2008 - The Consequences of Love. (6 page)

J
EDDAH WAS EERILY quiet in July after the summer departures. Al-Nuzla Street was deserted, even during the cooler evening time. The streets which had been so busy a week or so before were now empty.

Nearly everybody I knew was away from Jeddah. My friends Faisal and Zib Al-Ard were fighting in Afghanistan. Jasim was in Paris, buying presents and probably searching for new ways to decorate his café. Yahya was camping and no doubt looking for love on a hillside somewhere. There was no one around, just me. I gave up thinking about my brother and my uncle—there was no point trying to be with people who didn’t want to be with you. Besides, they would never talk to someone who worked in Jasim’s café. Those who knew, knew. And what my uncle didn’t know, which was a lot, he assumed the worst of. That was his religious way.

In our neighbourhood, there were only four kinds of people who didn’t go away during the summer vacation: those who didn’t have the money, those who didn’t have any relatives to visit, those who thought of holiday as a forbidden, vulgar pastime, and those who preferred Al-Nuzla when it was quiet. Although I had some money saved from my time at Jasim’s café, the only thing I would want to do is visit my mother and Semira. But they were in a country where the war never seemed to end.

Although I sometimes could find happiness by myself, shadowed by memories, I could not bear the searing heat and heavy silence in the empty streets of Jeddah during the holiday season.

The days seemed longer than usual and time was passing slowly. There was nothing to do, so there was nothing to write in my diary. With every minute I spent stuck in Jeddah, I felt myself sinking further.

On Tuesday afternoon, three days into my holiday, I decided to go outside and sit under the shade of my tree to take a break from reading.

I stepped into the hazy afternoon heat. I looked in both directions before crossing the road, but there was nothing moving. The street was deserted. With my sandal I scraped away the dirt on the pavement and sat down. I wanted to take a long rest. It was beautifully still at that time of the day. It was so quiet you could imagine a tumbleweed from one of those old cowboy movies rolling its way through Al-Nuzla. There was not one sheriff or religious policeman to stop it.

As I lay down, I noticed a woman—covered head to toe in a full black veil—walking briskly from the corner of the street. I wondered why on earth she was rushing around in this heat. I stretched out on the cool pavement, with my face turned to the street.

The sound of hurried footsteps was coming closer. I lifted my head. The woman was heading towards me, so I sat up.

She stopped, looking left and right. She was inches from me, looking at me through her black mask, her nose marked through her veil. She tossed a crumpled piece of paper into my lap and scampered away.

I quickly unfolded the paper. It was a note for me. I read it and the few words imprinted themselves in my mind.

I shook my head and sat back on the pavement and looked around to see if anyone was watching. What sort of trick was this? I folded the paper so that it was even smaller and pressed it deep inside my pocket.

The street was deserted again. I lit a cigarette and tried to look calm but thoughts and questions raced through my head. What a mad thing to do. Did the woman not know that the religious police watched our every move? And how could she possibly trust me? What if I were a traditionalist, a conservative; someone who would detest her actions as being un-Islamic? I might have followed her home and informed the man of her household on her. I didn’t even dare to think what men, whose only concern it is to honour their honour, might do to her.
Ya Allah
, I thought, she must be a crazy, crazy woman to take such risks.

But despite that, I was still excited by the fact that I was sitting there with a girl’s note in my pocket. And at some point, still sitting on the pavement, I started seriously considering the girl’s proposal.

“Why not? It’s going to be a long summer anyway,” the devil inside me said. I stood up and re-read it as I walked home:

My dear
,

I am writing to you in secret. No one knows about this except me and Allah. I just want to say that I like you and I would like to write to you again. I will look for you at the same time tomorrow under this tree
.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what she looked like: covered in a wide black burqa, and wearing black gloves and black shoes she looked like any other woman in the street. Underneath, though, anything was possible.

