–29 –
TARFAH’S VOICE WAS THE same as it had been on the phone, perhaps a little riper and more musical.
It was noon when Fahd first phoned her, anxious and uncertain, and after three rings her drawling voice had come down the line. A woman’s voice in every respect: supremely feminine, pleasant and welling with coquetry and refinement. When she spoke it was like a reed flute sounding sadly in an abandoned palm grove. Powerful and fluid, her voice could detonate passion in anyone’s heart. It was nothing like the throaty maternal utterances of Thuraya, or Noha’s unintelligible mumbling. More than just her voice, it was the warmth and searing honesty of what she said.
From their second phone conversation it seemed to Fahd that they had been friends since childhood. She told him how she had married a relatively unknown actor and separated after two years of suffering and disagreement. He had developed schizophrenia. Before the divorce she had travelled with him to Jeddah, where he forgot to take his medicine and started riding camels and horses on the corniche, screaming dementedly at her, ‘Take my picture!’
Back in their room her ex-husband had put on swimming trucks, crooning with furtive delight, ‘If only the gold market were lined in silk …’ and snatches of famous songs. Pointing from the high window at the swimming pool below, he said, ‘I’m going fishing.’
Tarfah was astonishingly warm and bubbly. She stole Fahd’s heart and made him feel exceptionally close to her, only rarely asking him questions as she told him of her childhood in Dakhna. She only mentioned her first name. He wanted a family name to feel more at ease, and despite her initial hesitation, she gave to him, making it clear that any similarity with the owners of a well-known commercial centre was pure coincidence. ‘Tribesmen!’ she called them.
With her chin resting on her fingers, she was beautiful. Her eyes were splendid, defying comparison with Thuraya’s Javanese slits, and likewise her tender, angelic voice, utterly dissimilar to the husky tones of the older woman. Even the things they talked about were different. Tarfah spoke like Scheherazade of her life, and that of her family and friends, filling Fahd’s heart and memory in the course of single week, while for months on end, Thuraya continued to ask after him and his Jordanian mother, giving him nothing of herself and shielding her life with a man’s caution.
He was eager to meet this angelic voice, and he turned his mind to a close comparison of the three: Noha, Thuraya and Tarfah. Which was to be his Mona Lisa? Tarfah of the wide eyes and the beautiful hands that supported her chin like faces in Salvador Dali’s paintings, propped on sticks and branches so as not to fall? Was it to be Tarfah’s face, burdened with the sorrow of angels, alert and tender and mournful all at once? Would it be Noha with her delicate sidelong glances, snatching fleeting moments to flick out a furtive look from between her Praetorian Guard, single-mindedly marching along the path by the wall of Prince Sultan University? Or Thuraya’s face, bewitched by Fahd’s, and perspiring with the force of her desire for oblivion?
These were the questions that attended Fahd as he met Tarfah at Le Mall. This time he was prepared for a romantic assignation of a completely different sort: a divorced woman of about his age who shared the same hopes and jokes and cultural references. Her text messages had brought them even closer and encouraged him to leapfrog the standard preliminaries.
When will I see my dear elephant? she asked, to which he mischievously replied, With the trunk or without?
The mall was close to the flat and he called her to say he was just setting out.
She whispered down the phone, ‘I love you!’ and there was the sound of a ringing kiss planted on the mouthpiece. Brazen as always he asked, ‘Where does that go?’ and she laughed.
‘On your mouth, my little lunatic!’
When he arrived he called her. She didn’t pick up, but sent a text telling him she was with her brother Ayman and would let him know when she was on her way.
He drove past the mosque in Ghadeer as the sound of the imam chanting the first rakaa of the evening prayer swelled from its speakers. He got out and went inside. The smell of Pattex glue filled the mosque’s interior and offcuts of new carpeting were scattered about the floor. Prayer, he felt, might summon God’s protection from the troubles he faced. How will He save you and deliver you from sin, O man?
He left the mosque and returned to the car, his phone ringing ever louder.
‘Listen: don’t come from direction of the main entrance.’
