“Whenever my eldest sister, Maymuna, begins to recite, her tears begin to stream but only out of her right eye. We never know what to think. Her tears don’t just stream down over her cheek, they spill out of her eye into the air and fall on her chest and onto my younger sister Sa’diya’s shoulder. Sa’diya says that there’s an angel with a watering can who sits in Maymuna’s eye and sprays us with her sweet tears. As soon as the first tear falls onto my father’s hand, he swells up with joy and says, ‘Praise be! An eye that cries for the sweetness of the Quran won’t be touched by hellfire. The fire won’t come near your eyes, Maymuna. God willing.’ Sa’diya would leave the tears where they landed across her neck as shield against the fire.
The detective was surprised by how nonchalantly Mu’az mentioned his sisters’ names in conversation; that wasn’t how things were done. Mu’az watched the television in front of him in silence for a while and then went on with his story. “Sometimes I ask myself, what’s life like for my sisters? Even television is a novelty to them. Look …” Nasser looked over at the black triangles huddled in the doorway of the Imam’s house: Mu’az’s sisters dressed in abayas that covered them from tip to toe, cones of black crowding one another to peek through the narrow crack in the door at the television in the cafe.
“When they’re sleeping sometimes I wish I could see beneath their eyelids. I want to see how they make dreams without the help of a satellite dish. I hear them whispering: ‘Which of the boys in the neighborhood are we going to marry? Who should we recite the chapter of Ya Sin forty times for?’
“‘The Eunuchs’ Goat?’
“‘His name’s Salih, don’t call him the Eunuchs’ Goat.’
“‘Yusuf?’
“‘Yusuf’s disappeared.’
“‘Mushabbab?’
“‘Our father says he’s no good.’
“To get Yusuf to come back to the neighborhood, Maymuna recited the Ya Sin Chapter of the Quran forty-one times, as though it were a raft that would carry her to him.”
“You’re talking about when a girl recites Ya Sin forty times?” Nasser asked.
Mu’az looked at him, shocked that police officers knew anything about occult rituals. “You’ve heard of it?”
“Ever since I was a kid, that ritual scared me. I was worried that a ghoul-girl would cast a spell on me so she could marry me.” He could tell that Mu’az had suddenly stopped listening to him. He’d turned his head to look at the thin old man dressed in blue wool robes and a red-checked head-covering who’d appeared at the end of the alley. Nasser followed Mu’az’s line of sight. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“That’s sheikh Muflah al-Ghatafani, Mushabbab’s friend.”
Nasser threw a fifty riyal note on the table and ran after the sheikh, leaving a bemused Mu’az in his wake. He followed close behind him until he reached Mushabbab’s orchard. He slowed for a moment before charging in after him. When he entered the orchard, he found the old man rummaging through the shelves and beneath the cushions.
“What did you come here to look for when you know full well the owner’s gone missing?”
The old man was clearly embarrassed. “I’m looking for something that belongs to me.”
“My name is Detective Nasser al-Qahtani and I’m investigating a murder. The owner of this orchard is wanted for questioning as a potential suspect in the crime. The fact that you’ve turned up here is enough to make you a person of interest in the case.”
“Listen, detective sir, I don’t have anything to do with this neighborhood or the people in it. I left an amulet with Mushabbab and I’ve come to take it back.”
“An amulet?”
“Yes, it’s an antique silver amulet that’s hollow on the inside and can be worn on a belt. I inherited it from my grandfather but I had to sell it to be able to buy a gold ring for the mother of my children.”
“So how did it end up here?”
There was a flash in the old man’s eyes and there was scorn in his voice. “Mushabbab collects antiques and he wanted the amulet, so he asked me to leave it with him so he could examine it closely. Didn’t you say he was gone?”
There was something cunning and ill-tempered about the way the old man looked at him and Nasser just knew that he was only giving him part of the truth. Nasser looked the man up and down; he wasn’t carrying anything other than that menacing smile.
“And did you find what you were looking for?”
“You didn’t give me a chance. Are you going to let me go?”
“Give me your address in case I need to call you in. Then get out of here. This place is off-limits.”
Mu’az: An Occult Future
AT MID-MORNING, YUSUF MET MU’AZ AT THE FOOT OF MOUNT HINDI. THE SON of a hag’s store had closed, and in its place was a new building with a cheaply-finished glass frontage, and a vast sign proclaiming APARTMENTS TO LET. Yusuf snorted at the thought of how long the flimsy building would last.
They set off up the hill in silence, Mu’az leading and Yusuf following. Yusuf didn’t want to look around at the houses he used to see as a teenager when he passed by on one of the son of a hag’s bikes. He kept his eyes to the ground and his brows firmly knotted together, but sounds still filtered through: children cackling like mountain goats, clambering about and shrieking at one another. Like the call to prayer, the smell of cooking rose from each of the tiny houses at exactly the same time. Female voices spoke a jumble of foreign tongues and Meccan slang. Windows opened and closed quickly to catch the attention of passersby, their distant clatter mingling with radio quiz shows, the clink of spoons on plates, coughs, and songs. Rocks tumbled; the steps up the hill were clearly defined in some places, but in most crumbling away.
Mu’az’s voice brought them to a halt. “We’re here.” Yusuf looked up to see an old wooden door. A mihrab was engraved on each leaf, and the knocker, positioned where the inner niche would be, was shaped like a dove in flight, its beak striking a flat plate of copper. The graceful old house towered above Yusuf, reaching up the slopes of the mountain so that its roof was level with the foundations of the square Mount Hindi citadel. It was perhaps seven stories high — attempting to count them just got him lost amidst the solid volcanic stones, mined from Mount Abu Lahab, from which it was built. A bunch of keys in Mu’az’s hand suddenly caught his eye. They had appeared out of nowhere. Mu’az took the largest one, the handle of which was shaped like a mihrab, inserted it into the cavernous lock with a trembling hand, and opened the door. It creaked loudly and released a breath of cold air. Their skin crawled at the musty odor of dereliction and the motes of dust that billowed out.
“This is where my treasure’s buried, Yusuf,” said Mu’az. Yusuf’s mouth felt dry. He didn’t dare to look up at the endless ceiling as he stepped into the hall. On both sides of the hall, windows looked out from spacious sitting rooms, and toward the back, stairs descended to both left and right, no doubt leading to cellars below. In the center, a wide staircase led upward.
Mu’az led Yusuf to a room at the back of the hall on the right, as he himself had once been led by Marie, the owner of the house, when Mushabbab had taken him to see her. He thought he had seen a visitation of the Lord come to answer all his prayers when the woman had said she wanted him to work for her in place of the Pakistani who was leaving her service. “A servant in the Lababidi house on Mount Hindi,” recalled Mu’az. “It was just what I needed to convince my father the imam. The salary they offered was persuasive, and he let me leave high school. What I found here was something I would spend the rest of my life looking for.” He went first into the small room, Yusuf following. It was bare except for a bed on the floor.