2008 - The Consequences of Love. (26 page)

He took my hand and added with a serious tone, “From now on, I am going to camp outside your door. She might drop me a note and things could develop from there.”

Think of something quickly, I panicked. You don’t want him stationed outside your house all the time.

“But Yahya,” I said, “there are no single girls living in my block.”

“How do you know?”he asked. “You are just being jealous.”

“No I am not,” I said. “I live in the building. There are two women and both are married. Do you want to get involved with a married woman?”

“Why not? I need love like anyone else,” he said.

“But think about the consequences. What will happen if the religious police find out…”

“So? What can they do?” he barked.

“They could lash you in Punishment Square and even deport you.”

“No, they will not deport me. I will just be lashed and even if they want to deport me, they will not. I have good contacts.”

I needed to try a different strategy. “Yahya, wasn’t it you who once told me that you believe in love that is unselfish.”

“Yes, and? What’s your point?”

“Well, if this woman is married and the two of you are discovered then she will be stoned to death.
Ya Allah
, they will put her in a hole up to her neck, with her hands handcuffed, and people will smash her face with stones. Not only will the one you love die, but she will die slowly after every feature of her beloved face is flattened and destroyed. There are blood-lusting men in this city waiting by Punishment Square, ready with big stones to beat her because she is married. If this is not selfish then I have no idea what is. I think you should walk away before anything starts.”

Yahya stood up without saying a word and drove off on his motorbike.

I knew I had managed to fend off Yahya, and stop him from pursuing his crazy idea of coming to my house to look for the girl he was convinced had smiled at him, but it made me realise just how far I had gone with Fiore. I felt uneasy. I thought once again about the risk we were running. While men and women lived totally separated lives, Fiore and I had managed to bring ourselves together under everyone’s nose. When we lay naked on her bed, we sometimes heard the blind imam through the tannoys cursing the girls who dropped notes at the feet of boys. “They will go to hell,” he would say.

But I was more concerned about the earthly punishment that might await us. “What if we get caught? Will we be caught? What would happen to her? What might happen to me? What will they do to us in Punishment Square? What would her father do to her if he knew she was in love and brought shame to his honour?”

But being caught by the religious police wasn’t the only thing Fiore and I had to look out for. Her father still wanted to marry her off.

Fiore said that her mother generally stayed quiet and would not challenge her father, but when it came to defending Fiore’s future, there was nothing that could hold her back.

She would shout at her husband and tell him that she would never allow him to marry their daughter against her wish.

“We will see about that,” he would say. “Your daughter is getting old. If she hangs around for much longer without accepting one of these offers, no man will want her any more. She will be too old, and she will die as a pensioner in my house. I will do whatever I can to prevent that.”

I
T WAS MORE than a month since I had left my job at the car-wash. I counted the remains of my savings. I worked out that I had just enough to live on for two more months, until the beginning of February.

That morning, I had tea with Jasim in his café. He was in a good mood. “Because,” he said, broadly smiling, “when new customers come to my café and get a glance of my new waiter, they are hooked and always return. They don’t want to live a day without seeing that boy.”

Since I had left his café, he had hired many boys, of all complexions and nationalities. His latest recruit was a Palestinian who had come with his mother and sister from a refugee camp in Lebanon.

Jasim gloated about the services his café offered in a society like Saudi Arabia. “I am so privileged because I see men coming here burdened by lust, but leaving relieved and smiling, as if they have had a day in a paradise.”

I had long stopped believing in his ridiculous claim that he was a prophet sent to desperate men by the god of desire. As Mr Quiet once told me, “Jasim is just a good businessman who found a lucrative niche in the market and exploited it fully using young boys and his smuggling business.”

But I could never tell Jasim what I thought of him. I always wanted to keep him on my side. You couldn’t make an enemy of him, because he had so many links with powerful men.

“You never know,” I would tell myself. “He might also be useful one day.”

