“Hisham,” said Adnan, turning to look squarely at him. Hisham remained impassive. “Hisham, please forgive me. Everything’s over. I want us to be like we were before.”
Hisham looked into Adnan’s lifeless eyes, which somehow seemed smaller to him than they used to. “Do you listen to Umm Kulthumm, Adnan?”
“Of course. Is there anyone who doesn’t?”
“So you’ll have heard the song where she sings, ‘He wanted us to be the way we were before ... Tell Time “Turn back, O Time, turn back for us once more”’ ...”
At that moment the bell rang. Hisham went off to his classroom while Adnan stayed put for a while; when he entered the classroom his face was like an ancient Egyptian mummy that had just been discovered. Before taking his seat he glanced at Hisham, who could see that all the emotions in this world were rolling inside his former friend.
51
The exams came to an end without anything happening to either Hisham or Adnan. Hisham did not see Rashid at school any more, just as Muwafiq had also disappeared. He was still visited by an insistent anxiety, but as days passed without anyone asking about him he felt a little safer and more confident that no one had mentioned his name ... yet.
He celebrated the end of the exams with a trip to his favourite bookshop to buy all the magazines he could find: ‘al-Hawadith’; ‘Arab Week’; ‘The New Public’; ‘al-Jadid’; ‘al-Arabi’; ‘Superman’; ‘Magic Carpet’, even ‘al-Yamama’ and the papers that had nothing but local news in them. He spent that afternoon flicking through the magazines, and following the latest adventures of Superman and Tintin. His mother had prepared a small feast in his honour, making all the fried food and pies and chilli he liked and paying no attention to his father’s objections to those ‘silly Syrian dishes’, though they were said with a smile on this occasion.
Afterwards Hisham raced off to see the gang for the usual rounds of Kiram and Plot. He laughed a lot and chatted happily with all of them, even Adnan. Everything that day seemed positive; he had a huge sense of well-being that he wanted nothing to spoil. In the evening he met Noura and made up for all the distance and apathy that had marred their last tryst, surprising her with all the warmth and emotion he displayed. She told him then how impressed her father had been with him when speaking to her mother over their afternoon tea, noting Hisham’s piety and scrupulousness in praying with the congregation at the mosque. Hisham simply gave her a smile in reply, followed by a dreamy look at her face and finally a long kiss. He knew what she was getting at, but marriage was hardly on his mind, though his parents would be thrilled if he brought the subject up with them, regardless of his youth; he was their only son and their financial position was comfortable.
His joy at the conclusion of the exam period had worn off, to be replaced with a new kind of anxiety, that of awaiting results. The fear of being arrested had not altogether dissipated, but it had greatly diminished. It looked as though Mansur and Fahd were standing up well and that neither had mentioned names to the authorities, and for the first time Hisham came to appreciate them.
The family was not planning to travel to Jordan or Syria that year, as Hisham’s results and the preparations for his departure to university made such a trip difficult. Instead, his father decided to take a short holiday to Qusaim for a visit to his parents and his sister, none of whom they had seen since the last trip there three years earlier. Hisham thought it would be a wonderful idea to escape temporarily from the haunted atmosphere in Dammam. He would see his grandparents and his aunt, whom he adored. He was not so fond of Qusaim itself, which lacked both friends and seashore for comfort; he would, moreover, be inescapably obliged to perform the dawn prayers with his grandfather in the mosque. But, his aunt foremost in mind, he began to look forward to the trip despite everything.
Over the next few days his father let his facial hair grow in preparation for the journey, sporting a small, crescent-shaped beard separate from his moustache. (It was considered shameful in Qusaim for a member of a distinguished family to be seen clean-shaven, especially in his family’s city, Buraida. People might forgive someone’s missing the dawn prayers for one reason or another – they counted those present in the congregation – but they could not pardon his lack of a beard, especially once past youth.) Hisham occupied himself with gathering together a few books he had been putting off reading, as a hedge against the long and dreary Qusaim days. He chose Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he was forever becoming bored with after only a few pages. He also chose The Iron Heel by Jack London and The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, to read again; The Principles of Philosophy by the Egyptian writer Ahmad Amin; and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, as well as a study he had got hold of from Zaki a while ago called ‘What Is A Leftist?’ by a French writer, published in the French journal ‘Les Temps Modernes’ and translated by a member of the Communist Action Organisation in Beirut.
