Alif the Unseen Page 10

  “How weak your little fleshy hands are. Have you ever done anything with them but type and fondle yourself ?”

  “Go to hell.” With a jerk, Alif succeeded in wrestling the netbook from Vikram’s grip. He turned his back, hunching over the keyboard.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Opening Intisar’s thesis. I put a copy online in the cloud. Maybe I can figure out why she wanted me to have this book, and what she expects me to do with it.”

  Alif pulled up the document on his home screen: a fifty-page document written in Arabic, titled Variations of Religious Discourse in Early Islamic Fiction. He ran a search for Alf+Yeom and found no mention of it until the last ten pages. Frowning, he began to read.

  The suggestion that the Alf Yeom is the work of jinn is surely a curious one. The Quran speaks of the hidden people in the most candid way, yet more and more the educated faithful will not admit to believing in them, however readily they might accept even the harshest and most obscure points of Islamic law. That God has ordained a thief must pay for his crime with his hand, that a woman must inherit half of what a man inherits—these things are treated not only as facts, but as obvious facts, whereas the existence of conscious beings we cannot see—and all the fantastic and wondrous things which their existence suggests and makes possible—produces profound discomfort among precisely that cohort of Muslims most lauded for their role in that religious ‘renaissance’ presently expected by western observers: young degree-holding traditionalists. Yet how hollow rings a tradition in which the law, which is subject to interpretation, is held as sacrosanct, yet the word of God is not to be trusted when it comes to His description of what He has created.

  I do not know what I believe.

  * * *

  Through his growing confusion, Alif felt pained: why had she never spoken of this to him? Why had she not revealed her spiritual crisis? Clearly the Alf Yeom had moved her in some deep and troubling way, yet she had been mute. If there were clues, Alif had failed to pick up on them.

  The last few pages of the thesis were a degeneration: stray thoughts and bullet-pointed arguments Intisar had not yet organized into prose. They seemed to have less and less to do with the work itself and more with her own fragmented mind, and ended in a series of pseudo-mathematical logic exercises, one of which, written in English, Alif recognized.

  GOD=God Over Djinn. GOD=God Over Djinn Over Djinn.

  GOD=God Over Djinn Over Djinn Over Djinn.

  “Hofstadter,” Alif muttered.

  “What now?” In dappled lamplight of the tent, Vikram seemed to have congealed into shadow; Alif had forgotten he was there.

  “Douglas Hofstadter,” he repeated. “Intisar has one of his recursive algorithms in her thesis. God equals God over jinn—they spell it with a D in English. It’s a mathematical model in which God sits on an infinite pillar of jinn who hand our questions up and up, and the answers down and down. The joke—or maybe it’s serious—is that GOD can never be fully expanded.” He scratched at a patch of dandruff on his scalp, frowning. “I think I may have lent her that book.”

  Vikram said nothing. Alif looked up at him and found he had trouble focusing. When he tried to make out Vikram’s features his thoughts shimmered, anesthetized, as though he was half-awake and remembering a dream. For one disorienting moment he was convinced he had been talking to himself.

  “Could you not do that?” he said, closing his eyes. “Whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s really weird.”

  “It’s not me, it’s you,” came Vikram’s voice, “You’re tired. Your mind is getting sick of dealing with things it’s taught itself not to see.”

  Alif did feel tired. He closed the netbook and lay down on his side with one hand over his eyes. The last thing he heard was an exasperated sigh. A blanket unfolded itself over his body. With a feeling of profound relief, Alif wriggled into a more comfortable position beneath it, and fell immediately asleep.

  * * *

  There was the scent of fresh water. A sparkling blue smell, absent any tang of dust, accompanied by a splash and a gasp. Alif opened his eyes. Beneath the hem of the tent he saw two pairs of feet: one a pharaonic red-brown, the other honey-colored, topped by stacks of silver anklets. Rivulets of water ran under them through the dirt. He heard scrubbing sounds, another splash, a woman laughing.

  “It’s cold!”

