Suddenly, Mu’az noticed the metal gleam around Yusuf’s neck. “You devil!” he yelped, and without thinking leapt on Yusuf, who was caught unawares and crashed to the ground under Mu’az’s weight. He had no choice but to fight back, and the two bodies rolled and grappled on the bare summit of the roof. The only sounds that could be heard were their grunts and Yusuf’s attempts to block Mu’az’s blows. He finally managed to get on top of Mu’az and pinned him between his legs. “Are you nuts?” he panted. “What are you doing?”
Too furious to speak, Mu’az replied by spitting at Yusuf, spraying saliva uselessly into the air between them. He saw Cain in Yusuf’s face. “How dare you take it? Those keys are mine! You have no right!”
Yusuf realized he was talking about the key hanging round his neck. “This? It doesn’t even fit any of the doors! It’s bigger than all the locks!”
“You tried all of them?” hissed Mu’az in outrage.
“Of course not! It was obvious — this one’s all rusty. The three mihrabs on the bow reminded me of a key I saw once in a manuscript Mushabbab has about the Kaaba, so I thought I’d check if it had anything to do with that. I just took it off the bunch so I can compare it with the picture next time I get a chance to sneak back to Mushabbab’s orchard.”
“You had no right to polish it! It was a beauty, and you’ve gone and wiped years off it. You’ve erased the time! I never even dared photograph it. Now you’ve stolen it.”
“Don’t be dramatic. I just want to put it back into its context. I didn’t mean to take liberties — I thought I’d been allowed into this house for a reason. You know Mushabbab and I collect keys that’ve been retrieved from old houses and the Zamzam Well. When the time comes, the keys might unlock some of the mysteries we’re after.”
Yusuf didn’t mention what had really made him take the key: a feeling that it was meant for him. The first time he touched it, his hand recognized it — it was his key, he could feel it …
Mu’az pushed Yusuf’s weight off his body and crawled to the other side of the bare roof, where he sat in a sulk looking out over the city. He avoided looking toward Yusuf. Neither of them made any attempt to give or take the key back. It was a fait accompli.
To dispel the awkwardness, Mu’az went downstairs to the kitchen at the back of the roof and took out a jar of Nescafe. This had been his celebratory drink on the morning he’d first entered that world. He spooned out the coffee and added a share of milk powder to each cup as Marie used to do for him every morning. He took the two steaming cups back up to the tirama, and they sat down on the edge of the teak wall, beautifully engraved to look as if it were braided, where they sipped their Nescafe and dunked pieces of shurayk, tasting of ghee, fennel, cumin, and nigella; they cracked the coffee-soaked seeds between their teeth. They shared the intimacy of their truce meal in total silence.
Mu’az watched Yusuf like he used to watch Marie at her post in the shadow of the minaret of the Turkish baths, hunched over her camera lens spying on the Haram Mosque, and repeated what she’d said when she first invited him to look through the lens himself: “You’re not being invited into a house, you’re being invited into a dying world. The end of days …”
He could feel Marie staring at him intently; she could see in him what he couldn’t see, as if looking into a crystal ball. “Well, since you know the Quran by heart, do you know what this is?” She reached out and took his hand, opening it up like a piece of paper on which she was about to write her last will and testament. She pressed the big pile of keys, with their interlinked domed bows in the shape of interlinked mihrabs, firmly into the palm of his right hand, then took his left and placed it over the treasure. “You’re the closest person to these pictures,” she said. She released him with that entrusting gesture, and he knew then what he had to do; he still knew. He opened his senses as wide as he could and breathed in the motes of the past, which still hung in the air here. He was amazed by the fading faces he dusted, as he himself faded into a trance.
“The last thing al-Lababidi photographed was the courtyard of the Haram Mosque on the first day of Muharram, 1400 AH, or 1979 AD, the day that Juhayman al-Otaybi barricaded the doors after dawn prayer, he and his fighters on the inside, preventing the masses outside from coming in to pray. We have rare photos of the funeral processions that al-Otaybi used to smuggle weapons into the mosque …” Mu’az wasn’t sure where her words began and ended. “They smuggled a whole arsenal of weapons into the mosque’s recesses under the cages of women’s funeral biers, along with sacks of dates as provisions for the rebels’ long occupation of the House of God.” Yusuf and Mu’az went downstairs, guided by Marie’s ghost, and followed her to a staircase that led from behind the rooftop kitchen down to a hidden room. It was from there that Marie had witnessed al-Otaybi’s attack. The walls were covered in photos of weapons, dates, and decaying bodies strewn around the Kaaba. Mu’az channeled Marie’s deep, grief-stricken voice as he repeated her words for Yusuf. Yusuf didn’t know if it was Marie speaking or his own apprehension as he listened to her explaining to Mu’az that day:
“We were photographing what we thought was the beginning of a new hijri century, during which the Mahdi would appear, when suddenly we heard gunshots and a flock of pigeons taking off in terror and fluttering around the mosque’s minarets. Al-Lababidi was killed by the first shot fired from the courtyard. Thank goodness he didn’t live to witness what happened after that. Al-Lababidi wasn’t a photographer, he was a hermit, and he gathered Mecca’s spirit into his photos as though he were reciting the ninety-nine names of God on a string of prayer beads. His lens faithfully followed his subjects — scholars, people who came to the city just to be near the House of God, its custodians, the Shayba Tribe — and in their faces he reverently awaited the coming of the Mahdi. I was al-Lababidi’s constant companion, this man whose heart was connected to Mecca, who took photos like he was pumping his own blood into the city. It was like his veins ran through the House of God, so when those shots were fired in the heart of the city, he had to die. On the same day the Haram Mosque was broken into. We weren’t able to parade his bier through the city as is the Meccan tradition. His funeral procession couldn’t pass through the Haram Mosque’s Funeral Gate, or cross the Mas’a to the covered market of al-Mudda’a and the Night Market so that the locals could ask God to have mercy on the deceased. He died with his spirit intact. He hadn’t been broken: neither by his rivals nor by the frequent spells in prison he had to endure whenever he was caught sneaking forbidden shots of the Mount of Mercy in Arafat or the courtyard of the Haram Mosque because, they claimed, photography stole the spirit and desecrated the sacred. When he was deprived of a proper funeral they said the Haram had shunned him on account of his temerity, and that his burial was cursed because the people hadn’t prayed over him and he hadn’t been admitted into al-Malah. What with the curfew and the heavy sniper presence on all the city’s minarets, we had to bury him here, behind the house, at the top of Mount Hindi. It was Doomsday on the Arabian Peninsula then …” Her voice was still there with them, and in the half-light the photos watched them. Before them was the Haram courtyard stained with blood and corpses, trucks piled carelessly with bodies streaming in from Ajyad Gate, Abraham Gate, Farewell Gate, Funeral Gate, and King Abd al-Aziz Gate; the last of these had been added during the expansion.