TWO GUARDS, ONE BALD, the other short and slender, both wearing the uniform of a private security firm, stood outside Entrance Three of Le Mall inspecting the men and women entering the mall complex through the sliding glass doors. Outside, Fahd reduced speed but instead of turning left at the roundabout by the entrance he continued along beside the wall of Ibn Khaldoun School, then stopped and called Tarfah’s mobile. Tarfah, wandering around a shop next to Entrance Three and exchanging a pair of earrings, suggested that he circle the roundabout and stop directly outside the doors. She had taken precautions and entered via Entrance Two on King Abdul Aziz Road and the guards here wouldn’t be the same.
Tarfah, or Scarlet—the name she used in the message boards of Kanoun’s art page—had got to know him two years before but neither had thought of getting any more intimate than interactions on the site’s discussion threads, emails or Messenger.
A phone call had never been an option, despite Scarlet being an active member of the site and her many charming contributions and astute observations. Fahd had even sent her a private message when she first registered, suggesting she change the signature line that appeared at the bottom of her posts—Suwaidi and Falluja are the two eyes in the face of terrorism—and explaining that the website was an art forum and did not permit discussions of security issues and politics. Despite all this irregular correspondence they had never held a conversation until the night he found a request from her to be added to his Messenger contacts. He consented and in the excitement of their late-night exchange she had sent him a mobile phone icon. He paused for a few seconds, unsure whether to write his number.
Forget it! Don’t bother! She wrote, but she had him hooked. He sent the number only for her to respond with a winking smiley.
She was in her thirties, with wide eyes, extraordinary dimples that appeared whenever she smiled, whether shyly or seductively, full lips and a round face of golden skin tinged an olive green. Her hair was black and soft, set in place with the hot air from the blow dryer that never left her room. Her hands, to which Fahd was addicted, were smooth, small and dark with beautiful thumbs; he had once told her that he dreamt of painting a picture made up entirely of thumbs like hers. Always calm and measured, she had an aura of hidden glee about her which hid a profound sadness that lay within her, manifesting itself through bouts of misery and anxiety that surfaced whenever she looked back over her short life: two failed marriages leading to an unshakeable phobia of matrimony, then three relationships, the latest of them with Fahd. During each affair she told herself: this one’s my true love; he’s the most beautiful; or, this one’s my love, he’s the most honest. But after months or years the love, or the sexual desire, would start to fade and die, until, finding herself neglected, she would begin all over again, cocooning herself in the affections of another man.
Fahd had teased her. Why do you have a picture of an elephant in your Messenger window? he’d written. Don’t tell me you’re the size of an elephant!
His taunts provoked her. She started playing a guessing game with him, first putting up a photo of a large eye painted with kohl and eyeshadow, then a pair of plump lips, then a small nose, then an earring hanging from her earlobe and finally her whole face, stunning despite being touched up with Photoshop. Then she restored the little elephant.
In the course of a first phone call full of laughter and noise, she told him she dreamt of riding an elephant and in the madness of the moment he replied, ‘I wish I was an elephant!’ She laughed at his indecency, and he laughed at her laughter, and so the hours passed, first in intimate confidences then in debate over the various artists showcased on the forum and the exhibitions scattered throughout Riyadh, at the Shadda Hall outside the Aziziya branch of Panda in Murabba, the Sharqiya Gallery north of the Takhassusi Hospital and the Faisal Bin Fahd Centre at The Capital Model Institute. She didn’t paint in oils and wasn’t obsessed with buying paintings; she was fond of many pictures but didn’t have the extra cash, so her only option was to collect images of these pictures from the forum and save them in a special file.
At first he was scared and unsure. There were signs that Thuraya wasn’t going to leave him be. She never stopped threatening him for his failure to create an opportunity for them to meet somewhere alone.
Strange, he thought to himself, the smell of her still in his nostrils. Young men are usually the ones who blackmail and threaten girls, so how come this woman’s threatening me?
Although Tarfah had been an acquaintance of his on the website for two years now, doubts continued to attend him, cawing crows hovering over a corpse. Had she been sent by Thuraya to exact revenge? Was Thuraya already online? Was she somewhere in the list of the last ten members to join? He looked over the pseudonyms and found nothing hinting at her name, her personality or the Hejaz origins she boasted about constantly, but still he asked himself why Tarfah had appeared in his life at this moment in particular, just as he was slowly extricating himself from Thuraya’s curse. Why had she only now begun writing to him and trying to get closer to him, when both of them had been around since the website started?
As he stopped by the guards in their sky-blue uniforms outside Entrance Three, Fahd caught sight of a woman, walking with excessive self-confidence and lethal and magnificent composure, swathed in a black abaya with a small white bear swaying from a loop on the side of her black handbag. She opened the car door and got in beside him.
‘Good evening,’ she said shyly, shifting her body and hitching up the lower half of her abaya.
Once the car had started moving, she looked at him with alluring eyes. His heart gave an unexpected lurch and he stretched out the fingers of his right hand so they rested between her succulent palms and the cocoon of her own, dark-brown fingers.
‘Go right,’ she told him and he turned north into the neighbourhood of New Wadi, with its protective cover of darkness that left all living things suspended in mid-air, raucous and honeyed.
Through his laughter he asked her, ‘How come you know the backstreets of North Riyadh when you live in Suwaidi?’
She giggled and said that her older sister Asmaa had nicknamed her Google and now all her relatives either called her Google or Tarfah.com; even the men of the family, young and old alike, were aware that she knew the lanes, main roads and shops, as though a comprehensive map of the city, its roads, buildings and neighbourhoods, slumbered in her little head.
TARFAH’S VOICE WAS THE same as it had been on the phone, perhaps a little riper and more musical.
It was noon when Fahd first phoned her, anxious and uncertain, and after three rings her drawling voice had come down the line. A woman’s voice in every respect: supremely feminine, pleasant and welling with coquetry and refinement. When she spoke it was like a reed flute sounding sadly in an abandoned palm grove. Powerful and fluid, her voice could detonate passion in anyone’s heart. It was nothing like the throaty maternal utterances of Thuraya, or Noha’s unintelligible mumbling. More than just her voice, it was the warmth and searing honesty of what she said.
From their second phone conversation it seemed to Fahd that they had been friends since childhood. She told him how she had married a relatively unknown actor and separated after two years of suffering and disagreement. He had developed schizophrenia. Before the divorce she had travelled with him to Jeddah, where he forgot to take his medicine and started riding camels and horses on the corniche, screaming dementedly at her, ‘Take my picture!’
Back in their room her ex-husband had put on swimming trucks, crooning with furtive delight, ‘If only the gold market were lined in silk …’ and snatches of famous songs. Pointing from the high window at the swimming pool below, he said, ‘I’m going fishing.’
Tarfah was astonishingly warm and bubbly. She stole Fahd’s heart and made him feel exceptionally close to her, only rarely asking him questions as she told him of her childhood in Dakhna. She only mentioned her first name. He wanted a family name to feel more at ease, and despite her initial hesitation, she gave to him, making it clear that any similarity with the owners of a well-known commercial centre was pure coincidence. ‘Tribesmen!’ she called them.
With her chin resting on her fingers, she was beautiful. Her eyes were splendid, defying comparison with Thuraya’s Javanese slits, and likewise her tender, angelic voice, utterly dissimilar to the husky tones of the older woman. Even the things they talked about were different. Tarfah spoke like Scheherazade of her life, and that of her family and friends, filling Fahd’s heart and memory in the course of single week, while for months on end, Thuraya continued to ask after him and his Jordanian mother, giving him nothing of herself and shielding her life with a man’s caution.
He was eager to meet this angelic voice, and he turned his mind to a close comparison of the three: Noha, Thuraya and Tarfah. Which was to be his Mona Lisa? Tarfah of the wide eyes and the beautiful hands that supported her chin like faces in Salvador Dali’s paintings, propped on sticks and branches so as not to fall? Was it to be Tarfah’s face, burdened with the sorrow of angels, alert and tender and mournful all at once? Would it be Noha with her delicate sidelong glances, snatching fleeting moments to flick out a furtive look from between her Praetorian Guard, single-mindedly marching along the path by the wall of Prince Sultan University? Or Thuraya’s face, bewitched by Fahd’s, and perspiring with the force of her desire for oblivion?
These were the questions that attended Fahd as he met Tarfah at Le Mall. This time he was prepared for a romantic assignation of a completely different sort: a divorced woman of about his age who shared the same hopes and jokes and cultural references. Her text messages had brought them even closer and encouraged him to leapfrog the standard preliminaries.
When will I see my dear elephant? she asked, to which he mischievously replied, With the trunk or without?
The mall was close to the flat and he called her to say he was just setting out.
She whispered down the phone, ‘I love you!’ and there was the sound of a ringing kiss planted on the mouthpiece. Brazen as always he asked, ‘Where does that go?’ and she laughed.
‘On your mouth, my little lunatic!’
When he arrived he called her. She didn’t pick up, but sent a text telling him she was with her brother Ayman and would let him know when she was on her way.
He drove past the mosque in Ghadeer as the sound of the imam chanting the first rakaa of the evening prayer swelled from its speakers. He got out and went inside. The smell of Pattex glue filled the mosque’s interior and offcuts of new carpeting were scattered about the floor. Prayer, he felt, might summon God’s protection from the troubles he faced. How will He save you and deliver you from sin, O man?
He left the mosque and returned to the car, his phone ringing ever louder.
‘Listen: don’t come from direction of the main entrance.’
He stopped and doused the headlights. A few cars were stopped outside the entrance and he took a space by the wall of the Ibn Khaldoun Schools.
‘Give me a ring just before you come out,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be outside; it’s a blue Hyundai.’
When she called he did a U-turn and stopped right outside the entrance. A young woman emerged, wrapped in an abaya, walking steadily, neither hurrying nor dragging her steps. She opened the door and got in: ‘Evening.’
She was breathing rapidly, panting, as though she had been sprinting over the gleaming porcelain tiles inside the mall, her high heels rapping at the lamps reflected in the floor like stars.
Fahd noticed her hand: the living image of the one he had seen on Messenger, resting on the keyboard with rare splendour. He reached out his hand and enfolded her long, slender fingers. Raising her hand, he kissed it passionately and she let out a muffled groan.