He stopped and doused the headlights. A few cars were stopped outside the entrance and he took a space by the wall of the Ibn Khaldoun Schools.
‘Give me a ring just before you come out,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be outside; it’s a blue Hyundai.’
When she called he did a U-turn and stopped right outside the entrance. A young woman emerged, wrapped in an abaya, walking steadily, neither hurrying nor dragging her steps. She opened the door and got in: ‘Evening.’
She was breathing rapidly, panting, as though she had been sprinting over the gleaming porcelain tiles inside the mall, her high heels rapping at the lamps reflected in the floor like stars.
Fahd noticed her hand: the living image of the one he had seen on Messenger, resting on the keyboard with rare splendour. He reached out his hand and enfolded her long, slender fingers. Raising her hand, he kissed it passionately and she let out a muffled groan.
At the traffic lights next to the mall he turned left down King Abdul Aziz Road, passing the Leen furnished flats, and as he approached the lights by the Panda supermarket in Maseef, he asked, ‘Shall we look for somewhere dark and quiet so I can see you?’
Her enchanting eyes watched him from behind her niqab. In contrast with her boldness over the phone she hardly said a word. When he asked her, ‘Which of these three roads shall I take?’ at the Panda lights she pointed with her hand held low, concealing it below the level of the window:
‘This way?’
‘Why are you pointing in that furtive way?’ he asked.
She gave her wonderful laugh. ‘My brothers warned me not to lift my hand when I point so people in neighbouring cars don’t see it!’
‘I don’t blame them!’ Fahd said mildly through his laughter. ‘If you were my sister I’d make you wear black gloves.’
She said that her mother and older brother, Abdullah, had once tried making her wear black gloves so men wouldn’t see the naked flesh of her hands, but she had fought back and refused.
She knew the city very well. Perhaps her knowledge of Riyadh’s more recent roads and neighbourhoods came from rides with her former lover around the new residential zones of North Riyadh, but she was reluctant to direct him there for fear he would find out about her past adventures, despite the fact that he had said on a number of occasions that he respected her openness and honesty.
After half an hour aimlessly circling Maseef and Murouj she said, ‘Go back towards Le Mall.’
So he went back, crossing the traffic lights heading north then turning left into the residential zone where the road twisted round and driving on a little further until they entered the darkness. He looked over at her and she unfastened her head covering. Her face bore the promise of eternal Paradise: round and full with soft cheeks, a small, pretty nose and a mouth that hinted at breathtaking lechery. She would smile and her amazing eyes would become more alluring still. How had her eyes acquired such magic, such splendour?
When he praised her she smiled and taking his hand between hers, kissed his knuckles one by one, then the tip of his thumb, and he felt the dampness of her saliva. Each looked at the other in the same instant, as though her eyes were calling out to him, and he leant towards her, pulling her head over with an audacity that would later amaze him when he remembered it and caressing it with infinite delicacy. He didn’t understand how he had been liberated from his old fears and he descended on her passionately until the wheel slipped from his hands and the car veered right and left.
The unlit road came to an end and he e
merged on to a brightly illuminated main road. Gathering himself, his attention was caught by a car following behind them. No sooner had it drawn level, than the driver flicked on his headlights.
She laughed. ‘That’s a well-known signal between us roadside romantics.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Nothing serious. It means, take it easy, you’ve been busted. Go back to the road we just came out of.’
He turned around and headed north, then took a right, passing a petrol station on his right and a wedding hall on his left. He saw a number of hotels spread out in the darkness.
‘Take any road to the right and go into the dark,’ she said.
He turned in, proceeding eastwards until the road gave out at a packed earth barrier, giving him the choice of going right or left. He went right, the illuminated hotel buildings and the main road now to his left and switched off the car’s lights, leaving the engine running in case of emergency.
She lunged and embraced him, kissing him roughly as she murmured: ‘I love you … I love you …’
He returned to the main road. She sat up straight and put her niqab over her face. But they weren’t silent for a single moment, both of them chattering away, full of joy and the desire to discover one another.
‘I forgot to pull your hair!’ she said.
