Mu’az remembered that early the next morning he and his father, the prayer leader, had taken up their spots in the square outside the Haram Mosque by the King Abd al-Aziz Gate. They saw the police shut the streets leading to the square before the execution, but Mu’az didn’t even notice the crowds that encircled them. All he could see was a man surrounded by military guards. He had no idea where he’d come from. The brute was dressed in white and his head had been shaved bald. From where he was standing, it looked to Mu’az like the man had no eyebrows or eyelashes or eyelids, or mustache, even. Mu’az knew he was one of the thirty-six terrorists who’d been sentenced. Photos of their arrest had filled every newspaper. The danger he’d once posed had been completely stripped off him now, though. He was nothing more than the vibrant quintessence of his audience’s voyeuristic impulse.
Al-Ibsi appeared beside the condemned, and Mishari quickly tied the man’s hands behind his back and blindfolded him. The scene was so horrific that Mu’az didn’t catch a word of the sentence as it was being read out by the official in the square. There was a collective shiver around Mu’az as Mishari recited the profession of the faith three times, the convict repeating after him. Mishari’s father al-Ibsi was standing nearby, watching nervously, in case his son botched his first assignment. He was ready to step in if Mishari’s nerves failed him and he was unable to carry out the procedure. For a split second, Mu’az sensed that Mishari was on edge because of the huge crowd, and remembered what he’d heard him say the day before: “My father’s determination is so immense it dwarfs even the crowd in the square.” At the exact same moment, the same words ran through Mishari’s own mind, and when the official signaled to him to proceed, he lowered the convict to his knees facing the direction of prayer, though he wasn’t in a posture of prayer but halfway between prostration and standing. The flash of the sword cut through the scene, eliciting a sigh from everyone watching, and then the slightest nick on the back of the convict’s neck. The head reared back, a blade of sunshine fell across the bend of his neck, and the man’s head was separated. The blow was so light his blood didn’t even spill out. The body remained kneeling, solid and strong, while Mishari turned away, wiping his sword with a cloth he produced from his pocket. Mu’az’s eyes were trained on something in the background, though. He watched al-Ibsi’s enchanted eyes as he traced the head falling in an arc and landing nearby; he could hear the head fall at his feet.
MU’AZ FLINCHED WHEN THE SHEEP TURNED ITS HEAD TO LOOK BACK AT HIM; IT WAS as if he’d heard the exact same sound. “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” He ran the knife across and the same old blood came spurting out, but not from the severed neck. It came bubbling up from the ground beneath his feet. Mu’az dropped the slaughtered sheep and ran. No doubt about it: he didn’t have Mishari’s mettle.
“Mu’az chickened out! Mu’az is a chicken, Mu’az is a chicken!” The taunts of the neighborhood children pursued him until he disappeared into the maze of the Lane of Many Heads. At midday, his brother Yaqub went to finish the task of butchering and picking out the parts their father had asked for.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 22
‘No,’ said Ursula, ‘it isn’t. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love. It isn’t so merely HUMAN.’
Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! … ‘Well, I’ve got no further than love, yet.’
Over Ursula’s mind flashed the thought: ‘Because you never HAVE loved, you can’t get beyond it.’
(Women in Love)
I wonder whether I’m Gudrun, but at the same time, there’s some Ursula in me, I find.
Your cruelty comes so unexpectedly; sometimes you cut me off for one night, sometimes more.
I know you’re always pursuing new victims for your massage table, but what I can’t stand is how much I depend on you. And how I burden you with my feelings, which change from one second to the next. I can’t help but feel my feelings have wiped you out. I pity you sometimes.
But you put up with me, unless there’s a new body on your massage table. You were up-front about everything from the beginning, you sounded a little martyr-like when you said “My passion in life is healing the injured. I want to help by giving them a little pleasure in the midst of all that pain.” But when you help one body by giving it pleasure, you put all the leeches, which are stuck to your flesh, on hiatus.
I’ve been a leech for the past two days in a row. I drink serenely from the cruelty of your cold shoulder. I know you won’t leave me waiting for long. You’ll come back to me. And you’ll say, “You’re a sex bomb.” It wouldn’t be wise of you to detonate me from afar.
A sex bomb?! Is that what you’ve been blowing up in my face every time you turn up or disappear without warning like this?
I remember when Azza was only five she used to sleepwalk — or, at least, she used to pretend she was sleepwalking when anyone caught her — across the alley into our house, through the door that we always left ajar, up the stairs, across the six laid-out sleeping rolls where my brothers slept, and into my bed. I could feel her tiny body squatting there beside my sleeping head. “Aisha,” she whispered. “I hate sleeping.” Without opening my eyes, I’d lift up the edge of the blanket for her to crawl in. When she settled in the bed, she wouldn’t press her body up against mine, rather she brushed against me lightly where it mattered. Making her body into a crescent, she left space between us: her forehead against my lips, her left hand tucked in my armpit, her toes between my thighs. Our bodies connected at three points, we’d both fall into a deep sleep. I felt my heart go out to this child who’d abandoned sleep to come find me.
There was a time when I thought I could bring you into my bedcovers like a child, but you shattered the parts of that child inside of me.
Aisha
The Mahmal
AN ANCIENT SILENCE LAY OVER THE LABABIDI HOUSE. YUSUF COULD SENSE IT IN all the rooms, the narrow passages and the open spaces of the parlors, and inside the mirrors that lay on either side of the arched doorways. Yusuf sat in the silence on his own, eyes watching him out of the photos. In the silence, his life came to him out of corners he’d never noticed before. Everything he’d missed came to visit him in al-Lababidi’s house.
One night, he was dozing on the floor of one of the sitting rooms, surrounded by photos of the people of Mecca, and when he woke up with a start at midnight, he’d realized he’d been thrown back into the same dream he’d had on the night the body was found, when he was nodding off on their rooftop in the Lane of Many Heads.
He’d been watching the neighborhood that night from the rooftop. The book Saudi Arabia by the First Photographers by William Facey and Gillian Grant lay in his lap. Mu’az had brought it to show him, opening it to the page with a picture by an anonymous photographer found in a file on the First World War. “You need to see this for yourself,” Mu’az said, raking up a circle of fear around Yusuf. “I fear God’s wrath! I won’t be the one to expose people’s secrets.” Then he disappeared.