Next, leaving the books in the background, Yusuf went out to the square where entertainers and storytellers were narrating the adventures of Abu Zayd al-Hilali to circles of listeners. On his left, sermons still echoed from inside al-Sawlatiya School every Thursday, along with sighs rising up from all the other schools and the homes of the great scholars of Mecca who either taught, led prayers, or delivered sermons at the Haram Mosque. Yusuf examined old title deeds and leases, some of which granted just one side of a store to a bookseller, while another bookseller took the other side; such was the booksellers’ rush for victory in the honorable occupation of bringing books to life.
As night wore on and the stores closed, Yusuf lingered alone, taking deep drafts of the night breeze, which was laden with the scent of ink, old paper, and perfumes, and echoes of the readings and recitations that were still going on. He stood amidst the network of stores, facing the awesome idol Hubal, who had been thrown out of the mosque, one of many idols that had stood in the area around the Kaaba in the pre-Islamic age and were removed after being smashed. Al-Lababidi’s shots were taken from angles that conveyed the vast might of the idol, which lay keeled over with its head, eyes, and nose squashed into the ground under one of the bookstores and its vast stone body stretched out. It was one-armed, because its arm, fashioned entirely out of gold, had been long since hacked off and melted down to make jewelry and gold bullion coins; the rest of the body had remained at the entrance of the Haram Mosque for worshippers to tread on or disdainfully leave their shoes on, until one night during the redevelopment, when it disappeared without warning.
In the dim light of the storeroom, Yusuf examined all the bookstore signs, in particular the attractive sign advertising the services of ABBAS KARARA, MAS’A, MECCA: ANY TOOTH REMOVED COMPLETELY PAIN-FREE, ALL KINDS OF FALSE TEETH FITTED, HALLMARK-GRADE GOLD CROWNING, ALL AT REMARKABLE PRICES.
Reliving his past in al-Lababidi’s photographs, Yusuf realized the danger he’d exposed Azza to. He had been fifteen when he’d dragged Azza to Sheikh Abd al-Razzaq Balila’s bookstore, which was a space of no more than four square meters where the air was laced with the aroma of books. The solemn old man in a white robe and matching muslin turban who greeted them didn’t lift his eyes from the parchment he was reading, part of a volume on mythical creatures that was bound in camel leather and stamped with gold leaf. The old man seemed to come from some immortal ancient time. Behind him were shelves loaded with old manuscripts — Ibn Sirin’s Interpretation of Dreams, Jahiz’s Book of Animals, The Soul by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya, The Necklace of the Dove by Ibn Hazm — side by side with stacks of parchments written in the hand of such great Sufis as al-Suhrawardi, al-Niffari’s Stations, and Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Openings. Abd al-Razzaq Balila’s bookstore represented stages through which the knowledge-seeker had to progress: when the student arrived from the Haram Mosque, laden with protestations of God’s oneness, he would travel through the old Arabic manuscripts, the exoteric sciences dispersing into irrelevance as he learned the esoteric ones.
When Yusuf had become engrossed in the Sufi section, Azza had gotten restless and tried to slip away, so he’d shaken off his abstraction and gone to hang out with her in the cartoon section.
They’d lurked there until the old man headed out to perform his afternoon prayer in the Haram Mosque, then Yusuf grabbed Azza’s hand and pulled her down the steps into a storeroom tucked between the houses in the Hajla neighborhood, where the modern-day mind could journey across the continents and see inside the minds of men, from The Courts of Great Men to Hugo’s Les Misérables as translated by the poet Hafiz Ibrahim. He pulled Azza in between the shelves. To their right, were Marx’s Capital, Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment, Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and The Union of Soul and Matter and his idealism based on the capacity of thesis and antithesis to create synthesis, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and his ill-fated war on windmills — books that had inspired many of the great upheavals that changed the path of humanity. To their left were the world wars — Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother—and the intellectual trials that had shaped humankind, from Asia to Europe to America — the Bustani translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, prophet of the Greeks, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Sartre’s The Flies and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Goethe’s repurposing of Sophocles’ model of tragedy, Orwell’s Animal Farm—along with a smattering of the works of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Foucault, Chekhov, Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Prévert, Balzac, Camus, and finally Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.
The yellowing pages of those old minds had made Azza cough, so Yusuf had distracted her with stories of wide-eyed young girls who ventured beyond the limited world of reality: Thumbelina, scarcely as tall as a thumb, who was nearly married to a mole, Rapunzel who let down her long hair from her prison at the top of a tower so her lover could visit her, Alice in Wonderland whose one teardrop flooded the underworld, and Cinderella with the fairy godmother who turned insects into horses and rags into jewels and silk so she could escape from the soot of her kitchen …
In the silence of al-Lababidi’s house, Yusuf’s soul peeled away and floated alone through time and space, wandering through a black and white world where Mecca’s past and present bled into one another on the walls. There was nothing to separate the photographs from the things that could be seen out of the windows. There was no longer any link to reality other than the diaries, which Nasser was as addicted to reading as Yusuf was to those photographs; the pair blended together in their shared addiction.