2008 - The Consequences of Love. (15 page)

“What do you want me to say?”

“You can start by asking me why I’m not married.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Saudi women are expensive, brother Naser. You know, some greedy fathers ask for almost a hundred thousand riyals dowry. Even a good father asks for fifty thousand.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

He shook his head. “Where do these parents think we are going to get this amount of money? I will never be able to afford to marry.” He bowed his head slightly and spat.

“Why don’t you marry a Muslim woman from another country?”

“Anyway, let’s keep quiet now,” he said.

He was still standing in front of me, still looking at the gate of the park. He then knelt down and picked up a discarded empty can and started fiddling with it. He threw it away after a while and put his hands in his pocket. He stepped backwards and sat down again. Our thighs touched. He put his hand on my lap, but moved away, uttering, “Oh
ya Allah
forgive me. Please,
ya Allah
”.

I could see he was squeezing his hands, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He got up and paced up and down in front of me. He then walked further to the left where there were no lights and disappeared in the darkness.

There was silence for a while. Then I heard a soft moan.

“My Fiore,” I mumbled, “you will soon read my letters.”

Later that night, I received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was a woman speaking a foreign language. The only word I understood was Berlin, which she kept repeating. “Berlin…Berlin.” I told her that I couldn’t understand what she wanted and was about to slam down the phone when I heard laughter in the background. I had lived with that laughter for years. It was high-pitched and interrupted with short squeaks. “Jasim, is that you?” I shouted through the phone. “Jasim?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Are you jealous?” he asked. “That was Rebecca. I just met her this evening.” He laughed. He paused, and added, “I miss you, my dear. I wish I could come back now, but the
kafeel
is insisting that I stay here with him.”

There was a long silence. Then suddenly a loud scream in the background. “Naser, I have to go. The
kafeel
is drunk.
Salam
, my dear.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, Basil’s eyes were shining.

Later that evening, as usual, he led the circle. After hours of talking about religious matters, he rose to his feet, saying, “OK, Naser, come with me. We are going somewhere important. The rest of you, read the Qur’an before you go home.”

“Sheikh Basil, you promised to give me a lift home today,” Abdu said.

Basil sighed and said, “OK, let’s go, hurry up.”

We followed Basil to his Mazda. Abdu casually walked to the front passenger seat. “No, you are not sitting there,” Basil said to Abdu. “Naser is sitting in the front seat from now on.”

Abdu didn’t move. He was still standing by the front door when I approached, his hand holding to the car’s door handle. He stared at me for a while, before he let go. He shoved me with his shoulder as he moved to the back.

Before I got inside the car I looked up at the tall nine-storey building which towered over the other houses in Al-Nuzla Street. I thought about Fiore’s crumpled notes; how I missed picking them up and how my hands shook when I opened them, how I missed seeing her walk along the street in her Pink Shoes. I felt in my shirt’s pocket and touched the note I carried with me.

Habibi
,

It is hard watching you in the street and not being able to act on the urge to come and touch you. I am no longer sure who is the lucky one: you—blind to my face—or I, who have seen you for so long now that my desire to be with you rips me apart
.

I got inside the car and shut the door and we drove off.

Basil slipped in a tape of the Qur’an read by the grand imam of Mecca.

“What a beautiful voice,” he said. “He is the luckiest man on this earth to be blessed with such a voice and to be the imam of Mecca. You know what that means? It means he is the imam of all the mosques in the whole world.” He circled his index finger in the air as he said that. “
Masha Allah. Masha Allah
.”

“Sheikh Basil, I would say that your voice when you read the Qur’an is better than any other I have heard. It merits to be recorded and distributed all around the world,”Abdu said.

Basil’s face lit up. He looked in his rearview mirror in Abdu’s direction and said, “May
Allah
bless you.”

Not to be outdone, I needed to think of something nice to say to Basil. After a moment, I exclaimed: “In fact
ya
sheikh, I have been to Mecca on countless occasions, and I prayed behind its imam, and let me say this, once he retires, there will be no better person than you to be the imam of the Holiest place on earth.”

