Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  He got Fahd into the car and sat in his seat, thinking hard and repeating, ‘There is no power or strength save through God.’

  As they were about to set off for the mosque and the washing of the body, Fahd’s mother came up and pushed a small bottle of agarwood oil into his pocket, saying that his father had been fond of it and liked to use it when he went to Friday prayers with the two boys. When Fahd opened it, taking the small glass stopper from the bottle with trembling fingers and put it to his nose, his father appeared in front of him, walking two or three paces ahead of Fahd and Saeed, his fragrant scent vanishing between the columns of Mohammed Bin Abdel Wahhab Mosque in Ulaya as he selected a place wide enough for Fahd to sit on his right and Saeed on his left.

  After the body had been wrapped, Fahd took out the agarwood oil and thought of wiping the stopper against the cotton but Ibrahim took the bottle from him and sprinkled dark drops on the corpse.

  Fahd could not believe that his father had really done it, that he had closed his eyes forever. How miserable he felt! He wished that Suleiman had given in and taken him with him, that they might have gone together to the heavens.

  But who can be sure? I might have been saved only to suffer even more. How often I imagine myself sitting next to him as the Caprice veers from left to right across Qaseem Road then plunges off in the blink of an eye to smash into the iron fencing that stops the camels wandering on to the road. The body of my father, who never wore a seatbelt, leaps up and strikes the ground, leaving nothing but a small bruise at the base of his skull. Did he die of fright, or did he bleed for the hour it took someone to come to his aid, like the accident report stated? If I had been alive alongside him I might have saved him, stood my dusty, dizzy body on the tarmac and held out my arm in front of the first car to pass and forced it to stop. We could have taken my father to the nearest emergency ward and saved his life!

  Faced with the male mourners his young eyes welled. He hated their makeshift tenderness as they pityingly stroked his head. A boy of fifteen has a real need for a proper father like Suleiman, not just a paterfamilias who commands and denies, but an intimate friend in whose embrace he could find refuge.

  How hard it had been, accompanying them in the hearse to Naseem Cemetery, driving in awful silence from Rajehi Mosque on to the Eastern Ring Road then into East Riyadh and through the long wall around the graveyard. A sob rattled in his chest and his Uncle Saleh drew his head towards him and said, ‘You’re the man of the house now.’

  Fahd gave a sudden groan and Saleh stroked his hair.

  ‘Take refuge from Satan, Fahd.’

  How hard it was to be surrounded by men, most of whom he didn’t know, as they singled him out with their consoling words. One, the stupidest of the lot, put five hundred riyals into his top pocket. Was this the value placed on the departed? How hard it was to return home with his Uncle Saleh and cousin Yasser, carrying his father’s brown mashlah that had covered his coffin. How hard for a fifteen-year-old boy to come home to find his mother and sister weeping together and be scarcely able to make them out through the cascade of tears veiling his eyes and drowning his heart in precocious, merciless sorrow. How often after that did Fahd lie in bed at night hugging his father’s mashlash and breathing in its scent, berating himself and muttering out loud, until the tears drenched his clothes and he finally fell asleep at dawn?

  I have not had my fill of you, Father! How could you go and fulfil the prophecy of that stupid rhyme? Why did you leave me all alone and naked? You never lived: just an outcast childhood, a youth spent imprisoned and in exile and finally a grown man denounced by his own family. No one would welcome an old ex-con until fortune finally favoured you with a wonderful Jordanian woman, Soha, my mother. But your luck was cursed, scarcely baring its teeth in a false smile before you were whisked away in the blink of an eye. I miss you, Father, now more than ever before. I miss you most in my youth. I miss you even at the dead of night as I ready myself for sleep and feel the loneliness, desolation and interminable tears. A night without end.

  Do you know what it means for a fifteen-year-old boy to go out to Zuhair Rustom Alley every afternoon and sit waiting for you on the doorstep? Can you understand the depths of his despair, his wailing sobs, every time he sees a car that reminds him of your wine-red Caprice. I swear that if you knew how my heart trembled, how my groans betrayed me as I circled your car like an imprisoned puppy longing to escape from its shadowy seats, you would have sprung from your grave in an instant and sprinted from the cemetery, your hair unkempt and covered with the coffin’s dust, traversing the streets like a man possessed to clasp me in your arms, pulling my little head to your chest and sobbing in remorse, ‘Never again, Fahd. I swear to you I shall not die again so foolishly.’

  It wounded me to hear Saeed say, ‘You’re lucky! You saw your father and spent your childhood with him, while I was born to find mine already gone!’

  Saeed, can you know what it means to see if you were born blind? Of course you can’t, you could never see: your understanding of the world around you came from your other senses. But to lose your sight aged fifteen means that you have experienced the world and the pleasure of gazing upon it, only for everything to turn a misty white like milk. That is how I feel, my friend. That is how I came to see my father on every corner, on every street in Riyadh, to hear his unmistakable laugh in the shops. For years I woke terrified, as though his hand had fallen on my head to rouse me, gentle and calm: ‘Come on, Fahd. Time for school.’

  You knew a little happiness, Father, living with my mother for a decade and a half. Then your dream passed away and you departed early. I, too, have known happiness for fleeting moments. But in this country they’re too sharp to let joy bloom unchecked. The guardians of twisted virtue, the guardians of the imprisoned breeze, leapt to pluck out my joy in its first year of life. I wonder, why do these severe and grim-faced men invade the precious privacy you have with your beloved?

  –6 –

  LEFT ALONE IN THE detention cell without being told why, Fahd had no choice but to entertain ghosts from his own memory who insisted on visiting him. Entering Shalal Café one summer’s night, for example, Fahd was looking for Saeed in their usual spot in the seats furthest to the right, over where the air was a little warmer and away from the clamour of mobile phones, but couldn’t find him. Then he saw him a few seats further on, unsmiling, taking a pull on the mouthpiece of his shisha then raising his face to the heavens and noiselessly blowing out the smoke. Fahd descended on him boisterously.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Saeed got to?’

  Saeed was in no mood for fun and laughter. He answered as though he were someone else, struggling to drag his words out from inside him. ‘I’m thinking about my strange life, Fahd. I’m thinking about a life with no childhood, about days with no flavour to them.’

  ‘Fear your Lord, sheikh! You’re doing fine. Be happy that you’re free: no mother or father to chase you around.’

  ‘I wish I had a father to chase me, one who I could take to the internal medicine specialist at Abdul Aziz Hospital, to the ophthalmologist at King Khaled Eye Hospital. I wish I had a father to take care of, to sit up with when he needed company. You know, people sometimes say it’s more painful to lose a father when you’re a child or teenager.’

  ‘Of course it’s more painful: you knew him and got used to him and you see him everywhere you go. Saeed, you can’t imagine how it feels to see my dad in the street. I see him on Urouba Road, going into Panda supermarket, standing outside Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais School with the other fathers, walking into Blue Diamond Video with me …’

  Waving at a waiter who rushed past without noticing, Saeed interrupted him. ‘Sorry Fahd, but what you say is wrong. Real suffering is to enter the world without a father, to find yourself confronted by some husband of your mother’s and have to call him “Dad”.’

  He was silent for a while, letting his bare head sink back like a man recalling his past. ‘My mother no longer trusts any m
an alive. All men are swindlers in her eyes. She thinks I’m always lying and cheating. My father, God have mercy on his soul, lied to her. Just imagine: when she was five months pregnant with me he came to her and said that he was going to take her and her mother to Mecca for the umra. My poor grandmother: she was so happy, dreaming of visiting the Grand Mosque again, a quarter of a century after she made the pilgrimage with my grandfather, who died a decade before I was born.

  ‘My mother never had the slightest idea what my father planned to do that day, the first of Muharram, 1400 AH. I was still in the womb. Maybe I could sense something, could hear what was going on in the Grand Mosque? Perhaps I heard the first shot that killed Muhsin, the one they called the first martyr to fall? My mother and grandmother were shut up with the other women and one of them convinced the rest that the Mahdi would fill the earth with justice and that the army of the oppressors would set out from Tabuk as foretold in the hadith. God would make the earth swallow them up, she told them, and the victorious Mahdi and his forces would set out for Medina followed by a great throng of people acclaiming him as their leader. There he would pray before leaving for Damascus, where he would lead the prayers following the return to earth of the Messiah, Eissa son of Mariam. That’s how they brainwashed their tiny minds.’

  The waiter was standing in front of them. Fahd ordered a pipe with apple tobacco and a pot of stewed black tea, and Saeed a coal to replace the one that had turned to ash on top of the tinfoil cover pierced with tiny holes.

  ‘For my father and his group, there was an abundance of signs to show the Final Hour had come. One of them was that Pharaoh would possess the gold of the earth. Now the doctor’s son and former minister Rashad Pharaoun had invested in the village of Mahd between Jeddah and Medina. There was gold there. The place later became known as Golden Mahd and attracted government money, so of course in their eyes this man was the Pharaoh and was harvesting gold from the earth of the Hejaz. You see how naïve my dad and his group were, Fahd? How they shaped reality to suit their whims until they’d built their ridiculous myth?’

  ‘Myths. That’s just about right,’ Fahd replied.

  Saeed puffed experimentally at his shisha on to which the waiter had placed another two glowing coals.

  ‘I can never forget my first days, Fahd,’ he went on. ‘Imagine my mother’s womb as a prison inside another prison halfway between Mecca and Medina, where she’d been taken, inside a still larger prison that was the country itself, inside the prison of this hateful planet. Sometimes I’m just speechless. Years before this all took place, my father used to frequent Ruwail Mosque in Bateeha Street. This one time, the man giving the sermon was the Mahdi himself. He used to meet them at Dar al-Ilm behind Amira al-Anoud Palace in Khazan Street. Of course, these guys weren’t Muslim Brothers, or Qutbis, as they were known, the ones who followed the teachings of Hassan al-Banna and rejected the idea of opposing the traditional religious hierarchy; the doves, in other words, as opposed to the hawks who believed in violence and force of arms. So why did my father turn against the authority of the Supreme Imam and take up arms in search of a stolen dream? What did he want? I’ve no idea!’

  Saeed was talking, sobbing almost, as they sat in Shalal Café. Amidst the bubbling of the shisha pipes he went on as if speaking to himself. ‘My father threw it all away, success, ambition, a family and a life, and galloped after a mirage dreamt up for him by a diseased mind.’

  He turned to Fahd, the beginnings of a small smile taking shape above his small moustache.

  ‘Know what, Fahd? If he could hear me talk, he’d say you’re the sick one, you’re the one that’s lost, that it’s you who’s galloping aimlessly after your desires. Yeah, and he might be right if he did. I’m fundamentally unhappy with my life, but he’s the one who made it like that. He’s the one who created this future for me. I lived with my mother and my grandmother. While I was learning my first life skills, developing my first view of the world, His Honour was basking in death. For long years my mother wept through nights of loneliness on his account, remembering how he had caused her to go to prison. My mother, who had never clapped eyes on a soldier in her life. My grandmother too. She absolutely loathed him, of course. He had deceived her at the end of her life and got her locked up. She may even have hated my mother and me as well, even though we had nothing to do with the mess.’

  ‘Saeed,’ Fahd said, ‘You’re doing so well at the moment. You finished your studies and got yourself a respectable job. Isn’t that enough? Thank God for what you have!’

  Saeed sipped at the cup of dark brown tea in his right hand while his left gripped the shisha’s hose, and smiled. ‘Some things are hard to make up for. You lived your whole childhood with your father. You felt secure, in other words. I never had that feeling. A few months later my uncles tried to marry off my mother and a new chapter of my painful life began.’

