If I were to throw myself from here to Bonn, I would still end up here. My passport is temporary, for one trip only: I need a close male relative or guardian to renew it for me. Not having any male relatives left, I won’t bother looking for a miracle if I’m going to be stopped by a piece of paper in the airport. Guardian’s consent: “I allow this woman to travel and vouch that she will return.” That form gets men’s blood pumping with visions of rulership and regalia. Try asking your father or husband or brother to sign that form and you’ll understand what’s meant by the phrase, “The sky shut in on itself.” Without it, I can’t even choose to jump.
Can words be thrown out after they’ve been used? Where does a word end up after it’s been read? There are two kinds of words: poisonous and not. Certain words make my mouth taste differently after I read them.
My skin changes colors. At the moment, I’m bluish. Poisoned by anger and these desires, which only grow the more I chew on toxic words.
I occasionally burst in on the passage at the end of the book when Halliday is reading Birkin’s letter about the union of darkness and multitudes of corruption: “There is a phase in every race […] when the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire. In the individual, this desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the self […] a reducing back to the original, a return along the Flux of Corruption.”
What if the souls of the dead were to merge with our own souls and expose our thoughts? Will my desire for destruction poison my father?
P. S. I shut down my computer. I turned off all the lights in my cubby-hole. Darkness everywhere. I closed my eyes and when I re-opened them, I noticed that even in darkness the light streams and crowds.
It occurred to me that this is what the grave will be like. After they’ve shut you in and you know with full certainty that no artificial light can penetrate, light will come up out of the depths of darkness. It will illuminate for your eyes what lies beyond.
There is life in the darkness.
Aisha
Nasser didn’t pay any attention to what Aisha had written about “jumping” and “self-destruction.” He spent the entire evening thinking back on Aisha and what she’d said about “merging with the souls of the dead.” He knew deep down that the puzzle-master was using the pieces to move him, using Aisha’s emails to read him. He was laying bare Nasser’s inner thoughts, laying bare the end of his conversation that morning with Yabis the sewage cleaner. He still couldn’t get over the fact that he’d voiced those delusions of his after he’d sprung the question on Yabis.
“Your wife, Umm Ahmad”—he didn’t dare say Kawthar, her name—“Yusuf wrote somewhere that she can detect the souls of the dead.” That was his question, and when all he got from Yabis was a blank look, he continued, “I’ve spent two decades around crime scenes and corpses. I know what it means when a woman can make out the souls of the departed in the air.” Yabis still wore that blank look; he was simply waiting for the detective to spill everything out. Nasser had never spoken these ludicrous imaginings out loud before. “Most of the time, when we get to the scene, the body’s already decaying, but on the occasions when we make it there while things are still happening and a victim dies in your arms, I swear you can make out the outline of their soul in the air right in front of you. Sometimes the person tries to whisper their last words into your ear, but their soul slips in instead. Do you know what that’s like? It’s like a blast of heat straight through to your brain. For a second you feel like another being has come over you and that you’re living two lives, with two souls, just for a fleeting second before the being slips out of you and its soul rises to the sky.”
The Donkey Empress
THE TURKISH WOMAN CHARGED INTO HIS OFFICE IN A BURST OF COLOR: VIVID red and yellow, white skin, a streak of blue eyeshadow and a ruby the size of a pigeon egg sitting between her enormous breasts, framed by the low neckline of her robe. She adjusted her loose headscarf, which had slipped to reveal a shimmer-dusted forehead and a peroxide mane sculpted to show off her fine ears and shoulder-length chandelier earrings — amidst all this glitz Nasser scarcely noticed the jubbah she was wearing instead of the usual abaya, and the green sequins and red studs that adorned it. He and the puzzle-master sensed a heat radiating from her that defied Israfel’s icy blasts from across the small office, and her glowing locks coiled into his throat and around the words they exchanged. Nasser spluttered and began abruptly, “You’re the Empress?”
