Where Pigeons Don't Fly (7 page)

Sameera, or Sameer as the other girls called her, would dash from her family home in Shubra, a full-length
abaya
draped over her head, and as the Palestinian bus driver set off down King Fahd Road, she would take it off and stow it in her capacious bag to reveal another
abaya
covering her shoulders, the garish silver embroidery on its sleeves gleaming against the black cloth. Another embroidered panel spread down her back and over her buttocks. She would put on a pair of large pink sunglasses and, from her seat in the back of the small bus, would turn her gaze to the cars moving past them on the road.

From her first day at the Academy this young woman in her twenties had strutted the corridors dressed in dark blue jeans and a white shirt with a drawing of a huge eye over her small breasts. Her stride was broad and manly and she never stopped chasing after the soft, brown-skinned girls.

When Tarfah saw Sameera for the first time she felt rooted to the spot and started to stare at her as they sat facing each other across the corridor. Sameera took the cushion from her seat and hugged it, its corner between her open thighs as she twirled a pen around her mouth in a quite blatant fashion. Tarfah couldn't tell if she was looking at her or the window behind her, because the sunglasses completely hid her eyes.

She wasn't the only one at the Academy: there were five girls, ‘boyettes' as they were known, who wore jeans, baggy shirts, trainers and sunglasses and roamed the courtyard hitting on girls. One would put her hands in her jean pockets and walk along with a male self-confidence, arm-in-arm with a soft white girl on whose shoulder she would sometimes drop her head. She was away in another world, insensible to the glances and sly comments of the others. They would go to the bathroom together, the open-topped partitions unable to muffle their fevered panting.

It was terrifying to watch them argue with their girlfriends, swapping filthy phrases and accusations back and forth because the girl had seen her ‘boyette' come on to some young woman who had responded to her advances. For Tarfah and her friend Nada there was nothing funny about it; it was strange and painful.

When Sameera tried it with Tarfah the time they found themselves alone together beneath the stairs, Tarfah could only pretend to ignore Sameera's flirtatious comments about her eyes. She pleaded with her to give it a try for a few minutes: just a hug and a clinch, and if she enjoyed it then she would kiss her a few minutes more. But Tarfah's response as she charged up the stairs in fright was that she would be unable to oblige: ‘I hate girls!' she shouted.

Sameera left her to vanish on to the second floor, but she didn't give up hope.

Tarfah had told Fahd that she would never work as a nurse, anyway, since her brothers had strongly opposed the idea and decided she would either become a laboratory assistant or a pharmacist. Then she laughed out loud as she told the story of Nada's cousin who worked as a pharmacist at a government hospital.

It was midday when a Bedouin with a thick upswept moustache stood up carrying a little tousle-haired girl, red-cheeked with fever. The cousin fetched the medicine and placed it over the prescription lying on the table—Fevadol for the temperature, an antibiotic called Augmentin and a strip of suppositories just in case—and started to write out instructions for their use. She took the bottle of antibiotics and made a mark with the pen above the level of the white powder inside, saying that he must add clean water up to the line then shake the bottle. Her white hand squeezed the bottle tight and shook it up and down in front of him as she said, ‘Shake it hard.'

The Bedouin's gaze devoured her.

He took the bag of medicines and walked a few paces then stopped and put the girl on the floor, removing the antibiotics from the bag and returning to the counter. Watching him as he walked towards her she noticed that he was aroused. Embarrassed, she averted her eyes. ‘Do I put the water in this bottle, or another one?' he asked. She answered with a shake of the head and fled to the shelves at the back of the pharmacy.

Tarfah laughed noisily. ‘Just imagine! Can you believe this society? These people? That's real frustration…' she added sadly. ‘Is it this hard for people to have sex?'

‘What do you mean? You're not saying that these directives are right?' Fahd asked.

Her voice a little calmer, Tarfah replied, ‘No, sweetheart, you know my position, but I can't imagine what it will be like to work there.'

