Closing the door to his room he opened the box of colour-graded sticks and with lunatic preoccupation pushed the pastels in every direction over the paper; at times he even felt that the pastels were moving of their own accord, guiding his hand about. Here a long road, shadowed with a storm cloud, there a solitary bush, an old upturned cart and a murder of crows wheeling at the top of the sheet.
He laid the pastel aside and used his thumb to smudge the road’s far end into the darkened sky. The horizon merged. His fingers became tinted with colour until they almost turned into pastels themselves and he was unable to judge which was his forefinger and which the chalk. He was eager and felt that he was panting as he pulled and pushed the pastels.
Just before dawn he grew drowsy and his heavy head slumped over the page. He came to mid-morning, his drool spread out over the sheet in the shape of a rectangular trunk, a jinn’s smoky body sprouting from the upturned cart.
After giving up pencils, then pastels, Fahd became addicted to oil paints, brushes, easels and palettes, but here he was, sketching away with his pencil as he sat at the Tea and Coffee Pot Café, across from Carrefour in Granada Mall.
He had chosen a seat next to the window, its opaque plastic film shielding the customer inside from the mall’s bustle. By the chair he had selected this film had split, a small gap through which he could spy on the shoppers.
He ordered Turkish coffee and water, took from his pocket a piece of paper and a 0.5 millimetre gauge pencil and surveyed the scene through the window. Women in abayas that failed to hide their jeans, some pushing trolleys that were empty or contained a sprawling, playful child clutching the string of a helium balloon, others trailing an Indonesian maid pushing the trolley after them, while yet more clustered around the ATM machine by Samba Bank, ringed with mischievous children.
The Filipino waiter set down a small brass pot on the table and as Fahd gripped the handle to pour the thick coffee the waiter peered at the page and said that it was beautiful. Fahd thanked him, and sipping at his green porcelain cup he stared at what his hand had made.
A small car stopped at revolving door number four and Tarfah got out, walking calmly and confidently and gazing at the drivers sitting on the small square plots of grass near the security office. She walked inside.
To her left were the shops whose layout she knew well, while on her right lay Carrefour’s open doors and the khaki-clad security guards chatting to each other through the crowds of shoppers. She passed the women gathered around a cash machine and glanced over at the café, walking straight ahead until she reached the spacious court next to the escalators, then doubling back to let her see more easily into the café’s curtained-off men’s section and look for Fahd. She didn’t want to call him; she wanted to catch him unawares.
Walking past, Tarfah saw Fahd busily smudging the pencil with his thumb and swung right, approaching the exposed patch of glass and rapping suddenly at the window with her ring. As Fahd turned she withdrew a little and all he saw were her eyes, smiling through her niqab.
He hurriedly drained the water from his bottle and walked outside, accompanied by his mobile’s message tone. He opened the message:
Beware of the following phrases if uttered by someone older than you:
1. Let’s go bird hunting.
2. Would you like me to teach you how to wrestle?
3. What do you say we go up to the roof and look at the pigeons?
4. Would you like me to teach you how to drive?
5. Let’s go and find some jerboa in the desert.
6. Today, the bill’s on me.
7. Let’s open the wardrobe.
8. Let me show you my stamp album.
9. Let’s stay up and watch a video.
10. Let’s see how a gecko suckles her young.
Compliments of the Committee for Fighting Sodomy, Qaseem
Fahd closed his eyes and sighed, clinging to Tarfah’s hand for several minutes and then releasing it as they traversed the mall’s wide central passage and passed Carrefour. Noticing that he seemed a little put out she asked him what the matter was, but he told her it was nothing. Where were they going, he wanted to know. Her molten eyes gave her answer, but she added that if he was preoccupied or not in the mood they could grab a coffee and just go for a drive. They stopped at the Starbucks inside the main entrance.
Saeed was just fooling around. Whenever he got a message making fun of Qaseem and its inhabitants he would pass it on to Fahd, who would respond with sarcastic remarks about southerners.
