2008 - The Consequences of Love. (7 page)

“Naser, I want to make my café like a paradise, where everything one desires, one gets. They can lock women away, but they can’t cage our fantasies. I want to find other ways to set passion free.”

For a while, we didn’t say anything to each other. And I did what I always did in Saudi when there was nothing else I could do. I closed my eyes.

Rashid was always watching me around the café, as he smoked the
shisha
, as he drank, and ate, and even when he talked to his friends. Although he wasn’t the only person who glared at me, he was the most persistent. He was the man known in the café for having a big meal every two hours, a routine he kept despite having been warned by his doctor to lose weight.

“What are you wearing today, handsome?” Rashid asked me one day.

“A
thobe
, of course. Are you blind?”

“Come on. You know what I mean.”

“Just leave it, please,” I said. “The usual?”

“Yes. Don’t forget to make the beans swim in oil,” he said, winking at me.

On my way to the kitchen to get his order, I grumbled to myself.

“Naser?”Jasim called. He was behind the counter, doing some paperwork. “What’s wrong?”

“Him.” I pointed to Rashid with my head.

“Try to be calm,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief and wiping his forehead.

“I am tired,” I said in a low voice.

Jasim put his other hand on my shoulder and patted it softly. “My dear, whenever you feel it is too much, always remember what I told you the other day. Be proud of who you are. Share what you have with others.”

I would stop complaining and do what he asked me to do because I felt I had no real choice. His café was where I lived too. And now that my uncle had deserted me taking my brother with him, Jasim was all I had.

The next morning another customer, Mr Quiet, lifted his ring-filled hand to get my attention. I smiled. He was one of the few men who had never tried to touch me. He always sat at the back of the room, the only table with one chair, which was always reserved for him. His face would disappear behind the haze of his smoke, his sunglasses and his own silence. I would serve him his usual: basbousa cake with coffee. He never spoke to me beyond saying, “May
Allah
enrich you.”

Jasim was the only person he would speak to, and their conversation was always brief. He was tall, had a thick grey beard, and always wore a blazer on top of his
thobe
.

“Never ask him questions of any sort,”Jasim had warned me about the man. “He likes to be on his own.”

“Not even his name?”

“I’ll tell you his name. He is called Abu Imad.”

I laughed. “He is even hiding behind his son’s name.”

I hurried to Mr Quiet’s table. “
Assalamu alaikum
,” I greeted him.

“
Wa ‘alaikumu salam
,” he responded in his melodious voice.

“Anything else besides basbousa cake with coffee for you today?” I asked him.

“No, thank you,” he replied. “May
Allah
enrich you.”

Moments later, Rashid walked in and sat at his table as usual.

“Ya boy?” he shouted.

“Oh,
ya Allah
,” I muttered, walking to his table.

“You are very slow today,” he said.

“If you want a faster service, maybe you should go to another café,” I responded.

“Just clean the table, my friends will be here soon.”

“I cleaned it a moment ago.”

“It is not done properly,” he said. “Look, here, here and here. Didn’t Jasim teach you that you should never talk back to the source of your living? Now shut up and keep cleaning.”

I shook my head, and as I leaned over the table he slid his hand under my
thobe
and slipped his hand between my thighs.

I threw the cloth on the table and stormed off to the kitchen.

In the kitchen, I washed my hands and started grinding the cardamom with the coffee. The Yemeni cook, holding the coffee-pot by its sharp curved spout, stood next to me waiting to add the spicy grounds.

Jasim burst into the kitchen and asked what I was playing at.

I ignored him and snatched the coffee-pot from the cook and poured some water inside it.

“Naser, I am talking to you,” Jasim said loudly.

“Just leave me alone.”

He asked the cook to leave us for a moment.

At that moment, Rashid entered the kitchen, yelling, “Jasim, all I did was to ask this boy to wipe the table properly.”

Jasim turned to Rashid and said, “Rashid, I know that as a healthy man you have your needs, but you have to be gentle with Naser. If you need anything from him, just ask him.”

