Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  He glanced at her face. She seemed pensive. Was it fear that rendered her speechless or confidence that they would get free? Did she expect him to blame her for getting them into this situation? His first thought was how to get her out of here, how to return her to her brother now they were stuck in some remote agricultural area fenced in by barbed wire. Then again, how was he going to free his car from this trap?

  Terrifying scenarios began wheeling through his head. What if he walked to the highway and flagged down a car?

  The car stops; the driver is bearded. He’s suspicious—some guy hanging about in the middle of nowhere with a frightened girl—but he seems concerned and pulls over.

  ‘You go back to your sister and I’ll find a shovel so we can clear the earth around the car.’

  He moves away and conducts a whispered conversation on his mobile. Is he calling the police? The men from the Committee? Either would cause a scandal beyond Fahd’s worst nightmares.

  ‘Let’s dig!’ declares the man, his eyes on the road. Damn him; he’s waiting for one of Committee’s SUVs.

  He’ll see it signalling with its brights from a distance, then two men will approach and take Fahd to one side, calm and reassuring: ‘Who’s that with you? Don’t be scared: just tell us. If you’re honest with us we’ll make sure you’re OK.’

  He admits that she’s his girlfriend. They question her and suddenly she bursts into tears.

  Those wonderful eyes; how can they shed tears?

  His feverish contemplation was interrupted by Tarfah.

  ‘Why don’t I call my friend Nada? Get her to send her driver?’

  ‘It’s an idea … At least I’d be able to concentrate on getting my car out without having you on my conscience.’

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t come with me?’ she said, her eyes welling. ‘I have to go with the driver on my own? Perhaps you could come with me to the mall,’ she added. ‘Find someone to tow your car.’

  He cleared some of the soft earth from behind the rear wheels then returned to the driver’s seat. ‘Have you called her?’

  ‘She’s not answering!’ replied Tarfah dejectedly.

  ‘Her phone’s switched off?’

  She gazed out at the furrowed horizon. ‘No, it’s on. She’s just not picking up. Perhaps she’s asleep.’

  Leaving his door open he tried pressing gently on the accelerator and leant his head out to watch the wheels. The car moved a couple of metres backwards then the wheels spun in place, digging into the dusty ground.

  Tarfah’s mobile rang and she picked it up, thinking that maybe Nada had noticed her missed calls. But when she looked at the screen, blinking on and off in the darkness, her face fell and she didn’t answer. ‘What does he want now?’ she spat.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Fahd nervously.

  ‘My brother, Ayman.’

  ‘If you come back to the mall with me,’ she said, ‘I could tell Ayman that you’re a brother of one of my friends and that you need help. What do you think?’

  He breathed deeply and went back to digging. His heart began to beat faster; his white robe was smeared with dust. He noticed a gaping hole next to where he was digging in the dark.

  What if a huge snake suddenly slithered out from that burrow and bit him while they were all alone in the middle of nowhere?

  Then he noticed the place was full of burrows. This city was all burrows—burrows upon burrows—and you never knew which burrow would swallow you up next.

  With the long nail on his little finger he squeezed the valves on the rear tyres and the air rushed out. Deflated tyres gripped better in sand. He set the car in reverse: a metre backwards then the wheels spun again.

  What was this? Was this the curse of Thuraya, with her feverish, miserable messages? She had already threatened to expose him as an artist who led women astray. Was it his mother’s, from whom he had fled and failed to call? Perhaps her health had reached breaking point and she needed his help.

  He was about to open his mouth for the thousandth time to tell Tarfah, ‘I was worried about this ploughed land; it’s cursed for sure!’

  Suddenly he stopped. If he walked into the field now he would never return.

  He asked her about Nada. ‘She answered yet?’

  ‘I sent her a message,’ she replied in a soft voice, low with fear.

  He stripped off his robe. His body had begun to sweat. A short while before this body had delighted in the paradise of alfalfa blooms as it gazed at the smiling, playful moon. Now the field had become a ploughed wasteland, empty and desolate, and the moon the brow of a wrathful demon gazing down gloating and mocking at a puny, isolated, powerless human being trying to extricate himself from disaster.