As they bought their cappuccinos, Lulua’s mournful voice reproached him: she and her mother had been trying to get hold of him for two days, and their mother was exhausted, worn out trying to track him down. He tried making the excuse that he had been painting for the next spring exhibition and promised that he would visit them both that night.
As soon as they drove off Tarfah’s phone rang and she began hunting fretfully for it in her bag. Fahd was miles away, staring up at the advertising hoarding at the traffic lights while she giggled to her friend Wafaa, but he paid attention when she glanced over at him and said, ‘There’s a friend of mine who’s been doing “short time” with this guy but so far, no action. Looks like she’ll end up paying him for it!’
She ended the call and her laughter trailed away as she put the phone back in her bag. ‘She’s completely mad.’
‘Who?’
‘Wafaa, my friend. She worked on the programme for eradicating illiteracy for nine years. She studied psychology. And now they’ve cancelled it; they’ve cancelled the contracts of more than eight thousand female teachers … Imagine! Just like that!’
‘God! And what did she do?’
‘Nothing. They thought of staging a demo at the Department of Education in central Riyadh.’
‘If they tried that they’d end up wishing they were at home unemployed.’
‘Now she tells me that her friend in the programme suggested they form a troupe of wedding dancers, so Wafaa told her there was a much more enjoyable, easy and quick way to make cash.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Work as a Friday girl. “Short time” for a thousand riyals in furnished flats and in hotels for two and half. Amazing!’
‘Are you serious?’
‘No, I’m joking, you maniac. Did you believe me?’
‘Why wouldn’t I? Anything’s possible in this country.’ Fahd lowered his voice as though speaking to himself. ‘The women are turning into Friday girls and the boys are off to Iraq!’ Then: ‘Friday girl! I like that!’
Tarfah laughed. ‘That’s what they call them. We once asked Wafaa about her man and she said he was going to Bahrain. We really thought he was travelling, but she laughed at us and said it was code for a guy who drinks too much!’
He didn’t spend long with Tarfah that evening. They roamed the darkened neighbourhoods of North Riyadh for a while and he gave her a half-hearted peck. She felt hurt and asked him to go to his mother’s; they would meet tomorrow if they could.
–38 –
‘SAY SOMETHING!’ SAID LULUA.
‘Who to?’ Fahd answered, setting down the bag containing bread and three cartons of yoghurt that he had bought from the supermarket and the bakery next door.
‘Anyone on planet Earth would be nice.’
‘You mean the jinn?’ he said, smiling.
‘I know you don’t believe in those things but I swear to God I heard it. Its voice was completely different …’ Then: ‘I swear it wasn’t Mum speaking!’
He wasn’t convinced, but when he took his seat beside his mother, prostrate on her bed in the dining room, he handed her a glass of zamzam water. She took three sips, then sprinkled a few drops into his right hand and he stroked her brow and head as he muttered a Qur’anic verse.
It came to him that there was a spiritual cure that might save this ravaged body; even holding her hand, still beautiful, warm and soft, could give her new impetus. She adjusted herself and began
to tell him about his childhood, then his father. Her tears flowed and she was silent. She had remembered the bag, maybe. She asked him to call Lulua.
‘I’m making tea, Mum. Just a minute.’
‘Your father bequeathed it to you.’
She grabbed Fahd’s hand and squeezed it.
Choking back a sob, Fahd said sternly, ‘Let’s have none of that talk; it’s no good.’ Then he added, ‘God give you a long life. You’ll be there for my wedding and you’ll see your grandchildren.’
Wearily, Soha described to her daughter where the old black leather bag was kept on top of the wardrobe. She would need the little stepladder behind the kitchen door.
–39 –
TARFAH SENSED THAT FAHD’S usual high spirits were dampened; she missed the touch and tenderness she had come to expect. He was going through a crisis, she felt, but wasn’t telling her. Wasn’t she the queen of trauma and tragedy? How many dreadful things had happened to her, and she hadn’t gone under, rising phoenix-like from the ashes every time and telling Fahd in lavishly sarcastic tones: ‘Smile! You’re in the Kingdom of Human Kindness!’
