He did not turn;
He did not see any of us,
But stared at the doorstep and the door
And surrendered his gaze to the plants on the balcony.
Bassam Hajjar, A Few Things
THE SHUBRA DAWN SEEMED calm and mild: a street stretching away east and west, twenty metres wide and lit with dim yellow lamps, a plastic speed bump midway down its length outside Fantoukh Mosque.
Out of the north door that opened on to the street came Abdel Kareem, the end of his shimagh wrapped about his neck, unable to conceal his anarchic black beard. He descended the steps in his sandals then turned right into the backstreets. Halting at a water fountain by a zawiya, he cupped his hand, took three gulps and went on his way. He greeted Ahmed al-Sameetan in a voice surrendering to sleep and the two of them walked home. Ahmed entered first and courteously invited his friend in. ‘Please do …’ to which the other, passing on, replied, ‘Too kind…’
They had come together years before, first at Fantoukh Mosque’s Qur’an school and then at Sudairi Mosque where they attended a study circle memorising the Qur’an. Later, they would go in the afternoon to the public library in Suwaidi, borrowing books by al-Albani and perusing the bound volumes of The Meadows of the Righteous and The Guide for the Fortunate. For years now, Abdel Kareem had taken part in meetings and trips with other large groups and his proselytising activities had increased, while Ahmed had begged off, preoccupied with family affairs, his sisters especially, following the death of his father, Ibn al-Sameetan. He often alluded to his virtuous sisters in front of his friend and to his desire to ensure their well-being with an upright husband who would appreciate them and keep them safe.
The matter of Tarfah’s failed marriage was no trivial matter. Her brothers had got her involved with a failed actor deficient in morals, humour and manners, but the victor in all of this was Ahmed. He felt his view of the matter had been correct, that here was a world of degradation and filth, which encouraged Ahmed to speak directly to his friend after a number of hints and intimations. He took the plunge: ‘As our forefathers said, “Arrange your daughter’s engagement not your son’s.”’
And with that the offer of his sister Amal was broached. He affirmed his brotherly love for Abdel Kareem and his faith that with him, Amal would be in the hands of one who feared God and sought His reward.
It wasn’t Amal that Abdel Kareem sought, however, but Tarfah. He wished to deliver her from Satan’s wiles into the kingdom of God and His justice, to bring her back, after two whole years spent astray, to the right guidance of the Creator and His servants who feared Him, His punishment and His vengeance. He would be rewarded twice over: once for his own sake, for completing his religious duty through marriage, and once again for offering protection to a weak woman ensnared by the devil Art.
So he took her and the three months she lived with him were some of the loveliest of her life.
Calm and self-possessed, he never hit or betrayed her. It was only that he sometimes felt he was betraying his religion and neglecting his work: his evangelism and his jihad. On warm evenings he would tell her that he appreciated and respected her but feared that growing used to idleness and comfort would divert his attention from spreading the word, the summer activities and retreats, not to mention his longstanding ambition to commit to jihad and not just with financial contributions.
Three times he took her to Jaffal Centre on King Fahd Road and once she persuaded him to go to Faisaliya Tower, but emerging at the end of a tense half hour spent wandering about he informed her it was her duty to remove herself from temptation and that he, too, must shield his sight from those ornamented women.
During the first two weeks he ploughed Tarfah twice daily and showered her with such great passion that she fell in love with him and gradually began to change, dressing as he wanted, placing her abaya over her head instead of her shoulders so that her breasts were no longer visible to the naked eye, and replacing her niqab with a full face covering lest her beautiful eyes be an enticement to the weak hearted. After two months of this affectionate relationship, without him asking anything of her or making a single suggestion, she bought black gloves and thrust her hands into them whenever she left the house.
Following afternoon prayers Abdel Kareem would stay behind at Sudairi Mosque on Sudar Street in Shubra to study with some of the Brothers, observe the sunset prayers and attend a lesson or lecture at the mosque. Then he would return to his flat, in the same street as the mosque, bringing tames bread and either stewed beans or bean paste. These he would eat with his wife after she had brought him stewed tea, two sprigs of mint, a wedge of onion and a couple of slices of lemon. He would fondle her as they ate, then he would take her to bed.
Returning one evening as usual he came across a copy of Riyadh in the little living room. He glanced at it and asked, ‘Who was here?’
‘My brother Ayman.’
‘I don’t like that guy. Anyway, you know I don’t like newspapers and magazines in my house.’
Tarfah asked his forgiveness and kissed his head. He smiled and stroked her cheeks and round face.
