2008 - The Consequences of Love. (23 page)

But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t sure whether it was the right thing to start talking about what was under her
abaya
just yet. So instead, I said to her: “Fiore, my love for you is a love built on faith. The type of faith a believer shows to his Creator, the type of faith Prophets demanded that we show to our God. After all, when Prophet Muhammad came with the Qur’an, we had only his words to believe him, and we did. You dropped note after note and I read word after word, that is how it is. Words, my darling, are powerful. I answered your call and chose to become your lover.”

I turned to look at her. All I could see next to me was the outline of a woman, a dark shadow next to me on the bench. When I listened carefully I could hear her breathing.

We both remained silent for a while.

“Fiore?”

“Yes,
habibi
.”

She repeated the words once more: “Yes,
habibi
.”

“All this time, I have done what you asked me to do. I have followed you like a faithful disciple. I have given you the most precious thing that I have, now that I am all alone in this world. I have entrusted you with my heart.”

“
Habibi
, I swear I will do whatever you ask of me, unconditionally,” she said.

“I want to see your face.”

“Here?”

“No. It is too busy here. I have heard of a place where we can look at each other for as long as we want without anyone interrupting us.”

“Where is it? It must be across the sea,” she mocked.

I wanted to take her to the place that Hilal had told me about. It was one of those very well hidden secret places that Jeddah was full of: like the Pleasure Palace, it was out of the reach and sight of the religious police, and all things
haram
could take place there without punishment. It was on the furthest possible spot on Jeddah’s long Corniche, almost outside the city. It wasn’t really a place where locals would go.

“No, it is in this city,” I said to Fiore. “Can you leave your house for an entire afternoon?”

Later that night, I went to Hilal. I told him that I needed to take Fiore on a date to the secret place on the Corniche.

He agreed to help me, but made me swear not to tell any of my friends, as he was sure the place would be closed down if all of a sudden locals started going there.

Hilal couldn’t drive because of his bad leg, but he said he would get in touch with a trusted friend—a vendor who worked near the Corniche. “He always drives me there,” Hilal said. “I could have found him a better job but he insisted on street selling because he wanted to be his own boss and work by the Red Sea.”

T
HE NEXT DAY the vendor was waiting by his handcart. I greeted him. He put his cart aside and asked me to follow him to his taxi. The car was covered with dust. He used his
gutra
to wipe the window and asked us to get in. I sat in the front seat, and Fiore got in the back.

We drove for a long time down an old, bumpy road that hugged the coastline. It was hard to believe we were still in Jeddah. To the left was the Red Sea and to the right, apart from the occasional birds flying over the desert, there were only dry bushes. Little dunes had built up in the potholes, swept in by the wind.

The driver veered on to an even rougher road. The car started jumping up and down, throwing up dust. We hit a hole and the car’s underside made a shrieking noise. The driver stopped and got out of the car, mumbling a prayer to
Allah
. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath and opened them again. The dust around the car had settled. I looked in the rearview mirror and knew that Fiore was staring at me but all I could see was the shape of a long nose through her veil.

We stayed like this for a long time. The driver eventually got back in and drove on, aligning the car’s wheels to avoid the holes as big as moon craters. We might as well have been on the moon since hardly anyone living in Jeddah could go to where we were heading now.

The driver fought with his jammed gear. The car slowed down, but only for a moment. It started speeding up again.

We passed a two-storey villa. A Land Rover was parked outside and a foreign white woman appeared on the balcony. She was wearing a bikini and had a towel around her waist. Ahead of us there were two little white girls and a boy playing football. The driver beeped his horn, lowered his window and stuck out his hand in a thank-you gesture, with his eyes staring straight ahead. I turned my head and looked at Fiore. She was still looking straight ahead.

I looked to my left and saw a young woman, who had been lying flat on a towel, being helped up by a black man wearing skimpy trunks. She leaned forward to dust off the sand from her thighs and calves then they both ran together, down towards the sea.

The car slowed. The driver beeped his horn again. Three girls with sunglasses and swimming suits were strolling by. He stopped the car and looked across at me and grinned. We had arrived.