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON, after my tea with Jasim, I was due to meet Fiore in Al-Nuzla Street and as I had promised the day before, I was due to bring her Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North
, which had been given to me by Jasim ages ago. I was about to put on my veil when I heard a knock on my door. It must be Yahya, I thought. I quickly hid my
abaya
, and the rest of my disguise under the bed.

I opened the door and saw Basil. He was leaning against the wall with his hands inside his
thobe
pockets. As I regained my breath, beardless Hamid appeared from behind him. “Go and search his house. I am sure this boy, like all corrupted boys in Al-Nuzla, has heaps of pornographic materials lying around,” Basil ordered Hamid.

“There is no porn in my flat,” I said, blocking Hamid’s way.

Hamid pushed me aside, hissing, “Move,
ya
apostate.”

I held my ground. I was suddenly fearless. I had no choice, with all the women’s clothes and Salih’s forbidden book in my room. I tried to shove Hamid back, but as I was about to shut my door, both pushed against me and they managed to force their way in. Basil quickly pinned me against the wall, screaming, “Go,
ya
Hamid, get the stick from the Jeep.”

Basil thumped the door shut with his foot.

“I swear to
Allah
I have no porn magazines,” I screamed.

He pushed me harder, the side of my face scratched against the rough wall. “Liar,” he said, “I used to be a street boy myself and I know boys like you have dirty porn, ah? If you don’t tell us where they are, we’ll find them. Where are you hiding it? Your kitchen cupboard? Your wardrobe? Or under the bed?”

I had to beg him. “Basil, I am sorry. I am really sorry I don’t know what was wrong with me then. Please forgive me. I promise I will come back to the mosque if that’s what you want me to do.”

“
Ya
apostate,” he said. “How can you leave the imam and make a mockery out of him?”

Hamid banged on the door, screaming, “Basil, are you all right? Basil? Answer me.”

“I am fine,” Basil shouted his reply to Hamid.

“Let me in and I will crush this cursed boy,” Hamid pleaded.

“Wait,
ya
Hamid,” Basil responded, “I am making him confess.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone,” I said to Basil. “I told you I am sorry.”

“Shut up,” he said, pushing my head harder against the wall. “Speak quietly.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked him.

He pressed his lower body against me and then I felt his hand squeezing my backside.

“Go to hell,” I said, trying to push him. “How can you call yourself a religious policeman? You are nothing but a desperate freak.”

He shouted towards the door, “I am going to open the door now, Hamid.”

“Wait. Wait,” I said. “OK. Just let me go now. I will come to the park.”

He immediately yelled out, “Everything is all right, Hamid. I am satisfied this boy has no pornography.”

He pressed his hand tight against my backside, and as he caressed my bottom, he said, “Meet me tonight at the park at 11 a.m. or I will come back to get you.”

He let me go and as he turned to leave, he smiled.

Before I went to Fiore’s house that afternoon, I went outside the flat and walked down Al-Nuzla Street to make sure Basil’s Jeep was not around.

The street was clear, so I went back and dressed up to go to the nine-storey building.

I had no idea what to do about Basil. But I knew that my magical time with Fiore couldn’t go on for ever. I had to talk to Fiore or deal with it myself.

As soon as we entered her room, I ripped off my disguise and pushed her on to the bed. I pulled off her veil more roughly than I intended. She was wearing a white T·shirt, her bra glowing through the thin fabric like underwater lilies.

I was still sweating from the walk from my house to hers dressed in the full
abaya
. I was never going to get used to it. As I joined her on the bed, she wiped the sweat from my face with the edge of her T·shirt. She moved over a little, and drew her long hair to one side of her face, and started braiding it into a thick plait.

I caressed her elegant straight back and her wide hips.

I gave her Tayeb Salih’s novel. She thanked me like an excited child given a beautiful and long-awaited present. She thumbed through the novel and then turned to me and looked at me with intense eyes; saying nothing. She suddenly pushed me back on the bed and lay on top of me kissing me passionately. After each time her teeth bit my lips, she used her tongue to soothe them gently.

