by Qanta Ahmed
Instead, I followed the inside of his wrist as he pointed something out on the document. The skin peeping out from under his starched cuff was blue-veined and delicate. A fat Rolex sank backward a fraction, dragged by its weight. I imagined kissing the tantalizing skin. His body seemed untouched, whether by sunlight or sex.
By this stage, I couldn't even hear Imad's observations about the paper. Even Malea's typing seemed to have retreated into the background. Imad and I were locked in a bubble of connection. As he bowed his head over the paper, locks of his gray, wiry hair brushed his shirt collar, creating a tiny rustle. Now and again he stroked his beard in deep thought. I was intensely distracted, unable to formulate a single coherent thought. Fortunately Imad was busy reading aloud the manuscript that was propped on his muscular knee. He didn't seem to need any response from me. It was adequate that I listen.
I was glad my coloring rarely gave away the deepening blush that was gathering to the roots of my hair. The heat in my ears was making them itch. Staggered by the intensity of my own attraction, I suddenly felt an intense desire to leave. I stood up abruptly, surprising both of us. I tried hard not to run, barely controlling my exit. He was clearly disappointed. The screen saver rang out with cricket calls once again.
He spoke slowly and softly, very sure of his words.
“You have to leave now, Qanta?” He paused. For a long time, he looked at me, unblinking. Finally, I could escape his gaze no longer. I allowed myself to see his fluid eyes which blazed like fiery brandy on a wintry day. In their blue reflection, I recognized the Doctor Zhivago of Arabia.
“Yes, unfortunately,” I lied. “But this was pleasant, Imad. I think this will be fun to work on this project together,” I added lamely, unsure how to end the conversation.
“Yes, it will be,” he said, leaning back in his chair. He crossed his long lean legs at the ankle as he relaxed backward.
His face relaxed into a smile as he wished me good day. We assured each other that we would remain in contact via email. Uninvited, Imad handed me his card with several numbers. On the back, in spidery writing he scratched his personal mobile number on the reverse. I carried the numbers out like a trophy.
As I turned to exit the door, I waved a final goodbye. Imad looked up, Sphinx-like once more. All traces of animation in his smile or cascading laughter had disappeared. He had returned to his public persona. I struggled to define what accounted for the change. Whatever the manufactured mask he had donned, he now looked at me through the veil of public office.
It was too late, however. I was already ensnared by the man beneath.
LOVE IN THE KINGDOM
WEEKS WENT BY AND BOTH my contact with Imad and my dilemma increased. Imad never suggested lunch or dinner. Following suit, neither did I. It would have been impossible for him to have been seen to have lunch with me in the hospital and as a single man living in Astra (the adjoining residential accommodations for the Saudi employees at our hospital) an invitation for me to visit him at his home would be scandalous and rather public, under the scrutiny of his colleagues who lived and worked with both of us on National Guard properties. I had never considered inviting him to my apartment even though I had a table to seat ten. I just knew he would never feel comfortable agreeing to drive to see me so publicly. There was a very real feeling of being observed in the Kingdom, and a man relating to a woman in any capacity always attracted inordinate attention. As a result we had no option but to continue our electronic relationship through emails and telephone calls. We could meet only in a virtual world.
After weeks of serial emails, some of which would total dozens in a day, Imad informed me he had an account with MSN Messenger. Together with AOL and Yahoo Instant Messenger, these were my links to the world I had left behind. Out of habit, the very first thing I did was open these accounts on my Internet access as soon as I entered my home. At the end of my day in Saudi, morning was dawning on the Eastern Seaboard and my friends could “visit” with me fairly frequently. It was like leaving an open door to my home. I felt less disconnected with the messages that popped up—quite literally; I now had someone with whom to chat.
