The passenger wasn’t relating a history, he was teaching Khalil to read the engravings on the wall of his own head and discover that he, Khalil, was the ancestor just risen from the grave beneath his ignominious burial mound, and that he was coursing with the will of that corpse.
In the rear mirror, the entire page of Khalil’s life was out clearly for him to read: