Starve me,
So that I become a lioness of discontent in the wildness of the night thickets,
So that I tease your bulging hide with my tooth’s keen edge.
Akl Awit, The Freeing of the Dead
APPROACHING BISHOP’S STORTFORD THE train slowed. A few people got aboard and passed by the ticket inspector with his small handheld device that stamped the day and date on the tickets of new passengers. The old lady offered Fahd a piece of gum. He took it and thanked her. His mind was a little calmer. He looked through the window at the empty wooden seats on the platform and the policeman who stood holding a big dog on a lead.
The train set off and Fahd’s memories galloped in its wake, wild and panting. He was thinking that it was no easy matter to rebel and to take risks with your life but if you didn’t do it when you were a teenager or a young man then you never would. That is how it had been with him: there had been nothing worth fighting for, nothing worth preserving. He hadn’t rebelled like his father. He hadn’t done what Suleiman had done and clashed with government and society. His father would have taken up arms, had he not slowly withdrawn, using Imam Turki’s mosque as a way to escape the Salafist Group, going to listen to the blind sheikh’s speeches and sermons at sunset prayers every day until he dropped out of the reckoning altogether.
Fahd’s decision to leave the family home forever was painful and devastating. Even if initially it was not on a permanent basis—spending first one night away then two, then more—it still saddened his ailing mother. What would she do at night? Would Lulua wash her forehead using water infused with the saffron ink from Qur’anic verses inscribed on white paper? Would she take three small gulps then rest her bandaged head on the pillow in search of sleep? Would she take a sleeping pill in order to drift off like the dead?
Fahd and Saeed had gone out together many times, loafing around Tahliya Street and Faisaliya Tower and pursuing the frisky girls who drew their admirers after them like panting dogs. They chased their lusts in a trance, like children chasing brightly coloured birds or butterflies, bewitched by a beguiling glance from behind a niqab, by eyes painted with kohl and maddening eye-shadow, by laughter, by shoulders jostling as the girls swayed, lascivious and lustful, and pointed mischievously towards the two young men.
Saeed become another person when girls teased him. Whenever he got the chance or came across some sheltered spot he would almost rub up against their abaya-clad bodies. He was indifferent to the presence of Indian and Filipino vendors and tried to avoid the looks of Arab street sellers—the Lebanese, Syrians and Egyptians—but when he caught sight of a Saudi walking behind his wife he would keep his lunacy completely under wraps. Alone with a girl, however, he would become demented and reckless.
One night he surged forward like a tiger towards two juicy morsels standing by the elevator and giggling in his direction and took them both in his arms. One of them hit him on the head with her handbag and he came back over to Fahd out of breath and laughing. ‘That bitch. She’s the one who gave me her number.’
Fahd could never match his wildness. He would follow after a girl full of trepidation but if she so much as glanced at him he would retrace his steps, stumbling like a bunny rabbit.
‘Your problem is that you take life seriously, even though it’s not worth it,’ Saeed would always tell him. The truly incredible thing was that Saeed’s extensive culture and learning could coexist with this demented pursuit of lust. When Fahd questioned him about the contradiction he’d laugh. ‘There’s no contradiction: it’s all culture.’
One girl, Noha, was exceptional but Fahd was not in love with her. For her to leave the house meant mobilising the ‘Armies of Christendom’ as he put it; she was unable to go out without being accompanied by her entire family, and so he steered clear, until he discovered some comfort for his own misfortunes in her voice and past. She started calling him every day on the landline in the flat (the ‘den’ as Saeed called it) then got hold of his mobile number.
One day she left home in the company of the horde, all their vast baggage and retinue in tow, and arranged to meet Fahd at Mamlaka Tower in the afternoon. He stood staring nervously at the Rabei flower shop until she appeared before him and, flustered, shook his hand. Fahd grew increasingly disconcerted as she closed her eyes behind the niqab and trembled like a madwoman. He left her after a few minutes. Later, she confessed that she had nearly taken him in her arms: ‘I just love your eyes! she said, then added, ‘Not to mention your golden moustache.’
He chuckled. ‘Golden, or ginger?’
Saeed always said that the girl who wouldn’t go out with you after the second phone call wasn’t worth your time. ‘Love is business, my friend,’ he would say, before delivering his famous line: ‘Do you think a businessman would put all his capital into a project that wouldn’t turn a profit for a whole month?’
‘Of course not,’ Fahd would laugh.
Profit, in Saeed’s eyes, meant holding a hand, giving it a squeeze (sometimes a kiss), a playful slap on the buttocks, a breathless embrace, a deep, long kiss and so on. To call moans and heavy breathing down a phone line ‘profit’ was ridiculous, hardly worth the effort. Why? Because watching porn and doing the job yourself was a sight better than the self-deception of bringing yourself off to a panting, moaning voice.
Fahd didn’t answer the missed calls from his mother and sister but, lifting the receiver of the phone in the flat, he was startled to hear his mother weeping and reproaching him for ignoring them. He gave a deep, tragic sigh and said harshly, ‘It was you who decided where your interests lay. Everything my uncle did was designed to get me thrown out, and you just tried to keep him happy. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who wanted me out of the house!’
Through her tears she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Fahd! I’m still your mother and Lulua’s your sister.’
She wouldn’t hang up until she had persuaded him to come round on those days when his uncle was away, especially now that her illness had become of serious concern. She said, ‘No one knows how long they’ve got, my son.’
It pricked his conscience and he made up his mind to stop by on the nights when his uncle was sleeping with his other wives. They settled into their routine. Sometimes his mother would beg him to stay the night and despite the appeal of life in the ‘den’ he would agree. Everything that was outlawed and forbidden in his uncle’s kingdom was freely available in Saeed’s lair. In Ulaya, there were no satellite channels, no glossy magazines or daily papers, no pictures, music or songs, no computer and no Internet; in the flat, there was all that and more.
Soha spent most of her time resting but only slept in her bedroom when her husband was at home; during the day she dozed in the dining room next to the kitchen, a small envelope beside her pillow full of folded strips of paper on which were written Qur’anic verses in yellow saffron. Without opening it she would take one and dip it straight into a glass of water until the liquid changed colour and then she would drink, wetting her chest and stomach and intoning prayers to God on behalf of her lungs that trembled like a pair of birds: ‘Oh God, Lord of mankind, send me strength. Heal me, for You are the Healer, who alone has the cure, the cure that never fails.’
Her view of life had changed and become more religious. Had her illness done this, or was it her new husband, the imam, who had turned their life in this house upside down? The marriage was not contracted to protect his brother’s wife or his brother’s children. These hadn’t even been fleeting considerations. It was done for divine reward in return for making devout a home that had once been immodest, wayward and sinful.
‘How do you feel?’ Fahd asked her.
‘It’s women’s troubles, my son; don’t bother yourself about it. Just stay close to me.’
One afternoon, Lulua placed a pot of mint tea before her mother and brother in the dining room with its bolsters and their colourful wool covers. Fahd poured his mother a glass and she asked him to fetch the phone book on the dressing table in her bedroom so she could call a technician to come and fix the air conditioner in the living room, which had started pumping out hot air.
‘Maybe it needs filling up with Freon,’ he said as he went to her room.
Searching on the dressing table and bedside table for the phone book he spied a small religious pamphlet, the kind that were given away free with cassette tapes in mosques and waiting rooms. The glossy cover carried a picture of a tree’s branches against a sunset and the title: The Efficacy of Charms and Herbs in Treating Cancer.
