“I’m on four, but looking for a fatwa to erase two.”
“I’m on five, and we’ve exhausted our options with sheikhs and fatwas. Now we’re looking for a third party who’ll marry and divorce me without touching me so my counter will be reset to zero.”
“How about you, Aisha, what are you on?”
“I’m an outcast, I don’t fit in anywhere in this musical scale of divorce…”
Correction: Azza’s in a state. There’s a rumor that Mushabbab was arrested for dealing hashish to the daughter of someone important.
P.P.S. Here’s the story as Mushabbab told it to Azza:
Mushabbab went up to the gate of a palatial house, looking with awe at the sky-high walls, more than eight meters high. From a window in his post adjoining the gate the guard watched him, knowing that the young miss had been expecting the man and had left orders at the gate for them to receive the parcel. Seeing the name on the parcel, the guard took it without questioning, and immediately, from the evasive look on the poor man’s face, Mushabbab realized it was a trap, even before the gate slid open and the police car appeared, and a circle of policemen closed in on him. They shoved him up against the car, and from there he watched, as if in slow motion, the parcel being transferred from hand to hand. No one even bothered to look inside. They kicked him unconscious on the spot, and by the time he regained consciousness he found himself lying by the side of the Mecca-Jeddah highway. He struggled back home and hid out in his orchard for more than a month, but his attackers saw no need to pursue him afterward. Apparently the broken ribs had simply been a warning to Mushabbab to forget whatever he’d seen in that palace.
“But how?” asked Azza, touching the makeshift bandage wrapped around his broken ribs. “How could you be so reckless?”
“If only you could’ve seen the poor girl … She can’t be older than twenty-four, and she has no life. She lives in harsher conditions than the prisoners in Guantanamo. Her father’s an international business tycoon, but she’s not even allowed access to a cellphone — even the maids are allowed that much. She’s under round-the-clock supervision and all she can do is sit there and watch while her life slips between her fingers.”
Azza couldn’t bring herself to ask whether a cellphone was the only thing he’d smuggled in that parcel. Instead she ventured, “May I ask how you got mixed up with this girl and this action movie plotline?”
“Her father’s one of my clients. I supply him with a traditional dance troupe whenever he wants to organize a showcase evening for his foreign guests.”
Azza regarded him sardonically. “Did you provide his daughter with the same service?”
Mushabbab was pleased to hear the jealousy in Azza’s voice.
“The whole thing started last month. The father asked me to go over there and he told me that his daughter was suffering from acute depression and that she’d tried to kill herself several times over the last ten years. She’d been taken to see the best psychiatrists but nothing worked, and since they’d heard that I practice healing through the Quran they wanted me to give it a shot. I’m always careful not to get involved with powerful people, but they wouldn’t accept any of my excuses; they just made an appointment for me to go see the girl.”
There was no sign of life at all anywhere around the sky-high walls, only the opening to the right of the gate from which the guard peered out. When Mushabbab presented the permission slip he’d been given, the red-checked headscarf vanished for a few minutes and then a door beside the gate opened and swallowed Mushabbab up. Amazed, he submitted himself to the secretary who’d come to receive him. He was shown to a car and driven through gateway after gateway until they reached a cluster of modern villas set amidst scattered palm trees. The place was an artificial tableau of lurid green. Nothing moved other than him and the palace secretary, two crows disturbing the plastic lushness of the scene as they headed toward what the secretary referred to as “the girls’ villa.”
He left Mushabbab alone in the reception room, some three hundred meters squared — another perfect tableau of luxuriant nothingness. A Filipina maid in a blue- and white-striped uniform appeared and asked him, “Anything to drink, sir?”
“Just water, please.” His voice came out muffled in the void. A tray bearing fresh orchids and a crystal tumbler of water was set before him and sat untouched as minutes stretched into an eternity. For nearly an hour he was left there, sitting by a coffee table weighed down with a variety of the finest dates, glazed nuts, and rich sweets. He was expecting somebody to pop up at any moment to inform him that the girl didn’t want to see him, and to show him the door. The furniture was exquisite — everything upholstered in pure silk — even the walls were covered in golden brocade. The entire space was freeze-dried by the powerful central air conditioning into a mummified tableau of grandeur.
Finally, a golden door at the end of the room opened with a faint sound, and a young woman appeared and padded barefoot toward him across the silk flowers of the Persian carpet. For the sake of her modesty, Mushabbab didn’t look up but the girl came so close that her feet came into view, and he could see the patterns of the carpet reflected on her pale crystalline skin, a sheen of blue and crimson.
“So you’re one of them? A charlatan who hasn’t got a shred of professionalism left?”
Mu’az didn’t say a word. She stamped on his foot, hard. “Apparently you’re a magician. You think I’m a child who likes magic tricks? Life’s just a broken toy.”
“There’s no magic involved, just your inner strength enhanced by my recitation. You could even try reading the Quran on your own to find inner peace.” Some sixth sense felt a tremor in the air. The call to prayer rang out in the silent emptiness around them, but it wasn’t that; Mushabbab felt like he was being watched. He ignored his apprehension.
“Next you’ll tell me to try the Surah of the Cow! My sisters already treat me like a mad cow that isn’t even good enough to make leather out of. I haven’t seen a street in ten years, apart from in video games and on TV. My mother left for the land of cuckoo clocks, chocolate, and secret bank accounts. Have you seen how they use remote-controlled robots to race camels now? Well I’m the camel. My sisters are the robots and my mother’s holding the remote control.” Having to listen to oppressive paranoia like that got under Mushabbab’s skin. “And when I don’t respond to the remote, they try to break me in with anesthetics — I had a suitcase full of every drug you can think of. First they got me addicted and then they took the suitcase away to keep me docile with pain. Now they’ve brought you along to annoy me.”
Mushabbab had just arrived back at the orchard when a messenger arrived. “Don’t come to the palace again. Your services are no longer required.”
I’d been videoed and they’d already screened me; apparently I’d been deemed unfit.
“Can’t you do anything?” asked Azza.
“Her father said he’d have me burned for practicing witchcraft! They said I should be grateful they let me go safely after I defied his orders and tried to smuggle that stupid package to her.”
Juhayman
TUESDAYS WERE MU’AZ’S DAY OFF FROM THE STUDIO, SO THAT MORNING HE headed for the Lababidi house, taking a roundabout route to be sure no one was following him. When Yusuf opened the door, he was preceded by the warm scent of shurayk bread, a local specialty made of mixed gram and wheat flour and fragranced with fennel, which he’d bought from Shaldoum’s bakery. Shaldoum always got that old-fashioned taste just right.
This time, when Mu’az led Yusuf upstairs, he kept going past the first rooftop and up to the tirama, the balustraded terrace elevated above the rest of the roof. “You could sleep up here on really hot nights,” he suggested. Yusuf sensed arrogance and superiority in the offer, as if Mu’az saw himself as the unchallenged sovereign of the domain and was deigning to toss Yusuf a few crumbs. He was letting Yusuf walk around in his kingdom and inviting him to enjoy a few fruits from the orchard of photos.