FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 19
Ignorance is not in the head but in the hand and its nerve endings, and in the heart. The worst death is death of the hand.
Under my clothes I was an electric toy that had lost its battery; all the wires that led to my senses and my heart had been cut.
I envy Azza, Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, as I see her clearly now: Azza, when she glimpses a swarm of bees, doesn’t run away but walks right into the attack with a laugh, and comes out immune to their stings. Sometimes rashly, sometimes innocently. I always feel sad for her, but only so that sadness for myself doesn’t overwhelm me …
If I had just a jot of her recklessness I’d probably be settling down in Casablanca with Ahmad now. As it is, he turned his back on me the second month after we got married, and threw those two words over his shoulder as he went: “You’re divorced.”
I hid the blow, knowing my little father’s heart wouldn’t be able to take a third shock. I built a cocoon around the words, and everyone in the neighborhood just took it for granted that he’d left me; the Lane of Many Heads never imagined that the legendary crystal bride would end up divorced.
So why’s Ahmad suddenly so keen to get me back? Is it your scent on me?
He never actually filed for divorce — maybe he just totally forgot about me. When he was forced to accompany me to Bonn, his face floated in front of me for the brief duration of the flight then he fled, leaving me to an endless string of operations, no doubt scared he’d be trapped by my crushed pelvis.
But now my cellphone rings at all hours, as if to say: what do you have left but me?
Does our love have a smell? What was it that created it?
Do you remember our last goodbye in the hospital room in Bonn? I skimmed you with my eyelashes, my chin, and the tip of my nose. I traced the pale whiteness of your belly with my features. Do you know what living flesh smells like? I can still smell it now.
In bed now, the tip of my nose can still feel the contact, and my eyelashes. It brings you to life so vividly.
Ahmad isn’t attracted to my scent; it’s your scent he’s sniffing for. Both the battery’s electrodes are connected, the energy is surging and the light has flicked on, luring the insects in …
Attached: you asked for more old photos, ^ …
This one’s from the first month, or rather the only month, of my marriage. Can you follow the plot of this psychological thriller, where all the characters are chopped to bits under the skin, but without guns, murders or ghastly diseases?
Aisha
Data Bank
“THE WESTERN FOOD CORPORATION — A SUBSIDIARY OF ELAF HOLDINGS — HAS finalized a deal to purchase a plot of 50,000 square meters in the far south of Mecca. Vice President for Development Salim al-Muriti has said that the land purchase forms part of the company’s strategic plan for new factory development. Steps are being taken to build the most modern food-processing plant in the region, which will comprise six standalone factories as well as centralized storage facilities. It is understood that purchase agreements for the necessary equipment have already been signed. A spokesperson for the corporation said the new factory will help fulfill the growing demand for food, especially in the critical seasons of both greater and lesser pilgrimages, which have seen steady year-on-year growth in the numbers of pilgrims.”
Yusuf was glued to the computer screen, even though there was a smell of stagnant sewers to the row of computers around him. Like every morning, Yusuf had snuck out of the Lababidi house and headed toward the nearest Internet cafe he could find. After handing over his five riyals for two hours’ use, he’d sat down in front of the last computer in the cramped room. Any hall of a house or corner of a shop that could fit two or three computers was enough to set up an Internet cafe that would bring in a steady stream of income for the owner.
Another day had come and gone and there was still no news from Mushabbab. Yusuf typed Elaf Holdings into the search box and hit enter. He looked through the corporation’s website, local newspapers, and discussion boards, searching for information about their extensive, almost octopoid portfolio projects: factories that made cement, plastic, bottled water, and prayer rugs; meat-packing plants where they processed the animals slaughtered in the pilgrimage ritual; real-estate developments for both low-income and high-income housing.
The Pakistani employee noticed the thick force field around Yusuf’s body and smiled as he set a cup of tea beside him by way of welcome, since he was a new customer. In an attempt to settle his nerves, Yusuf began writing an article. That morning he’d woken up to distorted images in his mind; he didn’t know whether they were the tail end of a nightmare or a reality about to befall the Lane of Many Heads. He paused to consider just how absurd what he’d written in his first article seemed compared to the destruction he could see from the roof of al-Lababidi’s house.
God sent his angels down to Adam on earth with emeralds, plucked from the gems of paradise. These angels were the first to master the art of building in Mecca, so they built, and Adam learned the art from helping them. Then he circumambulated what they had built.
Loud banging drums in his mind repeated the words that he chewed over constantly in all his articles:
At the time, the earth was home to demons and beasts. The angels took up their positions before the Haram Mosque, their backs to God’s House, looking out over the wasteland beyond and preventing the demons and beasts from entering the Sanctuary. Eve had also been forbidden from entering the Sanctuary. When Adam wanted to beget a son, he would go out to see her and lie with her and then return to the hollowed-out gem the size of a tent that God had sent down to earth for him to live in, as a consolation for having been excluded from Paradise, and which was raised back up after he died.
He searched for words that would neutralize last night’s nightmare and the sight of that adversary that was punishing them: faceless businessmen dressed in long, fine, gold-embroidered wool cloaks greeting men dressed in elegant black suit jackets and loud ties, individuals and groups, but all nameless. Faces and stars from the fifty states to the fifty-first and the fifty-second … Plus a woman with high heels and a facelift, standing for ruler of the world.
Yusuf only got gloomier. Staying in the Lababidi house had added heft to his gait; he dragged the whole house behind him. “One day Mushabbab and I were crossing the alley beside our house and he said to me, ‘I never noticed those stones before.’ I looked and saw faces as if they were out of a picture inside the house. Distress had turned human faces to stone.” He scratched those lines out.