He skimmed through and read a few lines from the introduction that declared that the best treatment for the most dangerous disease of our times—cancer—was prayer, Qur’anic amulets, incantation and blowing. The pamphlet provided testimonies of cancer victims who had turned their back on the lies and fabrications of medical doctors and placed their faith in God. It claimed that one doctor, an American, had been rendered speechless with amazement when scans showed his patient’s body entirely free of tumours, and when he asked, ‘Where were you cured?’ the man pointed heavenwards, the smile of true faith on his lips. Fahd quickly shut the booklet, returned with the phone book and called the repairman, who promised to pass by the following afternoon. The van wasn’t available at the moment.
As he was leaving, his mother embraced him and pushed a note, either two or five hundred riyals, into his breast pocket. Then she kissed his head, prayed that God protect him from all devils, human and jinn alike, and when he objected to her gift, saying that he wasn’t looking for charity from anyone, she was blunt: ‘It’s your money,’ she told him. ‘God rest his soul, your father’s money is your own.’
Since accepting a job as an editor for the Kanoun website’s art section, taking contributions and reviewing articles and comments, Fahd would spend long hours online back at the flat. He was no longer interested in Noha’s phone calls. He had met her again at the Paper Moon in Mamlaka Tower, hurriedly shaking her hand as she uncovered her small painted face and handed him a present wrapped in lemon-yellow paper, and placed in a carrier bag. On the card he read:
My darling,
For your eyes, your mouth and your little ginger moustache: I give you my scent and my femininity.
Back at the flat, as Saeed laughed and shouted ‘To hell with romance’, he broke open the wrapping paper and pulled out a bottle of Givenchy perfume. Giggling, he sprayed it at Saeed.
NOHA WAS YOUNG AND mischievous. Fahd wasn’t her first or last, and he wasn’t her only one, either. She gathered men about her to bathe her long nights with their rough voices and suggestive banter. Fahd enjoyed getting to know her and hearing stories about her family.
Her mother, a strong personality, would flip over from the Showtime movie channels whenever Noha came into her room and was desperately worried about her daughters. Noha told Fahd that she could remember her mother forbidding her to ride the horses at the funfair, even bicycles. She was not to jump around or play too energetically in case she broke her hymen.
‘A girl’s a matchstick!’ she would tell her.
When she was older and understood the implication of this sentence, she would lie beneath her blanket in the bitter Riyadh winter and ask herself, ‘A matchstick? Who will strike me, and when?’
Noha still recalled those moments as a young girl when she would hide beneath the bedsheet and send her little hand to grope around. She felt no pleasure, just the thrill of discovering this buried treasure. One day her mother walked in on her unexpectedly and Noha snatched her hand away in confusion.
‘What are you doing?’ her mother asked, sensing the child’s confusion and panic.
‘Nothing!’ Noha answered in terror.
Her mother wasn’t sure of what she had been up to, but she started dropping hints that it was a sin to play with oneself: ‘If you put your hand there you’ll never have children!’
It was absurd that a mother should threaten her child with the inability to bear children. So what if she did? What does being a mother mean to a girl of seven?
The next time she fiddled with her hand and moved it around down there, she was doing so for two reasons: first and foremost out of curiosity and secondly because she enjoyed its the way it felt. It was at this moment that her mother surprised her again, coming into the room and fully exposing her by uncovering the blanket. She moved closer and questioned her and Noha was stammering that she had been trying on her new underwear when her mother’s hand, burning and heavy, landed on her face.
Although Noha only left the house very rarely all her friends were men. She absolutely never went out without her mother and an army of brothers and sisters. Her mother would never let her go with children or the driver, nor with any of her relatives. In her mother’s absence the only person who could accompany her was her father.
Being accompanied by her father felt like a moment of wild rebellion to Noha, and it was the same on those rare occasions that she was allowed out with her friend. Her mother took her to her grandmother’s house, her mother took her to university, her mother took her to her doctor’s appointments, and so on, so much so that Noha would sometimes feel sorry for her, wrapped up in her daughter and neglecting her husband.
‘It’s wonderful that she’s done this,’ she would tell herself from time to time, ‘because otherwise I would have slept with lots of the men I’ve met. It’s true that I’ve done the deed with three to date, but that was only on the phone. If Mum had let me be for just a bit of the day I’d have done so much …’
It was imperative that Noha dispose of her sister, Nadia, with whom she shared a bedroom and bathroom. She did her best to upset and annoy her. Exploiting Nadia’s fear of the dark she started switching the light off early, leaving her sister quaking with fear. The two of them bickered until at last Nadia moved her books and bed in with her younger siblings, and the little bedroom became the kingdom of Noha’s secret love affairs.
During her first year at secondary school she was pursued by a boy two years her senior. He made her come, bringing her to a climax with just his voice and groans, as happened in the movies. Noha was amazed that her mother never heard her back then. She eventually took care to close her bedroom door and then, as a further precaution, to shut herself in the bathroom. How embarrassing it had been when one of her friends, hearing the echo bouncing off the ceramic tiles, asked her, ‘Are you in the lavatory?’
‘Yes,’ she had said, explaining that the insulation in the bedroom walls muffled his voice. He never found out the truth: that she was trying to keep her voice from the ears of her mother, who hovered in corners like bats in the dark.
A girl is like a matchstick, her mother would constantly remind her: she could only be used once. She meant that Noha should hold on to her virginity. The thought that Noha’s fingering might lead her to a sticky end terrified the mother, and her fear grew when she saw her playing blind man’s buff in the dark with her cousins. Whenever they caught each other she was convinced they must be canoodling.
Her poor mother.
Noha remembered the time she had been asleep or, to be exact, pretending to sleep, lying on her stomach as her cousin Samer, stretched out beside her playing his Game Boy, threw his hand across her and brushed up against her.
‘What a fool,’ thought Noha.
Noha had a male friend who she found out was gay. More worrying to her was that either he hadn’t realised it himself, or was unsure, or even that he went both ways, with women and with men. He would sometimes say things that would never pass a man’s lips: ‘Ha ha. Someone lift me up.’
She felt that the manliness of any young fellow in the habit of saying such things was open to question. Maybe the trickiest moment came when she sent him a risque image of herself, and pleaded with him to reply in kind, only to receive a photograph of his bottom, taken in the lavatory of a fast food restaurant.
Discussing his relationship with his last girlfriend he told Noha of peculiar moves that could only be of interest to someone with homosexual leanings.
Noha sent Fahd an intimate picture of herself, which she had saved on her laptop. One day she was with her sister Nadia, browsing through the picture folder where she kept images of the latest fashions. The girls were getting ready to attend their cousin’s wedding. The laptop was perched on the revolving chair in her bedroom and her sister was busy talking about the girls at school. She quietly spun the chair round before Nadia could catch sight of the shot, her heartbeat rising and her face colouring as she imagined her sister seeing it, not that she was sure she hadn’t. What would she tell her? Either that it was of her, in which case she had no reason for keeping it unless she had sent it to somebody, or that it was of someone else, which opened up another can of worms, and implied she had lesbian tendencies.
FAHD DIDN’T STAY WITH Noha, the Paper Moon girl, for long. Saeed was right: it was too much trouble waiting to get free of her armed bodyguards and easier to take oneself off to another, riper girl, who was easier to talk to and meet.
One evening Fahd paid a visit to Faisaliya Tower where he had organised a group art exhibition in the mall’s central hall, which allowed women strolling around the shops to stop and take in a picture. He was looking at a beautiful canvas entitled Daughters of the Rain, an abstract depiction of village girls cavorting beneath showers of rain, when he was startled by a woman in her late thirties standing next to him and looking at the same picture. Flustered, he moved to the next picture, only to find her next to him again, examining it through her niqab.
