Alif the Unseen Read online

  “I don’t want to leave the City at all,” said Dina, clutching her bad arm, “This has gone far enough.”

  “Suit yourselves. You’ll be in a State political prison within the week. And for little sister here, I think we know how particularly unpleasant that will be.” Vikram raised one arched black brow. “She’ll wish she’d given it to me after all. At least I would have made it good for her.”

  Dina gasped.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Alif snapped. “Don’t you dare talk like that in front of her.”

  With a laugh, Vikram stood. “What a prickly little monk it is. I’m only telling the truth.” He stepped out of the tent into the intensifying sun. “Gather your things, children, we’re leaving.”

  Alif spat an insult at the tent flap. Dina was sitting with her knees drawn up and her eyes down, silent.

  “I’m sorry,” said Alif, clenching and unclenching his hands, “We’ll get out of here. This was a mistake. He’s not a—he’s not—”

  “No.” Dina looked at him. “We should do what he says. It’s too late to change the plan now.”

  Alif jerked his backpack over one shoulder. “I just feel like this whole thing is getting out of control.”

  “We live in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the internet and falling in love with the wrong person.” Dina reached out to be helped to her feet. “It went out of control a long time ago.”

  Alif lifted her by the hand and held on as she got her balance. “It’s not like you to be so philosophical,” he said. She tilted her head.

  “How do you know?”

  An impatient growl from outside the tent made them both jump. Alif hurried out, inwardly chastising himself for failing to show Vikram more resistance, more nerve. Dina followed behind him.

  “You can stay behind if you prefer,”Vikram said to her. “That arm is tender and we are going to do a lot of walking.”

  “I do not prefer.” Dina’s chin shot up beneath her black scarf.

  “Very well.”Vikram padded down the alley on his silent, unshod feet. “Stay close behind me. I am going to play a little trick on our friend in plainclothes up ahead.”

  Alif peered over Vikram’s shoulder: at the end of the alley was a short, husky man with a mustache, wearing a polo shirt that clung in the heat and slacks that poorly concealed the pistol bulging in his waistband. To his horror, he saw the man turn and begin walking toward them, mouth set in a grim line.

  “Vikram—”

  “Calmly, calmly.”

  The man’s hand went to the bulge in his slacks.

  “You two,” he said, “Stop there. Set down the backpack.”

  Alif froze. Vikram loped straight up to the man, who did not appear to notice him.

  “These are not the banu adam you’re looking for,” he said.

  The man blinked. His face went placid and slack, as though he had recalled some pleasant memory. He smiled.

  “Quickly now, children,” said Vikram, loping onward. “This trick wears off pretty fast.”

  Aghast, Alif stumbled to obey. He heard Dina stifle a giggle. When they had turned the corner and emerged into a larger thoroughfare of the souk, she began laughing in earnest.

  “Dina!” Alif had never heard her laugh in public; had, in fact, heard her censure women who did.

  “I can’t, I can’t help it.” She bent forward, pressing the wounded arm to her midsection, her laughter ending in squeaks. Vikram looked pleased with himself. He began humming a raga appropriate to the hour of the day, interweaving it with some strange feral tune Alif didn’t recognize, until the music was one hybrid melody, without form, without origin, trailing along the street on motes of dust.

  Chapter Seven

  They were deep within the New Quarter before Alif thought about getting nervous.

  “I don’t want to see this gori,” he said, lagging behind as Vikram galloped past the sterile edifice of a fast-food outlet. “Can’t we keep the book to ourselves? You seem to know everything about it anyway. Why do we need to go dragging Americans into the whole thing?”

  “A boy as stupid as you shouldn’t do so much thinking. I know plenty about the Alf Yeom but nothing about this particular copy. The American is a sort of book scientist—if you’re serious about wanting to know where your lady friend got the manuscript, and where it originated, and you aren’t simply wasting my time, she may be able to help. You’ll hate her. She wears the most awfullooking polyester robes, like a country housewife who has given up on herself. These western sisters never know how to dress. It’s all exotic costumes to them.”

