The name started a hurricane inside Nasser’s brother. Like our ancestor Adam when God breathed the names of all creatures into his back so we could be created, his brother built an idol on the foundation of that name, Salma, molding her out of the breasts of the most gorgeous movie actresses, Umm Kulthoum’s deepest sighs, and the loveliest kidnapped brides out of Fairuz’s plays … He prepared a dower of twenty thousand riyals, a neckpiece of pure gold rashrash-work like a shimmering cascade, bottles of rose, musk, and ambergris, and a set of make-up with bright turquoise eye-shadow, pink rouge, and blood-red lipsticks, and he furnished the splendid open sitting room in the Qarawa Gardens in Ta’if, where he worked as a supervisor at the Bugariya orchards. But when he finally met Salma on the night of the wedding, she turned out to be a demon, and he fell into a terrible depression.
Nasser recalled the pall that marriage had cast over his brother’s life. He’d drawn his lot from a bundle of names three times, and every time, she turned out to be either a demon, or just a “woman with no salt,” as they say, meaning unremarkable and insignificant. He finally settled on the fourth: his Filipina maid. Every time, Nasser used to live off the crumbs that fell from the names and descriptions of his brother’s dreams, just like he was feeding now off David’s leftovers from Aisha’s letters, which had shattered all his teenage fantasies and replaced them with women like herself, women capable of penetrating his mind with their words, of desire and fruition. “Nasser, you’ve stolen a sleeve from that cheap flesh and now you’re worshiping it!”
Dogs barked in the distance, and Nasser thought to himself that the municipality should go back to culling them using meat mixed with broken glass. It would mean dog corpses filling the horizon with their rotting smells, though. He put his hand under his shirt and felt for his heart, which he’d never faced up to before. Bringing it out into the air, he could tell from the cracks all over it that there was a gaping hole inside of him like a cage, for a lover like Aisha or a wild bird like Azza, and that it was still beating and capable of loving Azza’s bare feet padding up the stairs to the roof as she crept out in her sleep to visit Mushabbab, or sinking into the sandy ground of Mushabbab’s orchard, or even when Mushabbab knelt down humbly to cover the tips of her toes. Nasser knew that all the men who’d had those two women had left cracks in his heart where oxygen was seeping in, feeding his infatuation, and teaching him how to outdo all of them in courtship. If either Azza or Aisha fell into his cage, he’d show no mercy: he’d starve her to make her eat his live flesh, he’d interrogate her and wring out her femininity, he’d tear away all the pages that Yusuf or the German had imprisoned her with, he’d wash her long hair with his hands and wipe everything she’d said from behind her ears with fragrant kewra water, and rest his own ear on her lips to break her fast … She, the one Yusuf’s diaries described as fasting from words.
“But Nasser, she’s half your age, and besides — you’ve been fasting all these years and now you’re falling for a dead woman!”
A Window for Azza
December 2, 2005
From California, USA, a motorbike has been imported to the Lane of Many Heads … You must have heard the roar of its engine.
Note all the details on the delivery slip, Azza:
Make: Yamaha, imported 2004
Color: red gloss
License: Florida 946248, 01/06143234
Owner name: Mushabbab Ateeq Al Nayib
Order name: al-Sheikh Khalid al-Sibaykhan
Notes: With thanks for your assistance in organizing private events.
Mushabbab was as happy as a child, saying that at last he could cross the whole city now and get out of the Lane of Many Heads.
Nasser couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw al-Sibaykhan’s name. He circled it in red several times before carrying on reading.
That Mushabbab is a rocket launcher. He’s thrust me out of the manual age and into the petroleum age with this motorbike of his.
“Life’s like gas, you burn it or you get burnt!” My hands respond to Mushabbab’s motto, pumping another shot of gas into the motorcycle, and I shoot like a screeching arrow along the Mecca ring road on my way back from Ajyad to Sittin, heading for the masses of people in the crowded neighborhoods where I drive around displaying the Starbucks logo on my T-shirt. Don’t laugh, Azza. I can’t be deformed, not even by a dubious logo on the back of my green shirt. I was hired by the advertising company on the condition I provided my own motorbike, so I’m using Mushabbab’s.
I fling off the logo behind my back. We won’t waste gas by stopping to look behind us; you’re here with me, the speedometer is showing “Azza,” you’re the point I was naively aiming for in my history studies.
Yes, this motorbike is the real me.
Speeding through tunnel after tunnel that cuts through Mecca,
I start with the glass and steel towers that surround me. They’re solid but I find my way in; all it takes is a firm foot on the gas and they start unraveling and peeling off the city’s skin to reveal the hidden kernel underneath.
Azza, burn all your patience and come race me in this speed,
Can’t you feel that I’m light, for the first time in my life? All I need now is to touch you in the rushing air and be blown away with you.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 24
Dear ^,
Did you really paint me from memory???
Even my mirror doesn’t greet me with a face like this! And the lips, my God … What a scandal! And that nose, sticking itself up in the air to scorn me.
You shouldn’t make my face so open; otherwise my features won’t have anywhere to hide from you.
I can read even your faintest trembles in the photos you send me. I can even read the scent of your mood now.
You smell like me now.
You’re like Birkin, who doesn’t need to admit his excessive sensuality, his darkness. For him, that deep, piercing gaze is enough to terrify Ursula, for me to know, with a new sense in my body, what he’ll say and how he’ll wreck the scene.
I think your challenge is the same as Birkin’s — not to fall in love with an Ursula but to test your ability to be subsumed in another person, someone who will understand you not through words but through touch, to move slowly, to keep sex from burning her — sex devours handfuls of one’s innermost core, it ignores those places that long most to be heard, it fails to give them expression or to allow them to express themselves, but soft touches are like butterflies fluttering at the edges of edges where it wouldn’t even occur to you that there were any nerves.
Birkin might submit to desire, Birkin himself might even act out that desire and sweep away, but that non-desire, that hunger to reach oneness that went beyond sensuality, remains like a delicate butterfly fluttering at the edge of his soul, unconsciously, without a backward glance to spoil it, swiftly rubbing its wings and leaving behind a colored stain of wing-dust on the soul.
Attachment 1: Jameela covered head to toe in a red wrap, with a man on either side: her father to the left, the registrar to the right.
Mu’az took this shot for me. I didn’t show it to Azza. I was too scared.
Attachment 2: After some hesitation I’m sending this picture of Matuqa, Yabis the sewage cleaner’s mother.