Mu’az’s line of vision was blocked by the personality opening the exhibition, and the lengthy, simpering speech with which he attempted to capture the artist’s attention. “The art movement is booming at the moment, with the reform movement reaching all of our cultural institutions. The Association for Culture and Arts in Riyadh would be delighted to host an exhibition of your work at the Center …”
Mu’az was dazzled by the stark contrast between the men’s white robes and the blackness of the women’s silk abayas. In the margins between black and white Mu’az used his developing and editing skills to recreate the past of the artist’s face: peeling away the veneer of foundation and powder, enlarging the pixels, returning the eyebrows to their original untamed thickness, filling the cheeks out a bit, sharpening the eyes with a glint of expectation and desperation. The bodies in the canvases poured out of those pixels, all without legs, yet running. In one corner, in the penultimate painting, the artist had just managed to capture the back of a knee, but the body was still managing to flee. Mu’az’s entire memory was captured in the void of that delicate painting, his lens clouded by the movements of some invisible internal ghost who blurred into the shining figure of this artist.
It was impossible for Mu’az to confirm his suspicions or identify the ghost; the disappearance of the veil and the figure polished by beautifying procedures and novelties had spoiled the delicate traces preserved in his archive as a reference point. The full parted lips were the same, that was certain. But the ears, each dotted with a diamond, were ready to flee. They didn’t match the ears in the archive. The biggest distortion was in the ankles: printed in his memory, they were crossing the Lane of Many Heads in the middle of the night, and he knew them well, but here they sat in high-heeled shoes, perfumed, oiled and manicured and stretched upward like a dancer’s. There was something vital missing: the dashing flight in pursuit of life, the will to escape. This ankle was fixed like a stake. It didn’t flee and it didn’t pursue life.
The throngs of men and women chatting, laughing raucously and flashily competing for the attention of the media were getting unbearable, and Mu’az bolted outside, gulping for air. He crossed Palestine Road and immediately sat down on the bare sidewalk in the parking lot of the Jamjoum Mall.
Abstract Past
MUSHABBAB DECIDED TO LOOK FOR THE FORT IN THE HUMAN STRUCTURE OF the area. He dawdled in front of every building and store to chat to people, combing their words for a slip of the tongue that might lead him to it, while Nasser and Yusuf went back and forth over the square of land they’d identified. It looked like a tattered scrap of parchment. No matter where they looked, they found nothing but houses and palm orchards, to the point that they began to give up hope of ever finding any remains of the fort underneath the rubble of fourteen centuries of abandonment. There was nothing at all in that neighborhood of erratically built mud buildings to indicate that it might also house the ruins of an ancient stone fort. Again and again all they found were cement walls and trucks parked outside decrepit, box-like houses. Yusuf’s limp was getting worse.
NASSER SEEMED PRETTY CHEERFUL, AND SURE ENOUGH THEIR STUMBLING SEARCH finally led them to an old stone column. The remains of the fort were right there; they’d missed the spot more than once, because it was hidden behind a dense curtain of dry creepers and guarded by a line of palms, looking as if people and long abandonment had conspired to hide everything that remained of it.
As they pushed onward, they were amazed by the ancient stone building buried under wild plants in the backyard of an empty mud brick house. Through an opening in the wall that they assumed must have been the main gate, they managed to get inside the circle of the tower, where the dim light rooted them to the spot. Everywhere around them were dried droppings and the echoes of thoughts, military strategies, conspiracies, and noble-sounding words of peace that still slumbered in that stone temple, interweaving with the wild plants to veil the truth.
Yusuf and Nasser wandered in the small rooms that adjoined the main hall, some of which were buried in earth or had been incorporated into the mud house, or were blocked up by stacks of boxes covered with cobwebs and plants. They kept coming back to the main hall, and to the wall that looked like a mihrab covered up with plaster. The plaster was coming off in places near the base, revealing engraved letters here and there.