Imad continued a daily catalogue of emails discussing his family, his friendships, his work, his travels. I had now grown used to our dialogue, which was already peppered with frequent phone calls. Mostly he would call me once I had reached home and often we would chat for several hours. Sometimes we would leave the calls to eat and then return to our conversations after our dinners prepared alone for ourselves in our separate houses. We were on internal numbers so the calls were unbilled, but I wasn't sure if they were unmonitored; without fail, after an hour, the call would be automatically disconnected. I never understood why and no one had any reasonable explanation. Likely the landlines in the Kingdom were still limited and so perhaps this allowed others to place their calls in turn. Either that, or someone was actually recording the conversations and, as we often joked, needed to change tapes. We never examined the matter more deeply, afraid of what we might learn.
Our conversations covered innumerable topics except the reality of what was transpiring in our evolving feelings for one another, feelings of which I was growing more confident. Instead, we exchanged professional opinions about our shared patients as well as our personal histories, family events, and feelings about the Kingdom and the worlds we both knew beyond here. When he finally met me online, we had been spending several hours a day corresponding via email. I was at my screen yapping to a friend in San Francisco when a message popped up from Indiana Jones.
“Hi, it's me.”
“Who is this?” I typed, cautiously, ready to delete the contact instantly.
“It's me, Qanta. It's Imad.”
I was surprised that the cautious, introspective Saudi had chosen such a flamboyant screen name. He characterized himself as an academic (yet still smoldering) screen hero! This was a man disconnected from a sense of self, childishly, at that. I kept these observations to myself. And so a real-time dialogue began. I discovered though he was intelligent, his command of written English was actually poor. I took pleasure in introducing him to new words, until on one occasion, he set me straight.
“Qanta, I feel like I am in English class!” followed by an onscreen laugh. In this way, over hours on the Internet, Imad began to come out of his very calcified shell.
In our secrecy, I didn't know we were engaging in the new illicit rage sweeping the Kingdom: online dating. Though I didn't realize at the time, what was normal and unremarkable for me to conduct with friends across the planet, in Riyadh carried serious connotations.
Here, it was the only way for Saudi men and women to really connect in pursuit of their attraction. Even though I was attracted to Imad it wasn't until years later that I fully understood what this virtual connection with me could mean. For him this was the foundation for a full-blown, modern-day Saudi romance. It was the only way he could know more about me. For me, it was a means to learn more about a man who couldn't approach me safely in any other forum, a way to pass time, and something I engaged in with friends as well as those who might become more significant.
Unquestionably, in the Kingdom, the matrix of online chatting was a combustible interface of sexual repression, desegregation, and the dangers of an accelerated, electronic pseudo-intimacy. The Internet allowed socially inhibited, closeted men to finally begin to communicate, in many cases, with equally suppressed women. The combination was flammable and under the veil of these false intimacies, individuals thought they were falling in love.
For men who had never known any women outside of their families, their abilities to discern any woman were severely limited. Anyone who showed attentive interest was alluring and, in a Kingdom where relationships almost always ended in marriage, a prospective wife. It was impossible for me to know what Imad was deriving from our conversations, but I was clear. I was learning more about a delightfully attractive and seemingly available Saudi man. He continued to intrigue me. Perhaps
his very inaccessibility made him all the more mysterious. It was hard to know for sure.
Even so, I began to build a fuller picture of him. He had an unmarried younger sister who was training to be a plastic surgeon, a brother who was a colorectal surgeon. His father, once a jet-setting entrepreneur, was now in retirement, an irritable insomniac. Of his mother he revealed very little, other than that she was difficult to please. But he was committed to satisfying his parents, returning to see them most weekends that he was free.
Though I was learning more, I was bursting to spend more time with him personally rather than virtually. No situation seemed to present itself. The very real prospect of facing house arrest and incarceration by Mutawaeen weakened even my bold aspirations of dating this man the way many Westerners were doing in the Kingdom—snatched moments at hotels around the city. I knew that wasn't for me or for Imad, either here or anywhere else. We were far too serious, perhaps even about each other but more importantly, very influenced by our Islamic values.