He told her that if the legislator who drew up the directives had thought a little differently, he would have issued severe laws that would commit anyone convicted of harassing women to years in prison, enough to make the Bedouin hesitate a thousand times over before exposing himself to her. But the punishment was always borne by the poor woman because she was the one who provoked his pole.

Fahd did not entirely trust his lover. Despite the fact she worshipped his very eyes, as she was always telling him in her texts, he would have his doubts whenever she called him and he heard the racket and wicked laughter coming from her friends at the Academy.

‘Where's Tarfah got to?' a girl might ask.

‘Over there, breastfeeding,' another would answer and they would burst out into wild laughter. Tarfah would laugh, too, and shout at them to shut up so she could hear him.

‘“Breastfeeding” means talking on the phone,' she would explain.

Her friends would try to make him overhear their jokes or mocking comments, then attempting to persuade Tarfah to let them say hello to her sweetheart. Tarfah told him that they also tried to make her talk to their boyfriends but she absolutely refused to do so. He wasn't convinced that she spoke to no one else apart from him, especially since her friends would
encourage her to live ‘free' as they called it, simply and happily. ‘The world isn't up to your complications!'

One message in particular had left him wracked with doubt:

I send you a bullet of love, an artillery shell of desire, a bomb-belt of tenderness and a booby-trapped car of roses and jasmine
.

What do you think of this?!
she had added at the bottom, then told him it had been sent by a Palestinian driver to a friend of hers who took his bus from Suwaidi to Mugharrazat. Fahd asked her how the Palestinian could send her friend a message like that unless she was having an affair with him. She stammered and snapped, ‘Believe it or not I didn't look at it like you!'

When Tarfah sent him a video clip of herself gazing from the bus window in her sunglasses, occasionally raising her uncovered hair with her right hand and sorrowfully singing along with Abdullah Ruwaished,
If I had another life, by God I'd live you twice
, he asked, ‘How did you manage to film a clip like that in the bus? Did the driver see you as you drove through the streets?'

She swore that there was a closed curtain between them and the driver, but some mischievous students liked to hassle him and would sometimes lift the curtain and talk to him, though he remained extremely respectful and courteous.

At first it would irritate Fahd when she talked to him like this, and her stories of Sameera—or Sameer—and the other ‘boyettes' would leave him unsettled, but occasionally he would feel that he was taking things too seriously, in a society that was unsmiling and tragic on the outside, but playful and cynical from within.

What could be more cynical than Sameera bumping her hand against Tarfah's bottom as she walked past her, only for Tarfah to turn round angrily: ‘Yes?'

Sameera wiggled her hand and eyebrows in astonishment as though she had done nothing wrong.

‘I told you. I've got no time for girls' silly games!' said Tarfah in vexation. She twisted her mouth in disapproval. ‘Silly groping.'

‘Dear God,' answered Sameera mockingly. ‘If only I had you trapped under the stairs or in the bathroom.'

Life in Riyadh was full of contradictions. No one cared how you were: your poverty, hunger, sufferings and woe; yet at the same time everyone thought that you were easy, that anyone could do with you as they liked.

 

–9 –

F
AHD RETURNED TO IT
, again and again: his uncle's visit. When Fahd's mother knocked on the salon's inner door her son politely excused himself to his guests. Soha handed him the tray of coffee, cups and dates, whispering, ‘Who is it?' and, when he had told her, ‘What do they want?'

Fahd shook his head, professing ignorance. When he poured the first cup for Ibrahim, the man took it, saying, ‘Live long, my boy!'

The man talked for a long time about decency, about protecting women and their dignity and satisfying their needs, until he finally got to the point, to wit: for the widow to stay single was damaging to her.

Fahd broke in. ‘But my sister and I live with her.'

‘Your sister is a young girl, Fahd, she needs care and attention, and you'll get married eventually.'

Had his uncle heard something? Had his mother complained to someone, and word got out, as it always did with the inhabitants of Buraida? Had his uncle got wind of her dissatisfaction, or her dreams? It was as though the man's words contained some mystery impenetrable to the boy, who sat listening politely before the shocking sentence hit him.

