“Don’t spit out God’s blessing. He’ll strike you blind!”
So then she’d bite into the head of a spring onion and her eyes would water. He would watch her and wait for the sunset, which signaled it was time to head home, hoping that the moon would rise and break upon her face in the same place that people claim it broke upon the Prophet’s face — peace be upon him — and Yusuf’s pounding headache would make the scene at the top of the mountain wobble and blur. It occurred to him that when he stood at Azza’s side, holding her tiny melting cotton-candy hand as they gazed down on the dizzying sight of the pilgrims circumambulating the Kaaba, they must have appeared taller than Noah’s ark and the graves of Adam, Eve, and their son Seth with their long-destroyed tombstones. In Yusuf’s history, it wasn’t just the Kaaba that was sacred. Mecca’s mountains were existential secrets and healing.
A great rumbling noise tore Yusuf back from his past to the hungry, empty present. The night was pitch-black with no moon to relieve its agony. When he opened his eyes, he found himself facing an imposingly high wooden barrier, which protected a construction site on that same mountain peak. He could feel the rock beneath his feet tremble: under cover of night, colossal machines were grinding away. Yusuf leapt over the fence, landing on his bad knee inside the construction site. Just a few meters away from where he’d landed, a bulldozer sank its teeth into the stone wall around Adam, Eve and Seth’s final resting-place. Rock after rock fell from the painstakingly stacked wall. The puzzle was disintegrating into chaos. Letters, black and white, piled up and rolled away, tracing out scattered lines of poetry and proverbs. Yusuf was too worried to take too close a look at the destiny that he imagined was written upon the ninety tablets Seth had received from the Lord at the dawn of creation.
Behind the bulldozer, the hoist of an enormous crane rose up, its fangs closed around a shrouded bundle shaped like a pointed obelisk. Each side of the obelisk was a body. Yusuf shook with terror: those were the bodies of Adam, Eve, and Seth, huddled together defensively as the crane wrenched them out of Abu Qubays and hauled them into the air for eviction. In the blink of an eye, Yusuf too sprung into the air, propelled by his good knee, stupefying the Ethiopian crane-driver who was suddenly shoved out of his seat as Yusuf took the controls. Sirens ripped through the night at Abu Qubays and glaring headlights surged at the crane. Yusuf struggled to control the machine, which lurched forward, swinging the pyramid-shaped bier through the air and smashing into the oncoming attackers. He had no choice but to save this ancient treasure from the construction — or rather, destruction — site. As the crane crashed through the site’s main gate, Yusuf was startled by a streak of yellow and a squeal of brakes off to his right. The taxi driver who’d nearly hurtled into him stuck his head out of the window to curse at him. For all the pandemonium and the fizzing, popping madness in his brain, Yusuf was fully lucid and recognized the driver. He could see it was Khalil, who’d once been a pilot and also his rival for Azza, though he was several years older. The contrast suddenly appeared absurd to Yusuf: to fight for Azza in the Lane of Many Heads was surely more worthwhile than fighting over stones in the House of God!
All of a sudden, the pulsating energy in Yusuf’s head sputtered out, the crane ground to a standstill and he slumped back in the seat. His will to react had dried up, as had any desire to keep going. He sat pallidly in the cabin waiting for the guards to surround him and escort him away. But his pursuers had also frozen in position, their cars forming a wide circle around him. None of them dared to go nearer in case the madman who had stolen the crane caught them by surprise. Khalil took advantage of the suspense and drove closer to the cabin, opening the passenger door for Yusuf.
“Jump,” he urged, with the warmth of an older brother. “Let’s get you out of here.” Yusuf studied Khalil’s face. A current of electricity zipped around in his head. He was at a loss. Was Khalil laying a trap or genuinely offering a helping hand? The Khalil he knew excelled in bullying both Yusuf and Azza, especially on Saturdays when they’d get back from their sheep’s head picnic at the top of Mount Abu Qubays. Envious and spiteful, Khalil would greet them: “So? Feel better now? Now you’ve eaten our ancestor Adam’s head and drunk the aspirin of Abu Qubays?” Azza would stick her long tongue out at him before the refreshing cool of the alleyway swallowed her up. Yusuf thought Khalil, with that malicious look of his, was capable of swallowing Azza’s head whole. From the crane cabin, Yusuf scrutinized the face that his mother Halima had always likened to that of a broken-winged eagle.
From the corner of his eye, Yusuf could see that his pursuers had gotten out of their vehicles and were creeping toward the crane. His neighbor from the Lane was Yusuf’s only hope of escape, so without another glance over his shoulder he leapt out of the cabin and threw himself into the seat beside Khalil.
“Fool!” Khalil cackled as he sent the car shooting forward at cinematic speed. The brakes shrieked and the wheels spit dust into the faces of their pursuers. Yusuf just gazed pop-eyed at the bodies of Adam, Eve, and Seth, which hung fused together like an obelisk in the sky over Mecca.
Memories on a Shelf
WHY DO PEOPLE PUT MORE FAITH IN WHAT THEY READ ON PAPER THAN WHAT’S scrawled onto clay or talismans? Look at the filthy plastic bags muddying my unpaved surface and you’ll see what my many heads consume and reuse.
Nasser plowed on with Yusuf’s diaries, ignoring all the intersections and stop signs that I, the Lane of Many Heads, placed in his way, going through page after page of Yusuf’s memoirs, all of which pointed to the fact that Yusuf was Salih the foundling’s closest friend. Salih was also known as the Eunuchs’ Goat — but then, I don’t want to implicate any of my heads in that headache. To tell the truth, these young people and the schizophrenic crazes they go in for are driving a stake into my historical behind. This guy Nasser … How could he ever understand that the seemingly trivial apparitions in my fishing net of misery were rooted in history? Like that nickname “the Eunuchs’ Goat.” At some stage in history, the castrated chamberlains who’d consecrated their lives to serving the Sanctuary became famous for a virile billy goat they kept. Livestock owners used to get the billy goat, known to everyone as “the eunuchs’ goat,” to inseminate their flock, borrowing him for several days at a time and letting him loose among their goats so he could spread his exemplary genes. The only condition was that the borrower was responsible for feeding him for the duration of the loan, and the borrowers were indeed very generous, if only so as to ensure the quality and fecundity of his seed. Most of the city’s blessed stock were descended from the eunuchs’ goat.
Salih got the nickname on account of his rosy vigor when he when found, as a newborn, by al-Ashi the cook in the yard outside his kitchen. Al-Ashi and his wife Umm al-Sa’d adopted the baby. There’s more to the story than that, but Nasser likes to sit in the cafe, like he’s doing now sipping his coffee coolly, and flicking through the diaries, so I’ll have to pay attention, to find out what stories Yusuf has been inventing about the heads on my shoulders: