I grasped the offered hand. I loved his well-manicured fingers and the light smell of lotion emanating from them. We walked hand in hand down the street, a spring in our step.
A radio from a coffee shop across the street screamed that we must dig trenches with our fingernails. “The Palestinian Resistance can be so delightfully melodramatic,” Uncle Jihad said.
The beasts of the underworld looked to Fatima for guidance. The snakes coiled about themselves, holding their heads high, waiting. They looked like thousands of miniature minarets, tiny lighthouses in an infinite sea without a shore. The bats and crows, too stunned to fly, began to gather in groups of their own kind. Fatima sought the imps. One by one she found them, shocked and woozy.
Adam wept. Ezra wailed. “My brother,” Job cried. Each imp shed tears of skin-matching color. “Our brother is gone,” Elijah moaned. “We’ll never see him again,” Noah added. And the scorpions and spiders and the beasts of the underworld joined in mourning.
“Wait,” interrupted Fatima. “What happened? Who was that white son of a whore? Where has he taken Afreet-Jehanam?”
“Do not mention the name of the departed to the bereaved,” Isaac said. “It grates our hearts.” He shook his head in dismay.
“The name of the magician is King Kade, the master of light,” Ishmael said.
“He loathes the underworld and its inhabitants,” Ezra said.
“Considers us parasites,” added Noah.
“His mission is to rid the world of dark,” said Jacob. “That is his vow. Are we dark? Look at me. I am yellow.”
“He is obsessed with jinn,” Ishmael said, “but he does not attempt to use our power. He kidnaps the powerful jinn and tortures them. He chains and whips them, forces them to work on his palaces before he kills them. He had Mithras, the mighty demon, paint a giant mural of bucolic scenes. As he painted, King Kade’s angels threw darts at him and they touched up the mural with dabs of white, dab, dab, dart, dab, dab, dart. And then King Kade sucked the life out of Mithras. Oh, Afreet-Jehanam, my poor brother. What tragedy awaits you.”
“Stop this,” Fatima yelled. “What has become of you? Why are you bemoaning your brother’s fate already? First, we will find that white idiot and kill him; we will annihilate him for coming into our realm without an invitation. After that, we will bring my lover home.”
“No,” said the imps, all eight of them in one voice. “We cannot.”
“Then I will go alone,” Fatima said. “You sit here and cower if you choose. I will fight the bastard myself.”
“There is no hope,” said Ishmael. “He wove a potent spell eons ago. Nothing from the underworld, living or not, can harm him. The most powerful jinn have tried to no avail. Creatures mightier than all of us combined have declared war upon him. The spell he wove cannot be undone. He cannot be conquered by anyone from the underworld.”
“But I am not from here,” announced Fatima. “I will defeat him.”
One by one, the little imps’ facial expressions changed, their demeanor transformed. Ishmael stood up first. “I may not be of any use at the great encounter, but I will make sure you get there.”
“And I will confound his armies,” Job said.
“I will get the carpet,” said Noah.
“Get a few,” said Elijah. “It is a long trip — why be cramped?”
“Come, my lovelies,” Jacob said. He raised his arms and created a yellow orb of mist above his head. The bats flew into it and disappeared. Elijah invited the crows into his sphere, and Adam brought the snakes, the scorpions, and the spiders.
“Let us be on our way,” commanded Fatima, sitting on one of the carpets.
“Upon thy head, King Kade,” said Isaac, “we declare war.”
“North,” said Ishmael. “We go to the land of fog and rain, the land of ice and snow, the land of infinite skies.”
“No, not yet,” said Fatima. “First, I go home.”
Once upon a time, the oud was my instrument, my companion, my lover. I played it between the two wars, started taking lessons during the Six-Day War and gave them up during the Yom Kippur War, a period of seven years.
My mother had wanted me to take piano lessons. “The lessons will be good for you,” she said one evening, when I was sitting on her lap out on the balcony of our apartment. The railing was a whorly arabesque of metal roses sprouting wherever the lines changed angles. My mother’s raised feet rested on one of the few unrosed spots. She attempted to tidy my hair while staring at the swirl of stars in the dark summer sky. “I think you’re talented. I hear you singing all the time.” She pulled my head to her bosom. I felt the softness of her silk housedress on my cheek, my eyes focusing on a print marigold as it heaved and contracted with each breath. The tireless scrapings of cicadas saturated the air. “Never once off-key. You’re my gifted baby.”
I squirmed, pushed myself off her chest with both hands. “I don’t like piano,” I said.
My sister, Lina, had been taking piano lessons for the past four years, ever since she was six, my age now. Her teacher was Mademoiselle Finkelstein, a white-haired, dowdy, bespectacled spinster who smelled of mothballs and vanilla. Whenever Lina slipped, made a mistake as she played the “Méthode Rose,” Mademoiselle Finkelstein would smack her knuckles with a wooden ruler that she used to tap a beat on the top of the piano. I asked Lina why she never complained about being hit. She said that the ruler wasn’t painful, that Mademoiselle Finkelstein only tapped her gently, that she loved her teacher. Her crimson knuckles told a different story. When I asked my father why Mademoiselle Finkelstein was such a cruel woman, he said it was because she was unmarried, which caused women to become bitter, harsh, and unforgiving after they reached the age of thirty. Of course, he explained, they made wonderful teachers, because they had the unfettered time to dedicate to their profession and they knew how to instill discipline. On the other hand, unmarried men, like his younger brother, Uncle Jihad, were simply eccentrics and did not suffer accordingly. The difference, he elaborated, was that men chose to be unmarried, whereas women had to live with never having been chosen.
For Fatima, the bogs of the Nile Delta were a welcoming sight, though the imps held their noses. She bade the carpets descend as they approached Bast’s cottage. “I beg you,” Bast said the instant she saw Fatima. “Do not talk to me of King Kade. I am not having a happy day. Cleopatra wants to mate, and I am in a foul mood. When I bleed, that so-called holy magician of light is not what I want to talk about.” The healer turned around and walked into her cottage.
Fatima and her entourage followed. “Stop being childish and churlish. You are needed.”
“Leave me,” Bast said, trying to stare Fatima down.
“No.” Fatima sat upon one of the barrels in the room, as she had once before.
“At least tell your companions to disappear. They are so colorful they sour my eyes.”
“Self-centered witch,” Elijah harrumphed, and he vanished, leaving a barely discernible indigo cloud that dissipated quickly.
“What is wrong with color?” Ezra asked. “Are you some big-city artist? Oh, never mind.” And he, too, disappeared into his orange cloud, followed by Jacob, Job, Noah, and Adam.
Isaac looked at Ishmael and shrugged. Ishmael grinned. They turned into cats. Isaac became a red Abyssinian and Ishmael an Egyptian Mau with dark eyes. And the Alexandrian healer laughed. “Still too red,” Bast said. Isaac wined his red and meowed.