The only thing the Eunuchs’ Goat wanted was for the entire world to forget about him and leave him there with that woman. He fought off all Yusuf’s attempts to get him to go back to the yard. And his usual academic attempts to give them a date and time. He tried to tie it to modern history for him, calling it a flavor that had abandoned the city during the long, lonely years of religious sermons, which mirrored the jihadi campaigns in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Yusuf drew him a diagram in words of how the spiritual and financial capital reserves of the Arab World were depleted in the eighties and nineties, just before the incursion of satellite hegemony, which arrived in the period between the First and Second Gulf Wars, when the illustrated and sensory encyclopedias of real life were being rooted out and banished. During that time, the guardians of the encyclopedias turned their attention to denuding. At the portals to land, sea, and brains, they planted censors who pored over all printed materials, blotting out any form that resembled a woman, whether in advertisements or even in dress patterns drawn in Chinese ink. Mannequins suddenly disappeared from all the shops — except for in the lawless cities of Khobar and Jeddah — and were burned in secret. Yusuf summed up his theory in a single sentence:
“After centuries, women want their revenge. This is what the harem of today looks like.” He pursued the economic liberalization plan that had been sketched out in bold. “At the dawn of the third millennium of democracy, promoted violently by the West, we found ourselves cresting a wave that would lay the encyclopedia of women bare: women in chamber of commerce elections, women in the arts, women in advertisements, in the journalists’ syndicate and in official delegations, women in politics and ministries, women educators and humanitarians, a woman leading the organization for human rights. The mannequins were attacking and they were about to overrun all our biggest cities.”
As he went from clothing store to clothing store, the Eunuchs’ Goat was flabbergasted by the attention paid to a certain inconsequential Lebanese man who looked like a designer of cheap knock-off fashions. All the biggest clothing boutiques in the Gaza Market, in Street 60, in al-Awali would hire the man at a rate of three hundred dollars an hour to come and give life to their limbs of cork. All he had to do was play around with the fabrics to arouse the devils of temptation.
For days, the Eunuchs’ Goat kept watch. He learned that the Lebanese man only ever turned up at closing time, and was astonished by the warm welcome all the boutique owners gave him. They would hand over the keys to their supply rooms, pile all the beauties around him, shut the door to their shops and walk off! Standing on the other side of those locked doors was true hell for the Eunuchs’ Goat, and he spent nights on end standing there, prey to his own wild imagination, wondering what that Lebanese jerk and those beauties were up to on the other side. Jealousy blinded him and left a bitter taste in his throat. He began stalking the Lebanese window designer, following his every move, recording, to the second, how long he spent on his own in the biggest boutiques, the ones with the most exquisite, most captivating, beauties. A desire for vengeance burned inside him. He spent night after night calling the office for the enforcement of public morals, begging them to come and break up these rendezvous.
One night, he took advantage of the break for evening prayers to sneak into the stock room of the al-Ceyloni clothing store. He hid in there, waiting patiently for the store to shut after evening prayers. He bore the claustrophobia, the stifling feeling of all those bolts of cloth and cardboard boxes on top of him. He expected to be discovered at any moment by the stock boys, who kept coming in and out of the room to fetch more fabric. Finally, at exactly midnight, closing time, he heard that warm welcome ring out and a grimace settled on his face: his Lebanese lover had arrived.
“Please, my dear, be sure to keep all the doors shut, just to be safe. We don’t want any problems with the authorities. They’re already not very pleased about our half-nude mannequins and the fact that you spend so much time alone with them!” With that, the manager, shut out the lights in the back of the store and left.
From his hiding place beneath all that cloth, the Eunuchs’ Goat felt he’d been stripped bare, now that he was finally going to confront his adversary. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to announce his presence or raise his head to check out what was happening, let alone to pounce on the guy as he’d planned. Minutes passed like epochs and the Eunuchs’ Goat was convinced that he’d die right there in his hiding place, that they’d find his bloated body in the morning under piles of imported cloth. But then as the temperature rose in the store, he knew that what he’d been expecting to happen was actually happening. He flew into a blind rage. He got up and headed toward the front of the store, guided by the faint purple light, to where the Lebanese designer was standing face to face with a blonde female figure. Crouching to watch, he could feel her breathing grow faster as the man bent over her, his shiny, dyed-blond hair grazing her breasts. He was fumbling with her silk trousers, undoing the belt then the two pearl buttons. There was a flash of panties and a glimpse of her slender waist topped by a perfectly round navel. The Eunuchs’ Goat’s heart leapt into his throat, and he experienced a thirst unlike any he’d ever known before. The Lebanese stopped to contemplate that creamy torso for a moment and then, slipping one hand between her legs and another between her shoulder blades, he lifted her up off the ground. The way he grabbed her made the Eunuchs’ Goat’s blood run cold. His entire body, including his face, was transformed into shards of dark-red glowing glass. He lost all feeling in his limbs and fought to stay upright, gripping at bolts of cloth that fell with him to the floor, causing a racket. The Lebanese was in thrall, however, and didn’t even bother to look to see what was happening. He carried the beauty over to one of the low display tables, which was padded with layers of bright fabric. The body was laid out plainly, trembling at the thought of the touch to come. With unexpected force, the Lebanese decorator stripped off her trousers, exposing her bare legs, and flapped them about like a hot silk cloud to air them out. He placed his left knee between her legs, spreading them apart roughly and with a second thrust, separated her left leg from her body, which crashed onto the ground, hitting the Eunuchs’ Goat. When the beauty’s toes pushed against his belly, the devil overtook him. For an instant, the Eunuchs’ Goat surrendered to the tempting pleasure, but then he simply stood up and walked, breathlessly, forward into the pool of purple light where neither adversary really existed any longer.
As he was busy struggling with the body, the Lebanese window designer didn’t seem the least bit taken aback. He looked at the Eunuchs’ Goat like he was just another red mannequin, and allowed him to reach out and help. In silence and harmony, they worked together, stripping her, piece by piece, greeting her nudity warmly. The Eunuchs’ Goat didn’t dare bring his body closer, touching her only with his fingertips, which turned red hot anytime he felt her shoulder or her arm, as his body grew as stiff as an actual mannequin. Only then did he notice the wound around the woman’s left eye, it was like a torture scar, which wrapped around her eye and down to her neck beneath her left ear. His tongue yearned to lick the laceration, to cleanse it. Another scar appeared across her waist as he wrapped it in satin, another torture scar slicing her body in two. The Eunuchs’ Goat thought back on the Indonesian woman who was married to his father’s kitchen helper. The woman entertained every hidden desire in the Lane of Many Heads, and her motto was famous. “This,” she said, pointing from her waist to her head, “is for my Lord, and this,” she said, pointing from her waist to her feet, “is for my lover.” The Eunuchs’ Goat fought the designer’s attempts to reattach her leg; all he wanted to do was to grab the leg and run. But then, when the designer turned to him and placed one of his hands between his legs and the other between his shoulder-blades and picked him up and carried him out of the shop, throwing him into the street, the Eunuchs’ Goat said nothing. He fell onto the sidewalk where he lay for hours on the floor of the market, completely drained, having lost the first woman he’d ever laid his hands on to his adversary, who wrapped her neck and waist with coarse crimson fabric to exaggerate the contrast between her modern jeans and the striped silk across her torso.