“I can feel Marie watching me now in silent pain. She wanted me to see this, to suffer as I realized how fast the encroaching sands of ignorance and fear were advancing, cementing over and obliterating everything in their path, and getting closer and closer to her heart too. She didn’t want to come too close to the worlds of my camera, but she taught me how to develop them and she used it to record her purification and her innocence for posterity. Straight away, my lost-cause creatures began appearing in al-Lababidi’s photo-worlds — forgotten, snatched, improvised — and Marie began to wilt slowly at the same time. The thought of beginning with death terrified me so I never picked up the camera on days when Marie had nothing to say. She eventually lapsed into total silence …”
Mu’az told Yusuf how one day he’d woken up and found himself up in the little kitchen on the roof, lying on the ground, his head resting on the millstone. A revolution broke out inside of him: he would either bring the outside into the house so that it could become a new pulse for the city or he’d take that pulse out into the pulse of the modern street and let them blend together. He decided to begin with the latter.
When he’d stood there, trying to choose between those worlds embodied in black and white, he’d found he didn’t dare. He just about managed to wrap up a few faces of pilgrims from the thirties in a folded sheet of ihram fabric he found, and leave.
He hadn’t walked so much as been carried along by those old bodies, who were still tramping on their pilgrimage from the ends of the earth. He was overcome by the heroic urge to release those beings to resume their lives of spirituality in Mecca, but he didn’t know where he should take them to set them free. His feet had led him to the teacher at his old primary school, where all the kids in the Lane of Many Heads had been taught. He had a notion that the pupils should see those photos, that they should form part of the curriculum of handwriting and reading that they all went through, so that the photos and the children could grow up together.
The teacher flicked through the stack of photos, then looked up at him and said, “All these people and stones and trees … You’ll be asked about them. Will you be able to breathe life into them on Judgment Day?” The teacher had recently been reading an eyewitness account of the end of days. The big red Xs that were slashed across the heads of animals in the drawings in science and reading textbooks crisscrossed in Mu’az’s mind. He pictured them advancing on the necks of his nobles and pilgrims, who’d run out of there.
Realizing he wasn’t going to wait for Judgment Day, he grabbed the photos and dashed out. No second life for these faces.
After that lengthy confession, Mu’az couldn’t stay away from the house. He hurried to the Lababidi house to see Yusuf whenever he could to continue telling the story, fearing that if he stopped, the house would surrender to Yusuf completely. It didn’t take long for Nasser to notice his routine.
Making use of the lunch hour when the shop was closed, Mu’az hurried to catch the public minibus, and Nasser followed him on his trip to Mount Hindi. Beneath the building with the APARTMENTS TO LET sign, Nasser saw him with a tall young man, a skinny specter of a guy who reminded Nasser of the ghost in Yusuf’s diaries. His heart started beating faster as if he were about to come face to face with his adversary, and he jumped out of his car, slammed the door, and sprinted toward them. His rapid footsteps caught their attention right away, and the tall young man hurried away while Mu’az turned back toward Nasser and blocked his way.
“Who was that you were just with?” Nasser asked, panting.
“Who are you talking about?” Mu’az asked, answering the accusation with total calm.
“The guy you were just talking to.” The man had disappeared, swallowed up by the mountain, and there was no sign of which path he’d taken.
“Oh, he just stopped me to ask how to get to al-Salam Hotel.”
Nasser was at a loss. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.
“Buying sweet dates for my dad,” replied Mu’az, nodding at the shopping bag he was holding.
His silencing stare bored into Nasser long after he’d left. Nasser’s police nose could smell the prey he’d been searching for all this time, and the heat in his temples agreed. He spent the searing midday hours walking back and forth on the mountainside, peering into people’s houses and faces, sneaking into corridors wherever he found a door ajar and investigating ruined buildings, looking for that tall specter. He knew his target was somewhere in this labyrinth.
That evening, Mu’az tried to find a way to go back. He had to make it absolutely clear to both Yusuf and the house that they couldn’t get rid of him, even if they started making deals with external forces like this Nasser, whom he’d only just managed to stop from uncovering his treasure.
The mountains ceased to tremble when they were both shut up in the Lababidi house together. Mu’az sat sulking on the roof in the shadow of the minaret of the Turkish bath, where he could keep an eye on Yusuf and the house. He wanted to be enveloped by the restful sunset over the rooftops like usual. The old pain attacked him during his long silence. But suddenly, he didn’t need to be jealous any more — didn’t need to possess or to tire himself out. After they had both performed the evening prayer on the roof, he told Yusuf the most important of his secrets. Still facing the Kaaba, he began:
“The day we discovered the corpse in the Lane of Many Heads, I came here to escape everything. Marie was sitting like she usually was, one leg over the other, leaning on those damask cushions and resting her head to the left-hand side, where she had a diamond flower-shaped brooch pinned on her chest — a moon hovering over a flower — and her muslin hat was sitting on her chignon of black and gray hair. My lens was still shaken from seeing the body in the lane so I sat on the floor in front of her, still trembling a bit. We sat there for hours, maybe days, and she said nothing the entire time, so finally I looked up at her. I realized that I’d seen yet another loss. I’d witnessed the death of a whole century. I didn’t dare touch her!
“I still don’t know whether it was me who killed her or not. Did I bring the germ of death with me when I came, destroying her world?
“That evening, the Meccan sky looked like an empty, colorless mirror that didn’t reflect the person looking into it. It was splintered by paths leading into and out of the Holy Mosque like ant trails around a nest, and you could no longer see the inside from the outside. I felt like I’d entered into her moment and I realized that she wanted to be left where she was, looking out over the Haram Mosque, which she’d spent half a century photographing. I was worried it would be disrespectful to the body, though, so I pulled her seat, just as it was, to the darkroom over there, read the Surah of Sovereignty over her, and closed the door. I gathered up my sinful, intimate photos, went down the stairs, locked al-Lababidi’s front door safely on all those heads that had been threatened with decapitation, and left. I buried the set of keys with the interlocking prayer-niches under the top step of the staircase in the minaret in the Lane of Many Heads. And covered them up with my father’s calls to prayers and recitations of the Quran, and I left them undisturbed until you, Yusuf, needed somewhere to escape to. I locked myself out of there; that was as far as I was going to get: shop assistant to the owner of Studio Modern in Gate Lane. Two simultaneous deaths made for a great ending, don’t you think?”