It wasn’t he who moved to leave; his body simply slipped out the door in a frozen sadness born of silence.
He didn’t know where he could go to escape this Meccan heat that swirled around him as if to melt her silence, which still enveloped him. The heat taunted him:
“You poor bastard. It’s like you take pride in deceiving yourself. All you had to do was turn her over to look for scars from the surgery, or order an autopsy to find the metal in her pelvis. But no — it’s just another example of what a coward you are.”
He stopped in his tracks. Am I really a coward or just greedy? You want to dissolve the truth of her into every woman so that nothing can break the bond of love you’ve clung to for the past quarter century, during which you’ve played the part of a man in the void that surrounds you.
He returned to find the chill of death had beaten him back to his own bedroom. Was it death or some legendary sadness that was released when he uncovered that body? What was certain was that it had a woman’s voice, which took form in the night to whisper into his ear:
Aisha
P.S. Are you serious when you say you want to love a woman like me?
Do you know how many men you’ve got to be? As many as the number of times a girl like me has fallen in love since puberty, as many as the number of teenagers who didn’t chase after me, whose eyes didn’t lust after me, as many as the number of men who weren’t kept awake at night by the thought of me, those who weren’t widowed by me or whom I didn’t cause to take their own lives, as many as … Can you love like that? As many as the nights my heart spent in agony, desperate to know why, and the nights I was supposed to spend sleepless in love that I spent sleeping beside my brothers instead. As many as the heartbeats my heart was supposed to beat if only I’d met the someone who could make it. As many as all those love scenes in books and movies and songs that I knew with all my heart were about me. Do you know how to love me with that kind of love? A love like a book of coupons I’m spending all at once to make up for the love I missed out on in the years I spent trundling back and forth between school and this cubbyhole in that yellow box of a school bus, blindfolded like a falcon so it doesn’t panic when it sees too much.
Maybe it would be easier for you to love a woman who’d already cashed in all her coupons one by one by the time you came along, so she didn’t expect you to settle the debts of those who’d come before and those who hadn’t …
Don’t laugh at me. I know I’m old-fashioned. I missed out on the era when people used to kill themselves for love.
An era of hearts whence love would not sprout.
P.P.S. Jameela the Yemeni girl’s mother left a gift for me. I found it on my bed: a set of lingerie woven out of fresh white jasmine flowers.
The people of Jazan weave their underwear out of jasmine …
I slipped out of all my clothes to try it on. I pranced around my room caressed by the jasmine petals as they were crushed against my petals. The perfume seeped down into my veins.
One day, I’m going to leave a pair of trousers made out of jasmine for you. Just so you can experience the pleasurable suffering of that sweet-smelling freshness for yourself. The dew of the deepest, gentlest touch. I imagined that I was clinging to your back, that the petals were smashed against your solid frame.
I spent the whole night tossing and turning. I couldn’t sleep properly for the disintegrating jasmine and the perfume it released every time I rolled over.
In the morning when I put on my jeans, the jasmine was crushed even further. Imagine what it’s like to face the world in a skin of jasmine.
Attachment: Photo of an amulet the shape of a half-moon, which Mu’az pilfered from somewhere, having taken a shine to the special trinket, and which then made its way into Mushabbab’s possession. Look at the silver half-moon, one of those old hollow charms which Bedouin women stuff with handwritten scrolls, talismans that can attract, or repel, or make fertile.
For the first time ever, Nasser didn’t shave. He didn’t stare worriedly at the damp patch that was forming on the ceiling above the shower, and the dirty drips from the ceiling didn’t break his train of thought. The gray-haired figure in the bathroom mirror surprised him. That unexpected whiteness was the only evidence of what he’d nearly done the day before: he’d wanted to have sex with a dead woman. Nasser stood there for a long time contemplating that face in the mirror, lost in the truth about himself that had been revealed the day before. Nasser felt a bleak whiteness plundering the Meccan air around him. Was this some disfigurement in the city or was it part of his own body?
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a face appeared in his memory. That old man Mu’az had pointed out, whom Nasser had then followed into Mushabbab’s garden where the man was searching for a silver amulet!
Nasser wiped the steam off the mirror then quickly went over to his noticeboard. He found the name and phone number, but then another business card bearing the same name caught his eye. How could he not have noticed that they shared the same last name and phone number? Muflih al-Ghatafani and Son, Research and Investigation, Pilgrimage Research Center. He ran over to his phone to dial the number, not noticing how late it was. It rang and rang, and Nasser thought the number must be out of service, when suddenly a woman’s voice, sluggish and drowsy, picked up: “He’s not in.”
Nothing could daunt the detective. “Where can I find him?” he asked.
He’d woken her up now. “Lying in the National Guard Hospital.”
It was only after Nasser had got dressed and was about to leave the house that he noticed the time.
A Layer of Tar
“THE NEAREST NATIONAL GUARD HOSPITAL IS IN UMM AL-SALAM, ON THE Jeddah road.” This time he didn’t wait for the elevator that was always dawdling somewhere between floors so that even the attendant could never locate it no matter how much he banged against the door on the ground floor. To Nasser it felt like everything around him was slipping on a thin layer of tar, skidding, still not keeping out a leak of damp. Without hesitating, he scurried down the dark staircase, which was covered in the yellow of the last sandstorm that had blown through Mecca a week before. Nasser headed for the Jeddah road, passing through the Barbie-like facade at the entrance to Mecca in the direction of al-Rusayfa and Road 60. He drove past the cafes and amusement parks and brightly-lit new fish restaurants, finally coming onto the bleak asceticism of the highway that wended between the sand dunes, getting narrower from time to time around volcanic mountains, the expanse only broken by billboards advertising the Sawa and Mobiley cellphone networks or tourism in Malaysia. Nasser felt like he was a long way away from the Lane of Many Heads now, but he wondered whether some stranger was leading him back to the lane and its secrets, which had come to matter more to him than finding out the identity of the murdered woman or her killer.