The thought made her shiver. She was like someone facing resurrection, weighed down with choices.
Nora was alone in her suite at the Intercontinental Hotel, though she was used to her sheikh being away at private meetings by now. Then, just like any other time she was left on her own, she found company in the handful of emails, which she secreted away like illicit drugs. If only she’d stolen the entire file. What might’ve been revealed to her — matters of life and death. Something like this short message:
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 66
Something inside me has broken. My satellite receiver maybe.
But. Here. There’s a signal.
You present it to me with a single orchid. You say, “Orchids remind me of you.”
My body believes you. My body mimics and learns how to be haughty.
My head spins from dancing on the inside.
A
Nora took pleasure in examining the orchid just like she took pleasure in the millions of tiny spiral loops that Aisha laid down in her messages to express herself, carrying herself from the peaks of life down to death. Her reflection had disappeared from the mirror: every time Nora looked she saw Aisha. She flipped through the guestbook from her exhibition for the hundredth time, asking herself who these comments were written for: Nora or Aisha? As de Falla played in the background, she scanned the book word by word to see which of them was the dead Sancho Panza and which of them was the living Don Quixote. How long would it take for one of them to come back to life and for the other to recede into death? She kept reading until the entire universe had shrunk to the size of a man’s head, and then to the size of a thought in a man’s head, and finally to the size of a ray of light in a man’s eye. Was it an Arab’s eye or a Westerner’s? Perhaps the eye belonged to the person who was stoking all these events and turning them into a time bomb. She was the one who’d dropped her name and identity: anything that would cause her to be born out of pre-existing memory, the memory of the woman who’d written these emails, which inhaled and exhaled her in their naked lines.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 77
I gave the baby to
It’s for her to bury, or bring back to life.
I’m tearing up the sheets of my mind one by one to see where he might have gone. Where he might end up. Can one jump with a baby in one’s heart?
Some nights, I hear him crawling up the staircase to my cubbyhole.
Some nights, I slither down to meet him.
I curl up in a ditch in the bare earth. Not a drop of rain. Oh, how the dead miss the rain!
I used up my entire stash of perfume bottles to get rid of his scent.
But he smells of my insides.
The scent stays hot, my every breath stokes it.
A
P. S. They found the apeman, whom they believe to be the missing link, frozen in a block of ice on the side of a mountain in North Carolina. When they melted the ice, they discovered he was nothing more than a rubber gorilla suit.
What will they find after we’ve melted? I would hate to die in a freezer. Don’t let them put my body on ice.
Aisha
Nora pushed those words to the back of her mind. Toward the hole into which she’d thrown all her memories. And took refuge in the only thing around her: in the autograph book that certified that she was the one who was still alive. Suddenly her eyes fell on a sentence in the book that she hadn’t seen before. The handwriting sent a shiver down her spine.
One day you’ll wake up and bury us all.
The phone rang. She picked up the receiver without thinking.
“It’s for you, ma’am.” The receptionist’s upbeat voice dispelled the gloom of that sentence, but then there was a second voice:
“Azza.” The word hung in the air, as if forever. “Azza.” Azza. The name echoed in her ears as though Yusuf were shouting to her from the roof. The name echoed around her bedroom, against the shut window. It fell on naked Aisha and Jameela at her father’s sink.
“Azza. Azza.” Nora was the name Khalid al-Sibaykhan had bestowed on her — the phone was still buzzing — after he stripped her of the name Azza so that he could own her by his mother’s name. He wanted her to understand the kindness he was doing her, wanted her to understand the name’s significance: “A powerful woman who was worn down by my father’s other wives.”
She couldn’t tell when the buzzing stopped and the knocking started. Was it the knocking of the distant past or the here and now? Not until she opened the door and saw him looking back at her.
“Azza.” His voice had always been warm, but now it trembled: frightened, desperate, cold. She reached for the phantom edge of her veil, to cover her head, to hide from his eyes. From that all-seeing familiarity she knew so well. His voice and his face matched the image she called up from the very depths of her lost memory. She came face to face with her own name: Azza. With that name’s burdened legacy. A burden he’d set on her shoulders. She fell. Yusuf fell down with her and they touched the ground at the exact same moment. She could hear nothing but the name she’d so longed to hear: Azza. A gaping void inside of her hungered for it. For the precise way Yusuf said it. He said it with gravity, like he said Mecca. It gave the name a formidable depth. He said it as though he were bashing against the Meccan ground to unearth the Well of Zamzam or Judgment Day. No one but Yusuf could do so much with just a name.
“Azza. Let’s go. Now.”
Pink
“DO YOU KNOW WHO KHALID AL-SIBAYKHAN IS? HE’S THE BULLDOZERS ON all our mountains. He’s the buyer, he’s the deeds that strip people of their properties, the one eliminating and demolishing. He’s your father, who contracted, annulled, and sold … Sold you, and your house. Al-Sibaykhan is the sin that has possessed us all. The Lane of Many Heads, you, and I are nothing but dots being erased on a map of genocide. We’re dots floating in the dust after a city has been ravaged. Dozing eyes, the moment before a city, many cities, are razed to the ground. Do you understand, Azza? You’re hanging in the air with a rope around your neck. You shouldn’t be on that side. It’s too dangerous. Jump to me, Azza.”
“Don’t talk to me about jumping!” she replied. “The only time I ever dared to open the window my father nailed shut, I saw my death, because her death was our collective death. What I saw made me jump right out of the alley, forever. Don’t you know me best, Yusuf? I can never jump, except to the wrong side.”
“We can change things, Azza. Help me expose all this!”
“You want exposure? More than this?”
“Help us get you out of this first, Azza of the Lane of Many Heads. Then we’ll expose what’s going on. Al-Sibaykhan is the reptile that will swipe its tail and cause the ground to swallow us all up.”
“Yusuf, please, make contact with the real world around you. Come out of your bubble of history and Doomsday. Who’s going to listen to all this?”
She steeled her heart and led Yusuf next door, into Khalid’s office. Adrenaline was pumping in her veins, and she tried to separate her mind from her shaking body. His maid or his coffee boy or his assistant could come in at any moment and see what she was doing, but she couldn’t back out now. They hurried to the desk, where they saw a safe underneath the drawers; when they knelt to open it, they found it unlocked.
Inside, the first thing they saw was the amulet, lying in the lower compartment. Yusuf’s hand shook as he picked it up and checked that the parchment was still folded carefully inside.