  Sullen, Alif ground his molars, feeling too hot and too tired for such an early hour.

  “Does this convert have a name?”

  “Most probably.” Vikram halted in front of a trim, freshly painted apartment complex with wide glass doors, attended by a defeated-looking provincial man in a dirty turban.

  “Here we are,” he said, and twisted inside as the turbaned doorman held the glass door wide for a girl whose black veil was patterned in rhinestones. Alif and Dina shuffled in after him, flinching under the doorman’s malevolent squint. Inside was a cool marbletiled lobby lined with a bank of elevators. The Arab residents who whisked in and out regarded Alif with blank disregard, making him feel unwashed and shabby and too dark; the smattering of pale foreign professionals regarded him not at all, chatting to each other with dogged good nature in voices two octaves too high.

  Following Vikram with downcast eyes, Alif found himself in the entranceway of an apartment on the tenth floor—how, he was not entirely sure; Vikram had entered without appearing to produce a key. Dumbly, Alif fixed on the one feature of the well-appointed living room that was most familiar: a Toshiba laptop, a three-yearold model by the look of it; probably no more than two gigs of RAM. A vinyl decal of the crescent and star—something only a westerner could conceive of or get away with—was plastered on the lid. Alif gazed at the machine with mild contempt.

  The woman sitting behind it seemed nervous, looking from Vikram to Alif to Dina with pallid, flickering eyes. She wore a headscarf rather than a veil. One lock of blond hair had escaped it, and lay simmering against her forehead.

  Vikram disconcerted her by asking for her hand in marriage as soon as they walked through the door.

  “You could do much worse,” he was saying now. “And probably will. I know what happens to you foreign women—your own men have forgotten how to treat you, so you fall into the arms of the first brown man who gives you a compliment. Since you are a converted sister, he will have to prefix that compliment with a bismillah, but otherwise he will be just the same.”

  “This is very rude,” said the convert. Her Arabic was foreshortened, accented. Vikram waved his hand dismissively.

  “You enjoy it. Otherwise you would never allow me to drop in on you like this.” He ran a finger along the edge of her hand. Alif was shocked when she made no effort to pull away or rebuke him. “I’ve made a study of you. A convert may be forgiven all her prior sins, but she does not forget them, does she. She still misses the feel of a man.”

  “For God’s sake!” Dina’s eyes flashed. “Ridiculous animal! You’re not fit to be among people.”

  The convert looked pained but said nothing. She seemed afflicted by a kind of ambivalence that Alif could not place, and it made him uneasy. He roused himself, realizing it fell to him to defend the honor of this woman in whom he had no stake.

  “Apologize,” he ordered Vikram. “You are deeply sorry, and you beg her forgiveness.”

  “Thank you,” said the convert, without quite looking Alif in the eye.

  Vikram grinned, leaning back in his faux-French brocade armchair; one of several that adorned the convert’s apartment. A bristling landscape of steel and glass was visible outside the window behind him, stretching toward the oil fields in the west.

  “I am deeply
sorry, and I beg your forgiveness,” he said, “But I’ve only spoken the truth.”

  The convert leaned against her desk, rubbing her temples like an old woman.

  “What did you come here to ask me,” she said in a monotone.

  Vikram gestured toward Alif ’s backpack, which sat on the parquet floor near his feet.

  “Show her,” he said.

  Alif unzipped the bag and pulled out Intisar’s book, careful not to put stress on the binding as he lifted it free. The convert sat straighter.

  “What’s that?”

  “This,” said Vikram triumphantly, “Is a genuine copy of the Alf Yeom. See, now you do forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? I believe you not.”The convert stepped out from behind her desk and knelt to take the book from Alif. She opened it on her knees, skimming the text with a slim index finger. Her nails, he noticed, were bitten raw.

  “Paper,” she murmured, “Real paper. Not parchment. Bound by hand. Some kind of pasting here too. What a smell.”

  “We can talk in English if you prefer,” said Alif.

