Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  He began to talk about his mother’s virtues and piety while Fahd raised his bare feet, which he had freed from his sandals that lay on the tiled floor, and placed them on the edge of the chair in a squatting position. He gripped his head in his hands and his slender body started to shake silently as his uncle consoled him, ‘Weeping cannot help the dead. What she needs from you now is prayer and patience. Umm Fahd was a true believer, a godly woman; she lived like a companion of the Prophet, may God have mercy on her.’

  When he had recovered from the fright and shock of the situation, the doctor came over, offered his condolences and told him that she was lying in bed three if he wanted to see her. Fahd instantly recalled standing with Saeed before the receptionist at Shamesi Hospital’s emergency ward, the receptionist suggesting they go to the morgue to examine the body and see if it was his father.

  Fahd stood up, disoriented and nervous, and went in, sweeping back the white curtain that hid the bed from the corridor with trembling hands. His uncle came in with him for a little while and Fahd burst into tears as he kissed her head and the golden hairs that spilled from beneath the bed sheet. The doctor gestured at the uncle to go outside and leave her son with his mother. He was kissing her, imploring her, trying to assuage his suffering, his sorrow and his tortured conscience.

  Where he got the courage to expose her white brow and kiss it he didn’t know. He searched for her hands, kissed them humbly, then kissed her feet. He noticed that her feet were swollen and saw that the ends of her legs were blotched and bloated with water. He lifted the cover from her glowing face and looked at her neck and shoulders where there were clear signs of bruising. He started shaking and rushed out to the doctor, taking him by hand and steering him to an out of the way spot. He asked the doctor if he had seen the bruises and injuries on his mother’s body. The doctor nodded and stated without being asked that he didn’t believe they had been the cause of her death. But who had beaten her like that? Fahd wanted to know and started yelling down the corridor, ‘My mother’s dead! Someone killed her!’

  The doctor calmed him down and his uncle and Yasser came over with Ibrahim, who had just that moment arrived and now embraced Fahd and offered his condolences.

  They took him to an empty waiting room. The uncle explained that ten days previously an Egyptian sheikh had blown on her and diagnosed that she was possessed. Moreover the infidel jinn inside her had spoken aloud in a voice heard by Yasser, Lulua and himself; the sheikh had even held a conversation with it, and it had promised to leave her, but yesterday it had reneged on its vow and defiantly refused to come out from her body. The sheikh had been forced to beat it until it did. He kept beating her until the jinn fled and its voice fell silent, then asked them to let her sleep so she could rest. She had slept, her eyes like clouds that couldn’t rain, and failed to awaken for dawn prayers the following day.

  She had slept with her face covered completely with her prayer robe, only her reddened feet showing. Pill bottles lay beside her; the voice of Imam al-Sudais faded away from within her mobile phone as he read surat Maryam, the sura that she loved so much. There was a bottle of zamzam water, bundles of paper inscribed with saffron, a slip covered with Qur’anic verses written in saffron and steeped in a cup of yellowed water, her Qur’an with an ostrich feather marking surat al-hashr, a small booklet of prayers, and grief suppressed, soaring on wings of pain, tears cocooned in the hanging curtains and the angel of a tormented death gathering up his things and bestowing a last glance on her before departing through the window. Outside there were men by the dozen, girls from middle school in Khazan Street. In Fouta Park playful children tumbled gleefully about. Employees of Jordanian and Palestinian eateries stood on the pavement as she passed by, flying, robed in white, face smiling despite the cloud of sorrow hovering round her eyes.

  Fahd stood up and made for the doctor, then turned, bewildered, towards the emergency ward’s entrance. Grabbing the arm of the dark-skinned security guard he said in a harsh voice, ‘An Egyptian beat my mother to death. Call the police.’

  The man moved away and made a call, speaking for several minutes as he took notes on the table by the outer door. Fahd’s mobile barked and, choking on the horror of the situation, he explained to Saeed what had happened: ‘My mother’s been killed, if you can believe it.’

  Alarmed, Saeed said that he was on his way and advised him to investigate. ‘You have to find out what happened, Fahd. Aunt Soha was as much my mother as she was yours.’