  Dina’s voice. Alif sat up and tilted his head from side to side; his neck was stiff from sleeping on the ground. Azalel was crooning in a low, affectionate warble, like a well-fed house cat, her inarticulate noises arranging themselves in his mind as sentences in a halfremembered language. She was calling Dina her precious child, her brown-limbed little girl, who had grown up so well; whom she had loved since she first saw her playing among the jasmine bushes in her garden. Alif didn’t know how he comprehended Azalel’s meaning, until, feeling freshly ill, he remembered that he had understood her when she spoke to him in his dream.

  The maternal caress of her voice aroused him. Wracked with conflicting spasms of shame and desire, Alif turned away. He was hungry. He fumbled in his backpack for a clean pair of socks and what was left of the dates. After eating as many of the sticky fruits as he could stand, he pulled out the Alf Yeom and opened it to read, knowing it would be unwise to leave the tent until the women were finished bathing. He found the spot where he had left off under one of Intisar’s yellow sticky notes.

  Princess Farukhuaz settled down in her bower, supplied with sweets and delicacies and rosewater with which to bathe her face in the heat of the day, and prepared to listen to what her nurse had to say. She knew full well that her father, a kindly but unsubtle man, had sent the nurse to ply her with stories that would frame her mind toward marriage. But the dream of the hind and the stag and all it portended was still fresh behind her waking eyes, and she hardened her heart against any persuasion the nurse might offer.

  “I’m ready, let’s get on with it,” she said with a yawn when her nurse arrived. “Ready for what?” the nurse asked innocently.

  “Your stories. You’re here to convince me to marry some prince of whom my father approves. It won’t work. I have been given a vision of the true nature of men, and I shall never subject myself to marriage.”

  “That’s as you like,” said the nurse. “My stories are stories, not whips to turn you this way or that.”

  “If you say so,” said Farukhuaz.

  “I do,” said the nurse. “Shall we begin?”

  Haroon and the Wise Judge of Abouzilzila

  Once upon a time in the land the Arabs call Al Gharb, there was a town called Abouzilzila. It was so named because of its frequent earthquakes, brought about by the great traffic of jinn through that area. Abouzilzila was a rocky, mountainous place with many caves. In one of these caves lived a highly respected hakim or judge from among the jinn, whose counsel was so sought-after that he was often consulted by humans as well as by his own kind.

  Abouzilzila was also home to an unfortunate farmer named Haroon. Haroon, never a very clever man, was the frequent butt of pranks by both his jinn and his human neighbors. The humans would leave his laundry in knots and hide his shoes; the jinn would cause his animals to go mad and copulate with mates from inappropriate species. One day, they went too far: Haroon woke to find his new crop of turnips entirely vanished. Since this was a great part of his livelihood, Haroon was fuming with anger, and decided to take decisive action. Packing up his elderly mule with supplies for a day’s journey, he rode into the mountains and up to the cave in which the wise judge lived. At the threshold, he dismounted, took off his hat, and called out in his most respectful voice:

  “Oh wise judge! I have come from the village below with a terrible case to lay before you, and humbly ask your judgment.”

  “I hear and sympathize,” came a voice from inside the cave. “Do go on.”

  Haroon explained the escalating pranks of which he had been a victim, culminating in the theft of his turnip crop. />
  “This is indeed a grave matter,” said the voice from inside the cave. Haroon thought he glimpsed a pair of yellow eyes floating in the darkness. “One to which I will gladly lend my trifling expertise. Send word to your neighbors, and tell them to present themselves tomorrow night at my cave. If they refuse, the wise judge will come and fetch them himself, which will not be pleasant.”

  Haroon thanked the wise judge profusely and hurried home, rapping at each of his neighbors’ doors in turn to deliver the judge’s message. He did not bother to conceal a note of smug triumph in his voice, nor the look of gloating when he saw the dismay on his neighbors’ faces. With the threat of the wise judge in their minds, Haroon’s neighbors, both human and jinn, presented themselves at the entrance to the cave the next evening with the greatest alacrity. Haroon came as well, eager to see for himself what the judge had planned.