‘The brother’s an artist?’ she asked boldly.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
She talked to him about Daughters of the Rain, why the artist had given such prominence to the colour blue when the rain clearly brought such joy and pleasure. He was on edge and anxious as he spoke to her, looking about in fear lest one of them dropped down from the top of the tower clad in his light cotton mashlah. Little did he know that his time would come later, one melancholy morning as he sat with his lover Tarfah in Starbucks, from where they would lead him away to face charges not merely of illegally consorting with a female, but also of using feigned affection and black magic to exercise his influence over the hapless girl.
The woman, whose name he later learned was Thuraya, was talking knowledgeably about the picture in the delectable, adorable lisp of the Hejaz, with her striking embroidered red headscarf and the perfume that filled his nose and mind. Were it not for her telling him that she was a mother of six, the oldest of whom was about his age, and her faintly husky voice, he would have been unable to guess that she was in her late thirties.
She had married young to a man from Qaseem and left the Hejaz, a place which made her coo like a pigeon whenever she mentioned it: ‘You’re fine and soft like a Hejazi!’
All that was beautiful, fine and wonderful in life had its origin in the Hejaz; the vulgar and barbarous belonged to the Bedouin. Thuraya was fiercely partisan towards her place of birth. Unembarrassed, she brought up her age and claimed that as a woman from the Hejaz her years didn’t show and that her eyes were still young and passionate: ‘The eyes of our women speak.’
Two days later she called him on his mobile on the pretext that she had some preliminary sketches for paintings she wanted to make. ‘Just a bored housewife’s feeble efforts,’ she called them, with an exaggerated laugh that sounded like racing cars speeding past. She hoped to get an opportunity to give them to him and get his opinion. They agreed that he would take them from her on a Monday, when she went to the Dr Shablaan Clinics to get her son treatment for his speech defect.
On the Monday he stopped the car in the dusty square next to the building and went inside, going up to the second floor, inspecting the signs of the individual clinics, then leaving again. He called her and said that he had gone back to the car and wouldn’t be coming up because it was difficult to see her there. She came striding out in high heels and almost fell on the uneven ground as she made for the car. He suppressed a malicious laugh and as soon as she got in, he noticed her confusion and the trembling of her hand. He shook it and she quickly freed it from his grasp. Her carefully ironed, soft black headscarf hung loosely over her niqab-rimmed eyes. She was extremely shy. Fahd could see no part of her save her hand and a ring of white gold. She only stayed three minutes. Saying she felt confused, she handed him a large envelope and left.
The next time they spoke she said, ‘I’ll see you at Uthaim Mall opposite Atiqa market. Turn right as soon as you’re inside. There’s a little bookshop beside the escalator; I’ll be there before the evening prayer.’
After sunset prayers he took a stroll in the mall. He went up the escalator. Children were stampeding towards the games arcade, wearing green bracelets on their wrists that allowed them to play all day long. He went back to the bookshop and looked through the books. Most had an Islamic theme. He picked one out by Sheikh al-Qarani and read on the cover: The book that has sold a million copies. He put it back and searched for some poetry or novels in translation. He sensed someone breathing nearby and a penetrating female perfume tightened about his throat. He turned to see a young woman drawing a headscarf across her mouth. She fixed him with her eyes, the eyeliner applied with exquisite care and the eyeshadow a light pink that matched the smooth pearls covering her handbag. From the opposite direction he received a sudden kick. It was Thuraya. He hadn’t noticed her come in.
‘Surrounded by admirers I see!’ she said, gritting her teeth and handing him a coloured paper bag as she looked about warily.
In the car he found a box wrapped in gift paper at the bottom of the bag and opened it quickly and eagerly. A bottle of cheap aftershave. He laughed.
A few days later as he was cleaning out his car he picked up the bag to throw it away and discovered a card with the silhouette of a man and woman embracing while the sun set into the sea behind them. On the back he read: I love you Fahd, but I’m scared that you’ll reject my love and my crazy passion because I’m older than you, maybe the same age as your mother!
Fahd felt remorse that he had been ignoring her, claiming that he was busy, that his studies took up all his time and that his friends wouldn’t leave him alone.
Haha, she would chortle in her text messages. Your friends, or your little girlfriends? I admit it, see? I know you’ve got girlfriends. Just give me a little of your time!
When she sensed that he wasn’t interested in her, she turned her conversation to art, and asked him about the sketches. Had he liked them? Very politely and extremely embarrassed he answered that she had conveyed her ideas very directly, and most of them were highly romantic and sentimental.
FOR THEIR NEXT MEETING Thuraya asked if they might sit together a while longer, in other words that she come out in his car and the two of them take a little drive. It would be easy, she said. ‘I’ll get in at the hospital entrance at evening prayers and we’ll go anywhere we like or just drive around in the car.’
He was hesitant and unsettled. Saeed hooted when he heard him prevaricating, and when he hung up, gave a wild laugh. ‘The classic case of the village boy who falls for an older woman. My friend, she’s the same age as your mother.’
Fahd smiled and blushed. He took the bottle of Givenchy cologne, tipped a few drops into his palm and rubbed his hands together.
He borrowed Saeed’s car and as he got in his phone was hit by a message. He headed out for the Eastern Ring Road. He had no idea where Iman Hospital was and was embarrassed to ask, so he called telephone inquiries and got the number. A Sudanese employee answered who gave an awful description of the route.
‘I know it’s in the South, not the East,’ he said, then handed the receiver to a young colleague who gave Fahd precise directions.
Ten minutes before the appointed time, Fahd was there. He passed through the Medical Institute’s gates with its domes like wind-filled sails, assuming it belonged to the hospital.
I’ll take a look around and get to know the neighbourhood in the few minutes that are left, he said to himself.
Worshippers were pouring into the mosque next to the hospital. Fahd felt that his bladder would burst. He looked around for another mosque. There was a large one facing the hospital, with Pakistani, Indonesian and Sudanese workmen clustered around the entrance to its toilets. He passed a Sudanese worker who had raised the hem of his thaub to avoid getting it wet as he sipped water from a palm cupped beneath a large cold-water tap. The droplets flowed in a long line along the bottom of his arm and dripped from his black elbow.
He pulled up at the domed gateway.
‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘I’m at the gate.’
‘Look to your right!’
But the woman in the embroidered abaya did not turn round.
‘The gate’s the one with the domes like tents, right?’
‘No, you’re at the Medical Institute. Keep going.’
He started the engine and found her looking out through her niqab. She got in next to him.
‘At last. Those kids were hassling me.’
She took a large bottle of scent from her bag and sprayed away at her chest and hands for a few seconds, then put it away and held his hand between her palms. Her hands were soft and finely lined, her long nails untended and untouched by red or silver nail polish. His fingers were curled to form a ring that she mischievously poked her thumb in and out of until he heard her moan.
He grew bolder and reached for her chest. Her bra was the rigid kind and he couldn’t tell if what it concealed was sagging or firm. Not firm, he guessed, or else why wear this horrible contraption?
She said that she had had her children young.
‘Married at sixteen and here I am with six kids. The oldest’s at university; he might be your age or older.’
She laughed. ‘But as you see, I’m not old.’
She had an adorable, seductive roll to her ‘r’ when she spoke.
‘Want to see me?’ she asked. ‘Just go down any dark alley.’
