Finally, in Khobar, I will live by your side. That city has brought us together again: me and you, and now Madame Wife, too!
How am I going to drive down that road, all the time remembering when you went by, on the same road, three years ago, beside my car, guarding me from afar? I can’t imagine myself on the highway heading east without you. No, it’s more. I can’t imagine myself in any place without you. I can’t imagine that I will be able to go on in this life without you. It’s all because of him! God punish you, Waleed, who ruined my life! God get my revenge on you.
42.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: December 24, 2004
Subject: Lamees Marries the First and Only Love of Her Life
From a sensitive woman’s heart springs the happiness of mankind.—Khalil Gibran
One reader—she didn’t give her name—tells me she doesn’t know how I can be so naïve as to exalt love. And how can I be so proud of my clueless friends who go on pursuing this hopeless quest and probably will do so for the rest of their lives? There is nothing better, she proclaims, than a respectable fiancé who, as they say, “walks in through the front door.” The two families already know each other, there are solid ties and since it’s all done through family channels the bride is certified as a good girl and everyone agrees on everything. There is no room for nonsense or deception as there is with this “love match” thing. This method is beneficial to the girl, since it guarantees that the guy won’t have any suspicions as to her past, which might well happen if they had had any sort of relationship before marriage. How could any rational girl kick away an opportunity like that and run after something not guaranteed?
Your opinion, my friend, is one I respect. But if we lose faith in love, everything in this world will lose its pleasure. Songs will lose their sweetness, flowers their fragrance, and life its joy and fun. When love has been in your life you see that the only true, real pleasure of life is love. Every other thrill arises from that basic source of pleasure. The most meaningful songs are those your lover hums in your presence, the prettiest blossoms are the ones he offers and the only praise that counts is your beloved’s. In a word or two, life only goes Technicolor in the very moment love’s fingers caress it!
O God, we—the Girls of Riyadh—have been forbidden many things. Do not take the blessing of love away from us, too!
After a three-week engagement and after waiting four months after the contract-signing ceremony, Lamees’s wedding day arrived.* It was the first wedding to be planned by Sadeem, Gamrah and Um Nuwayyir, in collaboration with Michelle, who had come from Dubai especially to attend her friend’s wedding on the fifth of the month of Shawwal, the month after Ramadan, when the marriage business booms.
Preparations were in full swing all through Ramadan. The biggest share of the burden fell on Um Nuwayyir and Gamrah, since they were the only ones in Riyadh, where the wedding would take place. Sadeem took on some light duties such as ordering the chocolates from France, while Michelle was responsible for using her connections to record a CD of songs written by some of the famous singers she knew personally. A custom-made CD for Lamees and Nizar to play during the party, and then copies could be handed out afterward to the guests as a keepsake.
Gamrah would begin working every night after she performed the evening Ramadan prayers at the huge mosque downtown. Shopping malls rarely open in the daytime during Ramadan, but they make up for it at night, opening until three or four in the morning throughout the holy month.
She always brought Saleh with her to the mosque when she went to pray—she wanted to be sure to inculcate in her little boy, who was now three years old, a sense of religious devotion early on. Saleh was happy to come, and would throw on his miniature black woman’s abaya, which Gamrah had cut and hemmed to his size after he demanded that she buy him one exactly like hers. He wouldn’t be put off about the abaya, and so she had relented, shrugging off Um Nuwayyir’s repeated warnings about giving in to his desires. Gamrah would remind Um Nuwayyir that Saleh was growing up in different circumstances than those in which her Nuri had been raised. Her little Salluhi was growing up among all his uncles, and so there was no cause to fear that he would lack adequate male role models just because his father wasn’t around. Anyway, he looked so cute, gathering the folds and ends of the voluminous black abaya around his little-boy clothes, his head covered all the while in a traditional shimagh.
During the prayers, Saleh would stand next to her imitating every one of her moves, from the very beginning with saying “Allah Akbar”* to reciting to bending down and prostrating himself on the carpet-covered floor. When he got bored with imitating her, he would twist his head and contort his upper body toward her as she bent and knelt, trying to peer into her eyes and those of the rest of the grown-ups lined up for prayer, seeing if he could make them laugh. Kneeling in front of them, he would lean so far forward that he would topple over on his face, and then he would roll over onto his back, still grinning his wide grin and waiting for someone to smile back, any one of those gloomy-looking women in the row who tried to avoid meeting his gaze and keep their concentration on the prayer. Losing hope, he would take the opportunity of their kneeling and bending to the ground in prayer to give every one of those frowning women a little pat on her rear end, before going back to stretch out on his back in front of them, laughing and totally proud of his achievement!
The women complained about his naughty behavior and ordered Gamrah to send him over to the men’s section to pray. Gamrah found his little antics adorable but would try to reprimand her son in front of the other ladies, fighting to keep from laughing. Saleh would give her one of his cute smiles, encouraging her to let out the laughter she was suppressing, as if he knew that she didn’t mean to scold him.
