The air around them trembled. The desire for his approval, the desire to please him, held Yusuf in its hot thrall. Could Mu’az have possibly had a hand in — he quashed that train of thought, ignored it. “I know how difficult it is for you to get here.”
“It’s not as bad as going there.”
“Have they found the Kaaba key yet?” Yusuf asked, as a way of distracting him from his sadness.
“No,” sighed Mu’az, “but they’re casting a new one in Turkey and they say it’ll be ready for the next pilgrimage season, in time for the ritual cleaning of the Kaaba …”
Mannequin
DETECTIVE NASSER TOOK NOTE OF WHAT YUSUF HAD WRITTEN IN HIS WINDOW about the Eunuchs’ Goat, the character who slaughtered sheep every day. He wanted to ascertain whether what Yusuf had written in his window could be a possible alibi for why he wasn’t in the neighborhood when the crime took place.
I doubt you’ll know me when I call to you with this voice: “Azza.”
I’ve lost my most important face in the mirror; I’ve lost the Eunuchs’ Goat.
No one can see me the way the Eunuchs’ Goat sees me. Every time he looks at me it’s like he’s saying, You exist, you’re a citizen, you belong, you’re a historian.
They caught him selling black-market carcasses to the restaurants in the Lane of Many Heads! You should’ve seen it, Azza. It was a parade of photos and titles in the pages of Umm al-Qura newspaper: the brave men of the municipal government and the Holy Capital’s licensing bureaus who’d performed the early morning raid against unregulated slaughterhouses.
I read out loud by your window while the finger of charcoal rattles between your fingers. Are the torsos you draw still fleeing a massacre? Did you make sure to get them marked them with veterinary certification stamps? I can’t stop reading and re-reading it.
“140 tons of spoiled meat intended for distribution and human consumption were seized today, along with the culprits who slaughtered camel mares, sheep, and goats. Authorities stressed that camel mares must be slaughtered systematically under the supervision of veterinarians … Several experts warned in their testimonies of the danger posed by careless treatment of sick animals, pointing to more than 200 diseases common to both animals and humans. Some of these include Malta fever, valley fever, anthrax, tuberculosis, rabies, tapeworm, which can be transferred to humans through contact with a slaughtered camel mare, and there may even be other diseases that are more dangerous.”
Most of them are here this very moment, living side by side with the people of the lane in perfect harmony, sharing their viruses generously. As you can see from the experts’ testimonies, Azza, the Eunuchs’ Goat is a vector for no less than two hundred epidemics. What’s worse, though, is the lie they’re spreading that the Eunuchs’ Goat stole the donation box, “The Bribe Box,” and embezzled all the donations that were meant to help him get his papers.
“Do you agree with me that this is all just a rotten plot, timed suspiciously to coincide with the recent news about changes in the stock market and the reports of Iran’s nuclear reactors?”
In the Lane of Many Heads, people joke that the Eunuchs’ Goat has fallen victim to the vagina of the woman who took him in, Umm al-Sa’d. Surely you noticed the fire. When al-Ashi heard the news, he burned all his records, and Umm al-Sa’d left without her loud red lipstick. She had a nervous breakdown and bailed. She hailed a taxi on the main road and abandoned the neighborhood.
The sun overhead was exactly perpendicular, not unlike his doubts, when Nasser left the police deportation center in Umm al-Joud. He’d actually taken note of these sleights of naming that were considered a form of municipal beautification: The Lane of Many Heads became Alley of Light; Umm al-Doud, Mother of Worms, they changed to Umm al-Joud, Mother of Munificence. He knew that if he spent any more time there — in that den of forgery, deportation, passports, and nationalities — the worms of the massacre that was taking place there would begin penetrating his bones.
He drove off with uncharacteristic calm as images of sweaty-faced men in khaki uniforms holding endless lists of deportees — none of which contained the name Salih, the Eunuchs’ Goat — floated through his mind. Unless he’d used a pseudonym, this meant that the Eunuchs’ Goat had escaped after his arrest. Either he paid a bribe, or seduced a soldier with his good humor and good looks, or maybe fate just gave him a lucky break. He was stuck with that nickname, the Eunuchs’ Goat. Could you really tell an officer or government official that that was your name?
What were the official documents that were being processed by the Interior Ministry? The ones that al-Ashi and his wife had drawn up and gotten notarized. The ones they’d paid bribes for so that their middleman, Ahmad, the sewage cleaner’s oldest son and Aisha’s husband, would make sure they got through? No matter how many favors he called in at Civil Affairs, or the Passport Authority, or the Interior Ministry itself, Nasser could find no trace of anyone who’d been naturalized with the name “the Eunuchs’ Goat” or “Turk” or “Salih” or “Defiler” or “Marbleskin.” Those were all nicknames by which the handsome Turkish boy was known in the Lane of Many Heads. He was the one, people said, who’d be getting all the girls in the lane pregnant on account of his good looks and fair complexion!
Nasser made a note: Questions remain re: Eunuchs’ Goat. Still a potential suspect.
Nasser drove to the Lane of Many Heads. He snuck through the window at the back of al-Ashi’s courtyard kitchen into the firewood store and then into the chilly courtyard. The walls were covered in foul-smelling grease, cooking pots lay silently on their stoves, cats inhabited the pits in which the lamb was roasted for mandi. It was as though the kitchen had been in disuse for ages, not just since Umm al-Sa’d’s recent trouble. Her nervous breakdown, which everyone in the neighborhood made allowances for. “Who could cope with three shocks like that? The arrest of the Eunuchs’ Goat, the stock market crash, and losing the share in the Arab League Building she’d inherited?”
“Umm al-Sa’d had survived the clutches of death but the boy she raised was her downfall.”
There was nothing of interest in the yard except for the buried remains of newspaper in the pits, which served as a pen for the cats and whatever overflowed from the sewers. He picked up a pile of ashes that bore the headline “Mile Tower”; it looked like a spear or a pen stuck into the sands on the Red Sea coast. It towered in the sky over Jeddah at a height of sixteen-hundred meters and had been built at a cost of fifty billion riyals in cooperation with Bechtel Corp. The wind blew pieces of other headlines around him in the yard:
Rattles Saber
Market Crash
World Silent Despite Rising Death
Women Driving: External Pressure, Interior Funda—
Food Inflation 30–50 %, Affects Milk, Sugar, Rice