A few months later, Michelle was officially made a producer of the program. Then she got her own show to produce. They asked her to be the on-air presenter, but Michelle’s father refused to allow her to host a show that would be broadcast in the homes of his relatives in Saudi Arabia. They ended up using a young Lebanese woman instead.
Working in the media opened up new horizons for Michelle, and for the first time she felt truly liberated from all the restrictions that had always been imposed on her. As she came to know different sorts of people and her network of friends and contacts grew, she began to feel increasingly confident and ambitious at work. Everyone there adored her, which motivated her to produce even better work. Jumana remained her close friend, but she wasn’t particularly fond of the work, so after graduation she took an administrative job at the station.
37.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: November 19, 2004
Subject: A Man Just Like Any Other?
Live your life fully, the sweet and the bitter,
and who knows? A new darling might come along
someone who would treat your sores
so your joy comes back
and you forget old love and me
and move outside the circle of my grief—Bader Bin Abdulmuhsin*
Brother Adel—who, I will hazard a guess, is a statistician—sent me a message criticizing my e-mails for being of varying lengths and not symmetrical like the hems of dresses in vogue this year. Adel says that in order for the lengths of my e-mails to be even, they must show evidence of natural distribution. According to him, natural distribution means that 95 percent of the data contained therein will center around the mean (taking into consideration of course the standard deviation), while the percentage of data outside the area of normal distribution on both sides of the mean does not exceed 2.5 percent in either direction, such that the sum total of standard deviation is 5 percent.
Shoot me!
The inevitable finale that Sadeem had closed her eyes to for a full three and a half years finally arrived. A few days after her graduation, after Firas sent over the laptop he had always promised her as her graduation present, he told her in a whisper, the words dripping out slowly like drops of water from a leaky tap, that he had gotten engaged to a girl related to one of his sisters’ husbands.
Sadeem let the telephone drop from her hands, ignoring Firas’s pleas. She felt a violent whirling in her head that pulled her down, pulled her somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. Someplace where the dead lived: the dead whom at that moment she wanted to be among.
Was it possible for Firas to marry someone other than her? How could such a thing happen? After all this love and the years they had spent together? Did it make any sense that a man of Firas’s strength and resourcefulness was unable to convince his family that he could marry a divorced woman? Or was it just that he was incapable of convincing himself of it? Had she failed, after all of her attempts, to reach the level of perfection befitting a man like Firas?
Firas simply could not be just another copy of Michelle’s beloved Faisal! Sadeem saw Firas as greater and stronger and more noble and more decent than that pathetic, emasculated weakling who had abandoned her friend! But it appeared they were cut of the same cloth after all. Apparently, all men were the same. It was like God had given them different faces just so that women would be able to tell them apart.
Firas had called her on her cell phone twenty-three times within seven minutes, but the lump in Sadeem’s throat was too painful to allow her to talk to him. For the first time ever, Sadeem did not pick up when Firas rang, even though she had always rushed to the phone the minute she heard the particular tune of his calls, the Kuwaiti song “I Found My Soul When I Found You.” He started texting her, and she read his messages in spite of herself. He tried to explain his behavior, but her anger, far from dissipating, simply grew more intense with every letter she was reading.
How could he have hidden the news of his engagement from her for two entire weeks, the period over which she had taken her final exams? He had talked to her tens of times a day to make sure that her studying was going well, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on! Was this the reason he had stopped calling her on his private cell phone and had begun to use prepaid phone cards? So that his fiancée’s family would not discover their relationship if they tried to get hold of his phone bills? So then he had been preparing for this for months!
He had been determined not to tell her, he wrote, before finding out for certain that she would graduate with honors. That was exactly what had happened: in her final term, she had received the highest grades it was possible to get, as she had generally done ever since she had known Firas.
Firas had considered himself responsible for her studies and her superior grades, and she had handed the reins over to him and contented herself—easily and happily—with obeying his commands, for they were always in her best interest. She had excelled in that term even despite her father’s death just ten weeks before finals began. Sadeem wished now that she had not done so well, had not passed and had not graduated. If only she had flunked, she would not feel this heavy guilt about achieving honors when her father had so recently died, and Firas would not have been able to leave her in order to marry someone else for yet another semester!
Was Firas leaving her now forever, as her father had done a few weeks before? Once the two of them were gone, who would take care of her? Sadeem thought about how Abu Talib, Prophet Mohammed’s—peace be upon him—uncle, and the Prophet’s first wife, Khadija—may Allah be pleased with her—had died in the same year, which had then been named the Year of Grief. She asked God’s forgiveness as she truly felt that her own sorrows this year equaled the sorrows of all humankind since the dawn of history.
She didn’t eat for three days, and it was a full week before she could bear to leave her room—a tormented week that was spent in reaction to the news that had numbed her feelings, paralyzed her thoughts, reopened her wounds and left her, for the first time in years, having to make decisions without consulting the counselor Firas.