Ahead of us, there was a long broken wooden fence, stretching from the edge of the sea to a small wooden building in the distance. “I will come back later in the evening,” he said.

I nodded and turned to Fiore. She had already jumped out of the car and was now running towards the broken fence, past the sign that read,
STRICTLY WESTERNERS ONLY
. I ran after her.

She stopped and grabbed the end of her long
abaya
, pulled it up above her knees, and sprinted towards the water’s edge where the waves touched the white sand. She stumbled, then fell forward, kneeling in the water.

I stopped to watch.

She was still kneeling, looking out to sea. She got up, took off her shoes and put them neatly behind her, out of the way of the lapping waves.

Down the coast, I could see a white man in swim shorts diving into the water. His companion, a woman in a yellow bikini, clapped her hands and leapt after him, into the belly of the sea.

Fiore had her back to me when she removed her head cover. I held my breath. Her hair was tied up with a silver pin, which she took out while shaking her head. Her thick, black curly hair rolled down over her back. I staggered towards her.

She stood up, and let her
abaya
slide over her shoulders and drop at her feet in the sand.

I stopped walking. My heart was beating so fast.

“
Ya Allah, ya
great Creator,” I mumbled to myself. She was wearing a pink linen dress with short sleeves which fell just below her knees. The dress hugged her slim upper body tightly, and although it fell loosely down her back, it still showed the outline of her curved hips. It was the sweetest dress I had ever seen, and I imagined it had the most beautiful body underneath.

She turned around to face me.

“
YA ALLAH, YA
great Creator.
Ya Allah, ya
great Creator.”

There were still a few metres between us. Fiore was sinking deeper into the water and I was sucked in by the sand. Her long hair was flying in the wind in huge dark tangles.

“Fiore,” I whispered.

She gently touched my face and felt my dry lips. With her index finger she wiped my tears and used them to wet my mouth.

“
Habibi
, here I am, at last, for you. Don’t let your tears veil me from your eyes. Stop crying. It is your turn to look at me now.”

First, I had to fend off everything that stood between me and her: the blinding sunlight, the wet sand and the wind whipping up her hair and hiding her face.

I spread her veil on the sand and we sat on it together. I turned so that my shadow shielded her from the sun. Then, carefully, I lifted her hair from her face, lock by lock, so that finally I could see her properly.

I was opening my eyes to the beauty of the world for the first time.

She didn’t wear any make·up; because she said she wanted me to see her natural without any added layers. “No veil and no make·up;,” she said, with a nervous laugh. Her skin was dark but lighter than mine. I lost myself in her brown eyes.

One of them was slightly smaller than the other, making her gaze feminine and fierce at the same time. Her nose arched elegantly over her face. Her mouth was slightly open, weighed down by her full lower lip, but she didn’t say anything.

I wanted to bring a smile to her face. I pretended that I was drunk with her beauty and made myself like a fool and swayed my head sideways before gently placing it on her lap. I looked up. And there it was: a wide, generous, beautiful smile.

The front of her dress was closed with a long series of buttons, in the same pink fabric as her dress. The first three stood open, revealing the soft skin spanning her collarbone. I moved my hand over the buttons, and opened three more of them, revealing her white cotton bra. My hand touched her skin whenever I opened a button. I counted a hundred finger steps from her navel to the tip of her chin. I placed my head on her chest, and with my hand kept the dress from falling sideways. Her hair was hanging over her shoulders next to my face, and her arms were around mine. She knotted her legs around my thighs.

“Fiore?”

“Yes,
habibi
.”

“You know that drawing of me you told me about that you wear inside your bra?”

“Yes.”

“I think it is time I replaced it.”

As she breathed in, her chest rose towards the sky and her breasts, like a swell in the sea, softly caressed my face before they sank back down. She breathed deeper and again her breasts heaved against me, my head like a small boat, rising and falling on the tide of her chest. I had taken the place of the scrappy drawing, and my head now lay between her deep curves.