I hit my fist on the table and shouted at Jasim, “If you want to sell my body, you will have to be a man and tell me to my face.”

I looked at his eyes to see if he was feeling ashamed. There was nothing. I pushed him out of my way and hurried to my room. I took down my mothers picture from the wall and sat with it in my lap. I wanted to cry, but I shouted to myself not to. Instead I sat on my bed looking at her in silence, clenching my teeth.

Jasim barged into my room. He looked at me in a way that made me uneasy.

“Jasim, please forget it,” I begged, as he came closer. “Please leave me alone.”

He sat next to me and whispered, “Naser, it is hard for me to ask you to do this not least because…” He paused, sighed deeply and then he said, “Naser, Rashid likes you. He said he must have you because he wants you to…”

“Let me guess. He wants me to be his boy until he gets married. I have heard it many times before but I am not going to do it.”

“Naser, we can’t refuse Rashid. He might not look it, but he is a very important man for this café. I didn’t tell you this before, but for me to keep my business open, I have to do certain things, obey certain rules. I am a foreigner like you; I could be kicked out from this country any minute if I don’t follow the rules. You are very dear to me, I will only ask you to do things for a reason. If this shop is shut, where will you go? Who will open their house to you? Naser, your uncle and brother are living in Riyadh now. They will never have you back and soon you will have to renew your
iqama
. Where will you get the money for the renewal? If you don’t pay and your residency is terminated, you will be deported. Is this how you want to repay your mother?”

“Leave me alone,” I yelled at him.

“Naser, listen to me. If you give Rashid what he wants, you will have nothing to worry about.
Allah
gave him everything but looks and manners. I’ll offer him etiquette lessons and you will have to give him some of your beauty. And I can assure you that we will get some of his wealth.”

“Just stop it, Jasim,” I said, putting my mother’s portrait aside.

But he must have sensed I was breaking, because like a killer peering at his victim, Jasim twisted his knife inside me: “Think how much your mother had to go through to send you away from the war to safety. And now you want to go back to the war zone, to death. I am sure she misses you, if she is still alive.”

I jumped up and started punching him, screaming, “I know she is alive. She is waiting for me!”

He didn’t fight back. “Hit me, Naser,” he said, “but you must realise that we only have each other. I have no family and you have none. I swear to you I don’t want him to touch you. But let’s support each other. We have to do what is necessary to live.”

I left the room and ran out of the café.

I ran past the shops, the big mosque and the nine-storey building, I took the bus to the Corniche and ran to my secret place. A storm swept across the sea and the beach, and blew for a long time. I felt closer to my mother here, there was only the sea to separate us.

Sitting on my rock and staring at the dark water, I began to wonder why it had all gone wrong. I had no words to describe the feeling inside me. I slowly walked towards the sea. Would things have been different if she hadn’t sent me away? Was she still alive in her hut at the foot of Lovers’ Hill? Maybe Jasim was right. Maybe she was dead. But if she were, I thought, then she must have died a long time ago, the day she sent my brother and me away. Because she had sung to us so often that we were her only reason to live.

That evening, I decided to leave Jeddah. I didn’t care where to. I had had enough. I had no reason to stay. I had made up my mind, and the only way out was to make a lot of money fast so that I could leave as quickly as possible.

I fell asleep on the rock, my rage spent. I returned to Jasim’s early the next morning, wet, dirty and hungry.

I opened up the café and the warm wind flooded the entire place, bringing with it the scent of drains and sewage. In the street, the potholes were filled with water. The school, just down the road from the café, had been forced to shut because of structural damage caused by the storm. We’d also heard that a restaurant belonging to an Egyptian man at the top of the hill had been brought down in the winds. The blind imam of our local mosque praised the destruction of the Egyptian restaurant during his morning sermon. As I laid out the tables and chairs I could hear him ranting, on and on. He started as usual, denouncing the enemies in this world and dedicating the majority of his speech to reminding worshippers of their duties towards their families. Then, after what seemed a deliberately long pause, he seemed to stray off his usual speech.

