I don’t know if hell has three circles, but Mecca does. The first ring is where the rich live, the second is for those who dream of getting rich, and the third is for the dregs, who wait upon the first two. I live in the worst, the farthest circle away from God. All around me, desperation is a way of life. In a drought I’ve seen children squat to sip from the sewer. The rich would rather kiss a leper than come to the filthy alleys where our crumbling hovels stand. They crowd around the Kaaba, their mansions and courtyards shouldering each other aside like old women grabbing for peaches in the bazaar.
Is my head less blessed, because it’s not covered with silk?
“Barakah, I trust you. You’re the only one I trust,” says Muhammad.
He comes to see me. That’s proof that he’s not rich yet. Ever since old Muttalib died, their clan has fallen. Slaves found themselves thrown out on the street, begging for a master to feed them. It’s shocking how the vultures closed in, stripping the Hashim of power, forcing them into humiliation. Muhammad did what he had to. He began to trade his small fund, and that has served him well. I never thought he’d reach twenty without begging for help.
His visits to me aren’t planned. He drops in on hell when the mood strikes him. God seal my mouth for saying such things. He loves me—that’s the real reason. I was the first person to hold him when he was born. I belonged to his mother, the lady Aminah, in those days. I’ve been passed along so many times I couldn’t name all my owners. I’m like a water skin that won’t be thrown out until it leaks its life away.
One day I look up from sweeping the blown dirt and leaves from my last master’s courtyard, and I see an amazing sight. Muhammad leading a caravan, and so young. An older merchant weary of travel trusted him to go in his place. When he spots me from atop his camel, he gives me a serious nod. I know Muhammad wants to dismount and embrace me, but he can’t, not in front of men he gives orders to. In the back of my mind I think, Your father never returned, your mother never returned. Maybe the curse ended with them.
And he did return. Word spread that Muhammad could be trusted to keep his head in dangerous corners. He will soon have the money to buy me for himself.
“Money?” I laugh. “No master will give me shelter anymore. You can have me for free.”
Muhammad winces, but we both know what is lacking. He first needs a wife. A female slave in a single man’s house is scandalous. Everyone would know what she’s really there for. Gossips would say that he likes them old.
“How did you become so respectable?” I tease Muhammad.
“Don’t worry. It’s a disguise,” he jokes back. Walking past him in the street, you see Muhammad’s hair and beard cut like those of someone who’s prosperous. He wears a cloak dyed in rich blue and trimmed with braid. Only I know what he is. He allows me to stroke his cheek to feel how perfectly the razor has done its work. And why not? I ushered him into this world, a squealing naked creature. His respectability ends at my doorstep.
“You’ve come to save me,” I murmur. “You’ve come to save everybody.”
“Don’t be foolish,” he replies. “I’m as helpless as anyone, and even more confused.”
I shake my head. “Wine ferments before it grows sweet. That’s what you’re doing. The sweetness will come.”
I think our intimacy pleases him. I wouldn’t be in danger if I shouted about it from the rooftops. That’s one advantage of being invisible. All poor women are invisible here, except in bed. For half an hour they are divine creatures then. What does that make me, twice as invisible? I was born a slave, and I sleep alone.
The memory of Muhammad’s mother haunts me. Aminah worshiped Abdullah beyond the grave. The gods were displeased; Abdullah was her only idol. She took that final trip beyond Yathrib to weep over the pile of stones where they buried him. When she turned her steps back to Mecca, a full month later, grief had destroyed her health. I was walking ahead of her donkey when I heard Aminah say, as softly as a frightened child, “We stop here.” She felt sick. Walking beside her, Muhammad hung his head.
I felt a shiver run down my spine. Two women and a six-year-old boy pitching a tent alone in the desert? We got it up somehow, and Aminah crawled inside, as if the tent’s folds could protect her from a trembling fever. She died so quickly. I barely had time to send Muhammad out of the tent, but he couldn’t stand it and ran back inside, just in time to fling himself on his mother’s unconscious body. We wailed together like wounded animals, then buried her with our own hands. The whole way home the boy kept staring at the dirt under his torn, ragged fingernails. The dirt of his mother’s grave. What a horrible thing to set your eyes upon.
I had my own horrors. Watching a young woman die like that, burning up in my arms, was worse than seeing your house burn down. This was a soul turned to ashes. Aminah begged me to take care of her boy. I did what I could. For a while it was possible. Old Muttalib took me into his house. I didn’t have to live in hell then. I had a tiny room at the back of his rambling mansion. He loved Muhammad so much that he even pushed out an old crone who had inhabited the room like a forgotten ghost. I shudder to think of where she went. But Muttalib died, and his sons lost the power. I cried to lose Muhammad, who was only eight. He went into Abu Talib’s house, a small dwelling where the clink of gold was rarely heard.
I can’t remind Muhammad of these things or he blushes with shame. “I should have gone with you on to the street,” he says. However, we both know that was impossible.
When he arrives in his fancy blue robes, the braid dragging in the dust because he doesn’t pay attention, my boy brings me bread, olives, and a small clay jar of oil. I don’t dive into it. The way the vulgar rich tear at their food disgusts me. I taught Muhammad better, and I’ve seen him sit quiet and hungry while Abu Talib’s sons clawed at the dinner bowls like hyenas. With the food Muhammad brings, we sit opposite each other on a tattered rug and nod politely for the other to go first.
“Here,” he says once, holding out a small glass vial. You didn’t even have to take out the stopper to smell what it was. Attar of rose. I thought I’d faint from intoxication.
“Open it,” he urges, when I shove the vial into my underblouse.
“Don’t be silly. It will attract flies, and I have enough as it is.” But I was just trying to keep from crying in front of him.
As Muhammad has grown, he has become more troubled. One day I ask him about this. “To be empty is to be miserable,” he says, which makes no sense
And now the bad times have come. People are afraid. You have to know how to read the signs. One day I’m walking along and what do I see? The sand outside a rich man’s gate is bloody. It’s not brown blood, the leftovers of a street fight. It’s shockingly red and fresh. Usually everyone looks away when there’s blood. To stare might mean you’ve got an opinion about the fight, and anyone with an opinion has taken sides, a dangerous thing to do in Mecca.
On this day I hear buzzing in the air. People aren’t just staring; they’re talking angrily, and I see something else. The trail of blood leads into the rich man’s courtyard. This wasn’t just a common knife fight between two young hotheads.
I know instantly what it means. The balance has been wrecked. The rich are protected from losing their blood, unless the tribes can’t settle their differences behind closed doors. Once there is chaos, no one is safe.
“Come away. You can’t stay here,” a voice says, and I feel someone pulling at my elbow. By now the buzzing voices are thicker, like flies around a dead animal, but I see that it’s Muhammad, and I let him drag me off.
“I’ve seen riots,” I say, because, to tell you the truth, I wanted to stay and watch. Not for the sake of more blood. I’ve seen women bloodied by their husbands more times than I can remember. All this cruelty is a kind of vanity, if you ask me. A man brags in the inns that he’s a bull in bed when his wife knows he’s a rabbit. So she has to pay. A crazy world, when one gets punished for another’s shame. I wanted to stick around to find out who the new victims were going to be. If the clans are jockeying for power, the losers aren’t the ones you want to serve.
When he gets me to a side street, Muhammad looks worried. He warns me not to go near that house again. I shrug. It doesn’t matter that much where you go when you’re invisible, but he repeats the warning and tells me there are three other houses I must not be seen around.
“Everyone watches. They know who goes through those gates,” he says.
“I’ll go where I please,” I say. Which is a boastful way of reminding him that wherever my master sends me, I have to go. I have to obey.
“You won’t be sent there anymore,” he replies. His voice is grim, but he won’t explain what he means. As we part at the corner, Muhammad leaves me with strange words: “The dawn doesn’t come back to awaken us twice.”
