In his wedding night dream, he followed Azza until he pinned her against a wall. She didn’t mind when her abaya slipped but she clung on tight to her face veil. He was having sex with a faceless entity. He couldn’t visualize its features at all — only the features of Azza as an eight-year-old, which was when he’d last seen her face. He worried that the child’s features would kill his desire and impatiently undid her braids, which cascaded black water into which he dove down, only to surface terrified and agitated, his body soaked. He hurried to get rid of that wetness by throwing his underwear into the heap of ruins behind their house, but the heap of manure lying beside him was still stinking of methane, an odor like blinding snuff, making his eyes and nose run. He remembered suddenly that he’d married her to spite himself, as if to cauterize his heart, which had been paralyzed by Azza. When he loomed over Ramziya, her eyes burst open in terror, arousing him so much he lost all control. His body even forgot how it had refused her the night before when the door to their bedroom had been shut behind them. Suddenly he was no longer Khalil with the invalid pilot’s license. He was a slave like the slaves out of the Thousand and One Nights, where the evil queen parades their virility in front of her husband, whom she’d turned to stone from the waist down with a wicked spell. He had an absence inside him that devoured both the tender and the desiccated, and it was met by her hunger, digging away in the simple room on that narrow wooden bed decorated with cheap, now tattered lace, and those rock-hard cotton-stuffed pillows that gave the neck a permanent crick. When they rolled onto the floor, the rough Afghan wool carpet, from the area near the border with Turkmenistan, lacerated her elbows. Two patches of blood spread out and the rug became greedier, taking bites out of her shoulders and the edge of her pelvis as blood poured from her knees and Khalil’s groans filled the room.
In a sudden moment of disgust, Khalil wrenched himself out of Ramziya and crashed backward into the door, panting. The oily touch of its glossy blue paint stung his nakedness. His disgust was directed inward: how could his body have submitted to this woman when his mind was preoccupied with another? He forced his clammy body into his old clothes, ignoring his wedding outfit with the starched and embroidered collar. The Turkish seamstress in the basement had made it for him, designing it specially to resemble some of the embroidered robes her grandfather had inherited from Ottoman governors, which she had on display in her workshop. She’d presented him with the replica as a wedding present. The Turkish woman was laying her hands on the Lane of Many Heads; with her little gifts and her recipes for beauty, doors in the neighborhood were opening, and daughters were being entrusted to her basement, where she taught them embroidery.
Without even turning to look at the red-splotched body on the woolen rug, Khalil rushed out of the apartment and down the stairs of the Arab League, which was awaiting a final settlement in the matter of its inheritance. “This marriage of yours is an insult,” he said to himself, “from the bride herself down to the cheap furniture that’s going to be thrown out into the street when the male heirs rob you and all the other tenants of the deeds that dead al-Labban made out for you.” He bit his tongue to refrain from adding “May he rest in peace” about a man who’d hatched and raised four greedy vultures who felt no compunction about undoing their dead father’s final good deed.
As he went past the first floor, he was careful not to make any noise that might wake up Umm al-Sa’d, al-Labban’s daughter, and her husband, al-Ashi. He slipped warily across the foyer to the basement vault where the Turkish seamstress was running her scissors over women’s bodies, making dolls, hiding defects. “No eunuch or Turkish seamstress is good enough at cutting or measuring or stuffing or lining to hide how ugly Ramziya is in that sticky mess I’ve just left her in,” thought Khalil gloomily.
As if he’d uttered the name of a genie, the Turkish woman suddenly appeared out of the darkness and blocked his path, her bright dyed-orange locks licking at him.
“How many times are you going to turn down my invitation and break my little heart?” she purred. “It’s the morning after your wedding! Let me read your coffee grounds for you.” Her demonic face tied his tongue. She carried on reading his mind. “There are demons frolicking over your face. It’s no wonder the prophecies were sent down to Mecca, to a cave. Let me tell you: the young men of the Valley of Abraham are like the very red fire of hell itself.”
Foolishly he tried to get around her, but she breathed her poison into his face. His movements were drowsy, drugged. She led him backward, toward her studio, and the doors parted, swallowing them both. Her eunuch servant disappeared on the other side of the partition, keeping watch.
“Your muscles are all so tense. Just a breath and they’ll snap!” Her voice was a cool salve, like the raw steak his boxing friends in the States used to put over their swollen eyes after a match. He’d almost become a pro, just because he loved pain so much. That was what always attracted him: pain. Maybe he got off on the torture of Azza being so impossibly out of reach. With dizzying torment, the salve spread over his skin, still swollen from Ramziya, and sucked up all his bruises and blood clots. For a moment, the world ceased to exist and he imagined all his internal wounds had risen to the surface because of the salve and its sucking. He imagined that the salve could spread to cover his breathing and take his soul away without his body noticing the theft. Rather than beginning to decompose, his body would go on for ages after his soul had left, and he would be embalmed in that salve like the most elegant of pharaohs. When she began to sway him, he didn’t even bother to open his eyes to see where his feet were landing, he just let her whirl him around, and it wasn’t until bliss began scaling his spinal cord that he realized he was dancing. He was dancing with the same hunger that had conquered the nightclubs of Miami.
But then when she lay him on the floor, he suddenly felt the need to be covered up, and he reached up to the hangers above his head, carelessly pulling the newly tailored clothes onto his body. He grabbed the finest and softest pieces, the silky, the ruffled, the fluttering. When he stood up, he slipped on the silk and fell. But there was no reason to ever move again; his body submitted to the will of the silk. All that time he’d spent chasing his father and the impossible beloved, and flying planes, and carrying strangers through the streets of Mecca aimlessly — the whole time, he now felt, he’d been chasing after this softness, this effortless body, which didn’t go after anything but had things come to it. There was a mirror in front of him; he peered into it. The figure looking back at him shocked him out of his reverie: the almost-naked woman draped in silk had his face. Behind her, a peal of Turkish laughter smelled of Turkish delight, halva, palaces, consolation. She was all over him like a young scorpion riding on its mother’s back. In panic he tore her clothes off his body and scrambled out. He found his own clothes, strewn like evidence of sin, across her doorstep. When he made it out onto the street, his clothes were on inside out and the pen in his breast pocket was digging into his chest, reminding him of his loyalty to pain. In the middle of the Lane of Many Heads, he stripped off and put his clothes back on the right way round without the slightest embarrassment.
From the alley, he shot a look back toward the Arab League behind him, his annoyance climbing from the Turkish seamstress in the basement vaults to the third floor, where he’d built his dreams for Azza but had installed Ramziya instead. He tried to summon up some affection for Ramziya, something like acceptance.