IN THE MONTHS THAT followed his father’s passing Fahd discovered drawing in pastels and for some time afterwards he stayed devoted to the technique. At that time he didn’t use an easel.
Closing the door to his room he opened the box of colour-graded sticks and with lunatic preoccupation pushed the pastels in every direction over the paper; at times he even felt that the pastels were moving of their own accord, guiding his hand about. Here a long road, shadowed with a storm cloud, there a solitary bush, an old upturned cart and a murder of crows wheeling at the top of the sheet.
He laid the pastel aside and used his thumb to smudge the road’s far end into the darkened sky. The horizon merged. His fingers became tinted with colour until they almost turned into pastels themselves and he was unable to judge which was his forefinger and which the chalk. He was eager and felt that he was panting as he pulled and pushed the pastels.
Just before dawn he grew drowsy and his heavy head slumped over the page. He came to mid-morning, his drool spread out over the sheet in the shape of a rectangular trunk, a jinn’s smoky body sprouting from the upturned cart.
After giving up pencils, then pastels, Fahd became addicted to oil paints, brushes, easels and palettes, but here he was, sketching away with his pencil as he sat at the Tea and Coffee Pot Café, across from Carrefour in Granada Mall.
He had chosen a seat next to the window, its opaque plastic film shielding the customer inside from the mall’s bustle. By the chair he had selected this film had split, a small gap through which he could spy on the shoppers.
He ordered Turkish coffee and water, took from his pocket a piece of paper and a 0.5 millimetre gauge pencil and surveyed the scene through the window. Women in abayas that failed to hide their jeans, some pushing trolleys that were empty or contained a sprawling, playful child clutching the string of a helium balloon, others trailing an Indonesian maid pushing the trolley after them, while yet more clustered around the ATM machine by Samba Bank, ringed with mischievous children.
The Filipino waiter set down a small brass pot on the table and as Fahd gripped the handle to pour the thick coffee the waiter peered at the page and said that it was beautiful. Fahd thanked him, and sipping at his green porcelain cup he stared at what his hand had made.
A small car stopped at revolving door number four and Tarfah got out, walking calmly and confidently and gazing at the drivers sitting on the small square plots of grass near the security office. She walked inside.
To her left were the shops whose layout she knew well, while on her right lay Carrefour’s open doors and the khaki-clad security guards chatting to each other through the crowds of shoppers. She passed the women gathered around a cash machine and glanced over at the café, walking straight ahead until she reached the spacious court next to the escalators, then doubling back to let her see more easily into the café’s curtained-off men’s section and look for Fahd. She didn’t want to call him; she wanted to catch him unawares.
Walking past, Tarfah saw Fahd busily smudging the pencil with his thumb and swung right, approaching the exposed patch of glass and rapping suddenly at the window with her ring. As Fahd turned she withdrew a little and all he saw were her eyes, smiling through her niqab.
He hurriedly drained the water from his bottle and walked outside, accompanied by his mobile’s message tone. He opened the message:
Beware of the following phrases if uttered by someone older than you:
1. Let’s go bird hunting.
2. Would you like me to teach you how to wrestle?
3. What do you say we go up to the roof and look at the pigeons?
4. Would you like me to teach you how to drive?
5. Let’s go and find some jerboa in the desert.
6. Today, the bill’s on me.
7. Let’s open the wardrobe.
8. Let me show you my stamp album.
9. Let’s stay up and watch a video.
10. Let’s see how a gecko suckles her young.
Compliments of the Committee for Fighting Sodomy, Qaseem
Fahd closed his eyes and sighed, clinging to Tarfah’s hand for several minutes and then releasing it as they traversed the mall’s wide central passage and passed Carrefour. Noticing that he seemed a little put out she asked him what the matter was, but he told her it was nothing. Where were they going, he wanted to know. Her molten eyes gave her answer, but she added that if he was preoccupied or not in the mood they could grab a coffee and just go for a drive. They stopped at the Starbucks inside the main entrance.
Saeed was just fooling around. Whenever he got a message making fun of Qaseem and its inhabitants he would pass it on to Fahd, who would respond with sarcastic remarks about southerners.
As they bought their cappuccinos, Lulua’s mournful voice reproached him: she and her mother had been trying to get hold of him for two days, and their mother was exhausted, worn out trying to track him down. He tried making the excuse that he had been painting for the next spring exhibition and promised that he would visit them both that night.
As soon as they drove off Tarfah’s phone rang and she began hunting fretfully for it in her bag. Fahd was miles away, staring up at the advertising hoarding at the traffic lights while she giggled to her friend Wafaa, but he paid attention when she glanced over at him and said, ‘There’s a friend of mine who’s been doing “short time” with this guy but so far, no action. Looks like she’ll end up paying him for it!’
She ended the call and her laughter trailed away as she put the phone back in her bag. ‘She’s completely mad.’
‘Who?’
‘Wafaa, my friend. She worked on the programme for eradicating illiteracy for nine years. She studied psychology. And now they’ve cancelled it; they’ve cancelled the contracts of more than eight thousand female teachers … Imagine! Just like that!’
‘God! And what did she do?’
‘Nothing. They thought of staging a demo at the Department of Education in central Riyadh.’
‘If they tried that they’d end up wishing they were at home unemployed.’
‘Now she tells me that her friend in the programme suggested they form a troupe of wedding dancers, so Wafaa told her there was a much more enjoyable, easy and quick way to make cash.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Work as a Friday girl. “Short time” for a thousand riyals in furnished flats and in hotels for two and half. Amazing!’
‘Are you serious?’
‘No, I’m joking, you maniac. Did you believe me?’
‘Why wouldn’t I? Anything’s possible in this country.’ Fahd lowered his voice as though speaking to himself. ‘The women are turning into Friday girls and the boys are off to Iraq!’ Then: ‘Friday girl! I like that!’
Tarfah laughed. ‘That’s what they call them. We once asked Wafaa about her man and she said he was going to Bahrain. We really thought he was travelling, but she laughed at us and said it was code for a guy who drinks too much!’
He didn’t spend long with Tarfah that evening. They roamed the darkened neighbourhoods of North Riyadh for a while and he gave her a half-hearted peck. She felt hurt and asked him to go to his mother’s; they would meet tomorrow if they could.
‘SAY SOMETHING!’ SAID LULUA.
‘Who to?’ Fahd answered, setting down the bag containing bread and three cartons of yoghurt that he had bought from the supermarket and the bakery next door.
‘Anyone on planet Earth would be nice.’
‘You mean the jinn?’ he said, smiling.
‘I know you don’t believe in those things but I swear to God I heard it. Its voice was completely different …’ Then: ‘I swear it wasn’t Mum speaking!’
He wasn’t convinced, but when he took his seat beside his mother, prostrate on her bed in the dining room, he handed her a glass of zamzam water. She took three sips, then sprinkled a few drops into his right hand and he stroked her brow and head as he muttered a Qur’anic verse.
It came to him that there was a spiritual cure that might save this ravaged body; even holding her hand, still beautiful, warm and soft, could give her new impetus. She adjusted herself and began to tell him about his childhood, then his father. Her tears flowed and she was silent. She had remembered the bag, maybe. She asked him to call Lulua.
‘I’m making tea, Mum. Just a minute.’
‘Your father bequeathed it to you.’
She grabbed Fahd’s hand and squeezed it.
Choking back a sob, Fahd said sternly, ‘Let’s have none of that talk; it’s no good.’ Then he added, ‘God give you a long life. You’ll be there for my wedding and you’ll see your grandchildren.’
Wearily, Soha described to her daughter where the old black leather bag was kept on top of the wardrobe. She would need the little stepladder behind the kitchen door.
TARFAH SENSED THAT FAHD’S usual high spirits were dampened; she missed the touch and tenderness she had come to expect. He was going through a crisis, she felt, but wasn’t telling her. Wasn’t she the queen of trauma and tragedy? How many dreadful things had happened to her, and she hadn’t gone under, rising phoenix-like from the ashes every time and telling Fahd in lavishly sarcastic tones: ‘Smile! You’re in the Kingdom of Human Kindness!’
She thought of the despondency that sometimes overwhelmed her when she was with him.
She was sitting in the dark of her top-floor bedroom in Suwaidi listening to the sunset call to prayer from a nearby mosque; it was the first time she had listened to it in such a downcast state: how could it be calling for peace of mind when she felt such hopelessness? As a child, whenever she’d felt sad or a strong urge to cry, she would creep into her wardrobe like a cat, closing the door on herself, shutting her eyes in the dark and letting her tears flow unchecked until her soul was purged and she could emerge to play and stampede about crazily.
All she remembered of her childhood was the bad and the sad, starting with being named Tarfah and, perhaps too, the superstition with which her immediate family and relatives poisoned her early years: that any woman called Tarfah was destined for bad luck in life. Though she hadn’t believed it, the years that followed had proved them right.
It was a mystery to her why her entire family should prefer her older sister, Asma. Was it because of her utter docility, the very opposite of Tarfah’s naughtiness? Or because Tarfah excelled at school while her older sister failed and had to repeat one year after another until they ended up together in the fourth year at primary school, before Tarfah overtook her and went to middle school first? Tarfah relied on her own talents, while her sister received assistance from private tutors, all to no avail. Was that really sufficient to make her family hate her, so that as a girl she often felt that she wasn’t their daughter at all, that she was in the wrong family? Neither their ideas nor their way of life tallied with her own and comparing her dark skin to her four fair sisters only made her more doubtful. When she was older and her father had died she would ask herself, ‘Did Mum sleep with someone else?’
Not a day passed without her being beaten for some reason, or for no reason at all, by her brutal father and her brothers. Even her youngest brother took pleasure in hurling his sandals at her when she walked by, as though she were a cat in the doorway that he wanted to drive off.
