Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  The teenager froze, then snatched up her bag and went outside, cocking her head to the left. In the corridor leading to the headmistress’s office Halima said to her, ‘Tarfah, your father’s waiting for you at the entrance.’

  Pulling the monitor’s hand to make her stop she cried, ‘Has something happened to my family?’

  ‘No. You’re suspended.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What, you don’t know?’

  At break time a sheikh had come to give the girls a religious lecture. He sat in the security guard’s room, took the microphone and began addressing the girls who were drawn up in orderly rows in the playground.

  Tarfah was rebellious and domineering and held sway over a little gang made up of Amani, Amal and Jawaher. The girls were sitting next to each other for the lecture and Tarfah started making fun of the sheikh’s speech, waving her hands and waggling her head, a living representation of the bewildered old man hidden from view behind the four walls of the guard’s room. Her friends, almost dead from laughter, buried their faces in their arms.

  The headmistress had been standing on the edge of the playground, and she walked up and pointed with her stick, calling out Tarfah’s name. Tarfah stood up and the headmistress signalled for her to move to the end of the row. When the lecture was over and the pupils scattered back to their classrooms Tarfah went to see the headmistress, who hadn’t even had time to sit down at her desk.

  ‘Why was I moved during the speech?’ Tarfah asked boldly. ‘They were all laughing!’

  ‘That is correct. However, moving one girl is quite sufficient and in any case you were the cause of the disturbance. Everything quietened down after you left.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s because they’ve got connections … teachers or monitors or …’

  This was a reference to Amani, whose sister taught maths at the school.

  ‘That’s quite enough insolence!’ broke in the headmistress, waving her stick threateningly.

  ‘I’m not insolent!’

  ‘Get out of my sight before I beat you.’

  The headmistress shoved her.

  ‘Insolence!’ said Tarfah, her mouth twisted in contempt.

  ‘Come here, you little bitch!’ the headmistress shouted.

  Tarfah turned towards her, her eyes throwing out sparks and her hands trembling with rage, then spat at her in disgust as she shouted, ‘You’re the bitch!’

  The headmistress drew up an order for three days punitive exclusion, then called her father and asked him to come over immediately and collect his daughter who was being suspended for misbehaviour.

  As the monitor accompanied Tarfah to the exit, Tarfah begged her to let her apologise to the headmistress; she might change her mind. Knocking on the steel gate to make the guard open up, the monitor said, ‘The headmistress has given an order. It’s been signed and sent.’

  She gave Tarfah a superior, vicious look. ‘Try behaving yourself next time.’

  The fourteen-year-old Tarfah went out, tripping over her abaya and holding her school bag and the suspension order. Her father took her away. Her mother was in hospital, having given birth early that morning to a little girl, Ilham. No sooner did he reach the house than he dragged her inside like a piece of livestock and pelted her with blows without knowing why he did so himself. He was panting, hitting and shouting,

  ‘You want to show us up in front of other people? God destroy you!’

  He left her crumpled up in her grimy abaya and went out, locking the front door and Tarfah burst into noisy tears, wailing, ‘God curse you! May He bring you death! Please God, let me die and leave this life.’

  She hated her father very much; she hated living with him. It tormented her that the only reason she had spat at the filthy headmistress was for his sake. The woman had called her a bitch, which made him a dog. She’d been defending him!

  After she had calmed down, having woken from a nap that lasted the whole afternoon, she stood in front of the mirror and said to herself, ‘The headmistress is right: I am a bitch!’

  Giving a sigh, she added, ‘And my father’s a dog, too, a dog sixty times over!’

  They were taught in their lectures that flirting was a serious matter, one of the greatest sins: a disgrace in this world and in the world to come an exceeding torment—words that fell heavy on the soul. Just considering the possibility (i.e. of talking with a young man) would strike the young girls not only with fear, but with outright terror.

