Driving by Starlight

by Anat Deracine

  I couldn’t move for a long time.

  19

  HUZUN

  Before Ahmed, before Mishail, even, I had known a deep, transforming love. I had discovered it by accident, when I had cut myself with an X-ACTO knife I was using for an art project. Blood had come pounding out of my skin, unexpected and rich as an oasis in the desert. I’d recognized my love for what it was in those days after my father’s arrest, when everything tasted like sand and time lost all meaning. It was why I’d taken the knife to my arms in the school bathroom.

  Despite what Maryam Madam might have thought, I wasn’t going to kill myself. I was just in love with pain, with that electric twang that started in my chest and ripped through my limbs until my palms twitched and reminded me that I was alive. Now, it coursed through me as a nearly blissful fury, leaving me light-headed and loose-limbed as I walked down the street. I knew I should go home. My mother would soon be awake, if she wasn’t already. She sometimes rose with the dawn for the fajr prayer, getting up from her meditative state and shouting to me to wake up and get to school. On many days I never even saw her, just heard her calling from the kitchen, reminding me to do something or not to do something else.

  It was a strange experience to be in such profound pain and yet still apparently whole, not bleeding out as if I’d been shot or ripped to shreds. I wished for that simpler, more comprehensible pain. At the very least, then nobody would think it strange if I started screaming.

  “You there! Where are you going?” asked a voice behind me. I turned to look but didn’t answer. The voice came from the passenger seat of an SUV. I blinked, unable to form any words. The car came to a stop a few feet away from me.

  “I said, where are you going? The mosque is the other way.”

  With difficulty, I opened my mouth to say, “Walking.” I couldn’t really say any more than that. I didn’t actually recognize where I was. I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d been walking.

  “Are you trying to be smart with us? Who are you?”

  I could’ve started running. I seemed to be on some wide boulevard with vapid sunflowers gaping at me from white bungalows, but if I ran far enough, I would have reached Haara or Batha or some other district where a car would have been unable to follow and where I could have outrun any old muttawa.

  But I didn’t feel real. I was floating. I was a cloud that shifted around my body rather than a solid contained within it. My legs refused to move. My mouth refused to work.

  “Show us your ID!” the man cried, getting out of the car and marching toward me.

  Still, I said nothing. I wanted to say I didn’t have my ID on me, but words slipped from my grasp like sand. He grasped my collar and shoved me against a wall, leaning close to my face. I made a startled sound and saw that he’d realized I was a woman. He cursed and jumped back, wiping his hands and spitting as if he had touched something polluted. The muttaween, these members of Al-Hai’a, the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, were supposed to be the pinnacle of chastity. They did not even speak to women, only ever directed their guardians to scold their womenfolk when their veils weren’t properly fastened.

  And this guy had just realized he had touched a woman and had pressed himself up against her enough to know for sure.

  I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. The muttawa pulled out his stick and landed three blows on my arms and legs before I could make myself stop. He hit me repeatedly until I moved as he wanted toward the SUV. His partner had left the driver’s seat and was opening the back door for me. If he hadn’t been glowering at me, I would have thought he was some kind of limousine driver taking me to a party.

  Sitting in the back, I was glad of the pain in my arms and legs. It was distracting, and it took my mind off the fact that Ahmed had been in Mishail’s bedroom. It didn’t really matter what had or hadn’t happened between them. Even if all they had done was sit on opposite sides of the room, even if she had remained fully veiled, even if they had never touched each other, they had shared a secret I hadn’t known. I was the innocent, ignorant one. I understood now that love, not the niqab, was the real veil over our eyes, that hope and not the abaya was the cage in which we were imprisoned. Love and hope drove us to wait in silence to be rescued from our fates.

  The muttaween took me to the station. I don’t know why, but I’d expected a jail cell with bars on the windows and a one-way mirror, the kind they had on television shows. Instead, it was almost like waiting to see the doctor at the National Hospital, a clean room that smelled a little too much of disinfectant, full of bored people trying not to fall asleep. Someone screamed in the distance, either from being tortured or from waiting in the emergency room with a broken arm, I couldn’t tell the difference.

