Alif the Unseen (3 page)

“Pardon me, brother,” Alif said in Urdu, “but I am not a mirage. Let me through.”

The guide stared at him. “We all come here to make a living, brother,” he said, curling his lip. “Don’t frighten the money.”

“I didn’t come here. I was born here.”

“
Masha’Allah!
Pardon
me
.” He splayed his legs. The tour group gathered behind him instinctively, like chicks behind a hen. Alif stared past them down the
street. He could almost see the corrugated roof of the tea shop where Intisar would be waiting.

“No one cares if a few fat Victorians came across the desert to look at a wall,” he blurted. “They’re dead now. We’ve got plenty of live Europeans out in the oil
fields at the TransAtlas facility. Give them a tour of that.”

The guide grimaced. “You’re crazy,
bhai,
” he muttered. He stood aside, holding his brood back with one arm. Alif had invoked a class bond more subtle than commerce.
Pressing a hand to his heart in thanks, Alif hurried past.

The tea shop was neither attractive nor memorable. It was decorated with a smudged acrylic mural of the New Quarter’s famous skyline, and the owner—a Malay who spoke no
Arabic—served “authentic” hibiscus drinks that had gone out of fashion several decades earlier. No native of the City would step foot in such a simulacrum. It was for this reason
Alif and Intisar had chosen the place. When Alif arrived, Intisar was standing in the corner with her back to the room, examining a rack of dusty postcards. Alif felt the blood rush to his
head.

“
As-salaamu alaykum,
” he said. She turned, jet beads clinking softly in the hem of her veil. Large black eyes regarded him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He crossed the room in three steps and took her gloved hand. The Malay busied himself at a wash basin in the far corner, head down; Alif wondered if Intisar had given him money.

“For God’s sake,” he said, breath unsteady. “What’s happened?”

She dropped her eyes. Alif ran his thumb across her satin palm and felt her shiver. He wanted to tear the veil away and read her face, inscrutable behind its wall of black crepe. He could still
remember the scent of her neck—it had not been so long ago. To be separated by so much cloth was unbearable.

“I couldn’t stop it,” she said. “It was all settled without me. I tried, Alif, I swear to you I tried everything—I told my father I wanted to finish university
first, or travel, but he just looked at me as if I’d gone crazy. It’s a friend of his. Putting him off would be an insult—”

Alif stopped breathing. Taking her wrist, he began to strip off the glove, ignoring her halfhearted struggle. He revealed her pale fingers: an engagement ring glittered between them like a stone
dropped on uneven ground. He began breathing again.

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t. He can’t. We’ll leave—we’ll go to Turkey. We don’t need your father’s consent to get married there.
Intisar—”

She was shaking her head. “My father would find a way to ruin you.”

To Alif’s horror he felt tears spring up in his eyes. “You can’t marry this
chode,
” he said hoarsely. “You’re my wife in the eyes of God if no one
else.”

Intisar laughed. “We signed a piece of paper you printed from your computer,” she said. “It was silliness. No state would recognize it.”

“The
shayukh
do. Religion does!”

The Malay shifted, looking over his shoulder. Without speaking, Intisar pulled Alif into the back room and shut the door.

“Do
not
shout,” she hissed. “You’ll cause a scandal.”

“This is a scandal.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Alif curled his lip. “How much do you pay that Malay? He’s very accommodating.”

“Stop it.” Intisar lifted her veil. “I don’t want to fight with you.” A wisp of hair clung to her jaw; Alif brushed it aside before bending to kiss her. He tasted
lips, teeth, tongue; she withdrew.

“It’s too late for this,” she murmured.

“No, it’s not. I’ll protect you. Come to me and I’ll protect you.”

One plush lip quivered. “You’re such a boy,” said Intisar. “This isn’t a game. Someone could get hurt.”

Alif slammed his fist against the wall and Intisar shrieked. For a moment they stared at each other. The Malay began pounding on the other side of the door.

“Tell me his name,” Alif demanded.

“No.”

“Your mother’s cunt! Tell me his name.”

The color seeped from Intisar’s face. “Abbas,” she said. “Abbas Al Shehab.”

“Abbas the Meteor? What a stupid, stupid name. I’ll kill him—I’ll run him through with a sword made of his own bones—”

“Don’t talk like something out of a comic book. You don’t know what you’re saying.” She shoved past him and opened the door. The Malay began shouting in an
incomprehensible dialect. Ignoring him, Alif followed Intisar out through the tea shop. She was crying.

“Go home, Alif,” she quavered, jerking her veil back over her face. “Make it so I never see your name again. Please, God, please—I can’t stand it.”

He tangled his legs between a table and chair and stumbled. Intisar disappeared into the twilight, a black omen against the fading air.

Sitting in the back of his wardrobe was a box. It was hidden behind a pile of winter clothing the maid had stacked there the previous spring, layers of tissue paper separating
sweaters and wool slacks. Alif maneuvered it free and set it on his bed. His throat spasmed; he waited. It spasmed again. He couldn’t cry; women would descend on him and ask questions. He
disciplined his body. When he was sure of himself, he lifted the lid of the box: inside was a folded cotton bed sheet. Unfolding it halfway, he saw a small stain, now more brown than red, shaped
something like the Indian subcontinent.

The stain had appeared during a week when Alif’s mother accompanied his father on one of his innumerable business trips. Alif had encouraged the maid
to visit her relatives in a nearby emirate while his parents were away, insisting he could manage on his own. The maid was skeptical but needed only a little convincing to agree. Alif gave Intisar
a key to the front gate and told her to dress in her plainest robe; if the neighbors saw her, they would assume she was Dina. When she arrived the first evening, Alif lifted her veil without
speaking, struck dumb by the face he had imagined and reimagined for months. In an instant he forgot all his mental projections of Lebanese pop stars and Egyptian movie actresses. She could have no
face but this face, with its mercurial dimple, mouth slightly too large, those elegant brows. He’d suspected she was beautiful—she spoke like a beautiful woman. But nothing had prepared
him for the force of that beauty.