She gave an unintelligible laugh. “The Donkey Empress!” she corrected. Nasser flinched. “‘The Donkey Empress is a butcher,’ that’s what was written on the wall of my atelier after the corpse appeared. It wasn’t hard to figure out that the accusation was meant to smear my professional reputation. The Turkish Empress of Fashion. I vowed to make up for everything my Ottoman ancestors inflicted on the women of this country, to get rid of the seclusion and the black masks, the head-to-toe black tents covering their bodies and the white veils over their faces. And beneath all that lie the forgotten spots: the sad kurtas and sirwals and Jawan sarongs. I came to the Lane of Many Heads bringing joy, modernity — and a good few conflicts too, what with all the men complaining “That Turkish woman’s turning them all into vamps!” She looked at him with her world-weary gaze. “I won’t deny,” she continued, “that Aisha’s dress was my breakthrough in the Lane of Many Heads. Before that, I’d had my big break in the city: I was the one who got the first bride ever to ditch the Hijazi get-up. If it weren’t for me, the Lane of Many Heads would still be stuck in the eleventh century and brides would still be suffocating from all that padding they stick under the traditional dresses, weighed down with necklaces made from fruit and silver-dipped cardamom pods. A stuffy dress with a million clasps can’t compete with the carefree present!” She paused to let her words fill the room, then carried on with a wink: “And Azza? Those rags I strung together for her to pull her out of her father’s spider web? Who knows where they took her! The Lane of Many Heads is so ungrateful. So ungrateful! There’s no pleasing it no matter how hard you try.”
Daughters’ Dowers
NASSER CORNERED HER WITH A DIRECT QUESTION: “TELL ME ABOUT THE DRESS.”
The Turkish woman looked up. An instinct for seduction lifted one corner of her smile, and she arched one tattooed eyebrow so high it almost reached her hairline. “The dress?” she cackled. “Let me tell you: hems keep climbing up and necklines keep falling down.” She shook with laughter. Nasser was so surprised that his question had missed the mark that he didn’t notice the innuendo.
“Aisha the schoolteacher. Her wedding dress, everyone says you designed and made it.”
She raised her head proudly and snorted. “She and I picked that style out together. It was the embodiment of everything she’d read about the French and Russian courts! A flower on each shoulder, elbow-length taffeta, and lace gloves, and pearls all over the bodice. We kept the details a secret so the girl could make a grand entrance. I staked my reputation and talent on making her a masterpiece of a dress. She arrived at my atelier for the first fitting in a procession. Her parents came with her, and the whole neighborhood was watching them. I had to close the shop to customers so as to keep the party out, and I managed to prize her away from her parents and get her in the fitting room with me alone. I locked the door and had her stand on the little stage I use for fittings — it’s not much bigger than a cake stand really, just a few feet across and one foot off the floor — anyway, I plunked her up there like a fruit on a plate, and the first thing I did was take off the drab gray robe she was wearing. I made sure she knew that I was unraveling a cocoon of her ugliness, picking her locks, peeling her, turning her into a beautiful sliced peach.” She said it with lust, and a steamy patch of humidity began to spread on the ceiling above her in the otherwise bone-dry room. “I was getting her ready to be presented to a husband; I knew what I had to stoke and what I had better leave, cooking gently among the coals, waiting to be consumed with care. The poor girl didn’t know what to think about all the ruffles and fish scales and layers I poured all over her, rustling and cruel, like a dead-end tunnel, and yet still as light as a cloud against her trembling, newborn body. I artfully arranged the lace to rub and excite her budding breasts, let the taffeta lick her legs, layered stiff net and starched cotton into a petticoat that pecked at her ass and nibbled her silky thighs. By covering her here and uncovering her there, with only air and ruffled fabric, I was able to replenish desire where it waned and reshape her so that she’d catch her husband’s eye, make him pant and salivate—” Suddenly, mischievously, the Turkish woman stopped speaking and just stared at Nasser. She enjoyed handing him this forbidden fruit naked on a tray, and then she burst out laughing, knocking him out of his trance. He realized she was choosing and polishing her words aggressively before she poured them into his ears, molten, the steam sizzling, to clothe the demons inside his mind. Nasser looked back toward her to find her staring impudently back. He could see that she’d opened up a route ahead of him and was urging him to take it; she left him with that realization and continued to stitch together her story: