Girls of Riyadh (23 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: December 31, 2004

Subject: Today He’s Back

Happy New Year! I don’t feel like writing any little introduction this week. I’m going to let events speak for themselves.

F
iras came back!

When Sadeem heard from Firas again, she tore out that day’s page from her little daily diary and enclosed it gently in her sky-blue scrapbook, where it nestled among the pages so full of his photos and interviews.

Firas came back to her, only two days after she had longed for him at the wedding. He came back, a few days after his marriage contract was signed and a few weeks before his wedding was to take place.

Sadeem was in Khobar. After spending the evening at a relative’s wedding, she had returned to her room at Aunt Badriyyah’s, and was unable to sleep. The air of Firas’s city polluted her lungs and the glaring streetlamps that lit the road blinded her eyes, and it seemed as if Firas was everywhere—as if he had spread out his black
bisht,
the cloak he wore on top of his
thobe,
in most of the official photographs, over the entire city, so that everything underneath it was cast in his shadow.

Sadeem had been lying in bed awake, sighing deeply, at four
A.M
when a text message appeared on her cell phone, which had all but died since Firas had gone away:

Sadeem couldn’t even read it clearly. Tears had filled her eyes, blurring her vision, the minute she read the sender’s nickname, which she had been too weak to delete from her phone: Firasi Taj Rasi. My Firas, my Crown.

She barely knew what she was doing as she pressed the button to call the sender’s number. Her Firas answered! Firas, her darling and brother and father and friend. He didn’t say anything, but just hearing his breathing on the other end of the connection was enough to make her weep.

He stayed silent, not knowing what to say. The sound of his car motor partly concealed the tightness in his breathing, as Sadeem went on sobbing in wordless rebuke of what he had done, releasing all that had been packed inside of her, waiting to be unloaded, swelling and growing until it filled her completely. He listened and listened to her painful gasps for breath as he murmured into his cell phone for her to imagine his planting one kiss after another on her forehead.

In one fell swoop he destroyed all the fortifications the resistance forces possessed.

He couldn’t believe it when she told him she was living with her aunt in Khobar, just a few kilometers away from his home! He kept her talking on the phone as he made his way toward her neighborhood. He didn’t know the house she was in, and he didn’t ask her. He told her that he was getting closer to her than she could imagine.

That was a dawn never to be forgotten! Birds cheerfully engaged in their early morning flutter, and a lone car roaming one of the quarters of the city of Khobar, driven by a man worn down by desire and longing for his sweetheart’s eyes. The two lovers lost the last of their reservations after what had seemed a lifetime of denial. Now fate, with the tender love of a father who cannot bear to see his children in torment, gripped their hands and led each to the other.

Sadeem went over to her window and looked out onto the street. She began describing the houses nearby to Firas, since she didn’t know the number of her aunt’s house or its exact location. All she knew was that it had a huge glass front door and on either side of the large door were a few untrimmed trees.

She caught sight of the lights of his car in the distance and felt as though she were floating in a warm ocean of bliss. He saw her at the window, her ash-brown hair tumbling across her shoulders and the creamy skin that he dreamed of kissing. “You’re cream and honey!” he would say to her whenever he stared at her pictures.

He shut off the car engine in front of the house, not far from Sadeem’s window on the second floor. She begged him to move farther off before one of the neighbors coming back from the nearby mosque after Fajr prayer saw him by her window at this early time of the day! He couldn’t care less. He started teasing and flirting with her, singing to her:

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: January 7, 2005

Subject: Life after Lamees’s Marriage

Readers were divided—as usual—between those who supported Sadeem’s return to Firas and those who opposed it. But everyone did agree this time—unusually—that come what may, the extraordinary love between these two demands an extraordinary ending to their story.

T
he hints about the benefits of attachment and stability Michelle heard from Hamdan came in a variety of shapes. He told her his dream was to marry a girl who would be his
best friend,
and that he was hoping he would find a girl who had exactly
her
grasp of things and
her
openness toward the world. (Michelle smiled as she heard him praise her openness, the very same quality she’d heard so much criticism of in her own country.) He was always complimenting her on her elegance, and he noticed the tiniest changes she made to her appearance from one day to the next.

Michelle admitted to herself now (having come to depend, in her new life in Dubai, on the principle of being frank with herself) that she could see one of two possibilities. Either she admired Hamdan very much or she loved him very little. His presence left her feeling happy—it was happier than she had felt in Matti’s pleasant company but much less happy than she had felt when she was with Faisal. She was quite sure that Hamdan carried in his heart stronger feelings for her than she had for him, and so she deliberately missed his hints and tried to get him to sense her hesitation about taking their relationship further than friendship. She was able to do it without completely severing the strands of his hopes (and hers) for the future. Hamdan gracefully accepted that Michelle wasn’t yet ready to talk about commitment.

He was perceptive enough to know that talking may be the best way to express what is in one’s mind, but expressing what is in the heart is more eloquently done in other ways. He knew from his university studies in nonverbal communication that when a person’s words conflict with tone of voice or gestures, the truth almost always lies in the way words are said rather than in what is said.