  As he dug away and smoothed the ground behind the car her phone suddenly rang. It was her brother and she didn’t answer. Fahd tried to shift the car again, opening the door and watching the wheels as he repeated, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ over and over. The car moved a further two metres and sank again. This time, he felt despair take hold.

  Her phone rang and she answered, smiling.

  ‘Listen, I’m in this place miles away. Get your driver to take Qaseem Road to Quwa al-Amn Bridge. He takes a right at the flyover then goes straight until he sees lights from a car.’

  She fell silent and listened. ‘I’ll tell you later. Now’s not the time.’

  Nada must have asked her what she was doing there.

  By his efforts he had succeeded in moving the car backwards a total of seven metres.

  ‘I’m going to try going forwards,’ he said to Tarfah. ‘If the car gets free I’ll turn right and drive off.’

  He put the car into first gear then stepped on the accelerator, wrenching the wheel left and right and screaming in English, action-movie style, ‘Come on! Come on!’ It moved slowly, then surged and he pulled the wheel to the right, straightening out and rocketing towards the highway like a lunatic until he reached the field of harvested alfalfa, where he proceeded calmly along the firm ground at its edge, unable to believe that they had escaped.

  ‘O wholesome harvest girls!’ he bellowed. ‘How great thy charity, harvesting this crop that I might proceed along the path to deliverance …’

  And Tarfah, aping his pomposity with magnificent derision, cried, ‘What ails thee, Abu Jahl?’

  –33 –

  THE WHITE PICK-UP TRUCK, stuck in the sand a quarter of a century before, on 30 July 1979, was nothing like the sea-blue Hyundai that Fahd drove with Tarfah beside him. In this vehicle sat a man, his shimagh wrapped into a filthy red-and-white checked turban around his head, driving like a lunatic through the dark of the night to escape the border guards, now dousing the headlights and proceeding on instinct, now guided by the light of his passenger’s small flashlight that prevented the guards tracking their Datsun. They were waiting for gunshots to catch them from the rear but the onslaught of the demented sand was swifter than any bullet; it held them firm, the pick-up’s lights suddenly froze and they fled in opposite directions, each man panting as he laboured to pluck his feet from the sand’s snare.

  The passenger got furthest and when he heard the sound of the border guards’ pursuing vehicles and the powerful lamps begin sweeping the desert in search of them, he ran for the cover of a small and straggling ramth bush and lay still, his heart straining. He was like a bird grazed by a rifle, that flees flapping its one good wing, bleeding and hopping as it hunts for the shade of a tree or rock to hide from the hunter’s gaze.

  The guards stopped their vehicle by the pick-up in the soft, paste-like sands. Their voices were strident in the night and the searchlights’ beams wandered about like cudgels cocked over bare flesh. They fanned out in three directions, away from the route they had come, and like swords drawn for the kill, four beams of light circled the desert.

  The passenger trembled, hiding his head between the branches to appear like a tarpaulin abandoned in the scorching midday heat, but the light fell suddenly into his gleaming eyes and one
of the guards cried out to his companions: ‘It’s him.’

  Pointing a pistol at him, the guard shouted for him to get up with his hands behind his neck. Exhausted, his face filthy and holding his hands behind his neck, he rose to his feet. One of the guards came up behind him, patted his pockets, and securing handcuffs around his left wrist first, then his right, he steered the man away. A few minutes later they had found the other man and they took them both back, together with their truck, to the Ruqai Centre on the border with Kuwait.

  The pick-up was impounded with seven other trucks, their loads concealed beneath green tarpaulins held in place with ropes wound round the brackets on the vehicles’ sides. After stepping forward with two other officers and cautiously uncovering one of the trucks, the border centre’s commander ordered the detention of the drivers and their passengers.

  They were carrying stacked bundles of small pink pamphlets, on their covers the title: An Address on the Subject of the Emirate and the Swearing of Fealty and Obedience, and a Judgment on the Duplicity of the Rulers towards the Scholars and the Common People, and the Proper Position with regards to the Rulers in Particular, and People in General.

