Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  Fahd was sitting by his wardrobe and listening to the muffled sound of his father’s voice from behind the clothes. He always felt that the voices of the dead would sound strangled, as if bubbling up through water. His dead father was telling him off. ‘And then what, my young Fahd? You kill your uncle and they haul you off to prison for years, until your uncle’s youngest son has come of age. Then they charge you with murder and you’ll find yourself in Justice Square before the black-clad executioner, sharpening his long sword and sending your head rolling away like a football. You will die and leave your mother and sister grief-stricken not just at my loss but at yours as well.’

  Fahd rolled over on to his left side and spoke to his father from his depths. ‘It makes no difference, Dad. Kill him and be killed for it or not, I’m going to run away. I’m going to leave this house. I’ll take your picture with me and hang it on the wall of another house without fear. I’ll arrange my canvases and easel in the middle of the living room and fill the house with the smell of oil paints, just the way you remember it. I’ll have no more of the stink of agarwood and incense that my uncle has filled the house with, so that I feel I’m living in a morgue or graveyard.

  ‘I swear to you, Father: I’ll have satellite channels once again, and I’ll watch the nine o’clock news on al-Jazeera just like you used to do. I’ll follow the investigative reports on al-Arabiya and I’ll enjoy the weekly movie. Fairuz’s voice will wash through the chambers of my heart and the walls of the house where I live, as it used to when mother and you would play it in the early morning. Do you know that even Mum has changed since you’ve gone? She’s forgotten Fairuz and the long-handled pot she used to make Turkish coffee. It’s lying upside down and neglected in an unused kitchen drawer. Maybe she’ll use it as a piss pot for my uncle when he’s too old to reach the bathroom. There are religious cassettes scattered through the house. I can’t understand how this tyrant got my sister to memorise religious anthems and simple-minded myths.

  ‘Everything has changed so much. Our life has turned completely upside down. Lulua’s childhood has been brought to an end; now she’s a woman who wants only to be a good, pious little wife when once she dreamed of being a television presenter. Do you remember her seventh birthday, when she went with you to Toys “R” Us and you bought her a pink tape recorder with a keyboard and microphone? Do you remember how she’d switch it on in the living room and you’d ask us to listen to her? How she once sang, I loved you and forgot to sleep, I’m scared that you’ll forget me and read out a made-up news report? How you laughed in delight as you clapped and the report became crazier and crazier? That’s all dead now, Dad. Now she dreams of being a corpse washer, or one of those female preachers, doing the rounds of gatherings and get-togethers and delivering Islamic lectures, telling women to fear God and the torment of the grave, to set aside the sinful habits of those who have fallen by the way, to invite them to organise themselves. Sometimes I imagine her joining some militant Islamist group. If the terrorists changed the way they worked and brought in women as partners and operatives, they’d be enthusiastic fighters for the cause, strapping on bomb belts to blow away anything they regarded as sinful and become martyrs, flying straight to Paradise.’

  ‘Is that what Princess Lulua has done?’

  ‘No, not that bad! I don’t think she’s ambitious enough for death!’

  –18 –

  THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH: a husband and wife, spreading out a plastic mat beside a small white car. Between them sits a boy of two, playing with a plastic bag. His mother lets down her luminous red hair while his father gives a fleeting grin between his heaving breaths, having placed the camera on a box, set the timer, and run back to his wife and child. On the reverse of the photograph a flowing hand has written: Suleiman and Soha – Nisf al-Qamar Beach, Sharqiya, 1986.

  The second photograph: a pedalo, licensed to hold two adults only. The husband and wife and their two children all wear yellow lifejackets, inflated and tied around their chests. The father looks worn out by his exertions as he pushes pedals with his feet. Next to him, his wife holds her one-year-old daughter in her arms. The father has his arm around the boy, who looks scared, as though he wants to cry, or has just stopped. There are traces of chocolate ice cream around his mouth. On the back: Suleiman, Soha, Fahd and Lulua – The Jeddah Corniche, 1989.