For others less inhibited, Riyadh offered a varied but very secret night life. Rushed sex in hotel rooms checked-in under anonymous names, or frighteningly risky meetings in sympathetic locations around the city (like the Hotel Intercontinental, where expatriates teemed the lobbies and restaurants) were the only trysts that couples could engage in. At the time hotel rooms could only be booked under male names. No woman was authorized to book under her own aegis, the assumption being she was attempting to stay unchap-eroned without permission of a male relative. I remembered Dodi and Abdul Aziz, the young muturjams (translators)11 who had recently confirmed my suspicions.
“Make no mistake, Doctora, this is a city of four million. You can get anything here, anything! If you have a girlfriend and want to meet her, a guy can rent an apartment. We can get alcohol, drugs, women—you just need to know the right people.” Dodi looked at me very hard, perhaps trying to communicate an invitation. I didn't dare express a single question in response.
Alternatives were more pallid. Some lovers persisted developing their relationships under the shelter of sympathetic friends. Frustrated lovers met either on a Western compound which, in our compound, would entail circumnavigating guards who knew not to admit Saudi nationals onto the grounds without express clearance, or at semi-public events limited to Western expatriates, whether a drive into the desert concealed in a procession of real married couples or a dull rendition of a Noel Coward play staged in a private auditorium built inside one of the more exclusive compounds.
Even in these places little privacy remained, and only the generosity of friends who would provide a vacated villa could allow the couple to be together for a few stolen hours. I found the gray-haired Western lovers to be the boldest with one another. Often they openly shopped in malls, the woman exposing her gray hair revealing both her defiance and her age, while she was escorted by her silver-haired squire. Generally speaking the Mutawaeen seemed deferent to age. They were rarely stopped.
* * *
Sometimes relationships reached a frenzy of excitement on the eve of Valentine's Day which always precipitated a raid of florists by the Mutawaeen who would confiscate every red rose, red wrapping, or Valentine teddy. In defiance, a number of us decided to wear red underwear as our subversive retaliation on the “immoral” day. Other more resourceful couples would express their feelings in flurries of exchanged gifts mediated through cooperative secretaries, maids, or drivers.19 Some would even purchase their roses days in advance, asking for them to be delivered in the middle of the night to avoid the fearful Mutawaeen.20
For those lovers with economic power, weekends away over the bridge from Dammam to Bahrain, or a short flight to Dubai, or stolen days in Amman or Beirut were the only alternative. For men this was relatively easy, often being able to drive themselves across borders or book flights. For Saudi women, travel entailed the permission of a male family member or, for a single expatriate female like me, permission from an employer. Most Saudi women couldn't obtain permissions from their male relatives for trysts.
For expatriates like me, entering and leaving the Kingdom required both an exit and re-entry visa. The coveted multiple-exit-re-entry visa was very difficult to obtain, and I didn't have the wherewithal to arrange this for myself. No, in my landlocked state in the Kingdom without the influences Imad enjoyed I was very limited in my options even to have dinner with Imad. I wondered if we would ever meet overseas.
Those that were emboldened enough to actually pursue a relationship beyond an Internet connection or Bluetoothing were constantly under threat of discovery and serious consequences. None of them, however, was ever seen publicly dating a Saudi in Riyadh. In fact, I had seen no cross-cultural relationships of any kind, whether in acquaintances or in the patients and families I attended. Once in a while socially I had come across an occasional American woman who had married a Saudi after a relationship conducted exclusively out of the Kingdom, not returning until marriage deemed them legal partners. Dating in the Kingdom was a very serious and illicit affair.
I found myself remembering Amanda's words well. As an English nurse who was found extremely attractive by many men, her warning was explicit.
“Don't fall in love with a Saudi, Qanta. That's a mistake. Use them for sex, that's all. But whatever you do, don't get attached. They never give up their families, their mothers, their culture.” She sounded bitter.