In his incessant text messages, he hinted to her that he was willing to remain her beloved for the rest of his life. That was what he wanted, in fact, but he would be forced to conceal it from his wife and family. He swore to her that the entire business was out of his hands; that circumstances were stronger than they were; and that he was in more pain at his family’s decision than she was. But there was nothing that he could do. There was no path before them but patience.
He tried to convince her that no woman would ever be able to replace her in his heart. He told her that he pitied his fiancée because she was engaged to a man who had tasted perfection in another woman and that taste would remain forever on his tongue, making it impossible for any ordinary woman to erase it.
After years of effort on her part to attain a level of spiritual perfection worthy of a man like Firas, he was now kicking it away in favor of an ordinary woman and a banal relationship. To himself and to her, Firas acknowledged that she alone responded to every emotion and instinct within him. He tried to convince her—and, even more, to reassure himself—that this must be God’s will, and they should be submissive to it even if they couldn’t figure out the reasons behind it. All other women were peas in a pod to him now. In his eyes, it didn’t matter who he married, if not Sadeem.
Sadeem responded to the initial shock by deciding to stay away from Firas altogether. For the first time in her life, she ended that conversation without even saying good-bye to him. She refused to answer his calls or acknowledge his imploring text messages, despite the truly demonic pain that had overcome her and that only he could relieve. She hid her grief over Firas inside her grief over her father, which had become fiercer after her breakup with the love of her life.
Sadeem made honest efforts to get beyond her heartbreak without help from Firas. But even the
most innocuous events could send her spinning out of control. Sitting down at the dining table with her aunt Badriyyah, barely a moment would pass before she broke down in tears as she stared down at a plate of his favorite seafood dish or a bowl of sweet pudding that he liked. When watching television with her aunt, she would try to choke down the sobs that constantly threatened to escape, but they slipped out despite her best intentions.
Aunt Badriyyah, who had moved in with her after her father’s death so that Sadeem could live at home while she got through her final exams, was insistent that Sadeem come to live with her in Khobar, but Sadeem refused. She would never move to Firas’s native city, no matter what! She couldn’t stand to live under the same sky as him after the wrong he had committed and the pain he had caused. But her aunt swore that she would absolutely not leave Sadeem on her own in Riyadh, no matter what she did and no matter what she said and no matter what excuse she came up with, in her father’s house and among all of those memories that it would be so hard to part with.
Only a few days after the breakup Sadeem began to crave Firas with an intensity that surpassed mere yearning or longing. For years Firas had been the air that she breathed, and without him now she truly felt as if she were suffocating, deprived of oxygen. He was her saint and she used to tell him every detail of her life as elaborately as a sinner making confession. She had told him everything—so much that he used to tease her about her endless stories, and then they would laugh together as he reminded her of those long-ago days at the start of their relationship, when he literally had to drag each word out of her mouth.
38.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: November 26, 2004
Subject: Patience Is the Key to Marriage
Some of you were saddened that Sadeem and Firas broke up. Others were glad that Firas chose a suitable & righteous wife instead of Sadeem, who would not have been a suitable & righteous mother to his children. One message contained the platitude that love after marriage is the only love that lasts, while premarital love is only frivolous play. Do you all really believe that?
Lamees would not have believed that her strategy of playing hard to get to conquer Nizar would demand so much patience! At first, she was convinced that three months would be time enough to ensnare him. It became clear, though, that this was a business that would require a great deal of savvy and patience. And as her admiration for Nizar grew, she found those two qualities diminishing.
She never called him and on the rare occasions that he called her, she tried to not always answer. But with every ring of her cell phone she would feel her usually unshakable resolve weaken. Her eyes would stay fixed on his number, glowing on the cell phone screen, until she picked up or the phone stopped ringing and her heart stopped its accelerated beating.
At first, the results were definitely satisfying. He showed an interest in her that indulged and gratified her vanity. From the start, she made it clear that their friendship did not mean he had the right to interfere or intrude in her life, asking her for an hour-by-hour run down of her daily schedule. And so he was constantly apologizing to her, justifying his concern about knowing when she was free by saying he wanted to be certain of not bothering her while she was busy. She also never returned his text messages. She informed him that she didn’t like to write messages, as she found that a waste of time and effort she didn’t have to spare. (Of course, had her cell phone fallen into his hands he would have found it crammed with text messages, sent and received, from her girlfriends and relatives, but he didn’t really need to know that!)
Gradually his obvious interest in her began to lessen, alarming her. His calls decreased noticeably, and his conversation became more serious and formal, as if he were beginning to set new limits on their relationship. Perhaps the time had come, Lamees thought, to ditch her plan. But she was afraid that she might regret her hastiness later on. After all, she was the one who always criticized her girlfriends for their naïveté and lack of patience when it came to men. She comforted herself with the thought that Nazir wasn’t the easy type—one of the main reasons she was attracted to him. She would be filled with pride if she was the one who ultimately captured his heart.
