Nasser read on:
June 6, 1995
Azza, your addiction to comics — particularly Batman issue 135, where Batman meets Batwoman — shocked me. The jealousy killed me. I was jealous of your obsession with that superhuman being. I realize now that Batman’s surprise attacks were your model for all those fleeing bodies in your sketches …
Aisha was my unbeatable competitor. That secret conflict with Aisha robbed me of two decades of my life, though maybe she was never aware of it. She had her brothers working as emissaries who’d race me to the bookstores at the Salam Gate and buy books for her, hunting out titles I’d never even heard of, then sneaking them in plastic bags past their father the schoolteacher who’d forbidden the termites that books put into people’s heads.
Aisha, whose weak sight got ever weaker, always read in bed after her family had all gone to sleep. I always imagined her like that, curled up in their reinforced concrete pressure-cooker house, while I sat on our mud roof and we competed to get as much light as we could from the municipal street lamps. I’d finish off a whole book in one night. But where she hid her habit from her parents, I, the fatherless, would read, and love what I read, in the open, because my mother Halima believed that my demon was made of paper — and anyway my book obsession kept me away from smoking, sniffing glue, and sneaking around harassing women, which was what all the other boys my age did.
My greatest loss to Aisha was Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the only available copy of which she’d managed, by some inexplicable miracle, to get hold of. She beat me to that lost time, which remained a hole in my heart like a keyhole through which my time trickled out, and sometimes it seemed to me that if I’d managed to get my own copy of that Lost Time then I might have lived a totally different life, might not have been betrayed like I have been.
ON THE ROOF OF AL–LABABIDI’S HOUSE, YUSUF REALIZED JUST WHAT A DAMAGING effect Aisha had had on his life, and realized that it was she, not Azza, who’d betrayed him. The one he’d excised from his diaries, the one he hated, even — he saw now what she’d stolen from him.
Yusuf was tempted to break into Aisha’s room right then to look for Proust’s Lost Time. He trembled a little at the thought. But he was pretty sure that she was sneaky and daring enough to have taken that Time with her.
He thought about Batman, wondering if Batman could have stolen Azza. Did Batman remind Azza of him, Yusuf? Or of some nocturnal creature that penetrated the darkness and avoided obstacles using sonar?
Yusuf was turning into the remnants of a bat, crashing into the remnants of her. He understood for the first time the meaning of all those red lines he drew as a teenager under Kant’s words: space and time are both finite and infinite; matter in itself is both finitely divisible and infinitely divisible; will was both constrained and free. He called out from the roof, “Azza! You’re all of those contradictions. Finiteness and divisibility of the infinite go beyond the surface. I mustn’t give up hope that you’re still there. I’ll search for you wherever you are, even in death, because your death means my death too …”
Yusuf missed bringing Aisha to life in his diaries, but he knew that fate had consigned those days to the past. There was no place for them in the present.
Ring Road
CHECKING THE PASSENGER LISTS OF ALL OUTBOUND SAUDI AIRLINES FLIGHTS for that Thursday and Friday, Nasser discovered Aisha’s husband Ahmad’s name on a dawn flight to Casablanca on the day the body had been found. His sudden appearance and disappearance made it look pretty likely that it was Aisha who was dead, but Nasser shuddered at the thought of going down that line of investigation.
That day, he was trapped for hours at the Gate Lane exit, which led to the Haram Mosque. The engines of all four lanes of cars groaned, pumping fumes into the Meccan heat in competition with public buses, refrigerated vans transporting foodstuffs, trucks piled high with live sheep, and tourist buses whose drivers stood on the gas and zoomed through the traffic, terrorizing the little cars that shoehorned themselves into the tiniest gaps in attempts to escape the creeping paralysis of the traffic. In seasons like this, and especially in the Umrah season during Ramadan, those buses played a leading role on the roads. They looked like mythical monsters, with the dense rows of pilgrims’ heads peering out of their darkened windows, and they mercilessly sliced paths through the masses of humanity before them, which is why Meccans simply vacated the center of their city and left it to the pilgrims, crossing the ring road around the Haram and heading for anywhere outside the first or second belts that encircled the heart of the city and from which all the main trade arteries branched off.
Nasser left the car running to go and buy some laddu balls, a specialty sweet made from yellow gram flour, raisins, and a hint of cardamom, which he stuffed — all six of them, each the size of a golf ball — into a sandwich under the amused eyes of the sweetseller. He’d eat that sweet for breakfast and lunch if he could, without a thought for the risk of diabetes that loomed over him like it did all the children of the Gulf’s oil boom. He enjoyed the greasy snack at the wheel, the car idling in the same spot thanks to a bus that had stopped in the middle of the road to offload pilgrims — Saudis from other cities whose cars were kept in designated spots at the outskirts of the city while they were loaded onto public buses to be dropped right in front of the Haram Mosque, then loaded back on and returned once they had performed their Umrah obligations.
Nasser looked at the bare shoulders of the male pilgrims and the unveiled faces of the women. If so much as a corner of cloth brushed one of those faces, a sheep had to be slaughtered in recompense. He thought it was weird that a woman’s face had to be uncovered for religious rituals, but sealed up again for life — he was an active participant in that contradictory habit, of course — and he realized that his heart wasn’t racing, his mouth hadn’t gone dry, the sight of those female pilgrims didn’t cause his body to stiffen — he looked at them as if they were some kind of non-masculine, non-feminine third sex — whereas the mere glimpse of a local woman was enough to nail him to the spot! The thought of meeting an unveiled Azza or Aisha in the courtyard of the Haram and stepping on the marble that their feet had touched caused his body to seize. Suddenly he had no appetite and he wrapped the uneaten half of his sandwich up and placed it on the seat next to him.
Ahead of him, the river of cars was dammed between banks of shops: Nour Grocery, Nour Valley, Nour Bakery, Nour Shawarma, Nour Juices … Harra Supplies and Salam Beverages were the only two names that interrupted the broken record repetition of the word Nour, light, over every sign. The repetition resumed a little way down the road, where the offices of the pilgrims’ guides were loudly decorated with lights trained on pictures of the two Holy Mosques and their custodian, the King, which hovered over the heads of the men sitting on long couches, waiting to receive visitors. By one of the offices, Nasser spotted a copy of Umm al-Qura sitting on a rack in front of a small bookstore stuffed with Qurans and biographies of the Prophet, so for the second time he left the car running and went over, paid the three-riyal cover price and grabbed his copy. Back in the driver’s seat, the traffic was still motionless, so he opened up the paper and flicked through in search of Yusuf’s Window, which caught him unawares with the headline “A View Over al-Malah.” He read:
Al-Malah is being extended upward to form a multi-story cemetery.