“What are you thinking?” she’d whispered.

“I can’t think,” he’d answered, and laughed.

With embarrassed smiles they signed a stock marriage contract Alif found on a Web site that catered to Gulf men seeking to cleanse the sins they planned to commit elsewhere. Though the paper
eased his mind somewhat, it took him three nights to work up the courage to uncover more than her face. They were both awkward. Alif was bewildered by her body, so much of which remained hidden to
him even when she was unclothed; she in turn seemed equal parts intrigued and appalled by his. Guided by instinct, they had created this stain. The blood was Intisar’s, but Alif could not
shake the feeling that something of his lay over it, an invisible mark of the ignorance he had shed. In the aftermath, he told her he loved her over and over again until she asked him to stop,
frightened of the power she now possessed.

Alif bent and rummaged through a drawer in his file cabinet. Their contract lay in an unmarked folder near the back, carefully pressed between stiff manila folds. He took out the single printed
page and ran his fingers over it, tracing the ballpoint indentation of Intisar’s signature. His own was a secondary-school scribble. She had laughed to see his legal name, so ordinary,
lacking the edgy brevity of his screen name, the only name she had ever called him. The name she would murmur in the faint grainy light of the street lamp that illuminated his room as they lay side
by side, whispering through the empty hours before dawn.

Alif put the file back and closed the drawer.

He had discovered Intisar several months earlier, in a digital forum where unwholesome young men like himself heaped bile on the emir and his government from behind clever pseudonyms. Intisar
intruded on their conversation like an elegant reproach, sometimes to defend the emir, sometimes to add new levels of complexity to their critique. Her knowledge was so broad, her Arabic so
correct, that her lineage was quickly apparent. Alif had always believed that aristocrats avoided the Internet, assuming—correctly—that it was full of riffraff and social disease.
Intisar intrigued him. He began to e-mail her quotations on liberty by Atatürk and John Adams; she countered with Plato. Alif was enchanted. He sent her money to buy a second mobile phone so
they could talk without being discovered by her family, and for weeks they spoke every night, often for hours at a time.

When they decided to meet, in the very tea shop where she had so recently shattered him, Alif nearly lost his nerve. He hadn’t spent time alone with any girl besides Dina since primary
school. When he saw Intisar for the first time, he envied her the enfolding anonymity of her veil; he did not know if her hands shook as his did, or if her face was flushed, or if her feet, like
his, refused to obey her. She had the upper hand. She could observe him, make up her mind about whether he was handsome, assess his tendency to wear all black and decide whether this offended her
or not. He, on the other hand, could do nothing but fall in love with a face he had never seen.

Alif lifted the stained sheet out of its box and breathed in. It smelled of mothballs, having long since lost any trace of Intisar’s perfume, or the aching, tender fragrance of their
mingled limbs. It baffled him to think that a year ago he did not know her, and in another year it might be as though they had never met. The anger he felt in the Malay’s tea shop was fading
rapidly into shock. How long had she planned their perfunctory meeting? On what day, as he sat oblivious in front of his computer, had her engagement been performed? Had he touched her, this
interloper? That thought was too much. Alif curled around the sheet with a howl, blood churning in his temples.

A frantic knock rattled out on his bedroom door. Before he could answer, his mother came into the room, clutching the trailing end of her scarf to her chest.

“Merciful God,
makan,
was it you who made that terrible noise? What’s wrong?”

Alif bundled the sheet back into the box. “I’m fine,” he said unsteadily. “Just a pain in my side.”

“Do you want paracetamol? Soda water?”

“No, nothing—nothing.” He attempted a nonchalant expression.

“All right.” His mother looked him over once, lips pursed, before turning to leave. Alif straightened and took a few deep breaths. Taking out the sheet once more, he refolded it
neatly, hiding the stain in its deepest layers. Then he rummaged in his desk for a pad of paper, on which he scribbled a note:

This belongs to you. You may need it
.

He did not sign his name. He tucked the sheet and the note inside the box and taped it shut, wrapping it in a Saturday edition of
Al Khalij
he found folded up on his bookshelf. Then he
tapped on the wall:

* * *

It was ten minutes before Dina appeared on the roof. Alif set the box down beside him and dangled his shoelaces for the black-and-orange cat, which had appeared among the potted
plants by some alchemy that did not involve stairs. He jerked his foot in the air and watched her bat at his dirty laces, feeling irrationally oppressed by Dina’s tardy response to his
summons. When she came out through the door of the stairwell, he was ready for a fight.

“Be careful with this one,” said Dina, bending down to greet the cat. “All cats are half djinn, but I think she’s three-quarters.”

“Where have you been?” he demanded, tucking the box under his arm.

She sniffed. “Praying
maghrib
.”

“God is great. I need a favor.”

Dina walked to the edge of the roof and knelt to brush dust from the leaves of a dwarf banana plant teetering in a clay tub. The cat followed her, pressing its body against her leg with a
rumbling purr.

“You were mean to me,” Dina said without looking at him. “All I wanted to do was talk about your book.”

Alif went to sit beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a donkey. Forgive me. I need to do something important and I can’t ask anyone else. Please,
Dina—if I had a sister I’d ask her, but you’re—”

“You have a sister. I danced at her wedding.”

Alif laughed. “Half-sister. I’ve met her four times in my life. You know Baba’s other family hates me. As far as Fatima is concerned I’m a dark little
abd,
not a
brother.”

Dina’s eyes softened. “I shouldn’t have brought her up. May God forgive them for the sins they have committed against you and your mother.”