She tried to maintain her optimism throughout the three-month period that she had set to get the relationship on track. She reminded herself how much Nizar had seemed to like her, thinking hard to recall every single moment or gesture indicating his admiration. It seemed so easy the first month that she was back in Riyadh, when everything that had transpired in Jeddah was still fresh in her mind. He seemed to enjoy anything she said and did even if it was really silly or trivial, like telling a dumb joke or having to brew two cups of coffee first thing every morning. Even their phone conversations during the first month after classes began to imply some lingering, hidden affection, for even though she was often standoffish and disagreed with him openly on many things, he was always the first to call, and to apologize if need be.
As the second month went by, she started thinking about the moments with him that she hadn’t much noticed at the time, but that on deep reflection seemed meaningful. For instance, there was the memory of her last day at the hospital in Jeddah, when they had lunch together in the cafeteria. He pulled out a chair for her, something he had never done. And then he sat in the chair closest to hers, rather than across the table as usual, as if the chair across the table were farther away than he could be on the day of their farewell. And there was the way he so often tried to lure her into saying certain words that he liked to hear from her because of her particular way of saying them, like the word water, since she pronounced the t like a d, sounding just like the Americans. And the way he imitated the way she pronounced the word exactly in her Americanized accent: egg-zak-lee!
As the third month rolled around, Lamees counted two entire weeks since the last time they had been in touch. Two weeks in which she had gotten totally fed up with optimism and strict tactics and strategies, which only someone completely without a heart would stick to, right? But she was still afraid of relenting. After all, looking back, she had covered pretty impressive ground, when you calculated the amount of time actually spent in carrying out her policy. She convinced herself that Nizar would be back on her radar one of these days. But only if he was really meant for her.
Fate didn’t disappoint her. In fact, the plan she was intending to cut short succeeded. He came to her father to officially ask for her hand. Three entire weeks before her absolute drop-dead deadline!
39.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: December 3, 2004
Subject: Pages from the Sky-Blue Scrapbook
Don’t wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality.—Mark Twain
My friend Bandar, from Riyadh, is totally exasperated. He is furious with me because my intent, as he sees it, is to portray men coming from Jeddah (the west coast) as angels who do no wrong, not to mention their being courteous, refined and witty. Meanwhile, rages Bandar, I am portraying Bedouins and men from the interior and east of the country as vulgar and savage in the way they treat women. I also depict the girls of Riyadh as being miserable head-cases while Jeddah girls are up to their ears in bliss which they procure with the flick of a finger!
Hey, Bandar. This has nothing to do with geography. This is a story I am telling just as it happened. And anyway, one can never generalize these things. All kinds of people exist everywhere: this variety is a natural feature of humankind and we can’t deny it.
On a page in her sky-blue scrapbook, where she used to paste the photos of Firas that she collected so carefully from newspapers and magazines, Sadeem wrote:
Ahh, the blemish of my heart, and my only love;
To whom I gave my life past and what’s ahead.
What makes the body stand tall when the heart’s pierc
ed through?
With you gone, I’ve no sense, no sight and nothing said!
O God, O Merciful One—You wouldn’t return him,
But You needn’t make him happy! Or loving her instead!
Make him taste grot and jealousy like me
And go on loving me!
God is generous,
He’ll repay me for the one who sold me off and fled.
Sadeem had never been in the habit of writing down her thoughts. When she met Firas she was inspired to write a series of love letters, which she read to him from time to time (feeding his arrogance so much that he would strut around afterward like a peacock spreading his tail feathers). After Firas’s engagement, though, she found herself spilling out lines of poetry in the silence of the night, during those hours which for the last three and a half years had been devoted to speaking to him on the telephone.
To my best friend, most cherished of mine,
To the star that one day fell down into my palms,
You were so near yet so far, so oppressed, so divine.
The Fates burst us apart! that we meet once again…
My friend, we will become the heroes of tales
We spin for our children, false names assign’d,
The internal struggle Sadeem lived in that period—the way her emotions zinged back and forth between extremes of rage and forgiveness—made her life a nightmare. She was incapable of discerning her own true feelings: she would curse Firas and spit at every picture of him that she could find, only to leap back and plant a kiss tenderly on each photograph as she begged it for forgiveness. She would recall how, through all those years, he had seemed to stand by her, and it would make her cry, but then she would remember the day years ago when he had alluded to broaching with his parents the subject of his attaching himself to a divorcée, and their response, which had hurt her so deeply that she had intentionally “forgotten” it (exactly what Michelle and Lamees warned her not to do). And that would make her cry even more bitterly over the lost years of her life, and wish all kinds of horrible fates for Waleed, who was the true reason behind all of her troubles.
Girls of Riyadh Page 20