Everything about him was wonderful: his delicacy and playfulness, even his anger was serene and self-possessed.
His lovemaking was neither too short nor too long, a delightful balance, yet he wouldn’t take her from behind. She had once shifted around during their drawn-out preliminaries, but he had backed off and returned to his familiar missionary position. Tarfah had got in the habit of doing it with her previous husband and learned to relish its pain, knowledge she would pass on to her lover, Fahd, when she slept with him.
One afternoon, talking to Nada on the phone, she said that she had found the perfect man. True, he was an extremist and very conservative, but he loved her and worried about her. Nada laughed and said, ‘You idiot, he’s an insecure paranoiac!’
In Nada’s eyes, men might act in various ways, but they were all paranoid. Tarfah would not accept this.
‘Abdel Kareem’s not like that!’
That’s what she thought: that she would live with him forever.
THE MODEST HOUSE WAS melting into the darkness as Lulua buzzed about on her own like a bee, lighting the oven in the kitchen, putting a kettle of water on to boil and listening out for the sound of bubbling. All of a sudden a fly began circling about. Lulua had no idea why she became so terrified whenever she saw flies and ants swarming together as if about to feast on a corpse.
Two days earlier she had made a dash for the can of insecticide and sprayed it at a column of ants marching beneath the skirting board of the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, telling herself that they were trying to devour her mother, whose body had become as lifeless and limp as an autumn leaf. And here she was now, hunting through the kitchen drawers for the plastic swatter and pursuing the fly like girls in fairytales who chase butterflies through the forest, slapping at it as it perched on the upper door of the fridge. The fly exploded, sticky blood and splayed wings, and Soha’s voice piped up, asking about the noise.
‘A fly, Mum,’ Lulua replied. ‘I was only killing a fly.’
Trying to remove it from the white of the fridge door she felt nausea flip her guts, the opposite of the great satisfaction her father had felt in prison as he executed his cockroaches en masse.
Fahd was taken aback to discover that Lulua had swapped her ring tone for a prayer.
‘God, I am Your servant,’ said the humble voice, ‘born of Your servants, man and woman. We are guided by Your hand, Your judgement carried out, Your verdict just: we beseech You in all the names that You possess.’
Lulua was silent for a moment then said, ‘This is my business. Prayer is a comfort and brings one closer to God. Mother needs prayer, Fahd, not Fairouz and Khaled Abdel Rahman.’
Her impersonation of their uncle irritated him. ‘He’s made fools of you and ruined you. He’s wrecked every loving and affectionate relationship that my father ever made.’
She sighed. ‘For your information, my relationship with my mother is better than it’s ever been. Prayer and being close to God increases people’s love for one another, but you’re stubborn. You’ve got a head like a rock because you hate my uncle.’
Lulua opened the lower half of the fridge and took a sealed plastic container from inside the door. She had undone it and smelled the mint’s green leaves, then plucked off a chilled sprig, washed it in lukewarm water and slowly lowered the leaves into the teapot, before swaying over to the dining room where the forty-year-old body lying on the bed had shifted upright. The woman smiled at her daughter.
‘Fahd hasn’t called?’
‘He called yesterday. He asked after you; he says hello.’
‘Do you know if he was able to open the bag?’
‘I didn’t ask him. I forgot.’
‘Fine, so you’ve no idea what’s inside?’
‘Treasure maybe? Gold?’ Lulua laughed.
FAHD DROVE THE CAR down University Road, inspecting the shops on either side. Tarfah said she didn’t like tunnels; despite the dim red lighting she sensed that she would die in one.
He laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not Tarfah any more. You’ve turned into Diana without my knowing it!’
Her laughter died away as she moved her head to his right shoulder and whispered flirtatiously, ‘I love you, Dodi!’
He had bought her a mocha from Dr Keif and a Turkish coffee for himself. He didn’t like Turkish coffee in paper cups, he said, because Turkish coffee was all about creating the right mood, and that meant somewhere to sit, a porcelain cup and his mother’s wonderful laugh as she whispered in his father’s ear at sunset in their home on the top floor in Ulaya. The coffee’s aroma would steal out of the living room and enter his room, fashioning a warm and intimate atmosphere from his parents’ love. Two cosy lovebirds, until King Death, idly circling over Qaseem Road and searching for a victim, had swooped down on two drivers, one sleepy, one fiddling with his mobile phone, and his father had crashed, his soul flying up into the distant skies.
