Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  On his way over to see her he was eager and full of longing. He was listening to MBC FM and the voice of Abdel Majeed Abdullah streamed sweetly out. As soon as he got close he asked her where he should pick her up.

  ‘Entrance Three,’ she said.

  ‘Facing the schools, right?’ he asked to make sure. ‘The one opposite Nada Alley?’

  He called again to tell her to come outside and she took him by surprise, swaying slowly over. Arrogantly, he thought.

  She got in beside him, in one hand the olive green handbag embroidered with knights holding lances and arrows and in the other a plastic bag whose shop logo he couldn’t make out. She said that she had been going to call him but he had surprised her by stopping the car outside the entrance. There were no shoppers about, just a pair of security guards lighting their cigarettes.

  ‘It’s evening prayers,’ she said to him. ‘That’s why no one’s outside the entrance.’

  They drove along together.

  He asked if they should take a hotel room or a flat, or hide out in one of the unlit building lots since it was nearly nine and there wasn’t enough time to settle down for a long session.

  ‘Don’t mind,’ she said. ‘You decide.’

  They drove north, searching for a building plot. They passed the first unlit dirt road. She uncovered her face and he kissed her quickly. They decided to look for a flat. She suggested they head over to Fahd Crown Hotel on the airport highway and he explained that there wasn’t enough time to enjoy a place like that. They ran through the names of furnished flats they had visited and settled on a new flat in Nuzha that they hadn’t used before.

  He parked the car, consumed by the worry that Tarfah would search through his things. He always did his best to stop outside the entrance to the flats so he could see her body move if she bent down to have a rummage.

  The reception area was spacious and luxurious but no one was there. The door to a side room was ajar and he knocked gently, calling out, ‘Friend?’

  An Indian emerged. From his broken Arabic it was clear he was a recent arrival to the country. He rapped out the usual question—‘Family section?’—then picked up the key and Fahd followed him to the second floor. The corridor was clad in expensive marble and the doors on either side gave the impression that the flats within were clean and respectable.

  His first impression on opening the door to flat 18 was that it looked like a room in a highway motel. He looked at the bedspread, worn through from repeated washing. In view of the time, which was flying through their fingers, he decided to take the flat and handed over a photocopy of their forged marriage contract and one hundred riyals to an Egyptian employee who had arrived that moment. Tarfah was sitting in the car. He signalled to her that she should come over but she didn’t move. He phoned her and asked her to get out.

  Taking the key he walked ahead of her to the lift and when the door slid shut she threw herself into his arms. He told her the place was run down and filthy but searching for another and wasting time wasn’t an option. Her heart fluttered as did her delectable breasts, a photo of which she had sent to him on the phone that morning, showing two currants, pricked up behind the pink stretch top that pressed against them.

  This is me just woken up … she had written. Fresh as a daisy!

  He had spent half an hour enlarging the area over her breasts in an attempt to read the printed English slogan: Let’s dance the Hula-hula!

  He opened the door and shut it quickly behind them. The flat was pitch black. He tried turning on the lights but without success, flicking the switch by the door, in the bathroom and the bedroom, even the button for the air-conditioner. It was no use.

  ‘Lock the door,’ she said. ‘I’ll light the candle I brought last time.’

  They needed the air conditioner, he said, and lifting the receiver dialled reception. The Egyptian answered. ‘Look on your left, sir. Flip the big switch.’

  He opened the grey fuse-box and pressed the large rocker. Everything in the flat lit up. He slid home the bolt on the front door and she rushed into the bedroom. Taking off his shoes, his socks and his shimagh he went into the bathroom for a short while and when he came out found her doing herself up in front of the mirror on the dressing table, lightly spraying perfume over breasts that quivered beneath the perforated black satin.

  He hugged her hard and squeezed her sinuous hips. She kissed him and he let his hands creep over her. Besieged by fear of failure he attempted to arouse himself.