She raised the niqab and turning her head to the window on her right she shook out her short hair and ran her fingers through it. She looked like a lustful young boy. Then she turned to Fahd and fixed him with a lascivious gaze. Her eyes were Javanese, eloquent and eager, while her red-painted lips were large and full, as if bruised by lust. The streets were slightly darker now but what few cars there were still passed them at every turning inside the alley.
‘Forget it, I’m covering up.’
She put the niqab over her face.
‘Khanshlaila neighbourhood scares me. They might know me,’ she said, then added, ‘I want to see your face!’
Fahd turned towards her. Their eyes met for an instant and he realised that she was mewing like a cat on heat. She extended her leg into the small space between them. Its smoothness shocked Fahd. Braver now he went a little further and then forced himself to stop.
‘It doesn’t bother you that your mother’s Jordanian?’
‘Not at all! Does it bother you?’ he said, laughing.
‘On the contrary! Here you are, white and sweet and the way you speak drives me crazy!’
They passed the end of Batha Road and stopped beneath the flyover at the lights for Southern Ring Road. Thuraya spotted a pink neon sign and pointed: ‘Furnished flats! What do you think?’
‘No. It’s not safe.’
‘To hell with you, you beast. It’s me that should be scared, not you.’
Thuraya ordered him back to the dark alley. He went in and saw her fiddling with something in her lap. Then she guided his hand down. Her moans were loud and startling and he was scared some passer-by or passing car would notice, especially since his upper body was leaning conspicuously over towards her.
She loved this, she said.
‘All I’ve got at home is an animal that can’t get it up.’
‘Have you thought about how I’ll drop you off and where?’ he asked anxiously.
‘No. I’m just thinking about being with you.’
Though nearly forty, she was terrifyingly irrational. She never thought with her brain, but rather with her emotions or even her lust, which she described as her ‘mood’. Speaking like a sensible adult he told her: ‘You have to think hard about this so you don’t get discovered and destroy your family.’
She stroked the back of his hand and answered like a reckless teenage girl. ‘Great! Let it be destroyed. Then I can be yours and yours only.’
‘So I can take you all the way home?’
‘No, maybe I’ll take a limousine even though my perfume stinks to high heaven. Maybe the driver will think I’m a lady of the night!’
Fahd stopped at an entrance to a ladies’ hairdresser and spotted an ambulance some way off, its lights doused and a man sitting inside, waiting, as though on the lookout for something.
‘Get out by the hairdresser’s. Go inside for a bit and when I’m gone come out and take a limousine.’
She got out and he drove his friend’s car away with a sigh of relief. Half an hour later he called her. She said that she had taken a limousine driven by a young Saudi, alarming him with the quantity of perfume wafting off her body. He had given her his mobile number and told her that he was at her service. Fahd laughed as he said, ‘So why did you take his number?’
She answered that it was just a business card. ‘The man makes his living from the passengers. Why, are you jealous?’
‘Never,’ said Fahd, cheerfully.
After two days, when Fahd had failed to answer her repeated calls, Thuraya sent him a text threatening to talk to the limousine driver and give him a chance to woo her. When he answered her call on the third day she said that the driver had told her she was lovelier than all those young girls and that he was ready to drop by, take her off in a Mercedes ‘Viagra’ and install her in her own flat.
‘So that’s your level, is it?’ Fahd asked.
‘No. I just want you to be jealous.’
‘Jealous of what? That you want to be a whore?’
She cried and hung up.
When Fahd lost his temper, he spoke with his mother’s accent. His mother had done the same. Whenever she had been irritated with him as a child, her speech would transform into a Palestinian-Jordanian dialect like that spoken by the inhabitants of the West Bank.
FAHD MESSAGED THURAYA TO say he wasn’t prepared to meet. It was Wednesday and the week’s end sent the Committee’s cars roaming the streets of Riyadh like venomous snakes.
‘I can’t shake this fear,’ he told her, and she replied that he hadn’t made his mind up about having a relationship with her. She kept insisting that he, a young man in his twenties, wasn’t interested in her because she was nearly forty, even though she had taught him so much and he had certainly enjoyed their last meeting.
He ignored his mobile for a while then found three unanswered calls and a couple of texts that he hadn’t noticed. He explained that he had spent an hour trying to call her but her phone was off. She had been in the bathroom taking a shower, she replied, and hadn’t wanted any of her sons and daughters to open her message inbox and ‘see the scandals’.
‘So … what do you say? Shall I make a move?’
‘Where?’
‘You’re such an idiot, Fahd,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you last week that I was invited to a wedding in Suwaidi? Will you come and pick me up there?’
‘OK. I’ll need half an hour at least.’
‘Oh, that’s so long! Where are you at the moment?’
‘Maseef. Up north.’
He started his friend’s car and sped off. He took out the little bottle of cologne from the side pocket and poured a little into his palm, dabbing his neck and behind his ears. He took King Fahd Road. It was eight o’clock exactly, which meant he had taken the wrong road for rush hour. The cars flowed slowly along like a river. His phone rang.
‘Shall I get going, Fahd?’
‘No, just bit longer. Wait until I’m at least halfway there.’
Five minutes later she called again. Then a third time. ‘Where are you?’
He looked out at the skyscraper alongside him. ‘Past Faisaliya.’
Then he told her to come out of the same hairdresser’s as before. After waiting with the Bangladeshi limousine driver for seven minutes she called and said, with an air of issuing instructions, ‘Look. I’ll wait for you at Haram Mall on the ring road.’
When the southbound King Fahd Road came to an end, Fahd took the Southern Ring Road heading east and, passing the first exit, he turned right off the slip road for Ha’ir and Batha. At the lights beneath the flyover she told him that she had left the mall on the ring road and taken the Iman Hospital road heading north. Before he reached the end of the road, she told him, ‘look left and you’ll see a hairdresser’s. I’ll wait for you in there.’
He jolted over the speed bumps without noticing and saw a police patrol car, lights flashing, race past in the opposite direction. Turning at the end of the street he pulled over at the World of Dreams hair salon, then called her. She only answered after it had rung five times.
‘Hold on a moment and I’ll be out,’ she said quickly.
He looked to the right, where a Bangladeshi workman sat on the kerb outside the newsagent’s that was next to the salon. Pulling himself together he turned left and noticed the patrol car pulled over in front of a van.
Thuraya emerged and hurriedly climbed in. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl and he was unable to make out what eyeshadow she was wearing because her niqab was tilted slightly forwards.
‘How come you were so late?’
Tenderly, she took his hand. Her palm was hot and its surface so fine that the yielding, silken skin almost sloughed off when he rubbed it with his thumb.
He set out for the Southern Ring Road, but the street didn’t continue on ahead and only two directions were available: right towards Batha Road and the jaw-dropping traffic by the lights beneath the flyover, or left, past the beauty salons, spare parts suppliers and the new district with its stench of overflowing drains.
He went right and looking over at the other side of the street she said, ‘Don’t go back! Just look at the traffic!’
The tunnel took him by surprise and he turned right, then turned again and re-entered the neighbourhood they had just left. Passing World of Dreams he decided to take the left-hand road this time in the direction of the new district where he could do a U-turn under the bridge and take the Southern Ring Road heading west towards Shamaat al-Amakin event hall.
In the new district there were open plots of land and whole floors of translucent darkness despite the putrid stench that crept through the air conditioning vents.
‘Fahd? Shall I uncover?’ she drawled.
He nodded, and she struggled to unfasten her head covering from behind, then looked over at him, a wanton catamite. She moved closer in the darkness and the car swayed slightly. She brushed his lips with a kiss that was fleeting and timid, as the darkened road had now come to an end and other cars suddenly appeared. Fahd decided to return to the ring road, turn beneath the bridge and head west.