He lifted his shimagh.
‘God knows I’ve got enough.’
She laughed and said that young men these days aged quickly. They got treatments for their depressing bald spots and took Viagra, and despite it all: nothing. He smiled.
‘And what about me, then?’
She unfurled her thumb. ‘Like this!’ she said then tugged at his hair, screaming, ‘Oh God, I love you.’
He asked if women liked baldness, or if it had become fashionable. How else to explain those football players who shaved their hair off with a razor?
He returned to Le Mall.
‘Where’s the poster of the Klimt painting?’ she asked.
Turning behind him he pulled out a sealed cylinder and said, ‘Forgive me, sweetheart. I was going to pick out a nice frame, but I didn’t like to weigh you down.’
‘So what? I’ll put it in my room without a frame.’
She pointed. ‘Don’t drop me at the Basic House entrance. Entrance Two, I mean. Look, Entrance Three is close by.’
After he left her he grabbed a hot mocha and set off, distracted by the echo of her anxious voice asking, ‘So, how did you find me?’
–30 –
SAEED WOKE UP AT eight the following evening. He glanced at the clock on the wall opposite. His thoughts drifted to his distant childhood and the days spent in his grandmother’s house in Khamees Mushait, recalling that evening five years ago when she had told him the story of his father, Mushabbab.
Mushabbab had taken her and Saeed’s mother, Aida, on a trip to perform the umra. This was nothing but the flimsiest of pretexts. The goal was to take over the Grand Mosque and proclaim the coming of the Mahdi at the dawn of a new century, rebelling against the government and its troops and awaiting the sally of the infidel horde from Tabuk that God would swallow up into the earth.
Saeed turned his face to the ceiling, knitting his fingers over his forehead, and his ever-active memory started roaming mournfully over the past. Fahd moved on the adjoining bed. His eyes were open and he gave a languorous yawn. ‘You look like you’ve been up for a while,’ he mumbled in a muffled voice to Saeed.
Saeed’s memories flowed on unchecked as he answered, ‘Know something, Fahd? There’s this very strange story that took place a couple of months before I was born. I keep thinking about it.’
Fahd snorted, his eyes puffy with sleep. ‘Don’t tell me you remember everything that happened before you were born!’
Unfazed, Saeed said, ‘Seriously, Fahd; my grandmother told it to me, and my mother confirmed it. While I was still in the womb and my father was in prison with Suleiman, my mother got up one morning at dawn to make Arabic coffee for my grandmother: weak coffee without cardamom. While she was busy washing the pot out over the sink her earring fell out and she cried out. My grandmother took fright at the harsh sound. You see, it didn’t resemble my mother’s voice, or to be exact, it wasn’t a voice that came from my mother’s throat but the throttled voice of a jinn.
‘My mother told me that my grandmother became alarmed and got up to help her, the two of them walking slowly towards the coffee room where the tongues of flame were dancing in the pot of coals. She was weeping and groaning and my grandmother was muttering, “What God decrees is good …” But that morning, my mother sobbed as she told my grandmother that they had killed Mushabbab at dawn, cut off his head with a sword, and as she patted her other earring, the one in her ear, she laid her hand on her belly, crying and repeating over and over: “God preserve my only child!”’
Saeed’s body bent at the waist as he propped himself up on his elbow and went on. ‘At that very moment your father was in prison, having bid Mushabbab farewell with a final glance as he put on the leather sandals they took turns wearing when one of them went to interrogation. But the sandals didn’t return after that final interrogation. There was no interrogation when they woke him on an early spring morning, in the final hours of the night. That night was the only one, your father told me, that he didn’t pray the voluntary late night prayer, but slept instead, troubled and ill at ease. As they led him away at that early hour, Mushabbab said, “Don’t forget my last wish, Suleiman!” This is what he said as he walked out, without turning round or stopping to say goodbye. That night he felt the chopping block. I was that final wish. I still remember the first time you came with your father to my grandmother’s house in Khamees. Do you?’
‘I remember you showing off!’ Fahd said, smiling.