  Her moans grew louder and she pulled him towards the bed, but he was slack and limp and he turned on to his back beside her, staring at the ceiling. She rolled on to him, laughing, doing her best to make the moment light-hearted, but she couldn’t erase the fact that she was handling a flaccid piece of meat. She sat on the edge of the bed and heard him say, ‘The place is disgusting!’ then, ‘The filth in here makes me feel sick!’ as though searching for something to excuse his failure.

  He noticed that her back was half-naked and shivering and her head, with its exceptionally soft, exceptionally black hair was trembling violently. He tried to comfort her and stroked her back but she went over to the dressing table as though she were drugged, picked up her head covering and spread it over the dirty pillow. She laid his head back upon it and said, ‘Relax!’ then added with a strained smile, ‘Don’t let it bother you. Everything will get back to how it was, and better.’

  She sat next to him and told him a joke, but Fahd was still dwelling on his failure. At last he got up, got dressed and gave her a sad smile.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  Going over to the dressing table she took a pack of slender Davidoff cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, blowing the smoke into the room. She handed it to him and he took a single drag then returned it to her, saying, ‘Sometimes I think about what’s changed in our relationship: how I start to feel afraid before we even touch, how even as we’re fooling around and kissing I’m worrying I won’t get it up … and then I end up failing for real.’

  Tarfah didn’t fully understand what lay behind this but she worried that their love really had begun to wither, that one day, not long off now, she would lose him. Who would fill his absence? She laughed to herself, remembering that she had the same thoughts about Khaled, who had devoured her body for fully three years, and now here came Fahd al-Safeelawi invading her life and making her forget her former lover.

  The life she led with her four-year-old, Sara, was so much lovelier than time wasted with these wretches, she thought to herself, But what can I do when my instincts take over? How can I quench the flames? I’m tired of taking care of myself and I don’t want another woman in place of a man. How I hate that! Whenever Nada comes close to whisper in my ear, or puts her arm about my neck and pulls me towards her to say something, or presses herself against me it disgusts me more than I can say. ‘I don’t like girls rubbing up against me!’ I shout at her and she and cousin Samia laugh and Samia, that idiot, says, ‘So you like boys doing it, then?’

  Sometimes Samia’s stories astonished her, like the time she told Tarfah about those everything-for-two-riyal stores crammed with junk where the only floor space left were narrow passageways just wide enough for a single person. In the crowds that came during festivals and at the start of the school term young men would squeeze past her and bump against her on purpose. She paid no attention and did nothing.

  ‘Let them have their fun, poor things!’ she would say, shaking with laughter.

  Tarfah embraced Fahd by the door and he pulled her slim hips violently towards him then lifted her plump hand and gave it a chaste kiss. In the lift there was only enough time to raise her veil and snatch a quick kiss between the second and ground floors. Handing her the car keys he issued rapid intructions. ‘Walk straight out to the car and wait till I’ve finished with him.’

  Handing over the flat after just two or three hours was tricky, and he launched into his oft-repeated lie, this time asking about the Nuwara wedding hall. Wh
en the Egyptian receptionist professed his ignorance, Fahd told him that it was on Qaseem Road; did he know it? Shamefaced, the Egyptian shook his head and said that he was new in town, all he knew was this building, to which Fahd, bringing the conversation to its natural conclusion, said, ‘We’re off to a wedding. If we’re not back by one, consider the flat free and the deposit’s yours.’

  The Egyptian grinned gratefully and thanked him.

  On Tahliya Street the luxury vehicles coasted slowly by, blaring music as they went, and young men sat chatting in cafés. When he reached Coffee Day he asked her if she wanted an Americano or a cappuccino. She declined. He took out a rose and sniffed gaily at it, but it only made him feel intensely sad. He nearly wept as he thought of his life.

  After he left her at the mall, she didn’t call him for an hour. He showered and switched on the television and then phoned her and asked, ‘Where are you?’