At the traffic lights next to the mall he turned left down King Abdul Aziz Road, passing the Leen furnished flats, and as he approached the lights by the Panda supermarket in Maseef, he asked, ‘Shall we look for somewhere dark and quiet so I can see you?’
Her enchanting eyes watched him from behind her niqab. In contrast with her boldness over the phone she hardly said a word. When he asked her, ‘Which of these three roads shall I take?’ at the Panda lights she pointed with her hand held low, concealing it below the level of the window:
‘This way?’
‘Why are you pointing in that furtive way?’ he asked.
She gave her wonderful laugh. ‘My brothers warned me not to lift my hand when I point so people in neighbouring cars don’t see it!’
‘I don’t blame them!’ Fahd said mildly through his laughter. ‘If you were my sister I’d make you wear black gloves.’
She said that her mother and older brother, Abdullah, had once tried making her wear black gloves so men wouldn’t see the naked flesh of her hands, but she had fought back and refused.
She knew the city very well. Perhaps her knowledge of Riyadh’s more recent roads and neighbourhoods came from rides with her former lover around the new residential zones of North Riyadh, but she was reluctant to direct him there for fear he would find out about her past adventures, despite the fact that he had said on a number of occasions that he respected her openness and honesty.
After half an hour aimlessly circling Maseef and Murouj she said, ‘Go back towards Le Mall.’
So he went back, crossing the traffic lights heading north then turning left into the residential zone where the road twisted round and driving on a little further until they entered the darkness. He looked over at her and she unfastened her head covering. Her face bore the promise of eternal Paradise: round and full with soft cheeks, a small, pretty nose and a mouth that hinted at breathtaking lechery. She would smile and her amazing eyes would become more alluring still. How had her eyes acquired such magic, such splendour?
When he praised her she smiled and taking his hand between hers, kissed his knuckles one by one, then the tip of his thumb, and he felt the dampness of her saliva. Each looked at the other in the same instant, as though her eyes were calling out to him, and he leant towards her, pulling her head over with an audacity that would later amaze him when he remembered it and caressing it with infinite delicacy. He didn’t understand how he had been liberated from his old fears and he descended on her passionately until the wheel slipped from his hands and the car veered right and left.
The unlit road came to an end and he emerged on to a brightly illuminated main road. Gathering himself, his attention was caught by a car following behind them. No sooner had it drawn level, than the driver flicked on his headlights.
She laughed. ‘That’s a well-known signal between us roadside romantics.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Nothing serious. It means, take it easy, you’ve been busted. Go back to the road we just came out of.’
He turned around and headed north, then took a right, passing a petrol station on his right and a wedding hall on his left. He saw a number of hotels spread out in the darkness.
‘Take any road to the right and go into the dark,’ she said.
He turned in, proceeding eastwards until the road gave out at a packed earth barrier, giving him the choice of going right or left. He went right, the illuminated hotel buildings and the main road now to his left and switched off the car’s lights, leaving the engine running in case of emergency.
She lunged and embraced him, kissing him roughly as she murmured: ‘I love you … I love you …’
He returned to the main road. She sat up straight and put her niqab over her face. But they weren’t silent for a single moment, both of them chattering away, full of joy and the desire to discover one another.
‘I forgot to pull your hair!’ she said.
He lifted his shimagh.
‘God knows I’ve got enough.’
She laughed and said that young men these days aged quickly. They got treatments for their depressing bald spots and took Viagra, and despite it all: nothing. He smiled.
‘And what about me, then?’
She unfurled her thumb. ‘Like this!’ she said then tugged at his hair, screaming, ‘Oh God, I love you.’
He asked if women liked baldness, or if it had become fashionable. How else to explain those football players who shaved their hair off with a razor?
He returned to Le Mall.
‘Where’s the poster of the Klimt painting?’ she asked.
Turning behind him he pulled out a sealed cylinder and said, ‘Forgive me, sweetheart. I was going to pick out a nice frame, but I didn’t like to weigh you down.’
‘So what? I’ll put it in my room without a frame.’
She pointed. ‘Don’t drop me at the Basic House entrance. Entrance Two, I mean. Look, Entrance Three is close by.’
After he left her he grabbed a hot mocha and set off, distracted by the echo of her anxious voice asking, ‘So, how did you find me?’
SAEED WOKE UP AT eight the following evening. He glanced at the clock on the wall opposite. His thoughts drifted to his distant childhood and the days spent in his grandmother’s house in Khamees Mushait, recalling that evening five years ago when she had told him the story of his father, Mushabbab.
Mushabbab had taken her and Saeed’s mother, Aida, on a trip to perform the umra. This was nothing but the flimsiest of pretexts. The goal was to take over the Grand Mosque and proclaim the coming of the Mahdi at the dawn of a new century, rebelling against the government and its troops and awaiting the sally of the infidel horde from Tabuk that God would swallow up into the earth.
Saeed turned his face to the ceiling, knitting his fingers over his forehead, and his ever-active memory started roaming mournfully over the past. Fahd moved on the adjoining bed. His eyes were open and he gave a languorous yawn. ‘You look like you’ve been up for a while,’ he mumbled in a muffled voice to Saeed.
Saeed’s memories flowed on unchecked as he answered, ‘Know something, Fahd? There’s this very strange story that took place a couple of months before I was born. I keep thinking about it.’
Fahd snorted, his eyes puffy with sleep. ‘Don’t tell me you remember everything that happened before you were born!’
Unfazed, Saeed said, ‘Seriously, Fahd; my grandmother told it to me, and my mother confirmed it. While I was still in the womb and my father was in prison with Suleiman, my mother got up one morning at dawn to make Arabic coffee for my grandmother: weak coffee without cardamom. While she was busy washing the pot out over the sink her earring fell out and she cried out. My grandmother took fright at the harsh sound. You see, it didn’t resemble my mother’s voice, or to be exact, it wasn’t a voice that came from my mother’s throat but the throttled voice of a jinn.
‘My mother told me that my grandmother became alarmed and got up to help her, the two of them walking slowly towards the coffee room where the tongues of flame were dancing in the pot of coals. She was weeping and groaning and my grandmother was muttering, “What God decrees is good …” But that morning, my mother sobbed as she told my grandmother that they had killed Mushabbab at dawn, cut off his head with a sword, and as she patted her other earring, the one in her ear, she laid her hand on her belly, crying and repeating over and over: “God preserve my only child!”’
Saeed’s body bent at the waist as he propped himself up on his elbow and went on. ‘At that very moment your father was in prison, having bid Mushabbab farewell with a final glance as he put on the leather sandals they took turns wearing when one of them went to interrogation. But the sandals didn’t return after that final interrogation. There was no interrogation when they woke him on an early spring morning, in the final hours of the night. That night was the only one, your father told me, that he didn’t pray the voluntary late night prayer, but slept instead, troubled and ill at ease. As they led him away at that early hour, Mushabbab said, “Don’t forget my last wish, Suleiman!” This is what he said as he walked out, without turning round or stopping to say goodbye. That night he felt the chopping block. I was that final wish. I still remember the first time you came with your father to my grandmother’s house in Khamees. Do you?’
‘I remember you showing off!’ Fahd said, smiling.
‘I remember you being scared and hiding behind your mother’s abaya while I strutted around in front of you, acting like I didn’t fear a thing. Do you remember me running towards the fig tree in the courtyard, trying to climb it and flashing my skinny legs? After several attempts I remember falling on my back, which made you laugh and brought you out from behind the abaya. I still remember those first moments. I remember your father coming, laden with presents and food. God have mercy on your soul, Suleiman!’
He paused briefly.
‘You know what, Fahd? Your father was like a man who runs a child over in his car. For years his conscience keeps him up at night, and all the time he’s trying to bring some happiness to the little boy he paralysed. It was a rare instance of loyalty on your father’s part, and you know there’s no such thing as loyalty in this country and its conscience has been asleep for a century.’
Fahd lay there listening.
‘I still remember my paternal grandfather’s death five years ago. Can you believe that a retired army general, a man who led a battalion in the Yemen war, defending the southern pass into the country tooth and nail, died at home like an old dog, forcibly ejected from Khamees Hospital to free up a bed? Think of him vomiting up blood while myself, my two uncles and my relatives looked on. No one cared. How could they, when they were busy separating those twins who had been brought here from the ends of the earth to have their photos taken and splashed on the front covers of local newspapers beneath the headline Medical Miracles. How could this happen to my grandfather, whose bones had been rattled by whining bullets in the seventies, who was almost killed by a stray round, but could find no one to tend and care for him?’
Fahd turned on his right side and peered at Saeed, who had fallen silent for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
‘If my grandfather had twins, my father and my uncle I mean, shouldn’t the government have taken care of him?’
Fahd gave a noisy laugh and said slyly, ‘But they were local twins. They don’t count: you have to be a foreigner. Unless your father’s eyes were blue, that is, that might work. It’s so our country becomes global and can pass on its scientific achievements to all the countries of the world.’
Saeed sat up in bed.
‘Anyway, it’s nine already. That was a nap and a half. Shall we get some fresh air in Tahliya?’
Fahd lifted his silenced phone from the table between the two beds and looked at the screen. There were seven messages waiting for him. Alarmed, he said, ‘Seven messages. Some good morning that is.’
Saeed cackled from the flat’s only bathroom. ‘What do you mean, morning? People are getting ready to go to bed.’
When he emerged, a nervous Fahd played him one of the messages:
‘So you’re not happy with me, as you put it … Well, some day I’ll settle my account with you … It’ll be savage, because I’m out of my mind and wounded and betrayed and I’m sure you know what happens to a woman when she feels betrayed … She becomes a lion!’
‘Who’s that?’ said Saeed anxiously. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the Hejaz one?’
Fahd nodded his head.
AS FAHD CLIMBED INTO the Committee’s vehicle that morning he wondered whether Thuraya was behind what had happened. On several occasions she had threatened to take her revenge if he didn’t respond to her desires. Had she reported the sea-blue Hyundai Accent? Had she told them that it was a car like a blue wave adrift in an arid desert? Had she taken down the number plate when she came out of the entrance of Iman Hospital that time, or as she left the World of Dreams hair salon? Had Tarfah’s old boyfriend wanted to revenge himself on her and been stalking her, his mind filled with suspicion? Had it been the uncle who hated him and thought of him as a shameless sinner?