Riyadh Tarawih prayers* usually ended around eight-thirty or nine P.M. and the shops opened their doors right after that. Gamrah would make her rounds, from the seamstress who was sewing the tablecloths and chair coverings for the wedding hall to the restaurant where she tasted new dishes every evening in order to select what pleased her most for the wedding buffet. She had visits to the florist and the printer who was doing the invitations, and many others, in addition to her many trips to the mall with Lamees to get whatever Lamees was still lacking for her trousseau.
Gamrah wouldn’t get home before two or three in the morning, although during the final third of the month she would return an hour or two earlier, in time to do the Qiyam prayers** at the mosque with her mother and sisters. At first, Gamrah’s mother wouldn’t let her go out on these work missions alone, but she began going easier on her daughter when she noticed how seriously Gamrah took it all. What most impressed Um Gamrah was when she saw her daughter make her first profit—for arranging a dinner party in the home of one of Sadeem’s professors at the university—and hand it over to her father, who finally was persuaded of the suitability of his daughter’s odd work. Her mother had tried to force her sons to accompany their sister in her nightly outdoor activities, but they refused, one and all, and she eventually let it drop. So Gamrah was free to go about her work, sometimes in the company of her sister Shahla, or with Um Nuwayyir, or—most of the time—with Saleh and no one else.
On the long-awaited day, Lamees looked more gorgeous than ever. Her long chocolate-brown hair flowed down her back in pretty waves. Her mother-of-pearl-studded gown dropped softly from her shoulders, draping gracefully in front and revealing her upper back before widening gradually until it reached the ground. Her tulle veil flowed from her head down her bare back. One hand held a bouquet of lilies and the other clasped Nizar’s hand. He was softly invoking God’s name over her before every step and helping her lift the long train of her gown.
Lamees’s friends could see the unadulterated joy in her eyes as she danced with Nizar after the procession, amid a circle of women, his relatives and hers. Their friend Lamees was the only one who had fulfilled th
e dream they all had, the dream of marrying the first love of their lives.
GAMRAH: May God’s generosity put us there next! Just look at those two blissed-out faces out there on the dance floor! Ah, how lucky is the girl who gets a Hijazi man! Where are our men when it comes to these romantic gazes of Nizar toward his bride? I swear to God, a Najdi would kill you if you said to him, sitting up there on the bridal dais, “Just turn toward me a little, and smile, for God’s sake! Instead of sitting there frowning as if somebody had dragged you here against your will!”
SADEEM: Remember how Rashid reacted when we told him to kiss you during the wedding? And look at this Nizar, all he does is kiss Lamees’s forehead every couple of minutes, and then her hands and her cheeks. You’re right, men from Jeddah are a different species.
GAMRAH: And look how considerate he is, he’s happy to let her stay in Riyadh while he’s in Jeddah, until she graduates and can move there. I swear to God he’s a real man, God bless both of them and make them happy.
MICHELLE: But isn’t that the way it should be? Or did you think he was not going to let her finish her studies, or that he would force her to finish in Jeddah because he’s there? This is her life, and she’s free to run it as she wants, just as he’s free to run his as he wants. Our problem here is that we let men be bigger deals than they really are. We need to realize—assume, even—right from the start that things like letting us graduate are not even optional, it’s just what makes sense, and our eyes should not fly out of our heads if one of these men actually does something right!
SADEEM: Shut up, both of you. You two are giving me a headache! Let’s just watch those lovebirds over there. They look so cute when they’re dancing together. Just look at how he looks at her! His eyes are glazing and he looks like he’s going to die of happiness. Oh, my poor heart! That’s what I call love.
GAMRAH: Poor Tamadur. Don’t you think she must be jealous because her twin sister got married before she did?
SADEEM: Why should she be jealous? Tomorrow her own luck and fate will show up. And by the way, have you noticed how well groomed these Hijaz guys are? Nizar is positively glistening, he’s so clean and tidy! Just look how perfectly trimmed his goatee is. Every Hijazi bridegroom I’ve ever seen has a goatee precisely that shape, and not too heavy. You’d think they all go to the same barber!
MICHELLE: Those guys get a scrubbing, a Turkish bath and facial threading so they won’t be too hairy, plucking and a pedicure and sometimes even a waxing. Not like the guys from Riyadh, where the groom looks just like all the guests except for the color of his bisht.*
SADEEM: I couldn’t care less whether a guy is well groomed or not. In fact, I prefer a man who is a little untidy. It’s so much more masculine—he doesn’t have the time or the vanity to dress up and buy the latest fashions and act like a teenager who has nothing better to do.
UM NUWAYYIR: God have mercy on the old days! The days when you used to fall all over yourself when it came to good-looking men. Even Waleed, how your eyes were full of him!
SADEEM: True, but after Waleed I got Firas, the untidy devil who filled my eyes with nothing in the world but him.
GAMRAH: Basically I’d take any guy, whoever he is, clean or filthy, tidy or messy. Who cares? As long as he’s there. I’m ready to be happy with any man. I’m so bored, girls! I’m fed up and I can’t stand it. A little more of this and I’ll go insane.