‘Well, I don’t know where I am!’ she said. ‘The most important thing is to get me away from Khanshlaila!’
She took his hand and laid it on her chest.
‘See how hot it is?’
The small potholes in the road were filled with filthy water that gave off an acrid smell. Fahd tried to avoid them in the soft gloom.
On the ring road the cars raced crazily. He tried keeping to the middle lane, avoiding hassle from the lunatics to his left and the influx of new cars on the right. He was not that skilful a driver yet, and cars in Riyadh moved as chaotically as blind ants fighting over crumbs.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Of course, and I desire you.’
‘Ahhhh!’ she sang with the madness of a forty-year-old child.
Her middle finger was toying with his fingers and every time he looked at her he saw her staring hungrily back.
‘Will you marry a Jordanian or a Syrian?’ she asked and he laughed out loud, then suggested she marry him to her daughter in middle school.
She remembered her husband and her mood suddenly clouded. He was a dog, she said: He beat her!
‘No one does that without a reason …’
‘OK then, I’ll give you an example and you be the judge: the last time I caught a slap from that bastard. For twenty years I’ve been trying to get him to buy us a house. Not for my sake, it’s for his kids, not that he ever cared about them! He always refused and asked me whether I lacked anything? This one time I decided to call his best friend and ask him to persuade my husband and help him buy a place, but on the condition that he mustn’t say it was me who called. More than once I told him: “Please don’t say that I called to ask you!” He gave me his word, but unfortunately he lied and told my husband about the call. My husband returned home like a raging bull. He came into my room, chucked the kids out and closed the door, then he flogged me with his aqqal until I wept.’
‘You’re in the wrong because you got his friend involved,’ said Fahd, boldly. ‘If you can’t persuade him yourself then that’s the end of the matter.’
‘Well of course, that’s not all that happened.’
‘Sorry for interrupting … This is Exit 25. Shall I get off here?’
She was silent and he turned towards her to find her devouring him with her gaze.
‘So, you’re going to leave me so soon, are you, Fahoudi?’
She glanced at her imitation Charroil watch. ‘Tell you what, let’s make a plan about where we’re going first, then we’ll drive. I want to see it and try it out, too!’
As she spoke she put her hand in his lap and he shrank back like a cat.
He took the exit and turned left at the lights. The area was all brightly lit hotels and cars. Children clustered at shop entrances and the women sold toys, nuts and fizzy drinks stored in blue and orange ice-filled refrigerators.
Thuraya resumed her story. ‘Later, I called my husband’s mobile when he was at work and his dirty little pal picked up. When I heard his voice I told him, “You’ll come to a bad end, mark my words,” and I hung up on him. When my husband got home he beat me again. I ask you, does anyone beat his wife for a friend?’
This time round, Fahd tried to avoid angering her. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been married.’
She punched him in the chest and in her beautifully flawed accent said, ‘My little idiot. So silly and soft. You’re just like the smooth men from the Hejaz: they love women and appreciate them.’
Fahd was heading south, and before the side road gave out he turned right and saw a rose-red neon sign proclaiming Shamaat al-Amakin. He pointed.
‘There’s the spot, see?’
She said he had to get out of the hotel district so they could drive around one of the new neighbourhoods until her friend turned up, because she didn’t know anyone else at the wedding.
FAHD NAVIGATED A NARROW path through the rows of cars, worried that he might hit one. A Honda stopped in front of him. The boot opened, then the doors, and two women got out of the back as a fat youth emerged from the driver’s seat and began pulling out white tubs of food. The tubs looked heavy and the youth hunched forward as he walked over to deposit them by the women’s entrance to the hotel. He closed the boot and moved off, and Fahd followed him to the ring road.
Fahd was forced to mount the pavement and come back down on to the road. Then he swerved across to the far left-hand side of the street and without stopping at the lights, kept to the left and turned into a newly built neighbourhood. Its buildings were of average height but its streets were fairly broad. In the darkness Thuraya’s hand reached out for his lap. Fahd’s breathing became uneven and rapid. Excusing herself she turned to look behind her then raised the armrest and leant towards him, snapping open the safety belt and entering the virgin forest.
Unable to drive Fahd stopped at the end of the road facing an old wall made out of breeze blocks. He hesitated. Should he switch off the car’s lights in the middle of the street, or would that leave them at risk of a car careering along in the dark? He kept the lights on and maintained a lookout for any headlights approaching from either side or from the rear. Bolder now, his right hand began caressing the softness of that realm of irresistible pleasure.
His phone rang in his pocket and Thuraya grimaced, saying that she’d told him more than once to switch off his mobile as soon as she got in beside him.
‘Seems you’re scared of Mummy!’ she added in vexation. ‘A Jordanian, to boot.’
Fahd laughed openly as he patted her thigh. He checked the number and saw it was Saeed. At a time like this, you bastard? he said to himself.
‘Don’t let it bother you,’ he whispered and they continued their tour of the quiet streets.
‘Go back to that street by the wall!’ she said with relish, but he found a wide road that was more or less dark and stopped the car by a high marble wall. He doused the lights, keeping the engine running and Thuraya surged forward like an enraged tigress in pursuit of its prey.
She was more skilful this time, calmer. This time he didn’t close his eyes but stayed on the lookout. An Indian labourer shot past them on a motorbike then a speeding car whose driver didn’t turn their way. Suddenly a car came swerving right up behind them and Fahd gripped her boyish crop and held her still so she couldn’t rise. Frightened, he snapped, ‘Don’t move.’
Her body stiffened.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he said soothingly, ‘but don’t lift your head up just now.’
Her body stopped moving and became cold as a corpse. The thickly bearded driver crossed to the right-hand side of the road, drove past in his old blue Ford Crown Victoria, then turned left across their car, pausing for a moment while he pressed the remote control for the automatic gate. He was the owner of the house next to whose high marble wall Fahd and Thuraya were parked.
The car mounted the cement ramp in front of the garage door and went inside. Fahd watched the red glow from the rear lights reflecting off the wall until the garage door closed, then switched on his lights and drove away.
‘You’re done?’ she asked.
‘No, but you need the right mood and a bit of peace, not anxiety and fear.’
He entered Aisha Street, always crowded at night, then went straight across at the ring road traffic lights, heading back to the cluster of hotels and passing the old, black women stacking up cans of Pepsi and Seven-Up in front of them, their niqabs hiding eyes that brimmed with the sadness of long years of toil and hardship. A white Toyota Camry estate stopped in front of him and two young black women got out and stared at them.
‘Good God, looks like the whole street’s black!’ said Thuraya.
‘Look’s like you’re a racist,’ said Fahd in a bantering tone, but she replied sharply, ‘Get out of here with your “racism” and your silly slogans.’
He laughed, embarrassed by her aggression and whispered that song he had once heard in the house of his grandfather, Abu Essam: ‘… from the red spirit of the revolutionaries …’
‘“We have set you in ranks, some above others …” she said, then, ‘God, Lord of the Worlds said that, not me.’
Thuraya hunted for a cassette. She found an old tape, blew on it to clear off the dust and put it in the machine. Suddenly, Fahd stopped outside the hotel’s entrance for women where a southern Egyptian was posted in a sky blue jellabiya, his turbaned head lolling forward over his cane. He was overrun by children trying to get past him to the women’s section.
‘I can’t get out unless I’m sure my friend has really arrived.’