Nor was this confined to the immediate family; even her aunt preferred Asma. Yet despite her father’s harsh treatment he would call no one else when he wanted food, drink or clothes. Was it because she was more scrupulous than her sister, or because he wished to put Asma at ease and have the little servant girl Tarfah perform her tasks for her?
Her father had not loved her mother. She would complain about him, never letting him alone and always suspicious. One morning, months after his death, she told Tarfah that he had cheated on her, and the whore he’d cheated with had borne him a child.
‘That’s enough, Mum!’ Tarfah had cried. ‘Please, stop it! God rest his soul!’ Then added in a subdued tone, ‘Speak well of your dead.’
But the terror she felt at night as she looked back over her long life and her sense of alienation while surrounded by her family only grew stronger. She remembered that it had been her father’s dream to be blessed with a daughter who mispronounced her ‘rs’ to sound like ‘ls’. Maybe his lover had had this flaw of speech and he had longed to see it embodied in front of him at home. Tossing and turning in bed, Tarfah whispered to herself, ‘So why did he hate me if I fulfilled this dream of his?’
She never won his love and was helpless before her siblings’ mockery whenever she uttered a word that contained an ‘r’. They would mimic her and one would always shout: ‘I dare you to say, “Rabbits run right to rocks”!’
Tarfah was exceptionally brave and had a sharp tongue, but she never had it in her to tell her mother what she went through as a child for fear that she would punish her and step up her surveillance. She couldn’t find the courage to tell her about her cousin, some five years older than her, who had asked her to come to his house to see the hawk his father had bought. She went off with him and he had shown her a hawk of his own.
For days afterwards she felt irritable and guilty and when she saw him at the door would hate and blame herself, as though he had been perfectly within his rights and it was she who had done wrong. She was scared that he would tell on her; the sin was her own.
Tarfah neither hated nor loved her father, though by rights she should have loved him because he was her father. Whenever she grew angry with him and whispered to herself that she hated him she would quickly become flustered and fearful of divine retribution, even though she couldn’t remember him ever holding her or hugging her or stroking her hair; the very opposite of her uncle, who adored her, showering her with praise in front of her family and his own daughters, too, and never hesitating to give her a hug every time he saw her. In his tender embrace she found all that she lacked in her family home.
When her father died, Tarfah wept dementedly and cried in silence for a whole month, so that the women who had come to pay their condolences pitied her and called back later to ask after her. She cried like a child, repeating over and over, ‘Bring back my father!’ But with the passing of days she grew reconciled to circumstances and on the final day of her mother’s mourning period, as she sat with her in the still night, her mother told her what had never been told: how he had once made accusations against her honour, how he had done her wrong and abused her.
She talked of the girl he had loved before he had got married and how his family had refused to let him wed her, forcing him to marry her mother because she was a cousin and an orphan and his financial circumstances were weak enough that only his cousin, cheap and no bother, was within his means and he within hers. She told Tarfah how he had betrayed her with the girl he got pregnant and Tarfah had been unable to stop her until she had convinced her daughter that it had really happened.
Her mother had shattered that dazzling aura, the barrier of sanctity surrounding her father. What disappointment Tarfah felt! How she hated her mother for destroying the image of a strong father that she carried inside her! Yet she hadn’t blamed her.
To this day, Tarfah was amazed that her mother had observed the mourning period and carried out his last instructions (for the woman who observes the prescribed period of mourning shall make for her husband a dwelling in Paradise), continuing to give alms on his behalf and refusing to remarry. If his name ever came up she would praise him and perfume his memory before her sons and daughters, who came to feel proud of him.
Tarfah almost wept when she learnt of his betrayal and the pride felt by her brothers and sisters never touched her. She would laugh to herself to see them squirreling his portrait away in the wallets they carried in their pockets. She was the only one who didn’t keep a picture of him; she wouldn’t even look at one. She feared herself and she feared him. She sensed she would catch a look of reproach in his eyes, a reproach that would seize on the doubts that swirled inside her, stirred up by her revulsion at what her mother had told her.
These things kept Tarfah awake at night as she grew older and the passing of time eroded her hostility towards her family. She began to draw closer to them, to live alongside them in peace, until she married Sami and divorced two years later to return with quite different feelings. The gulf between them had grown and she felt more estranged than at any time before. Her room became her refuge and her world. True, her brothers certainly appeared to treat their sisters with kindness, alarmed and jealous for their well-being, but Tarfah thought them selfish and fake.
Over the years she tried to bridge the chasm dividing them. She was, undeniably, disobedient and foolish with an ungovernable tongue. She was incapable of keeping her counsel for anyone, answering back fearlessly. For that is how she saw herself: fearless and restoring what was rightfully hers. They, meanwhile, regarded her behaviour as vulgar, as a shamelessness and insolence that contrasted with her calm, well-mannered sisters. Tarfah thought them naïve idiots, mocking their staggering stupidity and laughing herself silly when they failed at school, and so nobody was ever happy for her when she did well.