  –50 –

  FAHD PACED LIKE A wolf outside the emergency ward, passing back and forth before the glass door as though it were an iron cage standing between him and freedom.

  He saw his friend Saeed rushing down the west-most steps from the uncovered parking bays, looking bewildered and lost as he advanced. Saeed hugged Fahd to his chest, pulling his head towards him and kissing it as he muttered in distress, ‘May God console you and give us strength in times of trouble.’

  He began comforting him with commonplaces: this is the road we all must travel, maybe her passing gave her relief from the suffering of her illness.

  ‘But it’s murder, Saeed, not natural causes.’

  ‘Fine, so what now?’

  ‘I’ve brought in the police and the detective’s here now.’ He pointed inside. ‘He’s interviewing my uncle at the moment.’

  They went into reception. Yasser was leaning against the corridor wall looking right to where his father sat before the detective, talking to him with intensity and conviction and gesturing with both his hands, tugging every now and then on the shimagh as it slipped to the back of his head. Yasser was watching his father but couldn’t hear him.

  A fat man next to Fahd suddenly rose to his feet, the bottom half of his plump calves showing beneath the hem of the white thaub. ‘Peace be upon you and the mercy of God.’

  Raising his head, Fahd saw a stout-bodied Egyptian with a pale, round face beneath which a carefully trimmed black beard lay coiled, and a miswak that he chewed continuously and anxiously on both sides of his mouth. Fahd answered without holding out his hand. The man went over to the glass door and spoke to the security guard who pointed towards Fahd. The Egyptian sheikh came towards him, breathing unevenly, and warmly shook his hand, extending his condolences, invoking God’s mercy on the deceased and insisting on the inevitability of death and fate.

  Throwing his hands up in the man’s face Fahd screamed, ‘How could you kill a sick and frail woman, you criminal?’

  His rage and wild cries were met with calm and dignity.

  ‘God grant you the best reward,’ the sheikh intoned, crushingly emotionless, until the guard intervened and took them both outside. Fahd continued to call down eternal torment and hellfire on his head while the sheikh kept his features as impassive as the dead. ‘God guide you,’ he said, his glassy eyes staring into space and avoiding looking directly into Fahd’s face.

  After Fahd had calmed down a little and asked him why he had done it, the sheikh embarked on an explanation that the Prophet, too, had performed Qur’anic readings, then informed him that her husband, Fahd’s uncle, had also taken part in the assault. He described it in detail.When the demon’s harsh voice was first heard, Abu Ayoub had shouted at Lulua to fetch him a heavy stick: ‘Give us the broom handle.’ She had searched the kitchen and found it behind the door. She asked him what was the matter and he replied that the jinn had begun to speak and that the sheikh would now flog it until it left Soha’s body. As he explained this he was rushing over to hand the broom to the sheikh, who requested that Soha’s arms and legs be held down and started to beat her, first on her back, then upon her shoulders, since the demon was known to stand on the left shoulder. She was wailing in a voice eroded by exhaustion and effort until it sounded like the lowing of an ailing cow, the sheikh thrashing at her savagely before handing over to Abu Ayoub, who beat her calf muscles then her feet. Finally, with Soha cursing him listlessly, the Egyptian whispered to Yasser to hand him a scalpel, wh
ich the latter took from his pocket as if prepared for this very moment. The sheikh sliced her thumb and out flew sticky black blood, the blood of both the infidel demon and Soha’s spirit, after which she slept peacefully.

  The sheikh said that she would wake the next day a different person, her health transformed; all they had do was cover her face with a light blanket until noon the following day.

  But she slept forever.

  Invisible birds swooped down over the body stretched out in the dining room, while Dr Yasser, his eyes as round as an owl’s behind his glasses, gazed at the corpse with pride: all the knowledge and learning he had accumulated over the course of seven years at the College of Medicine in King Saud University had failed. The only true medicine, he now knew, was the Qur’anic cure.