  The duty commander at the border post sat at his desk, a copy of the pamphlet in his hand. He leafed through it rapidly, reading some of the Qur’anic verses and hadith, the first of which was Ibada Bin al-Samit’s report of their pledge of allegiance to the Prophet on the grounds that ‘… we must speak the truth wheresoever we be, for we are with God and so fear not the censure of critics.’ Flipping the pages with his thumb he read out loud to the two officers:

  Know that some of those who fawn over kings and rulers excuse themselves by pointing to the hadith recorded in the Sahih Muslim, when a man addressed the Prophet, saying, ‘O Prophet of God have you not perceived that when princes are set over us they look to their own rights and deny us ours? What do you command us to do?’

  To which the Prophet replied, ‘Hearken: they must bear their burden and you, yours.’

  But this furnishes them with no excuse, for the hadith is concerned with rights of the individual: the rulers’ monopolisation of booty and plunder and the like. Religion is not one of the rights of an individual, where forbearance in the face of preferential treatment is urged. In the hadith the man says, ‘… and they deny us our rights,’ but when the right is that of God, then no: the duty then is to reject the legitimacy of those who fail to implement God’s law.

  The commander tossed the pamphlet to one end of the table.

  ‘God preserve us!’ said one of the officers. ‘That’s outright sedition!’

  The commander nodded his head in agreement. ‘Planning a coup, it seems.’

  The third officer remained silent, averting his eyes from the others. Then he excused himself and left the office.

  Seven impounded vehicles in a military post on the Kuwait border, were laden with vast quantities of pamphlets churned out by the Vanguard printing presses in Kuwait and destined for remote villages and farms around Riyadh and Mecca, where they would be handed out to members of the group who, with precisely coordinated and pre-arranged timing, would distribute them through major urban centres such as Mecca, Riyadh, Qaseem and Ha’il.

  Suleiman led his own small group, delegating tasks with the spirit of a practised leader of men, his abundant vigour sometimes beguiling other worshippers into helping his companions and himself distribute the booklets, blissfully unaware of the incitement they contained against the government and what they termed jahili society.

  Seven years later, by a strange twist of fate, Suleiman al-Safeelawi was transformed from a distributor of clandestine literature into a distributor of newspapers for a major company.

  He had descended ravenously on newspapers after being denied them during his first period of incarceration. He had often thought of writing his memoirs in prison, believing his time as a member of the Salafist Group had been far superior to the childhood memories recorded by Taha Hussein in The Days. Yet despite his love of reading, his writing and his powers of description, metaphor and composition were no match for the great wordsmith. It was as though the Alfiyya marked the division between reading for pleasure and enforced study.

  Running from Ibn Malik, he had fallen, seduced and thrilled, for Sayyid Qutb, al-Albani and Hamoud al-Tuwaijri, and then, having emerged from prison, taken a job at the newspaper distribution company, married and enrolled at King Abdul Aziz University, he sequestered himself away with a new series of books, dividing his time between classical Islamic works such as The Unique Necklace, The Book of Animals and The Delicacies of the Caliphs and the Jests of the Refined, and the Russian classics, getting hold of Dostoyevsky’s complete works. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Adolescent and The Brothers Karamazov transported him to another world, far from petty doctrinal quarrels.

  After he had been promoted and his street level wanderings were behind him he would read all the time, even during office hours. At home, he would steal an hour to himself after sunset, though he still maintained his habit of dropping everything half an hour before the daylight disappeared and driving westwards over Urouba Bridge. It was as if he needed to satisfy himself that the sun had gone down to its resting place, as if he wanted to remember that distant sunrise over Jurida Square, when they escorted him away to be interrogated and from there to a series of long and arduous adventures in prison.

  –34 –

  JUST BEFORE SUNSET THAMAMA Road was relatively crowded, the ice cream vans scattered eye-catchingly either side of the road as Fahd drove along, suffering beneath the yellow disc of the sun.

