One day she left home in the company of the horde, all their vast baggage and retinue in tow, and arranged to meet Fahd at Mamlaka Tower in the afternoon. He stood staring nervously at the Rabei flower shop until she appeared before him and, flustered, shook his hand. Fahd grew increasingly disconcerted as she closed her eyes behind the niqab and trembled like a madwoman. He left her after a few minutes. Later, she confessed that she had nearly taken him in her arms: ‘I just love your eyes! she said, then added, ‘Not to mention your golden moustache.’
He chuckled. ‘Golden, or ginger?’
Saeed always said that the girl who wouldn’t go out with you after the second phone call wasn’t worth your time. ‘Love is business, my friend,’ he would say, before delivering his famous line: ‘Do you think a businessman would put all his capital into a project that wouldn’t turn a profit for a whole month?’
‘Of course not,’ Fahd would laugh.
Profit, in Saeed’s eyes, meant holding a hand, giving it a squeeze (sometimes a kiss), a playful slap on the buttocks, a breathless embrace, a deep, long kiss and so on. To call moans and heavy breathing down a phone line ‘profit’ was ridiculous, hardly worth the effort. Why? Because watching porn and doing the job yourself was a sight better than the self-deception of bringing yourself off to a panting, moaning voice.
Fahd didn’t answer the missed calls from his mother and sister but, lifting the receiver of the phone in the flat, he was startled to hear his mother weeping and reproaching him for ignoring them. He gave a deep, tragic sigh and said harshly, ‘It was you who decided where your interests lay. Everything my uncle did was designed to get me thrown out, and you just tried to keep him happy. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who wanted me out of the house!’
Through her tears she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Fahd! I’m still your mother and Lulua’s your sister.’
She wouldn’t hang up until she had persuaded him to come round on those days when his uncle was away, especially now that her illness had become of serious concern. She said, ‘No one knows how long they’ve got, my son.’
It pricked his conscience and he made up his mind to stop by on the nights when his uncle was sleeping with his other wives. They settled into their routine. Sometimes his mother would beg him to stay the night and despite the appeal of life in the ‘den’ he would agree. Everything that was outlawed and forbidden in his uncle’s kingdom was freely available in Saeed’s lair. In Ulaya, there were no satellite channels, no glossy magazines or daily papers, no pictures, music or songs, no computer and no Internet; in the flat, there was all that and more.
Soha spent most of her time resting but only slept in her bedroom when her husband was at home; during the day she dozed in the dining room next to the kitchen, a small envelope beside her pillow full of folded strips of paper on which were written Qur’anic verses in yellow saffron. Without opening it she would take one and dip it straight into a glass of water until the liquid changed colour and then she would drink, wetting her chest and stomach and intoning prayers to God on behalf of her lungs that trembled like a pair of birds: ‘Oh God, Lord of mankind, send me strength. Heal me, for You are the Healer, who alone has the cure, the cure that never fails.’
Her view of life had changed and become more religious. Had her illness done this, or was it her new husband, the imam, who had turned their life in this house upside down? The marriage was not contracted to protect his brother’s wife or his brother’s children. These hadn’t even been fleeting considerations. It was done for divine reward in return for making devout a home that had once been immodest, wayward and sinful.
‘How do you feel?’ Fahd asked her.
‘It’s women’s troubles, my son; don’t bother yourself about it. Just stay close to me.’
One afternoon, Lulua placed a pot of mint tea before her mother and brother in the dining room with its bolsters and their colourful wool covers. Fahd poured his mother a glass and she asked him to fetch the phone book on the dressing table in her bedroom so she could call a technician to come and fix the air conditioner in the living room, which had started pumping out hot air.
‘Maybe it needs filling up with Freon,’ he said as he went to her room.
Searching on the dressing table and bedside table for the phone book he spied a small religious pamphlet, the kind that were given away free with cassette tapes in mosques and waiting rooms. The glossy cover carried a picture of a tree’s branches against a sunset and the title: The Efficacy of Charms and Herbs in Treating Cancer.
