That night the room looked bigger with its wide-open window which paid no attention to the graveyard inside, its corpses each paler than the next. Nasser slept soundly amidst the clamor of the traffic below. He had no idea how many nights he spent in that cemetery of his; he’d lost all sensation. He was conscious only of Aisha’s eyelids stamping their silence over his entire body, and though time passed, he wasn’t aware how many times the sun had risen or set.
He was rescued from between her eyelids by the smell of grilling meat from next door. He realized he was famished; he couldn’t remember when he’d eaten his last meal.
“The wolves of this hunger are howling inside your mind, and it’s making you delirious.” He got up, dragging his feet over to the refrigerator and stood there, completely at a loss. Ever since he’d gone to the morgue, he’d been unable to stand the sight of the refrigerator or the thought of a morsel of food going down his throat. With a shudder, he reached for the tub of date biscuits beside the stove and started robotically stuffing them one after the other into his empty belly. The sugar rushed to his brain, waking him up. Through the haze over his eyes and the windows, he couldn’t tell what time it was, whether night or gloomy dawn. He took out his five bottles of Dunhill cologne, the last five remaining of a dozen he’d bought heavily discounted a year ago from a friend of his who smuggled goods into the country in a suitcase. He poured them down the toilet and flushed, and left the door closed until the sweaty, rank-smelling cloud had faded away.
FROM: Aisha
Message not numbered
Don’t search, ^, for message number 1; we mustn’t write it yet. We’ll leave it for when we’ve stopped speaking and fallen silent so that our words can go on imagining us and waiting for us, impatiently, at the edge of every sigh, so that they can say what we’re not able to express in any language.
I also skipped all the tens when numbering my messages. We’ve left them for the unknown, because we won’t consume everything — we’ll leave something secret. The important thing in our correspondence isn’t the search for freedom or love, but the puzzle. We lean toward it unaware, not translating, not even thinking. We don’t allow our consciousness to break it open, so we can stay clinging to the rope of its amazement, which could be severed at any time by anything, which relinquishes the reins so we can enter. There I find the dream that keeps me awake with thoughts of you, that keeps your dream company, and shares with it this sadness charged by us.
The most beautiful sadness is this moon.
You’re the most beautiful moon.
When the nurse was distracted, you seized the opportunity to whisper to me, “This is our secret …” Of course, you and I have to have a secret. Some kind of feverish sadness, so that we can cling to it.
“Do you give yourself to me in marriage?”
“I give myself to you in marriage.”
I made sure my words could be heard by the two witnesses, who for their part broke out in grins, rather taken aback and desperate not to miss a detail, when I surprised them by adding, “On the condition that I have the right to initiate divorce proceedings.” They applauded in delight, thinking themselves extras in a rehearsal for some comedy on that bright morning.
“Bear witness to this contract before God …” They shook our hands enthusiastically as the sunny garden paths fell silent, and signed our verbal marriage contract with an impromptu violin duet, making the morning seem even more gilded.
“This is my second wife. I’m still married to my other wife as well and she lives in the same city. I’m Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph,” you said, laughing, to shock them and make their performance even friskier.
All along, you were performing that ceremony as a joke. You never did believe me when I told you “all it takes to get married is an offer and an answer in front of two witnesses. A divorced woman like me doesn’t even need a male guardian to be present.”
“God, life is so wonderful without papers! May God strike me dead if I violate this ethereal contract.”
All the people enjoying themselves in the park turned to look when you started shouting, and then you grabbed me and held me so tightly you might have broken a rib, or three, and they grinned encouragingly. I soared on those smiles; even though you didn’t sense any change, I felt like a mountain of sin had been lifted off my neck.
Aisha
P. S. I was like a stone thrown through the air that day. I shook at the thought of that inevitable moment when it would crash to earth.
Yusuf had successfully managed to change Nasser’s perception of Mecca. He’d begun to see the city as a woman. Nasser was robbed of the Mecca he’d known and had sacrificed his life protecting. He had fallen into a spider’s web of contracts sealed and broken in the Lane of Many Heads. Yusuf’s words were making him dizzy: “every time Mecca was on the brink of dying of thirst, a woman brought it something to drink: Hagar, Zubayda, Fatima.” Aisha took the complete opposite position:
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message zero
Can you hear?
I’m possessed by the doves’ cooing.
I don’t know why I’m haunted by the events of the day I came back from Germany.
It was during the last ten days of Ramadan, and the clock showed eleven at night when I came out of King Abd al-Aziz Airport in Jeddah with my small suitcase. On the highway, the driver missed the exit for the Mecca road, so we had to take the Medina road that runs through Jeddah, north — south, and found ourselves stuck in celebrating crowds and traffic: it was the 23rd of September, National Day. It took us five hours to get across the city — a journey that normally took a quarter of an hour. I was somewhere between ecstatic and fearful as our car was swallowed up by a sea of cars of all different types — you couldn’t even imagine — fancy cars, beaters, wrecks, all draped with the green flag with its sword and the profession of faith — there is no god but God — faces painted green, green clothes of every kind, green scarves, green hats, fluttering from car windows and boys’ and girls’ bodies as they hung out of windows or popped up through sunroofs, dancing, exchanging victory cries, blocking all the city’s main arteries, or congregating around the main roundabouts and monuments to join dance circles where crazy hip-hop mixed with dignified traditional Gulf dances.