On the afternoon of a burning hot day in June the family got into their little 1967 Peugeot and set off first for Dhahran, then to Riyadh via Bufaiq. It was the first time they had used their own car for the journey to Qusaim; usually they travelled by train or taxi to Riyadh, then took one of the vehicles known as ‘boxes’ that ferried passengers in wooden compartments between Riyadh and Qusaim. They reached Riyadh shortly before midnight and went straight to the house of Hisham’s uncle, Abd al-Aziz al-Mubaraki; he was still awake, reading the Qur’an, the rest of the family asleep. He received them and woke his eldest daughter Munira, who welcomed them while Hisham’s uncle went back to the Qur’an. Munira made them a light supper of fried eggs with some yellow cheese and tea with milk, laying everything out for them on one of the empty roof terraces before returning to bed with an apology, saying she had been tired all day. Later, as they all went to sleep they could hear the heart-rending sound of Hisham’s uncle sobbing in his room as he recited from the Qur’an.
The next morning, at the dawn call to prayer, Abd al-Aziz woke them up to come and pray, but Hisham’s father asked to take leave instead in order to make the most of the time before the sun became too hot. After insisting for a while that they stay, Abd al-Aziz gave in and they sped off, his heartfelt prayers for their safety lingering in their thoughts.
As they descended the Dairab Heights on the Hijaz Road, the sun was timidly beginning to rise; by the time they got to Marrat it had entered its insolent phase, sending terrible, fiery rays down on them though it was still early in the day. Hisham’s father stopped at one of the cafés in Marrat, where they had a quick breakfast of hot brown bread and white tea. Afterwards his father filled up their thermoses with tea and bitter coffee and topped up their flasks with cold water. They reached Shaqra shortly before midday, by which time the sun had become an inferno. A short way past Shaqra, Hisham’s father turned off the asphalted Hijaz Road and drove into a sea of sand marked only by a few scattered lines running in all directions from cars that had left their tracks and then vanished. By now the sun had begun to sink towards the western horizon, still impudent. After a few kilometres the asphalt road disappeared from sight altogether and the family was left at the mercy of the boundless red sand dunes stretching out around them.
“God help us get through you, Jayb Ghurab,” Hisham’s father would say every now and then, using the name of the barren, sandy wastes between Riyadh and Qusaim. Everything had become limitless, dimensionless; there was nothing but sun, sand and the horizon, which never came any nearer. The sense of place itself was banished, and time seemed somehow to be suspended from the disc of the sun, which eventually took on a bashful aspect, clothed in red and threatening the very end of time itself as it was devoured by the horizon.
Darkness spread its cloak, and it seemed as though Ahriman, Zoroastrian spirit of evil and lord of the Earth, were astride the chest of Ahura Mazda, benevolent god of light and the celestial bodies, in another phase of their eternal struggle of alternating victories: this time the west, domain of Ahriman, was inevitably winning. The sta
rs emitted silver rays, a worthless glimmer in this infinity of sand. The only sign of life was the sound of the Peugeot and the few words exchanged by Hisham’s parents, perhaps simply to make their presence felt or to dispel their misgivings. Hisham knew they were surrounded by sand on all sides, but he could see nothing, only a few shadowy shapes hovering in the distance like the ghouls that haunted Sinbad on his voyages. Everything had stopped while only they moved on, like the Israelites through the wilderness.
Suddenly Hisham’s father turned off the sandy track he had been following and stopped the car. “We can’t go on in this pitch darkness,” he said. “We’ll spend the night here and keep going at dawn.”