  “Oh God, really?”The convert looked up at him, relief evident on her face. “Awesome. Thank you. My Arabic is so—I understand pretty well, but when I talk I sound like an idiot.” She looked back down at the book. “This is amazing. Just amazing. It’s sewn into the binding with silk thread, see? That’s how it’s lasted so well. I think that smell is from some kind of preservative resin, but it’s not one I’ve ever seen before.” She bent over the book once more, tracing the letters that curled from right to left and sounding out each word in a way that was at once childlike and elderly.

  “Are you an expert in books?” Alif knew his own spoken English, a mottled interplay of Anglo-Indian and Arab accents, sounded strange. He could read and write the language well enough, but avoided speaking it when he could. Dina watched in silence. She had given up on English several years earlier, since she could not seem to speak it without resorting to Urdu loan words every time she forgot something. It came from living in Baqara District, whose residents were mostly subcontinental. Urdu and English, she said, went in the same category of foreignness in her mind, and she found it difficult to separate them.

  “Not an expert yet, no,” said the convert, interrupting Alif ’s thoughts. “But I study history and I like books. I came here to get my PhD in archival science.”

  “At Al Basheera?”

  “Yes—in the American University exchange program.” The convert had a self-conscious grin. “I know, I know. Classic ajnabi. Go to an exciting new country to hang out with people just like you.” She blinked myopically, hunching over the Alf Yeom as if to protect it with her body. Alif wondered what she thought of Vikram’s improbable knees. He’d drawn himself into a kind of half-lotus, looking particularly demonic against the tawdry brocade of his chair.

  “She can’t quite see me as I am,” he said. “It’s an American quirk. Half in, half out. A very spiritual people, but in their hearts they feel there is something shameful about the unseen. You’d be right at home there, younger brother.”

  Alif was startled by the precision with which Vikram had guessed his thoughts. Perhaps he had been staring too openly.

  “That’s not fair,” said the convert in English. “We’re really not that bad.” She looked at Alif for support. “He does this to me because I tried to psychoanalyze him once for an article. I was so fascinated by the idea that a back-alley fixer from the souk thinks he’s Vikram the Vampire. So I tracked him down. And now I can’t get rid of him.”

  Alif caught Dina’s eye. Her expression mirrored his discomfort.

  “I am Vikram the Vampire,” said Vikram.

  “Then you’re very well preserved for a two thousand-year-old Sanskrit legend,” the convert said tartly.

  “What about this book?” prompted Dina. The convert flushed and rippled through several pages of the manuscript.

  “Well, if it’s real, it’s extraordinary,” she said. “The general consensus is that the Thousand Days were made up by a seventeenth century Frenchman named de la Croix. He was trying to cash in on the Arabian Nights craze. He was commissioned to study in the Orient by Louis XIV—the Roi Soleil, the Sun King. And when the Sun King gives you marching orders, you march. He had to come back with something spectacular. So he brought home a canon of stories he claimed were dictated to him by Persian dervishes, who in turn had heard them from the jinn. That part’s nonsense of course. But the consensus is that he was lying about the whole thing, and never met with any Persian mystics at all.”

  “That’s not the consensus,” said Vikram. “That’s the consensus of academics.”

  The convert made a sour face.

  “You said this Frenchman claimed to have heard the stories from the Persians,” said Dina, “But our book is in Arabic.”

  “After the Muslim conquest, Arabic became a scholarly language throughout the Persian empire,” said the convert. “It could be that whoever wrote these stories down saw them as some kind of advanced knowledge, appropriate only for sheikhs and learned people, and so recorded them in Arabic rather than Persian.”

  “Data encryption,” murmured Alif.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “This all presumes one thing,” continued the convert, tapping the spine of the book, “Namely, that the manuscript is an original, and not an eighteenth or nineteenth century translation from the French or even the English version. It happens, you know—one culture invents something and claims it’s from somewhere else, and then the people of somewhere else adopt it as their own. History is full of palimpsests like that.”

  Alif felt strangely insulted. “Intisar believed it was an original,” he said. “She wrote like she was certain of it.”

  “Who’s Intisar?”

  “The young man’s young woman,” said Vikram. “She’s the one who sent him the manuscript.”

