He tried closing his eyes. His mobile whispered a message’s arrival. Opening it he found an image file: lying on a white marble table top, a striped napkin folded into a small triangle and beside it a cup of Turkish coffee on a small white saucer. Darling: here’s your coffee, like it or not, and don’t forget mine, sweetened with your honeyed lips. I really miss them, Fahoudi.
He smiled and dozed untroubled until the sunset prayer.
He awoke enveloped in a lethal migraine. Swaying, he stood up and looked over at Saeed’s open door. He searched the kitchen shelves for some Panadol Extra then took two tablets one after the other and forced them down with large gulps of water that left him panting like a dog. He went back and stood facing the canvas, staring at it in a daze.
He saw the skulls lying about and the corpses, but noticed the birds at the top weren’t ravens but had turned white instead. They were pigeons flying over the bodies. Damn it, why were these white and grey pigeons here? In a choked voice, not knowing if anyone could hear it, not knowing if he heard it himself, he shouted, ‘I don’t like pigeons.’
He adored the life of Pablo Picasso, his creative madness, his transitions from one artistic period to another—blue, to pink, to cubist, to starkly abstract—though most of all he loved the stage that produced his famous painting, Guernica. However, he had no affection for the artist’s habits and behaviour. He loathed his love of bullfighting and his passion for doves … Or could they be pigeons? Why must pigeons flock into everything? Fahd started forward and made to rub them out but his sight grew dim, the canvas swayed, and he sat down slowly, holding his head, before stumbling over and taking the coffee pot from a drawer. Gripping the table edge, he poured water into the pot, placed it over the flame and heaped two spoonfuls of black Turkish coffee on to the water’s surface, stirring it around before lifting the pot from the heat.
He sat and drank his coffee in a dream. He raised his face to the ceiling and found that it was neither moving nor slowly descending. He rose to his feet and went over to the paint box, taking a tube without paying attention to the colour, just unscrewing the tiny lid, lifting it to his nose and inhaling deeply as he continued to drink the bitter coffee. He took a look around him: his bed over there, the kitchen in the corner, the ceiling lamps dangling over the dining table, shoes randomly scattered by the front door and the canvas unchanged on the easel, black ravens hovering at the edge, crows circling bodies cast down on a rooftop like a field of melons beneath the searing sun.
He felt that his senses had returned to him and imagined the ravens and crows suddenly flying from the canvas as he slept like a dead man and feasting on his eyes. What would he have done then? He would have woken without eyes, without a heart, perhaps.
He thought of the poem by Lorca that he loved, The Ballad of the Moon, and how the gypsies sought to fashion necklaces and rings from the heart of the moon that descended from its heights. He would be like Lorca’s moon, dropping down to play in the blacksmith’s forge, but there would be no boy to warn him of the wounding crows.
He thought of little Sara, her face unfolded like a moon, her childish laughter, her charm, as he carried her that evening in the Joy Oasis Arcade in Granada Mall, taking her back to her mother, Tarfah, and sitting with her in the family section. He wept when he imagined her warning him of the crows, without him warning her of the long nights she must live without a father, that father who was not alive that she might wait for his return, nor dead that she might forget him, for she had never seen him.
–60 –
FAHD REMEMBERED LORCA’S POEM as they questioned him about the olive-stone prayer beads around his wrist. He remembered the gypsies sallying forth from the olive groves on horseback, kidnapping the playful moon and from her glorious silver fashioning necklaces and rings. Were the stones about his wrist from the olive trees through which the gypsies rode, flying from the hands of Spanish girls out picking, to a prison on Mecca’s outskirts, between whose walls an inmate fretted, incarcerated for handing out his group’s anti-government pamphlets one dawn in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque? That inmate passed the nights, the nothingness, the silence, grinding the Spanish girls’ olive stones against the prison’s rough cement floor, piercing them through from both ends, threading stone after stone until they became prayer beads that he would keep as a legacy to his son, the artist, who would colour them with oils and set them at his wrist like a bracelet that he might always remember his father’s tragedy, never realising that he too would thread together his own tragedies and be forced to flee from the land he loved, accused of sorcery.