In the last tunnel westbound tunnel before King Saud University she told him to take Takhassusi Road. She examined the shops on the side of the road and told him that this road had a history: her cousin Umm Samia had lived there. Running south to where it hit Mecca Road at the Aziziya branch of Panda, the street began with construction supply stores and travel agencies and ended with interior décor shops and the offices of the Bin Baz Marriage Project, before running on into undeveloped plots, the very plots where the Committee once ran into her friend Nada.
‘Just imagine, the stupid girl goes for a morning drive down Thamama Road with her boyfriend and on the way back they decide to go into the new developments and suddenly the Committee’s vehicle is right behind them.’
As she said this Tarfah little realised that a few months later, on a street near Takhassusi Road, she too would fall into the hands of the men from the Committee and would weep and plead to no avail.
They passed a luxurious décor store and she said the owner’s son had proposed to her through her brothers before she married Abdel Kareem, her brother Ahmed’s friend.
No one in the family said anything when Ahmed insisted on Abdel Kareem. Tarfah had become a guinea pig in her brothers’ experiments and she loathed them all with the exception of Ayman. He was sweet and calm; nobody felt his presence in the house and nobody called him by his name.
‘Come here, goat!’ they’d say. ‘Go there, goat!’
Anyone sitting with them for the first time would assume they were mocking how tractable he was with his mother and sisters; any one of them could set him trotting ahead of her like a goat.
Their older brother Abdullah’s fabricated story was another matter. He claimed that when their mother, Qumasha, gave birth to Ayman her breasts had dried up and his desperation for milk had prompted her to hire a black woman as a wet nurse. Unable to continue paying the woman, Abdullah would say, Qumasha had finally let her go after her older brother came up with an ingenious solution: he took the two-year-old and gave him a she-goat’s teat, from which he drank until he became so inoffensive and pliable that on first acquaintance anyone would think he was mentally ill.
But Qumasha, who smiled whenever Abdullah told this tale of his, said that when Ayman’s uncle found out that he was the only one of the children to be raised on powdered milk, he started calling him ‘son of a cow’. This became ‘son of a sheep’ and the children took up this nickname and toyed with it like a lump of clay until it turned into ‘son of a goat’. His siblings almost forgot his real name, and he became ‘son of a goat’, until his mother became exceedingly cross at the indignity of being described as ‘the goat’ and his name changed again, becoming simply ‘goat’.
Ayman had left her by the Paris Gallery entrance of Granada Mall and she went in, giving the impression that she was late as usual for her two friends, Nada and Fatoum. But instead she snuck out of the mall: going into a couple of shops then leaving via the main entrance where her lover waited for her. She took great care that no one recognised her. Though enveloped in her black abaya and veil, there were those who might guess it was her from the way she wore her robe, from her slow, funereal steps, from the exaggerated confidence with which she looked about her and from the plump white hand which Fahd was addicted to kissing.
Fahd switched on the car’s secondary lights as she walked out, happy that there was no security guard at the entrance, not that he would have noticed that she had arrived in a black Camry and driven off in a blue Hyundai Accent. Given her fear of the average security guard’s keen powers of observation she was careful to go in by one entrance and leave by another; when she entered by the Paris Gallery she would go out by Carrefour, Extra, the main entrance, or the rear door that led to the neighbourhood of Granada.
‘I worry that my aunt and her daughter might drop by the house, decide to join me at the mall and call me on my mobile to find out where I am,’ she had said, but the only call she got was from Ayman, which she answered immediately, convincing him that she would be late and would give him a ring as soon as she’d finished walking with her friends.
Fahd was parked outside the mall’s main entrance and he started the engine as she approached. She walked slowly over, her handbag in one hand and a pink carrier bag in the other. Climbing in she said that she didn’t want to do anything with him, they would just talk, but his hand mounted hers and she took it, bringing it beneath her black veil and slowly kissing it. In no time she was sucking his fingers one by one.
Fahd slowed outside the entrance to some furnished flats and saw a fat, young, bareheaded Saudi sitting on a chair in reception. He didn’t stop. Saudis scared him because they were more curious than Sudanese or Indian receptionists. He might co-operate with the Committee or inform for pay and turn them in.
They entered the bedroom of another furnished flat like a pair of thieves. She started to kiss him as usual and, intoxicated, he surrendered. She took a red rose from the pink carrier bag. It had no cellophane wrapping, as though it had been freshly plucked from a garden. She said that she had taken it from a flower shop inside the mall. He handed her a small, container and a carton slightly larger than a matchbox. Smiling shyly she opened the container and looked at the strip within: three bubbles sealed with tinfoil. He told her to rip one open and smell it. She broke the seal, sniffed and said, ‘Oh! Wonderful!’
It was the smell of fresh strawberries.