I feel prickly all over when he says that, but before I can question him, he has melted into the crowd. Now, you’d think something dark was afoot. Maybe one night the vigilantes will raid a particular clan and wipe out all the young males. It’s happened before, and since they sometimes get careless and slit the throats of a few slaves, I keep to my house the next few nights, begging off that it’s my unclean days of the month.
The buzzing won’t die down. The next time I carry a basket of washing to the well, I stand next to an Abyssinian woman I know; it’s easier next to another black. They leave us alone. And she says, “You won’t believe it. Uthman wants to be king. That’s why they nicked him with a knife. It happened while he was coming home. He screamed blue murder and ran inside.”
“They did more than nick him,” I say, slapping the laundry harder against the rim of the well to make more noise. It wouldn’t do to be overheard.
“That’s not the point. A king—these Arabs won’t stand for it.”
A few eyes dart our way, so we shut up. But to tell the truth, I feel like laughing. A crazy man calls himself a king. I call myself Queen of the Nile, but the last time I looked, there isn’t a crown under my pillow.
Muhammad doesn’t smile when I bring it up, however. “Uthman bin al-Huwayrith. He’s not crazy. He just doesn’t know how to keep a secret.”
The Arabs love secrecy more than they love a feud even. They have a saying: “A secret is like a bird. Let it go from your hand, and it flies everywhere.”
Gravely Muhammad tells me that Uthman has become a Christian. He looks surprised when I burst out laughing.
“Is that all?” I say. The last thing a slave has to worry about is who to worship. Our masters point to their idols, and there’s an end to it. We bow down where they bow down.
“I wish you could understand,” Muhammad murmurs.
“Why?”
“Because Uthman has brought the pot to a boil. Not just him. There are others. They refuse to hide anymore.”
I settle down for Muhammad’s sake and pay attention.
“This Uthman is a rich Qurayshi. He got drunk one night and declared that the lands beyond Arabia are civilized. They have laws. A man’s money is as safe there as his life. He can even loan with interest, like the Jews. That made the others sit up, even though they don’t tolerate words against their damned pride. Uthman explained that the Christians are the true sons of Abraham, them and the Jews. If Mecca had a Christian king, trade would improve for everyone. Alliances could be made with Byzantium, where Christians pile gold as high as a virgin’s head to make her dowry. ‘Oh, and who would be king?’ someone yelled in derision. Which is where Uthman should have shut his big mouth. ‘Make me king,’ he shouted over the general laughter. ‘I’m a Christian already.’
“Uh-oh. The room grew quiet. Everyone knew there were hanif around, and it was assumed that Uthman was one. He went freely to and from the house of Waraqah. But Uthman tried to wave a big stick and accidentally hit a hornet’s nest. He upset the balance, and over such a stupid thing. They warned him with a nick, but then some others came out on his side, and they were mumbling about Christians and Jews too, saying that they’re all the true sons of Abraham.”
“Why not go and ask Abraham himself?” I say, growing bored with the tale.
Muhammad gives a small, crooked smile. “If only we could.” He explains that Abraham is the grandfather of grandfathers, and no one knows how long ago he lived or who his true sons are, except that part of keeping power for the Quraysh meant that they laid claim to him. He says that if they aren’t the sons of Abraham, they’re just another tribe of puffed-up bullies.
“Are you taking sides?” I ask Muhammad. And he drops a saying: “A lizard doesn’t hop from one branch until he’s sure of the next one.” Arabs live by old sayings. I shouldn’t criticize. Muhammad is being prudent. He’s known for that. He’s earned more money by refusing the third cup of wine than by shrewdness.
“This won’t go away,” says Muhammad, getting up and leaving me the last piece of bread. “Zamzam ran underground out of sight for a long time. No one knew it was there until my grandfather had a vision. God has been running underground too. He hasn’t broken through yet, but the ground is moist, and everyone can see it.”
“You can’t drink moist dirt,” I point out. Muhammad smiles and leaves.