“I dove down — just as Yaqut al-Hamawi says in his Encyclopedia of the Lands—from the top of the well to the bottom, sixty cubits, half of it through solid rock.
“I was in a rush to get to the bottom of the well and the three springs there: one coming from the corner of the Kaaba, one from Mount Abu Qubays and Mount Safa, and one from Mount Marwa.
“Good God, when the vapors hit me: the smell of the beginning of death, the beginning of hell, the beginning of paradise, the beginning — Amen … Suddenly its gasp, or my gasp, dissolved my wetsuit, and those springs flowing from the Black Stone compressed my body into a crevice even more violent, baring me to their powerful flow.
When the two divers dredged the well, it was actually my breast they were
dredging,
when they picked up pieces of pottery, and keys, and metal, and mud, and brought them up to the surface,
when my remains were the last thing that Muhammad the Egyptian or the Pakistanis Bin Latif, Hamid, Yunus and Shawqi pulled up from the well,
when I came to on the floor of the Haram,
I was as sad as Adam, who moved the angels to tears. To this day, the grooves worn by the water still run across my chest.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 20
Dear ^^^^,
A cat was run over on the asphalt. That’s me. Crushed under my own loneliness this morning.
If you don’t reach out to me through the screen, through the air, I’ll …
I’m erasing everything I’ve just said.
From the Lane of Many Heads to Bonn in one fell swoop. From the sublime to the ridiculous, as my Aunt Halima would say.
I found a young Aisha laid out on a stretcher, heavily drugged, suddenly among all those white, ruddy European faces. Their language, not just their speech but their body language too, locked me out.
You know, ^, I went into a succession of operations “the way the Lord created me,” in only that shirt that came down to my knees and had the hospital insignia over my heart and was open all the way down the back. I had no sister or mother there to cover up my rear when I turned around. And that female nurse who weighed me at the last minute to determine the dosage of anesthetic.
Arab and non-Arab alike, our bodies share different kinds of surgical stitches, ingenious ways of splitting us open, whether longways or crossways or laparoscopically, and with radiation: sedative, inductive, tumor-destroying. There were more than a few Gulf, African, and Asian faces in casts or bandages. The waiting rooms were crammed full of relatives. They read books to pass the pains of their ill loved ones, or listened to their iPods through earbuds, blocking out the sounds of the world, or passed cookies and cups of instant, vending-machine coffee back and forth. A universe of faces flashed past as my gurney was carted into the operating theater, with no face to follow after it with a concerned look, or muttered prayers, or even a trembling lip.
I passed by like a ghost: Patient Nobody. I was received by the elevators which waited silently in corners or suddenly appeared in empty sections of hallway. A single warning was repeated over and over: it might as well have read “Elevator to Outer Space: Return Not Guaranteed.” The elevator was as big as our bedroom in the Lane of Many Heads, but made of a metal to which no emotions could stick, metal burnished with pains unknown to humans. No matter how much I hurt, it outdid me. With a single, definitive “ping!” it spit me out into the next unknown. I got the feeling that the elevator wasn’t expecting me to return from the operating room or the post-operative care unit, but it didn’t stop to shed a tear.
How much time went by while I was in your hospital? If you asked me, I’d tell you the first day lasted forever. In the three months that followed, I regained my sense of time. The six months after that went by like the blink of an eye — the blink of an eye is a lifetime — with you.
I’m just getting it back now.
Calendars are a deceptive invention.
They exist so we won’t measure time with the units of our hearts (the units of existence).
Dividing time into years and months and weeks and days and hours extends the void. Or it limits eternity.
Ahmad was always working for some big shot or other. Before his most recent job, he was PA to a Gulf millionaire in Cairo for years, and having to keep the man’s many secrets turned him gray.
Who was crying on the phone last night?
The fog of Rovinac clouded most of Ahmad’s call. His fear pressed into my cubbyhole bedroom: “My friend the military attaché died alone in his kitchen. It was days before someone by chance found his body. Promise me you’ll be at my sickbed, my deathbed! Aisha, do you understand? Life here … The women aren’t like in our neighborhood; they just want you to be virile and strong with a functioning credit card …”
Under the shower this morning, my mother’s soap gave off the smell of aloe vera, and I heard his voice again. “You’re the shroud I’ll be buried in!” I didn’t catch the single tear that burned my left breast.
In its faint saltiness, I made a promise to myself that I’d never get ill or old and infirm. Not in the Lane of Many Heads and not elsewhere.
Aisha
P. S. You scared me when you said, “We used to have a poultry farm, and when one of the chickens died, we wouldn’t notice it in the middle of that vast sea of chickens. We would only realize one had died when the putrid odor spread through the farm. You have no idea how rank a dead chicken smells! It was my job to clear up that rotten mess, including the worms crawling all over it, with my bare hands — I’d act like it was no big deal to impress my mother. At times like that, the distance from the farm to the woods, where I had to dispose of it, seemed so endless. My only hope was to block my sense of smell, and my sense of touch.” You added, “I pretty much can’t smell anything any more.” How can I leave my scent behind me when you can’t smell?!
Wedding Night
KHALIL DROVE ON WITHOUT STOPPING. ANYONE WHO GOT INTO HIS CAB GOT in with a stomach churning, knowing that this guy was trying to escape from his own shadow. Wherever he stopped, Ramziya’s shadow would catch up with him and be all over him like a rash. A car with tinted windows raced ahead of him in a pack of other honking cars, decorated with scraps of tulle and white flowers. Out of the corner of a back window the bride’s white veil flapped in the wind. He hadn’t even given Ramziya a wedding procession, Khalil thought to himself. He didn’t give her a wedding at all except for the primitive ceremony called the khamsha, which was when, without any preliminaries at all, her female relatives chased after her like a frightened animal, threw a sheet over her, wrapped her up like a corpse, and bundled her behind a screen they’d erected to keep her secluded. For a week, she was excused from doing any housework and fed constantly, so that she’d plump up and her complexion would be rosy. In the end, Khalil didn’t notice the brightness to her features. They married on a moonless night, a night without any light at all, nothing except for the blood of the sheep they’d sacrificed and invited the neighbors to partake of. She was handed to him in a basket without any effort on his part. The feelings of guilt gnawed at him. He replayed the night over in his mind: the first night he spent with Ramziya, the pilot woke up drenched in his own sweat. In the dark he looked at the body wrapped in a cheap wedding dress and white veil, which was still clipped to her hair, one end undone and dangling down, the pin that held it in place lying neglected on her cheek like a wound. He stared into the smell surrounding them. Her body smelled like fertilized soil when it’s moistened by nighttime dew. He withdrew into his dreams of Azza, slipped into sleep, and began to snore.