He often thought of his arrest as he walked out alone along Great Yarmouth’s sandy shoreline and saw the lovers stretched out beneath the little bushes, whispering together, or embracing, still as stones, for hours on end. How hard it was for him to recall a passage from one of the three books his father had left behind in his bag, which discussed the societies of the jahiliya. The passage described how the writers, journalists and novelists in these societies openly told their young women and wives that … there is nothing morally repugnant about conducting free relations. Immorality is when a young man deceives his girlfriend or a young woman her boyfriend and does not keep her affection solely for him. Indeed, it is immoral for a wife to remain celibate once desire for her husband has died down, and virtue is when she seeks out a friend to whom she can safely entrust her body! There are dozens of stories with this message at their core and hundreds of educational programmes, cartoons, jokes and comedies that promote it…
Had the hand that drew the wavering blue line beneath these words in Milestones really been shaking as it seemed? Was it his father’s hand? Was it some sign, something his father wanted to keep before him at all times? Was it really some precocious and successful attempt at prophecy?
In recent days Fahd had opened the leather satchel, stuffed with documents and diaries, stories and memories, specialist books and picture books, secret pamphlets, pens, the olive stone prayer beads and a picture—how it had been taken and by whom he had no idea—showing his father and fellow inmates in the prison yard. These mementoes of his father had yet to claim his attention, with the exception of the green volume, a black line across the middle of the cover and on the first page a title in thulathi script that read Milestones with the name Sayyid Qutb in beautiful farsi typeface in the top right corner, then the words Dar Dimashq Publishing. The handwriting inside was in his father’s hand, notes in the margins written long ago.
Back then his father, or perhaps just the author, believed that all societies existed in jahiliya, a state of godless ignorance, and were either … atheistic communist societies, pagan societies in India, Japan, the Philippines and Africa, or Christian and Jewish societies that followed their deviant creeds.
Within this definition of jahiliya societies he included those that professed to be Muslim, but in fact submitted to an authority other than God. It was as though the words in the book Fahd leafed through were being uttered by his cousin Yasser. Was this the well from which his father, his uncle and Yasser had all drunk? The common source for all those that followed the call to wage war on society, to the extent that some of them abandoned their normal lives and took up residence in ghettos for their kind?
Haraa Sharqiya on the outskirts of Mecca, the neighbourhood where the families of the Divine Reward Salafist Group lived, was little more than a chaotic assemblage of houses and buildings, between which ran exceptionally narrow alleys like cattle pens, scarcely wide enough for two people to pass at the same time. Their homes were ferro concrete structures with three doors. The rear entrance of each house led directly to the front door of the house behind it, and was commonly used by the women to meet, hold whispered conversations and swap favours and cooking ingredients—they were also the doors through which many of them fled during the raids carried out by the security services shortly before the occupation of the Grand Mosque.
Suleiman al-Safeelawi was brave and reckless, returning at night with rare courage to a neighbourhood under surveillance and making his way inside via the back door that opened on to the whip-thin alleyway, to rescue his bag containing his proofs of identity—his ID documents and certificates from primary and secondary school—before slipping away while the detectives and soldiers stood watch over the front doors.
He could hear his own heart thudding as he crept to the house of the group’s leader, silent as a butterfly as he passed through the darkness to the men’s majlis where he slept at night, to find his bedding folded up as he had left it and beside it his black leather satchel. He picked it up without opening it and, fleeing to the cattle pen behind the house, made his way out of the sprawling district, most of whose modest dwellings housed members of the group—Brothers as they called themselves—along with a few students from the Islamic University.
That moment, back at the time of the second wave of arrests and now sunk in dread and silence and forgetting, did not permanently distance young Suleiman from the group. Even so, he began to attend lessons with the blind sheikh at Imam Mosque in Deira in the company of a young man of a similar age, before being joined by a third student, then a fourth. The group’s military commander sent a messenger to warn against keeping company with government sheikhs lest they draw attention to themselves, unaware that the young men had grown impatient with the group and its impetuosity. Nevertheless, when Suleiman met Mushabbab that afternoon outside the Kutub Watania publishing house he almost flew with joy to learn that the leader was asking after him and expected him to arrive on the tenth of Ramadan; joy, because the leader’s eye only singled people out if he had confidence in them, when their abilities and talents set them apart from the rest.
So Suleiman travelled to see him at a farm in the village of Ammar, west of Riyadh, where some of the Brothers were gathered. The leader took him by the hand and led him to a long narrow room like a corridor and showed him the red string onion bags packed with yellow pamphlets that bore the title of his first message to the umma: Correcting Confusion over the Faith of he whom God Has Made Imam over All People. It was only once Suleiman had driven the bags to their destination that he actually read the contents of this message, at a little house in Mecca, where the leader of the Meccan Brothers, entrusted with handing out the pamphlets in the Grand Mosque, was staying. It was the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan.
That first message, sent fluttering into the skies over Mecca, Riyadh, Ta’if and Qaseem by Suleiman and his zealous companions, made reference to part of a prophetic hadith that contained the following saying of the Prophet, upon him be the blessings and peace of God: ‘The religion of God shall only be established by he who is secured on all sides.’
Or, as the pamphlet explained: The story of this hadith, for whose sake we have come to divide ourselves into groups, is that the need to keep aloof from those who deny the oneness of God, to expose their enmity and cleave to the truth, was seen by some as an embarrassment and a hardship, an obstacle to spreading the faith that repelled the common people. Some were lax in applying this principle, while others abandoned it entirely. But we say that it is not as they believed, for God has lifted the embarrassment from us and adjured us to this principle, for if there were any embarrassment in it he would not have so commanded us. Listen to His exalted words:
‘And strive in His cause as you ought to strive. He has chosen you, and has imposed no difficulties on you in religion; it is the faith of your father, Abraham. It is He who named you Muslims, both before and in this revelation; that the Messenger may be a witness for you.’
If God Himself has commanded us to strive and made it clear to us that there is no embarrassment in it, and that this is the faith of Abraham, then know that adherence to this principle—striving and following the faith of Abraham—is what sets the true Muslim apart from the pretender.
And so in their eyes all people were pretenders and hypocrites, and it was their duty to exhort them, unembarrassed, to wash their hands of those who denied God’s oneness, for if they did not, they were of them. The faith was not to be established through sycophancy and silence but by cleaving to the truth and forbearance in the face of suffering.
The initial wave of arrests sent Suleiman fleeing into the desert in the company of the group’s leader, the two of them wandering the wastes for two weeks living on lizards captured in their burrows. Forty days later, after most of the group’s members had been released from prison and after the second wave of arrests prior to the assault on the Grand Mosque, Suleiman decided that things were now in deadly earnest. No longer was this a matter of a pellet gun puncturing the heart of a loudspeaker, as his brother had done in Muraidasiya, nor was it a handful of boys demonstrating outside the governor’s palace in Buraida. It had gone beyond mere jail terms: they now faced execution by the sword.
So Suleiman began to shun the group. Like black hawks, accusations of neglecting his duty to the cause eventually caught up with him, but he had vanished from sight, returning to a tiny burrow in Umm Sulaym before deciding to escape to Buraida. He would never leave again, he decided; he would be buried there. That was before the two security agents took him away from the Jurida marketplace to lose four years of his youth in a cold-walled prison. Yet this was certainly more forgiving than standing in Justice Square, waiting for the rattle of a sharp sword.
And so Suleiman’s fear saved him. He did not join the Brothers in their assault on the Grand Mosque at dawn on the first of Muharram, the first day of the fourteenth century after the Prophet’s flight.
THE NEXT TIME AROUND Fahd set the alarm on his phone to six o’clock, but only came to when he heard Saeed’s shout beside him, as though issuing from the depths of a cave.
‘Your mother called on the landline. She says your mobile’s off.’
Fahd quickly washed his face, put on his robe and throwing his headscarf over his shoulder said, ‘I’m late, I’ve got an urgent appointment. If she calls, say I have a meeting at the university.’
Before closing the door he looked back in. ‘Saeed! Tell her I’ve gone to enrol in a summer course.’
‘It’s almost sunset, you lunatic!’ Saeed shouted. ‘What university?’
He shut the door behind him, started the car and set out for Granada Centre in East Riyadh, towards the heavenly face of his beloved, the face that had shaken his weak and ever-eager heart to the core.
Switching on his mobile, he found three messages.
From Lulua: Mother’s asking for you. Where are you?
From Thuraya: All I ask is a word, to say you’re mine and you miss me. Answer me, Syrian!
From Tarfah: Where are you? I’ve been waiting an hour for your call. Shall I head out? It’s a long journey from Suwaidi, sweetheart.
He called Tarfah and told her to set off. ‘Sorry baby, I overslept.’
‘So, shall I bring anything?’ she asked with delicious playfulness.
When he burst out laughing she cut him off. ‘No, really. What do you long for most?’
‘Your heart!’ he replied passionately.
‘Trickster. Hustler,’ she cried in exasperation. ‘You leave me no way out.’
‘Your mouth, then.’
She sighed deeply and contentedly. ‘Now I believe you.’
When he started the car Rashed al-Majed was singing Oh, Don’t Keep Me from Him! on MBC FM and he thought of Noha, her tears and her choked and hesitant voice. He stopped at a petrol station and asked the attendant to fill his tank while he rushed into the little shop and bought a box of Fine tissues and a couple of bottles of water picked from the back of the refrigerator.
Tarfah described the different entrances to the vast Granada Mall: ‘Come to Entrance Two. Turn in off the Eastern Ring Road and it’s next to Dr Keif. You’ll see the main entrance in front of you with a picture of Marah Oasis hanging over it.’
‘I know the Extra Café at the end on the left,’ he replied. ‘Is it before that?’
‘Well, of course it is, and before Paris Gallery. I’m not talking about Entrance One, OK? That’s the one by Costa Coffee and Espresso. I’m talking about Entrance Two. You turn in off theEastern Ring Road and if you look right you’ll see Dr Keif. The entrance right next to it.’
As he turned at the traffic lights at the Imam Street exit he looked left and saw the green Dr Keif sign. It was nearly eight o’clock. He took a right, then another at the small roundabout facing the main entrance. Passing Entrance Two he saw that it really was a forgotten spot: nobody was about.
He called her before he stopped the car and she answered eagerly. ‘Where are you?’