  She was yet to leave the mall. Her brother hadn’t come. This time he felt her reproach more strongly. He hadn’t given his lover what she needed; his soul wasn’t what it was, his heart was just a witless blood pump. After switching off the light he wept and told himself it was a good thing Saeed wasn’t there because this was a golden chance to make fun of him.

  Tarfah rang. She was doing her best to sound cheerful but her voice was sad. She was practically certain that there was another woman in his life and that he, so sensitive, didn’t have it in himself to break her heart. He tried convincing her that he was going through a tough time with his sick mother, but gave none of the details about his personal life that she was looking for. Their conversations were about love and longing, or about the scandalous friends she described with sweet sarcasm, or about his problems with painting, his ambitions and his negative views of Saudi artists.

  –48 –

  FAHD HAD HAD NOTHING all day except a dried-up donut taken from the fridge and a cup of filter coffee. He had been wholly absorbed by his painting, Mecca. He was wired. In his mind sat Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and facing it, an image of an uncovered marketplace in the small Basque town with warplanes overhead pouring down fire and obliterating the strolling citizens.

  He painted a rooftop, broad as a desert and surrounded by minarets, and corpses sprawled all over the canvas, heads riddled with sniper rounds and trucks transporting the dead like crates of aubergines and tomatoes.

  Fahd sometimes wondered what had caused him to love art so, to become addicted to the heady reek of oils. Was it a true passion, a hidden need to express what lay within him? Was it a response to the prophecy of Mustafa, the Sudanese artist he had met as a boy with his father in Thalatheen Street? Was it merely a stubborn, perverse desire to crush his uncle, always bellowing that on the Day of Judgement Fahd would be asked to breathe life into his creations?

  He started to make a preliminary sketch for the painting, laying down pencil lines angrily and sadly. Then he threw the sketch away and began another until, with the tragedy and drama of Guernica in his thoughts, he made the decision to paint in only two colours, black and white. He drew widely scattered circles, heads like fat melons in a big field with small holes from which black liquid ran out to the earth.

  He was working away, sighing from time to time with suppressed exasperation, when it suddenly occurred to him that a painting finished in anger would turn out excessively sentimental and he had better calm down a little. Taking a cup of coffee he went over to his father’s bag.

  He opened it and rummaged through the books and papers, taking out the olive stone prayer beads and turning them one by one between his thumb and index finger, before returning to his chair beside the canvas.

  He picked up a brush and painted one stone white then another grey. This pleased him: a fresh distraction that lifted his burden of worry. Squeezing a tube of red he deposited a quantity the size of a small bird’s talon on a stone and with his thumb smeared the paint over its surface until it was bright red all over. He did the same with another stone in yellow, then another in green, and so on until the dull loop had been transformed into an African song, warm and pulsing with life. It was as though he had restored the prayer beads to life.

  His phone’s message tone trilled. He made no move to get up and ten minutes later it sounded again. Laying the prayer beads on the palette he slowly made his way over to the pocket of his thaub and read the two messages, one from Tarfah and one from Lulua: Fahd, Mum’s been asking for you since yesterday.

  He went back to the canvas hanging on the easel and contemplated the corpses, sprawled chaotically and absurdly. He heard the door of the flat slowly open then close, and measured footsteps proceed to the kitchen that opened out on to the small living room. Water poured into a cup and glugged into a thirsty body. There was the light tap of the glass on the kitchen table, then Saeed’s voice a few paces away: ‘Superb, Fahd! You really are a great artist!’

  Fahd turned to him with raised eyebrows. ‘Huh! How did you get in here?’

  Saeed laughed pointing at the canvas. ‘The door, but it looks like you need to get away from this picture!’

  Saeed went inside to sleep while Fahd worked on. The features of masked men and soldiers started to appear. As the time approached one in the morning he felt his chest constrict, as though twenty soldiers had thrown him down and were sitting on his heart. His breathing became irregular. He washed the brush he was holding and quickly cleaned the palette knife, then doused his face in a continuous stream of water at the kitchen sink. He put on his thaub and left without his shimagh. He started the car and drove away, directionless.