No one had any inkling of the terrible impact of this shock; the last sentence his Uncle Ibrahim uttered was like a cannonball crashing through the wall of a perfectly quiet
library, a volcano obliterating a world at peace, an earthquake in the upper reaches of the Richter scale demolishing a sad and humble dwelling, a shark's sudden leap splitting the quiet surface of the water. How can one convey the blunt force of that sentence? That an uncle with two wives should come and rescue Fahd's mother, the widow Soha, from her loneliness and protect her two children from hunger and corruption.

‘Your Uncle Saleh is a safer bet than a stranger to keep the family safe and protect his niece from strangers entering the house.'

‘So that's how it is. I don't think so, Uncle,' said Fahd, adding sharply, ‘My mother won't find it easy to replace my father's memory with another, whoever it might be.'

When the men had left, Fahd crept to his room, closed the door and wept until his soul grew still. He addressed his innermost self like an old man standing on the smouldering ruins of his house remembering happier days.

In the early morning, mother would wake me to go to school, while little Lulua was still sunk in sleep. I would sit drowsily in the living room as my father had his breakfast of a fried egg and a dish of Wadi al-Nahl honey. The voice of Fairuz, discovered by my father courtesy of Nabeel Hawamla, his Palestinian colleague at the newspaper distribution company, issuing from the kitchen:

I yearn, but for who, I don't know;

At night it snatches me from amongst the revellers.

How Fairuz used to upset me when I was seven, my mother standing in front of the kitchen sink and opening the north-facing kitchen window, the March breeze buffeting her voice, low, effortless and sad:

The breeze blew upon us at the valley's mouth

O breeze, blow, and take me to my country!

I used to believe that I would come home from school one day to find my mother gone, especially when her family had left for Amman after Saudi Arabia threw out the Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis. Jordan's announcement that the war against Iraq was a war on the Arab nation was, we sensed, the reason my family were expelled, and I only saw them again a few years ago. My mother was miserable, silent and tearful, but she rinsed her sadness and loneliness in song and night time excursions with my father to cafés and restaurants. On Thursdays and Fridays they would take us with them, while the rest of the week they would go out by themselves after we were asleep.

Will Fairuz continue to pour out her voice over the walls of our house? Will the aroma of the Turkish coffee to which my father and mother were addicted still ascend? Will the smell of oil paints waft from my room while I paint a portrait of a three-year-old Lulua, her mouth smeared with ice cream? Will my sister ever play again on the little piano my father brought back from Dubai? Will the Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt posters stay on the walls of the salon and the sitting room? Will life carry on in the corridors of our top floor in Ulaya, that life my father made, or will my uncle occupy our house on the pretext of protecting the poor widow and her two little orphans? He will come, and death shall come with him. Fairuz will die; her voice will be choked off, and in her place, Sheikh al-Hazifi reciting surat al-kahf. The Turkish coffee will go, its aroma fading in the face of Arabic coffee and sugared dates. The little piano will be destroyed, its white and black keys flying to the vast rubbish skip at the end of Sayyidat al-Ru'osa Street. My little sister will die and in the portrait that I painted her playful eyes will be ruptured, but the ice cream shall remain about her mouth, a witness. The head of her cotton doll will be severed because it is haram and all the videos put to death; Falounu and Sally will go to meet their fate.

What was it that Uncle Ibrahim was after? When he came to broach the idea of my uncle marrying my mother, did he mean it? Was it to be an atonement for taking part in a demonstration outside Ibn Battal's palace against the deputies and the pious, to show his relatives in Qaseem that it had been the error of a teenage boy?

At the end of that long day, night finally fell and Fahd went out, frustrated and sad. He drove towards Pizza Hut, passing the generator where the black cat hid. He had never liked cats. A shudder would run through his body whenever he caught sight of it hidden away, its eyes staring at him.

As soon as he was past the restaurant, Sulaimaniya supermarket and the petrol station, he stopped at Tareeqati Café and felt his way into the dimly lit interior. He ordered a bitter Turkish coffee and pondered his life, which since his tenth year had rushed by with frightening speed.