  After that day, however, Tarfah longed for the chance, if only to defy her father, though she was not in need of a man, or a woman for that matter; she needed to speak and spill it out, if only to a mirror, so she might bring a halt to the oppression that had begun to eat away at the edges of her two beautiful hands.

  Her father was troubled by her. Her mischief and insubordination made him anxious. She wasn’t like his other daughters, who were utterly calm and cold. There was a hidden fire within her. She loved people, mixed with them and made friends with all the other pupils. Everyone knew her for her rowdiness and good humour while at her sisters’ schools their fellow pupils were scarcely aware of their existence.

  It was a shameful day for her father when he first introduced a telephone into their house in Suwaidi, where the family was at that time going through something of a crisis. Nobody was to answer when it rang except him, or their mother if he was away. Having taken the caller’s name and handed the receiver to one or other of his daughters, he would remain next to her, listening in. The reason for all this angst over the telephone was a mystery to the girls. Of all of them Tarfah was the most resentful of her father and mother; how she longed to leap up at the first ring and answer!

  The only thing that recommended her to her father was her excellent marks at the end of each year, which made him happy. Neither did he have any worries about her gang of friends at primary school—where they were taught by a paid tutor who was known to the family and who also gave lessons to the daughters of neighbours he knew—most of whom came from villages around Riyadh such as Sudair, Huraimla and Thadiq or from the traditional city neighbourhoods of Old Shamesi, Sabala, Umm Sulaym and Jaradiya. But when he registered her at the Twenty-Sixth Middle School he became uneasy. It was an excellent government-run establishment, part of a complex that included primary, middle and secondary schools, but its pupils were utterly different to those at her fee-paying primary. They were fearless.

  Tarfah gradually grew apart from her village friends and extended the circle of her acquaintances until she came to lead a small gang of her own. She was in charge, the one who performed all the most daring missions. Hearing stories of girls’ relationships with boys, she was amazed and aspired to do likewise. She would see the secondary school students, with their clothes, their sexiness and their shameless gestures, and returning home would be shocked by her mother’s refusal of her reasonable requests:

  ‘Mum, I want to cut my hair.’

  ‘Mum, all my friends are dying their hair.’

  But her mother refused and refused until she grew weary and thinking of a way to shut Tarfah up, told her to ask her father, at which point Tarfah’s demands instantly ceased. That wasn’t so important, however; the difficult part was how to broach the subject of her teachers’ demands with her father because he would meet them with abuse and invective until, resolving to have done with his insults, she made her older sister Asma ask in her stead, at which he responded instantly.

  Tarfah hated them all, starting with her own name, which had been given to her in memory of her grandmother. Her sisters, Asma, Amal, Ahlam and Ilham, had modern, pretty names that started with vowels, while hers stood out like a mark of shame. Why Tarfah?

  ‘A curse on my grandmother and my grandmother’s father!’ she would say to herself when the intoxication of her rancour reached its peak. ‘Their names all begin with A or I—soaring, confident letters—and I get a T, squat and heavy as a toad.’

  ‘It’s enough that you have the honour of
bearing your grandmother’s name and keeping her memory alive,’ they would say and she would weep.

  ‘Damn her and damn her memory! Who is she, Lady Diana and no one told me?’

  Despite the strong, undaunted image she presented to her sisters, Tarfah’s existence was fringed with tears. The thought of running away had often got the better of her as a teenager, but to actually take off? Where to? Not to mention the fact that the idea was insane and extremely difficult to pull off. It was perhaps her greatest fantasy.

  She would be the last person in the house to go to sleep and she found herself in the grip of a strange habit: she would make her way to the front door and, opening it, would look up the street in both directions, though mostly peering to her left where the street stretched furthest with a mysterious turning at the far end.

  For several nights she went on opening the door and looking left, as though waiting for someone or something, until one night she felt the sharp edge of a leather sandal strike the top of her head, then a meaty palm twist her face round and a savage kick to her body. It was her father, beating her and swearing at her, biting his tongue to muffle his voice for fear of waking the household or creating a scene.