She had gone in via the main entrance then headed into the VaVaVoom Beauty Salon, walking out again a few minutes later and going for a wander that took her past the family section of Starbucks, where she ordered two small cappuccinos. She walked to the main hall and turned right as if towards the up escalator, but marched straight past it in the direction of Etam. Her black bag swinging, she emerged from Entrance Two.
He took the Starbucks cups from her and slowly moved off. He asked her about the unusually heavy crowds around the main entrance.
‘Maybe because it’s a Wednesday,’ she said.
They crossed the small roundabout and doubling back to escape the congestion around the mall, headed out to the highway.
Two days earlier, she said, she had gone with her family to an event at a hotel along Qaseem Road in a part of town full of vast building developments, hotels and small farms. She fell silent then suggested they go there. He drove on, past the petrol station on the Medina Road and past Musafir Café and Half Moon Café, then as Yamama College came up on the left he turned right off Quwa al-Amn Bridge and they entered the moonlit night. There were high, long walls with massive locked gates.
‘If only we could go inside one!’ he whispered.
‘All this sky to ourselves and you’re looking for walls?’
The car crested a rise heading east and descended. To his right he saw a small tarmacked road into which he turned without noticing the barbed wire and open steel gate at its entrance.
‘I don’t know this place,’ she said, cheerful as ever, ‘so I’m not responsible for it!’
‘Should I go back?’ he asked her nervously.
She smiled. ‘No, keep going!’
It was a very narrow, tarmacked farm road, just wide enough for a single vehicle. On the left sat a small cabin, a yellow lamp suspended from a cable over its door, and next to it a white tent and concrete latrine. Beside them was parked an ancient and dilapidated Hilux pick-up that looked as if it hadn’t been driven in a long time.
A kilometre and a half further on, the road ran out at a barrier of packed soil. A right-hand fork led to a muddy open space. There was a large piece of agricultural machinery for extracting well water and what appeared to be towering walls of dried alfalfa bales. The tarmac curved to the left and he followed it round until he came to yet another left turn that looked as though it returned to the highway.
‘You’re going back to the main road!’ she said.
‘We’ll stop here.’
He found a track cutting across a field of alfalfa and drove in. He switched off the lights and the engine and an awful silence descended. He raised the armrest between them and pressed her to him, breathing in the perfume on her neck. Gasping, she pulled him towards the foot space beneath her. The smell of the fields came in through the windows, a sudden breeze pushing the scent of the purple alfalfa between them. The fragrance was strongest as they reached their peak.
He plucked out some tissues, handed her the box, opened the door and poured water from a small bottle.
He got to his feet and bared his chest to the mild breeze. Up on the highway the trucks’ headlights moved slowly and steadily.
‘You like the field!’ she teased. ‘You know, I don’t like fields.’
He laughed as he canted the last drop of water from the bottle. ‘What field? You mean your field?’
‘Idiot!’ she drawled, her voice languid and embarrassed.
He told her that the sky here had its own fragrance, that the crescent moon being wooed by a star above them was waiting for her to perch on one of its points like a child, her legs dangling down: an image inspired by some place or picture he had seen.
She laughed. ‘Seems the artist inside you has woken up!’ she said. ‘But there’s not much for you to work with: no morning, no light, no harvesting women with sickles in their hands.’
‘Tarfah!’ he cried suddenly. ‘I’ve just had the most wonderful idea for a picture: a couple making love in a field beneath a rustic straw awning. I’ll call it The Lovers. What do you think?’
Then he remembered Van Gogh’s painting of the peasants resting at noon in the shade of a haystack.
He got in.
‘Shall we go?’ he asked.
She was trying to wind her abaya about herself and muttering, ‘I seem to have put it on wrong.’
He turned away from the door. She was gazing intensely at him, gratitude in her extraordinary eyes, and a tentative smile forming on her face. He kissed her forehead and she pulled his face towards her and kissed him on the nose.
She urged him to get going so that she wouldn’t be late for her brother at the mall. He started the car and turned the wheel. Instead of taking the left that would lead them past the cabin with the lamp, through the gate and on to the highway, he went right, guessing that this road ran parallel to the one that brought them here. There was no need for them to go back the same way.
At first the road was good, then the smooth surface gave out abruptly on to a track through the fields, two straight lines, evidence of where cars had gone before. The crops were high but he decided to risk it and pressed on at a moderate pace so as not to get stuck and sink into the soil or sand. Suddenly the field ended and he emerged on to a bumpy track. Concerned that the car might stall he kept going. Then he realised they were on the wrong road. Tarfah, who had been enjoying his devil-may-care approach, began to show signs of anxiety.
‘Why don’t you go back to the other road?’
After a few minutes spent circling around, lost and panicking, he said, ‘I don’t think I can find it.’
He parked the car on a patch of firm and level ground and looked over at the nearby road and the barbed wire. His heart beat faster.
‘Take this road,’ she told him. ‘We came from here.’
And though he knew she was pointing in the wrong direction he did as she suggested, telling himself that her encyclopaedic knowledge of Riyadh’s roadmap must cover even this wilderness. All of sudden he found their way blocked by a vast expanse of ploughed earth and coming to a halt next to the huge furrows he slipped the car into reverse and stepped on the accelerator. The rear wheels spun but the car stayed where it was.
He tried again, pressing harder on the accelerator and the car sank deeper. Getting out he bent over the rear tyre. When he touched the soil it was soft as paste. Damn. What was going on?
He glanced at her face. She seemed pensive. Was it fear that rendered her speechless or confidence that they would get free? Did she expect him to blame her for getting them into this situation? His first thought was how to get her out of here, how to return her to her brother now they were stuck in some remote agricultural area fenced in by barbed wire. Then again, how was he going to free his car from this trap?
Terrifying scenarios began wheeling through his head. What if he walked to the highway and flagged down a car?
The car stops; the driver is bearded. He’s suspicious—some guy hanging about in the middle of nowhere with a frightened girl—but he seems concerned and pulls over.
‘You go back to your sister and I’ll find a shovel so we can clear the earth around the car.’
He moves away and conducts a whispered conversation on his mobile. Is he calling the police? The men from the Committee? Either would cause a scandal beyond Fahd’s worst nightmares.
‘Let’s dig!’ declares the man, his eyes on the road. Damn him; he’s waiting for one of Committee’s SUVs.
He’ll see it signalling with its brights from a distance, then two men will approach and take Fahd to one side, calm and reassuring: ‘Who’s that with you? Don’t be scared: just tell us. If you’re honest with us we’ll make sure you’re OK.’
He admits that she’s his girlfriend. They question her and suddenly she bursts into tears.
Those wonderful eyes; how can they shed tears?
His feverish contemplation was interrupted by Tarfah.
‘Why don’t I call my friend Nada? Get her to send her driver?’
‘It’s an idea … At least I’d be able to concentrate on getting my car out without having you on my conscience.’
‘You mean you wouldn’t come with me?’ she said, her eyes welling. ‘I have to go with the driver on my own? Perhaps you could come with me to the mall,’ she added. ‘Find someone to tow your car.’
He cleared some of the soft earth from behind the rear wheels then returned to the driver’s seat. ‘Have you called her?’
‘She’s not answering!’ replied Tarfah dejectedly.
‘Her phone’s switched off?’
She gazed out at the furrowed horizon. ‘No, it’s on. She’s just not picking up. Perhaps she’s asleep.’
Leaving his door open he tried pressing gently on the accelerator and leant his head out to watch the wheels. The car moved a couple of metres backwards then the wheels spun in place, digging into the dusty ground.
Tarfah’s mobile rang and she picked it up, thinking that maybe Nada had noticed her missed calls. But when she looked at the screen, blinking on and off in the darkness, her face fell and she didn’t answer. ‘What does he want now?’ she spat.
‘Who is it?’ asked Fahd nervously.
‘My brother, Ayman.’
‘If you come back to the mall with me,’ she said, ‘I could tell Ayman that you’re a brother of one of my friends and that you need help. What do you think?’
He breathed deeply and went back to digging. His heart began to beat faster; his white robe was smeared with dust. He noticed a gaping hole next to where he was digging in the dark.
What if a huge snake suddenly slithered out from that burrow and bit him while they were all alone in the middle of nowhere?
Then he noticed the place was full of burrows. This city was all burrows—burrows upon burrows—and you never knew which burrow would swallow you up next.
With the long nail on his little finger he squeezed the valves on the rear tyres and the air rushed out. Deflated tyres gripped better in sand. He set the car in reverse: a metre backwards then the wheels spun again.
What was this? Was this the curse of Thuraya, with her feverish, miserable messages? She had already threatened to expose him as an artist who led women astray. Was it his mother’s, from whom he had fled and failed to call? Perhaps her health had reached breaking point and she needed his help.
He was about to open his mouth for the thousandth time to tell Tarfah, ‘I was worried about this ploughed land; it’s cursed for sure!’
Suddenly he stopped. If he walked into the field now he would never return.
He asked her about Nada. ‘She answered yet?’
‘I sent her a message,’ she replied in a soft voice, low with fear.
He stripped off his robe. His body had begun to sweat. A short while before this body had delighted in the paradise of alfalfa blooms as it gazed at the smiling, playful moon. Now the field had become a ploughed wasteland, empty and desolate, and the moon the brow of a wrathful demon gazing down gloating and mocking at a puny, isolated, powerless human being trying to extricate himself from disaster.
As he dug away and smoothed the ground behind the car her phone suddenly rang. It was her brother and she didn’t answer. Fahd tried to shift the car again, opening the door and watching the wheels as he repeated, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ over and over. The car moved a further two metres and sank again. This time, he felt despair take hold.
Her phone rang and she answered, smiling.
‘Listen, I’m in this place miles away. Get your driver to take Qaseem Road to Quwa al-Amn Bridge. He takes a right at the flyover then goes straight until he sees lights from a car.’
She fell silent and listened. ‘I’ll tell you later. Now’s not the time.’
Nada must have asked her what she was doing there.
By his efforts he had succeeded in moving the car backwards a total of seven metres.
‘I’m going to try going forwards,’ he said to Tarfah. ‘If the car gets free I’ll turn right and drive off.’