‘I remember you being scared and hiding behind your mother’s abaya while I strutted around in front of you, acting like I didn’t fear a thing. Do you remember me running towards the fig tree in the courtyard, trying to climb it and flashing my skinny legs? After several attempts I remember falling on my back, which made you laugh and brought you out from behind the abaya. I still remember those first moments. I remember your father coming, laden with presents and food. God have mercy on your soul, Suleiman!’
He paused briefly.
‘You know what, Fahd? Your father was like a man who runs a child over in his car. For years his conscience keeps him up at night, and all the time he’s trying to bring some happiness to the little boy he paralysed. It was a rare instance of loyalty on your father’s part, and you know there’s no such thing as loyalty in this country and its conscience has been asleep for a century.’
Fahd lay there listening.
‘I still remember my paternal grandfather’s death five years ago. Can you believe that a retired army general, a man who led a battalion in the Yemen war, defending the southern pass into the country tooth and nail, died at home like an old dog, forcibly ejected from Khamees Hospital to free up a bed? Think of him vomiting up blood while myself, my two uncles and my relatives looked on. No one cared. How could they, when they were busy separating those twins who had been brought here from the ends of the earth to have their photos taken and splashed on the front covers of local newspapers beneath the headline Medical Miracles. How could this happen to my grandfather, whose bones had been rattled by whining bullets in the seventies, who was almost killed by a stray round, but could find no one to tend and care for him?’
Fahd turned on his right side and peered at Saeed, who had fallen silent for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
‘If my grandfather had twins, my father and my uncle I mean, shouldn’t the government have taken care of him?’
Fahd gave a noisy laugh and said slyly, ‘But they were local twins. They don’t count: you have to be a foreigner. Unless your father’s eyes were blue, that is, that might work. It’s so our country becomes global and can pass on its scientific achievements to all the countries of the world.�
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Saeed sat up in bed.
‘Anyway, it’s nine already. That was a nap and a half. Shall we get some fresh air in Tahliya?’
Fahd lifted his silenced phone from the table between the two beds and looked at the screen. There were seven messages waiting for him. Alarmed, he said, ‘Seven messages. Some good morning that is.’
Saeed cackled from the flat’s only bathroom. ‘What do you mean, morning? People are getting ready to go to bed.’
When he emerged, a nervous Fahd played him one of the messages:
‘So you’re not happy with me, as you put it … Well, some day I’ll settle my account with you … It’ll be savage, because I’m out of my mind and wounded and betrayed and I’m sure you know what happens to a woman when she feels betrayed … She becomes a lion!’
‘Who’s that?’ said Saeed anxiously. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the Hejaz one?’
Fahd nodded his head.
–31 –
AS FAHD CLIMBED INTO the Committee’s vehicle that morning he wondered whether Thuraya was behind what had happened. On several occasions she had threatened to take her revenge if he didn’t respond to her desires. Had she reported the sea-blue Hyundai Accent? Had she told them that it was a car like a blue wave adrift in an arid desert? Had she taken down the number plate when she came out of the entrance of Iman Hospital that time, or as she left the World of Dreams hair salon? Had Tarfah’s old boyfriend wanted to revenge himself on her and been stalking her, his mind filled with suspicion? Had it been the uncle who hated him and thought of him as a shameless sinner?
He often thought of his arrest as he walked out alone along Great Yarmouth’s sandy shoreline and saw the lovers stretched out beneath the little bushes, whispering together, or embracing, still as stones, for hours on end. How hard it was for him to recall a passage from one of the three books his father had left behind in his bag, which discussed the societies of the jahiliya. The passage described how the writers, journalists and novelists in these societies openly told their young women and wives that … there is nothing morally repugnant about conducting free relations. Immorality is when a young man deceives his girlfriend or a young woman her boyfriend and does not keep her affection solely for him. Indeed, it is immoral for a wife to remain celibate once desire for her husband has died down, and virtue is when she seeks out a friend to whom she can safely entrust her body! There are dozens of stories with this message at their core and hundreds of educational programmes, cartoons, jokes and comedies that promote it…
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