He skimmed through and read a few lines from the introduction that declared that the best treatment for the most dangerous disease of our times—cancer—was prayer, Qur’anic amulets, incantation and blowing. The pamphlet provided testimonies of cancer victims who had turned their back on the lies and fabrications of medical doctors and placed their faith in God. It claimed that one doctor, an American, had been rendered speechless with amazement when scans showed his patient’s body entirely free of tumours, and when he asked, ‘Where were you cured?’ the man pointed heavenwards, the smile of true faith on his lips. Fahd quickly shut the booklet, returned with the phone book and called the repairman, who promised to pass by the following afternoon. The van wasn’t available at the moment.
As he was leaving, his mother embraced him and pushed a note, either two or five hundred riyals, into his breast pocket. Then she kissed his head, prayed that God protect him from all devils, human and jinn alike, and when he objected to her gift, saying that he wasn’t looking for charity from anyone, she was blunt: ‘It’s your money,’ she told him. ‘God rest his soul, your father’s money is your own.’
Since accepting a job as an editor for the Kanoun website’s art section, taking contributions and reviewing articles and comments, Fahd would spend long hours online back at the flat. He was no longer interested in Noha’s phone calls. He had met her again at the Paper Moon in Mamlaka Tower, hurriedly shaking her hand as she uncovered her small painted face and handed him a present wrapped in lemon-yellow paper, and placed in a carrier bag. On the card he read:
My darling,
For your eyes, your mouth and your little ginger moustache: I give you my scent and my femininity.
Back at the flat, as Saeed laughed and shouted ‘To hell with romance’, he broke open the wrapping paper and pulled out a bottle of Givenchy perfume. Giggling, he sprayed it at Saeed.
–20 –
NOHA WAS YOUNG AND mischievous. Fahd wasn’t her first or last, and he wasn’t her only one, either. She gathered men about her to bathe her long nights with their rough voices and suggestive banter. Fahd enjoyed getting to know her and hearing stories about her family.
Her mother, a strong personality, would flip over from the Showtime movie channels whenever Noha came into her room and was desperately worried about her daughters. Noha told Fahd that she could remember her mother forbidding her to ride the horses at the funfair, even bicycles. She was not to jump around or play too energetically in case she broke her hymen.
‘A girl’s a matchstick!’ she would tell her.
When she was older and understood the implication of this sentence, she would lie beneath her blanket in the bitter Riyadh winter and ask herself, ‘A matchstick? Who will strike me, and when?’
Noha still recalled those moments as a young girl when she would hide beneath the bedsheet and send her little hand to grope around. She felt no pleasure, just the thrill of discovering this buried treasure. One day her mother walked in on her unexpectedly and Noha snatched her hand away in confusion.
‘What are you doing?’ her mother asked, sensing the child’s confusion and panic.
‘Nothing!’ Noha answered in terror.
Her mother wasn’t sure of what she had been up to, but she started dropping hints that it was a sin to play with oneself: ‘If you put your hand there you’ll never have children!’
It was absurd that a mother should threaten her child with the inability to bea
r children. So what if she did? What does being a mother mean to a girl of seven?
The next time she fiddled with her hand and moved it around down there, she was doing so for two reasons: first and foremost out of curiosity and secondly because she enjoyed its the way it felt. It was at this moment that her mother surprised her again, coming into the room and fully exposing her by uncovering the blanket. She moved closer and questioned her and Noha was stammering that she had been trying on her new underwear when her mother’s hand, burning and heavy, landed on her face.
Although Noha only left the house very rarely all her friends were men. She absolutely never went out without her mother and an army of brothers and sisters. Her mother would never let her go with children or the driver, nor with any of her relatives. In her mother’s absence the only person who could accompany her was her father.
Being accompanied by her father felt like a moment of wild rebellion to Noha, and it was the same on those rare occasions that she was allowed out with her friend. Her mother took her to her grandmother’s house, her mother took her to university, her mother took her to her doctor’s appointments, and so on, so much so that Noha would sometimes feel sorry for her, wrapped up in her daughter and neglecting her husband.