  As darkness fell, a great creature lumbered out of the cave, one part shadow, one part beast, one part man.

  “Here is what you will do,” it said. “All of you will spend the night in my cave. At the center of the cave, I have placed a copper vessel housing a terrible night-seeing demon. It can read the thoughts of men and jinn, and will place a mark on the back of the thief. In the morning, we will know without doubt who has stolen Haroon’s turnip crop. Haroon and I will spend the night right here at the entrance to make certain no one is tempted to wander off.”

  The neighbors did as they were told, though each of them quaked with fear as they entered the cave, alarmed by the thought of the demon residing in the large copper kettle they found inside. Haroon bedded down next to his mule, casting furtive glances every now and then at the wise judge, who stood very still and upright all evening, and did not appear to sleep.

  In the morning, the judge herded Haroon’s neighbors out of the cave. One man, the butcher who lived down the road, lagged behind with an anxious expression. When he finally left the cave, he threw himself at the wise judge’s feet—or what passed for feet—and burst into tears. A large black stain was visible on his back.

  “Forgive me, wise judge, and forgive me, brother Haroon,” he wept. “I have indeed stolen the turnips. It was only a joke. I intended to give them back. That is, I sold them at the market to pay off my gambling debts, but I will repay you.”

  “Well, Haroon?” said the wise judge. “What would you ask of this man in recompense?”

  “The money he received from the sale of the turnips will do,” said Haroon, immediately cursing his sense of charity and wishing he had asked for more.

  “Very well. Sir, you will surrender your ill gained profit, and thank the Maker I have not decided to take one of your hands as well, as the Law decrees.”

  The man stuttered an incoherent and relieved thanks, vowing never to molest Haroon again. He returned to the village with Haroon’s other neighbors, all of whom were much shaken by the night’s events.

  “So a mind reading demon was the secret to your wisdom all along,” said Haroon to the wise judge when they had gone. “How fortunate that you possess this magical copper kettle.”

  “There’s no magic to it whatsoever,” said the wise judge, with something curiously like a snort. “It’s an ordinary kettle. I smeared the walls of the cave with soot. The innocent men slept soundly, but the guilty man sat all night with his back pressed against the wall, so the demon couldn’t mark him.”

  “Astonishing,” said Haroon.

  “Whether jinn or man, a wise person need never call on anything more arcane than his wits,” said the judge. “Remember that, Haroon, and keep a better eye on your crops.”

  Haroon returned to his village, satisfied, and from that day on extolled the virtues of the wise judge of Abouzilzila to anyone who would listen, taking care never to reveal the secret of his methods.

  “And that,” said the nurse, “Is why you can never trust your neighbors, and must always read verses against the evil eye when you encounter copper pots.”

  Princess Farukhuaz raised a delicate eyebrow.

  “Surely you’ve got it wrong, nurse. The moral of the story is that the guilty will always reveal themselves, and that wit is superior to superstition. Clearly by this you mean to convince me not to listen to my dream, and instead take the path of common sense.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said the nurse. “But a story is a story, and one may glean from it what one likes. Good sense need not enter into it.”

  “What a bunch of hagoo,” muttered Alif, closing the book with a snap. The unsettling scent of the resin-covered pages wafted up toward his nose. He felt his face go red, and fumbled for his smartphone.

  He powered down the device and pried off its outer shell, revealing the battery and SIM card. He slid the latter out with his thumbnail and bent it back and forth until it snapped in half. Then he dug in a side-pocket of the backpack, looking for the stash of spare SIM cards he kept hidden in an empty dental floss dispenser.

  “Good morning,” said Dina, coming into the tent.

  “Rosy morning.”The Egyptian response came to him automatically after years of listening to her dialect. “Give me your phone and I’ll swap out your SIM card. Safer for us that way, since we’re obviously being tracked.”