He put the car into first gear then stepped on the accelerator, wrenching the wheel left and right and screaming in English, action-movie style, ‘Come on! Come on!’ It moved slowly, then surged and he pulled the wheel to the right, straightening out and rocketing towards the highway like a lunatic until he reached the field of harvested alfalfa, where he proceeded calmly along the firm ground at its edge, unable to believe that they had escaped.
‘O wholesome harvest girls!’ he bellowed. ‘How great thy charity, harvesting this crop that I might proceed along the path to deliverance …’
And Tarfah, aping his pomposity with magnificent derision, cried, ‘What ails thee, Abu Jahl?’
THE WHITE PICK-UP TRUCK, stuck in the sand a quarter of a century before, on 30 July 1979, was nothing like the sea-blue Hyundai that Fahd drove with Tarfah beside him. In this vehicle sat a man, his shimagh wrapped into a filthy red-and-white checked turban around his head, driving like a lunatic through the dark of the night to escape the border guards, now dousing the headlights and proceeding on instinct, now guided by the light of his passenger’s small flashlight that prevented the guards tracking their Datsun. They were waiting for gunshots to catch them from the rear but the onslaught of the demented sand was swifter than any bullet; it held them firm, the pick-up’s lights suddenly froze and they fled in opposite directions, each man panting as he laboured to pluck his feet from the sand’s snare.
The passenger got furthest and when he heard the sound of the border guards’ pursuing vehicles and the powerful lamps begin sweeping the desert in search of them, he ran for the cover of a small and straggling ramth bush and lay still, his heart straining. He was like a bird grazed by a rifle, that flees flapping its one good wing, bleeding and hopping as it hunts for the shade of a tree or rock to hide from the hunter’s gaze.
The guards stopped their vehicle by the pick-up in the soft, paste-like sands. Their voices were strident in the night and the searchlights’ beams wandered about like cudgels cocked over bare flesh. They fanned out in three directions, away from the route they had come, and like swords drawn for the kill, four beams of light circled the desert.
The passenger trembled, hiding his head between the branches to appear like a tarpaulin abandoned in the scorching midday heat, but the light fell suddenly into his gleaming eyes and one of the guards cried out to his companions: ‘It’s him.’
Pointing a pistol at him, the guard shouted for him to get up with his hands behind his neck. Exhausted, his face filthy and holding his hands behind his neck, he rose to his feet. One of the guards came up behind him, patted his pockets, and securing handcuffs around his left wrist first, then his right, he steered the man away. A few minutes later they had found the other man and they took them both back, together with their truck, to the Ruqai Centre on the border with Kuwait.
The pick-up was impounded with seven other trucks, their loads concealed beneath green tarpaulins held in place with ropes wound round the brackets on the vehicles’ sides. After stepping forward with two other officers and cautiously uncovering one of the trucks, the border centre’s commander ordered the detention of the drivers and their passengers.
They were carrying stacked bundles of small pink pamphlets, on their covers the title: An Address on the Subject of the Emirate and the Swearing of Fealty and Obedience, and a Judgment on the Duplicity of the Rulers towards the Scholars and the Common People, and the Proper Position with regards to the Rulers in Particular, and People in General.
The duty commander at the border post sat at his desk, a copy of the pamphlet in his hand. He leafed through it rapidly, reading some of the Qur’anic verses and hadith, the first of which was Ibada Bin al-Samit’s report of their pledge of allegiance to the Prophet on the grounds that ‘… we must speak the truth wheresoever we be, for we are with God and so fear not the censure of critics.’ Flipping the pages with his thumb he read out loud to the two officers:
Know that some of those who fawn over kings and rulers excuse themselves by pointing to the hadith recorded in the Sahih Muslim, when a man addressed the Prophet, saying, ‘O Prophet of God have you not perceived that when princes are set over us they look to their own rights and deny us ours? What do you command us to do?’
To which the Prophet replied, ‘Hearken: they must bear their burden and you, yours.’
But this furnishes them with no excuse, for the hadith is concerned with rights of the individual: the rulers’ monopolisation of booty and plunder and the like. Religion is not one of the rights of an individual, where forbearance in the face of preferential treatment is urged. In the hadith the man says, ‘… and they deny us our rights,’ but when the right is that of God, then no: the duty then is to reject the legitimacy of those who fail to implement God’s law.
The commander tossed the pamphlet to one end of the table.
‘God preserve us!’ said one of the officers. ‘That’s outright sedition!’
The commander nodded his head in agreement. ‘Planning a coup, it seems.’
The third officer remained silent, averting his eyes from the others. Then he excused himself and left the office.
Seven impounded vehicles in a military post on the Kuwait border, were laden with vast quantities of pamphlets churned out by the Vanguard printing presses in Kuwait and destined for remote villages and farms around Riyadh and Mecca, where they would be handed out to members of the group who, with precisely coordinated and pre-arranged timing, would distribute them through major urban centres such as Mecca, Riyadh, Qaseem and Ha’il.
Suleiman led his own small group, delegating tasks with the spirit of a practised leader of men, his abundant vigour sometimes beguiling other worshippers into helping his companions and himself distribute the booklets, blissfully unaware of the incitement they contained against the government and what they termed jahili society.
Seven years later, by a strange twist of fate, Suleiman al-Safeelawi was transformed from a distributor of clandestine literature into a distributor of newspapers for a major company.
He had descended ravenously on newspapers after being denied them during his first period of incarceration. He had often thought of writing his memoirs in prison, believing his time as a member of the Salafist Group had been far superior to the childhood memories recorded by Taha Hussein in The Days. Yet despite his love of reading, his writing and his powers of description, metaphor and composition were no match for the great wordsmith. It was as though the Alfiyya marked the division between reading for pleasure and enforced study.
Running from Ibn Malik, he had fallen, seduced and thrilled, for Sayyid Qutb, al-Albani and Hamoud al-Tuwaijri, and then, having emerged from prison, taken a job at the newspaper distribution company, married and enrolled at King Abdul Aziz University, he sequestered himself away with a new series of books, dividing his time between classical Islamic works such as The Unique Necklace, The Book of Animals and The Delicacies of the Caliphs and the Jests of the Refined, and the Russian classics, getting hold of Dostoyevsky’s complete works. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Adolescent and The Brothers Karamazov transported him to another world, far from petty doctrinal quarrels.
After he had been promoted and his street level wanderings were behind him he would read all the time, even during office hours. At home, he would steal an hour to himself after sunset, though he still maintained his habit of dropping everything half an hour before the daylight disappeared and driving westwards over Urouba Bridge. It was as if he needed to satisfy himself that the sun had gone down to its resting place, as if he wanted to remember that distant sunrise over Jurida Square, when they escorted him away to be interrogated and from there to a series of long and arduous adventures in prison.
JUST BEFORE SUNSET THAMAMA Road was relatively crowded, the ice cream vans scattered eye-catchingly either side of the road as Fahd drove along, suffering beneath the yellow disc of the sun.
Every sunrise and sunset that passed before Fahd’s eyes wrung his heart and reminded him of his father on that final morning, a memory that led him back to thoughts of his two uncles and Yasser. He remembered his childhood, when his uncle took them all to a nearby farm to learn to swim. The pond was deep and shaded by the tops of tall palms and verdant trees. His uncle said that swimming in shady water would strengthen their young hearts, as if he intended to turn them into black rocks, unbreakable and incapable of bringing light to the world.
Whenever Fahd thought of them he wished that one day they would all go on a trip together and that the family car would swerve and flip over repeatedly or smash into a stray camel crossing the road, leaving no one alive. How wonderful it would be to celebrate their deaths! Of course, nobody’s death should be a matter of celebration, even those they called ‘infidels’, the ones al-Qaeda slaughter like sheep. The time he had opened a video clip on an Islamic website to find members of al-Qaeda butchering a terrified foreigner had terrified him and left him nauseous and he had fasted for a whole week.
He sometimes felt that those around him were the true heirs of al-Qaeda. The only difference was that out there they first trained in arms and laid waste to the West, then turned their attention to their own homelands, claiming they were in thrall to the infidel. In Riyadh and Qaseem, meanwhile, they merely supported their deeds and cheered.
Fahd still remembered September 11. He was in Bassam on Ulaya Street looking for a cheap microwave oven and the televisions were aglow. His attention was drawn by a group of middle-aged men gathering to stand astonished in front of the screens, watching the aircraft as they detonated into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Three of the men were applauding gleefully. Two were clean-shaven and the third had a slight beard and they clapped as though following a video game or some movie where good triumphs over evil. Later, Fahd would think of them and ask himself: where are those joyful men now? Were they amongst those who blew up the Muhiya Compound or the Hamra Oasis Village? The Civil Affairs building in Riyadh, perhaps? Are they in Iraq? Were they amongst those who joined the Fatah al-Islam Brigade in northern Lebanon, their corpses sprawled out in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp?
It terrified him to think that people here were in crisis, hostile to anything advocating progress. When you explained that progress was the inescapable destiny of all things, then talked to them of their errors—from their rejection of the telegram and the radio on the grounds that they were sorcery and devilry, to their refusal to accept television and women’s education, to their repudiation of the latest innovations such as identity cards for women—they would shut you up, using force if necessary. They would end the debate on the grounds that your faith was weak and your doctrine unsound and then, without any hesitation, inform you that you were a secularist preaching degeneracy or a filthy liberal, maybe growing aggressive enough to declare you an apostate whose killing was permissible by law.
He still remembered that episode of The Other Direction, a programme he sometimes watched despite hating it for being contrived. On one side of the debate was Sayyid al-Qamani, who opined that there was no democracy anywhere in Islamic history. How could there be, when the Emirate of the Muslims passed from one Caliph to another by means of poisoned dagger or cup? The other guest wore a turban and was called al-Sebaei. Provoked, he roundly abused al-Qamani, describing him as a monkey and an apostate from religion, and all this live on air in front of millions.
The speed monitor began to tick steadily as Fahd exceeded 120 kilometres per hour. He decelerated and his attention was caught by an Egyptian labourer at the side of the road, who was setting out upturned chrome bowls along a board lying across the tops of four barrels. Next to him was a camel pen surrounded by barbed wire and a gaggle of motorists handing over the price of a bowlful of fresh milk. He would squeeze out a bowl in front of them and they would gulp the milk down until the foam filled their noses and covered their moustaches, then continue on their way, belching as they inserted a tape of Islamic songs hymning the former glories of the Muslim world and extolling the Kalashnikov, the grave and the life hereafter.
