They reached the ballroom near the top of the building.
Halima crossed to the other side of the partition that separated the hall, shooting Mu’az a look that warned him not to follow. On the other side lay a forbidden world. It occurred to him that he could get his hands on one of his sister’s abayas and cross over to the other side — like those gatecrashers who came to weddings firmly wrapped up in abayas and veils so no one could see who they were — if only he wasn’t afraid of Halima’s wrath. He stood there as if standing outside heaven’s gates. Dancing and music and makeup and beauties.
His heart wouldn’t obey his commands to leave. The female guests were walking through to the other side and Mu’az was dawdling by the entrance, ignoring the abaya-clad female bouncer standing nearby. He retreated slightly to a spot where he could still watch the women as they entered. You could see their hair was piled elegantly on the top of their heads underneath their headscarves, and they shone like crystal dolls.
He checked them all out. He wasn’t looking for a face so much as he was looking for a body whose language he knew. The language that permits a man to read a woman’s body beneath her abaya. He could’ve picked Sa’diya out of a crowd of a thousand abayas, and he knew Azza’s fleeting black form, though he’d never told anyone about her little nighttime outings. He simply memorized how her pinky stuck out while she was drawing, guarding the surrounding area like a scorpion’s tail. He often crossed her flitting nighttime path, and followed her form, which emerged more often than not out of his imagination rather than Sheikh Muzahim’s house. Her disappearance would forever be a rupture in the ties that bound the neighborhood together. From within that rupture, he tried to guess where she might have gone. There were a billion stopping points between the morgue and the wide world. He thought back on the dawn the body was found. The black Cadillac that belonged to the social insurance employee. How much blackness on wheels had stopped at the entrance to the alley that day?
Mu’az was mesmerized by the drums and the colored glass and the jewels all around him. Where did luxury like this even come from? Even Mushabbab’s orchard, the neighborhood’s pride and joy, would feel embarrassed by these riches. Where did Mecca hide all these nude-clothed women? They were unreal. They were woven from cyber-fantasies and science fiction and grandmothers’ fairytales: “Beauty sculpted by hand or by God Himself?” Even the old legends were dumbstruck by the beauty of these women.
Mu’az had no idea where this particular woman had appeared from. She came from behind the partition, rushing against the tide of the other women, lifting the hem of her headscarf to cover her mouth as she went. She turned around and in that sudden movement her hair came loose and cascaded over her cheek. She reminded him of a dove laying its neck against its mate’s. The woman was gone again suddenly. She hid herself away in the image she kindled in his mind so she could disappear. Another bouncer, who was standing beside the elevator, nudged him, so he turned toward the elevator to make his escape — and that was when he spotted a slender foot disappearing behind a narrow door at the end of the hallway. He headed straight for the door without thinking. Every part of him was being pulled toward that crystal-studded shoe. When he opened the door, there was nothing to greet him but silence. He walked down the short corridor to another door, opened it, and walked through. This time he was met by the hush of an empty ballroom. He walked toward the faint light in the direction of the red-satin padded elevator; there was that alluring scent he couldn’t name. When he stepped forward, his footsteps sunk into the shiny redness and it enveloped him entirely. When the elevator launched him upward, his breath caught in his throat. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples. His blood was rushing as if it were about to burst out. When the elevator doors opened, he was hit by the scent of an orchid in the center of the hall. An icy draft leeched the energy from his body and the sluggish pulse of everything around him made him feel as if he were walking not through a room, but through the inside of that woman, who’d lured him here into this suite. Pale and trembling, he proceeded down the corridor, which led to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the rows upon rows of worshippers making their rounds in the courtyard of the Haram. The door he’d thought was a side exit opened up onto a large study. He instantly zeroed in on the table where a silver amulet lay beside several ornate antique perfume bottles — as if it had been waiting for him all along. It was hollow, in the shape of a half-moon, engraved with tiny diamond shapes. He recognized that amulet instantly. Mushabbab had once asked him to store it in locker number twenty-seven in the cloakroom next to the Holy Mosque.
Mu’az was dumbfounded that the amulet had found its way to this tower; perhaps — as Mushabbab had suspected all along — the centerpiece of a great conspiracy. Perhaps it was just a copy of the original, and yet Mu’az was completely mesmerized by it just as he’d been the first time he saw it. It was a suicidal idea, but he grabbed the amulet and ran. He crashed through doors and hallways until he made it into the elevator and began slowly descending the many floors. When the doors opened, he walked out into the lobby, which was silent and frozen by the central air conditioning, squeezing the half-moon in his hand.
Loss of Sadness
THAT NIGHT — IN THE HUSHED AL–LABABIDI HOUSE — YUSUF STOOD FOR A LONG while in front of a picture of Bull Cave. He could see his life in that photo: the day he turned eighteen, the time he took a visit to that cave where the Prophet had hidden from the polytheists of Mecca on his escape to Medina. Yusuf went to Bull Cave to subject his lineage to the oldest test in Mecca: to go up to the cave and try to squeeze himself past its narrow opening, for if it was too narrow, you were a bastard, and if you made it through to the cave, your lineage was legitimate. It wasn’t Khalil’s repeated taunts and aspersions about his lineage that made him go; he was motivated by something inside himself — he needed Mecca to accept him. He needed to be able to present his true self to this city, as if he were presenting his credentials, to put himself on the table without any character witnesses, save the Eunuchs’ Goat, who went with him everywhere, like his shadow.
The moon came out as they were climbing up Bull Mountain. When they got to Bull Cave, the Eunuchs’ Goat held back and let Yusuf go ahead on his own to submit to the test. Yusuf felt like he was facing death head-on. The crevice looked too narrow for a human body to pass through. Yusuf held his breath; leading with his skull, he plunged himself into the heart of the mountain. His animality, his femininity emerged in the pains of that labor. The moon surrounded his body thickly, kneading it into the whorls of the crevice, and as he shut his eyes and mustered all his animal strength to push himself deeper, his body was sucked in, as if by a whirlpool that he was powerless to resist, and came out into that animal womb. When the Eunuchs’ Goat came in through the cave’s wide main entrance, he saw Yusuf naked before him, his clothes having been torn off in the ordeal. He looked like a leech born backward and returned to the womb. Yusuf had not only been proven to be his father’s son but also son of this mountain, and this sanctuary, and the prophecy it had hosted, and of God, who was incarnate in the weakest of his creatures so there was no room left for weakness, aggression, or sadness. The Eunuchs’ Goat turned around and walked out silently.
After a while, Yusuf began to sense the movement of the plants behind him. Sensing earthy fragrance, he got up to leave; he came to stand beside the Eunuchs’ Goat, shoulder to shoulder with the mountain rock; its body was wet and dripped on them. A strange-tasting bliss settled heavily over Yusuf’s limbs, a weighty feeling of belonging. He realized that proving his lineage meant he’d proved his responsibilities as well. Below them, Mecca spread out from the foot of their mountain, and in the center, a single ray comprising all human existence streamed up toward the heavens from the Kaaba.