He could barely fathom the Egyptian giant who’d left his waste disposal business and his shanty at the dump between al-Samir and al-Ajwad in East Jeddah in the hands of a relative, and come to turn himself in so that he’d be sent home for free to spend his holiday with his family. He claimed his first stop was going to be the sulfur baths in Helwan, where he’d scrub the layer of scabies off his body before going home and impregnating his wife with a son. This he’d follow with a new escape, courtesy of a pilgrim’s visa, and return to reclaim his trash heap. Or rather his gold mine, which yielded him 500 riyals a day! The Egyptian was full of stories of his adventures against attempts to regulate international money transfers, the sums he’d smuggled across international borders through the black market using devilish tricks, the tower block he’d had built in the smart Cairo district of Heliopolis, his position as economic consultant to shady African trash-heap moguls.
He was being watched with great interest by a tear-streaming African face that told the story of a dying mother and his race back home against the Angel of Death.
An Indonesian offered strong competition with a photo display of the women who vied for his heart: dozens of faces plastered with lime, followed by eye shadow, and lips painted a garish red. They struggled fiercely to make it into the top four whom he’d marry as soon as he touched down in Jakarta, returning as a newly crowned emperor bearing the wealth of a year and a half in exile. Obviously, to him, ten thousand riyals was the wealth of Croesus.
The Eunuchs’ Goat lost count of how many stories he swam through there.
As evening fell, the touch of a salty breeze reminded him he was alone. The crowds had all disappeared, though to where he had no idea, and their place had been taken by the smells of human urine and desperation, a pungent odor rising from behind the trunks of ornamental Washington palms, in the blueness of the Saudi Airlines office across the way and the continuously replenished ATM with a camera’s eye to guard it.
The Eunuchs’ Goat felt like the ATM screen was following him as it repeated cheerfully, “Welcome to this automated teller service.”
Automated deportation service …
By midnight, his eyelids were drooping over a vast nothingness. He still didn’t know what he would say his country of origin was if he were to be detained.
At dawn the calls to prayer flocked on the horizon. He needed to empty his bowels, but his feet wouldn’t obey him. His entire being was tensed, erect, ready for the moment when the police vehicle and officers turned up. The moment of fear hung like a noose around his entire life. When it came, he might run, he might drop dead; the important thing was confronting that moment.
He didn’t know whether Mushabbab was serious about leaving him there or whether he himself was serious about persevering.
At first light, he awoke to find the eyes and stories thronging around him anew. Yesterday’s crowd had reappeared from nowhere and they seemed to be joined by a new body with every passing moment. The city dribbled fatigue and anticipation on them, drop after drop.
And that woman who kept nursing yellow water from a jerrycan, dozing and staring at him. At some point when the heat was at its fiercest, he imagined three women — blonde, raven-haired, and brunette — winking at him.
As the call to prayer rang out at noon, a bus with bars over its windows appeared, and the heaps of bodies suddenly pulsed with life. Conversations, jokes, complaints fell silent, and the mass surged toward the bus. The Goat’s eyes were glued to the bars over the windows. He noticed that as the bodies jostled to get onto the bus, hands attached to khaki uniforms pushed them back, and then grasped banknotes held out by other sweaty hands, which they then allowed to board the bus. It was soon full, the tires compressing under their weight, and then it heaved away, covering the remaining faces with dust.
The fit that seized the Eunuchs’ Goat left him bewildered; his body suddenly felt prepared and on edge — against what, he didn’t know. Around him, crestfallen faces lamented their missed chance at freedom.
His heart opened up like a cave that had been blocked up for centuries; the deep shadows of fear dyeing its walls dissolved and oxygen flooded in. He felt he could breathe again. No sooner had the fire entered him than his longing for Sa’diya al-Habashiya the Imam’s daughter became acute: hers was the only freedom he wished for any more.
He looked around him and still he couldn’t see Mushabbab, so he walked boldly to the road, in a strange city without knowing where he was headed, and continued down it over the bridge, which led to Road 60, amid the car horns’ shrieking. There, at the intersection, Khalil’s taxi caught up with him. Mushabbab opened the door for him wordlessly.
“If my mother knew what you did to me, she’d turn the whole neighborhood on your heads! She’d boil you in kerosene, no joke.” His mother Umm al-Sa’d’s stocky build and features were an exact copy of those of her father the milkman whose photo hung in her room beneath the caved-in red ceiling — like a sword above the neck of anyone who entered. She even had a mustache just like his, which she plucked every morning with her decorated red tweezers.
“They say angina’s the cool new birth control for 2005–2006.” That snide comment was characteristic of Khalil.
Mushabbab interjected, “In her capacity as mother to a goat, your loving mother has proclaimed a period of mourning for a herd of camels that were poisoned in Wadi l-Dawasir, and what with the snare of the stock market and the hundreds of thousands of the best she-camels being poisoned by fodder from the silos in the south, her liquid assets have been wiped out. As you can see, your mother’s busy with important things.” We were saying the first inanities that popped into our heads to celebrate the occasion of the Goat’s victory over his fear.
Disquiet
I, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, APPEAR TO BE THE ONLY ONE PAYING ANY ATTENTION to Nasser’s addiction. He’s become a very regular customer at the cafe, where he sits for hours reading Aisha’s emails. I personally never paid any attention to the schoolteacher’s emails, which she always crammed full of revolting emotion. In fact I’ve never once bothered myself with a female opponent, since I know women were created simply to submit to the status quo, my vile status quo. But there were her words, spreading cancer-like from Nasser’s head to my own.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 7
Did you notice I called you “sir” at the end of our conversation today?
I never knew my own father’s name; my mother always called him “sir.” The say she said it with such tenderness that he became the servant and she the queen.
Sir
If only my voice were as husky as my mother’s was, I could summon you here with that word.
I took Women in Love to bed with me this evening … My mouth was dry and I began to tremble — I’m still trembling.
How dare I bring that interloper into my bed?
The literal translation of the title brings me up short once more. Women in Love. In Love.
A fly dips its bitter wing and leaves its sweet wing breathing on the surface. The fly pauses on the surface of my cup of tea, with milk, perhaps drowning on its own, never to emerge again. I wonder: who will drink me?