  She ran to her bed and crept beneath the blanket, stuffing her sleeve in her mouth to silence the sound of her sobs. Catching up with her he stood before her body interred in the blanket, then kicked at her foot.

  ‘Cut it out! Understood?’

  She cut it out and fell silent and in the morning he came to wake her up as usual, with a sudden prod from his foot.

  Whenever Tarfah remembered those times she would ask herself, Why was I standing there at the door? And even if his suspicions that I was waiting for someone were correct, why didn’t he ask me who it was?

  Two days after the incident her father brought it up again. He hadn’t told her mother, but he impressed upon her that she had better watch out. His attentions became so oppressive that if he sat to sip his cup of coffee at sunset and Tarfah wasn’t there in front of him he would dispatch Amal or Ahlam to find her and report what she was up to.

  Sometimes, she would watch their neighbour as he stood outside the door to his house, patting the head of his young son or even sitting him on his lap, though he was really too old for it. Occasionally, he would take the boy’s hand and laugh and play with him. Whenever Tarfah saw this she either laughed or felt scornful. From her parents she had learnt that patting on the head was a sin; it was a form of sexual harassment and molestation, even when it was the father himself that did it.

  Now, grown up, with her second husband gone and her only daughter, Sara, sharing her bed, she still woke every morning with the feeling that any moment a foot would strike her where she lay, even now, a full ten years after her father’s death.

  Her father had been so tender and jolly with his brother’s daughters. She would be consumed by jealousy to see him laughing and joking with her cousin Maha, who openly prayed that God grant him a long life instead of her own father.

  ‘If only God had taken you with him!’ Tarfah would mutter to herself.

  –36 –

  If only God had taken me with him!

  FAHD HAD REPEATED THESE words to himself many times through his endless misery in the week that followed his father’s burial beneath the soil of the Naseem Cemetery. He said them again after his mother’s marriage, against his wishes, to the uncle he couldn’t stand, and after learning of his mother’s death by torture. And, finally, he said them as he sat there in the detention cell of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, where he was merely a rich joke in the mouths of the bearded men who brought him for interrogation: the hawk-eyed man and with him a muscular fellow, cheerful and mocking, and a third individual with an uncovered head and an incipient bald patch at the front of his pate.

  They sat him on a chair at the far side of the room and the hawk-eyed man scattered his belongings on the table, tipping the bag and letting them fall: his wallet, a gift from Tarfah with the Givenchy logo, a cheap pen, the 3G Nokia mobile phone, various bits of paper (mainly receipts from Maktaba), a fob in the form of a small silver elephant from which hung the keys to his Hyundai, Saeed’s flat and the inner and outer doors of their house in Ulaya, and the primitively-worked olive-stone prayer beads.

  ‘Goodness!’ the balding man said sarcastically. ‘All this in your pockets?’

  ‘Yes, sheikh.’

  ‘The brother is a Saudi?’ he asked, scrutinising Fahd’s features.

  ‘Of course! The ID card’s in front of you!’

  ‘I know that. I can see it. But you don’t look right.’

  ‘Maybe your mother isn’t Saudi,’ said the strongman with the massive face.

  ‘That’s right, she’s from a Jordanian family.’

  ‘So you’re a mongrel?’

  ‘Half Saudi, then!’ he said, chuckling happily.

  Staring at the papers and receipts the balding man said, almost in a murmur, ‘Half a man, in other words …’

  Fahd sat there, trapped by the three men. One of them studied his ID card. ‘Which branch of the al-Safeelawis is this?’

  ‘The Qaseem lot.’

  The balding man peered at him mistrustfully. ‘Where in Qaseem?’

  ‘My family is from Muraidasiya.’

  ‘Do you know Abu Ayoub?’

  ‘Sheikh Saleh …’ the hawk-eyed man said by way of explanation.

