I Am Pilgrim (14 page)

The zoologist’s headless torso seemed to float for a moment, as if in shock, and then it pitched forward into its own fluids.

The executioner stood in his unmarked thobe and looked down at his handiwork, the static on the

public address was replaced by a Muslim prayer, a swarm of flies started to gather and the crowd in

the square broke into applause.

The dead man’s young son – breathing hard from trying to run, badly grazed all down his left side,

a handkerchief wrapped around one bloody hand – limped into the car park just after his father ’s body had been loaded into the startling coolness of the white van. That was the reason the vehicle was air-conditioned – not for the comfort of the living but to inhibit the stench of the dead.

Most of the spectators had gone, leaving just the cops to take down the barricades and a couple of

Bangladeshi labourers to wash down the marble.

The boy looked around, trying to see somebody he recognized to ask them the identity of the executed prisoner, but the men were moving fast to escape the wind, pulling their chequered headscarves down like Bedouin to protect their faces. On the far side of the patch of grass, the
muezzin
– the assistant to the mosque’s leader – was closing wooden shutters, sealing the building against what was looking more and more like a major sandstorm.

Whipped by the wind, the boy ran and called to him through the iron railing, asking him for a name, a profession. The muezzin turned, shielding his face from the sand, shouting back. The wind

snatched away his voice so there was only one word the boy heard. ‘Zoologist’.

Footage from Saudi surveillance cameras monitoring the square – dug out a long time later –

showed that the
muezzin
went back to his work and didn’t even see the kid turn away and stare at the marble platform, his body battered by the burning wind, his heart obviously consumed by utter desolation. He didn’t move for minutes and, determined to act like a man and not to cry, he looked

like a windswept statue.

In truth, I think he was probably travelling fast: like most people who suffer great horror, he had

come unstuck in space and time. He probably would have remained standing there for hours, but one

of the cops approached, yelling at him to move, and he stumbled away to escape the cop’s vicious bamboo cane.

As he headed through the whirling sand the tears finally burst through his iron resolve and, alone

in a city he hated now, he let out a single awful scream. People told me later it was a howl of grief, but I knew it wasn’t. It was the primal scream of birth.

In a process as bloody and painful as its physical counterpart, the Saracen had been born into terrorism in a windswept car park in central Jeddah. In time, out of abiding love for his father, he would grow into a passionate believer in conservative Islam, an enemy of all Western values, an avowed destroyer of the Fahd monarchy and a supporter of violent jihad.

Thank you, Saudi Arabia, thank you.

Chapter Three

DESPITE ITS HUGE wealth, vast oil reserves and love of high-tech American armaments, nothing really

works in Saudi Arabia. The Jeddah bus system, for example.

With his dirt bike wrecked, the zoologist’s son had no alternative means of transport, which meant

that – due to the system’s erratic timetable and the worsening dust storm – news of the execution beat him home by twenty minutes.

His extended family had already gathered in the villa’s modest
majlis
and his mother was filling her relatives with growing terror. Between waves of pain and disbelief, she was railing against her country, the Saudi judicial system and the royal family itself. Although no Saudi man – let alone society itself – had ever been able to admit it, she was almost always the smartest person in the room.

Her bitter assault came to an end only when someone looked out of a window and saw her son approaching. Barely breathing through her tears, she met him in the hallway, desperately worried that

– tragedy piled upon tragedy – he had witnessed his father ’s execution.

When he shook his head, recounting fragments about the bike wreck in the construction site, she slumped to her knees for the first and only time, thanking Allah for every wound on his body. The boy bent down, raised his mother up and, over her shoulder, saw his two young sisters standing alone, as if marooned on their own private island of despair.

He gathered them all into his arms and recounted the final grief that had weighed on him all the way home but hadn’t yet occurred to any of them – as an executed prisoner, there would be no funeral or burial, no closing of his father ’s eyelids, no washing and shrouding of his body under Islamic ritual as their final kindness to him. His remains would be thrown into common ground and buried in

an unmarked grave. If they were lucky, one of the workers would lay him on his right side and face

him towards Mecca. If they were lucky.

In the months which followed, according to the mother in her long-delayed interrogation, the oppressive cloud of loss that settled over the house had little to disturb it. Apart from close relatives, there were no visitors or phone calls – the nature of the crime meant the family was ostracized by friends and the community at large. In a way, the family too had been cast into an unmarked grave and buried. Even so, the steady passage of the days finally dulled the keen edge of their grief, and the boy

– an outstanding student – at last picked up his books and started to continue his studies at home. More than any other thing, it steadied the family. After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.

Then, eight months after the execution, the eastern sky broke with an unheralded dawn – unknown

to the family, the grandfather had been working relentlessly on their behalf. Through what little
wasta
he commanded and the payment of bribes he could ill afford, he had succeeded in obtaining passports, exit permits and visas for his daughter-in-law and the three kids. Certainly it was a testament to how much he loved them, but the truth was the family was an embarrassment to the authorities and they were probably pleased to see them go. Whatever the subtext, he arrived late, gave the family the startling news and told them they would leave early in the morning, before the people whose help he’d purchased had a chance to change their minds.

All through the night they packed what little possessions they cared about, took one last turn through their memories and, with nobody to bid farewell, were on the road by dawn. The convoy of

four overburdened family vehicles drove for twelve hours, across the breadth of the country, through

timeless desert, past never-ending oil fields, until at dusk they saw the turquoise waters of the Arabian Gulf.