When it was time for the bouquet toss, the young single ladies lined up behind the bride, eager to find out who would get to board the sparkling marriage train next. Lamees’s and Nizar’s relatives crowded in, mixing with the rest of her friends. After her mother insisted, Tamadur sulkily joined them. Sadeem and Michelle stood front and center, and were hurriedly joined by Gamrah, who was quick to comply with Um Nuwayyir’s encouragement to stand among the young bachelorettes; even if she was married before, she was technically single at the moment of the bouquet toss and more than ready to remarry again.
Lamees turned her back to the girls, having earlier agreed with her three friends that she would try to throw the bouquet in their direction. She tossed it high in the air and the crowd of girls surged to grab it. After a lot of pushing and shoving and kicking and hitting, Gamrah got hold of what was left of Lamees’s bouquet, a few green leaves tied with a strip of white lace. She raised it high, giggling ecstatically. “I caught the bouquet! I caught the bouquet!”
43.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: December 31, 2004
Subject: Today He’s Back
Today he’s back
as if nothing happened
and with an artless child’s eyes
he’s come back to tell me
I’m his life companion,
his one and only love
He came bearing flowers,
how can I say no,
my youth sketched on his lips
I remember still, flames through my blood,
taking refuge in his arms
I hid my head within his chest
like a child returned to his parents…—Nizar Qabbani
Happy New Year! I don’t feel like writing any little introduction this week. I’m going to let events speak for themselves.
Firas came back!
When Sadeem heard from Firas again, she tore out that day’s page from her little daily diary and enclosed it gently in her sky-blue scrapbook, where it nestled among the pages so full of his photos and interviews.
Firas came back to her, only two days after she had longed for him at the wedding. He came back, a few days after his marriage contract was signed and a few weeks before his wedding was to take place.
Sadeem was in Khobar. After spending the evening at a relative’s wedding, she had returned to her room at Aunt Badriyyah’s, and was unable to sleep. The air of Firas’s city polluted her lungs and the glaring streetlamps that lit the road blinded her eyes, and it seemed as if Firas was everywhere—as if he had spread out his black bisht, the cloak he wore on top of his thobe, in most of the official photographs, over the entire city, so that everything underneath it was cast in his shadow.
Sadeem had been lying in bed awake, sighing deeply, at four A.M when a text message appeared on her cell phone, which had all but died since Firas had gone away:
I am suffering enormously, and have been ever since you went out of my life. I see now that I will suffer for a long time. A very long time. I deleted all your pictures, e-mails and text messages and burned all your letters so that you wouldn’t have to worry that they were around. I was in pain as I hit the delete button and as I watched the fire eat my treasure, but your face and your voice and the memories are engraved in my heart and can never be wiped out. With this message I’m not trying to get back together. I’m not even asking you to write back. I just want you to know how it is with me. I’m in bad shape without you, Sadeem. Really bad…
Sadeem couldn’t even read it clearly. Tears had filled her eyes, blurring her vision, the minute she read the sender’s nickname, which she had been too weak to delete from her phone: Firasi Taj Rasi. My Firas, my Crown.
She barely knew what she was doing as she pressed the button to call the sender’s number. Her Firas answered! Firas, her darling and brother and father and friend. He didn’t say anything, but just hearing his breathing on the other end of the connection was enough to make her weep.
He stayed silent, not knowing what to say. The sound of his car motor partly concealed the tightness in his breathing, as Sadeem went on sobbing in wordless rebuke of what he had done, releasing all that had been packed inside of her, waiting to be unloaded, swelling and growing until it filled her completely. He listened and listened to her painful gasps for breath as he murmured into his cell phone for her to imagine his planting one kiss after another on her forehead.
In one fell swoop he destroyed all the fortifications the resistance forces possessed.
He couldn
’t believe it when she told him she was living with her aunt in Khobar, just a few kilometers away from his home! He kept her talking on the phone as he made his way toward her neighborhood. He didn’t know the house she was in, and he didn’t ask her. He told her that he was getting closer to her than she could imagine.
That was a dawn never to be forgotten! Birds cheerfully engaged in their early morning flutter, and a lone car roaming one of the quarters of the city of Khobar, driven by a man worn down by desire and longing for his sweetheart’s eyes. The two lovers lost the last of their reservations after what had seemed a lifetime of denial. Now fate, with the tender love of a father who cannot bear to see his children in torment, gripped their hands and led each to the other.
Sadeem went over to her window and looked out onto the street. She began describing the houses nearby to Firas, since she didn’t know the number of her aunt’s house or its exact location. All she knew was that it had a huge glass front door and on either side of the large door were a few untrimmed trees.
She caught sight of the lights of his car in the distance and felt as though she were floating in a warm ocean of bliss. He saw her at the window, her ash-brown hair tumbling across her shoulders and the creamy skin that he dreamed of kissing. “You’re cream and honey!” he would say to her whenever he stared at her pictures.
He shut off the car engine in front of the house, not far from Sadeem’s window on the second floor. She begged him to move farther off before one of the neighbors coming back from the nearby mosque after Fajr prayer saw him by her window at this early time of the day! He couldn’t care less. He started teasing and flirting with her, singing to her:
Be patient a moment, let my eyes feast!
I’m thirsty for you—melting of desire
Oh you little devil, you are prettier than you ever were then!
Girls of Riyadh Page 22