“We have new forms of evil lurking amongst us,” he said. “This new evil is manifest in a foreign man, a man who came to destroy our morals and values. This man sells satellite dishes.” I shook my head. “Now, oh
ya Allah’s
worshippers, we have a man who is going around selling these dishes and our people are swayed by this evil and now they are erecting these ugly things on their roofs like minarets. And do you know why? They want to watch prohibited Egyptian films and corrupt our youth. But last night,
Allah
spoke. He sent his anger and flattened the restaurant of a man who claims to have opened it to feed people’s stomachs, but is only filling their minds with lust and immorality. This was a message from
Allah
to our government too: if they don’t act, He, the greatest, will.”

The ‘evidence’ of
Allah’s
vengeance was still visible in the street. Soon after I had opened up, the customers started arriving. The Yemeni cook was in the kitchen and Jasim was counting the money. He said nothing to me.

I saw Rashid spit before he stepped inside, then announce, as if I was his wife, “I am here, get me coffee.”

He sat at his table. A few men followed and scattered around the café, greeting each other. Suddenly Rashid stood up and shouted at his friend, Gamal, sitting in the opposite corner, “Do you see what’s happening to our city? Our government bombards us every day telling us how rich we are, yet look what’s happening—one bucket of rain and Jeddah is drowning. They should install a proper drainage system with the money they have.”

Gamal laughed, and Rashid sat down, pleased with himself.

“Your coffee,” I said, putting it on his table.

At the counter Jasim held my hand and looked at me askance.

I stared back at him.

Taking my hand from Jasim, I turned around saying, “I will be in my room.”

The air was heavy in the back room, and my eyelids were getting heavier by the second. Only the shrieks of the men as they played dominoes kept me in a conscious state. They banged the tables, but I blocked them out. I longed to hear from my mother and Semira that things would be OK.

I turned to the wall. I thought about Mother, about Semira, and about their friends, the sex workers, on Lovers’ Hill. I thought about the countless years they gave their bodies to hungry men. I thought about the lonely nights they spent in the arms of men they didn’t know; men who arrived under darkness; men who waited around the hill like wolves to avoid other men and wait for the signal that a woman was free. I thought of my mother and Semira, and how they had raised me and Ibrahim, helping each other with the little money they had earned. I wondered what they would say if they could see me here, in Jasim’s back room. There was a knock.

I drew a deep breath. “Come in,” I exhaled.

Rashid entered the room, closed the door and hung his
guim
on a hook. He patted down his
thobe
, looked at his shoes and then, without saying anything, he turned off the light.

In the dark and just before he held my hand, Rashid whispered, “Jasim said you will be my boy until I get married.”

One early morning, four weeks after Rashid started coming regularly into my room, I was smoking a cigarette outside the café, numb to what was going on around me. I saw Mr Quiet about to enter the café. He must have noticed that something was wrong because he came over to me.

“Naser, how are you today?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

He whispered, “Please let me know if you want to talk. I can assure you that quiet people are good listeners.”

He lit a cigarette and walked inside the café, bowing his head.

I was too shy to talk to Mr Quiet about Rashid. It took me a while before I approached him.

As I served him, Jasim peered over at us from behind his counter just yards away, and Rashid watched from his usual table in the front of the café. I whispered that I would like to talk to him but that the only time I was free was before I opened the café and before Jasim and the Yemeni cook arrived.

He nodded and said that he would come the next day after early morning prayers.

Mr Quiet came to my room at exactly half-past five the next morning.

He said he knew what Rashid wanted from me in return for the safeguarding of Jasim’s business. I wasn’t the first boy that had happened to, he comforted me. He knew someone who could find me a new job quickly. His name was Hilal, from Sudan, and he promised he was a good man and would look after me.

It took a while after Mr Quiet promised to help me for Hilal to finally find me a job at a car-wash, and a small flat to live in.

By the time I left Jasim’s, I had been working in the back room for six weeks.

On my last day, when Rashid had just left me with a hundred riyals, I looked up at the ceiling. Jasim’s pressure and my dream to leave the country had led me to accept life in the mirror. But not for much longer. I took one of my shoes and smashed it hard against my reflection.