IN SPITE OF HER relationship with her father, Tarfah still wished that he had been there when she got engaged to Sami.
She wanted to marry Sami, but something told her that her father would have refused the match because she was yet to finish her studies and also because he evaluated men quite differently than her brothers, unmoved by material concerns and never flattering anyone. He hoped to see every one of his girls at university and in the best departments. He had no patience with absenteeism from school and would turn into a tyrant whenever his wife asked him to let Ahlam or Ilham take a day off. But after his death, anyone who wanted to go to school could go and if they couldn’t be bothered than no one would blame them. The house was transformed into a little city of chaos within a city beset by chaos.
One night, Tarfah read the little advertising slogan blinking on the ATM screen, which described the country as the Kingdom of Human Kindness. Putting the notes in her wallet she thought to herself, ‘Incredible! They’re calling it the Kingdom of Human Kindness! Wouldn’t the Kingdom of Chaos be better?’
‘Find out about him? He’s our child! We’ve known him since he was little!’
This was her brothers and sisters, speaking about Sami. They were delighted whenever he came over, sitting beside him in a fever of excitement like someone having a photo taken with a minor television star. Only Ahmed, the second oldest of her brothers, remained unimpressed. Actors, singers and sports stars, he said, led dissolute lives and were unsuitable for marriages; that went for Sami, too, regardless of the fact they knew him.
Ahmed wasn’t extreme in his beliefs but he observed the daily prayers at the mosque, the first and only person to perform the dawn prayer in their neighbourhood mosque for many years. He disliked gossip, hated nobody and was affectionate and devoted towards his family, his sisters and his widowed mother.
Before her father passed away, Tarfah’s cousin, son of the uncle who lived in Khobar to whom, or to whose family, she was partial because she felt that they were more civilised, asked for her hand in marriage. Her father refused on principle to countenance an unemployed man, even though his family were only suggesting an engagement, and gave them to understand that her future would never be linked to a man who couldn’t tell how long he might be waiting for a job.
As for Sami, Tarfah knew no more about him than the average television viewer or what could be gleaned from his photographs in the press, but she was quite certain that she disliked his inquisitive, vulgar family whose general manner and way of speaking lacked sophistication and breeding. When his mother and older sister came to present her with the offer her reaction had not been good, but his maternal aunt, who happened to be Tarfah’s cousin, spoke with her and managed to convince her, telling her that he had confided his love for Tarfah to his sister, recalling the lovely eyes she had had as a child before she had covered up.
If he couldn’t marry her, he declared, then he would never marry.
She didn’t have a clear childhood memory of him. She had seen him in the flesh just once, a few months back when he had visited her uncle’s house. With her cousin Samia, Tarfah had spied on him through the opening in the tent. She had thought that he was just a vain young man, inordinately proud of the pair of curls that flopped across his brow. He was talking to his aunts and moving his hands about confidently, maybe arrogantly.
Their phone conversations after the engagement never went further than his television appearances, his minor stage roles and his friends in the industry. They never touched on any relationships with other women. He was just an actor playing supporting roles, who got his break on Channel One, in instructional slots that advised the viewer not to waste water, to exercise financial prudence, and to show respect to the disabled and assimilate them into society, and so on.
Tarfah didn’t take the business of marriage terribly seriously. She sat watching a foreign film with subtitles at noon on her wedding day while Asma shouted, ‘From now on you’ll get him in the flesh!’ from outside the room, assuming that she was gazing at Sami on screen. This lack of excitement on her wedding day left her family in shock. Her appearance didn’t change until after the evening prayers in the wedding hall. She wore a blouse and skirt and her hair was carelessly tousled; in the end Abdullah shouted at her, bewildered at her indifference and lack of emotion.
No one understood that Sami needed her to be able to show her off at events, while people whispered, ‘That’s Sami’s wife!’
‘He cared about my dresses and how I looked, not for my sake or his, but for those women whose comments he always looked forward to.’
She was led to him by her gossiping sisters who spent the time comparing Tarfah to her cousin or her aunt, and despite her happiness to see her family gathered together in one place, especially the women, her mother-in-law began to isolate her bit by bit from the rest, claiming to be worried about the jealous eyes of the other women.
Sami travelled a lot for work, moving with various camera crews around Egypt, Syria and Jordan where the studios were, but he missed her and at night he would woo her endlessly down the phone. He bought her gifts and beautiful antiques on which he inscribed poetic sentiments and the words of favourite songs expressing how he felt inside. Indeed, when he came home he would bring scraps of paper on which he’d recorded his longing: receipts and bills, a ticket stub from a bus or train, film and theatre tickets. Every scrap of paper he kept in his jeans was a blank page for the words and thoughts he addressed to his beloved Tarfah.
The strange phone calls didn’t bother her at first either when Sami answered and told the caller it was a wrong number or the times she answered and the caller hung up. It didn’t make her angry, but doubt took root in her heart, especially when he would lower his voice during phone calls he didn’t want her to hear. She ignored it, though, because she trusted him.
