It was probably around ten at night when Nasser saw the begloved eunuch making a quick exit from the lobby on his way out of the neighborhood. He was carrying a black leather briefcase, which looked like something a lawyer would carry. The dog followed him, but Nasser just let him be. He summoned up his courage and went into the lobby himself. He didn’t hesitate to make for the door that led to the studio; it was ajar. He knocked and waited. He knocked again, more loudly this time. He entered, fearlessly, and hadn’t taken two steps forward before he was greeted by that hoarse laugh. He didn’t even have to guess who it was who’d just peeked her head out from behind the curtain that surrounded the gallery, which looked like a floating room up near the ceiling; she didn’t come down to greet him, or beckon to him to come toward her, but nevertheless he did. She was looking at him with an amused smile, trying to guess how far he’d go. And Nasser had nothing to lose. He felt like a dog lured by a bone. Her smile widened as he climbed the stairs to the balcony. She looked more like a lioness, now, than a wild bitch, waiting for a signal from him to pounce. Like an expert, she turned around, letting her curvy ass invite him further. By the time he got up to the balcony, she was leaning vulgarly on the bed, and Nasser’s cheeks flushed. All that time he’d spent pacing the alley, he’d never noticed this invitation, open to any and all passersby. He ignored the call to dissipation. His voice broke through the cloud of her heavy breathing like a plank of wood.
“I want you to answer one question.”
She raised her heavily penciled right eyebrow quizzically. “Is this an official inquiry?” she asked.
“Do you know where Aisha is?”
Her laughter shook him.
“You’ll really give me the honor of letting me be your informant?” she whispered. “You want me to be the one to tell you?” He looked stupefied. When he said nothing, she added, with feigned sympathy: “Are you afraid of love?”
“Can you answer my question?”
“I’ve got an answer for anyone who asks, anyone in charge, anyone in need.”
He was lost. The hound inside of him responded to this animalistic woman. He just had to close his eyes for events to call each other forth and for him to be transported somewhere else. Somewhere off this path he’d followed his entire life. He knew that if he shut his eyes, he’d cross light-years, toward places he’d never dreamed of before. But not before he had an answer to the question that had brought him here.
“Answer me.”
“I’ll say it again: you know the answer.” Despair tore through his insides when he heard that.
“Azza’s dead,” he sighed. “Her father buried her yesterday.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she mocked.
“Give me an address where I can find Aisha,” Nasser insisted.
“Only hyenas dig up graves, but … If that’s what you want, we can dig it up for you. You’re the king and I’m your humble servant.”
NASSER WAS WALKING BACK THROUGH THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, BUT HE DIDN’T feel like he’d left the vaulted studio. It was beside him, inside him, as he walked along. He could smell it in his sweat. The end of his conversation with the Turkish woman was ringing in his head:
“The Turkish seamstress has no limits. Let her indulge you, and you’ll relax and feel rested. If you please her, you’ll be pleased.”
“I won’t rest until I find Aisha.”
“I’ve got prettier ones, younger ones, freer and more fun …” She drew out her words, watching to see how he reacted. “My book of tricks has everything. Audio and visual. Fixed and moving. Live and pre-recorded. Automatic and manual. Home-grown and imported. Innocent and experienced. Soft and coarse. Silent and vibrating. Front and back … Oh, you poor thing. You’re no angel. You’re just flesh and blood, aren’t you?”
From the gallery room where they were, he didn’t notice the sun come up. When he came to, the vaulted basement was full of people — and cameras. He tried to look away from the rows of women learning how to use the five sewing machines in front of the frosted window that was open out onto the street. In his confusion, he stumbled over the partition where finished orders on hangers were waiting to be picked up. Behind the partition he saw the basement’s true dimensions. Three hundred square meters soaked in blasting music, eastern and western, full of women, their faces covered with men’s headdresses, dancing wildly for the cameras in each of the room’s four corners.
“Look, my girl used her tiny limp to invent a new style of hip-hop dancing. The fans went crazy, we got thousands of messages from fans aged eight to whatever God wills!”
When he went back out into the neighborhood, Nasser filled his lungs with the dry air. The blur of glaucoma pooled in his corneas. When he got back to his apartment that afternoon, he sensed that its tempo had changed. He was desperate for the dose of security he got from the emails and the diary entries, but when he looked under his bed, he found nothing, not even a scrap. When he ran over to his wardrobe, there was no sign of Aisha’s sleeve, which he’d hidden there. The inside of the wardrobe hadn’t been tampered with but a void was spreading. The ground was receding beneath his feet. Someone was erasing his memory, leaving only white noise …
Case Closed.
The End.
PART TWO
Madrid 2007
“NORA!” A TREMOR RAN THROUGH HER WHENEVER SOMEONE CALLED HER BY name. Her split-second hesitation made him doubt it was her real name. The potential of a concealed identity lent her an aura reminiscent of Andalusian women cloaked in mystery and passion. Whenever he finished his shift guarding her, something of her face would stay with him — that haughty look, the sense you had that her face was turned inward, like she was looking inward from a balcony folded around herself. She was totally unlike anyone else he’d ever had to guard: people who went about under pseudonyms or hid the skeletons of past professions or crimes. At the company he worked for, fellow bodyguards would come back with unbelievable stories — about complete nobodies who feigned importance by hiring bodyguards, or people who were never more than a hair’s breadth from death on account of their long involvement in resistance movements or the criminal underworld. The recruitment agency that hired him took immense care in choosing among applicants: they only ever hired men with enormous physiques like his, they conducted thorough background checks — looking extra carefully for involvement in war crimes (hard to detect) — and on top of that they required a clean criminal record, proof of proficiency in martial arts and weapon handling, convoy and motorcade experience, and so on. He was an Arab migrant with a Master’s in philosophy that hadn’t helped him put food on the table in Beirut and wasn’t any good here either — his name was Rafi, but he went by “Rafa” here — just one of millions of Arabs who had to shed skin, blood, and name to meet the needs of the other.
Around him, morning overflowed with warm sunshine and faces gathered in the garden and on the terrace of the Ritz Hotel. The white cane furniture in the garden made the sunshine brighter and the atmosphere more cheerful. Rafa sat at the table closest to the twin curved staircases which led up to the hotel lobby. From there he could see the whole area around his client, Nora, who was sitting opposite her female assistant, tasting the breakfast tapas, sipping a morning coffee and quietly watching the laughing customers mingle with the lush greenery. He examined her like he examined his own face in the mirror every morning: it too was masked, by a U.S. Marines — style crew cut and a gleam that hid the truth of forty years of life and disappointment. The name Nora was more than a veil, though: it almost gave away a past that hovered like a shadow at her temple and neck and covered her entire chest. Rafa felt like he was watching two people, one trying to peel the skin off the other. Nora’s perfection lay in her unawareness of that duality, the unconscious rebellion beneath an acquiescent surface. Nora, he felt, was outside of time, sitting there anachronistically in Madrid’s grandest hotel as if waiting for a sign that would allow her to slip back into the past.