Girls of Riyadh (20 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: November 12, 2004

Subject: Michelle Frees Herself of All Constraints

May God accept your fasting, your night prayers and all those good deeds you’ve been doing during the holy month of Ramadan. I missed all of you, my allies and my enemies, and I was touched by all the messages I got inquiring about me. They kept on coming right through the entire month of virtue. Here I am, I have returned to you like the fasting person returns to food in the month after Ramadan. Some of you thought that I would stop at this point and not continue the story after Ramadan. But friends and foes: I will carry on. The wick of confessions coils long. And the longer it burns, the more my writings blaze.

M
ichelle adapted to her new life more quickly than she had expected. She welcomed the fresh start and worked hard to put her former life behind her. It was true that all her deep anger and resentment at her world still lay crouched inside of her, but she was able to make enough peace with it so that she appeared undamaged to people around her. It helped that Dubai was prettier than she had expected, and that she and her family were treated far better by everyone there than she had anticipated.

At her new university, the American University at Dubai (AUD), she met an Emarati girl named Jumana who was about the same age and was also studying information technology. The two had several classes together, and each noticed the other’s good looks and perfect American accent right away. Jumana’s dad owned one of the biggest Arab satellite TV channels, and Michelle’s father was delighted to find that his daughter had made friends with the daughter of one of the most successful men in the United Arab Emirates, if not the whole Gulf. Meshaal would tell Jumana every time she came to visit them that she was a carbon copy of his sister: same height, same figure, same hairstyle, even same taste in clothes, shoes and bags. Meshaal was absolutely right. The two girls also had the same outlook on many things, and that helped them become close quickly. Their similar attributes freed them from the nasty issue of jealousy between girls who feel inferior to each other.

At the beginning of the first year’s summer break Jumana suggested to Michelle that she work with her at her father’s TV station on a weekly TV youth program. Michelle agreed enthusiastically. Every day they surfed Arab and foreign Internet sites searching out breaking arts news, which they presented in a report to the program’s producer. They were enthusiastic and thorough, and the producer gave them responsibility for handling the entire arts section on their own. As it happened, Jumana had planned to spend the rest of the vacation traveling with her family in Marbella, so the task fell on Michelle’s shoulders alone.

Michelle threw herself into her new job and continued it even after her fall term started. The program reported news and gossip about Arab and foreign celebrities, so Michelle’s job required her to contact PR managers around the Arab world to confirm this rumor or that or to schedule interviews. She got to know some of the people she reported on personally, and they began to include her in their plans when they visited Dubai. She got invitations to their parties regularly.

A few months later, Michelle was officially made a producer of the program. Then she got her own show to produce. They asked her to be the on-air presenter, but Michelle’s father refused to allow her to host a show that would be broadcast in the homes of his relatives in Saudi Arabia. They ended up using a young Lebanese woman instead.

Working in the media opened up new horizons for Michelle, and for the first time she felt truly liberated from all the restrictions that had always been imposed on her. As she came to know different sorts of people and her network of friends and contacts grew, she began to feel increasingly confident and ambitious at work. Everyone there adored her, which motivated her to produce even better work. Jumana remained her close friend, but she wasn’t particularly fond of the work, so after graduation she took an administrative job at the station.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: November 19, 2004

Subject: A Man Just Like Any Other?

Brother Adel—who, I will hazard a guess, is a statistician—sent me a message criticizing my e-mails for being of varying lengths and not symmetrical like the hems of dresses in vogue this year. Adel says that in order for the lengths of my e-mails to be
even,
they must show evidence of natural distribution. According to him, natural distribution means that 95 percent of the data contained therein will center around the mean (taking into consideration of course the standard deviation), while the percentage of data outside the area of normal distribution on both sides of the mean does not exceed 2.5 percent in either direction, such that the sum total of standard deviation is 5 percent.

Shoot me!

T
he inevitable finale that Sadeem had closed her eyes to for a full three and a half years finally arrived. A few days after her graduation, after Firas sent over the laptop he had always promised her as her graduation present, he told her in a whisper, the words dripping out slowly like drops of water from a leaky tap, that he had gotten engaged to a girl related to one of his sisters’ husbands.

Sadeem let the telephone drop from her hands, ignoring Firas’s pleas. She felt a violent whirling in her head that pulled her down, pulled her somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. Someplace where the dead lived: the dead whom at that moment she wanted to be among.

Was it possible for Firas to marry someone other than her? How could such a thing happen? After all this love and the years they had spent together? Did it make any sense that a man of Firas’s strength and resourcefulness was unable to convince his family that he could marry a divorced woman? Or was it just that he was incapable of convincing himself of it? Had she failed, after all of her attempts, to reach the level of perfection befitting a man like Firas?

Firas simply could not be just another copy of Michelle’s beloved Faisal! Sadeem saw Firas as greater and stronger and more noble and more decent than that pathetic, emasculated weakling who had abandoned her friend! But it appeared they were cut of the same cloth after all. Apparently, all men were the same. It was like God had given them different faces just so that women would be able to tell them apart.

