I can feel my dead father’s eyes boring through the back of my head. I always leave the house to his darkness, and take refuge, with a flashlight, beneath the thick blankets to sneak a few words:
After the First World War, Lawrence began a
savage pilgrimage
in search of a
lifestyle
that was more fulfilling than what industrialized European society could offer him …
I still don’t feel safe so I read Women in Love again from beginning to end.
I steal a few words, a few passages,
Risking sleeplessness, I point the flashlight at certain words in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition that I feel speak to me personally:
Lawrence’s lover Frieda wrote upon his death in 1933 that ‘Lawrence’s writing conveyed to his fellow human everything he had seen, felt and known: the splendor of life and the hope for more and yet more life … that inestimably heroic gift.’
The flashlight goes out and I throw off my blanket and everything else.
Where can we get more of this more from life? What kind of more?
I review every detail of my life, searching for a droplet of that “more.”
Attachment: This is my Auntie Halima’s palm. It’s scary how small it is, lines running parallel and intersecting.
A “wounded palm” is a piece of gold jewelry that runs from around the ring finger down to the wrist forming a triangle. Auntie Halima couldn’t afford one so she traced the shape of one on the back of her hand.
Aisha
P.S. “Why don’t you buy red towels?” asked the fetus I miscarried in my dream last night (every night, in fact).
For two whole years I kept praying: Ahmad — please, God, let him sleep with me just once and release the collar of that dirty word divorce from around my neck. Just one thrust toward life, dear God: a child!
And now here’s Ahmad, reopening the hotline between us, pleading for us to pick up where we left off.
What would make a hunter return to the prey he’s left to rot for two whole years?!
Words like these were a challenge to Nasser. Whenever he stood at the entrance to the alley beneath Aisha’s window, which was taken up almost entirely by an air-conditioning unit, he felt a weight descend on his heart. It was the burden of her obsession with the things she called the “splendor of living” and “more and more life.” What could it be?
He was torn between Aisha and Azza: which one of them could he tie to the body? The wretched, crumbling houses around him defied him; Nasser felt he was being watched in that moment in which he was seeing through to my body and my many distracted heads.
At nightfall, he watched them as they slumped in front of their television screens. It was like looking through department store windows. They tore away the image so they could dive straight into the story. He disappointed them so much when they compared him to the detectives from CSI, whose science fiction plotlines were firmly stuck in all my heads. Nasser felt small and ignorant stacked up against those fictional detectives.
For all his horror at how uninhibited Aisha had been toward that German, he could still close his eyes and in an instant replace that annoying “^” with his own name, Nasser, pretending to himself that he was the one she was writing to. Why shouldn’t he be the object of that surge? He wanted to bash his head into hers so their thoughts would start to mingle.
“May God smash your heads together!”
My mother Halima’s expression fascinated him. It summed up the need to be open to the other, even to the point of butting heads.
The Hell List
NASSER PARKED HIS CAR AT THE ENTRANCE TO MY WINDING NETWORK OF ALLEYWAYS and stood for a moment watching approvingly as my parasites woke up and began their day, before heading to the cafe where the Pakistani waiters greeted him with a stack of molasses-flavored shisha tobacco. He sat down and contemplated the freshly washed colors of the dawn sky over Mecca, quite different to the glaring sunsets, when it seemed to him as if Abel’s blood were dyeing the evening sky over the Sanctuary. He could still just about make out the old page, which had been torn away, leaving behind a fresh one; every morning the inhabitants rewrote the city’s fate upon it in Cain’s breaths. Is that what Yusuf’s diaries were trying to do?
The cashier, a Sudanese bachelor, had spent the night on one of the cafe chairs wrapped in a blanket and was just stirring to the scents rising off a teapot that one of the Pakistanis had set down on a tray beside him, along with a cup sitting in a pool of water left over from a hurried rinse.
Nasser didn’t know what kind of message the neighborhood was trying to send him by following him even through his dreams … Nasser’s thoughts were interrupted by a sudden kerfuffle from just outside where the African woman who’d been sitting at the side of the road with her goods had leapt to her feet and shot away down the street.
“Good morning to you, too!” snorted the detective as he watched her disappear from sight, leaving behind her mat and the cheap wares piled up on it. She didn’t run so much as the alleyway simply opened up and swallowed her. At precisely that moment, a truck emblazoned with the logo of the Market Inspection Service—“Safeguarding the Holy Capital”—appeared, and before it had even stopped the doors burst open and two officers leapt out to pounce on the miniature stall. They kicked over trays of roasted almonds and watermelon seeds and ground them into the dust. Then they began picking up the bags of snacks and foodstuffs that had been packed and tied carefully by hand and tossing them into the back of the truck. Ready-to-use sachets of hibiscus tea processed by a company called Vitaminat Group, Bakura bars — short, curved, tamarind-flavored sugar sticks — colored imitation lollipops produced in improvised kitchens by illegal workers, cheap toys and games made in Taiwan.
Once they were done and their truck continued onward, deeper, into me, I was seized by a fever of activity. The makeshift stalls that were laid out down the length of the alley all disappeared, their owners having managed to hide inside the entryways to people’s houses, as cats clustered around the bits and pieces that had been spilt and scattered around, licking and sniffing disdainfully in an effort to determine what was good to eat.
Nasser watched as the waiters huddled in the bathroom of a dilapidated house, shutting the door behind them, while the kitchens hid their poor day-laborers in tiny coal rooms. Nasser didn’t watch so much as feel himself one with the endless, obstinate movement in the neighborhood. He thought, “If the angel Israfel’s trumpet rang out, heralding the coming of Judgment Day, the Lane of Many Heads would simply lay out its sinful red carpets and its staff of heretics and carry on being unruly after the trumpet was blown. Chickens would still be roasted on spits over flames, flatbread would still bake in the tandoor, biryani would simmer on in its pot, the grease would bubble up, unceasingly, lying in wait for stomachs that were ready to renounce their deeper hunger and all that they’d accomplished in the day.” I won’t pretend that the notion didn’t flatter me or that I wasn’t filled with pride.
I wasn’t quite sure how to understand Nasser’s yearning to possess everything, even a neighborhood like me. He’d spent so much time here that he’d begun to see my miserable winding alleyways as an extension of his own body. That’s right, I’d tricked him into thinking that he himself was just another one of my many heads. I entertained him with little crumbs of my inner thoughts, all the while keeping him far away from the place where I stored all my secrets and sins. He even began thinking that he was incognito; that he knew exactly how many undocumented wastrels were hanging around, that he knew who was splitting the rent on the shacks where they took turns enjoying what pleasures they could on my lumpy, bumpy beds; that he knew all the petty offenses — merely human nature — and the crimes that violated both religion and the regulations on public safety in the Holy Capital; that he could count every single sigh sighed by the women as they watched episode after episode of reality TV behind boarded-up windows, before the next round of confiscation and destruction put an end to it.