  A fully veiled woman came forth to escort me to a questioning room. When we were alone, the woman unveiled and asked me who I was, as if I hadn’t answered the muttawa because he was a man.

  “Please phone Maryam Alkhalaf,” I said. I mentioned her relationship to the Sudairi family and watched the woman’s eyes grow wide. “My name is Leena. Her son is my guardian.”

  I was quickly transported to yet another room, one more in line with my imagination. A small, ragged carpet in the corner was left for me to pray on. The rest of the room was covered in linoleum and smelled too clean, that disinfectant smell that meant people had left bodily fluids of one kind or another on the tarpaulin.

  I paced the room, letting my fingers run across the brick walls. Eventually the female guard who had questioned me entered and dragged me out by the elbow. I wondered idly if this was what jail was like for women, a bureaucratic nightmare of being led from one windowless room to another, waiting for paperwork to be stamped, and eventually discovering that the obscure rules intended to empower women were now being used to imprison them. Wasn’t that the way life worked? Muhammad had abolished the right of the hand, forbidding men to take more than four of us for their possession. It was his great negotiation, intended to help women who were slaves and concubines, to help widows of a war-torn desert, a compromise welcomed until we discovered that other women, elsewhere, could have the whole of a man’s heart to themselves and none of his fists.

  My thoughts ran on until I was taken to yet another room covered in linoleum, this one looking like one of those in-home beauty salons that the Palestinian and Yemeni women set up to make money, using homemade halawa or sugar wax, to give us unevenly smooth legs that nobody would ever see.

  An old crone who had been dozing in a chair smiled toothlessly at me, giddy with the prospect of a customer.

  “You rich kids,” the guard said, “you think you can get away with anything. No consequences.”

  “I’m not rich,” I said.

  “Not rich, huh?” the guard repeated sarcastically. “You think the women piled in the hovels of Naseem are phoning Sudairis before breakfast?” She dragged me to a chair. There was a strange brownish-black dust on the floor, and I realized with horror what it was: human hair.

  “No!”

  “Be quiet! And be glad that’s all we’re cutting off!”

  My blood ran cold. I had heard the stories of women, usually wild foreign women, who were captured for indecency and underwent something known only as khassa, the cutting.… a procedure that tamed them for work in the harems in Bahrain. I didn’t know what it involved and didn’t want to.

  “First time?” asked the wrinkled crone. She held an electric shaver in her hand. “Come, come. It’ll grow back soon.”

  I tried to break free of the guard’s grip, only to receive a hard slap.

  “Hold still or you’ll get hurt.”

  The guard shoved me into the chair and placed her knee on my thigh. I tried to throw her off, but the weight was too much. My muscles weren’t cooperating. Meanwhile, the crone had started shaving my head.

  This was the standard punishment, the most lenient one, for feminine indecency.

  The buzz
ing sent shudders down my spine. I felt rather than heard my hair fall. It had never been very long, but I had finally been ready to grow it out, to stop looking like a boy now that I knew what I could look like with my hair blowing behind me in the wind as I drove.

  I closed my eyes and prayed quietly. I didn’t have the strength to look in the mirror in front of me. I felt hollow, as if the last of my tethers had been taken and I was falling into a bottomless abyss.

  “Get up,” the guard said. “Your guardian is here.”

  I opened my eyes and saw myself in the mirror. I couldn’t even recognize the face in front of me, red eyes blazing out of sunken cheeks, a bluish-white head shaped like a dented fruit.

  The horror had just begun. I had to face Maryam Madam, my mother, my friends at school. I could avoid Ahmed, but no one else.

  The world of women would bear witness to my shame. I knew I’d said I could live by the words of the rebels, I’d claimed that I would pay any price for freedom, suffer any consequences for what I believed. But I was sixteen, and my one and only vanity had turned to dust on a sticky floor.