They all got out of the car and sat down on a nearby sand dune until their eyes got used to the dark, enough to be able to see by the diffident light of the stars. Then Hisham’s father asked him to get out the tea-making things while he went to look for firewood. “This is my mistake,” he said. “We should have travelled during the white nights, when the moon is full. But whatever fate God chooses for us is best.”
“God’s power is great, and only good things await us,” said Hisham’s mother as she took the tea-making implements out of a plastic bag. “So what’s the hurry?”
Despite the heat, Hisham’s father lit a fire that illuminated the area around them, lending a sense of calm to the moment. He filled the teapot and placed it beside the fire. Hisham watched his father with a smile: the man never changed. They had plenty of tea and coffee in the thermoses, but tea and coffee made over a fire in the desert had a different taste for his father; it made no difference to Hisham, but he was happy if his parents were happy – and they were, sitting around the fire with a strange contented gleam in their eyes. Once his father had finished making the tea he poured out the tea left over from Marrat, though they had only drunk a little of it, and filled the thermos with the freshly-made tea. Then he filled the pot with water again, this time for coffee. They all drank their tea with a few bites of brown bread, sitting in a ring around the fire in the still roasting heat, while around them an atmosphere of tranquillity enveloped everything.
After supper Hisham’s father told stories of the aqilat traders at the end of their era, of their journeys to Syria, Egypt and Iraq, and the tale of his first voyage with them when he was not yet fourteen years old. At that time his wage was no more than his board, which itself was only a few small dates or some ‘aqil patties’, cakes of wheat, sugar and fat. (If he was lucky, he might receive some ‘fire patties’, large loaves of bread baked in the hot sand under a fire.) He would work all day long in the service of the riders, walking on foot most of the time. Hisham and his mother had heard these stories on numerous occasions, especially on picnics in the countryside. They knew that these adventures contained a certain amount of exaggeration, but they happily condoned it. Ibrahim al-Abir had suffered much in his life, and had every right to be happy.
Hisham moved a little way off from his parents and sat on the soft, cool, previously untouched sand. He began running it though his fingers, content, and looked up at the distant stars in the dome of the infinite. The voices of his mother and father seemed to reach him from the ends of the earth, though he was only a few steps away. He realised why it was that only in this tranquillity and this infiniteness was God’s message ever revealed to his prophets, where nothing was to be found but the secret of existence itself, which one could perceive but not see, feeling it deep inside without being able to define it.
Hisham heard his mother calling him to come and sleep in the car with her; he moved over to where his parents were and sat down facing his father by the fireside.
“I’m going to stay here for a bit, Mother,” he said. “Goodnight.”
“Fine,” she said, giving in and going to the car alone. “But watch out for the animals.”
“The animals!” his father said, laughing, “The only things that live around here are genies!”
Hisham could hear his mother murmuring in the distance, praying to God to protect them from His harmful creatures. “Don’t forget to recite the Sura of the Seat of God and the Two Pleas for Divine Refuge,” she said, referring to the Sura of Daybreak and the Sura of Mankind, used to invoke God’s protection from evil. “And you, Hisham, don’t fall asleep outside. There’s room inside for everyone.” And with that he heard the car door slam shut.
52
Hisham was woken by the sound of his father moving about as he lit a fire, though where and when he had got the wood Hisham had no idea. The sun had not yet risen, bathing everything in daylight; instead, there was only a distant glow in the east mingled with the last shadows of night before daybreak. It was clear that Ahura Mazda was advancing towards another victory, that the east was going to burst forth once again. Hisham vaguely remembered lying back with his arms behind his head and watching the stars, when sleep must have caught him. The air was utterly magical, though the faint sting of dawn prompted him to draw a blanket over himself. (He did not know where the blanket had come from, but his mother, he was certain, would have been unable to close her eyes knowing that he was asleep in the open air.)
