Aisha
Detective Nasser flung the message away, then moved Aisha’s name closer to the center of the circle. The hound in him said, “She ought to be put to death.” He resisted an urge to stick a finger down his throat and vomit up the bile brought on by Aisha’s email, the way she’d smuggled this stranger into the Lane of Many Heads. From her few words it was clear that Aisha had a ticking desire inside of her — accompanied by treacherous urges that, as he knew from his experience of criminal practices, were embedded inside every woman. Nevertheless, he couldn’t yank out the wire or predict when the timer was going to go off.
Much as his inner hound was tensed, ready to pounce, it was actually the beating arousal of his inner man that spurred him on. He wanted to see this dissolute woman stripped naked before him. Detective Nasser found himself trailing after a short phrase in a message that wasn’t numbered like the others.
FROM: Aisha
You answered all my doubts about whether you still had feelings for me when you said “I see you!”
This is my face. Are we the ones who carve these maps onto our own skin? Eastern faces like mine are heavy with sadness, while your faces are like plastic, without even a single wrinkle of suffering. I believe our souls are old. These are secondhand souls, encumbered with the weight of having known life and death.
In my early adolescence, I read that pain was what scorched away our faults to reveal the gold beneath,
I would often sit and experiment with pain, from a starting point of no pain,
I had something deeper than pain, this need for something, for a hand, here,
I had this photo of a tree trunk that had been gouged by ibexes, sharpening their horns for the mating season in spring,
every time I looked at those marks on the trunk I felt that deeper-than-pain …
It had never occurred to me that I’d ever say what I’m saying to you now, because I knew you couldn’t read my Arabic … But now … It’s caught up with me. I won’t say “pain,” it’s something deeper, what lies beneath all pain …
Has my face turned into a tragic Kabuki mask?
Aisha
He couldn’t stop. Nasser flicked through page after page, racing against the German guy toward this brazen, naked woman. From the mental archive of crimes he’d seen, he knew that Meccan women were experts in unspoken love: in his interrogations he often had to rely on slips of the tongue, or otherwise use all kinds of “pressure” and even threats to extract their deepest secrets and use them to unravel the knots … This one, on the other hand, had written her love down; her own words had indicted her, even if they’d never left her drafts folder. Words weren’t supposed to be a striptease like this — certainly not those of a woman from the Holy City. If Aisha was the victim, this was the first time Nasser had ever come across a victim who insisted upon documenting her own improprieties from beyond the veil of death.
Detective Nasser started when a cadet appeared in the doorway to tell him his shift was over, and wondered guiltily whether the cadet had been able to read the sinful thoughts on his face.
“God spare us this nasty business,” the cadet began abruptly. “Did you hear? Officer Ali’s taken over the investigation into the theft of the key of the Kaaba. They found the thief dead and half-eaten by dogs in Umm al-Doud, outside Mecca.”
“Seriously?!” Nasser was irritated by the junior officer’s lack of ceremony.
“They should’ve assigned the case to you, sir. Everyone in the crime unit said that there was no choice but to give it to Nasser …”
“That’s kind of you to say, but my hands are full at the moment.”
“What a curse it’ll be if they can’t find the key! If I were handling the investigation, I wouldn’t be so sure that the young guy who attacked the thief isn’t an accomplice. What if he’s got the key? The maintenance company went through the drain and the pipes, but they couldn’t find anything.”
“With a lively imagination like that, you could be a first-rate detective.” The cadet blushed. The police hound in Nasser perked up at the mention of the theft of the key to the Kaaba, but he ignored it. He was itching to get back to the naked emails in private.
“What will happen to the Muslims of the world if we don’t find the key? Does that mean that God has shut the door to His house in our faces? Are we cursed?”
“They’ll just have to cast a new key until they can solve the puzzle of the stolen one,” replied Nasser in an attempt to end the conversation.
“They’ve tried several times, sir, but all of the keys have broken in the lock. They might have to take the whole door off …”
“They just need to find a specialist locksmith; that’s all there is to it.” Nasser moved toward the door so the cadet was obliged to leave. As he was leaving, Nasser paused and returned to his desk. He picked up the box of papers where he’d put the file of Aisha’s emails and then left without hesitation, as if he were simply leaving work at the end of the day with his things. When he got into his car, the hound growled: “You’ve really got yourself mixed up in it now.”
Fragments
HE CARRIED THE PAPERS TO HIS SMALL APARTMENT IN THE ZAHIR NEIGHBORHOOD. It wasn’t much more than a large bedroom with a table and hot-plate in one corner and a small bathroom off to the left. Two whole decades of his prime had been chewed over by this place.
Words from the letters and diaries he’d been reading had clung to his body, and they began to tickle him, arouse him. He reined in the eager police hound inside of him, letting the man take over. He dumped the papers on the bed and threw his work jacket over the back of a chair. Then he stripped off his pants and faced his own short, stocky body in the mirror. He ran a hand over his muscles, and as it sank lower, he asked himself: “How do you think a girl like Azza or Aisha would react to a body like this?” It took him some time to satisfy the eyes and hands gasping and spasming over his virility, to ride out their agonizing, ecstatic wave. He was sweating by the time he was finished.
He looked around sheepishly as if apologizing to an imaginary audience. He felt as if the hound inside had been watching him through indifferent eyes. He walked to the bathroom, averting his gaze from the small mirror that reflected his body from the shoulders up, turned on the faucet and submitted to the gush of water, soaping and scrubbing away every trace of what he’d just done. Wrapped in a towel, he went back out into the room and quickly made himself a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich with cucumber and greens. His body was still alert and in no mood for clothes, so he lay back down on the bed naked, enjoying the sensuous touch of skin on soft sheets. He could feel the cotton of the pillowcase and covers all the way down his back to his legs as he lay half-watching the forty-five-inch television, which he’d paid for in installments over three years so as to give his cramped room a view of oceans and mountains and to allow him to play host to seductive women whose nubile company he could now enjoy every evening.
He opened a file of letters that lay on his bedside table, ignoring the damp box on the floor below him — complete with his own personal signature across the cover of one of the diaries — and began to eat his sandwich. With one ear on the sports channel, he trained his eyes on Aisha’s emails and continued reading where he’d left off, letting every page and word trace its imprint on his naked body.
From: Aisha
Subject: Message 3
Do you remember how many times you had to wake me up after a massage? You used to run the back of your finger up my cheek to my temple …