2008 - The Consequences of Love. (2 page)

I was woken from my reverie when Jasim called my name. I looked up. He indicated that I should join him at the counter.

“I am going to miss you but you will get a great present from Paris,” he announced as he kissed me on both cheeks. His eyes were bloodshot, streaks of red crossing the white of his eyes.

“Don’t you ever get tired of travelling?”

He thought for a moment and shook his head, giggling.

“How long are you going for?”

“Shush,” he said, “you are like a fire-breather. You burn me with what you say.”

It was as if every word he spoke were saturated with an expensive fragrance. I brought my face closer to his and inhaled deeply.

“Have you been drinking perfume?”

“An exclusive one from France,” he responded.

His eyes lingered on mine. Sweat started dripping from his face as if I was truly breathing fire on him. But I was only watching him silently.

He turned to the small stereo behind him, slipped in a tape and adjusted the volume. Um Kalthoum began singing one of her melancholy songs. A customer yelled at Jasim, begging him to turn the sound up. Some men were up on their feet, their eyes shut and their heads swaying.

I looked at Jasim, surprised. He was shorter than me but his shoulders were broader. As he softly swung his neck and head to the music of Um Kalthoum, his
ogal
fell slightly out of shape.

“Since when do you listen to Um Kalthoum?”

He didn’t answer.

Instead he looked at the reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Our faces met. His deep voice was bouncing off the mirror. “What a beauty you are, my dear Naser. I have watched you grow taller, your eyes swell into the size of oceans, your cheekbones rise, and ah, your neck ascend to the height of the sky.”

I followed Jasim into the kitchen and through the crowded corridor to his private room.

The room was full of the dreams and fantasies of the kind of life Jasim was after. Painted red, it had enough space for a single bed, a chair, a TV, a VCR and video cassettes piled on top of each other. The walls were lined with posters, photos and handwritten poetry.

He closed the door, then grabbed my hand and rested his head on my chest.

“Not a single beat,” he muttered. “Maybe one day. Maybe?”

I didn’t answer.

For a while we didn’t say anything to each other. Then he gently directed my hand to his chest and placed it on top of his heart, and asked me, “Can you feel?”

His voice trembled. “If I were to put the whole earth on top of my chest, Naser, I would cause the greatest of earthquakes.”

He threw himself on his bed and rolled over to face the wall. He then rolled back and with his chin facing up, he looked into the cracked mirror on the ceiling. He sighed deep and long and said, “Oh Naser, you looked beautiful when you lived in that mirror. You were free, sexy and sensual. It was your world. And what a world it was.”

He closed his eyes and said, “Your mother’s envelope is on top of the TV. Please leave and switch off the light.”

Outside the kitchen, I bumped into the new boy.

“Can you get me some mint tea?” I asked. I glanced down and saw the boxes full of perfume bottles. I helped myself to a few and went to find a table outside.

The cars were gliding down the hill and speeding along Al-Nuzla Street. I lit a cigarette and watched them.

The boy came out of the café.

“Here is your tea,” he said. He put the little tulip-shaped glass on the table next to me and poured the tea from the large pot.

“Naser?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got something to tell you.”

I leaned closer and he whispered rapidly, “I spent last night over at Fawwaz’s house. His parents are not here. He told me the usual thing: “What we are doing is
haram
. But in this country it is like we are in the biggest prison in the world, and people in prison do things to each other they wouldn’t otherwise do.” He asked me to be his boy until he gets married. Anyway, the café will shut soon for prayer time and so he will take me on a date to the shopping mall.” Not waiting for a response, the boy went inside. Not long after, he and Fawwaz came out of the café and walked down the street hand in hand.

When I was sixteen, and had been working in the café for about a year, I was taken to the shopping mall in central Jeddah by a man called Abu Imad, whom I nicknamed Mr Quiet. He was about forty years old. When we arrived at the mall, there were lots of men strolling across the hall, chatting and laughing, holding hands or arm in arm.

