On the last night, before they reached her sheikh’s camp, Nora was sleeping deeply when she was woken by a horrific burning smell. Her eyes sprang open in the dark and she could see Bundug towering over her in the tent like a plume of smoke. His fiery eyes paralyzed her as she lay there and without even breathing he raised his arm into the air and brought it crashing down onto her body. She could make out the feel of his headdress band tearing at her flesh. Only his execrable breath disturbed the total emptiness of her tent. He whipped her silently. The headdress-band dug deeper into her flesh and Nora received the blows in silence. Any notion of pain or self-defense had left her. The pain was too deep to scream for or move away from. As if her soul was being torn away, her body surrendered to the flogging, as her two companions watched, goggle-eyed, from their beds, paralyzed in their own nightmares. The blows sought out her face especially, as if to break her pride, blindly striking at her neck and chest. Nora raised her arms to cover her face and her body turned to stone to absorb the pain. Part of her embraced it, using it to wash away an old sin she’d been hiding somewhere deep inside her.
Bundug’s demonic laughter interrupted the rhythm. “Ah, so it was a flogging you were lusting for all this time? I knew just the kind of whore you were from the moment you started playing the virgin and praying every chance you could.” He waited in vain for her to respond. “If you breathe a word of what I did to you, I’ll crawl into your sleep and break your neck. And I’ll crush your bones under my camel’s hooves and throw them in the desert far from any trails.” He spat at her and disappeared.
Her sheikh pretended not to see the signs of whipping on her body. He knew, but he chose to obey the rules of a vital partnership that enabled him to enact the final stage of his plan.
Media
NOTHING BUT THAT DEEP SENSE OF ISOLATION. ALL THE FACES THAT HAD GIVEN Mu’az’s shots their meaning had vanished: al-Lababidi’s house, then Yusuf, then Mushabbab, then Khalil. The feeling of a curse frosted the air. “Mecca paused on the verge of Doomsday”: this was the shot that summed up for Mu’az the crushing emptiness around him. To coexist with it and within it, Mu’az surrendered to the seasonal rhythm of life in Studio Modern, where he worked, this time looking for some purpose to his life.
The studio was no bigger than three meters by three meters, with a wooden screen that was bare on the outside, and on the inside bore a poster of a waterfall whose water droplets remained perfectly static, night and day, never refreshing Mu’az with a cool mist. He felt like the studio was too small to accommodate his dangerous thoughts these days — especially when the owner turned up late and Mu’az was left alone with a female face. Then, it would no longer be the camera taking the photo, but Mu’az’s whole body that took the shot and developed it underneath the skin. Sometimes a young woman would take a risk and smuggle a few locks of her bangs into a photo, and Mu’az would know that the bangs would be sent straight back to him the moment they arrived at the passport authority, for him to take a new photo without; then, he’d watch as the girl tried to slip some other signature of herself into the picture, this time pulling her headscarf back a little to reveal just the roots of her thick black hair, outlining her forehead with a dark border, and this time she’d succeed in getting it past the hands of the passport office employee. In the unofficial shots, the girls would relax, smuggling a glimpse of cleavage into the frame, or the edge of a leg. What got him most were the women’s slender ankles, totally unlike his mother’s thick camel-hoof ankles covered by a layer of dust. These were softly rounded, like flower buds.
“I’ll devote myself to photographing nothing but women’s ankles one day, thousands of ankles spread out like wallpaper, and I’ll stand at the very center of the wall amidst them all.” That was his most recent dream, which he was sure was a sin-free zone, since he couldn’t recall any religious texts that prescribed a punishment for ogling women’s ankles.
Mu’az firmly believed that he’d been taking photos before he even owned a camera. Today, as he climbed the minaret’s spiral staircase and stood hidden at the tiny window, looking out onto the alley from above, he could see the old men he’d grown up knowing — they looked isolated, each a portrait of loneliness or weakness or worry — and the little drawings sketched by young boys who were dusty and confined to tiny areas around their houses, just like he had once been, but his generation, he could see, had found ways out and were now smoking water-pipes at the cafe or chasing the shadows of the girls, who’d gotten bolder. Mu’az could see that the younger girls of the Lane of Many Heads tried harder now to peek out from behind their abayas, attempting to look the world in the eye and seeing more than his sisters had seen.
IN THE NEWSPAPER THE STAFF, WHICH A CUSTOMER WAS HOLDING, A LARGE PICTURE taking up a whole quarter-page caught Mu’az’s eye; the customer was busy tidying himself in front of the mirror and smoothing his eyebrows with spit, so Mu’az took a longer look. It was a painting of a human torso in black on a white background. A quaking longing shook Mu’az’s heart all of a sudden; he knew that form. He skimmed the first lines of the article:
“Under the auspices of his Excellency the Minister for Culture Faysal al-Mu’ayiti, an exhibition by contemporary artist Nora will open at 8 p.m. tonight, Wednesday 20th February, at Earth Gallery, Jeddah. Nora has been hailed as one of the most promising female artists of Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art movement …”
The customer’s eyes pierced him from where he sat before the camera’s lens with a stretched-out smile like a baguette dotted with sesame seeds and notched by the baker’s knife, waiting to be photographed. Attempting to control the tremble in his hand and his heart, Mu’az automatically reached out and switched on the glaring lamp, illuminating the baguette; his lens hovered for a while as he looked for an angle that would soften the dark, knotted eyebrows. Suddenly a cascade of shots hit Mu’az, static ones, moving ones, all Azza’s drawings he’d spent his nights with, those severed human trunks that inhabited the Lane of Many Heads and which he’d spent his childhood peeping at to the point that he started dreaming about them, even when he was awake, and now they were here, poured into that quarter-page of newspaper right in front of him. His hand froze over the captive face inside his viewfinder, as if receiving a long-awaited divine visitation that contained everything he had devoted himself to, contained his whole life; impatiently, he pressed the button, crushing face and baguette, and let the man leave. Mu’az himself was out the door in a flash, running down Gate Lane. It wasn’t long till the opening, but seeing the notice about it had left him no time to think: he had to be in Jeddah that evening and find the address: Earth Gallery, The Seafront, opposite Jamjoum Mall, Jeddah.