She took hold of him by his head and as though it might be their last time together, moved over every inch of him until every pore in his body came alive and his mouth sprang forward searching for the rain cloud. Her rain cloud. She rained torrents, he would tell her, and her soul laughed lightly as she mischievously asked, ‘Even in summer?’
He chuckled and whispered in her ear, ‘Even in summer: no rain dance needed. Just passing next to it makes it pour.’
On her way home she talked to Fahd on the phone as she sat alongside her brother, telling him he hadn’t given her the hand cream or her gloves. Then she laughed. He only realised she was sitting next to Ayman when the steady blip of the Camry’s speed monitor sounded. Hastily, he said goodbye—‘When you get home, call!’—and hung up.
She was certifiable, he told himself; how could she speak so brazenly next to her brother? Her innuendo was transparent: hand cream was the lubricant and gloves were the rubber sheath.
‘Gloves. What symbolism! Completely crazy!’
Her recklessness called for revenge, he told himself. The next time they met he found a choice spot behind the front door to the flat where he hid and held his breath, with some idea of singing her hair with his lighter. She called out his name repeatedly and he didn’t answer, so she punched his number into her phone and his mobile rang suddenly in his pocket. He emerged from his hiding place laughing, ‘Damn you. It was too late for me to put it on silent!’
She embraced him, her head encircled in her hijab, and passionately received his mouth.
In the lift he moved closer to hug her and lifting her veil she snatched a final kiss. ‘I’m really worried for you, Fahoudi.’
She feared loss, loathed it: the loss of the father who had hated her and never stopped beating her, the loss of Abdel Kareem who left without telling her he would never return, the loss of Khaled who had slept with her for three years until his wife had discovered what was going on from his mobile phone and he had decided to abandon Tarfah and never see her again.
Tarfah took Fahd’s hand and laid it on her cheek. ‘Promise me you won’t leave me, Fahd?’ she whispered fearfully.
He nodded gratefully, lost in the ripe tenderness of her cheek.
ONE NIGHT ABDEL KAREEM didn’t return from Sudairi Mosque.
He called Tarfah to say that he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow: he was going on a trip for two days. But he didn’t return after two days or three days or a week or a month.
After a fortnight of waiting and weeping in the flat she went back to her family. Ahmed avoided looking at her. At first he accused her of tiring Abdel Kareem out with her demands. Withdrawn from the world, pious and god-fearing, Ahmed believed that life held nothing worth fighting, boasting and struggling for. His life was the life of the soul and required no hardship or suffering. Yet after two weeks of searching and questioning friends and family and the worshippers at the Fantoukh, Sudeiri and Sanei Khairi mosques, Ahmed discovered that Abdel Kareem had made a clandestine trip to Syria with two acquaintances from Eid Mosque in Suwaidi.
His mother wept for a long time, as did Tarfah, who had assumed that God was compensating her for the suffering of her bitter childhood and two years of a failed and bloody marriage, with a man worthy of sacrifice and love.
But he had betrayed her and she hadn’t fully realised it at the time. In the second month of their marriage, Abdel Kareem had received a young man at the flat in the most mysterious manner. His phone rang once and he jumped to his feet and went down to see him in his jellabiya.
Rushing over to the window of the men’s majlis that looked over the street, she switched off the lights and spied on them from behind the drawn curtains. On the other side of the road she saw a tall young man with long hair reaching nearly to his shoulders, talking away as he sat behind his open car door with the engine running, and at the same time she saw the back of Abdel Kareem, absorbed in their discussion.
At first, she asked her husband who came and went like that without being invited up to the majlis, to which he replied that he was one of the Brothers from the nearby Eid Mosque. When she began asking closer questions about his name and his job and how Abdel Kareem had first met him, he said, ‘He’s a childhood friend, from primary school,’ and she understood that he didn’t like her asking about things that didn’t concern her.
He locked his phone with a password and grew jumpy whenever the message tone sounded. He persuaded her that this was men’s business and that she had no right interfering and prying. ‘Do you lack anything?’ he asked her and when, unsmiling, she said she didn’t, he added, ‘Do I deny you anything?’
But she would smile again and change the subject. ‘Can I make you coffee?’
When he stripped and went to the bathroom to take a long shower before the first call to Friday prayers, Tarfah tried to open his phone, entering all the numbers she thought might work and give her access to his inbox, but she never succeeded.
She was amazed by how much time he spent on the Internet in that second month. One evening his friend called him from the street and he hurried out, leaving the computer on. She ran over and jogged the mouse before it could close and leave her needing a password to open it. Opening a few files on the desktop she found maps of Syria, Northern Syria and the region around Raqqa and Deir Azzur.