Looping across the sea like a necklace was the glittering causeway that connected Saudi Arabia to

the independent island nation of Bahrain. It ran for sixteen miles over bridges and viaducts, a triumph of Dutch engineering known as the King Fahd Causeway. Every mile, giant billboards of the Saudi monarch smiled down on the family as they crossed the ocean, an irony not lost on the boy: he was

the man who had signed the decree executing his father. Fahd’s hated face was the last thing he saw of his homeland.

After paying another bribe at the border, the grandfather and three cousins were allowed briefly to

enter Bahrain without papers to ferry the family’s goods to a house the old man had rented through a friend of a neighbour. Nobody said anything, but all their hearts sank when they saw it.

The dilapidated home stood in a small square of dirt in a semi-industrial section of Manama, the

country’s capital. The front door was hanging open, the plumbing barely worked and electricity served only two rooms – but there was no going back now and anything was better than life in Jeddah.

With the family’s meagre goods finally unloaded, the boy’s mother stood with the old man in the

decaying kitchen, quietly trying to thank him for everything he had done. He shook his head, pressed a small roll of banknotes into her hand and told her he would send more – not much, but enough –

every month. As she bit her lip, trying not to cry at his generosity, he walked slowly to his granddaughters, who were watching from the dirt yard, and put his arms around them.

Then he turned and hesitated – he had left the hardest part to last. His grandson, aware of what was coming, was trying to look busy opening boxes on the back porch. His grandfather approached and

waited for him to look up. Neither of them was quite sure, as men, how much emotion to show – until

the grandfather reached out and held the boy tight. This was no time for pride; he was an old man, and only God knew if he would ever see his grandson again.

He stepped back and looked at the youngster – every day he thought of how much he resembled his

own boy, the one they had executed. Still, life lives on in our children and their children, and not even a king can take that away. Abruptly he turned and walked towards the vehicles, calling to the cousins to start the engines. He didn’t look back lest the family see the tears rolling down his cheeks.

The boy, surrounded by his mother and two sisters, stood in the gathering darkness for a long time

and watched the tail lights of their former lives disappear into the night.

Chapter Four

TWO DAYS LATER, for the first time in her adult life, the children’s mother went out in public unaccompanied by an adult male. Despite her fear and embarrassment, she had no choice – if she didn’t keep the children occupied their loneliness and new-found poverty might overwhelm them.

Adrift in a foreign land without relatives or friends, she found the local bus stop, bundled the kids on board and walked for hours with them through the city’s shopping malls. It was a revelation. None of them had any experience of a liberal interpretation of Islam, and they looked wide-eyed at posters for American movies and Bollywood musicals, stared at Western women in tank tops and shorts and

couldn’t believe Muslim women in elaborate abayas who had surrendered their veils for Chanel sunglasses.

For the boy, one thing above everything else swept his feet from under him. The only female faces

he had ever seen were those of his mother and close relatives – he hadn’t even seen women in photographs: magazines and billboards showing unveiled women were banned in Saudi Arabia. So, in

the shops of Bahrain, suddenly afforded a basis of comparison, he learned something which otherwise he would never have known – his mother was beautiful.

Of course, all sons think that about their mothers, but the boy knew it wasn’t prejudice. She was still only thirty-three, with high cheekbones, flawless skin and wide almond eyes that sparkled with intelligence. Her nose was fine and straight, leading the eye directly to the perfect curve of her mouth.

More than that, her recent suffering gave her a grace and hauteur far above her modest position in life.

One night not long afterwards, with his sisters in bed, he sat beneath a bare light strung across the kitchen and haltingly told his mother how lovely she was. Laughing, she kissed the top of his head,

but in bed that night she cried quietly – when a boy started to notice a woman’s beauty it meant he was growing up, and she knew she was losing him.

In the weeks that followed she succeeded in enrolling the three kids in good schools and the boy,

after six attempts, found a mosque that was rigid and anti-Western enough to have met with his father ’s approval. A fifteen-year-old who walked in off the street, unaccompanied by any male member of his family, was an unusual addition to any group of worshippers, so, on the first Friday

after prayers, the imam, blind since birth, and several other men invited him for tea in a beautiful garden at the back of the building.

Under a purple jacaranda tree the boy volunteered almost nothing about the events that had brought

him to Bahrain, but the men weren’t easily diverted and, unable to lie to the imam, he finally told them in fractured vignettes the story of his father ’s death. At the end the men bowed their heads and praised his father. ‘What son – what devout Muslim – could not be proud of a man who had spoken out in defence of his faith and its values?’ they asked angrily.

For a boy who had been shamed and rejected by his community, who had been lonely for so long,

it was a salutary experience. Already the mosque was starting to fill the emotional void at the centre of his life.

The blind imam told him that God sends only as much suffering as a man can handle. Therefore the

horrific events in Jeddah were a testament to his father ’s deep devotion and courage. With that he reached out and ran his fingers over the teenager ’s face, committing him to memory. It was a sign of respect, a special welcome into their fellowship.

The boy – saying only that the worshippers were highly educated – told his mother nothing of the lectures he attended most nights at the mosque. It was men’s business, the imam said, and a man could speak freely only if he knew it would not be repeated.

And while the boy took those first steps into violent politics with what turned out to be a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood, the rest of the fleet was sailing in the opposite direction. Unlike most people in Bahrain, the family didn’t have a TV, but the girls’ exposure to pop culture increased every day – at school, in malls, on billboards – and as with every other country in the region, popular culture didn’t mean Arabic.