She might be the daughter of one of the royal families or one of the wealthy Saudi families who lived up the road in Al-Nuzla Al Sharqyhya. But if she were rich or a princess, why wasn’t she away like everybody else? Maybe she was a servant or the daughter of a religious man? Could she be the wife of a man who had gone on holiday with his male friends, leaving her behind with their children? Was she a girl, a woman, or a widow? Was she one of the neighbours? She might be the sister of one of my friends? But my friends never talked about the women in their households.

I remembered what Omar had said that morning at Jasim’s café about the girls who threw notes at boys’ feet. Maybe she had written similar notes to other boys. Maybe she had already broken many hearts and was looking for her next victim?

Even if I did pursue this, just one careless moment could have me arrested by the religious police and that could lead to Punishment Square where lovers are lashed and sometimes even killed. How dare this woman put me in danger? Life in Jeddah was hard enough without being teased by someone with nothing better to do. Who wanted this kind of terror wrapped up in a scrap of paper?

I tossed the note into a bin and returned to my room.

That summer, in the absence of anyone to keep me company, I spent my time reading books, and re-reading my diaries and letters to my mother. Often also thoughts and memories would come back, from my time as a fifteen-year-old boy, trapped in Jasim’s café and forced to accept the passion of sex-hungry men. I didn’t need a diary as a reminder; the memories of those days stayed with me in the skin of my body.

It all started a few weeks after the incident with my
kafeel
, the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah. I was still having nightmares. Once, I woke up in tears in the middle of the night. I was crying and screaming for my mother.

My uncle came into our room.

“Be quiet,” he shouted.

But I continued to call her name. It was enough to set my uncle off in flames.

“I told you not to mention the name of that sinner, may
Allah
burn her in hell,
insha Allah
”.

I jumped off my bed and pounced on his chest. I hit him in the face. He pushed me back on the bed, holding me by my neck with both his hands. He was sweating, his upper lip bleeding and his eyes staring at me, fixed as if they belonged to a lifeless doll. I was wheezing and struggling for breath.

As he turned his back, he shouted, “Get up and leave my house. You are ungrateful, you don’t even pray. You are an apostate and I don’t want to waste my money on someone like you. I want you out by tomorrow.”

I protested, I cried, I pleaded, but my uncle was hearing none of it. He closed the door and the next morning he watched me as I packed my bags. He told me there was no hope in me becoming a good Muslim because I was brought up by an irreligious woman. “But look at Ibrahim,” he said, “I am his father now and you can see the difference. He is already showing signs of becoming a blessed Muslim.”

I didn’t know where to go. I begged him one last time to change his mind. “I am only fifteen,” I pleaded with him, “I don’t have any money. Where do you want me to go?”

“Go back to your bad Muslim friends, the glue-sniffers,” he replied, pushing me out of his house and shutting the door behind me. I sat outside the house for a while not knowing what to do next.

The only friend who could help me was Jasim.

By then I had known him for three years. I met him when I went to his café for the first time one morning when I was twelve. When I approached the counter to pay for my tea, he said there was no need to because I was his youngest ever customer who read a newspaper as he drank tea. “And you are reading my favourite paper too,” he said, pointing to my
Okaz
. He told me that he admired people who liked reading and that instead of buying a newspaper every morning I could come to his café and borrow his.

We got to know each other better over time and as well as lending me his daily paper, he also started to give me presents, mainly novels and poetry collections. But it was when he painted my mother, based on my description, that he became very dear to me. With his beautiful painting of her, he made me miss her less because she was now within reach, because her face, ingrained in my memory, was turned real again, her smile colouring everything on my path, and because whenever I wanted her warm love, I would hold the drawing and embrace it tightly.

“You are my best friend,” I told him on the day he finished the portrait. “You are my best friend.”

When I arrived with my bag, Jasim immediately took me to the kitchen away from the customers. I persuaded him to let me live in the small room at the back of the café, the one with the mirrored ceiling.

“Look, Naser,” he said, “I can let you live in this room. But you have to understand that to me it is more than just a room.”

