He looked her up and down. “My, my Halima, bird wings and high heels?” he teased.
“If the job demands it.”
“Give me one of your outfits. I can put a veil on and come help you.”
“No boys allowed.”
“I’ll come as your little assistant boy and help carry your stuff. I can just peek through the door.”
“You call the prayers and you’ve memorized three-quarters of the Quran and you’re sharp enough to steal the kohl off an eyelid — and now you want to come peep at girls?”
“Just from the doorway. I want to see what an eight-star hotel looks like on the inside. I want to see what Mecca looks like from a skyscraper. I promise you I’ll look down at my feet the whole time. I’ll only look up to see the sky.”
“Everything in the neighborhood’s topsy-turvy now. I don’t know what to think. Even you all, sons of the imam! You’re not like you used to be.”
His pure eyes stared straight into her own and pleaded. For a moment she looked to him like the very embodiment of tragedy. Her deep-set eyes were like graves for her husband and son, the whole neighborhood even. He could have lain down to die in one of her all-enveloping eyes. Tragedy stopped at her neckline, however. Maybe if he’d been able to picture one of those great big breasts, he’d have enjoyed a glimpse of paradise, the promised land of milk and honey.
She draped her veil over her face. She didn’t permit him, nor did she forbid him, so he followed her in silence. They walked down the alley amidst barking dogs and jangling music videos.
It was night. He was all in black and she wore heels with flashy diamante buckles on the side. They got into Khalil’s cab. The scent of olive-oil soap preceded her into the back seat. Khalil turned the car over robotically and set off into the Meccan night, smirking with menace, searching for what to say to annoy Mu’az.
“So,” began Halima, “How do you like being married?” It was the question all of the Lane of Many Heads had been wanting to ask ever since they attended his wedding to Ramziya the sewage cleaner’s daughter. The question came as a shock.
This woman was the definition of a trooper, he thought to himself. Nothing — not a body, not the disappearance of her son or beloved — nothing could put an end to the rituals of her life. Here she was, made up and tottering on high heels off to a wedding, and asking him about his bride.
“Well, to tell you the truth, Auntie—”
“Now don’t you start complaining!” she warned him with her usual giggle.
He couldn’t help but laugh.
“I haven’t laid eyes on Ramziya since we got kicked out of the Arab League. I sent her back to her father’s house and I started living in this cab.” His voice conveyed a mixture of relief and sadness as they drove through the al-Zahir district.
“Khalil, don’t just abandon her like a house that’s been left to someone in a will. God will curse you for wronging her!”
“My body’s been sucked into a void and my mind’s in a different space altogether. Please, Auntie, stop giving us headaches with this curse business. I’m a man and I won’t be beat. I defeated cancer. Doctors in the U.S. said I was a miracle case. It had spread through my stomach despite the intense chemotherapy, and they’d given up hope.” Khalil looked at himself in the rearview mirror and ran his hand over his hair, which had grown back sparsely after his treatment. “I was determined to make the angel of death choke on my dust. I fought back with yogurt and garlic, clinging to life like a flea on the back of a bull. I drank buckets of that stuff. One morning I woke up and discovered the cancer vanished. It was a miracle. The will to live can make miracles out of Moses’ staff, or yogurt, even. But it’s not working at the moment, now that I’ve got Azza eating away at me. She keeps metastasizing. And Ramziya’s like a bucket of garlic, burning up all my cells, benign and malignant together.” Khalil’s expression was all bitterness now. Everyone knew that the chemotherapy had left him infertile. The day he went to ask Yabis for Ramziya’s hand he surprised everyone with an award-winning performance.
“It’s your daughter’s decision. If she wants to have children, then it would be unjust to tie her down to a man like me. The doctors robbed me of that option. They could’ve frozen some of my sperm before they put me through the chemotherapy, to give me the chance to have kids in the future, but they gave me the treatment without letting me know what the side effects were.” The light shining through his thinning, almost glowing, hair gave him a boyish air, a vulnerability that played on the heartstrings. It was a miracle when his hair started to grow back after the chemotherapy and he started treating his hair as if it were a child. He would oil it and comb Minoxidil through it every night. He was as careful as he possibly could be and he never suffocated it under a headscarf. He spent more on that desiccated chaff than he did on his entire body — the body that had already betrayed him once and given life to that dinosaur, cancer. That day, standing in the alley in front of the sewage cleaner’s house, he could be heard as he explained, in detail, how the doctors had failed to freeze a portion of his sperm. As he delivered his scientific exposition to Yabis, the look on the man’s face reminded him of a cow drinking happily from a muddy puddle. His response was entirely unexpected:
“I know my daughter. Who are we to question God’s wisdom? Who knows? Did you hear about the Indian lady who got pregnant in her seventies? When the Lord wills it, milk will pour from stone udders.” Their blind faith was almost defiant and Khalil decided to punish them for it by going through with the marriage.
On their wedding night, that same inner demon goaded him. As she walked toward him resignedly, he stretched his arm out, blocking the doorway to of their bedroom. “You’re going to walk out of here just like you walked in, childless, all the way to your grave. Nothing but burnt firewood. There’s no point to anything you do in there. It’s pointless. You’re just a toy for me to play with.” His idiotic talk pained even his own ears.
“Leave it to God,” Ramziya had said, sighing, emitting a faint whiff of something rotten. She defied him by replaying the same pious tune her father had. “Don’t reject God’s blessings. When you get to the bottom, say, ‘Praise be,’ before you say, ‘It’s tar.’”
Halima’s probing questions made him uncomfortable and in an effort to distract her he nodded toward the mass of white buildings that had come up on their right.
“Those are the Sayf buildings. There are forty-four of them in total. They’re kitted out like spaceships and all lit up. They were built over where the mountain and citadel of the Dabba used to be.”
“Yusuf’s obsessed with that mountain,” Mu’az chimed in. “Those are the rocks from which horses first emerged in the beginning of time and it’s where the Dabba will appear at the end of time. It will wipe the earth out with its tail and then comes the resurrection. He still writes about how they destroyed the citadel, which was more than a century old, despite Turkey’s objections and their pleas for UNESCO and the heritage protection bodies to get involved.”
Khalil shot to life as if he’d been stung by a scorpion. “You still see Yusuf, you son of — an imam?”
Mu’az brushed off the insult. “Don’t you follow his column in the paper? He said that they’d promised to rebuild it on a different mountain farther away, complete with all its original underground vaults and secret passages. Including the Ottoman chests that are still shut up with great big padlocks on chains and the old guns and cannons that are breeding-grounds for rats now and haven’t been fired in more than three-quarters of a century.”