All this she let pass without a fuss, but not so his peculiar attempts to isolate her from other people, to keep her as far as possible from his relatives and in particular, his aunt and her cousin Samia in whom she had discovered two new friends. He didn’t like her calling them when he was away, as though he wanted to hear every word she said to them and they to him. It got to the point that on entering the flat he would immediately ask her who had called and what they had talked about, even sneaking a look at the list of received calls on her phone and rampaging about the house, enraged and consumed by suspicion, if he found that the list had been deleted.
Yet at the same time, returning to their flat after taking Tarfah to see her family in Suweidi, he would spend hours on the phone with his aunt. He was uneasy about his aunt’s manner and he was worried about her influence over his wife. She had something on him. His surveillance of Tarfah reached a point where instead of checking her incoming and outgoing calls he felt the need to place a small listening device beneath a couch in the men’s majlis that sat alongside the table where the phone lay. So suspicious was he in fact, that before they went out together on some errand or other he would wait for Tarfah to go to the bathroom, then rummage through her handbag.
Sami was paranoid, but life went on, slow and unchanging, until the day he returned unexpectedly early from Amman, before the end of a shoot for a new soap opera. The production manager had fired him for molesting a young Palestinian make-up artist. As she bent over him to apply cream and make-up at the start of each day he would start praising her eyes and mouth. Then he went further, sliding his hand along the armrest, to make the movement look accidental, and letting his elbow brush her thigh. She finally screamed at him one day and everyone gathered round, the actors, the director, the assistant director, the set designer and the wardrobe master, to find the girl in tears, casting her powder brush aside and refusing to work.
After this, Sami was forced to accept the minimum wage for soap actors, and remained without work for a year; they even had to give up his flat and go and live with his family. A new and painful episode in Tarfah’s life began. She argued with his mother over trifling matters and Sami would stalk out of the flat in a temper and be gone for a day or two, while Tarfah stayed behind in the family home, mistreated and downtrodden as a slave. She grew to hate his selfishness and poor behaviour and his running away infuriated her.
Around this time another a major change took place in Tarfah’s life. One day she came across a small, blackened spoon on top of the shade for the bathroom light. Naturally enough, she threw it into the kitchen bin. Two days later she found another spoon, slightly singed. She suspected that he was on something, what she didn’t know, and then she noticed brown crumbs scattered on the carpet beneath his side of the bed. The carpet was light in colour and the crumbs that darkened it she recognised as hashish. He was rolling joints.
She had never noticed the way he smelled before, but after the first year she began avoiding his embraces; he stank and every time he took her to bed it was as though she were a virgin. It felt like rape.
He had no real money, just a modest sum he earned from bit work in television, no more than 3,000 riyals, not even enough to cover his secret budget for a single week. Though they were living with his family he began harping on at her that she should take her expenses from her family and his refusal to shoulder any responsibility caused her irritation to peak.
Then his mother started to unleash her arrows at Tarfah, attributing every new incident, crisis and sudden disappearance to her failure to give birth. She said that if Tarfah had had children Sami wouldn’t leave the house after every argument, as though he wasn’t running away from her sharp tongue and their swapped insults. In order to stop his mother’s crazed assault Tarfah was forced to make repeated visits to a gynaecologist, until after numerous examinations and consultations he threw her out, saying, ‘If your husband isn’t with you next time, don’t come!’
Sami kept promising to come to the doctor with her, and didn’t. He kept promising to start over with her in a flat away from his family, and didn’t. He tried summoning up the spirit of the happy times they had spent together in the flat in Wuroud but she had become a wife in name only and in the end she went back to her family in a rage.
He tried to get her back, making up stupid excuses for why his life had turned out so badly: there were people conspiring against him in television, people in production companies who hated working with him and people plotting to abort his promising start on stage. It was these people who had got him hooked on the delicious giddiness of hashish cigarettes. Even his family hated him for his success and his popularity with the public. With this he lost possession of Tarfah’s respect and her soul. Unable to bear being shut up with him in one place for longer than half an hour she returned to the family home in Suwaidi to put her old room in order, a tiny space more like a cupboard, no larger than twelve square metres.
Though she missed him and longed for him for the first few months, Tarfah eventually got used to living on her own, despite her brother’s badgering her to go out and see her friends. Her brother Ahmed, meanwhile, felt that his unshakeable conviction that artistic and celebrity circles were filthy and depraved had been vindicated and whenever there was slightest problem at home he would chastise his sisters and mother for casting Tarfah into such iniquity.
STOPPED AT THE UWAIS Mall traffic lights on Ulaya Street, Fahd tried opening the bag and discovered that it was secured with a combination lock. He entered a few guesses. Three numbers wasn’t difficult, but nor was it easy. The year of his father’s birth, minus the millennium: 956. No response. He put in 985, the year of his own birth. No response. After a few more failed attempts, the year of the mosque’s occupation occurred to him, 979, but it didn’t open to that, either. What if he tried a nice round number? Fahd asked himself, like the hijri date of the same incident: 400. To his surprise, it opened.