While they were summoning the sheikh who now sat before him, Fahd thought, What accursed prayer beads are these? What ripe olives flew here from Granada or Seville? What olive tree in Andalusia is cackling faintly at my plight, in league with gypsies against the moon, now plotting with the gypsies here against me? Are these men gypsies, too, my father? Are they gypsies, too, dear Lorca? Am I the moon who came to earth and entered the forge to play? Yes, I am he; I have a side that glows like silver, and a dark side, too. I have descended to this forge of a land that I might live, but I paid no heed to little Sara’s warning and I could not do as Lorca’s moon and suddenly ascend at the right moment, grasping the child’s hand. No, I remained for the gypsies to charge me with possession of olive stones. Dear Lorca, I stole no olives, I merely kept their stored and dusty stones safe. A week ago, I painted them to resemble the bright African skies. When the gypsies came stealing through the forest of cars I did not hear their drums. I did not hear them cry from their car at the frightened people in the alleys, scampering and hiding like rats. I heard nothing but my sweetheart’s voice as she eased the burning loss of my mother. I failed to see that Andalusia had come to Riyadh, never thought that Riyadh would travel to far-off Andalusia.
‘So shall we go for a drive in the car or take a furnished flat?’ Tarfah asked.
‘What do you say to a coffee?’
‘Mmm. In the car, perhaps.’
‘No, let’s sit at a café.’
‘I think the cafés are always being watched by the Committee. Nada says there are employees in the cafés who work as spies for them. They earn more than their regular wages.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, adding, ‘Sounds to me like exaggerations and rumours.’
‘Anyway, going into cafés in the morning is scary.’
Fahd didn’t give it much thought. His grief was overwhelming, stifling. Although a week had passed since his mother’s burial he still had the feeling that Riyadh’s skies had lowered until he could touch them with his hand. It muddled his thinking. He was unable to continue work on his oil painting or start on another while he remembered Naseem Cemetery, Rajehi Mosque and the morgue. Perhaps the image that affected him most was the memory of standing inside the grave and looking up at the faces of the people, the movement of their lips, their outstretched hands bearing brick and lumps of clay. Whenever their faces came to mind he tried imagining them silent, that sound had been utterly abolished, leaving nothing but the image. He tried imagining that he was deaf, freeing up vast space for the image alone. How might he paint bodies circling about him, stopping to incline towards him, faces muttering, murmuring, staring, old faces, others youthful, faces wearing glasses, faces veined and worn, and all with a light coating of the dust thrown up by the ring of feet?
A scene worthy of a future painting, perhaps: The Cemetery.
–61 –
FAHD REMAINED IN THE cramped holding cell, detained on charges of practicing sorcery and committing the lesser idolatry, all because of a string of painted prayer beads. Despite the kindness of the sheikh with the cream mashlah and his paternal air, he had now vanished and Fahd hadn’t seen him again. He was like Lorca’s gypsies, hiding their knives in the dust.
It was a narrow, stifling room with a fan dangling from its ceiling, though he couldn’t tell whether it was working or whether warm air was shuffling in from some high window like a cr
ook-backed pensioner. If this was going to go further, he wondered, how long would he be held here? Would they transport him to another prison? Would the court hand down a harsh punishment? He remembered the hawk-eyed man telling him that the penalty for sorcery in this safe and untroubled country was death, telling him this as his slender fingers toyed calmly with his beard. The killers’ calm was agonising. Despairingly Fahd shouted that he was no magician; his father had been in prison that was all. He had passed the time with these olive stones, he had …
The man had smiled, until Fahd could almost see the cutting beak behind his mouth, and mockingly said, ‘My goodness, are the whole family ex-convicts?’
Fahd was in a desperate situation, the man went on. The charges against him were solid, especially since the woman’s brother had made a complaint on her behalf that Fahd had bewitched her so that she would go out with him against her will.
