“Those bodies are the rebels. Marie took these shots of the destruction — or perhaps it really was the end times — which descended upon us at the turn of the century instead of the Mahdi we’d been hoping for.”
The eyes around them had begun to move, and came out of the photos in a huge procession, streaming from every corner of the house and from the fear-misted camera lens—Say: There is no god but God! — to pay their last respects at the funeral processions of those who departed during those final days of the old times.
Umm Kulthoum’s Sighs
SITTING AT THE ENTRANCE OF SHEIKH MUZAHIM’S STORE, NASSER RESEMBLED A wormlike appendage. The neighborhood stared at him with open dislike, and he was totally ignored by Sheikh Muzahim, who looked drained and hadn’t bothered to reach over to his tray and upturn a cup to welcome Nasser with coffee, or even refill his own cup, which was encrusted with desiccated grounds. He’d been getting the man at the cafe to prepare his routine morning coffee for him since Azza’s disappearance, but the man boiled it to death, spoiling the aroma of the blend with his slapdash approach and leaving a bitter taste in the Sheikh’s mouth. He’d left a plate of dry, half-eaten dates unfinished, and a fly was hovering loudly around a pile of pits that had been tossed into one corner of the shop. A fly was hovering around his whole life. Day after day since the body had been found, Sheikh Muzahim sat in his store staring into the void Azza had left behind in his heart. It wasn’t the pain of love or of missing Azza — sitting there, he couldn’t remember ever missing Azza or ever allowing her to forge any bond between them at all; he’d never had a thought to spare for her and so she’d closed in on herself and pushed him over the edge of her heart and down into the abyss of his store, where he could rot alone for all she cared. Just like her mother: he’d hated every morsel of food she’d ever cooked for him and would try to escape through the storeroom to go sit in the store, but she’d still reach through the door with an arm like a slippery snake to leave a tray of food a meter in front of the chair where he always sat, as though she were feeding some kind of feral cat. But the food dripped with cold resentment and would sink silently down his throat to choke his intestines like heavy stones. Azza was exactly like her mother, who’d died of childbed fever just to provoke him. “That’s what a woman does to you when you let her into your heart, she sticks her muzzle in and drinks your blood.” Thus he was careful to keep a safe distance between Azza and himself.
“Since we came under Ibn Saud’s leadership, after Mecca surrendered to his army and was then followed by all of the Hijaz — since he founded the Kingdom of Najd and Hijaz — no one’s been able to escape his dominion except for that devil the radio and now these satellite dishes too …” He only said it to fill the silence brought by Nasser’s arrival.
“Where’s your daughter? Is Azza dead? Who do you think killed her? Did Azza kill herself to escape your cruelty?” Those were the questions the detective had prepared, but Sheikh Muzahim grabbed the reins and beat him to it.
“Have you found the devil yet? Satan’s been throwing the rotting flesh of his followers in our neighborhood. They chose the alley right in front of my storeroom so as to trash my business, to get revenge on me; they want to hurt me and my daughter, because I’m the only one fighting back against their depravity! They’re walking all over us and herding us like livestock with their fiendish media and God knows what else!”
Sheikh Muzahim was foaming with rage. Nasser struggled to keep up with him as he went back in time — to long before this most recent crime — reciting a litany of Satan’s offenses he himself had witnessed.
“Satan has many faces, God help us. The main one is the accursed radio, an evil that wormed its way here in the sixties via Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s speeches. It snuck into his followers’ houses in secret, through balconies all over the city, and into the palm groves between al-Abtah and al-Hujoun, to Wadi l-Zahir and the gardens of al-Misfala and the foot of the mountains overlooking the Majin Pool. Then, when the Lane of Many Heads came to life, it was accompanied by that demon singing out of a box in the Sharif’s garden, which was given to Mushabbab’s halfwit grandfather, Ali Bao. Sharif Awn singled him out for preferential treatment to humiliate the people of the Hijaz. Don’t ask me about his story, ask one of Mushabbab’s acolytes, like Yusuf — God help him — that guardian of history. I wonder what he has to tell you about that despicable family? Mushabbab’s father, who was the Sharifs’ protégé, was a dissolute wretch. He used to hold monthly parties in his orchard for that witch who’d enslaved Mecca’s men, Umm Kulthoum. They’d listen to her concerts live on Radio Cairo — Heaven help us — and they were all head over heels; her sighs drove them wild. I only witnessed it once, when I was a teenager. It was just after the pilgrimage season and that wicked old man’s pockets were stuffed with what he’d made off the pilgrims, so without even a thought to the sanctity of the holy months, he held a party to celebrate the coming of the month of Muharram and invited everyone who was anyone in Mecca — but he left the gate open to passersby too, to all the dervishes, lowlifes, and travelers staying in the adobe houses around the orchard. That night after evening prayers, zealots like me flocked there along with Mecca’s rich and famous, but we kept to one side and watched, expecting the sky to fall on their heads at any moment. It wasn’t long before we began to see arrogance, dissolution, and poison stuffed inside the baklava, fried doughballs, and Turkish delight along with ground pistachio, rose petals, and honey. Our blood boiled at the sight of the hordes of men in their Hijazi waistcoats and cloth caps, but that was nothing compared with those degenerate women, who we could see shaking their rumps behind the curtain which separated them from the men while they waited for the music to begin. Suddenly, the huge wireless began to shake with singing and sighing, and all ears and hearts were glued to it, drinking in that satanic voice. I remember how we begged God’s forgiveness, sensing the disturbance to the column of light rising from the roof of the Kaaba to its counterpart in the Heavens. Suddenly the Sharif’s green parrot squawked its favorite warning—“Bala bakash, bala bakash! Don’t joke with me!”—and the lanterns hanging on the orchard gate flickered in a sudden breeze, and at that moment our sheikhs burst in with their hennaed beards, night air trembling in the rustle of their black cloaks, short white robes and red checkered headscarves. They made straight for the radio at the edge of the open sitting room; the men reclining on Persian carpets and the youths sitting around on the orchard’s earthy ground had no time to react. The sigh emanating from Umm Kulthoum’s bosom seemed strained and lengthened under the weight of that first rock as the beards surged forward and attacked the men dancing to the pipe music with coarse wooden sticks — thin, strong ones that left marks all over the shoulders and split the foreheads of more than a few children, including those of Mushabbab and his friends, who were too frightened to burst into tears even. They concluded their raid by finally silencing the radio with a boulder, but then, equally suddenly, they began to lose ground. Al-Labban, Umm al-Sa’d’s grandfather, spearheaded the resistance.”
Sheikh Muzahim paused for a moment and watched the effect his words were having on the detective. “Are you following?” he asked. “Do you see how these people strayed into sin? Do you care?” Nasser nodded, and the old man went on.