He was parked in Ruman Street just off the Northern Ring Road, beneath the building where Saeed lived. The smell of rot spread through the car’s interior, masked by the reek of cheap perfume. His nostrils twitched and he started to sneeze, then he switched on the light and gazed upon the bag’s secrets.
He began to leaf through the documents and diaries, the books marked with their date of purchase from Mecca’s bookshops and the pamphlets containing Juhayman’s addresses, one of which his father had distributed that Ramadan to the worshippers in the Grand Mosque. Fahd read the titles. A weighty tome turned in his hands: Apprising the People of the Signs of Discord and the Portents of the Hour by Hamoud al-Tuwaijri. He opened it and a light cloud of dust rose towards his face. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and on the page before him read:
Concerning the man of Qahtan
Qais Bin Jaber al-Sadafi relates a hadith handed down from his grandfather, by way of his father, that the Prophet, the blessings of God and His peace be upon him, said:
‘After me there shall be Caliphs, and after the Caliphs, Emirs, and after the Emirs, Kings, and after the Kings, Tyrants. Then shall come a man of my House, to fill the earth with justice after it has been filled with tyranny. Then shall the man of Qahtan be made Emir. In the name of He who sent me the True Word, it shall be no other.’
This account is given by al-Tabrani; Al-Haithami said of it:
‘In its chain of transmission are names I do not know.’
We also have the account of Abdallah Bin Amr Bin al-Aas—may God be content with him and his father before him—in which we find the following:
‘Then shall come the Zealous Emirs. Six shall be born of the line of Kaab Bin Luay, one shall be a man of Qahtan and all shall be righteous and without equal.’
Abu Harira, may God be content with him, relates that the Prophet, the blessings of God and His peace be upon him, said:
‘The Hour shall not arrive until a man from Qahtan comes forth and drives the people before him with his staff.’
Fahd shut the book and hefted another, which he recognised from the cover: Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones. He took a number of small pamphlets and read some of their covers: The Emirate, The Oath and Obedience, Exposing the Rulers’ Deception of Scholars and Men and Sincere Advice and Justice in the Life of Man. He lifted a small, yellow booklet of only a few pages, whose cover proclaimed: A Vindication of the Religion of Abraham, Upon Him be Peace.
In the margins of these pamphlets he read the comments in his father’s shaky hand: The position on civilisation … peaceful evangelising … jihad … compliance … the Religion of Abraham … obedience …
Lifting these books up, Fahd came across a series of letters to his father, a small folder with diary entries and a number of documents. One was a fatwa dated 20 November 1979:
In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful, Praise be to God alone and Peace upon His Prophet, His family and His companions:
On Tuesday, the first day of the month of Muharram in the year 1400, we, the below signed, were summoned by His Majesty King Khaled Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud to attend him in his office in Maadhar.
His Majesty informed us that directly following dawn prayers that day a group had entered the Grand Mosque bearing arms and demanded the oath of obedience be given to one they called the Mahdi. They swore the oath and prevented people from leaving the mosque, fighting those who opposed them and opening fire on people both within the mosque and outside.
Fahd replaced the document and took up another yellowed sheet of paper, which he realised was a long poem in the classical style. He read the opening:
Through a dark night a servant ran,
With his piety, fleeing the faithless,
Fleeing the feuding that beset him round,
The warring of happiness and woe.
He scanned the page and turned it over: there were more than forty lines of verse.
Closing the bag he switched off the car’s overhead light and got out.
He turned the key in the lock. The flat was dark. Saeed hadn’t returned yet, and he decided to open the bag again, picking out the small folder of diary entries. He read on, wide-eyed.
Mecca, 1979
After two days of questioning I was transferred from Buraida to Riyadh accompanied by a soldier who stuck to me like my own shadow, leg irons at my ankles and handcuffs about my wrists. The bolted truck drove down what I think was the old airport road until it entered a gate at the back of an old building and I was placed in a cell no more than 1x2 metres in size.
Fifteen days deprived of sleep. Whenever my head nodded they’d hammer on the cell’s steel door and I would jerk upright in panic. These desperately cramped cells were laid out along a narrow corridor where I was brought, first descending four steps into a room full of soldiers and guards then dragging my leg irons down another four steps to the grim cells themselves.
After they locked me in I amused myself by reading the graffiti on the back of the door: names, dates, a calendrical table for one of the hijra months written by a prisoner to count off the days, a variety of contradictory political slogans reflecting the prisoners affiliations, penises and arses, sexual positions and obscenities. Pushing it in to enter, the cleaner hadn’t noticed what lay behind the door, while the cell doors that opened outwards were subject to constant scouring.
