That day it felt to Nasser that Yusuf was using the darkness that ran through the heads of women like Azza and Aisha to get the better of him. The heads of these women, wrapped in abayas even darker, were primed, one way or another, for tragedy.
A Henna Half-Moon
I WOULD NEVER PRETEND — ME, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, DESERT LEECH THAT I am — that I wasn’t used to the 45-degree Celsius heat. The scorching middle-of-the-day heat is my favorite kind of high. Who would believe that my legendary senses have begun playing tricks on me lately? I lapped up the stink and the sweat and closed my eyes tightly to try to sleep, but the buzzing of Nasser’s curiosity kept me awake. He was standing by the side of the road chatting, and Halima was looking down on all my hustle and bustle from the rooftop. She made me feel self-conscious. Through the doorway she handed him the Arabic coffeepot and a tulip-shaped demitasse, and pressed a handful of dates into his palm.
“Lord, I haven’t tasted coffee like this since my aunt Etra left us …” Her smiling eyes brightened. All that precise measuring and tireless preparation was so she could hear a stranger sigh like that when they tasted her coffee. Halima’s face stuck out from her headscarf, which was wrapped around her face, accentuating her smiling eyes, and leaving the part in her hair uncovered, the ends resting against her chest. Hers was a youthful face that had made peace with the world, and her preoccupying worry of late — that Sheikh Muzahim would turn up to evict her any day now — hadn’t caused any wrinkles. The half-moon colored in henna on her palm appeared and disappeared with her every gesticulation as she spoke. Nasser began to suspect that she might have been meeting Yusuf secretly. Absorbed in the motherliness of her face, Nasser stood there by the side of the road listening to her and trying to follow any thread that would lead to Yusuf.
“My father came from Jawa in the Qasim Oases originally, but he became a city-dweller. He used to sit out in the alley, dressed in a striped sarong like the people of Jawa who come to live in Mecca. He even started to speak with a Meccan accent.” She bit off half a date with her tiny teeth and squeezed the other half into her palm. The stone she threw at a crow perching on the lip of a water vat; it flew off and landed on the shoulder of the one of the stone soldiers, its eyes trained on her. She polished her samovar with clay dust, which made all my coverings shine as well. Stories trickled out from her giggles:
“This house used to belong to my father. He sold it to Muzahim when the drought wiped out our orchards in the Fatima Valley. He sold the soil for mere cents and used it to prop up the men who came to see him who’d been wiped out. He took in a Yemeni man who came on pilgrimage from Aden and gave him a job selling the dates he used to harvest from the orchards in Fatima Valley. He rewarded him by giving me to him as a wife just like Jacob did with Moses. My father wasn’t impressed by his trustworthy character so much as the story he told: he claimed to be related to a Meccan family.” She pointed toward the sky. “They kept the name a secret, though, until they could prove it.”
From his eternal spot in his shop, Sheikh Muzahim listened in on their conversation. He would interject, but then pull back, not wanting to expose his opposition to the story. “He wasn’t a Meccan, her husband,” he cut in. “Not on your life, God help us. He was a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He was raised in the happy land of Yemen by their genie servants. He was cursed because he dared to alight in Mecca and pretend he was related to its servants.”
Halima didn’t pay any attention to his sarcasm. She was in the thrall of her own tale:
“I fell madly in love with the handsome Yemeni. I didn’t care who he was related to! Every time I looked at him it was electric, my heart trembled. But we weren’t allowed to enjoy it. The old men in the Lane of Many Heads used to make fun of him for the claims he made. They said that throughout Mecca’s history there were always Jews and Christians and infidels pretending to be Muslims so they could spy on the House of the Lord. But God cursed them and wiped them out for their insolence.”
“Hmph,” Sheikh Muzahim snorted. “How these birdbrained women dream!”
“My father, though, he adopted the Yemeni and took him to the venerable memorizers of Meccan lineages, al-Qurashi and one of the sons of Na’ib al-Haram. They saw that he carried the ancient blood and features, and they were ready to testify to his lineage, especially after they heard my husband talk about the moon-shaped birthmark on his mother’s palm.” She looked wistfully at the henna moon on her own palm, which defied all the neighborhood’s customs and traditions. “He told me that this moon here used to remind him of the one on his mother’s hand.” She showed Nasser her palm, ignoring Sheikh Muzahim’s snarling derision. “What I gathered was that my husband was descended from Mecca’s devoted servants who’d gone to Yemen in search of the key.”
“What key?”
“He showed me a drawing of the oldest key to God’s house. They said that an Iranian pilgrim once had stolen the key and fled to Yemen with it. Mecca’s most loyal servants, among them the Shayba clan, went looking for it, but the happy land of Yemen stole their hearts and they married Yemeni women, had children there, and never returned.”
“But what was it about that key in particular?”
“I don’t really know the true story, but they believed it was the greatest key. God knows best. The one that the books of the Shayba clan say unlocks all doors. Don’t ask me how. Over the centuries, the doors of the Kaaba have been changed, but that key is blessed. It unlocks them all. The historians spotted that key in the drawing that my husband had inherited from his grandfather. It had been passed down from father to son for generations in the Shayba clan.”
“But what exactly did your husband the Yemeni have to do with that key?”
“It was a message he’d inherited from the servants of Mecca. They raised their children to search for the missing key and bring it back to Mecca. My husband told me that his father was one of the servants and that he’d told him to return to Mecca so that he could prove his lineage and go searching for the key. They believed that the key had been taken to al-Andalus. An ancient Andalusian traveler had either taken it back there with him or made a forgery. The traveler had gone halfway across the world, from southern Spain to the village of Solomon in Yemen, where there’d been an earthquake that destroyed everything in the village. The only thing left was the doors, so he took them all back to al-Andalus. People say that by tracing the seals of Solomon that were etched into all the locks he was able to make a key that unlocked them all and that it was an exact copy of the greatest key.”
Sheikh Muzahim cleared his throat. “The woman’s head is stuffed full of her husband’s delusions. Those Yemenis all bring Solomon’s hour with them: at sundown they chew qat and start having hallucinations of the key that unlocks all doors, including the door between genies and humans.”
I confess it does amuse me to hear them go around in the same circles like that, and their imagination always heats up the neglected corners of my mind.
“My husband didn’t come to Mecca to plant roots and settle down. He came chasing the dream of the key. His father had driven it into him and he’d made sure that all his descendants would go looking for it after his time was up. My husband was killed, though, before he’d even appeared before the judge to verify his lineage. And on that same day, Yusuf kicked in my belly to announce his presence. I named him Yusuf after his father. I wanted to pull him back into life through his son.”