Damn! Fahd thought to himself. Wasn’t it she who had pursued me? Hadn’t my desire for her faded? Hadn’t she been the one who proposed meeting to console me for my mother’s death? Now who will console me for my death, when it comes? Will I have to stand in some public square like Saeed’s father, Mushabbab, wearing a hood that bears the reek of impending death before my head is sent flying? The penalty for sorcery is beheading by the sword, so kill every sorcerer, but I, sheikh, am not a sorcerer. My father was the one who got me in this fix; he was the one who bequeathed me his effects that I might be mindful of his mistakes and avoid the long imprisonment, the night-time terror of waiting for deferred execution and that was his lot. Look, Father, I’ve taken a short cut. I’m going straight to the slaughterhouse.
The huge man terrified me, roughly turning the toothstick in his mouth and telling me that my file had been handed over to the Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution. There was no way out apart from the Indonesian bringing food and tea. How could I offer him a bribe when I had nothing? I promised him a big reward if he helped me. Not to escape: I just wanted to make a call.
His eyes flickered about as he handed me his battered mobile phone. I hurriedly dialled Saeed’s number, terrified that it would be turned off or he wouldn’t answer, particularly since he wouldn’t recognise the number. The moment I heard his voice I quickly said that I was in the Committee’s headquarters, mixed up in a serious case, to which he said in his Southern way, ‘Leave it to me.’ The next day the sheikh with the cream mashlah arrived and I was so happy to see him that I almost hugged him. I reproached him for leaving me, for not listening to my story and the story of the coloured prayer beads, and he smiled, patting my shoulder and telling me that I would leave once I had drawn up a confession of being alone with a woman other than a relative and signed it, pledging that I would not commit the same sin again.
Feeling that I had been set free, I almost fainted. A murderer condemned to death, out in Chop-Chop Square, and just before the sword is raised through the air to split him with its maddened whistle, just before it sinks into the flesh and tendons of his neck and sends his head flying, one of the crowd cries out, ‘I release you in God’s name. In the name of God Almighty, go, you are free,’ and the people gathered there praise God and noisily rejoice, while the condemned man is led back to the car, his hood removed, and seeing life anew, signs away his right to appeal in the courts.
And so the worthy sheikh saved me from execution. I could have fallen on his head and kissed him and I could have embraced Saeed when he came to collect me. My eyes were flickering all over. I had no idea how he’d managed to arrange things, more easily than I had thought possible.
As soon as Fahd saw Saeed he asked him how he had done it.
‘Get in and I’ll tell you,’ Saeed said.
‘But how? How come they changed their minds so easily?’
‘Connections, my friend. Connections over and above the law …’
‘What connections?’
‘Your uncle.’
‘Damn you and my uncle!’ Fahd bellowed in a rage, trying to open the car’s locked door. He raised a pointed finger at Saeed and screamed, ‘I swear if I’d known this when I was back there I’d never have signed the pledge, even if they’d condemned me to death. I’ve nothing left to lose!’
‘Fahd, listen to me. If things had been left to grow and spread it might not have been a death sentence, but you could have gone to prison for a long time and been robbed of your life and your studies.’
‘What, Saeed? There’s no one left to help me off their rubbish-tip except my murderer of an uncle?’
‘Because your uncle has ties to them. Don’t forget, he knows their top guys and most of them pray at his mosque. They’ve got interests in common.’
‘Fine. Where is he then?
‘He came after making a few calls and finished your paperwork, then he left again.’
‘He left? Really? Without saying anything? He didn’t make any problems for me?’
Saeed avoided the question and turned his gaze towards the shops in the street. He would go back to the flat, he said, so Fahd could take a shower and change his clothes and celebrate his release at an expensive restaurant.
When Saeed tried to park the car outside Buhasli restaurant on King Abdullah Road, Fahd objected, remarking that he hated the whole street, its shops, restaurants and cafés. He had barely recovered from his unpleasant memories of Starbucks, he said, so Saeed drove on to Saraya, the Turkish restaurant on Thalatheen Street, and as they were waiting for their food, Fahd asked, ‘Tell me. What happened?
