“I may not have anything useful to give you for your investigation. Look at my sons. Yusuf was right when he attacked me in a fit of craziness. So far every son I’ve had has run away. Musfir most recently, and before him Ahmad, the oldest. They were adopted by a relative of mine who wanted to give them a clean life, far away from septic tanks.” He thought he’d strayed away from the case at hand, but the detective’s eyes sparkled at the mention of another lead: Ahmad. There were plenty of witnesses who’d seen him scurrying down the alley the night the body was found. It would be easy to accuse him of murder. He wanted to ask Yabis whether his wife Kawthar had seen her daughter-in-law in the corpse, but he was afraid of the answer.
Instead, he said, “Ahmad lives abroad. He left Aisha two years ago, two months after they’d got married. People in the neighborhood say he used to hit her. That makes him a suspect in the murder and it makes Aisha the victim, potentially.”
“Aisha and Ahmad went away together. She had to go with him. He came to see us before they found the body. I let him have it. I was so angry he’d abandoned Aisha. He told me he’d put an end to their separation. When my son says he’s going to do something, he does it.”
What really complicated things was that there was a disappearance larger than death. The crux of the issue wasn’t the murder victim, it was mistaken identity. Whether Azza, Aisha, or the body. There was a mass of crushed woman in front of him, and he had no hope of making out the murdered from the insane from the one who’d slammed the door in the face of the Many Heads and run off. Nasser was faced with the challenge of teasing out that spiritual DNA from the mass, so that he could absolve Azza of the stain of suicide, passing it on to some other girl in the Lane of Many Heads, and so that he could exclude Aisha, as well, and thereby not draw attention to the woman sitting in his own heart, speaking to him with an intimacy he’d never experienced from a woman — or another person — before.
“And Azza, Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, where did she go? Any ideas?” The detective traced Yabis’ glance as he looked up at Azza’s empty bedroom and her father’s shop, as a male pigeon danced, courting two females, among the clay soldiers on the roof. He was flying out from his wooden coop to the ruined building and back.
A laughing Yabis interrupted his train of thought. “They only ask me to come clean for them once or maybe twice a year.”
“Is that because Sheikh Muzahim’s a tightwad?”
“It’s ’cause their output is so meager. The only people in that house are a girl who’s buried in her papers and charcoal drawings, and Yusuf’s mother, who’s in her fifties and spends half her life at weddings, serving and drinking tea. That woman’s whole life is wrapped up in tea leaves and mint leaves and the leaves of her son Yusuf’s notebook. In the case of Sheikh Muzahim, what comes out isn’t even a tenth of what goes in. He lives off of dates and unsweetened coffee. In short: those people are vegetarians … That’s beyond the scope of the kind of work I do.” Nasser looked at the sewage cleaner as if he were something beyond the scope of life. A parasite subsisting on life’s rituals, like aging and decay, like an illness that removes the weakest elements from the human mass; he was like the kind of death that scrapes the surface of the earth clean so it can celebrate new births and deaths.
“You’re not curious about who the victim is?”
“I didn’t even lay eyes on her.” Suddenly Nasser was filled with shame. “We’re talking about our women. We look down at our feet when we sense a woman walking past.” A sandstorm wind blew toward them; Yabis waved his hand in the air as if to drive it away. “What with this stifling air and sandstorms, what’s so weird about a boil swelling up and exploding one night in the Lane of Many Heads?” A moment later, he said, “People are strange.” Nasser kept quiet so as to let him carry on. “During the holidays, people defecate twice as much. And I make twice as much money. I don’t mind going out to empty tanks during the holidays. That’s celebratory excrement even if it’s a bit gluttonous.”
The detective couldn’t bring himself to continue down this path any longer so he brought the conversation back around to Ahmad. “People say your son Ahmad has close ties to a lot of important people.”
“For example, I would never want to empty the septic tank of a building where Ahmad lives. Ahmad’s crazy about wheeling and dealing. Everything he expels reeks of the same odor: rotting food the likes of which has never been seen in the Lane of Many Heads. That might not matter much to you, but I’m picky about my customers.”
“What if we need you to come empty the tank at the criminal investigation unit?”
The sewage cleaner laughed. “Your unit doesn’t really suit me, no offense. The walls of your septic tank are probably covered in all kinds of nuclear, chemical, and conventional weapons.” Nasser laughed, and then they both fell silent. The detective’s silence puzzled the sewage cleaner somehow. He continued, “You should’ve seen the fast food invasion. You can clean a septic tank a thousand times, but you’ll never get rid of that smell of fast food, especially hamburgers—”
The detective cut him off. “Who would have a motive to kill someone in the neighborhood? Who could the murderer be?”
“Have you heard about depression? I just heard about it recently in the Labban building. Umm al-Sa’d, al-Ashi’s wife, took her adopted son the Eunuchs’ Goat to a shrink. ‘He’s depressed,’ she said. And she said we shouldn’t be ashamed of psychological problems. A month later when we went to empty the septic tank, it smelled like colocynth incense. Painkillers turn the bowels sour. It knocks the bugs out without any insecticide. Even we sewage cleaners, as soon as we breathe that stuff in, our tongues get tied up and our faces and limbs begin to twitch.”
Nasser asked Yabis about the state of his own mental excretions. Yabis looked into Nasser’s eyes. Apropos of nothing, he said, “You seem like an enlightened man, detective. Ever since Yusuf left I don’t have anybody to talk to. Yusuf was the most educated person in the Lane of Many Heads. He understood how we spoke, and he spoke for all of us, every last one. He was our reflection. When we lost our minds, he was the one who went to the Shihar Hospital and received electric shocks. Shocks straight to the brain.” The sewage cleaner was desperate to talk, so Nasser just let him, pulling on the thread that led to Yusuf.
“Yusuf’s like me. He’s digging his way through the Lane of Many Heads, you know? Some people’s heads are filled with the same stuff you find in people’s stomachs. Then he’d publish the remains in the newspaper and call it the history of man. He told us, and he was talking to me the whole time, about the revolt of the army and the common people during the rule of the Sherif Muhammad bin Abd Allah, when they forced the mufti and the wazir to expel the Shiites from Mecca in 1732, because they accused them of sullying the Kaaba, because according to their rites the pilgrimage doesn’t count unless the pilgrim dirties the Kaaba. What they thought was filth was actually lentils mixed with oil, which had gone runny in the Meccan sun. Detective, what’s all this waste if it’s not the thing that gets us drooling, makes us pay any price — high or low — to fill our bellies with it so that it comes out of our orifices, the superior and the inferior.”