  Paralysis crept through Riyadh’s body, slumbering like a mysterious woman. The streetlights were faint as they fought against the columns of dust laying their fire over the city. In the murk of the heavy dust the bridge by Mamlaka Tower was invisible, likewise the crystal ball atop Faisaliya Tower. Cars driven by high-spirited young men waited at traffic lights. He pulled up beside one. On the back seat three heads bobbed uproariously as the voice of Rashed al-Fares split the dust of the night. Fahd looked over at them with a smile. In the front seat was a young man, his hair tied back in a ponytail, gesturing at some girls who sat behind the smoked windows of a pearl-grey Cadillac Escalade. One of them opened her window and made an obscene gesture with her middle finger. They erupted with a loud yell accompanied by the squeal of tyres as they chased after the girls’ Indian driver, well-trained in these night time excursions.

  Fahd glanced in the direction of Shoe Palace and considered paying a visit to his mother and sister. It was late, though. He took a right on to King Fahd Road and opened the window—perhaps the twenty soldiers slumped over his chest might be swept away—but the surging dust, like a wild squall of rain, whipped at his face and hurt his eyes. He reconsidered his need for fresh air and closed the window.

  If he wept softly now, he whispered to himself, it might ease his cramped heart and the smugly squatting soldiers would fly away. Opening the glove box he took out the first tape he found, then pushed it into the slot, and Fairouz’s voice emerged, wounded and sorrowful:

  I yearn for you and cannot see you, nor can I speak with you;

  From the backstreets, from behind the shutters, I call out to you.

  He thought of the nights long ago, his father reading in his room and Fairouz’s voice melting softly in his ears.

  He didn’t go over the bridge over Imam Road, but stopped on the far left, by the Abdel Lateef Jameel traffic lights, and looped back round to the petrol station on the corner, stopping in a parking bay outside a Coffee Day kiosk. He ordered a medium-sweet Turkish coffee and a small bottle of water and drove slowly along Qaseem Road sipping his coffee as Fairouz summoned up a sad memory of his father, drawing his final breath on this accursed stretch of road.

  When he returned, having driven some seventy kilometres, he wasn’t breathing calmly as he had hoped.

  A completely jinxed night, he told himself.

  In bed he tossed and turned and drank water until t
he daylight came and he dozed off, discontent.

  Part 7

  The jinn’s deadly laugh

  A settlement bleak as a buckler’s back

  About whose edges sing the jinn by night.

  Al-Asha

  –49 –

  THAT DISTANT MORNING IT was not the cries of his mobile’s message alert that woke Fahd, but a repeated ringing, like weeping. Very sluggishly he opened his eyes, his head weighed down with sorrow, and saw the number of a landline blinking on the screen. With a sense of foreboding and disquiet he pressed the green button and his uncle’s voice, which he hadn’t heard since leaving home, informed him that he was at King Khaled University Hospital: Fahd’s mother was very ill and they were waiting in the emergency ward.

  ‘What happened to her?’ Fahd shouted frantically.

  ‘She’s in a coma at the moment,’ his uncle said, ‘and we hope that God will deliver her from harm.’

  He hadn’t said that she was dead, but the tone and numb quality of his voice hinted at something dreadful.

  Fahd rushed into his thaub and shimagh and drove recklessly to the hospital. At the second roundabout just before the exit for the university, the car swerved violently and he lost control, though luckily there was no one on the internal road except for him. He pointed the car in the right direction and drove calmly on, muttering prayers, until he reached the lights, where he took a left then went right into the bays opposite the emergency ward. He parked and sprinted off, shooting past the parked ambulances like a sand grouse flapping over the desert.

  Behind the glass door, his uncle and cousin Yasser were standing with the doctor. As soon as he opened the door and went inside his uncle greeted him and kissed him on both cheeks, then led him to a seating area near the trolley beds by the door. He eased Fahd on to a wobbly leather chair, then sat down beside him and said, ‘May God console you. What God gives and what He takes belong to Him alone.’