As usual Mu’az paid no attention as he slipped easily between the public bus stops and found the blue and orange bus with broken air conditioning that dropped him at the stop behind the Mahmal Shopping Center in downtown Jeddah. Mu’az surrendered his eyes to the salty air of the artificial seawater lake created where the neighborhood known as Clay Sea used to be. It had formed the city boundary and was full of quarries out of whose Manqabi stone Jeddah’s most beautiful old buildings were built; the stone breathed humidity, salting the bones of its inhabitants. But the greedy, ever-expanding city known as the Mermaid was swallowing it up now, trapping it between cement and giants like the National Bank, the Queen building, and the Seafront and Mahmal shopping centers.
From the bus stop Mu’az took a taxi to the exhibition venue. He flung himself into the car seat and let go, allowing his body to become a numb reflection of the nights he’d spent alone once Khalil was gone, and his feverish search for some battle of his own. With a hazy, wandering gaze, Mu’az absentmindedly sliced Jeddah, the Mermaid City, into mental images, ignoring the driver’s ploy to stimulate the meter by taking a diversion over Crown Prince Bridge to the new tunnels over Road 60, instead of the Andalusia Road shortcut to the Palestine junction then the short distance west toward the sea, thereby crossing the entire Mermaid from east to west, along the full length of Palestine Road. In one panoramic shot, Mu’az captured the whole road stretched out like a tightrope for circus clowns to walk across through the air: it began pulled tight with poverty and tumbledown buildings, then, as it approached Jeddah’s central nerve, known as al-Medina Road, the oil boom buildings and glass towers began to appear, leaning toward the sea, and it ended with the fountain of King Fahd’s palace, which sat right in the Red Sea, so famous for its rare coral. Between Road 60 and al-Medina Road, on both sides, was cellphone kingdom, where cars crawled slowly, horns honking, amidst the armies of workers buying and selling the latest cellphones, new and stolen. As they passed the almost-deserted U.S. consulate building with its cement security barrier, he couldn’t resist taking a mental wide-lens shot of the machine guns mounted on armored cars at the gates.
“Can all that protection hide images of peace and safety inside?” he wondered. Before him, the disc of the sun was a vivid orange, setting at the very end of Palestine Road. On both sides, clouds of crows gathered to roost in the trees of the villas’ gardens, and every time the wind blew or a car horn shrieked, a black torrent rained from the treetops, blotting the edges of the orange sun. Mu’az recalled one of Yusuf’s Windows, entitled “The Crow in History,” which had caused a storm — also sending al-Ashi into a bout of depression and doubt — and led to Yusuf’s column being banned for several months:
We once imported crows as a way to eliminate the rats that were multiplying with the increased garbage that our cities produced. Now, whenever the crows gather and rain down from the treetops, debate flares up in Mushabbab’s orchard, and many of his companions repeat the old saying that Arabs used to call crows “the one-eyed ones,” because they close one of their eyes and make do with looking out of the other since they’re so keen-sighted — so keen-sighted, in fact, that they can see a beak’s depth under the ground! But Mushabbab also moves the discussion on to portray crows as the one-eyed false Messiah who represents one-eyed Western civilization: with one eye on the material, it is blind to the spiritual!
The taxi passed Palestine Commercial Center, and women’s bodies captured Mu’az’s lens: one hurrying through the mall’s horseshoe-shaped parking lot, her face uncovered, and behind her another covered entirely in black, even her hands covered in black gloves, and behind them both a group of girls with their headscarves falling around their shoulders, the sea breezes sending locks of their brightly-dyed hair streaming behind them. Mu’az would have been gripped by the sense he’d touched down on some planet other than Earth had it not been for the wooden cart parked at the mall entrance, right in the shade of the ATM, and the African woman leaning against the blue logo of the Saudi American Bank, with an orange tiger-print scarf lazily covering her hair, three braids escaping to the right and the curve of her neck revealing her prominent collarbones. He took a quick snap of the girls sweeping by in fancy abayas decorated with frills, silver designs, and colored edging at the sleeves that matched their headscarves, and rings and bracelets made of all kinds of leather, beads, metal, and crystal. “Wallah, al-banat fallah!” thought Mu’az, remembering the ditty from his childhood: “Goodness, the girls are loose and free!” His finger was poised over the button inside his head as he sighed. “How could you forget your camera?!”
The Pakistani driver was watching Mu’az’s face the whole time, and his laugh brought Mu’az back from his surprised reverie.
“You are new in country?” asked the driver.
Mu’az shook his head. “Imagine!” he chuckled.
When they approached the King Fahd fountain in the sea, Mu’az’s lens widened in anticipation. The driver pointed to the left, announcing their arrival at the address. Mu’az could see a fancy-looking gallery with a throng of cars outside it; it was a quarter of an hour until the opening. He indicated to the taxi to stop outside the Jamjoum Mall and crossed Palestine Road on foot to get to the gallery.
He quietly slipped into the crowd and was enveloped in a cloud of perfume: heady Oriental spices for the men and cloying sweet essences for the women. At the entrance he could isolate the smell of his own sweat and the developing agents still clinging to him; the powerful developers that could reveal features out of nothingness in his darkroom were dwarfed by the presence of those bulldozing perfumes.
Mu’az found himself facing the final painting. In its emptiness he could make out a faint blue halo encircling two female figures whose backs were turned to the world. One, though, was looking back at him, with a mixture of pain and mockery in her face. Mu’az shuddered and closed his eyes, denying Azza and Aisha’s appearance on that blank canvas and ridiculing himself for his fanciful ideas. “You’re the son of an imam — you know nothing about the female sex except for Azza and Aisha, so you imagine every woman looks just like them!”
Someone was talking to the artist. “Picasso once said that art is the memory of sadness and pain. He saw pain as the backbone of life. He said, ‘I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas’ death.’ So what it is that makes you paint in this ashy gray, Nora?”
“Laziness!” she replied instantly, with a laugh, but her real answer was hidden from Mu’az by the Pakistani waiter holding a tray of appetizers who had moved in between Mu’az and the crowd. Mu’az snatched a glass of water and gulped it in one go to quench the sudden dryness in his throat.
“No, no — the truth of your art must be exhibited in Riyadh too. Just call me.”
Mu’az’s skin closed like a sheet of Polaroid film over the horse-like neck that arched back in response to the compliment. He craned to get a better look at the image of her face, framed in black silk. As he looked, the developing agents inside his head turned the artist into a picture of a filly, the finest of all of Solomon’s horses. The journalists’ cameras and eyes crowded out Mu’az’s lens, already misted with old images of another woman — but this one veiled — that overlapped with the gleaming face of the artist. Mu’az struggled to peel away the past’s layers of veils, so as to compare what was silenced underneath with today’s clarity. The fullness of the lips always gave away what was behind the veil, yesterday and today; so what was that contradiction he sensed inside his private archive?