The air-conditioned shopping mall was built to a foreign design. Its five floors were full of shops that sold Western products. “This shopping mall,” Jasim once told me, “is like the glossiest of shopping malls you can find in Paris or London. You can buy all European and American brands of electrical goods, designer shoes and clothes. You can even find Armani and Calvin Klein.”

Right outside the mall was Punishment Square. It was here that heads and hands were cut off and lovers were flogged, beheaded or stoned to death. This was the place where Faisal’s father did his job.

Inside the mall, my companion bought us both a drink and we sat by the fountain. Two religious policemen strode past us. They were both holding sticks, and they were turning their heads left and right, calmly and deliberately.

“Look,” Mr Quiet said, “they are searching for secret encounters between men and women.” Then he leaned closer to me and whispered, “Only the other day I witnessed a scene where a young man and woman were caught by the religious police. Thanks to
Allah
you are a man. Otherwise, we would be heading towards that Jeep now and
Allah
only knows where to after that.”

The waiter and Fawwaz disappeared from view. My eyes panned to a woman in full burqa exiting a shoe shop just opposite Jasim’s café. Just then the religious police Jeep approached slowly and parked outside the shoe shop, hiding the woman from view. It reminded me that I had been in this country for ten years, yet I had never talked to a girl or held a woman’s hand.

The woman emerged again from the shadow of the Jeep, crossed and walked down the road. The Jeep remained parked with the religious policemen still inside it, no doubt observing the street from behind its shaded windows, making sure that Jeddah remained a world of black and white.

I drank my tea in a single gulp and opened the envelope. It contained all my recent letters to my mother and as I flicked through them I noticed how the black ink still sparkled. I felt the need to run, to run a long way from Jasim and the memories of his café.

I
WAS TEN years old and my brother, Ibrahim, was three, when our uncle brought us to Jeddah from the refugee camp in Sudan. We had been living in the camp for five months. My uncle, the elder brother of my mother, worked as a chauffeur for a Saudi family in Jeddah. He had heard about us being in the camp because someone from our village had met him in a café where Eritreans meet and told him about us. The man had told my uncle where in the camp to find us.

When my uncle arrived and said he was here to take us with him to Saudi Arabia, I refused. I wanted to wait in the camp with my mother and stay as close as possible to her. My uncle argued that Jeddah was not so far away. “You see, you will not be far from Eritrea, which is just opposite Jeddah, across the sea.”

He finally managed to change my mind when he said that Saudi Arabia was one of the richest places on earth and that I could earn mountains of money to send to my mother.

We were taken to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and from there we flew to Jeddah.

Our plane landed at Jeddah Airport, in the early evening just a few days before Ramadan, 1979. From the very start I fell in love with the city.

We took a taxi to our uncle’s house. The roads were wide and well lit, and my eyes flicked from one building to another, from one street to the next. Back in the refugee camp, at this time of night, the moon and the stars would shine giving us just enough light to move around. But in Jeddah, there was no need for the moon or the stars. I peered out of the window and saw lamps that hung above the street from tall posts. They were like goddesses aiming their generous light towards the city.

“Oh
ya Allah
, and the streets are so smooth. There are almost no bumps in the road,” I said to my uncle.

There were tall buildings on all sides, much higher than the one-storey houses I had seen in Khartoum. As we drove alongside the coast road, I hung out the car window and inhaled the breeze that smelt of fish and salt.

The taxi entered a tunnel that went deep in the ground. “Uncle, we are going under the earth,” I said. “Only dead people go there.”When we exited the tunnel, I cheered, “We are still alive.” My uncle smiled and rubbed my head.

When the car stopped at some traffic lights, I looked across to a plaza where there was a huge sculpture of a bicycle. In my imagination, I could see someone riding it. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw two feet on the pedals, wearing red Italian-made shoes; slim legs in blue jeans; and long black hair falling back from a woman’s face.