That he was free of the mental complexes that usually cripple men’s brains was one huge attraction for Michelle. Even though he possessed many of the qualities that seemed to make other men self-obsessed—he was handsome and had strong principles and was materially and socially successful—he appeared to her to be amazingly well balanced. She found him intellectually stimulating, engaging, sophisticated and emotionally enlightened.

And even so, even with all of this, Michelle realized that she could not really love him. Or maybe she was unable to allow herself to try. She had had two tries already, and that was plenty for her. If her family was going to refuse her relationship with her American relative because
he
wasn’t one of
them,
and the people of Saudi Arabia were refusing one of
their
own sons to her because
she
wasn’t one of
them,
what was there to guarantee that this run of misfortune would be broken now with Hamdan the Emarati guy? After the first experience, she had fled to America, and after the second, she had immigrated against her will to Dubai. Where would she be exiled if she were to fail for a third time?

Everything in her life seemed to be going brilliantly except when it came to love and marriage. Michelle did not believe that she and destiny would ever agree on a suitable man, for Michelle had been quarreling with her destiny for time immemorial. If she found a man she liked, destiny plucked him away from her; and if she detested him, destiny threw him at her feet.

L
AMEES ANNOUNCED
that she would officially start wearing the
hijab
after returning from her honeymoon. In Saudi, as everyone knows, women have to wear some form of
hijab
—some kind of head cover to conceal their hair and neck—but women have the choice to take it off, even in front of unknown men, within the confines of houses and as soon as they cross the country borders. Lamees decided that she would start to wear it whenever non-Muhram
*
men were around, following the rules of Islam. She would wear it in front of her cousins and coworkers and whenever she traveled outside of the kingdom. Her friends all congratulated her on this bold spiritual step—except for Michelle, who tried to dissuade her from her decision, reminding her how hideous
hijab-
wearing women usually looked and how the
hijab
restricted a girl from being fashionable because it also required covering her arms with long sleeves and her legs with long pants or skirts. But Lamees had made her mind up absolutely, and she had done so before seeking anyone else’s thoughts on the matter, including Nizar’s. Lamees felt that she had had all the liberation she wanted before her marriage and during her honeymoon. Now it was time to pay her dues to God, especially after He had granted her such a wonderful husband, one who was just right for her and whom she had dreamed of finding, and whose love and tenderness toward her made her the envy of all her friends.

Lamees’s life with Nizar was truly a picture of married bliss. They were in greater agreement about everything and more in tune with each other’s needs than any of the married couples around them. They were totally complementary. For example, it was really difficult to get Nizar upset about anything; Lamees, on the other hand, was highly strung and sensitive. But she was more judicious and more patient than he was when it came to anything related to home or budget. So Nizar relied on her to take care of all household affairs, while always lending a hand, every day, in cleaning and washing and cooking and ironing. As long as they had no babies, they both preferred not to have a maid.

Lamees was very attentive to her relationship with her husband’s family. She worked hard to please them, especially his mother, whom she called Mama—something none of her Najdi friends would ever do.
*
The excellent relationship between Lamees and Um Nizar strengthened Nizar’s attachment to his wife even more as time went on.

Nizar would randomly bring home a bunch of red roses for Lamees for no special occasion. He posted little love letters on the fridge door before going off to his on-call shifts at the hospital. When he was about to take his rest break there, he always called her before going to bed. And when he returned home, he would take her out to a restaurant or shopping without the slightest anxiety or embarrassment about the possibility of running into one of his friends while his wife was at his side (a hang-up many Saudi men have). She made him sandwiches and salads, leaving them in the fridge when she set off to do her own hospital rounds. He waited impatiently for her to be finished so that they could spend the rest of their day together, like newlyweds still on their honeymoon.

T
HERE WAS
a question haunting Sadeem that no one could answer to her satisfaction. She put her question regularly to Gamrah and Um Nuwayyir, leaving them feeling at a complete loss as to how to help their Sadeem. Is it a blessing or a curse for a woman to have knowledge? she wanted to know—referring to both academic knowledge and the practical experiences of everyday life.

Sadeem had observed that despite human progress and a general refinement of society’s ideas about life, when it came down to searching for a suitable bride, young and naïve girls tended to hold more of an attraction than girls who had attained an advanced level of knowledge and had a more sophisticated understanding of the world. The fact that it was extremely unusual for a female doctor to be married was a case in point. Men who came from this part of the world, Sadeem decided, were by nature proud and jealous creatures. They sensed danger when face to face with females who might present a challenge to their capabilities. Naturally, such men would prefer to marry a woman with only a very modest education, someone feeble and helpless, like a bird with a broken wing, and without any experience of the world. That way the man could assume the position of the teacher, who takes on the job of forming his pupil into whatever he wishes. Even if many men admired strong women, Sadeem pondered, they did not
marry
them! So the ignorant girl was in hot demand while the smart and savvy one watched helplessly as her name became slowly etched in a giant plaque in commemoration of spinsters, a virtual list that was growing longer every day to accommodate the requirements of all the insecure men who didn’t actually know what they wanted and so refused to attach themselves to a woman who knew absolutely what she wanted.