  –51 –

  ABU AYOUB’S FACE HAD darkened, either from grief or from his anxiety over the investigation and the questions about death and crime. Yasser trailed him like his shadow as the detective summoned the Egyptian sheikh, who handed over his residence permit. The detective jotted down a few pieces of information and began questioning him about the events of the previous night.

  How painful for Fahd to recall the previous evening: dust settling thick over Riyadh, the city swimming in heavy layers of dust that clogged eyelashes and flew up nostrils to enter the brain, dust caking the heart.

  He thought of how he had gone out after midnight and begun gloomily circling the streets, unable to sleep or breathe. He remembered stopping at the traffic lights at the junction of the Urouba and Ulaya roads, thinking that he would visit his mother if it weren’t so late. Had that been the moment, the instant her breath grew still? Had she looked at the qibla, towards Mamalka Tower where Fahd sat, and given up her soul? Had he not seen, for instance, a butterfly fly through the grime, or a blinded pigeon stagger into the lampposts by Ulaya Mall, or maybe fall at the feet of the security guards by the entrance to the parking bays of Mamlaka Tower? Might his mother’s soul have been flapping away, sad, listless and content, scornful of the world, of people, of this extraordinary country? Was her soul yet to depart, the thick staff at that very moment lifting into air full of dust and dirt to descend with the lisping whistle of a high wind fleeing the backstreets?

  Through the door of the emergency ward came a man in his forties carrying documents and dressed in civilian clothes and a shimagh. He passed quickly inside and greeted the doctor, speaking to him for a few moments, before going to stand over the detective and leafing through the ten sheets of paper loaded with sadness and anger, where Soha’s name was listed like that of a soldier struck down by a stray bullet before ever reaching the field of battle.

  Yasser suddenly materialised alongside the man and appeared to discuss something important with him. Fahd approached, leaving Saeed sitting on a plastic chair like those usually found in public parks. The man in the civilian clothes, who was the senior detective, was explaining to Yasser the procedure that would be followed in this case: the body would be transferred to the morgue at Shamesi General Hospital where it would be dissected to establish the cause of death. Yasser was trying to persuade him to bring things to a close without carrying out the autopsy, since the family wouldn’t permit his aunt’s body to be exposed to the gaze of strangers, its sanctity and dignity violated by the surgeon’s scalpels. There was just no need for it.

  From beside them Fahd suddenly asked, ‘Who are you to decide if we need it or not? Did you lot need to flog her to death?’

  Yasser, the honorary doctor, waved his hands frantically in the face of his angry, grief-stricken cousin as he tried to explain that according to tests and X-rays her death had been inevitable.

  ‘The disease had spread to her lungs and there was no hope of recovery so we tried curing her with the Qur’an. We’d heard that God had cured many people through traditional Islamic healing.’

  The senior detective remarked that there had been a similar case two days previously in Dawadmi. The victim had been a ten-year-old boy who was beaten to death. He mentioned that there were many cases of people being tortured to exorcise jinn and demons.

  As the three of them stood in the passage opposite the curtained-off beds, Abu Ayoub came over and stated that the best way to honour the dead was burial. Death was a part of life, he said: Umm Fahd’s death had been decreed and might atone for her sins, for a Muslim’s suffering on earth shall ease the torment they face in the afterlife. The senior detective was nodding in agreement. Abu Ayoub went on: the autopsy would delay the burial and complicate matters for the relatives who would be arriving tomorrow afternoon, travelling from outside Riyadh to pray over her.

  Glancing at his father out of the corner of his eye, Yasser completed the thought: wouldn’t withdrawing the case make it unnecessary for the deceased to go to the dissection table and mean she could be put straight in a fridge?

  Fahd objected. ‘Am I going to withdraw a murder charge? And whose murder? My own mother’s! I will not.’

  Fahd dripped sweat and rage, the events of his mother’s final days streaming past his eyes like some endless film reel.

  He remembered his mother a month before, telling him the story of his father’s eldest sister, Haila, a tale she had heard a number of times from Suleiman. She’d never forgotten it: how Haila had died fifty years before out in Wadi al-Rawghani near Unayza; how the girl’s father had fasted for two successive months in penance for manslaughter, or neglect of a ten-year-old child.