‘Basically your uncle asked me to tell you that he never wants to see you again.’
‘To hell with him. I don’t want to see my mother’s killer anyway.’
‘There’s something else.’
Saeed fell silent, poking holes in his paper napkin with a fork and considering how best to explain. ‘He took a copy of your case file at the Committee and asked them to keep a record of your pledge.’
‘Why? So he can haggle with it whenever he wants?’
‘No.’
‘You sure?’
‘He told me he was taking your sister to live with him because you are untrustworthy and incapable of looking after her.’
Fahd said nothing for a while, briefly peering out at Thalatheen Street as if he was struggling with his eyes to stop a sudden tear springing forth. He saw pigeons wandering around over the broad pavement. One of them hopped on a tub containing a wilting bush while the rest continued to circle the tightly packed paving stones, pecking away as if reading their painful life stories. He returned his gaze to the gloom of the restaurant and whispered in a sad, defeated voice: ‘God damn him.’
‘A week ago you were thinking of emigrating. When I asked you about your sister you said she was the same as your uncle and she didn’t concern you any more.’
‘She’s all that’s left of my family, Saeed, do you understand?’
His voice changed, becoming strangled. A grief-wracked sob rose from his chest and he cried a little. Knotting his hands on the tabletop he laid his head on them and wept for a long time, silent and full of sadness. Saeed let him be for a few minutes and then reached out his hand and laid it on his head.
‘Be brave, Fahd. You’re a man, you have to confront life and its challenges.’
Leaving the restaurant, Fahd saw a Starbucks on the other side of the street with its famous green sign and shouted in a mocking voice so Saeed could hear, ‘Bye-bye Starfucks!’
Saeed laughed as he opened the car door. ‘That’s a global company. You’ll find it on every corner in the world, maybe even in that village you’re planning to live in in Britain.’
‘Very possibly, but you know something? The difference is that there’s no Committee there, nobody watching your every move and counting your breaths. No, “Where are going? Where have you been? Who’s that girl with you? Your mother, your sister or your lover?”’
Saeed let out a long whistle. ‘Well, I hope life over there agrees with you.’
�
�62 –
FAHD DROVE HIS SMALL car towards Ulaya Street, past the Pizza Hut in Urouba Road and into the narrow side street called Sayyidat al-Ru’osa, from where he entered Zuhair Rustom Alley, stopping briefly by the black door behind which his childhood had passed like a dream. This door, from whose threshold he had bade farewell to his father Suleiman as he started the car and headed off to Qaseem, never to return. This door, through which his gypsy uncle entered with glassy eyes and a belly fat with care and deliberation, to expel not just Fahd, but Fahd’s whole life, from this contented household. This door, through which he passed for the first time carrying his satchel, headed for the unfamiliar faces of pupils and teachers at Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary School. This door, scuffed by the feet of his grandfather, his grandmother and his mother’s three brothers. This door, from which they carried the body of his mother, fighting for life after being subjected to a savage beating. This door, ponderous, melancholy, scowling. This door, broad-shouldered as a gorilla, not wide enough to admit the dreams of one small family that began its life with an ill-starred association with the Divine Reward Salafist Group, the breadwinner spending years in prison for taking a risk and handing out pamphlets inciting rebellion before returning to live his life with honour, shunned by respectable families. This door that opened smoothly and didn’t creak, unlike his grandparents’ door in al-Muraidasiya, which shamed them with its vibrant squeak, reckoned a kind of singing by the local congregation, some manifestation of the Satanic pipes that must be stilled. This door, witness to a life which flew past in a demented rush, never pausing to look over its shoulder.
Fahd raised his eyes to the fogged glass of the car window: maybe he would see his sister’s ghost. But he saw nothing there save silence and slow death, nothing save a pot with its withered plant.
He started the car and drove off. Turning left and passing Sheikh al-Islam Mohammed Bin Abdel Wahhab Mosque he looked out at the southern steps where the shelves for sandals stood empty. But lying on the ground he noticed a pair of tattered leather sandals like those of his father, his father’s final pair that had driven him to his death.
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