The detective stood up suddenly, and as though he’d been sleepwalking, he saw the world Mu’az inhabited, took note, and left. He wouldn’t be returning to him as a potential suspect.
Nasser went back to some of Yusuf’s articles, which spanned two years. He read an article by Yusuf on the unprecedented and simultaneous rises in expenditure in three sectors (real estate, psychiatry and cosmetic surgery, and livestock, specifically camels and goats) in which he tried to uncover the links between them. He noted how Yusuf compared — in red ink — the disparity between the value of his friend the Eunuchs’ Goat and the market price for goats, which averaged as much as 160,000 riyals for a billy goat.
The detective rifled through, looking for mention of the kid Salih, known to all as the Eunuchs’ Goat. At Imam Daoud’s Quran memorization classes, the children had sat in a circle bisected by a blue curtain, the girls on one side and the boys on the other. The sweet little boy had fallen in love with the round protrusion in the curtain where the girl Sa’diya’s elbow poked through. He’d spent many evenings breathing in the smoke of his father’s cooking and the smoke of their ridicule for being head over heels for a girl’s elbow. Salih was tied to an invisible rope that ran between al-Ashi’s kitchen and the mosque to keep him from going out to the main road and falling into the hands of the immigration police.
A Window for Azza
August 16, 2005
It’s summer, you see, when everything around us dies. The Lane of Many Heads flops limply like a salted fish laid out in the sun to dry, and our burning hearts, desperate to escape the putrid stagnation, eat away at us.
Every summer I spend with you, Azza, brings such a conflict. The days stretch and my patience shrinks; I can’t stand you being hidden away from me, I can’t stand all these Meccan windows shutting in my face. When night comes, I happily tear off my clothes, knowing that I’m peeling away the barriers between us. That is, if you too shed your layers.
Our constant complaints had driven Mushabbab crazy so he decided to test us: “What are your greatest fears?” he asked. “Lay them out on the rug in front of me and I’ll squash them for you like bugs.”
“The immigration police,” said the Eunuchs’ Goat, retching with sour fear at the thought. “The deportation truck with the bars over the windows … It paralyzes me. I’m trapped in the alley, and if I do leave, I’m blinded by visions of plainclothes immigration police. At every bend in the road I expect them to pounce and drag me away. Where would they send me? Me, the one whose umbilical cord they cut in the dirt in the yard outside the kitchen, nameless, voiceless; I only learned to speak as an adolescent. Will I live and die without ever leaving the Lane of Many Heads?”
When it was my turn, the trump card I’d hoped for didn’t materialize. When I posed that prying question to myself, I realized that I, Yusuf, am the source of my own fear. My thin body is possessed by Awaj ibn Anaq, the giant of legend from the time of Noah. I am chained to the distant past, but I move around on a spaceship. Everything around me is automated, but my mind belongs to legends and the time before.
Maybe my fossilized body needs a quick renovation.
It occurred to me to surprise him by turning the question back on him: “So, Mushabbab, what’s your greatest fear?” But I chickened out. I knew Mushabbab was our axis: if he weakened or slipped, our entire circle would collapse.
It made perfect sense to us: no fear was so great that a woman’s abaya couldn’t fix it.
Mushabbab wrapped the Eunuchs’ Goat up in it carefully and we all bundled into Khalil the Pilot’s taxi. When we approached the checkpoint, Mushabbab instructed him to slump limply in the abaya. The indifference in the soldier’s gesture as he waved us through sent tingles down the Goat’s spine.
It was as if he’d turned feverish when he realized we’d crossed the sanctuary boundaries and were headed toward Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast. Tales of the mermaids there had burned holes in the imaginations of the young men in the Lane of Many Heads.
“The chicks in Jeddah, sweet lord…” We weren’t going there to check out God’s gifts, though. Mushabbab directed us along the ring road toward the old Jeddah airport.
The sun had risen by the time we got there. Stretching before us was an expanse half a kilometer wide, carpeted with men and women of all colors and races. The image of people assembled for the Day of Judgment came to mind.
“This is where everyone who wants to abandon the petroleum paradise flees to. Here in the open air is where workers take refuge when they’re waiting to be picked up by the immigration police. It’s the rapid delivery service back to the homeland,” said Mushabbab.
“Some people wait a week or even a month before someone comes along and picks them up,” added Khalil the Pilot. “Some even end up having to bribe soldiers to hurry the process along.”
“One man’s hell is another man’s heaven.”
Mushabbab’s proverb was directed at the Eunuchs’ Goat, who quickly asked, “You mean they don’t round up the people without papers here in Jeddah?”
“Nah, they round up bribes: one to get you a residence permit and another to deport you. Right, out.” Mushabbab gestured to the Goat to get out of the taxi. He left him there with those waiting people, while we stopped at a distance to observe.
The section editor at the Umm al-Qura newspaper had deliberately drawn a veil over that window onto the hell of deportation. “These ‘windows’ of yours are supposed to shine a light on Mecca. Not on the sea.” Before tossing the draft article into the wastebasket, he took a thick black marker and crossed out the following section:
In the first few hours, the Eunuchs’ Goat lost his ability to hear and speak. A flood of vehicles swept past in a flash; the humidity that clung to his nostrils prepped him for the question “What country?” With no homeland to be sent back to, he was sure he’d rot in detention.
A voice in the crowd kept repeating: “People who are forced to wait a long time get so hungry they eat their blankets!”
They were all telling their stories in broken Arabic that reeked of sour spices.
A Sri Lankan maid chattered non-stop about the lazy husband she’d been sending her wages home to for the last ten years, only to discover that he’d remarried and had children on her earnings. She was flying back home on the wings of a buraq to teach him a lesson.