“Are you sure about this, Sheikh Muzahim?” Yabis asked him.
“May God help us, and may He forgive me.”
Neither of them spoke of what lay before them as the truck got moving, leaving the Lane of Many Heads behind. A pack of children caught his eye; they were running after a bright yellow bulldozer that was carving its way from the top of the Lane of Many Heads, wiping out the empty sheds and shacks in its way as it rolled along, plowing into Sheikh Muzahim’s chest, which was hollowed out like a grave. The tanker slowed for the two men to watch the bulldozers in the rearview mirror. They sank their teeth into Mushabbab’s orchard and bit hard, tearing up the vaults concealed beneath. With a single stroke, clouds of dust and smoke and leaves and old stones flew out in every direction, causing sparks where they landed on the Lane of Many Heads. Sheikh Muzahim didn’t turn to look when the bulldozers smashed old mosaics and crushed antique books beneath them, ink mixing with dirt. The neighborhood kids skipped about, grabbing any chunks of engraved wood, old artefacts, and musical instruments they could get their hands on. The vaults beneath the orchard, which were filled to the brim with treasures, caved in. Furniture, jewelry, house signs, salvaged pieces of inlaid wood, everything Mushabbab had spent a lifetime collecting, heard a single crash and was churned up in the dirt. The jewel of the Lane of Many Heads was torn to pieces and left strewn over the crumbled ground.
When Sheikh Muzahim arrived at the police station, a bunch of officers and sergeants were sitting in a semi-circle watching a single computer screen, which was showing stock market trades. The police officer sitting closest was selling stocks one minute and buying others the next. He seemed to be an expert in timing his deals; with every successful tap of the keyboard, he sighed a sigh of relief.
“Pardon me. The profits are nothing major, I know, but I’m going carefully. Little by little here and there to rescue what I can.”
An officer patted him gratefully on the shoulder. “We’d be in serious trouble without your help.”
“These small stocks are like stocks in magical companies. A total blessing. If it weren’t for these, we’d all be bankrupt. The big corporations are in free-fall. The market is swinging like mad and we’re liable to fall off into hell. What’s up with you, Qahtani? Have you stopped breathing?”
“I got offered half a million for my she-camel, but I didn’t want to sell. Then I watched her die because of that rotten feed from the south.”
“Only a deranged person would invest in stocks or camels, I’m telling you.”
Sheikh Muzahim was leaning against the door frame, propped on his cane, adrift in a sea of hesitation and shame. He tapped his cane against the ground.
“Are you alright?” asked one of the officers, his words tinged with impatience. Cigarette smoke hung in the air over the trades being executed. Their lips were faintly stained around the edges; Sheikh Muzahim felt like they’d all been dipped in some kind of ink. Their smiles were strained and the smell of tea coming off their crimson-tinged lips soured to the air. The moment Sheikh Muzahim opened his mouth to speak again, he had a coughing fit.
“The girl in the morgue is my daughter,” he hissed, his eyes watering.
He’d armored his heart and his head with that fear, without which he’d never have allowed an unidentified corpse in a morgue to drag him out of his comfort and respectability. The terror of that single phrase had shocked the Lane of Many Heads and turned all its heads gray. He didn’t know who it was who by chance had thrust that terror into his heart: “They send all the unidentified bodies to the medical school. The students lean on their breasts and drink Pepsi.”
Fourth Move: Direction of the Qibla
THE DARKNESS MELTED AWAY AT MIDNIGHT. SHE MOVED AMONG BEINGS OF both sexes, and words and actions and reactions dissolved.
This young girl was flying for the first time, and she could define the course of her journey in colors:
Red: the inside of the black car that picked her up, starting from an unopened point in time, which she left behind like a sealed tin can tucked on a shelf.
Veined marble: the transitory tower overlooking the courtyard of the Sanctuary, a last glimpse as she was leaving Mecca.
Gold: everything in the villa where she stayed temporarily in Jeddah: a transition point.
Silver: the color of adrenaline, pumping in huge doses, blinding her along with the water pressure of the jacuzzi on her body — no matter how vigorously she was scrubbed and churned, that skin didn’t dissolve or peel off.
Three points of black: the eyes of the Filipina servant who took her ripped black abaya from the bathroom floor and pushed it into the trash can, and then immediately removed the bag so as not to dirty even the gold rim of the trash can.
Mustard: the seats of the private airplane, which smelled of new leather and were whisking her through the air right now.
Navy: the silhouette of the VIP air hostess to whom she’d been entrusted, who fastened her seatbelt, checked the pillow behind her neck, poking at her new identity and picking curiously over the tidied-away clutter of yesterday — of the time before the adjustment.
“Welcome on board today’s direct flight to Marbella. We will be flying above giant cities, maxi-cities, super-cities, hyper-cities, at a cruising altitude of 1,000,000 feet. In the seat pocket in front of you, you will find a list of the in-flight entertainment available today and a menu of our snacks and hot meals. You will also find paper bags should you feel unwell during any periods of turbulence. The journey might take a long time … But it often flies by… No need to fasten your seatbelts!”
Large chignon: the hair she’d embarked with now cascaded down her back and all over the seat, as thick as a horse’s tail.
Translucent white: the outline of her arms hugging her chest tightly in that silky white shirt. She didn’t look up in response to the inquisitive glances around her, or even raise her eyes once: an entity practicing total self-erasure, total absentia.
Cold mercury: the mirror in the villa on the Red Sea that played games with the face she knew. Slippery metal whose eye she evaded, though she knew it, knew its secrets.
Brown: the wide, frightened eye that took her by surprise through the crack in the storeroom door that dawn. A look of fear that stripped her body of its previous obedience and launched her away with an illiteracy beyond illiteracy: no suitcase, no name, not even an outline of what might be ahead.
Red: the knee-length socks that her memory had managed to save and were floating in a ball over her complimentary plate of fruit.
Transparent: Zamzam and all those ills of hers for which it had been prescribed: bitterness, sickness, hair between the eyebrows … Her right eye was the prey and the left was the hunter, wall-eyed; everything they looked at dissolved.
Her scent no longer had any hope of drawing her back to what she was before that dawn.
Envious eyes: somewhere in her memory.
Hot flashes: for the heart she left behind under a stone in the alley, a heart crushed beneath a stone, erasing a criminal record in that smashed-up face. She locked it up and left, capable of — anything? Everything.
The pans of a weighing scales: a woman’s eye on one side and another woman’s eye on the other. Which one fell and which one gave up?
The musk of conclusion: darkness, with which she wiped her forehead, erasing her dumb, uncovered face — which didn’t know and didn’t want to know — entirely. She wiped behind her ears, she didn’t want to hear the clink of metal inside herself, she wiped under her chin with the palm of her hand like she was following the water of her prayer ablutions; she bent her head forward and placed her index finger on her lips and silently, silenced, realized what was happening, became aware of the separation in the kernel within the lips closed tight on a secret. Her finger slid upward and touched the point between her nostrils. She threw her head backward and sighed: “Everything becomes flexible when we leave territorial airspace …”