  I swayed on my feet as the guard dragged me to the headmistress.

  “This one?” she asked, as if I were a chicken being picked out of a cage.

  Maryam Madam nodded. Her lips were white, so I knew she was furious.

  “We’re so sorry,” the guard said, sounding truly contrite. “We had no idea she was special. We had followed the procedure before she even told us who she was and asked us to call you.”

  Anger made me snap my arm free. I was about to say something when I saw the headmistress widen her eyes in warning. Her head shook only a fraction, but I saw it and silenced my tongue.

  “Illi faat mat,” Maryam Madam said with a smile, placing a hand gently on the guard’s shoulder. It meant, What’s past is dead. “You were only doing your duty, dear.”

  The guard stood stupidly, struck dumb by the headmistress’s gentle tone. I realized what she’d expected: the casual cruelty we’d come to expect from the rich and infamous.

  “When can I take her home?” Maryam Madam asked.

  “Let me check for you, ma’am,” the guard said, veiling herself and entering the main lobby, where the men’s offices were. She left Maryam Madam and me staring at each other in silence.

  “You win more friends with honey,” Maryam Madam said.

  I knew I ought to say something—sorry, thank you, I didn’t do anything wrong—but all I could think of was “Isn’t it time for school?”

  “It is,” Maryam Madam said. “Naseema can take care of things.”

  Then she leaned in for a hug. I startled away for a half second before I let her hold me.

  “What have you told them?” she whispered in my ear. “What were you doing? Do they know whose daughter you are?”

  “Only that my name is Leena,” I said. “I wasn’t doing anything. Just walking. Alone.”

  “Good,” Maryam Madam said, stepping away. I missed her warmth instantly, and her delicate rose perfume.

  The guard returned, looking flustered. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the report here says that she insulted a muttawa and touched him inappropriately.”

  I squawked in surprise, but Maryam Madam touched the back of my arm to get me to be quiet.

  “We need a promise from her guardian that he’ll keep her in check before we can let her go.”

  “My son is her guardian,” Maryam Madam said. “He’s at school. Isn’t it enough for us to sign?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. He has to come in and identify himself for it to be official.”

  I saw Maryam Madam’s jaw clench and then release. When she spoke, her eyelashes batted almost flirtatiously. “Is it enough if the signature comes from a government official?”

  “As long as it’s from a man who agrees to take responsibility for her behavior in the future,” the guard said, looking embarrassed.

  Maryam Madam smiled. My heart raced because I knew what she was going to do, and I couldn’t bear to let her do it. I couldn’t be in the debt of the man who had betrayed my father, the man who was responsible for my unfortunate situation in the first place. I wouldn’t let myself be humiliated by groveling up to the minister for a favor. I wouldn’t let anyone from that family of traitors help me.

  “No!” I shouted, surprised at the hatred in my voice. “My father is Hadi Mutazil. Call him! Tell him I’m here.”

  “Leena, no!”

  The guard looked between us uncertainly.

  I shook my head. “They want my father to come home? This is the way. Tell him I’m in jail. Tell him to sign the taahud and come from his jail to this one, and then sign my taahud.”

  Tears flowed down my cheeks. I couldn’t stop them.

  “Leena, be quiet!”

  I folded my arms around my chest.

  “Is it true?” the guard asked, looking as stunned as if she’d seen a unicorn. “This is the rebel’s daughter?”

  “No,” Maryam Madam said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The guard ran back out to the lobby.

  “What did you do that for?” Maryam Madam hissed.

  “They said there was only one way to make him come home,” I muttered through my sobs. “Only one woman who could make him come home. I just want him to come home.”

  “Who said?”

  “Please,” I said, and the rest of my words tumbled out before I could stop them, “my mother’s planning to get a divorce.”

  Another electric shock of pain ripped through my body.

