In the Lane of Many Heads, feelings toward the scandal were mixed.
Second Move: Desperation
AN HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN OF THE BODY:
He turned the key in the lock. The door slid aside like a curtain to ease him into the silence inside. His suitcase sloughed away from him in the hallway. He took a single step and was paralyzed by a clear peal of laughter, deep and satisfied like velvet. A shiver attacked him at the joy in that laugh, the abandon, the vigor, the recklessness — he didn’t recognize them, though it was definitely her voice. That joy, so full of life and death. Who was making her laugh like that?
Blending into the dim light, he held his breath at the half-open door to the room where he and Aisha had slept. His bones were groaning from the six-hour flight. The air was trapped in his chest at the sight of the cubbyhole, which was getting smaller as time went by. Like in a Pharaonic temple where farmers engraved their annals and their gods, he’d succeeded in engraving his history onto the oily paint of the walls, though it didn’t give him any sense of pride. He’d left scars on the room’s memory. The deepest of his engravings had been the word divorce, which, in his carelessness, had formed a layer of armor over her body, giving her voice that poisonous tone when they spoke on the phone.
He watched Aisha lying peacefully by herself, illuminated by the light of her computer screen, stretched out across her entire bed, nude but for her red knee socks that drew his eyes toward her dark triangle like a flame. With him she’d never been definable or had any substance; she had no surface and no relief; she always reduced herself to an ink spot washed a thousand times; she contracted and withdrew in his hands and let him drill into her so he could create his own fantasies. Now, her neck was arched on the pillow for a kiss or a droplet of saliva, that neck which had never arched for him to kiss. He didn’t even know what it tasted or smelled like. He always identified women with their smells; for him a smell could embody a woman. One onion was enough to reincarnate the aunt who’d brought him up, while the smell of bleach and Dettol always brought back his mother. At the beginning of his marriage, whenever he beat Aisha, he’d soak her in Dettol out of regret and say, “Lie and rest on my mother’s chest, and lie me down too!” He’d ladle it out and feel safe. Even the women who consoled him in Casablanca strutted about with bodies made of rotten smells — sweat, or a garlic mixed with perfume. The garlic bodies were huge, inducing tyranny and control, inducing murder; when a garlic breast descended upon him, he’d be convinced that he’d come out ripped limb from limb and carted off as booty. Those bodies shrieked and scandalized with every touch. Aisha was the only bodiless woman; he’d still never manage to grasp her scent.
“Maybe now, stretching on the silky bedclothes and the fluff of her dreams, she’ll give off an animal smell or the warmth of new satin.” That lavender-colored satin coverlet — whenever he was there she’d be careful to fold it and keep it out of his reach in her closet, and in the two years since their marriage and divorce he’d never touched it, as if his touch on its uncovered body would leave a stain or a burn! This lavender coverlet, which she’d taken out in his absence, was the one thing Aisha brought to the marriage from her teenage closet of dreams, and was probably also the only piece he’d let her add to the furnishings he’d chosen, and then only grudgingly. He felt drawn to it, wanted to touch the forbidden item and leave his mark on it, if only for the last time.
“Aisha gets out her hidden scents and lies in them, dreaming and flirting with her dreams …”
He was struck by a sigh at that reserve of passion that he’d never experienced, and swift as a reptile he was on that altar-bed; he didn’t know how his body managed to execute that entry: it was as if a second flowed like a drop of water and let him flow into her, he spread the length of Aisha’s body, violating that satin, and suddenly his body was satin and Aisha’s fluff. The moan that heaved through her body came up through his lips. The moment kneaded the room into a single dough: somewhere in a dream, he grasped it or it grasped him. Suddenly his body was being crushed, returning to what it was, the sob that came out tore through the dough, and Aisha was torn too, in a flash she awoke, saw who he was, and he was outside her. This woman’s eyes were popping in wrath and a coldness harder than death; he the ever-absent repudiated usurper had returned, and he was unbearable. A monstrous anger and need to possess erupted out of his chest and he reached for her, to destroy that coldness and those red socks, and again she was in his hands, under him. He didn’t know when her hand began hitting, not wanting to know him let alone love him, he was a rejected nobody on that blank sheet of a non-body, he was despicable, he was outside of everything, alone.
Suddenly the house felt empty, apart from the text-filled computer screen and the book, which had tumbled to the floor, open and face down, beneath his feet. On the front cover was a woman, and on the back a man. The woman, standing there with her red kerchief and bold red knee-length socks, and the blackness of her woolly hat, and a sketchbook under her arm, didn’t pay any attention to him. The man facing her, to her left, had sleek hair parted over his forehead like a curtain and sleepy, half-open turquoise eyes. He felt them closing on him. He felt menaced by the man’s beard; it reminded him of the sheikhs from the Haram Mosque, though this beard was nothing like theirs.
In a final, resigned gesture he picked up the book, and on the open page read the lines highlighted red:
Birkin watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of the living man … Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second — then let go again, let go for ever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved
(Women in Love)
When Ahmad left the cubbyhole and the house and her deadly silence, the Lane of Many Heads didn’t know where to hide him with his suitcase. Her features floated at his heel on every wall and bend in the alley, she was screaming at him to notice the red sock crumpled in a ball and hung on the cafe’s satellite dish. How come it was there, watching him? He avoided his father the sewage cleaner’s house and the cafe, where the doors were still shut and the workers still asleep in the shacks round the back. He ended up, dragging his suitcase behind him, at the old-style Mahawi Cafe at the entrance to the city, which was open 24/7 to receive the eternal flow of pilgrims. He stared blankly at the Pakistani waiter for an age, he didn’t know how long, and then suddenly realized he was supposed to order a drink — to add taste and smell to her silence …
“Apple shisha … No, wait — just plain Persian tobacco.” The waiter smiled, understanding his need for the strong tobacco. “Some bread? Stewed beans? Masoub? Tea? Liver and kidney? Dough balls with honey or cheese?”
“No.” A single breath expressed the void in his wide, staring eyes. An hour went by while he watched the glowing embers turn gray in the bowl of the shisha pipe, which he hadn’t even taken one puff of. The forgotten mouthpiece sat like a corpse in his hand, like his own body, which groaned as if it had been crushed under the wheels of a car.
“That cursed woman is my scourge. She’s like a cat — she has seven souls …”
Third Move: Jaws