As the traffic lights turned green and the car engine roared into action, I saw her head tilt slightly and she looked at me. Then a wink. That was definitely Mother, I thought to myself. I held my brother’s hand and lifted him from my uncle’s lap. I pulled him closer to me and kissed him on the cheek. But he leaned his head back against my uncle’s chest: he had fallen asleep.

“Ibrahim?” I urged him to wake up. “Look, look.” I was distracted by the street with its large villas, trees, and beautiful cars in different types, colours and sizes. “Ibrahim, look, look at these cars.” I pushed my head through the space in between the two front seats to take a better look. Then I retreated and whispered in Ibrahim’s ear, “We will have a car like that one day.”

As we continued driving, there was something that puzzled me. Alongside the men in their white
thobes
, there were figures in black which, under the street lamps, looked like the men’s shadows thrown against the white walls of the houses. They reminded me of the stories about invisible spirits my mother used to tell us, only here, you could actually see them. I knew that Saudi Arabia was a holy country and miracles could happen all the time here. But because I hadn’t seen any women in the street, I had worked out who these figures in black were.

“Uncle, can I ask you a question?”

“Yes, son,” he replied.

“That’s a woman, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“There, look, there.” I pointed to the shadows.

My uncle smiled and said, “Yes. Oh, blessed childhood ignorance.”

“Why are they covered so much? It is not cold here.”

“The women are wearing
abayas
”

“Uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t they get hot dressed like that? How do they breathe?”

“It’s
Allah’s
, request. But He, the Greatest, will reward them in heaven,
insha Allah
”

“So, will the girls in my school look like this too?”

“You will be going to a boys’ school. The girls have their own school.”

I thought back to the small school in the refugee camp. All my friends there were girls. In fact the boys would beat me up because they were jealous whenever we played the wedding game because all the girls would choose me. I told my uncle the story.

“Oh
ya Allah
we ask your forgiveness. I will have hard work on my hands with this one. Listen, Naser, it is bad for boys and girls to mix.”

“Why?”

“It’s
haram
, son.”

“Why is it
haram
?”

“Grant me your patience,
ya Allah
. Because—” He stopped and looked away. After a few seconds, he added, “Because we are like fire and oil, and if the two of us come together, there will be a big flame and thus hell on this earth and in the afterlife. So you see, son,
Allah
is trying to protect us for our own good. OK?”

“OK,” I said, leaning against the window, not understanding a thing.

“Here we are,” my uncle said, as the taxi parked next to a tall white building. “This area is called Al-Nuzla.”

It had only been a few days since we left our tent in the refugee camp. But it already seemed as though we were on a different planet.

My uncle opened the front door. When I saw the TV, the large black sofa with red stripes, the thick blue carpet, I turned to my uncle, my eyes wide. I kissed his hand and cried, saying, “Thank you, Uncle, for bringing us to this beautiful city.”

But then I imagined my mother all on her own having to hide under her bed from the bombs, like we used to do whenever the fighter planes came over our village at night. “Please
ya Allah
help her stay safe,” I prayed silently, vowing at the same time that I would study and work hard to bring her and Semira to safety.

But that night, as I ran away from Jasim’s café, Jeddah felt different. It didn’t feel like the same place any more.

In the old days, when the place was only an arid landscape on the fringe of the desert, the inhabitants had called the place Jeddah, the implication being that
Jaddah Hauwa
, the mother of humankind, was buried in their midst. But that night I thought this was nothing but myth-making.

I remember thinking how the modern city planners had continued with their ancestors’ habit of burdening the city with an oversized name. They started calling Jeddah ‘The Bride of the Red Sea’. And they dressed her accordingly with the most expensive things. There were bronze sculptures decorating every major street; the bride glowed with jewellery. There were the elegant bridges that cut across the city from all directions, like henna drawings on a bride’s hands. And there were the tree-lined avenues that were the petals sprinkled at the feet of the bride.

But despite all this, I thought to myself, Jeddah couldn’t be known as the Bride of the Red Sea. It lacked the overwhelming happiness of a woman about to be married. In Jeddah there were too many people whose days and nights merged into one long journey of sadness. I was one of them.