  The third photograph: a pretty little girl sits in front of a cake with four candles on top. Next to her is a laughing boy with his arm flung round her neck, his other hand moving as though to grab a candle or snuff it out. Behind them children laugh, boisterous and gleeful. On the back: Lulua (4), Fahd (7) and Saeed – Lulua’s birthday, Funtime, King Fahd Road.

  The fourth photograph: a frightened boy on a little pony, his hands nervously placed in front of him on the animal’s back, peers towards the camera with tearful eyes. On the back of the picture: Fahd in Thamama, Riyadh, 1990.

  The fifth photograph: a groom with his ghatra hanging self-consciously down over his face and resplendent in a white mashlah with wide, horizontal stripes, stands alongside a bride in her wedding dress, her white, rose-embroidered veil over her face. On the back: Suleiman and Soha’s wedding – January 6, 1984. May you have a long and happy life together!

  The sixth photograph: a young boy stands on a white blanket next to another boy holding a bunch of roses; both are laughing at the camera. On the back: Saeed after the operation with Fahd – King Abdul Aziz Hospital, 1992, and then in a shaky hand in green ink: Memories of an appendix.

  The seventh photograph: three boys bashfully stand behind school desks, one of them shyly ducking his head. In the background is a wall decorated with blue paper and flowers and the edge of a row of lockers beneath a high window. Written on the back: Fahd in middle school with Muwaffaq the Iraqi on his right and Ziyad the dwarf on his left – Second year, Middle School, Class 2/2.

  The eighth photograph: a boy belted into a high chair. To his right is a man with a carefully clipped moustache, its red hair mixed with a little white, sitting back with a beautiful smile. To his left is a woman wearing a hijab who laughs as she puts a potato chip dipped in ketchup into the little one’s mouth. On the back of the picture: Fahd with his grandparents, Abu and Umm Essam – Abu Kamal Restaurant, Thalatheen Street, Ulaya.

  The ninth photograph: a husband, his wife and their two children, with a handsome young man in a jacket and tie alongside another youth with an open collar and an old man with a white moustache. On the back: Suleiman, Soha, Fahd and Lulua with Essam, Kamal and Abu Essam – Sham Restaurant, Amman, 1995.

  The tenth photograph: a small picture, 6x4 centimetres, of an eager-eyed boy, his red hair combed backwards, fighting back a grin. On the back: Fahd Bin Suleiman al-Safeelawi, 1992.

  This last photograph Fahd remembered well. He recalled his father and the Yemeni photographer in Studio Zaman on Thalatheen Street laughing together at the boy’s eagerness. He had held his breath before the lens to hold back his laughter and appear a man, for a man does not laugh.

  It had been after this picture was taken that Suleiman had grasped his son’s hand, and the two of them had walked the length of Thalatheen Street and gone into an art gallery, one of whose pictures Suleiman liked. He had spent a long time arguing with the salesman over the price, then they had walked out without buying it.

  Pictures then more pictures, memories coming to life in the photo album Fahd kept in a wardrobe drawer. It felt to him as though they were his memories and his personal history, his whole life, in fact. Nothing took him back to his beautiful past like this album and the songs that summoned up those moments to which they were bound. For Fahd, these photographs were life itself; he had no idea what he would do if one day he couldn’t find them. Would he put an end to his existence? Commit suicide? What would he do if, all of a sudden, he became a person without a past? Was the past only present in photographs? Didn’t memory inevitably lead back to the past? It did, but memory needed a spur to stir its cells awake; like a
horse pulling a cart uphill it needed someone to apply the whip.

  Some nights after the football match, Fahd was sprawled on his bed thinking back to his early childhood, until the memories and his own oppressive longing led him to his father’s features and the picture of them together, his father playfully pulling his head towards him in front of the ice cream cart in Thamama.