‘Is he thinking of marrying a Syrian?’ Tarfah thought to herself, before coming across a map of Iraq. She closed the file quickly. She noticed another labelled Expelling the Infidel from the Arabian Gulf and then some documents: Training Regime for the Mujahid from the al-Battar online magazine, various texts from the Maqrizi Centre’s website and fatwas from The Voice of Jihad. She opened the favourites file in his web browser and quickly scanned the list of sites that Abdel Kareem had saved there: The Maqrizi Centre for Historical Studies, The Islamic Media Resource, The Minbar of Tawheed and Jihad, al-Battar, The Voice of Jihad.
Suddenly she heard his key slip into the keyhole in the flat’s front door and she came back out.
‘Why are you so late?’ she asked with loving concern. ‘I hope nothing went wrong.’
Put on the back foot he said something about the mosque needing help with its library and replacing the air-conditioning units. Would he like coffee or tea, she then wanted to know, or would he wait for supper?
Going into his little office he noticed that the screen hadn’t shut down. He had been gone for more than twenty minutes and it was set to switch off if left inactive for two minutes. It must have been her; she had spied on his things, Abdel Kareem whispered to himself.
She came in and set a cup of tea on the table. He looked at her. ‘Tarfah, where were you a moment ago?’
‘In the kitchen,’ she answered, pretending not to understand.
‘When I was downstairs with my friend, I mean.’
‘I was here,’ she said, and pointed. ‘In the living room.’
He rose from his chair, went out into the living room and sat on the sofa, where he picked up a little book. To make a mistake was no sin, he told her, but lying was. ‘Don’t lie, Tarfah!’
‘You keep everything from me!’ she shouted, losing her temper. ‘I don’t go near your computer or your phone. People I don’t know come and visit you and when I ask you who they are you dodge the question. It’s my right to know. I’m your wife.’
‘My life isn’t your personal property, woman, understand? Don’t stick your nose into things that don’t concern you.’
He slammed the door on his way out and two hours later returned carrying bread, milk and a box of sugared dates. She rose to greet him and kissed his head. Then they went to bed.
When Abdel Kareem vanished, Tarfah stayed in the flat, waiting. Every time she heard a car stopping in the street outside and a door slamming she would peer around the curtains. When she heard the footsteps of the man who lived in the flat next door her heart would stop beating for whole seconds, waiting—longing—for Abdel Kareem’s key to slip into the lock and turn twice, for him to push the door slowly open and come in, weary with travel, or from some long and arduous retreat. She would kiss his head, remove his rumpled shimagh then undo the buttons of his thaub and take it off so he might go into the bathroom and stand for long minutes beneath the pulsing spray while she dashed to the kitchen to make him supper and prepare two pots of tea—one with red tea, the other ginger—and pour some honey into a little dish with a few olives. Overjoyed, infatuated, she would wait for him in the living room and consider whether she should phone her family to breathlessly inform them, ‘Abdel Kareem’s back!’ or call his mother first.
But no one opened the door.
No car came quietly to a halt outside the building.
No voice called from a strange number to tell her he was all right.
Nothing at all, save the longing that gnawed at her limbs and filled her nights with loneliness.
IT WASN’T JUST THAT Tarfah sensed the cooling of her relationship with Fahd; lying on her bed at night and examining her life her intuition would bother her. She began to lose hope of ever seeing Fahd without having to beg him. What was at first a mere impression had become undeniable fact, had become a sort of pleading on her part. There was some mystery she didn’t understand. Why was he avoiding her? When she spoke with him he seemed almost tearful with longing for her.
There was a mystery in their relationship that Fahd barely understood himself. He wanted to meet her, to hold her, to sear her mouth with kisses, but he kept going to the bathroom to wash his mouth out, gargling and spitting, sniffing the air almost, as if his very breath smelt foul. It got so bad that when she dragged him down there he almost vomited. How many times had he lingered in the bathroom dousing himself with blisteringly hot water, watching the steam rise up as he scrubbed away?
That evening his directness surprised her, and maybe himself as well: ‘Will I see you today?’
She didn’t moan lasciviously, but, coquettish and sly, replied that he should give her an hour to see how she felt. Then, because she had already made up her mind to agree, she became impatient.
On his way over to see her he was eager and full of longing. He was listening to MBC FM and the voice of Abdel Majeed Abdullah streamed sweetly out. As soon as he got close he asked her where he should pick her up.
‘Entrance Three,’ she said.