She went on to describe an impassioned affair she was currently engaged in with a young Saudi of twenty-five, some ten years her junior. They had met at a hospital Masalaama (farewell party) on the compound. He had been a junior employee in a minor administrative role. A newly married man, he was in her arms disarmingly charming in his puppyish attraction for her. They began meeting during the day in her deserted villa on compound, when her fellow roommates (also British nurses) would be busy at work. Amanda volunteered for additional night shifts so that her days could be free to pursue her desires.
In turn, her lover left his desk largely unnoticed and in broad daylight drove himself to her apartment, also on the complex. No one had ever stopped him. He had hospital identification and was on hospital property. There they would meet and in a dull back bedroom on a lumpy bed, finding little in common, they would quickly embark on intense and very compressed sex, which satisfied something in both of them. Amanda actually could tell me very few substantial details about him. She knew he was married and lived in Malaaz, a neighborhood close to the hospital and, ironically, very close to the central prison in Riyadh where trespassers of “virtue” were frequently incarcerated.
Zachariah my driver had once pointed out the sinister building as we drove to the stable where I rode horses at a private arena in the same area. It would be years later before I would read in the Arab News21 of what actually transpired inside the Malaaz Prison.
Within the labyrinth of concrete cells the Mutawaeen “questioned” detainees observed by a panel of clerics concealed behind one way glass. After brutal interrogations, offenders were compelled to sign pre-written confessions to nameless crimes with their fingerprints under the mandate of a Sheikh. This is what Amanda's lover would face, were he discovered. The punishment for adultery in the Kingdom was death for a married man and at the very least flogging for an unmarried woman. Amanda herself, still married to a husband overseas, was risking the death penalty. I wondered if she could know this.
Because of its grave nature, a charge of adultery has to be supported by the sworn testimony of four witnesses, according to Islam. Even so, I thought Amanda incredibly reckless to discuss what was essentially a capital crime in open earshot of the bustling ICU. Her lover, already a young father of a son, age two, was expecting another child later in the summer. He had no intention of leaving his wife who, unlike him, spoke no English and was barely literate in Arabic. He felt obliged to remain married to her because she had been chosen for him by his parents. Divorce for him was unthinkable, and the financial obligations to his divorced wife likely too expensi
ve for his small salary. He was trapped.
Amanda had obligations too. She was estranged from her husband in London and over past weeks was gradually negotiating a rapprochement with him over strained phone calls. She had no interest in a future with him either.
“This affair is purely for kicks, Qanta,” she said nonchalantly. “He doesn't mean anything to me. I am just having fun.” She bowed her head, busying herself with a clipboard. She colored to the roots of her hair at the memory of the sex she had had earlier in the day, but even so she sounded at once cold as she talked about her lover. I looked around to see who might be listening in the ICU but no one was nearby.
“I am very clear about what I am getting from this. He's just meeting a need, Qanta. You see I've been faithful to my husband since we were married, but since I came out here to Riyadh to help save for our house that we are buying in Islington, he confessed he had bedded a woman we both know. So I thought, what the hell. Fuck it! I am going to have some fun myself.” Bedding the young Saudi was easy for Amanda. At the Masalaama he had drunk rather a lot of our moonshine, Siddiquie (Arabic for “buddy,” which was the name for bootleg homemade beer that was rampant across the compound). With a bit of Dutch courage, he finally responded to her very blatant attentions.
“He wasn't the most experienced, though, Qanta. I had to show him a thing or two,” and she trailed off, giggling, leaving me to my own imagination. I shuddered to think how the naïve young Saudi had coped with this raucous nurse raised on a diet of beer and debauchery in London. Even though there was no love involved, I had no doubt they had both gained from each other through this relationship.
In my opinion Imad and I needed an occasion to meet outside the hospital. Though not for the reasons Amanda sought with her lover. I wanted to see whether I was running away with a fantasy or whether my attraction to this delightful Saudi man was real and returned. Daily, I pleaded with my ICU pharmacist friend Saraway to put in a good word for me, to act as a mediator, and perhaps even mention my romantic interest in Imad, but he was mortified by the prospect.