  Suddenly panicking he opened the wardrobe door, then pulled out the drawer looking for the album. He couldn’t find it. Maybe his mother or Lulua had taken it to gaze on days that would never return. He rifled through the chest of drawers and bedside table but to no avail. Frantic and frenetic he remembered that he had put it beneath a large suitcase on top of the wardrobe and he mounted a small stepladder and lifted the case. A great cloud of dust billowed out, filling his eyes, and in a single movement he sprang backwards off the ladder and fell on his rump.

  Standing before the basin in the bathroom to wash his face and eyes he almost burst into tears. He went out in search of his mother and found Lulua in the living room.

  ‘Where’s the album, Lulua?’

  ‘What album?’ she said coldly as she wrote out her homework.

  ‘My album. The photograph album in my drawer. Who took it?’

  She didn’t answer, just shrugged and frowned. He went into his mother’s room. She was in the bathroom. He waited and when she emerged, her wet head wrapped in a white towel, he attacked her with questions about the album. She replied that she knew nothing about it. He hunted through the house like a wounded wolf, inside which other wolves lurked and howled. He didn’t know who he was any more. What was his name? Where had he come from? Where would he go and where would he stay? Who were these people, moving around all about him?

  The next day, having searched the yellow rubbish bin without finding anything, Fahd came back inside, his head bowed and miserable, and sat on the entrance steps with their covering of artificial green grass. He was looking up at the neighbour’s window where a pigeon fluttered and perched. He turned his eyes right towards the wall, then left at the basketball net hanging on the long water pipe outside the bathroom; he had gone head to head with his father trying to get the ball in that very net, and sometimes, when Suleiman was asleep, he had played against Saeed. He looked to his left, at the unfrequented space next to the low wall that separated off their neighbour’s ground floor, and spotted a scrap of paper tumbling as if propelled by an invisible breeze. He stared at it for a moment then rose and picked it up. It was a deep shock when he turned the paper over to see Saeed’s eyes and waving hand at Lulua’s birthday party. It was a scrap ripped from the complete photograph. Searching for others he found another piece showing his father’s coy face and part of the white mashlah that he wore on his wedding day. He hunted around but could only find these two pieces. So. One of them had shredded his photograph album, destroyed the lot then taken it out to the street, and these two scraps were all that had escaped the bundle of shredded paper.

  He went up the steps, crying and shouting, ‘Who’s the bastard, the dog, the son of a dog, who ripped up my album?’

  His mother took fright, murmuring prayers and trying to calm him as he ran blindly about the living room, weeping in anguish. ‘God curse your fathers and your forefathers.’

  He was insensible to his surroundings; he could not see in front of him. He didn’t know how he had acquired this vast strength as he tore the pocket of his house shirt, and kicked at the wooden partition until it shook. He threw himself down the steps shouting, ‘I want to die!’

  His mother and Lulua rushed after him trying to stop him. The girl handed her mother a yellow infusion from which wafted the smell of saffron, and Soha began sprinkling it on his face as she chanted, ‘In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful …’

  A jinn had possessed him, she assumed, and it was the jinn that had rolled him down the steps.

  The next day Fahd found out that his uncle had asked Lulua to tear up the pictures in her folders, because they were haram: they delivered their owner to hellfire and prevented angels entering the house. The Prophet, he told her, had said, ‘No angel shall enter a house in which there is a dog or a graven image,’ and had cautioned her about the punishment awaiting those who create pictures: ‘“Verily, those who shall receive the severest torments on the Day of Resurrection are the makers of graven images.”’

  Then he had chatted away cheerfully to her until he discovered where the album of photographs was kept and ripped them up one by one.

  When he learned of this, Fahd lost his temper and finally resolved to leave the house.

  Bit by bit he started to bring his possessions over to Saeed’s rented flat, and when Saeed urged him to stay by the side of his mother and sister, Fahd told him he would go somewhere else if he didn’t want to have him as a guest. So Saeed let him have his way until the day came that Fahd told his mother: ‘I hate you, and I hate your damned husband. I even hate this house now: it’s got no soul now my Dad’s gone.’