He swerved his car aside and stopped. I was worried that I had said something bad. I looked in shock when he stretched both of his arms towards me and kissed my forehead with his hands tightly holding my face.

Basil parked his car on a wide street between Al-Nuzla and Mecca Street. It was where Al-Nuzla police department was based next to a big scrapyard where the police kept cars damaged in accidents. “Here we are,” Basil said to Abdu, and told him to get out of the car. I turned my head to the back seat and for a moment I thought I saw Abdu’s proud shoulders sink into his chest.

“Come on, move it, Abdu. I am in a hurry,” Basil yelled.

The moment Abdu was out of the car, Basil accelerated so fast that my shoulders pressed against my seat.

The park was darker than the last time Basil and I were there. The only working light post was now flickering on and off.

I looked at Basil, his face disappearing every time the light flicked off. When it flicked back on, he was still there gazing at me. I felt a deep disgust and I looked away.

He took my hand and he held it. This time, he didn’t ask forgiveness. Instead, he squeezed tighter.

“Naser?” There was a soft gleam in his eyes, something I had seen before in many of the men’s eyes at the café.

“Yes,” I replied.

The light went out again and took his face with it, but his voice remained: “I am going to tell you something.”

The light came back on. “You know, it is now four years since I have become
mutawwa
.”

“Yes,” I said again.

“You know what that means for a former bad boy like me?”

“Four years of virtue,” I replied.

The light flickered over his face. “Four years since I last have been with my boys.”

I remembered what Al-Yamani had said about Basil. “The blind imam,” he said, “found Basil at a moment of extreme weakness, having just escaped death on his motorbike. It was easy for the imam to convert him like that. But deep down, Basil is a street boy, he always was and always will be.”

I looked at Basil and said, “You will be rewarded,
insha Allah
. I heard that you have sent ten young boys to Afghanistan.”

“
Insha Allah
,” he said in a hurry. The customary glimpse at the sky and bowing of the head were absent. I suddenly felt his hands under my
thobe
. And when the light returned his face was almost touching mine. He tilted his head slightly to the side, and his eyes looked to my lips. He moved his head forward.

I grabbed his neck with my two hands, and hissed, “Do what you are thinking of doing and I can assure you, in the name
of Allah
the merciful, I will break your beautiful white teeth.” I was surprised at the cruel threats coming from my mouth, but I seized my opportunity. “And tomorrow, I want you to make me the imam’s guide in front of the group. I want to collect rewards as well. If you don’t, I will tell the blessed imam what you tried to do tonight.”

I pushed him away. The light went out again. I found my way out of the park without looking back.

At home, as I went over the incident with Basil once again, I still couldn’t believe what I had done. The pursuit of love, it seemed, was opening up another side to me I didn’t know. But this was a battle to pursue love, and in battle blood is spilled, I told myself with a heavy heart, feeling that worse was still to come because I was in no doubt that Basil would seek revenge somehow. Basil was a street boy and in Jeddah, street boys have a long memory.

The next day, just after the Sunday morning prayer while we were sitting in a circle, Basil stood behind me and putting his hand on my shoulders announced in front of the group, “Naser, from now on you will be the imam’s guide.”

I looked at the floor in a daze. I couldn’t believe it. Finally, my Fiore, we will get to write to each other.

I looked up at Basil to thank him but he wasn’t smiling.

THE LOVE-LETTER COURIER

A
T EXACTLY HALF-PAST six on the morning of Saturday, 2
nd
September, I left my house on my way to guide the blind imam to the girls’ college. The humidity that had been sitting over Jeddah the entire summer was finally receding. It was a sign that autumn was coming, my favourite season of the year in Saudi—the cool air always refreshed my soul.

There were lots of students in new uniforms heading back to school. I left my house and immediately bumped into the nerd. He stood stock still and looked me up and down with his unwavering eyes. I stared back, stretching my eyes wide open with my fingers to match his gaze. “So you are a
mutaunva
now?” he asked me in his high-pitched voice.

