Alif the Unseen (14 page)

“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, where the 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 djinn. 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 is 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 1920s. 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’s 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 head scarf 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 archival 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 e-mail 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 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 were discreetly 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 the 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.

“Let’s get a taxi,” said the convert.

“Will they take us together? We’re obviously not related.” Alif looked dubiously at the convert’s pink skin.

“In the New Quarter they will. They’re used to foreigners doing all kinds of weird things here.” The convert stepped into the stream of cars, bicycles, and mopeds and raised
one arm. A black-and-white cab drew up alongside her.

“You get in front, Alif,” murmured Vikram.

Alif obliged, wincing as he lowered himself onto the overheated vinyl seat next to the driver, a Sikh man whose yellow turban brushed the underside of the roof. Climbing in through the back
door, the convert gave him directions in accented but passable Punjabi. They sped off into the white glare of midday traffic.

“Wait—where’s Vikram?” The convert turned to look out the back window, dismayed. Alif felt the same needling dysphoria he had experienced the night before, when Vikram
was like a word he once knew or an errand he had forgotten to run, facts just beyond the pale of memory.

“I think—I think he’s meeting us there,” Alif said, though why he thought so he did not know. He shook his head to clear it. Half in, half out.

“But he doesn’t know where we’re going! This is ridiculous.” The convert gave a forced little sigh and leaned back into the seat cushions, which groaned in agreement.
Alif shrugged.

“Vikram knows everything.”

“Do you believe him? I mean about what he is?” The convert’s eyes were narrow in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“If you don’t know, it means you think there’s a possibility that he is actually an evil spirit.”

“Evil?” Alif turned to look at her. “You think so?”

“Ha! You really believe him, don’t you.”

The corners of Alif’s mouth twitched. He thought of half a dozen veiled insults, and despite himself, the worst one came out.

“Why did
you
become Muslim?” He found himself elongating the pronoun with a hostile sneer, forgetting for a moment that he shared some of her foreignness, some of her
skepticism.

The convert seemed unsurprised by his implication. “Islam was presented to me as a system for social justice,” she said carefully. “I converted in that spirit.”

“God never came into it, then.”

“Well, of course
God
came into it, but as a—as an—”

“A side issue? A thought experiment? Or something for one of your papers?”

The convert jerked as though she’d been slapped. “That’s not fair,” she said in a quieter voice. “That is really, really not fair.”

Alif felt chastened. Thinking of Dina and what she might say to him if she were there, the feeling deepened to shame too heavy for an apology. He turned his burning face toward the window: they
were speeding through the indifferent neighborhoods between the New and Old Quarters. Baqara District was not far away. If he leaped out at this street corner, he could reach his house in a
fifteen-minute walk. As the cab slowed for a passing microbus, Alif actively considered it. The frantic confusion of the last two days was settling into something else: a malaise, a desire for
nothing more than to sleep in his own bed, even if it meant waking up to the police. Was not capture inevitable anyway? Alif could think of no other dissident, religious or political, who had
successfully evaded State. He was no different—no smarter, no better equipped.

The cab jerked forward again. Alif watched regretfully as familiar streets slid away one after the other. The convert’s silence was becoming oppressive. He unzipped his backpack and
removed the
Alf Yeom
once more, thumbing through the delicate pages until he found his place.