  Haila had started experiencing frequent headaches. She took to supporting herself against walls as she walked and dragging her feet. The world around her gradually faded and bit by bit the light went out. The traditional remedies and cures offered by a woman called Moudi in Sabakh didn’t help; her attempts to cure Haila’s dizzy spells and loss of sight were fruitless.

  Suleiman had never known his sister—he was not yet born when she died—but he could picture her perfectly from his mother’s description: a beautiful, pale-skinned child with two pigtails hanging down her back, a parting that gleamed like lightening and wide eyes with a singular gleam. When she laughed her white teeth showed and she smiled with the watchfulness of a twenty-year-old, though younger by far. She relieved her mother of many of the household duties.

  Her father returned after sunset prayers and told his wife that the imam from the mosque in Jurida would come to blow on her. The sheikh came twice and in a loud hoarse voice recited, ‘“By the star when it goes down, your companion is neither astray nor is he misled,”’ then blew out forcefully from his mouth until the young girl, fed up, covered her face with a black shawl. She was disgusted now, trying to keep her covered face away from him, so he wrenched her face in his direction and recited in something like a scream, ‘Say: It has been revealed to me that a company of jinn paid heed …’

  ‘Enough!’ Haila said more than once, holding out her hand like someone trying to ward off harm.

  Afterwards, going out to the front door with her father, the sheikh decreed that she was possessed, which is how the father came to burn a thumb-sized twist of the black shawl over the spirit stove then puffed on the catching flame. As soon as the white smoke coiled up from the glowing fabric he inserted it into Haila’s nose. She cried out at the touch of the searing ember and almost gave up the ghost, pinned down by her mother’s arms until both tiny white nostrils had been transformed into something resembling a stovepipe, rimmed with black and open sores.

  A few days later her father and his wife drove the old red Ford south out of Buraida, carrying the blinded, woozy child with them. The road to Unayza was unforgiving and rough, the vehicle lifting and dipping through the potholes. Near Urouq al-Nafoud they had to dig and tamp around tyres that had stuck in the soft red sand. At last they reached Wadi al-Rawghani and breathed a sigh of relief.

  It was night and exhaustion had left them drowsy as the dead. There were tents for hire in the wadi but the father stopped the car and got out, dragging the box of tea and coffee-making implements from th
e boot. Opening the wooden crate he took out a long-stemmed brass coffee pot and hunted in the dark for matches and a scrap of cloth which he stuffed in the spout. He took a match from the box marked Abu Shuala and illuminated the darkness with a small flame set at the wick of the spirit stove, which immediately gave off a smell of gas. The father needed to set his head straight with a cup of bitter coffee before he slept. In the Ford’s cabin nothing disturbed the sound of the mother’s snoring save an occasional wail from Haila.

  One still summer’s night, a few days before her death, Fahd’s grandmother revealed that she had put snuff in the water and made Haila take seven swallows in a row. On the third day of living in the tent and being treated with the dusty-smelling snuff, in the early morning while her father was out negotiating with some men about buying a cow, Haila died in her mother’s arms.

  Having purchased the cow and tied it to a tent peg the father returned and went in to see his wife. They washed their little girl’s body, placed her in a coffin and said the afternoon prayer over her with the other worshippers, then they buried her in the Taeemiya cemetery outside Unayza. Father and mother returned to town with their cow. When his grandmother told this story, she felt a rage and bitterness that robbed her of her voice as it had done every time she had told it over the past fifty years.

  Had Soha died the same way? Haila had died at the hands of a sheikh in Wadi al-Rawghani and now Soha had perished at the hands of an Egyptian sheikh. Back then, his grandfather had paid penance for his sin, an admission of guilt, but Fahd’s uncle and cousin avoided taking responsibility for killing Umm Fahd. In their eyes they had used their initiative after modern medicine had been unable to cure her.

  ‘Dear God! Had mother ever imagined for a second that she would die one day beaten with a stick and unable to breathe, drowned by drinking water until she vomited? Can it be that science and the study of medicine have had no effect on my cousin with his big, close-set eyes, like an owl lurking in the dark?’