She thought of the despondency that sometimes overwhelmed her when she was with him.
She was sitting in the dark of her top-floor bedroom in Suwaidi listening to the sunset call to prayer from a nearby mosque; it was the first time she had listened to it in such a downcast state: how could it be calling for peace of mind when she felt such hopelessness? As a child, whenever she’d felt sad or a strong urge to cry, she would creep into her wardrobe like a cat, closing the door on herself, shutting her eyes in the dark and letting her tears flow unchecked until her soul was purged and she could emerge to play and stampede about crazily.
All she remembered of her childhood was the bad and the sad, starting with being named Tarfah and, perhaps too, the superstition with which her immediate family and relatives poisoned her early years: that any woman called Tarfah was destined for bad luck in life. Though she hadn’t believed it, the years that followed had proved them right.
It was a mystery to her why her entire family should prefer her older sister, Asma. Was it because of her utter docility, the very opposite of Tarfah’s naughtiness? Or because Tarfah excelled at school while her older sister failed and had to repeat one year after another until they ended up together in the fourth year at primary school, before Tarfah overtook her and went to middle school first? Tarfah relied on her own talents, while her sister received assistance from private tutors, all to no avail. Was that really sufficient to make her family hate her, so that as a girl she often felt that she wasn’t their daughter at all, that she was in the wrong family? Neither their ideas nor their way of life tallied with her own and comparing her dark skin to her four fair sisters only made her more doubtful. When she was older and her father had died she would ask herself, ‘Did Mum sleep with someone else?’
Not a day passed without her being beaten for some reason, or for no reason at all, by her brutal father and her brothers. Even her youngest brother took pleasure in hurling his sandals at her when she walked by, as though she were a cat in the doorway that he wanted to drive off.
Nor was this confined to the immediate family; even her aunt preferred Asma. Yet despite her father’s harsh treatment he would call no one else when he wanted food, drink or clothes. Was it because she was more scrupulous than her sister, or because he wished to put Asma at ease and have the little servant girl Tarfah perform her tasks for her?
Her father had not loved her mother. She would complain about him, never letting him alone and always suspicious. One morning, months after his death, she told Tarfah that he had cheated on her, and the whore he’d cheated with had borne him a child.
‘That’s enough, Mum!’ Tarfah had cried. ‘Please, stop it! God rest his soul!’ Then added in a subdued tone, ‘Speak well of your dead.’
But the terror she felt at night as she looked back over her long life and her sense of alienation while surrounded by her family only grew stronger. She remembered that it had been her father’s dream to be blessed with a daughter who mispronounced her ‘rs’ to sound like ‘ls’. Maybe his lover had had this flaw of speech and he had longed to see it embodied in front of him at home. Tossing and turning in bed, Tarfah whispered to herself, ‘So why did he hate me if I fulfilled this dream of his?’
She never won his love and was helpless before her siblings’ mockery whenever she uttered a word that contained an ‘r’. They would mimic her and one would always shout: ‘I dare you to say, “Rabbits run right to rocks”!’
Tarfah was exceptionally brave and had a sharp tongue, but she never had it in her to tell her mother what she went through as a child for fear that she would punish her and step up her surveillance. She couldn’t find the courage to tell her about her cousin, some five years older than her, who had asked her to come to his house to see the hawk his father had bought. She went off with him and he had shown her a hawk of his own.
For days afterwards she felt irritable and guilty and when she saw him at the door would hate and blame herself, as though he had been perfectly within his rights and it was she who had done wrong. She was scared that he would tell on her; the sin was her own.
