As Yusuf retraced his steps back toward Mecca’s giant glass monsters, he felt restless. He remembered when his mother had told him that anyone who entered Bull Cave would be relieved of all sadness forever. A tremor passed through the mountain’s stones and the moon blinked coolly, revealing Mecca naked before Yusuf’s eyes. She had discarded her eternal sadness, surrounded by grand mountains, preparing to cast off, without a shred of sadness, the old features that stood in the way of the new architects of her present.
Bodily Reality
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 26
With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation.
And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him, and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.
…
He gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.
(Women in Love)
Dear ^,
Would you translate this load for me?
This sinful rendezvous with physical ambiguity.
This unbearable morning knowledge.
I won’t come back to re-read this passage unless, by some miracle, you and I should meet again.
Unless the unknown should answer my pleas and put you back in my path once more, for another moment, if only for …
Do you remember that night in Bonn? The night I left you and walked back on my own in the dark? I’ll admit I was frightened for the first few paces. Do you know what it means for a woman like me to walk somewhere by herself for the first time, on an unfamiliar street — or on any street? With every step forward I was expecting to drop dead, or to be attacked and have my head split open and my brains spilled everywhere. The Lane of Many Heads was walking with me in my head, watching and ready to poke around in there and tell all the locals what it had found.
At one point, I was taken aback by the shadow limping beside me as I walked along the river. Then, instead of one shadow, there were five shadows pouring out of my body as I limped along. For a moment, I thought it was something inside of me coming out to attack me. To punish me for the strange scent that still clung to me, and for the desire that was renewed with every step I took away from you. But then suddenly, I could see those five shadows for what they actually were: happy ecstatics dancing around me. Those shadows knew something I could never even dream of knowing, sated to the point of yet more hunger. Some fear had snapped and released this multiple me. But still there’s more to this me that hasn’t been discovered yet. Every one of your looks releases another me that I had no idea about. I walked on — no, the five I’s walked on, with a sinful delight, back to the hospital. Somehow, though, I — and my other I’s too — hated you for leaving me to face this fear by myself, leaving me to bear this sin alone. Because sin’s not in your make-up, whereas for me, every charge of pleasure I experience releases an equal charge of guilt. Guilt about what sometimes gives pleasure so intense I can’t bear it. With every breath of love I took, I hated you, while you just kept asking me, “Are you okay? Is your conscience okay with this? Feeling any regrets?” And I just kept repeating, “I’m giving myself to this moment, no further. I’m floating along with the present, with life, with the deal we made.”
I was too scared to say I was giving myself to God. I didn’t dare utter God’s name after what …
Do you think I’m cursed now? No, you don’t think that. You believed what I said about giving myself up to life. But I was really just giving myself up to your taste. The taste that now poisons me even in my humblest prayers. I feel like I’ve lost something. Not my dedication, but rather the emptiness from life. Now, I’ve got indigestion from life. Indigestion from you. Can you call that a distraction?
I owe you. I owe you for the joyful lightheartedness you brought to our brief connection. How long did it last? Three, four months?
Every time my feelings ground me down, you made me fly. You massaged my sluggish conscience so that it could fly unencumbered.
Did you say that my demon is the story of the fall from grace? Why do you deny the fact that there was one thing that caused us to fall from grace? When the body discovered its taste, and its secrets, it became too heavy for the heavens to support and its plunge to earth was inevitable. So that we could spend our lives looking for the self-respect we lost back in paradise. Now, ^^^, you made me wonder: can life be boiled down to regret? Regret over what? The apple? The fall? The loss of face?
But you just laughed smugly and said, “Life’s all about avoiding abstraction!” Do you think this life of mine is an abstraction?
Do you actually agree with me when I say that our fates are pre-determined? We determined them. When God lifted us up in his palm like specks from Adam’s back, he made an oath. That was the day each of us had our fate determined and it was granted that we could plunge forward into it to reach the truth. We’re here on earth as an experiment to see if we can reach that truth.
God, what a weird writer of fate I must be for choosing this storyline as my experiment: Being torn between Mecca’s Lane of Many Heads and Bonn, Germany.
I’m starting to think this plot’s more than I can handle.
I spent the entire day today going about dumbfounded by the absurdity of our intercontinental relationship. The laughter and the bursts of affection. What is this cyber-relationship compared with real life on a city morning where you wake up to a woman of real flesh and blood? I am a woman made of thin air, amusing herself — unwisely — with a man made of solid stuff, surrounded by solid bodies and a concrete life. How long can ether and a solid hold together? Does eternity have a chance when it’s only made of thin air?
Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole with the bed in the middle. I put the lavender coverlet on the bed, spread it out and try to reincarnate the dolphin you encouraged me to visualize in my spine.
Nasser’s body tensed with those “fingers of silence upon silence” upon it. He stopped reading abruptly and got up, and like a sleepwalker drove magnetically to the morgue at the Zahir Hospital, where he was met by a chill silence lying over the refrigerators in the purplish light. His vision was filled with that purple and his fingers trembled — not out of fear, no, but out of the longing as huge as the fog that had accompanied him along the roads and down the hospital corridors to this place, to this drawer that the morgue supervisor opened for him, to this silent, swaddled body. He didn’t dare uncover her face but he was desperate to touch her fingertips, he was certain that those fingertips held a message for him. He sighed deep inside—I’m exhausted—he wanted her to reach into the depths of his exhaustion and erase it, to stamp her fingerprints onto his lips. As soon as he’d pulled the cover down off the shoulder an indescribable scent rose up. A torrent of sadness spread through the morgue, blinding him. A pearly cloud enveloped him and he could feel his hair crackling and turning gray. The cloud dissipated, slipping through the doors to the corridor outside the morgue, leaving Nasser empty, hollowed out. Finally, and with effort, Nasser was able to get a hold of himself, his eyes having gone as rigid as the sculpture laid out before him. He entered into the perfection of death: “Death is the body of a woman.” He knew it for certain now. His clouded eyes floated over her chest, over the two dark peaks and back down to the triangle of darkness, and to … His eyes froze, his throat went dry, it felt like he was grinding glass between his teeth; he stood for a long while in that silence, searching for an equal silence inside himself (in all the silences that had swallowed his feelings, all the female bodies he’d silenced since his adolescence, wrapped in blackness of abayas), and for a moment he was one with her absolute silence, he penetrated as deep as the wound that killed her, to the floor of her abyss.