When Mushabbab caught up with them they’d already begun chipping it off. Together they entered a single, hazy dream, with no light save that of the flashlight whose batteries were rapidly running down. It was difficult to say which of them was awake and which dreaming, or which was guiding the dream that was carrying them all toward discovery.
Beginning from the base up, they worked in total secrecy, continuing for as long as the daylight lasted. Until the wall finally disappeared into absolute darkness, they carefully probed for where to scrape off the plaster, afraid to switch on a flashlight in case its light advertised their presence. They kept at it for days, and when night became day again they still hadn’t slept a wink. Yusuf limped energetically about on his steel knee, and they survived on dates and dry wheat bread, taking turns to go to the market to fetch bottled water and to empty their bowels behind the fort wall. Often, Mushabbab would lean silently like a dot on the wall opposite, summoning the will of the ancestors to help them continue in their excavation.
Sometimes, Nasser would lie down, taking up a position at the furthest end of the hall and feigning sleep, allowing the silence to spread over him until he might as well not have been there, so that nothing remained before the wall but Mushabbab and Yusuf’s breaths. The two were virtually joined together; it was essential to contract all the individual goals and wills in that hall into a single will, a single chisel to dig into that tree and pry the covering from its hidden roots. At the distant edge of Yusuf’s being, Mushabbab was breathing into him all the history and wisdom of the centenarians he had known, drowning in images he assembled from what they’d read in the writings on the wall, while Yusuf patiently continued scraping away at the layer of plaster.
As the will of that historical being pressed forward, the roots emerged bit by bit, and then its trunk: climbing it was the name Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf. The three went on for days, scraping rhythmically, until the wall finally surrendered the full spread of branches, bearing the names of well-known tribes, which it had been concealing all those centuries. At times, Yusuf became detached from the memory of the tree, and Mushabbab from Yusuf’s memory, and they both became detached from Nasser’s dream; then, the three would lose their direction, their sight growing weak in the darkness, their eye sockets contracting and their fingers trembling. They were like addicts isolated from the outside world. Nasser’s eyes widened as he imagined the hand that had engraved the tree, and evoked its strength of will; in that faint light it looked to him like a giant’s hand reaching to the sky.
Desires
MU’AZ SAT ON THE CURB IN THE JAMJOUM MALL PARKING LOT FOR A LONG while. The massive shopping center windows behind him were obscured by the sea air and the blue steel. He was aware of a fountain in the ocean spraying salty water into the damp air. This fountain, he thought to himself, was a challenge to the historical process of the eventual collapse of all nations and heroes. It hadn’t been switched off since the death of King Fahd, during whose reign it was installed. It still raised its plume dozens of meters skyward. He took several photos in succession of the spray spanning across the sky over the sea. He knew when the photos were developed that the spray of the fountain would look like men in white robes patchy against the sky like stains. He could have his own solo exhibition of his imaginings of these dissolved men. Mu’az realized that he’d been deceived by the artist’s face. He’d been so preoccupied he forgot to look at her body language, her walk, her voice, failed to compare her to the audiovisuals of his memory. From his hiding place on the minaret stairs, he used to watch Azza’s nightly escapes, cocooned in a black as black as the asphalt, which was what now separated him from the truth of her identity. All he had to do was cross over and take another look at her from far away. He’d ignore the face — cast a veil over it — then he’d know the truth of her. His feet failed him, though. No matter how hard he tried to stand, he couldn’t. The idea that this woman might be Azza frightened him. If she were Azza, it would destroy the Azza he’d built his photographic world around. The Azza of the Lane of Many Heads was an impossible creature, a being that reality couldn’t capture. As he sat there paralyzed he thanked God that she hadn’t seen him and that he hadn’t gone up to her. No matter who this artist was, she wasn’t Azza. Or, then, what if all women were Azza? The one he’d tried so hard to keep under wraps, like the first outlines of the human form on the walls of a cave. As soon as it is exposed to light and breath, its color fades and the flame, which has lasted for tens of thousands of years, is extinguished. Mu’az stubbornly closed his eyes in the face of that Azza, whom he’d preferred not to recognize at the moment, fearing he might go blind.