She pressed the buttons on her mobile and started talking, waving at him with her left hand to lower the volume on the cassette player. Her friend appeared to have asked her a question, because she said, ‘It’ll be quarter of an hour before I get to the wedding.’
She was lying. She hadn’t told her that she was outside the door at that very moment.
‘Let’s take a quick spin,’ she said.
‘It’s tricky to get out of this area because of the traffic. I don’t think there’s anything stopping you going in and waiting.’
She sensed he wanted rid of her and in a broken, faltering voice said, ‘You still haven’t taken that money out of the bank for me. I told you my sister was coming from Jeddah and I need to go shopping with her.’
Fahd was carrying no more than one hundred riyals in his pocket. His bank balance was in good shape but he found it hard to swallow that a woman his mother’s age should be exploiting him. True, she was in need, he told himself, but it was unpleasant to be begged from so brazenly. He took her lined hand and kissed it in something like apology.
‘I’ll bring the money next time, before your sister gets here.’
As Thuraya prepared to open the door with a defeated air, he said, ‘Just a minute, I’ll set you down right outside the entrance.’
He wanted to atone for disappointing her; he hadn’t brought the money and he hadn’t found a quiet spot where they could sit together and she could see him properly.
‘I want to see you facing me,’ she had said. ‘The whole time we’re in the car I only see you from the side and you’re concentrating on the road.’
He didn’t really understand what she meant by seeing him properly. He thought of inviting her to Saeed’s flat but he kept having second thoughts, worried that some disaster might occur and he would put his best friend into harm’s way.
He left Thuraya and drove Saeed’s car to Maseef. He told himself he had to get a hot mocha and stopped at Coffee Day on King Fahd Road. Most of the seats were taken. He went to the bathroom, washed his face and looked at his eyes in the mirror, rinsed his mouth out repeatedly, then finally took a seat in a far corner, parallel with the road outside and raised his hand when the Filipino waiter looked his way.
He thought of when she said to him: ‘I was a Hejaz girl, coddled by my family, until circumstances dictated I marry that man from Qaseem. Miserly and filthy. My friend, that man never washes or puts on scent. He doesn’t seem to know that there even is such a thing as scent. I’m the complete opposite. I was always clean and nice-smelling. To this very day I take care of myself and my clothes, and that’s after half a dozen kids. One time I called this sheikh and told him that I couldn’t bear living with my husband and that I didn’t sleep with him at all. “At all?” he asked. “No, but every couple of months or more and I need a man who’s always there and tender.” The sheikh suggested straight out that I ask for a separation. How could I ask for a divorce when I’ve got no job and six kids to look after? And what did he tell me? That he was worried I would fall into temptation and sin!’
Her voice became dreamy: ‘I’m with you now, Fahd. I want you but I know that you won’t marry me, that you’re a young man and I’m a married woman with six children, the oldest only a year younger than you. Remember how I told you at the start that I wasn’t one of those girls who spends her nights in hotels on the outskirts of Riyadh or in furnished flats, that I was scared to weaken before you, your good looks and your youth? Well now I’m ready to open my heart to you. I’ll open everything.’
They were parked outside a stall selling mango juice and he asked her, ‘OK, and what about Fadwa?’
She became agitated. ‘Please don’t speak about her ever. I’ve become jealous of her. When I first told you about her, I said it was because I was looking for some warmth. It’s not as easy for women to meet men as it is to meet women. I got to know her at a wedding in Jeddah. She was leading the band: brown, with a strong yearning voice. I was utterly bewitched when she sang,
O my desire,
My solace,
I love you, how I do,
Why turn away,
Why leave me,
When I love you,
I love you, how I do!’
Thuraya sung in her throaty voice, and that night, Fahd sang along with her. She laughed. ‘It’s like you lived with female wedding singers all your life. Like you listened to their drummers and memorised their songs.’
He told her that it was an old and famous song, and that it had been recorded by Abdel Muhsin al-Mahanna, Ahlam and Asala. He had a nice voice, she said, then continued, ‘Fadwa sang in that voice of hers looking dazzlingly in my direction, so I smiled at her and she smiled back! My relationship with her began then. Of course, my three sisters were with me and they think I’m very pious and strict, mainly because I’ve lived most my life in Riyadh with an old man from Qaseem, so it wasn’t easy to go up to her and talk or get her mobile number. But her looking at me encouraged me to smile. She was watching the bodies of the dancing women as she sang, then she’d steal a glance at me. I’d smile and she would smile.’
Thuraya sighed.
‘My sisters asked me what I thought of her, and I said her signing was incredible, that her voice was wonderful, strong and expressive, that she chose sad, romantic songs, but I didn’t tell them that she had a face like a child, or that her hand slapping the drum was sublime.I wanted to press her to me in a long embrace and smell her breath. Oh Fadwa! My poor Fadwa!’
She turned to him, pressing her lips together.
‘You know, Fahd, I’d love to be with you and her together.’
Her wish took him completely by surprise. She desired Fahd and in the same instant longed to have Fadwa for just one night.
‘I want to see her in front of me, smoking and blowing smoke in my face. I love her voice, her face, her body.’
Fahd put the mocha on the café table. His troubled train of thought, uninterrupted by the al-Arabiya report on Saudi stocks and shares on the television, came to end and he left.
FADWA WAS A YOUNG woman in her late twenties with the features of a boy. Thuraya was captivated by her eyes and brown skin and loved her firm breasts.
‘Lovely and feminine,’ she told Fahd, adding that she had pursued her until Fadwa had finally consented to meet at a café on the Corniche in Jeddah.
‘She ordered a grape-flavoured shisha and said, “Shall I order you one?” I apologised saying that I didn’t smoke, even though I’d like to, and she took a packet of Marlboro Lights out of her silver handbag and handed me one. I hesitated, but her wink and captivating smile hypnotised me into taking it. She changed her mind and took it off me, putting it in her mouth, swiftly lighting it with her silver lighter and blowing a thin stream of smoke into my face.’
Fadwa’s eyes were grave as she handed her the cigarette. Thuraya saw her lipstick on the filter and put it between her lips with pleasure, feeling dizzy as she tasted the butt that had been in Fadwa’s mouth. She drew in smoke, filling her chest, and coughed violently, resting her head on the table until Fadwa was almost dead from laughter and her eyes wet with tears. She came over and sat next to Thuraya and pulled her head to her breast.
‘I caught this scent that left me light-headed. She was stroking my head and saying, “Seems you’re too old for these games.”’
She was on the verge of tears as she looked at Fahd.
‘Must I lose what pleasure is left to me just because I’m thirty-seven? You can’t imagine the risk I’m taking with my sisters and family by going into that café, the fear I feel when I’m wiping my face with a handkerchief covered in rose-water and spraying heavy Oriental perfume until the smell goes away.’
Was she missing tenderness and warmth? She wasn’t looking for relationships with women, but she needed intimacy and love, to be held tight.
‘What can I do with a man whose entire life is hotels, shisha, friends and satellite TV? Shall I look for another man? “Thuraya,” I tell myself, “at least avoid committing a sin!”’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Fahd. ‘What sin?’
She looked out of the car window at a fat white cat that leapt off a rubbish bin and scurried off as a Yemeni emerged from his room in a loincloth and white T-shirt and threw the leftovers of his chicken ribs in its direction.
‘My darling Fahd, you know a relationship with a stranger is considered adultery and my relationship with you hasn’t gone that far, but I’m scared.’
With a happy childhood and troubled youth in the large family home in Jeddah, Thuraya had been pampered by her late father. In year two of secondary school she had loathed mathematics but the woman who taught the subject, Miss Awatef, gave her such looks of tenderness and admiration that Thuraya followed her lead and passed with flying colours despite knowing nothing at all.