We stayed like that for hours.

Before the sun set, before the sea changed colour, before the Westerners left in their Land Rovers, before the vendor returned to pick us up and take us back to Al-Nuzla, she stood up and asked me to come with her.

I inhaled the hypnotising scent of jasmine she left behind her. She was kicking up the sand with her feet. We reached a steep sand dune overlooking the sea. She started to climb. I toiled behind her. She reached the top of the sand dune and faced the sea.

The wind blew. Each curl of her thick black hair twisted upward towards the sky like a thousand belly dancers in a slow groove.

She then turned around. As we both sank deeper and deeper into the crumbling sand, as our hands touched, her smile sparkled. And when the wind lifted up the sand and sprayed it over our heads like rain, and we lifted our arms in the air, our words echoed in each other’s mouths: “I love you, I love you, and I love you.”

It was time for the vendor to take us back to Al-Nuzla. Fiore was about to put on her
abaya
, but I urged her to wait. “Please wait for a bit. The vendor is not here yet.”

We were still standing on the edge of the sea. We looked into each other’s eyes without blinking. I told her that I hoped no day would pass without my head and her breasts meeting. We ripped the little drawing apart. And that’s when she said, “Naser, I have a plan.”

“
Habibi
, when I saw you walk in Al-Nuzla Street for only the second time, I was on my way to visit my friend in Al-Nuzla Al-Sharqyhya. You were wearing blue jeans and a white T·shirt. I admit I turned my head and followed you with my eyes. But it wasn’t broad shoulders that brought a smile to my lips. It was your features. I was instantly attracted to your tender characteristics.” She paused. We were holding hands, facing the sea.

“Tell me, what is your plan, Fiore?”

“I want to take you home with me, I want you in my room and I want us to have all the privacy lovers need. Here’s the plan. I want you to dress as a woman and arrive at the nine-storey building as if you were my best friend from school coming to study with me. You’ll need an
abaya
, long gloves and a face veil, just leave the rest to me.”

“
Ya Allah
, you are crazy. What about your father?”

“We will meet in the women’s section. After all, it was his idea to put the wall up between our section and his. And you don’t need to worry about my mother. She will understand. She hasn’t lost her belief in love.”

As she put on her veil, I looked away to the sea with my back to her. She wrapped her hands around me and put her head on my back. “Naser, don’t be sad,” she said, “you will see me again soon. OK?”

I turned around and even though it felt strange to kiss a woman in
abaya
, I kissed her lips through her veil. “OK. The vendor will be here any minute now.”

That same evening, I went to the shops near the roundabout in Al-Nuzla Street and bought a black robe, a long scarf, face veil, black gloves, knee socks and low black shoes.

I was just leaving the shoe shop when I bumped into Basil. He stood motionless and, without a word, he stared at me and my large collection of bags.

I stepped back and almost dropped the bags. But I quickly gathered my composure. I had to act normal: the last thing I wanted was to give Basil a reason to smile all the way to Punishment Square with me and Fiore in the back of his Jeep.

We looked at each other in silence.

I had to walk past him to get to my house. As I sidestepped him, he held me by the arm. Without looking at me, he said, “And just what are you up to, dear Naser?”

I wish I hadn’t responded but I did. “Don’t exhaust your mind thinking how to get back at me,” I said. “Just drop it and leave me alone. I am not going back to your imam’s mosque.”

He let go of my hand, and turning around slowly he sniggered, saying, “We’ll see.”

As I walked home, I couldn’t stop thinking about my encounter with Basil: “What is he going to do? Did he see what was inside the bag? No. I am sure he didn’t.”

I reminded myself of the very thing that made me defeat my fear and accept Fiore’s proposal for love, that life is temporary. If anything happens to me now, I thought, I am happy because at least I know what love feels like.

I lay on the bed, hardly able to wait for the next day and my appointment with the most beautiful flower in the world.

I
T WAS THURSDAY morning, mid-November and almost four months since Fiore’s first note dropped into my life. I was sitting on my bed, my veil spread out next to me.