‘Facing the schools, right?’ he asked to make sure. ‘The one opposite Nada Alley?’
He called again to tell her to come outside and she took him by surprise, swaying slowly over. Arrogantly, he thought.
She got in beside him, in one hand the olive green handbag embroidered with knights holding lances and arrows and in the other a plastic bag whose shop logo he couldn’t make out. She said that she had been going to call him but he had surprised her by stopping the car outside the entrance. There were no shoppers about, just a pair of security guards lighting their cigarettes.
‘It’s evening prayers,’ she said to him. ‘That’s why no one’s outside the entrance.’
They drove along together.
He asked if they should take a hotel room or a flat, or hide out in one of the unlit building lots since it was nearly nine and there wasn’t enough time to settle down for a long session.
‘Don’t mind,’ she said. ‘You decide.’
They drove north, searching for a building plot. They passed the first unlit dirt road. She uncovered her face and he kissed her quickly. They decided to look for a flat. She suggested they head over to Fahd Crown Hotel on the airport highway and he explained that there wasn’t enough time to enjoy a place like that. They ran through the names of furnished flats they had visited and settled on a new flat in Nuzha that they hadn’t used before.
He parked the car, consumed by the worry that Tarfah would search through his things. He always did his best to stop outside the entrance to the flats so he could see her body move if she bent down to have a rummage.
The reception area was spacious and luxurious but no one was there. The door to a side room was ajar and he knocked gently, calling out, ‘Friend?’
An Indian emerged. From his broken Arabic it was clear he was a recent arrival to the country. He rapped out the usual question—‘Family section?’—then picked up the key and Fahd followed him to the second floor. The corridor was clad in expensive marble and the doors on either side gave the impression that the flats within were clean and respectable.
His first impression on opening the door to flat 18 was that it looked like a room in a highway motel. He looked at the bedspread, worn through from repeated washing. In view of the time, which was flying through their fingers, he decided to take the flat and handed over a photocopy of their forged marriage contract and one hundred riyals to an Egyptian employee who had arrived that moment. Tarfah was sitting in the car. He signalled to her that she should come over but she didn’t move. He phoned her and asked her to get out.
Taking the key he walked ahead of her to the lift and when the door slid shut she threw herself into his arms. He told her the place was run down and filthy but searching for another and wasting time wasn’t an option. Her heart fluttered as did her delectable breasts, a photo of which she had sent to him on the phone that morning, showing two currants, pricked up behind the pink stretch top that pressed against them.
This is me just woken up … she had written. Fresh as a daisy!
He had spent half an hour enlarging the area over her breasts in an attempt to read the printed English slogan: Let’s dance the Hula-hula!
He opened the door and shut it quickly behind them. The flat was pitch black. He tried turning on the lights but without success, flicking the switch by the door, in the bathroom and the bedroom, even the button for the air-conditioner. It was no use.
‘Lock the door,’ she said. ‘I’ll light the candle I brought last time.’
They needed the air conditioner, he said, and lifting the receiver dialled reception. The Egyptian answered. ‘Look on your left, sir. Flip the big switch.’
He opened the grey fuse-box and pressed the large rocker. Everything in the flat lit up. He slid home the bolt on the front door and she rushed into the bedroom. Taking off his shoes, his socks and his shimagh he went into the bathroom for a short while and when he came out found her doing herself up in front of the mirror on the dressing table, lightly spraying perfume over breasts that quivered beneath the perforated black satin.
He hugged her hard and squeezed her sinuous hips. She kissed him and he let his hands creep over her. Besieged by fear of failure he attempted to arouse himself.
Her moans grew louder and she pulled him towards the bed, but he was slack and limp and he turned on to his back beside her, staring at the ceiling. She rolled on to him, laughing, doing her best to make the moment light-hearted, but she couldn’t erase the fact that she was handling a flaccid piece of meat. She sat on the edge of the bed and heard him say, ‘The place is disgusting!’ then, ‘The filth in here makes me feel sick!’ as though searching for something to excuse his failure.
He noticed that her back was half-naked and shivering and her head, with its exceptionally soft, exceptionally black hair was trembling violently. He tried to comfort her and stroked her back but she went over to the dressing table as though she were drugged, picked up her head covering and spread it over the dirty pillow. She laid his head back upon it and said, ‘Relax!’ then added with a strained smile, ‘Don’t let it bother you. Everything will get back to how it was, and better.’
She sat next to him and told him a joke, but Fahd was still dwelling on his failure. At last he got up, got dressed and gave her a sad smile.
‘Shall we go?’