“Thank you,
habibi
” she said a while later, pulling away and leaving my mouth on fire. She sprung to her feet, saying, “Wait, I’ve got a book I want to show you.”

She walked to her desk and came back holding a heavy-looking volume. “Here, take a look at this and you will see what I wanted to be.”

Fiore threw the book into my lap. It was bound with an Islamic cover. She had already told me that all her books were bound abroad.

She fixed her pillow and lay down on her back. She stretched her legs out and the book she had just given me was pushed off my lap with her feet. She had immediately taken its place.

She then reached out and wanted to grab the book she had meant to show me. But I took it back and opened it. It was a book with large photos. Did she want to be a photographer? I looked at a picture in colour of a Japanese woman in a white dress, sitting on a bench with her legs crossed and staring at the wide still blue sea in front of her. How beautiful, I thought.

In my mind’s eye I gazed far into the future. I saw Fiore as the most successful photographer of her time.

A flicker of happiness shone across my face but then I thought, what about me?
Ya Allah
, I had lost track of my own dreams. For a second I just couldn’t remember what I had wanted to be when I was younger; before school where the dream of the afterlife was so imposed on us that dreams on earth were forgotten. What did I want to be? Who did I want to be with?

My mood plummeted.

I flicked through the photography book once again.

I heard Fiore breathing deeply. I turned and stared at her in silence. We were behaving just like any couple might act in any other bedroom around the world. But we were not just anywhere. I was in Jeddah—and I was in a woman’s room. I was in Saudi Arabia, where love had been erased from the dictionary, and yet somehow I had found a way to express my passion for another.

I couldn’t dispel the thought that I was living a dream. Everything was getting so blurred that I could no longer work out where the reality began and where the illusion set in. In a country like this, what could Fiore and I seriously expect of our future together? Where did we go from here? How would we live, and where?

I pushed Fiore’s legs aside and covered my head in my hands.

“Naser, are you all right?” Fiore asked.

I nodded.

She now rested her head on my thigh. I looked down at her. Our eyes met and she winked at me. I bent and kissed her. Twirling a lock of her hair in my fingers, I whispered, “I was just thinking about our future together. How nice it would be if you were to be a great photographer and I—”

“
Habibi
, let’s not talk about this,” she said, sitting up on the bed.

“Why not? You gave me the book. I thought you wanted me…”

“I just wanted to show you something I had dreamed about in the past.”

“Past?You are only nineteen. It sounds like you’ve already buried your dream.”

“
Habibi
, I have been buried all my waking life, let alone my dreams. Now, let’s read,” she said.

I kept quiet. But as I continued to flick through the photography book, I became more agitated. The pictures that had made me joyous only moments earlier now seemed to create only envy in me. I looked at the photographer’s name and thought, if this woman can do this why can’t
habibati?
I put the book aside. I didn’t want to be reminded of a dead dream.

I gazed at the bookshelf stacked with books from all over the world. She, like me, was living someone else’s life through what she read; breathing and eating from pages written in a faraway land. We were living an imported life. Why are we here? It felt as if the bookshelves were leaning towards us trying to push us out of the room, as if to say: life is out there. The books were our transport, their covers flapping, ready to fly us away to where we really wanted to be, in a place where we could be together and live our dreams.

As she shifted on the bed, my veil slid on the floor. I picked it up, thinking, “
Ya Allah
. I have to wear this
abaya
and make myself invisible just to be with her, just to see her face, just so that I can touch even only one tip of her finger. I have to schedule my caressing her breasts at a time when her father is praying at the mosque or out with his friends: even her moans have to fit a man’s timetable.”

I was angry, I knew that now. I wanted to tear down the thick curtains, and break her window; then I would strip off her clothes, kiss her body all over and we would make love so freely that the whole world would hear our cries of pleasure, and the men of Jeddah would know that my woman was not a mute.

I turned back to the book and tried to read the introduction, but no matter how much I tried to quieten my thoughts, they quickly stormed into mutiny. I looked across at Fiore. She was immersed in Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North
. She wasn’t yet ready to face up to the truth.