“What on earth am I supposed to do here? I told you to take me to al-Rusayfa.”
“Yeah, and I say get out here.”
“Take me back to where you picked me up, or else I’ll have to sit here till Judgment Day.”
“Be my guest!” Khalil turned off the engine, and they settled into a silent standoff.
“You’re out of your mind,” said the man. “If I knew how to drive, I’d kick you out and drive off myself.”
“You have no choice but to get out.”
“You want me to go out there with all the demons? They’re your tribe. You sure drive like one …”
“How perceptive of you!” laughed Khalil. “You know, I almost like you!”
“I bet you don’t even like yourself,” said the man, examining him. “Look at how you’re dressed! You’re making an ass out of yourself.”
“Is that so? Just a few minutes ago, I managed to scare someone into taking off their clothes. Some passengers wet themselves all over that seat you’re sitting on. That’s why it’s got that plastic cover on it.”
“You’re just a silly little boy in a man’s body.”
“Yeah, and sometimes the little boy dresses up in a traditional Hijazi outfit like you’re wearing. I have all kinds of disguises in the trunk. I even dress up like cartoon characters to entertain the more mature customers like yourself.”
“You’re pathetic, a lost soul, that’s my diagnosis.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. I don’t have a soul.”
“Is that the only thing you have to be proud of? Listen”—the man straightened up in his seat and spat the words at the back of Khalil’s neck—“I have all the time in the world, even for blue demons like you. I buried my three sons in their prime. Azrael plucked them like fruit when they each turned twenty. I lost them all to car accidents, the plague of our age. Nothing fazes me any more. If you want to sit here until the crows peck out our eyeballs that’s fine by me. But if you try and drag me out of this car — I swear to you — all hell will break loose.”
“You mean my inane little performance hasn’t shocked you?”
“You know, if you need a shrink, I’m all ears. My wife and relatives actually tried to make me go see one when they felt they couldn’t get through to me any more.”
“I’m looking for men like you,” said Khalil accusingly. “Men from the bowels of Mecca, like my father. You’re all alike: you’re like fish out of water as soon as you leave the tiny circle around the Sanctuary. You’re all flapping around on the ground, getting further and further away, and crushing your children’s throats in the process. What were you going to do in a modern, plastic neighborhood like al-Rusayfa anyway?”
“I was thinking of getting married again and having some more children for Azrael to feed on. My wife’s not interested in helping.”
“Just like my father,” Khalil laughed bitterly.
The man studied Khalil’s profile. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Sometimes I’m a respectable taxi driver and stick to the highways. But most of the time I drive into the guts of the city, entertaining myself by toying with all these nobodies.”
“Nobodies? Listen, boy, one day you’re going to come face-to-face with death, and you’ll realize you can’t go around talking about human beings like that.”
“You’ve almost convinced me”—Khalil turned round to look the man in the eye—“that you’re not as bad as you look.”
“Meeting people like you is a lot like looking in the mirror.”
“Now you’re boring me.”
“Get rid of me then, take me to the nearest place where I can find another taxi. There’s no way I’m going to let you abandon me here in the wilderness.”
Khalil turned the engine on. “Maybe I’ll take you where you wanted to go.”
“No, thanks,” the man said quickly. “I’ve decided I don’t want to bring any more children into the world now that Azrael has turned taxis into race cars. Sooner or later this life of yours is going to fall to pieces in your hands. You’ll see.”
A Window for a Window
WITH THE EXPERT MALICE OF EACH OF MY — THE LANE’S — MANY HEADS, I MADE Nasser spend his morning between two windows: Azza’s, which was nailed shut, and Aisha’s, which was blocked by an air-conditioning unit. In the end he retreated to his seat in the cafe to see which of my secrets he could unearth by comparing my geography to the information contained in Aisha’s messages. He read:
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 4
Dear ˆ
Like a sip of coffee on a cold morning, your name revives me.
Do you remember the day you took out your encyclopedia because you wanted to learn more about Mecca, my city?
“Wow …” You were amazed that it was the center of the universe.
The Mecca of books is beyond the internal geography of our neighborhood.
The Lane of Many Heads is a scandal just waiting to be exposed.
I once dreamed that the Lane of Many Heads was a woman’s body dumped by the side of the road.
The sky over her was clear but for the clouds over the only neutral space: a jewel-like garden that was nestled in the navel of Wadi Ibrahim. It belonged to Mushabbab, a descendant of the freed slaves of the Sharifs and a lover of music and water. To the right was Radwa Mosque, and to the left the house of Sheikh Muzahim the wholesaler, where Auntie Halima lived on the roof. In the shadow of these lay our house. Aside from all that, from head to toe it was a down-home but cosmopolitan body that prayed and would stop dancing at prayer times, and during the pilgrimage season would cater to the pilgrims with improvised clothing stalls, hide away its musical instruments, empty its rooms to rent them out, and give over its kitchens (even though “the devil pisses in their food,” according to the old ladies in the neighborhood, who’d long since surrendered to the cooking of strangers).
If you investigate the history of our neighborhood, the Lane of Many Heads (“Abu r-Ru’us” or, the way we say it, flouting the rules of correct pronunciation, “Aboorroos”), you’ll find that it emerged as people began settling here. The municipality made it official when they gave the neighborhood a major makeover and excised its name and history. They changed the name of the street to Radiant Passage, but the Lane of Many Heads remained fuzzily in our memories, intimating some warmth whose origin we couldn’t put a finger on. Then Sheikh Muzahim came along to blast it away and shove his own memory into that spot instead:
“We never hear a single voice in the Lane of Many Heads praising God. Even the angels have washed their hands of you!”
There was no one as obsessed with perdition as the wholesaler Sheikh Muzahim. He shoved it under our noses so we could smell nothing else when we went to bed and when we rose with the birds’ hymns. Sheikh Muzahim gathered up all the original melodies, while the discordant notes gathered like a murder of crows over the Lane of Many Heads, warning us of hell.
Nasser stopped reading for a moment to hate Aisha, then continued:
“You’re driving the angels out of our neighborhood with this nudity!” he exclaimed, cursing their screens. But then the neighborhood dared to fight back: