Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  As Yasser’s father nodded his agreement, Ibrahim deftly took up the conversation. ‘It’s none of our business. Is that why we’re here, Yasser? Fahd,’ he continued, ‘you know that the fingernail never leaves the flesh: you’re part of us my boy and there is no one closer to you and your sister than your Uncle Saleh.’

  The fan in the ceiling turned sluggishly as his words took flight, sometimes settling on Fahd’s ears and sometimes floating through the majlis window to the alleyway outside.

  Yasser stroked his forked beard with his long fingers as he watched out of the corner of his eye from behind his spectacles, his loosely draped shimagh pulled back to show the front half of his white skullcap and a set of coloured pens proudly arrayed in his breast pocket. How Fahd would have loved to see Yasser turn up with his white doctor’s uniform and (why not?) a stethoscope hung around his neck or carried in his breast pocket.

  Yasser was in his fourth year studying medicine at King Saud University. His enrolment there had been enough for his father to leave their home in Buraida and move to Quds in East Riyadh. No sooner had Yasser’s feet stepped over the threshold of the College of Medicine than he fell in with some religious students, standing shoulder to shoulder with them as they set out to put heavenly reward before earthly success and battle with the dean of the college to prevent male and female students mingling in the laboratories of King Khaled University Hospital.

  They wrote one complaint after another and faxed them off, once to the rector, another time to the governor of Riyadh, a third time to the Interior Ministry, and occasionally to the king himself, while they fanned the flames on Islamic websites.

  Yasser had not wanted to study medicine but his father had forced him so he could show off to people about his son. After completing his first year, he planned to transfer to study aqeeda at the College of Sharia in Imam Mohammed Bin Saud Islamic University and asked an ultraconservative sheikh for his opinion. Instead of telling him to study medicine and use his knowledge to benefit the umma, the sheikh declared that it was a worldly and useless subject, and that God had not included it amongst those branches of learning extolled in the verses of the Qur’an.

  ‘There’s mixing of the sexes, as well, sheikh!’ Yasser added, to ensure the sheikh would make him abandon the sins and studies of the unbelievers. Instead, the sheikh fell silent for a moment then surprised him by insisting that he continue with his medical studies to fight against the corrupting influence of co-education.

  ‘There is more than one type of jihad, my son,’ he said, ‘and the jihad of you and your fellow students, the struggle against mixed classes and moral degeneracy, is the greatest of them all. Your duty is to fight the hypocritical secularists wherever you find them, for as you know, moral degeneracy is one of the causes of the collapse of societies and states.’

  And so Yasser stayed on at the college, inciting his fellow students against the university authorities, groups of them walking in on the dean and occasionally making official complaints about the department and the dean to the rector himself. If necessary they would collaborate with others outside the university and send telegrams to the king and crown prince, warning of the problems created by allowing students of both sexes to study side by side in the university’s laboratories and dissection classes, in operating theatres, hospital corridors and common rooms.

  So he fought, as his sheikh had suggested, withdrawing from his studies and striving hard in the distribution of little booklets and cassettes that warned young Muslim women of the dangers of mixing with men, expounding the religious rulings that forbade it and talking of the threat it posed to the umma.

  Saeed knew Yasser. He would sometimes run into him at biology lectures in the College of Science. More than once he had seen him leading a bunch of students through the reception hall of the university’s administration building, sprinting towards the lifts on their way to see the rector.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder how he manages to pass in a difficult subject like medicine when he’s so busy with complaints and statements,’ Fahd said one day at Saeed’s flat.

  Saeed gave a mirthless smile, leaping towards the kettle in the kitchen area in the corner when he heard the sound of boiling water and the pop of its automatic switch. He started preparing two cups of tea.

  ‘You know that they’ve got doctors with the same extremist beliefs? They fix their marks, even if they don’t deserve them. I heard worse than that: they’ve got extremist friends in the IT department who can access student records and their grades, pass and fail and so on.’

  ‘But how?’ said Fahd, astonished.

  ‘It’s no problem. They’ll change an F to D, or even higher. Helping those Brothers who are distracted from their studies by the war on corruption and temptation and the battle against the secularists in the university brings them heavenly reward.’

  Then Saeed laughed, and, stirring the tea, shouted, ‘Long live the Arab nation!’

  ‘And the Islamic nation,’ he added, bringing the cups over.

  Some months later they were back in the flat flipping through the papers. Fahd was reading a long article in Riyadh about the imposition of a uniform dress code for all female Saudi employees in the health services. Doctors, pharmacists and nurses were forbidden from wearing jeans, were required to cover their hair, must have no gold or other jewellery on them, nor wear nail polish or make-up, and had to use rubber-soled shoes that made no sound when they walked, with heels less than five centimetres high. Fahd was reading these details out loud to Saeed, and they both thought of Yasser and his jihad; Yasser, the holy warrior doctor who championed his Faith in the College of Medicine.

  ‘I can understand everything except for this business with the rubber soles.’

  ‘So they don’t make a sound when they walk,’ said Saeed sagaciously.

  ‘Well, I realise that, but so what if they do make a sound? What could possibly happen?’

  ‘Sound, my friend, attracts attention to the seductive motion of the female form!’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Fahd said.

  ‘Anyone who hears that sound, even if they don’t actually see the lady doctor, will still picture her in their mind—her buttocks, her swaying breasts—and he’ll desire her.’ Saeed laughed.

  ‘What? So even the click of a heel is shameful, now?’

  ‘Of course. It leads to temptation.’

  Saeed dropped a Lipton teabag into one of the cups.

  ‘Know something, Fahd? Sometimes I think we’re lucky to be living in a time like this, and in this place in particular. Bizarre things like this could lead to the creation of bitterly dark art and theatre. Unfortunately, art itself is also under attack and outlawed.’

  Fahd let out an uncharacteristically loud laugh and said, ‘Just imagine: every female doctor and pharmacist will put a little ruler in her bag and when she gets a new pair of rubber-soled shoes, out with the ruler to check if the heel’s higher than five centimetres.’

  ‘No,’ replied Saeed, more earnest than ever. ‘The real disaster is that breaking these rules might lead to someone losing her job. A doctor’s heels clicking over a hospital’s marble corridor could put her on the unemployed list. What a country.’

  A moment’s silence passed and then Fahd shouted, ‘I’ve got an idea!’

  ‘Let’s hear it, genius.’

  ‘Why don’t they lay carpets in the hospital corridors, so the doctors’ and nurses’ shoes don’t make a sound?’

  Saeed groaned. ‘I swear to God you’re the most brilliant man I know, more brilliant than all the holy warriors in the hospitals.’

  He took a sip.

  ‘Why don’t you register that idea with the patent office?’

  –8 –

  Darling: don’t miss page 5 of Riyadh.

  TARFAH RECEIVED FAHD’S MESSAGE and her laughter washed the night. His message was the fourth she had received since the decision to impose the dress code. The rest of the messages had been from her friends at the Acad
emy for Health Sciences, mocking the idea of the shoes, jeans and accessories. Tarfah thought of the students who wore jeans in class beneath their abayas and then a second abaya on top.

  Sameera, or Sameer as the other girls called her, would dash from her family home in Shubra, a full-length abaya draped over her head, and as the Palestinian bus driver set off down King Fahd Road, she would take it off and stow it in her capacious bag to reveal another abaya covering her shoulders, the garish silver embroidery on its sleeves gleaming against the black cloth. Another embroidered panel spread down her back and over her buttocks. She would put on a pair of large pink sunglasses and, from her seat in the back of the small bus, would turn her gaze to the cars moving past them on the road.

  From her first day at the Academy this young woman in her twenties had strutted the corridors dressed in dark blue jeans and a white shirt with a drawing of a huge eye over her small breasts. Her stride was broad and manly and she never stopped chasing after the soft, brown-skinned girls.

  When Tarfah saw Sameera for the first time she felt rooted to the spot and started to stare at her as they sat facing each other across the corridor. Sameera took the cushion from her seat and hugged it, its corner between her open thighs as she twirled a pen around her mouth in a quite blatant fashion. Tarfah couldn’t tell if she was looking at her or the window behind her, because the sunglasses completely hid her eyes.

  She wasn’t the only one at the Academy: there were five girls, ‘boyettes’ as they were known, who wore jeans, baggy shirts, trainers and sunglasses and roamed the courtyard hitting on girls. One would put her hands in her jean pockets and walk along with a male self-confidence, arm-in-arm with a soft white girl on whose shoulder she would sometimes drop her head. She was away in another world, insensible to the glances and sly comments of the others. They would go to the bathroom together, the open-topped partitions unable to muffle their fevered panting.

  It was terrifying to watch them argue with their girlfriends, swapping filthy phrases and accusations back and forth because the girl had seen her ‘boyette’ come on to some young woman who had responded to her advances. For Tarfah and her friend Nada there was nothing funny about it; it was strange and painful.

  When Sameera tried it with Tarfah the time they found themselves alone together beneath the stairs, Tarfah could only pretend to ignore Sameera’s flirtatious comments about her eyes. She pleaded with her to give it a try for a few minutes: just a hug and a clinch, and if she enjoyed it then she would kiss her a few minutes more. But Tarfah’s response as she charged up the stairs in fright was that she would be unable to oblige: ‘I hate girls!’ she shouted.

  Sameera left her to vanish on to the second floor, but she didn’t give up hope.

  Tarfah had told Fahd that she would never work as a nurse, anyway, since her brothers had strongly opposed the idea and decided she would either become a laboratory assistant or a pharmacist. Then she laughed out loud as she told the story of Nada’s cousin who worked as a pharmacist at a government hospital.

  It was midday when a Bedouin with a thick upswept moustache stood up carrying a little tousle-haired girl, red-cheeked with fever. The cousin fetched the medicine and placed it over the prescription lying on the table—Fevadol for the temperature, an antibiotic called Augmentin and a strip of suppositories just in case—and started to write out instructions for their use. She took the bottle of antibiotics and made a mark with the pen above the level of the white powder inside, saying that he must add clean water up to the line then shake the bottle. Her white hand squeezed the bottle tight and shook it up and down in front of him as she said, ‘Shake it hard.’

  The Bedouin’s gaze devoured her.

  He took the bag of medicines and walked a few paces then stopped and put the girl on the floor, removing the antibiotics from the bag and returning to the counter. Watching him as he walked towards her she noticed that he was aroused. Embarrassed, she averted her eyes. ‘Do I put the water in this bottle, or another one?’ he asked. She answered with a shake of the head and fled to the shelves at the back of the pharmacy.

  Tarfah laughed noisily. ‘Just imagine! Can you believe this society? These people? That’s real frustration…’ she added sadly. ‘Is it this hard for people to have sex?’

  ‘What do you mean? You’re not saying that these directives are right?’ Fahd asked.

  Her voice a little calmer, Tarfah replied, ‘No, sweetheart, you know my position, but I can’t imagine what it will be like to work there.’

  He told her that if the legislator who drew up the directives had thought a little differently, he would have issued severe laws that would commit anyone convicted of harassing women to years in prison, enough to make the Bedouin hesitate a thousand times over before exposing himself to her. But the punishment was always borne by the poor woman because she was the one who provoked his pole.

  Fahd did not entirely trust his lover. Despite the fact she worshipped his very eyes, as she was always telling him in her texts, he would have his doubts whenever she called him and he heard the racket and wicked laughter coming from her friends at the Academy.

  ‘Where’s Tarfah got to?’ a girl might ask.

  ‘Over there, breastfeeding,’ another would answer and they would burst out into wild laughter. Tarfah would laugh, too, and shout at them to shut up so she could hear him.

  ‘“Breastfeeding” means talking on the phone,’ she would explain.

  Her friends would try to make him overhear their jokes or mocking comments, then attempting to persuade Tarfah to let them say hello to her sweetheart. Tarfah told him that they also tried to make her talk to their boyfriends but she absolutely refused to do so. He wasn’t convinced that she spoke to no one else apart from him, especially since her friends would encourage her to live ‘free’ as they called it, simply and happily. ‘The world isn’t up to your complications!’

  One message in particular had left him wracked with doubt:

  I send you a bullet of love, an artillery shell of desire, a bomb-belt of tenderness and a booby-trapped car of roses and jasmine.

  What do you think of this?! she had added at the bottom, then told him it had been sent by a Palestinian driver to a friend of hers who took his bus from Suwaidi to Mugharrazat. Fahd asked her how the Palestinian could send her friend a message like that unless she was having an affair with him. She stammered and snapped, ‘Believe it or not I didn’t look at it like you!’

  When Tarfah sent him a video clip of herself gazing from the bus window in her sunglasses, occasionally raising her uncovered hair with her right hand and sorrowfully singing along with Abdullah Ruwaished, If I had another life, by God I’d live you twice, he asked, ‘How did you manage to film a clip like that in the bus? Did the driver see you as you drove through the streets?’

  She swore that there was a closed curtain between them and the driver, but some mischievous students liked to hassle him and would sometimes lift the curtain and talk to him, though he remained extremely respectful and courteous.

  At first it would irritate Fahd when she talked to him like this, and her stories of Sameera—or Sameer—and the other ‘boyettes’ would leave him unsettled, but occasionally he would feel that he was taking things too seriously, in a society that was unsmiling and tragic on the outside, but playful and cynical from within.

  What could be more cynical than Sameera bumping her hand against Tarfah’s bottom as she walked past her, only for Tarfah to turn round angrily: ‘Yes?’

  Sameera wiggled her hand and eyebrows in astonishment as though she had done nothing wrong.

  ‘I told you. I’ve got no time for girls’ silly games!’ said Tarfah in vexation. She twisted her mouth in disapproval. ‘Silly groping.’

  ‘Dear God,’ answered Sameera mockingly. ‘If only I had you trapped under the stairs or in the bathroom.’

  Life in Riyadh was full of contradictions. No one cared how you were: your poverty, hunger, sufferings and woe; yet at the same
time everyone thought that you were easy, that anyone could do with you as they liked.

  –9 –

  FAHD RETURNED TO IT, again and again: his uncle’s visit. When Fahd’s mother knocked on the salon’s inner door her son politely excused himself to his guests. Soha handed him the tray of coffee, cups and dates, whispering, ‘Who is it?’ and, when he had told her, ‘What do they want?’

  Fahd shook his head, professing ignorance. When he poured the first cup for Ibrahim, the man took it, saying, ‘Live long, my boy!’

  The man talked for a long time about decency, about protecting women and their dignity and satisfying their needs, until he finally got to the point, to wit: for the widow to stay single was damaging to her.

  Fahd broke in. ‘But my sister and I live with her.’

  ‘Your sister is a young girl, Fahd, she needs care and attention, and you’ll get married eventually.’

  Had his uncle heard something? Had his mother complained to someone, and word got out, as it always did with the inhabitants of Buraida? Had his uncle got wind of her dissatisfaction, or her dreams? It was as though the man’s words contained some mystery impenetrable to the boy, who sat listening politely before the shocking sentence hit him.

  No one had any inkling of the terrible impact of this shock; the last sentence his Uncle Ibrahim uttered was like a cannonball crashing through the wall of a perfectly quiet library, a volcano obliterating a world at peace, an earthquake in the upper reaches of the Richter scale demolishing a sad and humble dwelling, a shark’s sudden leap splitting the quiet surface of the water. How can one convey the blunt force of that sentence? That an uncle with two wives should come and rescue Fahd’s mother, the widow Soha, from her loneliness and protect her two children from hunger and corruption.

  ‘Your Uncle Saleh is a safer bet than a stranger to keep the family safe and protect his niece from strangers entering the house.’

  ‘So that’s how it is. I don’t think so, Uncle,’ said Fahd, adding sharply, ‘My mother won’t find it easy to replace my father’s memory with another, whoever it might be.’