  ‘My husband is your uncle, like it or not,’ she replied. ‘No angel will enter the house if there’s a dog or a picture in it, and anyway … we don’t need pictures to remind us of anything.’

  He picked up a new sketchbook that he had left behind. ‘Fine, so if he rips up the photos the angels will troop in, will they?

  As he scuttled down the steps like a wolf, he added, ‘And shouldn’t the dog leave the house before the pictures?’

  Part 3

  Love, fear and darkness

  Starve me,

  So that I become a lioness of discontent in the wildness of the night thickets,

  So that I tease your bulging hide with my tooth’s keen edge.

  Akl Awit, The Freeing of the Dead

  –19 –

  APPROACHING BISHOP’S STORTFORD THE train slowed. A few people got aboard and passed by the ticket inspector with his small handheld device that stamped the day and date on the tickets of new passengers. The old lady offered Fahd a piece of gum. He took it and thanked her. His mind was a little calmer. He looked through the window at the empty wooden seats on the platform and the policeman who stood holding a big dog on a lead.

  The train set off and Fahd’s memories galloped in its wake, wild and panting. He was thinking that it was no easy matter to rebel and to take risks with your life but if you didn’t do it when you were a teenager or a young man then you never would. That is how it had been with him: there had been nothing worth fighting for, nothing worth preserving. He hadn’t rebelled like his father. He hadn’t done what Suleiman had done and clashed with government and society. His father would have taken up arms, had he not slowly withdrawn, using Imam Turki’s mosque as a way to escape the Salafist Group, going to listen to the blind sheikh’s speeches and sermons at sunset prayers every day until he dropped out of the reckoning altogether.

  Fahd’s decision to leave the family home forever was painful and devastating. Even if initially it was not on a permanent basis—spending first one night away then two, then more—it still saddened his ailing mother. What would she do at night? Would Lulua wash her forehead using water infused with the saffron ink from Qur’anic verses inscribed on white paper? Would she take three small gulps then rest her bandaged head on the pillow in search of sleep? Would she take a sleeping pill in order to drift off like the dead?

  Fahd and Saeed had gone out together many times, loafing around Tahliya Street and Faisaliya Tower and pursuing the frisky girls who drew their admirers after them like panting dogs. They chased their lusts in a trance, like children chasing brightly coloured birds or butterflies, bewitched by a beguiling glance from behind a niqab, by eyes painted with kohl and maddening eye-shadow, by laughter, by shoulders jostling as the girls swayed, lascivious and lustful, and pointed mischievously towards the two young men.

  Saeed become another person when girls teased him. Whenever he got the chance or came across some sheltered spot he would almost rub up against their abaya-clad bodies. He
was indifferent to the presence of Indian and Filipino vendors and tried to avoid the looks of Arab street sellers—the Lebanese, Syrians and Egyptians—but when he caught sight of a Saudi walking behind his wife he would keep his lunacy completely under wraps. Alone with a girl, however, he would become demented and reckless.

  One night he surged forward like a tiger towards two juicy morsels standing by the elevator and giggling in his direction and took them both in his arms. One of them hit him on the head with her handbag and he came back over to Fahd out of breath and laughing. ‘That bitch. She’s the one who gave me her number.’

  Fahd could never match his wildness. He would follow after a girl full of trepidation but if she so much as glanced at him he would retrace his steps, stumbling like a bunny rabbit.

  ‘Your problem is that you take life seriously, even though it’s not worth it,’ Saeed would always tell him. The truly incredible thing was that Saeed’s extensive culture and learning could coexist with this demented pursuit of lust. When Fahd questioned him about the contradiction he’d laugh. ‘There’s no contradiction: it’s all culture.’

  One girl, Noha, was exceptional but Fahd was not in love with her. For her to leave the house meant mobilising the ‘Armies of Christendom’ as he put it; she was unable to go out without being accompanied by her entire family, and so he steered clear, until he discovered some comfort for his own misfortunes in her voice and past. She started calling him every day on the landline in the flat (the ‘den’ as Saeed called it) then got hold of his mobile number.