“But it crashed into me … Are you sure it wasn’t you playing a trick on me with this Veil Monster?”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Mu’az replied. “And anyway, it’s a game that mothers and grandmothers play. To be honest, it still scares me. It’s just a silly, childish game, but somehow it manages to arouse the devil in us.”
“But it was really there; I saw it running down the alley to your house. It must have been you.”
“I swear on the Quran it wasn’t me.” He lost his smirk. “It must’ve been that thing,” he added, gesturing to the heap on the floor in the corridor. “Someone must’ve been here, waking up the Veil Monster.” His voice trembled. He came into view standing by the staircase, carrying a candle that threw their shadows leaping toward the great heavy door as if rushing to escape. The smell of burned meat took hold of their senses and the walls of the corridor.
“You don’t think—” Nasser was silent. “If Aisha has indeed run away, why would she draw attention to herself with a game like this?” He was more interested in quelling his own doubts than those of Mu’az. “Who could it be?”
“Well, that’s hard to say, but the only person around here who’s known for playing dress-up games like that is Khalil—” The absurdity of his own idea took him by surprise. “But he’s never shown any interest in Aisha. Not in a woman with that kind of intellect …”
“Well what is this Veil Monster then?!”
“It’s a ghoul made of masks, or face-veils. Our mothers play the Veil Monster trick on us whenever we act up.” He stood examining the features of the mask, which were scrawled in coarse coal, as if it were a face that had burnt to a crisp, black and gauzy with fresh blood on torn lips.
So there they were, all of these heads bursting with apprehensions and suspicions — those of Mu’az and Nasser, for example — and they were completely out of my control.
Nasser summoned Khalil for interrogation. On the day, however, Nasser clean forgot and left Khalil the pilot waiting outside his office while he rifled, utterly engrossed, through Aisha’s letters, looking for any mention of the Veil Monster.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 10
I asked you to grant me some faraway corner of yourself.
The corner shouldn’t be a cellar, or a storeroom on the roof even. It should be more like a treehouse in a forgotten backyard, where you hid out as a child and pretended to be a pirate or an angel of revelation, where you hid your possessions, your little anxieties, your adventure comics.
I hole up in there with you, and we spy through the bathroom windows of the surrounding buildings at the girls bathing directly across from the green almond tree with its round birds’ nests that fall to the ground every morning to wipe away the Lane of Many Heads’ fatigue … When a girl is washing herself, she will often pause for a moment, rooted to the spot, and stare into a golden mote, imagining a book, a man’s faraway hand, or that of an angel, or God even … Then she plunges herself beneath the fast-flowing stream. Or she scribbles a few words on paper in ink whose sighs bleed under the water pressure, their intimacy washing away… As unsuitable as ink might be for writing in water, it’s perfect for writing about the deepest secrets and sins and caresses …
A nest of straw, no more … With you.
Aisha
P.S. I had a dream. This isn’t me speaking, it’s the voice of the Veil Monster, the Lane of Many Heads that’s forced its way into my mind. It was a silvery night, and I was crawling toward the darkened hallway, feeling my way along, led by the sound of muffled laughter from a spot at the bottom of the stairs. My mother and grandmother were there, squatting on the ground, flattening out a brown paper grocery bag between them, cackling wickedly as they slashed the shape of the Veil Monster’s hideous features onto it with a fat charcoal crayon. From my hiding place I could hear its flesh tearing, and the black abaya being eaten away by its own gluttony to the point that it was worn and frayed; the mouth was bared in shrieking anger. Topped off with that growling voice, it was the picture of torment. Suddenly, the Veil Monster was looking directly into my eyes, and then crawling toward me, its voice squeaking. I fled, but its strangled voice was licking my body, and it was only then that I realized I was naked.
With its rasping voice, it caught me at the door to my cubbyhole, where any resistance I possessed left me, and I froze like a bare tree stump. The Veil Monster was bearing down on me; it wanted to drink my blood. Then my auntie Halima appeared, pretending she’d come to protect me, but she let it grab my leg, here, then my hand. Something hot and wet made my leg slippery, and the Veil Monster couldn’t manage to drag me away; I’d peed myself.
I was woken by your index finger on my spine.
The leg that the Veil Monster had taken hold of stayed numb for a whole week. The parts in that play had been masterfully shared out between my mother, grandmother, and Aunt Halima. In the course of it, they left behind fragments of our hearts broken off by the Veil Monster so they could be certain we’d be tamed. Having watched the Veil Monster being created didn’t lessen the terror he provoked in us in any way: he had only to make the slightest movement for a satanic spirit to rear its head within me, more frightening than my mother and grandmother could have calculated.
I think it’s the Lane of Many Heads transforming himself into a fearsome creature to keep us under control, and I don’t think we’ll ever be strong enough to tear off his masks.
The Veil Monster is the embodiment of a repressive urge hidden inside the women of the Lane of Many Heads, a chain of docility passed on from mother to daughter.
Do you think that’s what sharpens and guides Azza’s charcoal when she draws? Or is it her passion?
Azza has never taken fear seriously. Even love is just a flickering flame for her. “Why would you expect love to last forever? It’s just a feeling like any other feeling. Do you expect fear or upset or anger or sadness to last? They’re all temporary. They only come so they can go away again.”
For Azza, love has always been more like flu than cancer, so she flutters from heart to heart, reveling in the fever of constantly falling in love and always emerging from it lighter in heart and soul, ready to take on another, more highly evolved virus. She doesn’t face life or men with grim seriousness.
If only you knew how much fun it was to be around Azza! It’s like being in a patch of sunshine that never dries up, like being in an endless painting.
Still, I pity those consumed by cancerous love for her, like Yusuf!
Nasser was choked up with anger at Aisha. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason, but he felt a malicious satisfaction that she’d nicknamed the Lane of Many Heads “the Veil Monster.”
When Nasser finally permitted Khalil to enter, the fortysomething threw himself nonchalantly onto a chair and relaxed into it, leaving Nasser to read his body language. His shiny black leather shoes clashed loudly with his bright white leper’s socks. His features were elongated; his eyes and mouth were rectangular and uniform, and his cropped-looking ears stuck out like airplane wings. Khalil didn’t let Nasser finish looking him over, but began abruptly:
“My father continued to cover our expenses for years, even after I graduated from the Aviation Academy in Miami. He only cut us off after that Egyptian wife of his had a baby.” Suddenly Nasser’s suspicions about Khalil being the Veil Monster who’d escaped down Aisha’s corridor fell apart.