  “Oh, Leena,” Maryam Madam said. I shook my head and turned away. I didn’t want her sympathy. I was sick of everyone’s zakat, their charity and pity and kindness. I just wanted the world to be fair for one damned minute.

  “Leena, there’s something you should know,” Maryam Madam said, taking her hands in mine. “You know that I love you as if you were my own daughter, don’t you?”

  I nodded. I wouldn’t have called her if I hadn’t known it.

  “When your father was arrested, I promised him I’d take care of you no matter what. You would never have to worry about school fees, uniforms, textbooks, going to college, none of that.”

  I looked at her in surprise. I had assumed that my mother’s catering business had paid for all that.

  She leaned in to whisper, “Your father chose this. He’s far more powerful as a symbol of resistance than he would be out here, under surveillance. They planned this, your father and Karim. He won’t come home.”

  I shook my head dumbly. I couldn’t believe it. No man would decide to put his family at risk to play out some Raif Badawi fantasy, staying in jail purely to stir up a national rebellion. It had to be a lie. And Karim? How could the headmistress speak the minister’s first name so casually, as if they were friends? He was a monster who had destroyed someone else’s family to enrich his own, a sniveling, bootlicking traitor in search of power.

  The female guard entered, her face white. She said, “Put on your veils. The minister’s on his way.”

  20

  ITJIHAD

  We waited, silent and veiled, while the minister snapped at the guards and signed some paperwork that we weren’t allowed to see.

  “Yellah,” he said, and marched out without waiting for us. Maryam Madam grabbed my arm and followed him.

  “My driver’s waiting,” Maryam Madam said.

  “Get Norah, leave her, meet me at the usual place.”

  Norah. My mother. My blood boiled at the way he used her name, as if he had the right. But he was gone before I could speak, his gait so crisp and quick that his shoes tapped down the long staircase like a hammer.

  I got into the back of a Chevrolet that had a curtain between us and the driver. Maryam Madam instructed him to take us to my house. So she knew where it was.

  None of this made any sense. Not unless Maryam Madam was telling the truth. I tried to remember the night of my father’s arrest, but it was a blur. My mother was screamin
g for them to stop. My father was screaming that it would all be fine. Insh’allah. Even in that moment, he’d remembered to ensure his promises about the future with the mercy of God, as if knowing that he could do nothing alone.

  If it was true, then the minister was one of us. But what did that mean, really, one of us?

  If it was true, and if the wrong people found out, death would be a kindness compared with what those in power would do to us all.

  The car stopped in front of my house. I wondered if my mother would be there and hoped desperately that she wouldn’t. I didn’t want to face her. I wanted to stay in the car, hidden behind black silk forever.

  “I called her,” Maryam Madam said. “She knows. I told her to wait. I said I’d bring you back.”

  I swallowed.

  “Tell her Yasin Al-Mudathir is angry that the lunch he ordered has not yet arrived. Can you remember that? She’ll come right down if you do. Tell her nothing else.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Yasin Al-Mudathir. It’s an easy name.”

  “No,” I said, digging my fingernails into my thigh. “I won’t stay in the dark anymore. I want to know what’s going on. Who’s Yasin Al-Mudathir? Where are we meeting him? What does he want?”

  Maryam Madam looked nervously toward the driver. Of course he was listening. Everyone was always listening. As if I didn’t know that the reason I couldn’t even talk to my own mother was that our house was under surveillance. Our phones were under surveillance.

  “Look, there’s no reason for you to get involved in—”

  “No reason?” I snarled, pointing at my shorn scalp peeking out from under the veil. “I’m already involved! I’m the one who has to suffer the consequences of every decision you make!”

  Maryam Madam drew a sharp breath.

  “I’ll get her,” I said. “But I’m coming with you.”

  I leaped up the steps to my house two at a time. It was when I got to the door that I realized that Yasin and Al-Mudathir were the other names of the prophet Muhammad. Al-Mudathir meant the one who is concealed.