In middle school she had been very interested in her cousin, the son of her paternal uncle. Her brother had married this cousin’s sister, and she assumed she would marry the boy. She went to the house next door, where they lived, and set about ironing his clothes when he was due to travel to Cairo, but she lost hope and consented to marry her husband.
In the beginning her new life was fun. ‘I admit he was handsome. At the start of our marriage he’d drown me in presents but everything broke down after the first year. I remember the time I made up my mind to leave him and go to my family in Jeddah, that thing my mother used to say to me and my sisters came back to me: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, my girl.”’
Thuraya told how in a modest, working class home in the East Riyadh neighbourhood of Salehiya, near Salehiya Roundabout on the right-hand side after the petrol station, there in the house where her in-laws lived, her husband lay sleeping in the dining room. He was due to get up and attend Friday prayers at the mosque with his brothers, and Thuraya, in obedience to his mother’s instructions, laid out the food in the dining room and woke her husband, who opened his eyes with difficulty and then went back to sleep. When she woke him for the third time he sat up on the floor-cushions scowling and sent his meaty palm flashing out towards her. Her soft ear rang and a wobbling tear descended. It was the first time he had laid a hand on her and it wouldn’t be the last.
Thuraya stopped and murmured at Fahd, ‘I wish I’d known you ten years ago, back when I had my strength and my desire to take revenge on him. I would have betrayed him and bedded you whenever I liked.’
She married a year before her cousin. When she gave birth to her first son at her family home in Jeddah, and while she was in her forty-day seclusion, she went to the window of her second-floor flat to watch her former sweetheart’s wedding procession. She laughed as she remembered the scene: ‘I was peering from the window like in those television dramas and weeping with grief while my firstborn wailed on the bed. Can you imagine?’
Thuraya spent long years virtually untouched in bed. She imagined her life to be a good one, settled and safe, but from a woman in the neighbourhood and the wife of one her husband’s friends she learnt that they had sex more than once a day. One of them said that her husband would come home exhausted and couldn’t have his afternoon nap without one; the other confided that her husband used to rouse her when she was fast asleep at night to take his pleasure. Looking at them both Thuraya asked herself, ‘What makes them so special compared to me? Their dark skin? Their ugliness?’ But though she might tell herself these things she went through a period devoid of self-confidence, which she gradually began to regain with the adolescent Fahd, before he, too, eventually left her.
Once, she said to him: ‘Don’t go thinking that I’m telling you about my problems and his neglect just to excuse my betrayal or get you to sympathise with me. It’s not that at all, Fahd. You might not believe it, but ten years ago my husband and I abandoned each other. We don’t do any of the stuff that married couples do. My six-year-old girl was a whim of mine. I wanted a little boy or a girl so I went in to see him all covered in perfume, even though he doesn’t deserve it, and that was the last time he did it.’
FAHD’S TIME WAS DEVOTED to the art pages of the Kanoun website, his exhibitions, and his worn-out mother and sister, turned in on herself in their house in Ulaya, never seeing anyone and never seen. Her time was divided between caring for their mother, her schoolbooks and writing precocious Islamic anthems. For fun, Lulua would invent rhymes and riddles, raising her voice to make herself feel someone else was in the house as she waited for Fahd to take her out to Cone Zone in his new car to buy toffee ice cream. Their uncle knew nothing about their excursions. They would steal ten minutes to go to some nearby shop in Ulaya Street or Urouba before their uncle returned and so as not to be late back to their mother who had aged painfully quickly in the last two years.
‘Is something wrong with Mum?’
But Lulua never answered. She would dodge the question by starting some new topic of conversation. ‘Have you seen what my uncle’s arranged …?’
Once, as they stood waiting for cream cheese fateer from the Damascus Fateer House on Layla al-Akheliya Street, he cornered her. ‘You throw me out of the house and hide everything from me, even my mother’s disease.’
She told him that their mother had had a tumour in her colon for the last four months. ‘Seems that it’s benign.’
‘Seems!’ he shouted in anger. ‘What do you mean, “seems”? Listen to me, Lulua, I have to know: is it malignant or benign?’
Gradually she told him and finally conceded that it was malignant, though, according to the doctor, it was in its early stages and a cure seemed likely, God willing. But the uncle said that cures came from God and even Yasser the doctor said that the treatment would be painful and psychologically damaging; herbs were healthier and more effective.
After sunset prayers each day their uncle would open the street door and come inside with his bulk and muttered incantations. The cat would flee from the entrance with her kittens, and he would climb the long staircase panting loudly, short of breath and searching for Lulua, who would prepare a glass of water into which she had dipped a strip of fine Hejaz paper dyed with saffron. Having blown over the water for several minutes he would sit down next to Soha, give her three mouthfuls and start blowing on her as he held her forehead in his right hand, tugging at her roughly while reciting Qur’anic verses and puffing at her face and chest until at last she gave a sigh and forcefully thrust his hand away. His strong grip hurt her and no sooner did he desist than she would slump, her eyes drooping, and sleep with the calm of the dead, as though she had run vast distances during his recitation and now he was done she was seeking out the nearest bench in a public park to stretch herself out to nap.
On their way back to the flat after picking up the fateer the message tone sounded on Fahd’s phone.
I love you, the sweetest man in all of Sham.
His conscience painfully unfurled, tree-like, until his limbs trembled. He thought back to how Thuraya had made a fool of him, making him drive to a strange and filthy flat, throwing her small handbag, patterned like snake skin, on to the living room sofa and embracing him.
Burying her head in his chest she had lifted it up to face him, her narrow, ardent eyes turned towards him. Though he had responded, he was tense and frightened. She pulled him to her by his hair and he surrendered like a suckling infant, led on like a masochist who needs a firm hand to proceed. She gasped and thrust his head down but at the critical moment he leapt up like a cat sensing danger and fled to the kitchen where he opened the tap over the sink. The long stream of water made a loud sound as it struck the bottom of the zinc basin, drowning out the gurgling of the water in his mouth as he tipped his head back then ejected the water in a single spurt, spitting as if hawking up his guts. Thuraya didn’t immediately understand what had happened but he motioned to her that they should leave.
Slumped in the living room at Saeed’s flat, the smell was still in his nostrils. It had the scent of agarwood oil, and though not in and of itself unpleasant, the sudden image of the dark oil that his uncle had scattered on his father’s white casket made him gag. Was this the reason why, to Saeed’s astonishment, he had abstained from food for two whole days?
‘Come on man, she’ll come right in the end, God willing!’ Saeed said, assuming his fast had been precipitated by his mother’s illness and recent decline.
For two days the smell of oils never left him. He squeezed the paint tube, moving the rough brush distractedly over the paint and staining the canvas the purest black then suddenly attacking it with red, sketching out a small bird hovering in the top left corner that almost escaped the edge of the canvas to fly around the living room ceiling. When Saeed asked him if he wanted anything from outside, he handed him the wrung-out, empty tube of white paint and told him they could be found at Maktaba on Ulaya Street or any branch of Jarir. He returned to the painting. Along the bottom edge he painted a bunch of hands, just hands held aloft, impossible to tell if they were pointing to the sky, bearing witness to something, threatening someone or raised in supplication to the bird in the top left corner.