  ‘He’s my uncle!’ He almost added, ‘And my mother’s husband!’ but a lump rose in his throat and he fell silent.

  ‘Blessings!’ said the hawk-eyed man, then added offensively. ‘On him, not you.’

  ‘As for you, who cares?’ said the strongman.

  Pips of sweat had started to appear on the bald patch of the man with the uncovered head. He drew a pen from his pocket and sliding the point beneath the string linking the widely spaced prayer beads he lifted them towards his nose and gave a tentative sniff, his eyes blinking rapidly and anxiously, then slowly moved them across to the hawk-eyed man and lifted them to his nose. The hawk-eyed man sniffed twice, moved his head back, then leant forward and sniffed again, his eyebrows raised. The balding man slowly transferred them to the nose of the strongman.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked Fahd.

  ‘Prayer beads.’

  ‘Why are they all coloured like an African necklace?’

  After a period of silence Fahd replied, ‘I painted them. I’m an artist.’

  The balding man slowly raised his eyes towards him. ‘You draw human beings?’

  ‘Everything.’ Even nudes, he almost added.

  An Indonesian entered carrying pots of tea and coffee, placed them on a table in the corner of the room, then poured coffee for the three men. Having put the prayer beads into a small envelope, the balding man rose to his feet and tipped a few drops of coffee on to his thumb, unwilling to wet it with his tongue after it had touched the beads lest the black magic pass to his mouth, then into his body, and he die. He wiped the moistened thumb on to the glued flap on the envelope and pressed it shut.

  The strongman whispered a few words in his ear and he nodded in agreement. The hawk-eyed man, who had heard nothing of this but clearly understood the secret message, nodded in turn.

  Fahd stayed staring towards them anxiously. He remembered a newspaper report he had read a year back about a witch who had been seen by the men from the Committee, fleeing her flat on a broomstick after they had raided it and discovered prayer-beads, amulets and charms.

  Witch arrested in Medina; Den of black magic raided

  Ukaz, 29 May 2006

  Yesterday morning (Monday) members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice received a surprise when they raided a den of black magic in the neighbourhood of Ard Mahbat, near Seeh in Medina, and found more than twenty women in the company of an African witch, naked as the day she was born.

  The real surprise was not her refusal of the blanket provided to cover he
r nakedness, but that she flew from the room like a bird and disappeared from the flat to the amazement of more than twenty members of the Committee who were present.

  A terrifying landing

  The chase was on.

  Committee members set out in pursuit, hunting for the witch through the upper and lower levels of the four-storey building, the sorceress having vanished from the second floor. During their search they came across a citizen in his pyjamas with his children behind him, appealing for help from his fellow residents. The citizen informed them that a naked African woman had dropped from the bedroom ceiling into the middle of his sleeping children, terrifying them and setting them screaming and wailing.

  ‘When I went to see what was going on in the bedroom,’ he added, ‘my children told me about the bizarre scene they had just witnessed and when I realised it was a witch we all fled from the flat.’

  Witch hunters

  Ascending to the fourth floor the Committee members located the completely naked witch in a citizen’s flat and loudly recited the call to prayer and the Ayat al-Kursi to paralyse her. One Committee member then threw a blanket over her until her clothes could be recovered, and once dressed she was arrested.

  A source at the Committee stated that the operation to arrest the witch and her accomplices was led by Sheikh Faheed al-Oufi, head of the Committee’s centre in Harra Gharbiya. Recovered from the witch’s room were prayer beads, amulets, written charms, magical knots, instructional videos for the practice of black magic and a belt of the sort worn around the skirts of female primary school pupils, indicating that a schoolgirl had been bewitched. A Qur’an was also found beneath the witch’s chair.

  Part 5

  An old black bag

  –37 –

  IN THE MONTHS THAT followed his father’s passing Fahd discovered drawing in pastels and for some time afterwards he stayed devoted to the technique. At that time he didn’t use an easel.