Summer had begun, he supposed. Ice cream vans were scattered about, along with sellers of Wadi melons, pomegranates from Ta’if and dates and milk from Qaseem. People straggled down both sides of Thamama Road into the early hours, searching for a cool breeze in the Nejd nights whose like was to be found nowhere else in the world.
His mobile rang and it was Tarfah, promising to wait for him. He had assumed that she was at Granada Mall but she said she would wait for him at a clinic. ‘When you get to Abraj Street call me, and I’ll come to you.’
He was returning from a weekend place belonging to friends and had taken Abraj Street heading south in the direction of the Knowledge Clinic where Tarfah was waiting. He drove past it, then turned right down a side street as she had requested, so the people by the door and the receptionist wouldn’t notice that she had got out of one car (her brother Ayman’s) and left in another.
She got in and they set off for Quds then doubled back to the eastern extension of King Abdul Aziz Road. When he reached the traffic lights by Jarir, his face to the east, she signalled to him, her finger concealed from the eyes of other motorists, that he should turn back in the opposite direction. He turned, driving past Panda then Jarir, and they took the southbound Eastern Ring Road.
On their left, in Quds and Roda, they noticed a number of furnished flats on offer, and picking a complex, Fahd parked the sea-blue Hyundai outside the entrance as the street filled with people emerging from the sunset prayer.
From the glove compartment he took out a folded copy of a forged marriage certificate that Saeed had procured for him that day: ‘This is for you to use in emergencies!’ The Sudanese receptionist pretended to inspect it without moving his eyes from a card game on his computer screen. The price of an apartment was 250 riyals, he said. Fahd handed him the money and he began to enter their details, continuing to click on the mouse and move cards across the screen as though locked in a life or death struggle for victory.
‘Go and get your luggage,’ he said, desperate to carry on with his game.
‘I don’t have any,’ Fahd said. ‘We’ve only come for a wedding in Riyadh.’
The receptionist returned the certificate and handed him the key to the flat. Fahd went back to the car then they went together into the lift, embracing passionately as he said apologetically, ‘Sorry sweetheart, there are no lights in furnished flats!’
She laughed out loud as he opened the door and they crept into flat 101. Like any nosy woman she headed for the kitchen and opened the cupboards, then the fridge, and inspected the dark brown sofas in the living room.
They went to the bedroom. She removed her abaya, revealing her uncovered shoulders and gave her familiar smile, that delicious grin both coy and impudent. Her hair was soft and her breasts were alive with anticipation; part of her bra was visible, an elastic strap covered in striped red satin. As always she rushed to his mouth, devouring it hungrily as she pulled off his shimagh and whispered, ‘That’s better!’ then let out an unexpected laugh as she threw her body on to the bed.
He asked her why she had laughed and she turned her face away, ‘It’s nothing!’ and busied herself with stroking his chest. He stopped her. Taken aback, he asked her why she had laughed like that. He remembered Thuraya, who as he departed after their first meeting had told him that he looked funny naked, scampering into the bathroom like a rat making for a drain!
He felt unexpectedly irritated. His mood clouded as he insisted she tell him. She laughed and explained that she was too embarrassed to say. Summoning a strained smile he coaxed her to speak.
‘I’m worried you’ll be angry,’ she said.
He hugged her, kissing her neck and earlobe and whispering, ‘How could I be cross with my Taroufi?’
‘My friend Nada saw a picture of you on the forum standing next to one of your pictures at a group exhibition …’ She roared with laughter, her hand clamped over her mouth, and said, ‘I can’t … I can’t … Fahd, please don’t embarrass me …’
‘Come on!’ he said impatiently. ‘Tell the story!’
Still laughing, Tarfah told him that Nada had said that he had looked ridiculous standing next to the website’s owner; his pale skin, red hair and shimagh had made him look like one of the darfours in the Lipton Tea adverts: a whitey. He frowned slightly, and laughed to humour her. Why darfour? How had the word first found its way to this racist society? If you came from the Eastern Mediterranean, that’s what they called you. They had said it to him at school when he was little, even though his father was Saudi, he had Saudi nationality and he had been born here. The teachers at Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary referred to him as ‘son of the Jordanian woman’, as though he didn’t have a name. Even the website’s owner, whom he took to be a cultured man, had once referred to the fact that his mother wasn’t Saudi.
‘You know,’ he’d said offhandedly, ‘you can tell you’re half-grilled from your red hair.’
Fahd sat up all night thinking about the phrase ‘half-grilled’.
‘Damn it! Was he trying to say that I’m not fully Saudi? Why would he talk about me as if I were a lump of cooked meat? Or did he mean that the sun hadn’t tanned my face properly, that I hadn’t been seared brown by the heat of the Nejd or the desert and my hair turned black as night?’
He could still recall the decision he had taken in the summer holidays before starting secondary school to dye his hair, angering his mother who said, ‘Ever since you grew up your heart’s been dyed black!’
How he had hated her at that moment.
Tarfah threw herself at him, hugging him and whispering, ‘She’s an idiot, anyway; she’s never experienced the taste of that red-haired madman in her mouth, or had it flog her!’
Her brown hand had descended and started fondling him and it awoke, uncoiling like a snake. In a teasing tone she said that she loved lollipops and that a year ago she had been handing them out to some women and children who were guests at her house when a woman in her fifties asked her what they were.
‘They’re lollipops!’ she’d answered. ‘You suck them.’
The woman had laughed and said, ‘Well thank God I’ve got my own special lollipop at home. It’s black, true, but it’ll do.’
She was pointing over at her dark-skinned husband, and Tarfah murmured, ‘My lover’s lollipop is red. The imported kind.’
Whenever Tarfah mentioned her surname she would add that she didn’t come from the family of the same name who owned a huge shopping centre in Riyadh. ‘We’re not tribesmen!’
It was the distinction people drew between tribal types, nicknamed ‘110 volts’, and the brighter ‘220 volt’ bulbs from the cities: a bit like she was reassuring him that he wasn’t obliged to think of marrying her. Once, he said to her, ‘I don’t know why people here are always turned into numbers. When a guy’s a farmer or a tribesman you call him “110 volts” and sometimes no more than 60, not enough to power a light bulb! Southerners are Zero-Sevens after their dialling code, and loads of those of mixed birth from our parents’ generation and before had their birthdates recorded as 7/1, as if the whole lot were born on the day the welfare budget’s announced. You even retire from a government job on 7/1. The government would love it if we all dropped dead on 7/1. It would make their job easier!’
Tarfah moaned, his madman plunging in and out, a famished polar bear switching back and forth between two darkened caves, and her beautiful wide eyes rolled up in ecstasy as though she had fallen into a coma of everlasting pleasure. He cried out at her, cursing and clutching himself with his slippery hand and she embraced him with an intoxicated whisper: ‘I love you!’
Returning from the bathroom he was surprised to see the light from a pair of candles wavering over the two tables beside the bed. His bewilderment showed, and she told him that she had brought them in her handbag, thinking of furnished flats with no lights! He embraced her and kissed her nose, which reminded him of the pliancy of cotton wool or young girls’ rosy cheeks. It was slightly broad and squashy, as though devoid of cartilage and bone.
Fahd opened the wardrobe, took his cigarettes from his pocket and before lighting one from the candle flame, asked her, ‘Do you mind?’
She shook her head coyly and he blew white clouds into the room’s murk, the smoke rings rising like dancing demons.
‘Have you ever smoked?’ he asked.
‘Twice, when I was working at the clinic. Nada, my friend in reception, she’s a smoker.’
He handed her his cigarette and she hesitated, then took it, saying that she would only try it ‘because it tastes of your mouth’.
As she exhaled he said, ‘I get the impression your relationship with Nada is a strong one. There’s nothing else going on between you, is there?’
‘Oi,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t come near me.’
She would talk about relationships between women, how in crowded bathrooms at wedding functions you would see each pair of friends enter a cubicle together for ten minutes or more, to emerge in disarray and make a hasty stop in front of the mirror, taking their lipsticks from their purses and restoring colour to their lips.
‘What about you, then? How do you know all this if you haven’t tried it?’
‘Want to know the truth?’ Tarfah added. ‘Lots of people are convinced that Nada and I must have some history together, because we’ve been friends for eight years and because Nada is really fair and soft and has a small body, while I’m dark and taller than her. They always assume I must be her man and she’s my sweetheart. I just can’t imagine myself ever being in a relationship like that.’
She wrapped her leg around him and began kissing him slowly, savouring it, as the hot breath from her mouth whispered, ‘How can I think of woman when I’ve got a lover like you? Huh? Tell me. How?’
When they were as hot as two coals she assumed the position like a cat awaiting her tom, her voice growing gradually louder and louder until he ordered her to put the pillow in her mouth. She was grateful and giddy, her long lashes shading her wide eyes, and every so often she would press her fingers against her lower eyelids, feeling a faint pain run through them.
From time to time she would talk about the old boyfriend who had left her after five years together. In their final year, she said, he had tried persuading her to marry, on the grounds that he was married and settled and that she, too, had the right to expect marriage, security and children. He was plotting to get rid of her politely, ostensibly looking out for her interests but really looking to end it.
She said that Nada had told her she dreamt of marrying a Saudi man who wouldn’t betray her. They were in Sahara Mall together and she noticed a handsome man sitting on a bench in the main plaza, playing catch with a little girl and waiting for his wife to emerge from a shoe shop.
‘That’s the one!’ Nada had cried in delight and Tarfah had pulled her away by the hand, saying, ‘You moron. If you show you’re keen what’s a guy like that to do? They’re all acting, sweetheart!’
‘And what about you lot?’ said Fahd. ‘A man only cheats with a woman who gives him the chance. Don’t you think wives cheat on their husbands?’
She smiled, thinking of Leila.
With a little sigh of annoyance, Tarfah pulled the bed’s white blanket over her exposed buttocks and told him about Leila, who claimed to be religious, ruled her majlis like the head of a sect of dervishes and interfered with what other girls wore, and how she had discovered her betrayal. Tarfah and her sister had stalked her as she wandered around the hotel looking for an unlit spot to continue her secret telephone conversation.
‘My sister pointed at her. “She’s asking her sheikh for guidance!”’ she said cattily, and let out a loud laugh.’
