DAYS AFTER THE BODY APPEARED AND AZZA DISAPPEARED, THE CLOUDS OF senility settled over Sheikh Muzahim’s shop. He’d woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of gnawing canines. He listened intently, unable to believe what he was hearing. He followed the sound to the room at the very back of the storage space and opened the door. The sight of Jameela, lying there gnawing a corn cob between her hands, hit him like a ton of bricks. She simply stared back at him, and for a moment he didn’t recognize her. Who stuck her in here, he wondered. Then he suddenly remembered how they’d married her to him that very night.
“Did you really marry Jameela, you gray-beard?” he asked himself.
He recalled how it had all taken place mere hours before the body was found nearby. Her father, Hasan the Yemeni, had brought a registrar from the Hafayir neighborhood.
“Don’t worry about it, Sheikh, it’s all in accordance with the customs of God and His prophet. People told me about this guy. He may work outside the law, but it’s to serve people who live outside the law, illegals.”
When the father returned, Jameela was trailing behind him dutifully, dressed in a faded abaya. He pushed her forward at the entrance to Sheikh Muzahim’s shop, her back to the street, and stuffed the five thousand, a whole stack of bills, into his pocket. He disappeared without a word. Sheikh Muzahim didn’t even look at him, he was so entranced by Jameela. The words stuck in his throat, gagging his lust. He was so enamored, he couldn’t bring himself to utter even a breath. He had no idea how much time passed as he just sat there staring at her. He heard the door at the back of the shop swing open and he saw a look of terror on Jameela’s face as she stared at the doorway. He was too scared to stand up lest his passion flood the room. He wanted to gather up everything he had for her, to enjoy her pumpkin plumpness, to store her up and consume her in small portions or maybe squander her entirely in one go. He didn’t know what greed it would take to possess her. He got up, limping, and she followed him, submitting to a flick of his wrist. They walked through the door at the back of the shop into the storeroom.
He laid his desire out, crushed like a scorpion beneath a stone, and covered it with the dome of Jameela’s body. It wasn’t enough. He was in a frenzy. He wanted to spend eternity watching her from below and he would have if it hadn’t been for the commotion outside in the lane. He left her there and went to see what this storm was that was brewing in the neighborhood. On her wedding day, he shut her up in a storeroom.
In the days that followed, she broke through doors into the depths of his storeroom. She lived off her fear, her loneliness. She made her way to the sacks of dates, starting with the ones nearest to her, leaving gouges wherever her fingers had dug.
Sheikh Muzahim was terrified that his lust had betrayed him with Jameela, and then he woke up and found her gnawing. In the doorway of the storeroom, he watched her; saw what days of neglect had done to her. She’d fattened up, and left a sticky trail on the floor, which led him to her. Just below her chin, her neck had grown fatter, like a cushion for her little head. Her waist had filled out, and fat bulged from her chest and hips, weighing down her short frame. His eyes, which had been wild and hungry for her, were suddenly repulsed. His eyes cut her down to the bone, laying bare the hungry child standing before him. Where had this monster come from?
Suddenly he recognized the black and white, most of which had been erased: those were Azza’s charcoal drawings, which a terrified Jameela had destroyed. The edges, which had been spared erasure, were enough to remind him of the body. He stood by the door, paralyzed. The need to live slapped him across the face. To strip off his clothes and walk out into the middle of the Lane of Many Heads, raving about a sin that no outburst of repentance could wipe out.
Sheikh Muzahim slammed the door on that threatening creature, gnawing, monstrously fat, scratching about in Azza’s charcoal, and lay down in his shop, despairing and alone. Tears began to stream down his face, grooving his puffy cheeks. He hadn’t cried since he was a child in diapers, but he’d stopped caring now. He began searching for Azza under every single sack in his shop. They ended up piled outside in the street, most of them bearing long-past expiration dates, and he slumped disheveled between them, his head uncovered and his beard long undyed.
As night fell over the Lane of Many Heads, Sheikh Muzahim was left on his own. Insomnia ate away at his eyelids and he couldn’t sleep. “Did she spot Jameela in the shop when we were signing the marriage contract? God, please tell me Azza didn’t run away because she saw her.” The thought of Jameela, that rat, skittering around in Azza’s place burned him up inside. “Who can bear this pain, Lord?”
In deepest night, he sharpened his senses, waiting for Azza’s footsteps, but all his finely tuned senses could hear was Jameela’s gnawing, which was constant, night and day. She paced and munched and grew. Her canines had started on his bedding and his dreams of drought. He didn’t dare stir from his bed in case he should startle her, worried that she’d tear open his belly and consume him alive. All that time he spent listening, he never once heard her go into the bathroom to expel what she’d devoured. It all just rotted inside her, surfacing as pallor on her skin.
“Did Azza see her? Did this rat make you run away, Azza? My darling. She chased you away so she could have this old man, your father, all to herself!”
Pepsi Can
SHEIKH MUZAHIM WOKE UP THAT MORNING AT DAWN WITH THE REALIZATION that he’d had enough. He got out of bed, and for the first time in ages he wasn’t limping. He was determined to put an end to his agony. He performed his ritual ablutions quickly and announced the dawn prayer from the mosque, as Imam Dawoud had overslept.
“Every stone that’s ever heard me call for prayer will testify on my behalf on judgment day,” he thought to himself. He was hoping that the stones and the soil itself would help him with the day’s mission. They watched him march toward his house, his beard faded, and with huge effort unlock the storeroom, and venture toward the ratty animal within. When she saw him, her jaw dropped, spraying chewed-up wheat, and she went goggle-eyed. He led her into the shop and emptied the whole shelf of sweets into a burlap sack for her. He handed her the bag and said, “Okay, you get going now. Back to your parents’.”
She fumbled with the buttons of her abaya, one flying here, the other there, stubbornly determined to cover herself up modestly; she was a married woman now and her husband was the biggest merchant in the Lane of Many Heads! But he stuffed a coffin-like stack of five hundred riyal notes into her cleavage and pushed her into the street. With one eye on her buttons and another on the fading henna dye in his beard, she grabbed her bag and walked out. It was her job to soak some Aden henna and re-dye his beard for him, she thought. She’d steal some of that henna from her mother’s bag — after all it was her own grandmother who went up into the mountains above Sanaa and picked the leaves, drying them and sending her family bags of the stuff.
He watched her roll away from him, her abaya jutting out over her ballooned-up belly and breasts. He had no idea when he’d chase her down with the word divorce. He should’ve wrapped the word divorce up in that bag for her so she could chow down on it greedily along with the candy.
For a second, he thought about throwing the word at her from behind, but he hesitated, worried that she’d trip on her own weight, that she’d explode in the street, her fat spraying everywhere like Azza’s blood, sullying the road in front of his home for the rest of his life.
He watched her until she disappeared, and then, as silent as before, he leaned on his cane and walked to the entrance of the Lane of Many Heads. There he got into the municipality sewage tanker that was waiting for him.