  He glanced up as she handed him her cell phone: she was wearing a blue cotton robe embroidered in geometric patterns of red and yellow yarn. Instead of her usual veil she had a black scarf wound over her head and face. Her eyes were rimmed in thin lines of kohl.

  “You look—” Alif struggled for a word that wouldn’t sound ridiculous.

  “Like a film extra on the loose? I know. I feel silly.” Dina sat down slowly, favoring her wounded arm. “It was all she had, and I’ve been living in that abaya for two days straight. It’s still got some of my blood on it. She offered to wash it for me. Your clothes too, if you don’t mind borrowing some of her brother’s.”

  “I do mind,” said Alif, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ll stick with what I’ve got.” He bent over the two phones—Dina’s was an older model without a touchscreen, encased in one of the girlish pink skins that were fashionable—and installed a new SIM card in each.

  “Dial seven eights,” he said when he was finished, handing Dina back her phone. “When you hear a beep, enter whatever phone number you’d like to use. Make it something you’ll remember. Then hit pound and hang up.”

  Dina made an incredulous noise. “How do you set all this stuff up?” she asked. “This is crazy.”

  “This isn’t my grid,” said Alif, “I don’t do phones much. I just know people who do.”

  He glanced at her again, furtively, as he closed up his smartphone. Dina seemed unruffled, as cool and self-possessed as a native tribeswoman in her borrowed robe. Only her arm, held at a tender angle against her body, belied the shock she had endured.

  “How is it?” he said, gesturing to her right side.

  “God be praised,” she answered. There was a half-note of exhaustion in her voice. It was enough to trigger all his protective instincts, and he made her sit down, fussing around her with the blanket he had slept under until she fended him off with her good arm.

  “I’m hurt,” she said, “Not indigent. You make me feel like someone’s grandmother.”

  “You were shot, for God’s sake. You’ve got to rest. I—”

  He stopped when Azalel slipped in with a copper tray of tea things and bowls of minted yogurt. Her face was concealed beneath a cream-colored veil held in place by an elaborate chain circlet of some dark metal; her robe, a pagan shade of saffron, failed to hide the curve of her hip. Unable to speak, Alif backed away from her without a word, ignoring Dina’s curious expression. Azalel seemed amused by his discomfort. She turned and walked back through the tent-flap, glancing at Alif over her shoulder with a look that went straight to his groin. He sat down hastily.

  “Tea?” asked Dina, reaching with her left hand for a steaming kettle on the tray. Alif blessed her discretion.

  “Let me get that,” he
said. “You take it easy.” He poured two glasses and set one of the bowls of yogurt in front of her. They ate in silence punctuated by hissing sips of tea, staring pensively past each other into middle space. Alif felt as though he should take charge and announce some kind of plan that did not involve continued reliance on the hospitality of Vikram the Vampire. He cursed Abdullah and his wild ideas. Clearly they had exchanged one kind of trouble for another. And Azalel—Alif banished her from his thoughts.

  “Good, it’s awake.” Vikram appeared before them, framed by sunlight as he stooped to enter the tent. “How did it sleep? And how is little sister’s arm?”

  “My arm is fine,” said Dina in a cold voice.

  Vikram sat down next to Alif and helped himself to tea.

  “Here is what we are going to do,” he said. “We are going to take your copy of the Alf Yeom to a well-connected gori I know and see if she can trace it. There aren’t many left, and how your woman came by it might tell you something about her motives. We’ll also shake off all the tails you have collected, one of which is even now skulking at the corner of the alley, waiting for you to appear. Then we will talk about getting you and little sister safely out of the City.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Alif felt his face go hot. “I wasn’t consulted about any of this. What gori?”

  “An American.”

  “No. No way. I don’t want foreigners involved in my business. Jinn are one thing, but I draw the line at Americans.”

  “Foreigners,” snorted Vikram. “Neither of you are properly native. You are obviously a wretched mongrel, and little sister, unless I miss my guess, is Egyptian.”

  “Whatever. The point is I don’t want to talk to this friend of yours, and I’m not leaving the City until I know Intisar is safe.”