“Yep,” I replied, “
Alhamdulillah
.”

“Since when?”

“Look, nerd…”

As soon as I said that, he shouted, “You see, you can’t be a good
mutauwa. They
would never call others bad names.”

“It is a slip of the tongue, may
Allah
forgive me.”

“You are not a
mutawwa
,” he insisted.

“Why not, is
Allah
yours only?”

Just then I saw the Pink Shoes in the distance. I left the nerd for what he was and turned my back on him. She was walking a few yards behind a man, who must have been her father, and whom she had referred to in one of her notes. Then with bated breath, I realised I could actually try to guess what she looked like from his features. He looked an attractive man. He was of medium height, dark-skinned, with a round face, deep brown eyes, full lips, and a tightly trimmed black beard. His elegant face inspired awe in me, like that of the famous Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki. Saudis’ complexions varied dramatically. There were very light-skinned Saudis, as well as brown and dark-skinned ones. He could easily be a Saudi, I thought to myself. But he could also be from any country in the Gulf, or maybe even from Africa?

I wondered whether she had inherited any of his features.

He walked with his left hand resting on his round belly, holding the hem of his headscarf in place with his fingers. His head was high, and he didn’t make eye contact with anyone along his path. Perhaps he was walking her to college.

I hurried towards them. As I approached, I looked over his shoulder at Fiore. I knew it couldn’t be long before I would finally write to her.

By a quarter to seven, I was outside the imam’s house. Before I went inside, I said a prayer, “Please
ya Allah
forgive me for taking advantage of the sheikh’s blindness, but I hope that I will only be balancing his sermons of hate with my search for love.”

The imam’s door was open. I entered after knocking three times, as Basil said I should do. “I am on my way, Naser,” he yelled from the women’s side of the house. “OK, may
Allah
prolong your life,” I called back. I took off my shoes and made my way to the living room. It was a small room with modest furniture. His living room had traditional Arabic
majlis
seating, with cushions and mats on top of a thick blue carpet. To the left of the room, there was a long shelf full of Islamic books. Next to the shelf there was a door which led to the rest of the house, to the imam’s study, his bedroom and the women’s section. The old black leather bag was lying on one of the mats. I looked towards the door to check that it was safe. I sat next to the bag and opened it. I peeped inside to see where I could easily hide my future letters to Fiore—that morning I just had with me a small note. It was a test really, to see if our plan worked, and to say that I had successfully recruited the imam and that now we could send each other as many pages as we liked. There were four small Islamic booklets, a bottle of musk, some pens and a small address book.

I tucked my note to Fiore between the booklets, making sure it wasn’t visible when you just opened the bag. I stood up and went to sit down on a cushion opposite the bag. I crossed my legs, and fixed my eyes on the bag hoping nothing would go wrong.

The imam came in, walking slowly but steadily as if he was a seeing person. I noticed his feet stuck in brown sandals. He had neatly trimmed nails, but his skin looked dry. I stood up and kissed his forehead. I picked up the bag, swung it over my shoulder and took him by the arm to lead him to the door.

We left his house in Al-Nuzla Street and turned right into Market Street, which was busy with many shops and traders. After about ten minutes, I could see the girls’ college: a tall white building fenced by high walls. I turned to the imam and said, “We are almost there.”

At the gate, as I helped the imam pass through, I said in a loud voice: “Dear imam, your servant Naser will pick you up again ten minutes before the day ends, so I don’t need to see the girls coming out of the gate.” I shouted to make sure that Fiore, on the other side of the door, would hear me and know that I had finally managed to open a new path of communication with her.

“Speak more quietly, may
Allah
curse the Satan,” the imam hissed. “I am blind, not deaf.”

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON, I returned to the college to pick up the imam and guide him home. I arrived at the building, as I had been instructed, ten minutes before the end of the school day, so that I wouldn’t be around when the girls left.