‘It’s wonderful that she’s done this,’ she would tell herself from time to time, ‘because otherwise I would have slept with lots of the men I’ve met. It’s true that I’ve done the deed with three to date, but that was only on the phone. If Mum had let me be for just a bit of the day I’d have done so much …’
It was imperative that Noha dispose of her sister, Nadia, with whom she shared a bedroom and bathroom. She did her best to upset and annoy her. Exploiting Nadia’s fear of the dark she started switching the light off early, leaving her sister quaking with fear. The two of them bickered until at last Nadia moved her books and bed in with her younger siblings, and the little bedroom became the kingdom of Noha’s secret love affairs.
During her first year at secondary school she was pursued by a boy two years her senior. He made her come, bringing her to a climax with just his voice and groans, as happened in the movies. Noha was amazed that her mother never heard her back then. She eventually took care to close her bedroom door and then, as a further precaution, to shut herself in the bathroom. How embarrassing it had been when one of her friends, hearing the echo bouncing off the ceramic tiles, asked her, ‘Are you in the lavatory?’
‘Yes,’ she had said, explaining that the insulation in the bedroom walls muffled his voice. He never found out the truth: that she was trying to keep her voice from the ears of her mother, who hovered in corners like bats in the dark.
A girl is like a matchstick, her mother would constantly remind her: she could only be used once. She meant that Noha should hold on to her virginity. The thought that Noha’s fingering might lead her to a sticky end terrified the mother, and her fear grew when she saw her playing blind man’s buff in the dark with her cousins. Whenever they caught each other she was convinced they must be canoodling.
Her poor mother.
Noha remembered the time she had been asleep or, to be exact, pretending to sleep, lying on her stomach as her cousin Samer, stretched out beside her playing his Game Boy, threw his hand across her and brushed up against her.
‘What a fool,’ thought Noha.
Noha had a male friend who she found out was gay. More worrying to her was that either he hadn’t realised it himself, or was unsure, or even that he went both ways, with women and with men. He would sometimes say things that would never pass a man’s lips: ‘Ha ha. Someone lift me up.’
She felt that the manliness of any young fellow in the habit of saying such things was open to question. Maybe the trickiest moment came when she sent him a risque image of herself, and pleaded with him to reply in kind, only to receive a photograph of his bottom, taken in the lavatory of a fast food restaurant.
Discussing his relationship with his last girlfriend he told Noha of peculiar moves that could only be of interest to someone with homosexual leanings.
Noha sent Fahd an intimate picture of herself, which she had saved on her laptop. One day she was with her sister Nadia, browsing through the picture folder where she kept images of the latest fashions. The girls were getting ready to attend their cousin’s wedding. The laptop was perched on the revolving chair in her bedroom and her sister was busy talking about the girls at school. She quietly spun the chair round before Nadia could catch sight of the shot, her heartbeat rising and her face colouring as she imagined her sister seeing it, not that she was sure she hadn’t. What would she tell her? Either that it was of her, in which case she had no reason for keeping it unless she had sent it to somebody, or that it was of someone else, which opened up another can of worms, and implied she had lesbian tendencies.
–21 –
FAHD DIDN’T STAY WITH Noha, the Paper Moon girl, for long. Saeed was right: it was too much trouble waiting to get free of her armed bodyguards and easier to take oneself off to another, riper girl, who was easier to talk to and meet.
One evening Fahd paid a visit to Faisaliya Tower where he had organised a group art exhibition in the mall’s central hall, which allowed women strolling around the shops to stop and take in a picture. He was looking at a beautiful canvas entitled Daughters of the Rain, an abstract depiction of village girls cavorting beneath showers of rain, when he was startled by a woman in her late thirties standing next to him and looking at the same picture. Flustered, he moved to the next picture, only to find her next to him again, examining it through her niqab.