Fahd laughed, drawing her soft, moonlike face toward him and kissing her nose and mouth. Her lips formed a cocoon around him as she gathered in his face with unhurried pleasure. She wanted to sweep the sheet off but he prevented her and abruptly got out of bed, picking up one of the candles and placing it beside the other. He looked at her breasts and the shadow on the side of her face that leant against her palm was extraordinary. The folds of the bedsheet, rising and falling from light to dark, lent a compelling beauty to the composition. She laughed and let her face fall from her palm.
‘You look like you’re drawing me.’
She would make an amazing subject for a new painting, he said. He could see it in his mind, along with all those paintings of nude reclining women, and he thought of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and another of Picasso’s paintings, Femme Nue au Collier.
‘Should we go?’ he asked.
She screwed up her face as she laughed and told him, ‘You’re an idiot. You’ve got it all wrong. It’s the woman who says she’s late. For example, you should ask me, “Aren’t you late?” so I get the hint in an indirect way.’
He apologised with a kiss and she started to get dressed while he went into the bathroom to wash his mouth. He heard the imam reciting the second rakaa—‘Does he not know, when that which is in the graves is scattered abroad and that which is in human breasts is made manifest…’—and for a moment considered going out to pray to mislead the receptionist, but he didn’t.
Emerging from the bathroom he asked her the name of the old wedding hall opposite Uwaida Palace on King Abdul Aziz Highway.
‘You mean the Malakiya?’
He nodded and talked her through a credible way of leaving the key with the receptionist so he didn’t have to return the next day just to hand it in.
Before she went out she covered her head. In the living room she stopped him and kissed his head. He laughed.
‘You’re the first person to fall in love with my head.’
Lifting her niqab she pulled his face to hers and kissed him, then let it fall as she giggled and said, ‘You’ve had your final kiss from me.’
He had left the key in the door after locking it in case anyone tried opening it from outside with a spare set.
Before opening the door he replayed a scene in his mind, based on a dream she had recounted to him earlier, which had left him terrified though he hadn’t revealed his fear lest he ruin her mood. Before they had met that afternoon, she had told him, she had been asleep and dreamed of him lying on a bed in a room that resembled her own while she sat beside him, stroking his face with her fingers and gazing at him lovingly. Every so often out of the corner of her eye she would catch a glimpse of lizards’ tails, with their thorny scales, poking out of the space beneath the wardrobe. As she toyed with his face she grew afraid and thought of how she could suggest they go somewhere else without alerting him to the presence of the hideous reptiles and frightening him. At that very moment she heard the sound of her brother coming out of his room and she woke in a panic, staring over at the wardrobe but seeing nothing.
Turning the key he remembered the door of flat 102 across the hall and the shoe rack outside it, crammed with six or more pairs of shoes. Was this the explanation of the dream, that the shoes were the fat lizard tails seen by Tarfah? Or were they the bearded men of the Committee, lurking behind the door in their hair mashlahs and waiting to pounce as soon he opened up? They would lead him away to the GMC, pulling his lover behind him as she wept and pleaded. ‘Silence, whore!’ they would say, and enter a case of illegally consorting with a female against him at the Committee’s headquarters in Roda and turn him over to the police.
Quietly, apprehensively, he opened the door. The shoe rack was completely empty: the flat’s occupants had left.
They took the lift down in silence and he led her out to the car before returning to the Sudanese receptionist and asking him, ‘Do you know the Malakiya wedding hall?’
The man shook his head apologetically.
‘They told me it was on King Abdul Aziz Road. Do you know how to get there?’
‘Leave here and take a right on to the service road leading to the ring road. Then at the lights at Exit Ten take a left and you’ll be on King Abdul Aziz Road.’
Fahd handed him his secret treasure—the key—and brought his carefully planned conversation to its conclusion. ‘Great. Look, we’re going to a wedding and so long as the hall’s near Qaseem Road and we manage to get out early we’ll drive directly to Majmaa. Keep the key and if we’re not back by two then you can free up the flat.’
The receptionist took it gratefully and said that if Fahd wanted he would hold the flat for him until tomorrow.
Tarfah said she wouldn’t go back to the clinic because it had locked its doors half an hour before. Instead of Le Mall or Granada Mall, she chose Sahara Mall at the intersection of King Abdul Aziz and King Abdullah.
He drove west along King Abdul Aziz Road, the tape player drawling out the song she loved—My sweetheart, so far away from me, I long for your eyes—nodding her head in quiet rapture. After the lights he turned right into the King Fahd quarter, swung behind the mall and stopped at the main entrance.
Tarfah said her goodbyes, got down and he went on his way, rolling down the windows and breathing in the warm breeze that blended with the cold air from the air-conditioner.
The following day she told him that a Bedouin had chatted her up after she had got out and in front of the security guards had started chanting, ‘The sure of step walks like a stunner,’ unable to recall that the last word of the proverb should be ‘king’. Were women being truthful, or were they making it all up, fantasising that their femininity could arouse a man’s lust? They might be being honest after all; men here were maddened by desire, hunting women any way they could. Many women had lived harrowing, painfully blighted childhoods, their formative years swinging back and forth between violence and tyranny, between psychological damage and physical harm. There was little Noha, surrounded by an army and with a mother who counted her breaths even as she slept, Thuraya who spent her days with a neglectful, filthy husband, and mischievous Tarfah who refused to accept the favouritism shown to her sisters.
TARFAH’S CHILDHOOD HAD BEEN painful and never peaceful, from her name, a sacrificial offering to her deceased grandmother, to its endless, depressing days.
One afternoon, in Class 2/3 at the Twenty-Sixth Middle School in Suwaidi, the gigantic school monitor, Halima the Ethiopian, had come to the door and asked for Tarfah. The grammar mistress standing in front of the blackboard motioned for her to go to the headmistress’s office and as a terrified Tarfah crept out from behind her desk Halima added, ‘Bring your bag with you!’
The teenager froze, then snatched up her bag and went outside, cocking her head to the left. In the corridor leading to the headmistress’s office Halima said to her, ‘Tarfah, your father’s waiting for you at the entrance.’
Pulling the monitor’s hand to make her stop she cried, ‘Has something happened to my family?’
‘No. You’re suspended.’
‘Why?’
‘What, you don’t know?’
At break time a sheikh had come to give the girls a religious lecture. He sat in the security guard’s room, took the microphone and began addressing the girls who were drawn up in orderly rows in the playground.
Tarfah was rebellious and domineering and held sway over a little gang made up of Amani, Amal and Jawaher. The girls were sitting next to each other for the lecture and Tarfah started making fun of the sheikh’s speech, waving her hands and waggling her head, a living representation of the bewildered old man hidden from view behind the four walls of the guard’s room. Her friends, almost dead from laughter, buried their faces in their arms.
The headmistress had been standing on the edge of the playground, and she walked up and pointed with her stick, calling out Tarfah’s name. Tarfah stood up and the headmistress signalled for her to move to the end of the row. When the lecture was over and the pupils scattered back to their classrooms Tarfah went to see the headmistress, who hadn’t even had time to sit down at her desk.
‘Why was I moved during the speech?’ Tarfah asked boldly. ‘They were all laughing!’
‘That is correct. However, moving one girl is quite sufficient and in any case you were the cause of the disturbance. Everything quietened down after you left.’
‘Or maybe it’s because they’ve got connections … teachers or monitors or …’
This was a reference to Amani, whose sister taught maths at the school.
‘That’s quite enough insolence!’ broke in the headmistress, waving her stick threateningly.
‘I’m not insolent!’
‘Get out of my sight before I beat you.’
The headmistress shoved her.
‘Insolence!’ said Tarfah, her mouth twisted in contempt.
‘Come here, you little bitch!’ the headmistress shouted.
Tarfah turned towards her, her eyes throwing out sparks and her hands trembling with rage, then spat at her in disgust as she shouted, ‘You’re the bitch!’
The headmistress drew up an order for three days punitive exclusion, then called her father and asked him to come over immediately and collect his daughter who was being suspended for misbehaviour.
As the monitor accompanied Tarfah to the exit, Tarfah begged her to let her apologise to the headmistress; she might change her mind. Knocking on the steel gate to make the guard open up, the monitor said, ‘The headmistress has given an order. It’s been signed and sent.’
She gave Tarfah a superior, vicious look. ‘Try behaving yourself next time.’
The fourteen-year-old Tarfah went out, tripping over her abaya and holding her school bag and the suspension order. Her father took her away. Her mother was in hospital, having given birth early that morning to a little girl, Ilham. No sooner did he reach the house than he dragged her inside like a piece of livestock and pelted her with blows without knowing why he did so himself. He was panting, hitting and shouting,
‘You want to show us up in front of other people? God destroy you!’
He left her crumpled up in her grimy abaya and went out, locking the front door and Tarfah burst into noisy tears, wailing, ‘God curse you! May He bring you death! Please God, let me die and leave this life.’
She hated her father very much; she hated living with him. It tormented her that the only reason she had spat at the filthy headmistress was for his sake. The woman had called her a bitch, which made him a dog. She’d been defending him!
After she had calmed down, having woken from a nap that lasted the whole afternoon, she stood in front of the mirror and said to herself, ‘The headmistress is right: I am a bitch!’
Giving a sigh, she added, ‘And my father’s a dog, too, a dog sixty times over!’
They were taught in their lectures that flirting was a serious matter, one of the greatest sins: a disgrace in this world and in the world to come an exceeding torment—words that fell heavy on the soul. Just considering the possibility (i.e. of talking with a young man) would strike the young girls not only with fear, but with outright terror.
After that day, however, Tarfah longed for the chance, if only to defy her father, though she was not in need of a man, or a woman for that matter; she needed to speak and spill it out, if only to a mirror, so she might bring a halt to the oppression that had begun to eat away at the edges of her two beautiful hands.
Her father was troubled by her. Her mischief and insubordination made him anxious. She wasn’t like his other daughters, who were utterly calm and cold. There was a hidden fire within her. She loved people, mixed with them and made friends with all the other pupils. Everyone knew her for her rowdiness and good humour while at her sisters’ schools their fellow pupils were scarcely aware of their existence.