By dawn the next day the paint had dried a little. With Saeed still sound asleep, Fahd opened a small tube of white paint and selected a one millimetre brush with a rounded, tapered point. Very delicately he swept up the white paint and in the centre of the canvas, right in the eye of its stormy blackness, began to draw exceptionally fine white lines, bunched together and bowed like swords. At first he imagined he was painting palm branches, bent and flying through the air, but after an hour spent hunched over the canvas in the quiet of the hateful city the outlines of a little feather started to appear, rocking in the heart of the painting; a bird’s feather falling from the lofty heavens to a sickeningly silent city. It seemed to be swaying between two skyscrapers, but it was bigger than both of them, the artist’s lens held close against it, rendering the vast towers no more than a distant backdrop to the scene.
Fahd painted with precision and perfection while in his mind an old memory unfurled of his Aunt Heila’s house in Buraida, of the wood fire in the coffee room where one cold winter’s night he had been playing with cousin Faisal, Hissa’s son, and Heila’s daughters, Shareefa and Lateefa.
The elder daughter, Shareefa, ordered them to all place their hands on the floor then suddenly lifted hers: ‘The car has flown!’
They kept their hands on the floor, alert and repeating warily and suspiciously,
‘It has not flown …’
Whoever got it wrong and raised their hands saying, ‘It’s flown,’ was out of the game, and so on until there was a winner.
‘My mother Noura’s flown.’
‘She hasn’t flown …’
‘The cat has flown.’
‘It hasn’t flown …’
‘The pigeon’s flown.’
‘It’s flown.’ and everybody raised their hands as one, while Fahd wavered for a moment before lifting his own.
‘Fahd, you’re out,’ screamed Shareefa.
‘No I’m not,’ he shouted angrily.
‘You didn’t lift your hands fast enough.’
‘Pigeons don’t fly!’ he said, swaying.
‘Pigeons fly, you idiot!’ said Lateefa, laughing.
‘Fine, Fahd gets a let-off,’ said Faisal sympathetically. ‘Let’s carry on.’
Sharifa thought for a bit then shouted, ‘The palm tree’s flown!’
‘It’s hasn’t flown …’
‘The feather duster’s flown!’
‘It hasn’t flown…’
‘The feather’s flown.’
‘It’s flown,’ said Fahd.
‘It hasn’t flown,’ shouted Faisal and Lateefa together.
The children began arguing in the still of a night broken only by the chirrup of cockroaches on the tall palms in the courtyard. Shareefa said that feathers don’t fly and Fahd objected loudly and angrily, saying that feathers flew.
‘No, no. Wrong,’ yelled Faisal and Lateefa. ‘Feathers don’t fly. It’s the pigeons that fly.’
Did pigeons fly? In his friend’s flat in Maseef, Fahd peered at the painting and thought back, spreading the wings of his memory and flying away to where the velvety pigeons in his uncle’s yard in Buraida scuttled on red legs, pursued by Yasser or Faisal. They dashed about flapping their clipped wings, tipping forward on to their breasts and righting themselves, then continuing their scampering and pecking at the tacky earth floor.
He remembered an old folk story from Buraida that he had heard as a child, about a young carpenter whose mother lived with him in a house with a yard where a large thorn tree rested against the top of the wall. The young carpenter sat in its shade all day making doors and windows, until his mother grew sick of his constant presence, which prevented her from meeting her lover and being alone with him. She wracked her brains for a way to make her son go to work outside the house. One day she summoned up her old woman’s cunning and came up to him, mumbling and mortified, to complain that the birds in the thorn tree were watching her naked and that the only way to get rid of these peeping fowl was to cut down the tree. She got her wish and her son lost his cool shade. He left to work beneath a distant tree and she, free of his constant company at home, could have her lover visit whenever she wanted.
AFTER PASSING GHABEERA ON Manfouha’s main road, Yasser stopped the car outside a dilapidated old building below which were shops for pots and pans and a cheap goods emporia (Everything for 2 Riyals). He adjusted his spectacles in order to dial the Egyptian sheikh’s number.
‘Peace be upon you, Sheikh Mohammed.’
In stately tones Sheikh Mohammed Abdel Muati informed him that he would be down in a few minutes. Yasser stared out at the road ahead: the female street sellers, the Egyptian women in their hijabs out shopping on the high street, two Egyptian youths waiting outside a stall selling sugar cane juice, municipal buses parked by the roadside, Bangladeshi labourers carrying buckets full of water and car-washing gear on their shoulders, Pakistanis in Punjabi dress driving their motorcycles next to the kerb, Indians, Afghans and children queuing outside the Temees Afghan bakery on the other side of the street, an old beggarwoman, black, hunchbacked and tapping on his car window. Yasser pointed his thumb to the sky and his lips moved: ‘God is generous.’
There was a tap at his other window and he swung round in irritation only to find the Egyptian sheikh smiling at him. His face was round and pink, rimmed by a reddish beard, a dark prayer-bruise on his forehead. He wore a pristine and well-pressed white ghatra, slightly raised to reveal a sieve-like string prayer cap, while his collar hung open where he had forgotten to button up his thaub. This he now did as the car left Old Manfouha for Ulaya and ‘the Jordanian woman’s place’ as Yasser called the house of his father’s third wife.
The Egyptian was talking about corruption in Manfouha and the Bangladeshis who traded in alcohol, prostitution and other banned commodities.
‘God suffices me and is my best provider!’ he exclaimed, combing his fingers through his beard while Yasser expressed his agreement. Then he changed the subject and asked if Abu Ayoub was well. Almost playfully he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we found him a jolly young Egyptian girl, Sheikh Yasser? A real salt of the earth type, instead of the hassle and problems of a sick woman who needs her kids, not a husband.’
Yasser nodded, ‘Just as you say, sheikh.’
At home, Lulua was in the dining room with the green bolsters, changing the foam mattress for her sick mother, while Soha walked slowly and listlessly to the kitchen and from there to the bedroom, where she put on a long-sleeved shirt and a black headscarf. Then she wrapped herself in a blue, spotted prayer robe and faced towards the qibla, raising hands tattooed with henna and imploring her Lord to treat her kindly or take her to the side of Abu Fahd, who had left one morning never to return. Whenever she thought of Suleiman and their outings in the Riyadh night a tear sprang to her eye and a sob grumbled in her little chest.
The steel gate at the bottom of the stairs creaked and the sound of the Abu Ayoub’s coughing and incantations grew louder as he mounted the stairs, a plastic gallon jug of zamzam water in his hand, which he set down by the entrance to the kitchen from which wafted the smell of fried eggs.
‘This zamzam water’s been blessed,’ he said to Lulua.
She poured a glass and handed it to her mother, who staggered towards the dining room. Minutes later the doorbell rang and Sheikh Mohammed Abdel Muati entered accompanied by Yasser. The pair of them waited in the men’s majlis for the five minutes Soha needed to dress herself in her prayer robe, over which Abu Ayoub placed her black abaya.
The Egyptian sheikh sat facing her, reassuring her that God had great compassion for His servants and that He, praised be His name, would cure her of what ailed her. From time to time he tugged at his white ghatra as it slipped backwards. Then he approached her, and laying his heavy hand upon her head, began to recite surat al-najm—‘ “By the Star when it goes down, your Companion is neither astray nor is he misled …” ’—first chanting, then muttering, then reciting in his head and blowing so hard that her niqab almost flew off.
Soha felt no relief. She sighed to herself, resisting the rough hand that weighed upon her. It was heavy and his breath stank of rotten eggs, but for twenty minutes she kept her composure until he mixed some oil with caraway seed, stirring them together with his thick thumb. He left, having first prayed for her speedy recovery and told her that to show resistance and steadfastness in the face of God’s test made amends for any sin committed by man.