‘The brother’s an artist?’ she asked boldly.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
She talked to him about Daughters of the Rain, why the artist had given such prominence to the colour blue when the rain clearly brought such joy and pleasure. He was on edge and anxious as he spoke to her, looking about in fear lest one of them dropped down from the top of the tower clad in his light cotton mashlah. Little did he know that his time would come later, one melancholy morning as he sat with his lover Tarfah in Starbucks, from where they would lead him away to face charges not merely of illegally consorting with a female, but also of using feigned affection and black magic to exercise his influence over the hapless girl.
The woman, whose name he later learned was Thuraya, was talking knowledgeably about the picture in the delectable, adorable lisp of the Hejaz, with her striking embroidered red headscarf and the perfume that filled his nose and mind. Were it not for her telling him that she was a mother of six, the oldest of whom was about his age, and her faintly husky voice, he would have been unable to guess that she was in her late thirties.
She had married young to a man from Qaseem and left the Hejaz, a place which made her coo like a pigeon whenever she mentioned it: ‘You’re fine and soft like a Hejazi!’
All that was beautiful, fine and wonderful in life had its origin in the Hejaz; the vulgar and barbarous belonged to the Bedouin. Thuraya was fiercely partisan towards her place of birth. Unembarrassed, she brought up her age and claimed that as a woman from the Hejaz her years didn’t show and that her eyes were still young and passionate: ‘The eyes of our women speak.’
Two days later she called him on his mobile on the pretext that she had some preliminary sketches for paintings she wanted to make. ‘Just a bored housewife’s feeble efforts,’ she called them, with an exaggerated laugh that sounded like racing cars speeding past. She hoped to get an opportunity to give them to him and get his opinion. They agreed that he would take them from her on a Monday, when she went to the Dr Shablaan Clinics to get her son treatment for his speech defect.
On the Monday he stopped the car in the dusty square next to the building and went inside, going up to the second floor, inspecting the signs of the individual clinics, then leaving again. He called her and said that he had gone back to the car and wouldn’t be coming up because it was difficult to see her there. She came striding out in high heels and almost fell on the un
even ground as she made for the car. He suppressed a malicious laugh and as soon as she got in, he noticed her confusion and the trembling of her hand. He shook it and she quickly freed it from his grasp. Her carefully ironed, soft black headscarf hung loosely over her niqab-rimmed eyes. She was extremely shy. Fahd could see no part of her save her hand and a ring of white gold. She only stayed three minutes. Saying she felt confused, she handed him a large envelope and left.
The next time they spoke she said, ‘I’ll see you at Uthaim Mall opposite Atiqa market. Turn right as soon as you’re inside. There’s a little bookshop beside the escalator; I’ll be there before the evening prayer.’
After sunset prayers he took a stroll in the mall. He went up the escalator. Children were stampeding towards the games arcade, wearing green bracelets on their wrists that allowed them to play all day long. He went back to the bookshop and looked through the books. Most had an Islamic theme. He picked one out by Sheikh al-Qarani and read on the cover: The book that has sold a million copies. He put it back and searched for some poetry or novels in translation. He sensed someone breathing nearby and a penetrating female perfume tightened about his throat. He turned to see a young woman drawing a headscarf across her mouth. She fixed him with her eyes, the eyeliner applied with exquisite care and the eyeshadow a light pink that matched the smooth pearls covering her handbag. From the opposite direction he received a sudden kick. It was Thuraya. He hadn’t noticed her come in.
‘Surrounded by admirers I see!’ she said, gritting her teeth and handing him a coloured paper bag as she looked about warily.
In the car he found a box wrapped in gift paper at the bottom of the bag and opened it quickly and eagerly. A bottle of cheap aftershave. He laughed.
A few days later as he was cleaning out his car he picked up the bag to throw it away and discovered a card with the silhouette of a man and woman embracing while the sun set into the sea behind them. On the back he read: I love you Fahd, but I’m scared that you’ll reject my love and my crazy passion because I’m older than you, maybe the same age as your mother!
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