  Every sunrise and sunset that passed before Fahd’s eyes wrung his heart and reminded him of his father on that final morning, a memory that led him back to thoughts of his two uncles and Yasser. He remembered his childhood, when his uncle took them all to a nearby farm to learn to swim. The pond was deep and shaded by the tops of tall palms and verdant trees. His uncle said that swimming in shady water would strengthen their young hearts, as if he intended to turn them into black rocks, unbreakable and incapable of bringing light to the world.

  Whenever Fahd thought of them he wished that one day they would all go on a trip together and that the family car would swerve and flip over repeatedly or smash into a stray camel crossing the road, leaving no one alive. How wonderful it would be to celebrate their deaths! Of course, nobody’s death should be a matter of celebration, even those they called ‘infidels’, the ones al-Qaeda slaughter like sheep. The time he had opened a video clip on an Islamic website to find members of al-Qaeda butchering a terrified foreigner had terrified him and left him nauseous and he had fasted for a whole week.

  He sometimes felt that those around him were the true heirs of al-Qaeda. The only difference was that out there they first trained in arms and laid waste to the West, then turned their attention to their own homelands, claiming they were in thrall to the infidel. In Riyadh and Qaseem, meanwhile, they merely supported their deeds and cheered.

  Fahd still remembered September 11. He was in Bassam on Ulaya Street looking for a cheap microwave oven and the televisions were aglow. His attention was drawn by a group of middle-aged men gathering to stand astonished in front of the screens, watching the aircraft as they detonated into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Three of the men were applauding gleefully. Two were clean-shaven and the third had a slight beard and they clapped as though following a video game or some movie where good triumphs over evil. Later, Fahd would think of them and ask himself: where are those joyful men now? Were they amongst those who blew up the Muhiya Compound or the Hamra Oasis Village? The Civil Affairs building in Riyadh, perhaps? Are they in Iraq? Were they amongst those who joined the Fatah al-Islam Brigade in northern Lebanon, their corpses sprawled out in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp?

  It terrified him to think that people here were in crisis, hostile to anything advocating progress. When you explained that progress was the inescapable destiny of all things, then ta
lked to them of their errors—from their rejection of the telegram and the radio on the grounds that they were sorcery and devilry, to their refusal to accept television and women’s education, to their repudiation of the latest innovations such as identity cards for women—they would shut you up, using force if necessary. They would end the debate on the grounds that your faith was weak and your doctrine unsound and then, without any hesitation, inform you that you were a secularist preaching degeneracy or a filthy liberal, maybe growing aggressive enough to declare you an apostate whose killing was permissible by law.

  He still remembered that episode of The Other Direction, a programme he sometimes watched despite hating it for being contrived. On one side of the debate was Sayyid al-Qamani, who opined that there was no democracy anywhere in Islamic history. How could there be, when the Emirate of the Muslims passed from one Caliph to another by means of poisoned dagger or cup? The other guest wore a turban and was called al-Sebaei. Provoked, he roundly abused al-Qamani, describing him as a monkey and an apostate from religion, and all this live on air in front of millions.

  The speed monitor began to tick steadily as Fahd exceeded 120 kilometres per hour. He decelerated and his attention was caught by an Egyptian labourer at the side of the road, who was setting out upturned chrome bowls along a board lying across the tops of four barrels. Next to him was a camel pen surrounded by barbed wire and a gaggle of motorists handing over the price of a bowlful of fresh milk. He would squeeze out a bowl in front of them and they would gulp the milk down until the foam filled their noses and covered their moustaches, then continue on their way, belching as they inserted a tape of Islamic songs hymning the former glories of the Muslim world and extolling the Kalashnikov, the grave and the life hereafter.

  Summer had begun, he supposed. Ice cream vans were scattered about, along with sellers of Wadi melons, pomegranates from Ta’if and dates and milk from Qaseem. People straggled down both sides of Thamama Road into the early hours, searching for a cool breeze in the Nejd nights whose like was to be found nowhere else in the world.