  The convert shrugged her shoulders. “It’s possible she was mistaken. If this is the genuine article, it’s the first Arabic edition ever to surface in a hundred years of scholarship on the subject.”

  “Western scholarship,”Vikram interjected.

  “I beg your pardon, but is there any other kind? I mean, aside from the City, the Arabian Peninsula has been an intellectual black hole since the Saudis sacked Mecca and Medina way back in the 1920’s. Palestine is a wreck, so there goes the scholarly tradition of Jerusalem. Ditto Beirut and Baghdad. North Africa still hasn’t recovered from the colonial era—all their universities are in the pockets of autocrats and westernized socialists. Persia is up to its neck in revolutions. If there is any native scholarship on the Alf Yeom, it’d be the first I’ve heard of it.”

  Silence followed the convert’s pronouncement. Dina fidgeted restlessly with her sleeve, looking at no one. Alif struggled with a rising dislike for the woman sitting across from him. She looked unmoved. Touched by a faint, sour breeze coming through the window, the edge of her lavender headscarf fluttered against her chair like a flag.

  False colors, thought Alif.

  “Look, I don’t mean to be a buzz kill,” said the convert, trying again to catch Alif ’s eye. “I’m just—if this is real, I’d be surprised. That’s all.” She straightened a little in her chair.

  “You’ve made me look foolish in front of my young friends,” Vikram said. Something in his voice made Alif look up in alarm. “I don’t thank you for that.”

  “I’m sorry!” The convert dabbed sweat off her brow with the back of one hand. “I didn’t mean to. You brought this book to me and I’ve given you my opinion. It looks at least a hundred and fifty years old—it’s not a modern forgery or anything—but unless we can prove for certain that it predates de la Croix’s French edition, all we know is what has already been agreed upon.”

  “How can we discover exactly how old it is?” Alif asked in careful English.

  The convert sighed. “I could take a sample of the paper and look at it in our arc
hival forensics lab—that’s a fancy way to say ‘under a microscope’. The way wood pulp is processed into paper has changed a lot over the centuries. That would give us a good idea. Then I can work on figuring out how your friend got her hands on it in the first place.”

  “I wish I could just speak to her,” said Alif, half to himself. “I wish I could just ask her why she sent this to me and what she expects me to do.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  An impassioned refusal to tell the convert anything was forming itself in his mind when he was struck by a realization.

  “I can,” he said. “My God, I can. Hollywood is gone. There’s nothing to stop her from writing to me if she wants—I could make a new email address, get on some public network. She has to speak to me now.” Forgetting his animosity, he turned to the convert with eagerness.

  “Could you get us into one of the computer labs at Al Basheera?”

  “Yeah, sure—”

  “That’s a bad idea,” said Vikram. “Basheera is upper crust territory. I can handle one or two fat state security agents, but not tens of them, and not in a closed space. If Alif is asked for his ID at the gate, that will be the end of it.”

  “Don’t go,” said Dina anxiously.

  “You’re forgetting something.”The convert flashed an ironic little smile. “You’ll have the ultimate escort: a white American with a blue passport. No one is going to ask you for your ID. In fact, no one is going to remember you were ever there.”

  * * *

  It took nearly half an hour to convince Dina to stay behind at the convert’s apartment and rest. She was anxious not to be left alone. Only after Alif swore to call her every half an hour did she agree to take a couple of ibuprofen and lie down on the couch. When she was settled, Alif and Vikram followed the convert down a set of service stairs that led to an alley behind the apartment complex. The alley, Alif noticed, was better kept than his own street in Baqara District; the bags of garbage discretely confined to wooden stalls and dumpsters, the ground recently repaved.

  The convert led them around the far edge of the apartment building and into a busy street. Alif saw a McDonald’s and an American coffee franchise with a round money-green logo, incongruous against a dusty view of the Old Quarter glimmering on a rise in the distance. There was a scent in the air like newly minted paper. He sidled a glance at Vikram: the man looked solemn and preoccupied. His expression was so human that Alif felt suddenly insecure, wishing back his predatory confidence, needing it to bolster against their sanitized surroundings.