Tarfah neither hated nor loved her father, though by rights she should have loved him because he was her father. Whenever she grew angry with him and whispered to herself that she hated him she would quickly become flustered and fearful of divine retribution, even though she couldn’t remember him ever holding her or hugging her or stroking her hair; the very opposite of her uncle, who adored her, showering her with praise in front of her family and his own daughters, too, and never hesitating to give her a hug every time he saw her. In his tender embrace she found all that she lacked in her family home.
When her father died, Tarfah wept dementedly and cried in silence for a whole month, so that the women who had come to pay their condolences pitied her and called back later to ask after her. She cried like a child, repeating over and over, ‘Bring back my father!’ But with the passing of days she grew reconciled to circumstances and on the final day of her mother’s mourning period, as she sat with her in the still night, her mother told her what had never been told: how he had once made accusations against her honour, how he had done her wrong and abused her.
She talked of the girl he had loved before he had got married and how his family had refused to let him wed her, forcing him to marry her mother because she was a cousin and an orphan and his financial circumstances were weak enough that only his cousin, cheap and no bother, was within his means and he within hers. She told Tarfah how he had betrayed her with the girl he got pregnant and Tarfah had been unable to stop her until she had convinced her daughter that it had really happened.
Her mother had shattered that dazzling aura, the barrier of sanctity surrounding her father. What disappointment Tarfah felt! How she hated her mother for destroying the image of a strong father that she carried inside her! Yet she hadn’t blamed her.
To this day, Tarfah was amazed that her mother had observed the mourning period and carried out his last instructions (for the woman who observes the prescribed period of mourning shall make for her husband a dwelling in Paradise), continuing to give alms on his behalf and refusing to remarry. If his name ever came up she would praise him and perfume his memory before her sons and daughters, who came to feel proud of him.
Tarfah almost wept when she learnt of his betrayal and the pride felt by her brothers and sisters never touched her. She would laugh to herself to see them squirreling his portrait away in the wallets they carried in their pockets. She was the only one who didn’t keep a picture of him; she wouldn’t even look at one. She feared herself and she feared him. She sensed she would catch a look of reproach in his eyes, a reproach that would seize on the doubts that swirled inside her, stirred up by her revulsion at what her mother had told her.
These things kept Tarfah awake at night as she grew older and the passing of time eroded h
er hostility towards her family. She began to draw closer to them, to live alongside them in peace, until she married Sami and divorced two years later to return with quite different feelings. The gulf between them had grown and she felt more estranged than at any time before. Her room became her refuge and her world. True, her brothers certainly appeared to treat their sisters with kindness, alarmed and jealous for their well-being, but Tarfah thought them selfish and fake.
Over the years she tried to bridge the chasm dividing them. She was, undeniably, disobedient and foolish with an ungovernable tongue. She was incapable of keeping her counsel for anyone, answering back fearlessly. For that is how she saw herself: fearless and restoring what was rightfully hers. They, meanwhile, regarded her behaviour as vulgar, as a shamelessness and insolence that contrasted with her calm, well-mannered sisters. Tarfah thought them naïve idiots, mocking their staggering stupidity and laughing herself silly when they failed at school, and so nobody was ever happy for her when she did well.
–40 –
IN SPITE OF HER relationship with her father, Tarfah still wished that he had been there when she got engaged to Sami.
She wanted to marry Sami, but something told her that her father would have refused the match because she was yet to finish her studies and also because he evaluated men quite differently than her brothers, unmoved by material concerns and never flattering anyone. He hoped to see every one of his girls at university and in the best departments. He had no patience with absenteeism from school and would turn into a tyrant whenever his wife asked him to let Ahlam or Ilham take a day off. But after his death, anyone who wanted to go to school could go and if they couldn’t be bothered than no one would blame them. The house was transformed into a little city of chaos within a city beset by chaos.
One night, Tarfah read the little advertising slogan blinking on the ATM screen, which described the country as the Kingdom of Human Kindness. Putting the notes in her wallet she thought to herself, ‘Incredible! They’re calling it the Kingdom of Human Kindness! Wouldn’t the Kingdom of Chaos be better?’
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