Nasser went up to the roof, but no sooner had he set foot there than he forgot what he was doing. The sudden shock of open space had blinded him. He couldn’t remember why he was there, and he felt that the slightest movement, a breath even, would summon Aisha: sitting there, with the face of his sister Fatima, whom they’d nicknamed Dawn because she was so radiant. He could almost hear Aisha writing, asking him “Do the dead take Time with them for company?” Nasser pushed these delusions from his mind and walked to the edge of the roof to see how far it was from there to the place where the body had been discovered. “Could she have fallen off this roof?” There was no straight line between the two points, so unless the body’s trajectory changed as it was falling, it couldn’t possibly have landed in that spot, which was quite a way off and nearer the end of the alley.
Suddenly, he felt a crunch of glass underfoot, and when he stepped aside he saw fragments of crystal; he spotted other beads scattered about, glinting in disparate corners, and he trailed them to the pile of boxes to his left, where he found more crystals: twelve-millimeter gems. He picked through the pile of boxes and came across a sleeve torn off of a dress, the whiteness of its lace grimy with dust and the underarm thickly stained where deodorant had stewed in sweat. For a moment, Nasser lost himself in the feminine, yellowed scent, but the hound in him had already identified the smelclass="underline" Aisha. He had no desire to complicate the matter by wondering who could’ve torn the sleeve from her arm, and when …
What’s the sweat of death like? If he knew anything about the chemistry of sweat, he could’ve reconstructed the moments that preceded that tearing: were they moments of passion or terror? He inhaled the scent deeply and staggered: life flared up inside of him. He stuffed the sleeve into his pocket and left. The hound inside him curled up inside the sleeve. It had discovered itself; it swooned.
Yusuf’s Rib
YUSUF LOWERED HIS EYES, SHIELDING HIMSELF FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD WITH his eyelids in an attempt to disappear among the Sanctuary’s many columns. His intervention in the theft of the Kaaba key meant that he was now not only being pursued by the killer but also by the police. The money he’d made from pushing elderly pilgrims around the Kaaba had dried up after the police confiscated his wheelchair, and he could no longer feign the weightlessness of the insanity that had sustained him during his refuge in the Sanctuary. He felt like his skeleton couldn’t bear the weight of his body any more. He moved around alone, crawling with his torso flat against the cool marble floor of the courtyard, listening to the ravenous emptiness inside of him. The body pursued him. For the first time, he began to miss the wretchedness of the Lane of Many Heads, a wretchedness he’d rebelled against ever since the day he’d opened his eyes to life. He raised his eyes to the Kaaba and prayed: “Dear God, free me of this corpse I bear and transform me into a man.” In the presence of God, he summoned Azza in the hope of working his way back to the point at which the rift between them had first begun. It would have been better if she’d been the one killed, for he would much rather have mourned her than have her despise him, and cause him to despise himself. But however hard he tried to identify it, the moment at which Azza first wished to exist outside of him eluded his memory. She was in his blood, an extension of his rib. She had the same big wide eyes, her legs had the same strong kick. It wasn’t his mother Halima’s face that had been the young Yusuf’s entire world but Azza’s tiny, soft-skinned body as she crawled, and later when she learned to walk even before he did. And then she began to grow up.
Her black abaya swallowed her up, and she was told that she would have to amputate that extension of her body. Azza had suddenly become something shameful, ripe for being buried alive.
Now, at twenty-eight, Yusuf finally knew what it meant to be down and out. Azza’s absence had driven him to the streets, not because he was afraid that he’d be accused of murder, but because he was afraid of being implicated in the scandal that the woman’s murder had brought to light. They say that twins can sense when their other twin is near death; so far, Yusuf’s senses assured him that Azza was alive.
And yet, ever since the theft of the key Yusuf had felt a watchful presence pursuing him, lying in wait, holding off before it pounced so it could use him as bait. Mushabbab had warned him: “The body’s just one element in a big conspiracy against us. Lay low until things blow over. Go take refuge in the House of God and don’t come out until you hear from me.”
Yusuf mocked him at the time: “The whole of the third world suffers from conspiracy theory paranoia. Anybody who can’t get their wife pregnant says it’s a global conspiracy!”
“I have a theory,” Mushabbab said, ignoring his mockery. “I think they need you to lead them to something. That’s the only possible explanation for what’s about to happen in the neighborhood. That corpse signifies far more than we think we know. As soon as it appeared in the Lane of Many Heads, everything went topsy-turvy.”
Mushabbab was full of nonsense, no doubt, but the message imprinted upon the body smoldered in Yusuf’s mind. Could taking refuge in the Sanctuary save him? What other choice did he have?
There Yusuf was, constantly moving, never stopping in one place … If he stopped, his pursuer would catch up with him. But whenever he looked around him, all he could see were the pillars in the Sanctuary’s many colonnades beginning at Victory Gate and stretching, dizzyingly, all the way to Farewell Gate and Cemetery Gate. How on earth could someone hope to disguise themselves within the House of God?
Yusuf would wrap his yellowed headscarf around his head and then adjust it in case his veiled face looked too conspicuous and gave him away. He blended in during the prayers. Whenever he listened to the worshippers praying around him he heard them muttering litanies of requests and supplications; some even dared to offer up a list of curses. Yusuf trained his senses to conjure up the angels he used to see when he came to the Sanctuary — the playground of angels — as a child. Every Friday, his mother Halima would perfume herself and accompany him and Azza to the Sanctuary Mosque, leading them in through the Ajyad Gate, which stood in a spot that faced the oldest mountains on earth, from which the very first horses had sprung to life at the beginning of time. From there the three would enter the Sanctuary courtyard surrounding the Kaaba. It was like a cake cut into slices: marble walkways crisscrossed the courtyard between the areas where pilgrims prayed, which were covered in fine pebbles washed in musk, agarwood, and ambergris. The pebbles had long since been replaced by slabs of white marble, yet when Yusuf walked barefoot his feet still tingled with delight at the rough touch of those ancient stones.
Yusuf pressed his head to the marble floor, listening for the conspiratorial female voices in the courtyard of those childhood Fridays.
Directly after Friday afternoon prayers, Halima would go over to the same stone slab to the right of the Well of Zamzam, spread out a rug, and take her seat at center stage. The black abayas multiplied around them as women with their little ones spread out brightly colored rugs. Mopping the perspiration from their temples, they sipped tea from tiny gold-rimmed cups and devoured roasted almonds and watermelon seeds. They played their roles masterfully. Each circle of abayas was its own stage in which the husband played the starring role in a boisterous drama seasoned with ennui.
“Don’t worry, Wadoud. Count out four thousand prayers on your prayer beads over water and then give it to him to drink. That’ll have a troublesome lover wrapped around your little finger in no time …” This tried and true advice was punctuated by the disconsolate sobs of a woman who’d been abandoned, bursting into tears at stage right; to the left a mother prostrated twice before God, pleading to join her young son, to whose green funeral procession, headed for al-Malah Cemetery, she had just bid farewell.