Going over to the dressing table she took a pack of slender Davidoff cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, blowing the smoke into the room. She handed it to him and he took a single drag then returned it to her, saying, ‘Sometimes I think about what’s changed in our relationship: how I start to feel afraid before we even touch, how even as we’re fooling around and kissing I’m worrying I won’t get it up … and then I end up failing for real.’
Tarfah didn’t fully understand what lay behind this but she worried that their love really had begun to wither, that one day, not long off now, she would lose him. Who would fill his absence? She laughed to herself, remembering that she had the same thoughts about Khaled, who had devoured her body for fully three years, and now here came Fahd al-Safeelawi invading her life and making her forget her former lover.
The life she led with her four-year-old, Sara, was so much lovelier than time wasted with these wretches, she thought to herself, But what can I do when my instincts take over? How can I quench the flames? I’m tired of taking care of myself and I don’t want another woman in place of a man. How I hate that! Whenever Nada comes close to whisper in my ear, or puts her arm about my neck and pulls me towards her to say something, or presses herself against me it disgusts me more than I can say. ‘I don’t like girls rubbing up against me!’ I shout at her and she and cousin Samia laugh and Samia, that idiot, says, ‘So you like boys doing it, then?’
Sometimes Samia’s stories astonished her, like the time she told Tarfah about those everything-for-two-riyal stores crammed with junk where the only floor space left were narrow passageways just wide enough for a single person. In the crowds that came during festivals and at the start of the school term young men would squeeze past her and bump against her on purpose. She paid no attention and did nothing.
‘Let them have their fun, poor things!’ she would say, shaking with laughter.
Tarfah embraced Fahd by the door and he pulled her slim hips violently towards him then lifted her plump hand and gave it a chaste kiss. In the lift there was only enough time to raise her veil and snatch a quick kiss between the second and ground floors. Handing her the car keys he issued rapid intructions. ‘Walk straight out to the car and wait till I’ve finished with him.’
Handing over the flat after just two or three hours was tricky, and he launched into his oft-repeated lie, this time asking about the Nuwara wedding hall. When the Egyptian receptionist professed his ignorance, Fahd told him that it was on Qaseem Road; did he know it? Shamefaced, the Egyptian shook his head and said that he was new in town, all he knew was this building, to which Fahd, bringing the conversation to its natural conclusion, said, ‘We’re off to a wedding. If we’re not back by one, consider the flat free and the deposit’s yours.’
The Egyptian grinned gratefully and thanked him.
On Tahliya Street the luxury vehicles coasted slowly by, blaring music as they went, and young men sat chatting in cafés. When he reached Coffee Day he asked her if she wanted an Americano or a cappuccino. She declined. He took out a rose and sniffed gaily at it, but it only made him feel intensely sad. He nearly wept as he thought of his life.
After he left her at the mall, she didn’t call him for an hour. He showered and switched on the television and then phoned her and asked, ‘Where are you?’
She was yet to leave the mall. Her brother hadn’t come. This time he felt her reproach more strongly. He hadn’t given his lover what she needed; his soul wasn’t what it was, his heart was just a witless blood pump. After switching off the light he wept and told himself it was a good thing Saeed wasn’t there because this was a golden chance to make fun of him.
Tarfah rang. She was doing her best to sound cheerful but her voice was sad. She was practically certain that there was another woman in his life and that he, so sensitive, didn’t have it in himself to break her heart. He tried convincing her that he was going through a tough time with his sick mother, but gave none of the details about his personal life that she was looking for. Their conversations were about love and longing, or about the scandalous friends she described with sweet sarcasm, or about his problems with painting, his ambitions and his negative views of Saudi artists.
FAHD HAD HAD NOTHING all day except a dried-up donut taken from the fridge and a cup of filter coffee. He had been wholly absorbed by his painting, Mecca. He was wired. In his mind sat Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and facing it, an image of an uncovered marketplace in the small Basque town with warplanes overhead pouring down fire and obliterating the strolling citizens.
He painted a rooftop, broad as a desert and surrounded by minarets, and corpses sprawled all over the canvas, heads riddled with sniper rounds and trucks transporting the dead like crates of aubergines and tomatoes.
Fahd sometimes wondered what had caused him to love art so, to become addicted to the heady reek of oils. Was it a true passion, a hidden need to express what lay within him? Was it a response to the prophecy of Mustafa, the Sudanese artist he had met as a boy with his father in Thalatheen Street? Was it merely a stubborn, perverse desire to crush his uncle, always bellowing that on the Day of Judgement Fahd would be asked to breathe life into his creations?