  A Bengali hawker passed by and offered them small bags of pistachios and almonds. Saeed lifted a hand in refusal and went on. ‘You know, Fahd, one of these days I’ll introduce you to a colleague of mine from work. His name’s Rashed. He’s around forty and a real bookworm. He was the first person to encourage me to read up on Islamist groups. My friend, after reading about these guys, I truly wished that my father had been a Sufi. I wish he had been a tablighi. Those extremists think they’re good for nothing but contemplating the world and the possessions that surround them. Some may say that their beliefs are wrong. Well, what’s right then? Brandishing guns in the House of Calm? Killing worshippers, soldiers, women and pigeons? What did my father want? Do you know what they used to say and dream about, because these were essentially people who were driven by confused dreams? They would say that we shall come together in the Grand Mosque and pledge allegiance to the Mahdi and on the third day the infidel army shall set out from Tabuk and God will make the earth swallow them up without us having to kill a single person in the mosque.’

  Smiling, and shifting the coal that had settled on the ash-smeared head of the shisha, Fahd said, ‘Just think of it: they really believed that the military base in Tabuk, which for them was the infidel army, was going to move against Mecca to fight them and that God was going to make the earth swallow them up on their way over.’

  Saeed let out a short laugh that fought back a tear.

  –7 –

  SOMETIMES FAHD FELT SAD to be all alone with no brother, but Saeed’s presence in his life gave it some warmth, especially once they were living together at the flat on the Northern Ring Road in Maseef. Before they lived together Saeed would drop by Fahd’s at least once a week and the two would go out to Shalal Café on Dammam Road, or the Qif in Salah al-Din, having first taken a turn around the wall of the Ministry of Education, stealing delightful glances at the girls who hid their jeans beneath abayas. Saeed would send a trial balloon towards them, a flirtatious word for the girl to engage with or ignore, then decide whether to try further or give up. Fahd would giggle in embarrassment and keep quiet, sometimes turning round to watch the reaction of the girls they had just flirted with.

  Among the girls he hunted down on their jaunts was young Nada, and this despite the fact she was out walking with her brother and sister, the latter becoming a stand-in girlfriend to Fahd. But Saeed soon discovered that she had to climb mountains and descend valleys if he wanted to meet her, as an entire army of relatives was constantly in attendance.

  Fahd and Saeed would sometimes agree to meet up at sunset or evening prayers when all the cafés closed their doors, getting together in the lobby of the Salahuddin Hotel. If they were in the mood to revisit childhood memories they would head to the nearby Abu Baseel Restaurant and order two loaves of tames flatbread and a couple of bowls of stewed beans or bean paste.

  If Saeed didn’t want to go out he would ask Fahd to bring over fateer from the Damascus Fateer House or hummous with olive oil and falafel from Abu Zaki Hummous, and the two of them would stay up until midnight, when Fahd would make his way home, muzzy-headed a
nd melancholic. Following the death of his father, this happened more than once. He needed something to help him forget what had happened, because the death felt like a betrayal and he was struggling to forgive his father for suddenly vanishing from his life and leaving him all alone with his mother and little sister, Lulua.

  Fahd was haunted by the memory of the tortuous evening when his Uncle Saleh had come over bringing with him his son, Yasser, his mother’s brother, Ibrahim, and his two great-uncles on his father’s side. Fahd was sitting in the small majlis whose window looked out over the passage by the side of the house, sprawled out in the light of a green lamp revising his chemistry syllabus. He had grown used to the silence, broken only by the sound of the Bangladeshi who delivered orders from the supermarket, and the moment the doorbell rang he went to open the dining room window and looked down into the street. All he could see was red light from the back of a car stopped next the front door and when he made to go downstairs, a worried Lulua blocked his way.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he answered as he went downstairs over the cheap black carpet.

  He opened the door. There were five of them and they greeted him. Ibrahim gave a smooth apology. ‘So sorry for turning up without an appointment or a phone call.’

  ‘This is your house, Uncle,’ Fahd said politely. ‘You don’t need to call ahead and make appointments.’

  Yasser stared at the poster of a Paul Klee abstract depicting a fisherman in his boat then looked over at his father. ‘Representations of living creatures aren’t permitted, nor is glorifying them and hanging them on walls.’

  Fahd longed to scream in his face: ‘What’s it to you, scumbag? Is this house yours or ours?’