Firas had called her on her cell phone twenty-three times within seven minutes, but the lump in Sadeem’s throat was too painful to allow her to talk to him. For the first time ever, Sadeem did not pick up when Firas rang, even though she had always rushed to the phone the minute she heard the particular tune of his calls, the Kuwaiti song “I Found My Soul When I Found You.” He started texting her, and she read his messages in spite of herself. He tried to explain his behavior, but her anger, far from dissipating, simply grew more intense with every letter she was reading.

How could he have hidden the news of his engagement from her for two entire weeks, the period over which she had taken her final exams? He had talked to her tens of times a day to make sure that her studying was going well, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on! Was this the reason he had stopped calling her on his private cell phone and had begun to use prepaid phone cards? So that his fiancée’s family would not discover their relationship if they tried to get hold of his phone bills? So then he had been preparing for this for months!

He had been determined not to tell her, he wrote, before finding out for certain that she would graduate with honors. That was exactly what had happened: in her final term, she had received the highest grades it was possible to get, as she had generally done ever since she had known Firas.

Firas had considered himself responsible for her studies and her superior grades, and she had handed the reins over to him and contented herself—easily and happily—with obeying his commands, for they were always in her best interest. She had excelled in that term even despite her father’s death just ten weeks before finals began. Sadeem wished now that she had not done so well, had not passed and had not graduated. If only she had flunked, she would not feel this heavy guilt about achieving honors when her father had so recently died, and Firas would not have been able to leave her in order to marry someone else for yet another semester!

Was Firas leaving her now forever, as her father had done a few weeks before? Once the two of them were gone, who would take care of her? Sadeem thought about how Abu Talib, Prophet Mohammed’s—peace be upon him—uncle, and the Prophet’s first wife, Khadija—may Allah be pleased with her—had died in the same year, which had then been named the Year of Grief. She asked God’s forgiveness as she truly felt that her own sorrows this year equaled the sorrows of all humankind since the dawn of history.

She didn’t eat for three days, and it was a full week before she could bear to leave her room—a tormented week that was spent in reaction to the news that had numbed her feelings, paralyzed her thoughts, reopened her wounds and left her, for the first time in years, having to make decisions without consulting the counselor Firas.

In his incessant text messages, he hinted to her that he was willing to remain her beloved for the rest of his life. That was what he wanted, in fact, but he would be forced to conceal it from his wife and family. He swore to her that the entire business was out of his hands; that circumstances were stronger than they were; and that he was in more pain at his family’s decision than she was. But there was nothing that he could do. There was no path before them but patience.

He tried to convince her that no woman would ever be able to replace her in his heart. He told her that he pitied his fiancée because she was engaged to a man who had tasted perfection in another woman and that taste would remain forever on his tongue, making it impossible for any ordinary woman to erase it.

After years of effort on her part to attain a level of spiritual perfection worthy of a man like Firas, he was now kicking it away in favor of an ordinary woman and a banal relationship. To himself and to her, Firas acknowledged that she alone responded to every emotion and instinct within him. He tried to convince her—and, even more, to reassure himself—that this must be God’s will, and they should be submissive to it even if they couldn’t figure out the reasons behind it. All other women were peas in a pod to him now. In his eyes, it didn’t matter who he married, if not Sadeem.

Sadeem responded to the initial shock by deciding to stay away from Firas altogether. For the first time in her life, she ended that conversation without even saying good-bye to him. She refused to answer his calls or acknowledge his imploring text messages, despite the truly demonic pain that had overcome her and that only he could relieve. She hid her grief over Firas inside her grief over her father, which had become fiercer after her breakup with the love of her life.

Sadeem made honest efforts to get beyond her heartbreak without help from Firas. But even the most innocuous events could send her spinning out of control. Sitting down at the dining table with her aunt Badriyyah, barely a moment would pass before she broke down in tears as she stared down at a plate of his favorite seafood dish or a bowl of sweet pudding that he liked. When watching television with her aunt, she would try to choke down the sobs that constantly threatened to escape, but they slipped out despite her best intentions.

Aunt Badriyyah, who had moved in with her after her father’s death so that Sadeem could live at home while she got through her final exams, was insistent that Sadeem come to live with her in Khobar, but Sadeem refused. She would never move to Firas’s native city, no matter what! She couldn’t stand to live under the same sky as him after the wrong he had committed and the pain he had caused. But her aunt swore that she would absolutely not leave Sadeem on her own in Riyadh, no matter what she did and no matter what she said and no matter what excuse she came up with, in her father’s house and among all of those memories that it would be so hard to part with.

Only a few days after the breakup Sadeem began to crave Firas with an intensity that surpassed mere yearning or longing. For years Firas had been the air that she breathed, and without him now she truly felt as if she were suffocating, deprived of oxygen. He was her saint and she used to tell him every detail of her life as elaborately as a sinner making confession. She had told him everything—so much that he used to tease her about her endless stories, and then they would laugh together as he reminded her of those long-ago days at the start of their relationship, when he literally had to drag each word out of her mouth.