He started to make a preliminary sketch for the painting, laying down pencil lines angrily and sadly. Then he threw the sketch away and began another until, with the tragedy and drama of Guernica in his thoughts, he made the decision to paint in only two colours, black and white. He drew widely scattered circles, heads like fat melons in a big field with small holes from which black liquid ran out to the earth.
He was working away, sighing from time to time with suppressed exasperation, when it suddenly occurred to him that a painting finished in anger would turn out excessively sentimental and he had better calm down a little. Taking a cup of coffee he went over to his father’s bag.
He opened it and rummaged through the books and papers, taking out the olive stone prayer beads and turning them one by one between his thumb and index finger, before returning to his chair beside the canvas.
He picked up a brush and painted one stone white then another grey. This pleased him: a fresh distraction that lifted his burden of worry. Squeezing a tube of red he deposited a quantity the size of a small bird’s talon on a stone and with his thumb smeared the paint over its surface until it was bright red all over. He did the same with another stone in yellow, then another in green, and so on until the dull loop had been transformed into an African song, warm and pulsing with life. It was as though he had restored the prayer beads to life.
His phone’s message tone trilled. He made no move to get up and ten minutes later it sounded again. Laying the prayer beads on the palette he slowly made his way over to the pocket of his thaub and read the two messages, one from Tarfah and one from Lulua: Fahd, Mum’s been asking for you since yesterday.
He went back to the canvas hanging on the easel and contemplated the corpses, sprawled chaotically and absurdly. He heard the door of the flat slowly open then close, and measured footsteps proceed to the kitchen that opened out on to the small living room. Water poured into a cup and glugged into a thirsty body. There was the light tap of the glass on the kitchen table, then Saeed’s voice a few paces away: ‘Superb, Fahd! You really are a great artist!’
Fahd turned to him with raised eyebrows. ‘Huh! How did you get in here?’
Saeed laughed pointing at the canvas. ‘The door, but it looks like you need to get away from this picture!’
Saeed went inside to sleep while Fahd worked on. The features of masked men and soldiers started to appear. As the time approached one in the morning he felt his chest constrict, as though twenty soldiers had thrown him down and were sitting on his heart. His breathing became irregular. He washed the brush he was holding and quickly cleaned the palette knife, then doused his face in a continuous stream of water at the kitchen sink. He put on his thaub and left without his shimagh. He started the car and drove away, directionless.
Paralysis crept through Riyadh’s body, slumbering like a mysterious woman. The streetlights were faint as they fought against the columns of dust laying their fire over the city. In the murk of the heavy dust the bridge by Mamlaka Tower was invisible, likewise the crystal ball atop Faisaliya Tower. Cars driven by high-spirited young men waited at traffic lights. He pulled up beside one. On the back seat three heads bobbed uproariously as the voice of Rashed al-Fares split the dust of the night. Fahd looked over at them with a smile. In the front seat was a young man, his hair tied back in a ponytail, gesturing at some girls who sat behind the smoked windows of a pearl-grey Cadillac Escalade. One of them opened her window and made an obscene gesture with her middle finger. They erupted with a loud yell accompanied by the squeal of tyres as they chased after the girls’ Indian driver, well-trained in these night time excursions.
Fahd glanced in the direction of Shoe Palace and considered paying a visit to his mother and sister. It was late, though. He took a right on to King Fahd Road and opened the window—perhaps the twenty soldiers slumped over his chest might be swept away—but the surging dust, like a wild squall of rain, whipped at his face and hurt his eyes. He reconsidered his need for fresh air and closed the window.
If he wept softly now, he whispered to himself, it might ease his cramped heart and the smugly squatting soldiers would fly away. Opening the glove box he took out the first tape he found, then pushed it into the slot, and Fairouz’s voice emerged, wounded and sorrowful:
I yearn for you and cannot see you, nor can I speak with you;
From the backstreets, from behind the shutters, I call out to you.
He thought of the nights long ago, his father reading in his room and Fairouz’s voice melting softly in his ears.
He didn’t go over the bridge over Imam Road, but stopped on the far left, by the Abdel Lateef Jameel traffic lights, and looped back round to the petrol station on the corner, stopping in a parking bay outside a Coffee Day kiosk. He ordered a medium-sweet Turkish coffee and a small bottle of water and drove slowly along Qaseem Road sipping his coffee as Fairouz summoned up a sad memory of his father, drawing his final breath on this accursed stretch of road.
When he returned, having driven some seventy kilometres, he wasn’t breathing calmly as he had hoped.
A completely jinxed night, he told himself.
In bed he tossed and turned and drank water until the daylight came and he dozed off, discontent.