After two weeks I was transferred to Jeddah and from there I was taken to Mecca in a jeep. They bound my eyes with a blindfold made of fabric and did not remove it until I had been sitting in the cell for three hours. When at last I could open my eyes, I saw an old friend of mine, a fellow student from the Grand Mosque Institute.
The cell was about 6x4 metres and was home to five of us. Its walls were covered with a white paint that gave off an acrid smell. It was the new prison in Mecca and I stayed there for five months knowing nothing, without the faintest idea where I was, nor whether I was above ground or below, with no book, newspaper or wristwatch to indicate the time, day, or date. It was as though time had stopped on the first day of Muharram, 1400 AH.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally saw, one day at noon, some books in the possession of the young prison guard Daghaylaib, who had brought them to the cell. My heart fluttered with joy at finding a window through which it could peer out at a world other than those hateful walls.
Daghaylaib stood there reading out our names in order and handed each of us a Qur’an. After he had gone one of the Brothers noticed that the cover bore a picture of the Holy Kaaba, on either side of which was something like the figure of a man. These were depictions of living creatures on the Noble Book, he told us; God protect us, they must not be permitted to remain there. Three agreed with him and decided to strip off the covers, while myself and my friend begged to differ. We saw no harm in it.
The next morning the guard called out their names, and the three of them were taken out and lined up between the cells. Three troopers came with special clubs and began to beat them, the whistling of the staves stirring the still air of the prison, their voices rising and falling.
In prison emptiness towered as tall as the minarets in the Grand Mosque and we had nothing save the dream of books and newspapers. I amused myself breeding cockroaches. Whenever a particularly fat one came near me I would hit it with my sandal until it lay flat and a small sticky sack burst from its rear. I would peer at it for a while then lift the sack in my hand and put it in an empty yoghurt carton and a few days later I would enjoy the sight of tens of tiny cockroaches pouring out of the sack. I’d bore a hole in the carton’s lid for ventilation and the cockroaches would keep growing and growing and with them grew my sadness, until one day I decided to kill them all.
Later, I wanted a string of beads to count out my prayers, or the members of my family lest I forget them, or the Brothers who had been executed. Asking for a luxury like prayer beads was difficult and so I began saving up olive stones until I had enough to fill my palm. I grated the stone’s tip against the cement floor so the hollow centre showed, then turned it over and did the same to the other end until I had a pierced bead. I then cleaned out the core, and when I had thirty-three beads I pulled a thread from the matting, arranged the stones along it and tied the ends together.
Was I in such dire need for prayer beads or had the emptiness driven me to find something to entertain myself, to disperse the endless hours, coiled like a hibernating serpent?
After a year had gone by they asked us what books we wanted and I asked for a collection of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry. I was full of joy as I soared with the verses of vainglory and wisdom. I memorised half the collection as well as fifteen juz’a of the Qur’an.
One man memorised The Delight of He Who Longs To Journey and after they took it back he decided to write it out in its entirety upon the white walls. Using the metal tabs from fizzy drink cans he inscribed it with the utmost care. The oldest man in the cell, an old illiterate fellow who had saved up the drink cans, could not understand the words, but he took his pleasure from the beautiful lines and the man who had written them decided to teach him the alphabet.
The walls told us tales of times past and we told them of our sadnesses, our loneliness, and our great fear of the unknown. After they started allowing us family visits, one man’s relatives brought him cologne. He gave it to Daghaylaib, who was a kind man, and he perfumed us all. He sprayed the cheap shimaghs we had been given after a year inside. That night I wrapped the scented head cloth over my face and no sooner had I fallen asleep than I saw nightmares, the like of which I had never seen and never will again. I saw them take me, blindfolded, to Justice Square. They stood around me and one read out my sentence: one of the corrupt of the earth, to be beheaded by the sword. Hearing the sword slither from the scabbard I trembled and recited the shahada. Then, without warning, the executioner pricked my side with the point and I hunched my back in fright, my neck stretched out like the scrag of a bird. The briefest instant, then the unsheathed blade split the filthy air and cut into my frail neck. My head flew off, rolling like a football while my eyes stayed open, looking out at the crowds.
I woke up, sweating and afraid, and opening my eyes I stared at the cell walls until the cramped chamber seemed a shady Paradise. It was truly the happiest moment of my life to find myself breathing evenly and to see the beautiful prison walls, a happiness only to compare with the instant of my release.
For my first visit, my father and Ibrahim came. They were happy that they had found me at last and that I was still alive. The time after that it was my mother with my father and brother. The trip from Riyadh to Jeddah was sleepless and exhausting for them, and so it went on until the order was given, three and a half years into my sentence, to alleviate these hardships by distributing the prisoners according to their home regions.
I returned to the Ministry’s prison in Riyadh where I lived among new cellmates, before they moved me to Ulaysha Prison. I sensed that they would release me, then. It was wonderful there: we read newspapers, listened to the radio and knew what was going on around us.
