“Newspapers are al-Ashi’s drug. He reads but he doesn’t write. He’s half illiterate.”
The Eunuchs’ Goat liked to spread these kinds of rumors about his adoptive father, and no one knew for sure, or cared very much at all, whether or not al-Ashi really could write. He read closely, engrossed in the pages as if discovering great secrets, obsessively studying the photos of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abd Allah, and Crown Prince Sultan, with whom he was infatuated. He was always cutting their pictures out of the color photograph supplement, and then he’d hang them compulsively on the walls of his lean-to, like a barrier between himself and the greasy-smelling, bloodstained yard; between himself and the eye-shriveling ovens. The photos made him feel a sense of connection between his yard and the aspects of existence that remained out of reach, even for his imagination.
He studied the photos of the soccer players with a sport-obsessed child’s delight, and when he reached the sports supplement he’d always have to pause his reading to adjust his glasses, which had remained unchanged for a quarter-century. In fact, every surprising news item caused him to grab the corner of his sarong, exhale warm air from the depths of his soul, and polish the lenses.
Only then, confident that he could make out even the tiniest news items that lurked in corners almost beyond the reach of his lenses, would al-Ashi cry, “All is well in the world!” Then he’d lean over to take the first sip of the tea his wife, Umm al-Sa’d — the mother of his happiness — had prepared.
The moment the sun touched his feet, he folded up his arms, legs, and the newspaper in one decisive movement, and stood up, adding the paper to the stack on the shelf opposite the door.
As he did every morning, al-Ashi paused and stood with his back to the yard, sipping his tea and contemplating the trove of newspapers arranged according to date and compelling subject matter: he knew, for example, exactly which stack contained the beginning of the terror campaigns and the crackdowns and police raids that followed, and he kept pictures of the dead security forces officers and the list of the country’s thirty-six most wanted.
Al-Ashi cast an extra glance toward the stack of double-sized special editions announcing the deaths of kings — Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, al-Hasan, and Hussein — and news of who would succeed them. This pile contained the telegrams sent to congratulate them on the occasion of their investiture and to commiserate after their funerals.
Here, too, laid out horizontally, he kept the issues that contained special stories: the Lane of Many Heads made a rare appearance in the story about the miracle that was Aisha, the sole survivor of a bus accident that had killed three families from the neighborhood while on their way to Medina. This was followed by Prince Abd al-Aziz’s promise to cover the costs of her treatment in Germany at His Majesty’s personal expense.
Al-Ashi also held on to reports about the performance of the stock exchange and significant donations, and reports about the vast “economic cities” projects inaugurated by King Abd Allah. He stacked these horizontally so he could keep track of their claims.
Half a century’s worth of dust was lined up there neatly; Hamid al-Ashi knew that he was laying his memory out on that shelf: he could forget everything, become as senile as he liked, as long as the box of recollections stayed up there out of dementia’s reach; a standalone repository that he could link up to the void inside his head whenever he felt like it, to become a young man or a child once again — any age from six onward, in fact, because that was the age at which, in this very courtyard, his fascination with newspapers had begun. And just how old was he now? Whenever he was accosted by that question he would steal a furtive glance at the shelf and know that he was as old as that heap of the kingdom’s history, years of growth and plenty that had transformed the yard from the site of slave auctions into al-Ashi’s kitchen. And yet in reality they still hadn’t passed through my, the Lane’s, net of despair except for on that shelf, with its photos of monuments and galas and foundation stones being laid and ribbon-cutting ceremonies with little girls wearing coronets of flowers and clutching golden scissors. He carefully organized and arranged even during the years after the boom had petered out, years that saw the music shops in the vicinity of his kitchen multiply, closely followed by the kingdom’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the first municipal elections in forty years. Al-Ashi scrutinized the short row near the end and picked out the first photo of a Saudi woman ever published in a local newspaper: it was a photo of the broadcaster Samar alongside Maha. Then he carefully picked out the first angry response to the photos of Saudi women appearing in the pages of newspapers, addressed to all the dailies and weeklies, and even the supplements which carried short news items. The photos became so commonplace after a while that it was almost impossible to continue collecting them one by one so he decided to make do with his archive of the earliest examples. Whenever al-Ashi looked at the row of papers, he had the sensation of a vast female army advancing. It had only just been detected, in the years from 2004 to 2006, but it was decisive and it was sweeping the country. Particularly notable was the news that a number of women had been elected to the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce. The most important photo of them all was the one of Hanadi, the first young woman to obtain a civilian pilot’s license, standing in front of a massive airplane with Prince al-Waleed bin Talal and her parents. This was to mark her joining his aviation firm, and it was accompanied by a two-page-long message of congratulation from the Prince. Al-Ashi took the flood of newspaper-ink faces in warily; perhaps one day Umm al-Sa’d would turn up in the middle of this forward march. There was no point trying to pin down exactly how he felt about that possibility, which would turn the Lane of Many Heads, me, upside down if it came to pass. What if she also decided to publish her memoirs? She would definitely make the front page of all the papers. She’d make a hell of a splash, and anybody who could afford the two riyals for a newspaper would get the chance to see her do it. Goodness knows how many people would read the newspaper that day. Would the readers sense the power of her strong thighs and the vortex that lay between them, a perfect copy of her bright red lacquered lips, which would become a craze every woman would imitate?
“I’m in deep shit tonight with al-Souq Telecoms. I’ll be eating hay when the market shuts.” Al-Ashi had trained himself not to notice his wife’s comments about the stock market. He didn’t understand anything about that empire of numbers whose swells and ebbs his wife monitored constantly. The only thing it meant to him was that she’d embrace him with all the frustration and power of her broad shoulders, flat chest, and masculine frame. He’d trained his senses to switch off and allowed himself to be swallowed up by her womb in a nightly implantation from which he was revived every morning. On nights like tonight, however, when he could sense she was agitated, he’d look deep into her womb to see all the defenses she hid there. He understood very well what it meant to enter a body that had already been inhabited by that coldest of metals, gold.