I interrupted him, “Jasim, don’t worry. I will beg my uncle to take me back. I am sure he will agree. Trust me, I will move out before long.”

“No, no, don’t worry about moving out so soon,” he said, “I want to help you. But I want you to help me too.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Work in my café. I will sack the waiter. The boy is so unreliable. I feel you will be a better one. And don’t worry, I will pay you the normal wages.”

It didn’t take me long to agree. Because, I thought, if I had had money I would have paid our
kafeel
in cash for the renewal of our residency and not with my body. “I can now save enough money for me and my brother,” I mumbled.

“Are you OK?”Jasim asked.

“Yes I am,” I said, smiling and feeling happy that from now on I was going to take responsibility for myself.

“I love it when you smile, my dear,”Jasim said. He held my hand and looked at me with gleaming eyes.

I turned my head away.

He let go of my hand and warned me, “But you know working here means you will have to leave school?”

In return Jasim promised me that I could read whatever I liked from the books he smuggled from abroad. He smuggled them on request of people who wanted to read books banned by the authorities. They were banned either because they challenged the government or because they were thought to be un-Islamic. His customers’favourites were books by the Saudi writer, Abdul Rahman Munif, who was stripped of his Saudi citizenship because of his political writing, and lived in exile in Syria.

I thought that my stay at the café would be short because I was convinced that my uncle would take me back if I offered him most of my wages as a contribution to the household. But a few weeks after I moved to the café, my uncle’s boss relocated to Riyadh and he moved there with my brother. I found out only when I visited the caretaker of my uncle’s building. He was a Sufi from Pakistan—an outsider like me—and he kept me up to date about Ibrahim and how he was doing.

But that morning, when he opened the door, he lowered his head and said nothing. Then he embraced me and said, “
Allah
is now your only companion in life, my son.”

I thought something terrible had happened to my brother. I shouted at him to speak up, begging him to tell me at once. But Ali firmed his grip around my hands and said, “Nothing happened to him. But they left. They left you for good. But you are not lonely, son,
Allah
is with you.”

“What do you mean they left? Where? Which neighbourhood? Have you got their new address?”

“No, Naser, they left for Riyadh. For good.”

“Why didn’t they at least say goodbye?” I cried.

“I am sorry,” he said, “I am sorry.”

From that moment on, the café became my life. I woke up at six o’clock and worked until ten at night. After a full day’s work, I didn’t have any energy left to venture outside the café. I ate the food our Yemeni chef cooked in the café and it was Jasim who bought me new clothes. I started living a life completely opposite to the one I had lived with my mother: instead of women, I was now surrounded by men.

One morning, a few months after I arrived in the café, Jasim asked me to wear tight beige cotton trousers under my
thobe
. “It is your new work uniform,” he said, as he sipped his coffee. It was early morning and we were in the back room.

“Look, Jasim,” I protested. “I can’t even zip up the fly. You got the wrong size.”

“No, I am sure they will fit. Just pull them up harder. Let me help you,” he said. He held my trousers by the waist and grabbed hold of my briefs.

I shivered at the warmth of his hands on my body. His eyes caught mine. “Sorry,” he murmured. Then, “Here, ah, you see, my dear. Perfect!”

He lit a cigarette and I could see his gaze running over my body.

“Look, Jasim, I can’t wear this to work. It is bad enough wearing a
thobe
, I can’t imagine what it will be like wearing something as tight as this. I’m tired of customers pinching my bottom all the time and promising gifts if I agree to their propositions.”

I could smell the cardamom on his breath as his face came closer to mine. “Don’t worry, you will wear it under your
thobe
. But can you blame them, Naser?”

“What?”

“My dear, in a world without women and in the absence of female glamour, boys like you are the perfect substitute. Why hide your attractiveness and your tender physique like a veiled woman? You are the closest my customers have to a beautiful and sensual person roaming freely in their world. So why sit on your beauty like a bird without wings, when you can fly?”

I sat on the bed not knowing how to respond.