I found it hardest to sleep at Eid and just afterwards, because the release orders were issued towards the end of Ramadan and when the list of names was published, ten or fifteen prisoners, or sometimes just one, and I did not find mine among them, I would enter a state of severe disappointment. At the end of a year’s hardship, injustice, tedium and anticipation, I would be hanging on the small and nebulous hope of the Ramadan to come.
They let me go at the end of Ramadan 1404 AH. The head of the prison’s investigations unit sent for me. I was asleep. My cellmates woke me and I sprinted for the bolted door in my underwear.
‘Put your robe on, idiot!’ one of them shouted, so I dressed and Daghaylaib led me to the office of Lieutenant Saoud.
‘God willing, this is your chance!’
That’s what he said. They were always mysterious, even though they had become our friends through long acquaintance. He said nothing more, even though my father and Ibrahim were in the room next door finishing up the paperwork.
There was a detective who was supposed to be standing in a hidden location behind the chair where I sat, studying my features through this mirror-like panel. He was meant to familiarise himself with me, tail me in the first months following my release and write reports on my conduct. Instead, he came straight into the room. The lieutenant shouted at him, threw him out and smiled.
‘This lot just don’t get it!’ he said in his Hejaz accent. ‘Idiots, I tell you.’
Then he explained to me that the man who had just come in had been given the task of following me and warned me at length to keep clear of suspicious activities that might do me harm and to ensure my behaviour was irreproachable.
‘Suleiman, you have to prove your good behaviour. Invite the man for a cup of coffee or something!’
Then he laughed, and I laughed with him.
My father, my uncle and my brother came to collect me. Walking out with them was a wonderful moment, delightful, but at the same time terrifying. I came out in Ramadan to find my family home transformed into a scene of great celebration.
Scarcely a month passed before I was swept by nostalgia for my time inside. There, the days had all been alike, but that serenity and calm and one’s reliance on others just did not exist in the city outside. There you were required to work, to scrabble and lie and cheat and dissemble, to get married, to be a good father, to own a house, to…
My brother said I should travel in order to shake off my depression, but I had no passport; they had confiscated it when I was arrested. I went back to the prison investigations unit and asked the lieutenant if I might have it back. Through half-closed eyes he looked at me and said, ‘You need to go to the Interior Ministry and present a request for reconsideration.’
‘A request for reconsideration!’ I whispered within myself.
As though I had been lost and created anew with no passport or memory.
I went and wrote out a letter in which I begged them to recreate me as a human being. They are the Creator and we their dependents.
I forgot to tell you: when I came to use my identity papers they told me, ‘You have to renew your civil status and get a new ID Card, instead of using the old papers.’
No objections. We’re their dependents, my boy, dependents in every sense, from our nationality to the choking air that we breathe.
A month after submitting my request for reconsideration I went back to the lieutenant in prison. He rebuked me, ‘You’re the strangest, stupidest prisoner I’ve seen in my life. Prisoners never show their face around us once they’ve left!’
To myself, I said, ‘I’ve been longing for the days of loafing around, sleeping, reading, writing and having fun inside. It’s an extraordinary blessing to be found nowhere but in your venerable prison.’
Every five or six months I would go back and ask what had happened to my request for reconsideration, to which the answer would be, ‘Your letter hasn’t come yet.’
Where has it got to?
One year and two months later I was informed they had consented to my request and a week after that I made my way to the passport office and entered the section for Saudi citizens. I stood before the official and submitted my request, which he examined for a few seconds then asked, ‘Is this your first passport, or have you owned one previously?’
With the innocence for which my brother envied me I answered, ‘I had a passport before!’
He raised his head from my documents. ‘Where is it?’
‘You’ve got it!’ I said, stupid as only I could be.
He frowned and shook his head. ‘How do you mean?’
I explained how I had been a political prisoner and he indicated that I should go to the special desk: the desk run by the security services. Off I went and found myself standing before an alert young man with blazing eyes who told me, ‘Your passport has been placed in the archives; it can’t be recovered.’
I was anxious and almost wept.
‘Well, what’s to be done?’ I asked.
‘My good fellow,’ he said casually. ‘There was no need for you to say you’d owned a passport. If you’d asked the official for a new passport he would have searched the computer and your name wouldn’t have appeared. Your old one predates the computer system.’
‘What can I do now?’ I asked him.
He was dismissive. ‘Come back in a week. Maybe he’ll have forgotten your name and what you look like.’
Just two days later a colleague of mine at the distribution company suggested I apply at the passport office in Sharqiya and put me in touch with one of his relatives there. I did so and when the passport came through I left the building almost flying. The green passport was paper wings that could take you anywhere in the world. It was my key, my first revelation of the beachfront in Bahrain where the low, gentle waves broke before a bewitching sunset and the sun’s golden rays scattered and tangled in Soha’s hair. There was nothing more beautiful than to stand surrounded by waters that stretched endlessly away. It was as though life itself had no limits, as though the cell no longer surrounded me, though I sometimes had the feeling that it was pursuing me, embedded within me like a tree I could not chop down or break away from.