It was a shameful day for her father when he first introduced a telephone into their house in Suwaidi, where the family was at that time going through something of a crisis. Nobody was to answer when it rang except him, or their mother if he was away. Having taken the caller’s name and handed the receiver to one or other of his daughters, he would remain next to her, listening in. The reason for all this angst over the telephone was a mystery to the girls. Of all of them Tarfah was the most resentful of her father and mother; how she longed to leap up at the first ring and answer!
The only thing that recommended her to her father was her excellent marks at the end of each year, which made him happy. Neither did he have any worries about her gang of friends at primary school—where they were taught by a paid tutor who was known to the family and who also gave lessons to the daughters of neighbours he knew—most of whom came from villages around Riyadh such as Sudair, Huraimla and Thadiq or from the traditional city neighbourhoods of Old Shamesi, Sabala, Umm Sulaym and Jaradiya. But when he registered her at the Twenty-Sixth Middle School he became uneasy. It was an excellent government-run establishment, part of a complex that included primary, middle and secondary schools, but its pupils were utterly different to those at her fee-paying primary. They were fearless.
Tarfah gradually grew apart from her village friends and extended the circle of her acquaintances until she came to lead a small gang of her own. She was in charge, the one who performed all the most daring missions. Hearing stories of girls’ relationships with boys, she was amazed and aspired to do likewise. She would see the secondary school students, with their clothes, their sexiness and their shameless gestures, and returning home would be shocked by her mother’s refusal of her reasonable requests:
‘Mum, I want to cut my hair.’
‘Mum, all my friends are dying their hair.’
But her mother refused and refused until she grew weary and thinking of a way to shut Tarfah up, told her to ask her father, at which point Tarfah’s demands instantly ceased. That wasn’t so important, however; the difficult part was how to broach the subject of her teachers’ demands with her father because he would meet them with abuse and invective until, resolving to have done with his insults, she made her older sister Asma ask in her stead, at which he responded instantly.
Tarfah hated them all, starting with her own name, which had been given to her in memory of her grandmother. Her sisters, Asma, Amal, Ahlam and Ilham, had modern, pretty names that started with vowels, while hers stood out like a mark of shame. Why Tarfah?
‘A curse on my grandmother and my grandmother’s father!’ she would say to herself when the intoxication of her rancour reached its peak. ‘Their names all begin with A or I—soaring, confident letters—and I get a T, squat and heavy as a toad.’
‘It’s enough that you have the honour of bearing your grandmother’s name and keeping her memory alive,’ they would say and she would weep.
‘Damn her and damn her memory! Who is she, Lady Diana and no one told me?’
Despite the strong, undaunted image she presented to her sisters, Tarfah’s existence was fringed with tears. The thought of running away had often got the better of her as a teenager, but to actually take off? Where to? Not to mention the fact that the idea was insane and extremely difficult to pull off. It was perhaps her greatest fantasy.
She would be the last person in the house to go to sleep and she found herself in the grip of a strange habit: she would make her way to the front door and, opening it, would look up the street in both directions, though mostly peering to her left where the street stretched furthest with a mysterious turning at the far end.
For several nights she went on opening the door and looking left, as though waiting for someone or something, until one night she felt the sharp edge of a leather sandal strike the top of her head, then a meaty palm twist her face round and a savage kick to her body. It was her father, beating her and swearing at her, biting his tongue to muffle his voice for fear of waking the household or creating a scene.
She ran to her bed and crept beneath the blanket, stuffing her sleeve in her mouth to silence the sound of her sobs. Catching up with her he stood before her body interred in the blanket, then kicked at her foot.
‘Cut it out! Understood?’
She cut it out and fell silent and in the morning he came to wake her up as usual, with a sudden prod from his foot.
Whenever Tarfah remembered those times she would ask herself, Why was I standing there at the door? And even if his suspicions that I was waiting for someone were correct, why didn’t he ask me who it was?
Two days after the incident her father brought it up again. He hadn’t told her mother, but he impressed upon her that she had better watch out. His attentions became so oppressive that if he sat to sip his cup of coffee at sunset and Tarfah wasn’t there in front of him he would dispatch Amal or Ahlam to find her and report what she was up to.
Sometimes, she would watch their neighbour as he stood outside the door to his house, patting the head of his young son or even sitting him on his lap, though he was really too old for it. Occasionally, he would take the boy’s hand and laugh and play with him. Whenever Tarfah saw this she either laughed or felt scornful. From her parents she had learnt that patting on the head was a sin; it was a form of sexual harassment and molestation, even when it was the father himself that did it.
Now, grown up, with her second husband gone and her only daughter, Sara, sharing her bed, she still woke every morning with the feeling that any moment a foot would strike her where she lay, even now, a full ten years after her father’s death.
Her father had been so tender and jolly with his brother’s daughters. She would be consumed by jealousy to see him laughing and joking with her cousin Maha, who openly prayed that God grant him a long life instead of her own father.
‘If only God had taken you with him!’ Tarfah would mutter to herself.
If only God had taken me with him!
FAHD HAD REPEATED THESE words to himself many times through his endless misery in the week that followed his father’s burial beneath the soil of the Naseem Cemetery. He said them again after his mother’s marriage, against his wishes, to the uncle he couldn’t stand, and after learning of his mother’s death by torture. And, finally, he said them as he sat there in the detention cell of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, where he was merely a rich joke in the mouths of the bearded men who brought him for interrogation: the hawk-eyed man and with him a muscular fellow, cheerful and mocking, and a third individual with an uncovered head and an incipient bald patch at the front of his pate.
They sat him on a chair at the far side of the room and the hawk-eyed man scattered his belongings on the table, tipping the bag and letting them fall: his wallet, a gift from Tarfah with the Givenchy logo, a cheap pen, the 3G Nokia mobile phone, various bits of paper (mainly receipts from Maktaba), a fob in the form of a small silver elephant from which hung the keys to his Hyundai, Saeed’s flat and the inner and outer doors of their house in Ulaya, and the primitively-worked olive-stone prayer beads.
‘Goodness!’ the balding man said sarcastically. ‘All this in your pockets?’
‘Yes, sheikh.’
‘The brother is a Saudi?’ he asked, scrutinising Fahd’s features.
‘Of course! The ID card’s in front of you!’
‘I know that. I can see it. But you don’t look right.’
‘Maybe your mother isn’t Saudi,’ said the strongman with the massive face.
‘That’s right, she’s from a Jordanian family.’
‘So you’re a mongrel?’
‘Half Saudi, then!’ he said, chuckling happily.
Staring at the papers and receipts the balding man said, almost in a murmur, ‘Half a man, in other words …’
Fahd sat there, trapped by the three men. One of them studied his ID card. ‘Which branch of the al-Safeelawis is this?’
‘The Qaseem lot.’
The balding man peered at him mistrustfully. ‘Where in Qaseem?’
‘My family is from Muraidasiya.’
‘Do you know Abu Ayoub?’
‘Sheikh Saleh …’ the hawk-eyed man said by way of explanation.
‘He’s my uncle!’ He almost added, ‘And my mother’s husband!’ but a lump rose in his throat and he fell silent.
‘Blessings!’ said the hawk-eyed man, then added offensively. ‘On him, not you.’
‘As for you, who cares?’ said the strongman.
Pips of sweat had started to appear on the bald patch of the man with the uncovered head. He drew a pen from his pocket and sliding the point beneath the string linking the widely spaced prayer beads he lifted them towards his nose and gave a tentative sniff, his eyes blinking rapidly and anxiously, then slowly moved them across to the hawk-eyed man and lifted them to his nose. The hawk-eyed man sniffed twice, moved his head back, then leant forward and sniffed again, his eyebrows raised. The balding man slowly transferred them to the nose of the strongman.
‘What’s this?’ he asked Fahd.
‘Prayer beads.’
‘Why are they all coloured like an African necklace?’
After a period of silence Fahd replied, ‘I painted them. I’m an artist.’
The balding man slowly raised his eyes towards him. ‘You draw human beings?’
‘Everything.’ Even nudes, he almost added.
An Indonesian entered carrying pots of tea and coffee, placed them on a table in the corner of the room, then poured coffee for the three men. Having put the prayer beads into a small envelope, the balding man rose to his feet and tipped a few drops of coffee on to his thumb, unwilling to wet it with his tongue after it had touched the beads lest the black magic pass to his mouth, then into his body, and he die. He wiped the moistened thumb on to the glued flap on the envelope and pressed it shut.
The strongman whispered a few words in his ear and he nodded in agreement. The hawk-eyed man, who had heard nothing of this but clearly understood the secret message, nodded in turn.
Fahd stayed staring towards them anxiously. He remembered a newspaper report he had read a year back about a witch who had been seen by the men from the Committee, fleeing her flat on a broomstick after they had raided it and discovered prayer-beads, amulets and charms.
Witch arrested in Medina; Den of black magic raided
Ukaz, 29 May 2006
Yesterday morning (Monday) members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice received a surprise when they raided a den of black magic in the neighbourhood of Ard Mahbat, near Seeh in Medina, and found more than twenty women in the company of an African witch, naked as the day she was born.
The real surprise was not her refusal of the blanket provided to cover her nakedness, but that she flew from the room like a bird and disappeared from the flat to the amazement of more than twenty members of the Committee who were present.
A terrifying landing
The chase was on.
Committee members set out in pursuit, hunting for the witch through the upper and lower levels of the four-storey building, the sorceress having vanished from the second floor. During their search they came across a citizen in his pyjamas with his children behind him, appealing for help from his fellow residents. The citizen informed them that a naked African woman had dropped from the bedroom ceiling into the middle of his sleeping children, terrifying them and setting them screaming and wailing.
‘When I went to see what was going on in the bedroom,’ he added, ‘my children told me about the bizarre scene they had just witnessed and when I realised it was a witch we all fled from the flat.’
Ascending to the fourth floor the Committee members located the completely naked witch in a citizen’s flat and loudly recited the call to prayer and the Ayat al-Kursi to paralyse her. One Committee member then threw a blanket over her until her clothes could be recovered, and once dressed she was arrested.
A source at the Committee stated that the operation to arrest the witch and her accomplices was led by Sheikh Faheed al-Oufi, head of the Committee’s centre in Harra Gharbiya. Recovered from the witch’s room were prayer beads, amulets, written charms, magical knots, instructional videos for the practice of black magic and a belt of the sort worn around the skirts of female primary school pupils, indicating that a schoolgirl had been bewitched. A Qur’an was also found beneath the witch’s chair.