Only once his father had finished making the tea and coffee did Hisham stir, and at the same time his mother came over from the car, eyes red and smiling as she looked at him. They all gathered around the fire, warming themselves and sipping tea with condensed milk accompanied by mouthfuls of the brown bread. There was nothing lovelier than the desert at first light, stretching away into the distance, with a fire lit and a nip in the air, or at daybreak when the sun rose over the boundless horizon, the dewy morning breeze caressing one’s face with the allure of a virgin new to love.
The car moved off as the sun was about to erupt over the horizon, which was already ablaze with light; a few minutes later and the landscape resumed its appearance of a painting by the Artist of all Creation. Beneath the light of the sun the sand dunes resembled mythical creatures, their danger concealed within. For untold hours the car continued on its way. Once more the sun began to rage, and soon once again began its descent towards the west, as Ahriman honed his spear and whetted his arrows.
A troubled look appeared on Hisham’s father’s face. The water and fuel they had brought with them had almost run out. “We should be near Unayzah by now,” he said, the acute anxiety in his voice betraying itself to Hisham and his mother, who stared ahead with frightened expressions. But the road would not end, and the horizon stretched on without any sign of life. As the sun began to set again, concern turned into terror. No water, no fuel and no food; the sand dunes would swallow them up, only to resume their appearance of beauty in the morning, as if by nature and intention they were good. But the desert, like fate, or like some kind of bashful sadist, would crush you, stifling you until you thought all hope had gone, and then suddenly release you, showing you all that was loveliest of itself.
Just as they had all reached the brink of despair, Hisham’s father suddenly let out a cry like a small boy who has managed to find his parents in a crowd.
“Unayzah! it’s Unayzah!”
Hisham and his mother craned their necks. “Where? Where?” they asked over and over, gazing at the horizon with eager eyes but seeing nothing.
“Over there,” Hisham’s father said with calm self-assurance, his smile and confidence restored. “Can’t you see that black dot on the horizon?” he said, pointing into the distance. “It’s the Unayzah water tower. Praise be to God, we’re safe and sound.” Hisham and his mother could not see anything where his father had pointed, but they took his word for it, and joyous expressions returned to their faces where only moments earlier there had been the expectation of certain death.
The sun had become blood-red when the Unayzah water tower became clearly visible, with a jumble of tightly-packed mud-brick houses beyond it.
“Unayzah,” Hisham’s father said happily as he saw it, “this is Unayzah.” And at that moment it was the most beautiful city any of them had ever seen.
“There’s Khashm Ali,” he said. “After that comes Buraida.” Sure enough, less than an hour later they were within sight of Buraida, with its rows of mud-brick houses and its cramped, dusty streets, the pale lights of lanterns hung from the buildings peeping out bashfully from those narrow openings. They went down al-Khabib Street, which was almost empty, and then, after crossing al-Jarda, turned off into a narrow street scarcely wide enough to let the car pass. The smell of marquq stock was everywhere. Hisham’s father parked the car in front of a mud-brick house with a huge wooden door, like any other in the street. “Thanks be to God for bringing us here safely,” he said. “We’re here at last.”
They knocked hard on the door for a while before they heard a feeble, quavering woman’s voice saying, “Who is it? Who’s there?” It was Hisham’s grandmother, Umm Ibrahim.
“It’s me,” Hisham’s father called out loudly, “It’s me, Ibrahim, Mother.”
Hisham heard the sound of the wooden bolt being slid back. Then the door opened and his grandmother’s face peered round, her mouth and nose covered with her veil and only her tiny eyes visible, weepy as always from chronic trachoma. Her legs were no longer strong enough to hold her up unaided, and her hands trembled as she saw her son standing before her, her son whom she had not seen for three years. (The only news she would receive of him came through infrequent letters and ‘blessings’ or gifts of money that he would send her when circumstances allowed.) They all went inside, and then came warm embraces between Ibrahim and his mother, and between Hisham and his grandmother, along with a few tears.
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