The Ruins of Us (24 page)

He settled into the patio chair, its mesh firm against his back. But as he closed his eyes and began to meditate on the meeting, he heard the door again, and even before he could see her, he smelled Mariam’s perfume, some potent stuff that she picked up at the women’s market. He didn’t turn around, waiting for her to speak. Instead, she cuffed him on the back of the head.

“Ow.”

“Hamar. What is your problem? I’ve never seen you treat Umma and Baba this way.”

“Did you just hit me?”

“Umma should have hit you too. You’re worse than a donkey. You’re a donkey’s dirty little bum.”

“I’m glad to see all those books you read are helping your vocabulary.”

“Shut up. Just because you grow your beard long and wear those ugly old sandals doesn’t mean you’re a man. Two summers ago, you still had all of those stupid Star Wars statues above your bed. I haven’t forgotten.”

“A lot can happen in two years. I stopped wanting to be something that I wasn’t.”

“A geek?”

“No. An American. You’ll learn someday. The way they shove their culture down our throats. They’re bullies, that’s all.”

“So you think they should all read the Koran and Ibn Khuldun and work to understand us, but we should ignore their culture?”

“No, not at all. They just shouldn’t bother and leave us alone.”

“You’re jealous of them.” She arched her thick black brows.

“Jealous?” He sighed. “Pathetic people want to be something that they’re not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran off to New York one day.”

“At least I wouldn’t have to wear a garbage bag to school.”

“See? They’ve already made you ashamed of your culture. You should be proud of it. You know, it’s possible to have modernity and faith.”

“No, it’s people like you and your stupid friends and the religious police that make me ashamed. And I’m not going to leave. I’ll go to college, but then I’ll come back. I don’t want to
be
American. I just want to be myself, which is impossible here. That’s why I started my blog. I’m going to make a change for myself.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous. You think words make any difference at all? Words are just letters. They don’t affect anything.”

She threw her hands up.

“There’s no talking to ignorance.” She sighed loudly. “Just try not to be so rude to our parents.
That’s
un-Islamic.”

She went back into the house, leaving the sliding door open. He heard her bedroom door slam at the top of the stairs. She would probably waste an entire evening typing away at her blog, exchange a few angry IMs with Dalia, her best friend from school—a poor, confused girl with a Saudi father and a dead Lebanese mother who was rumored to have been something of a whore with the American men over on the State Oil compound. He made a note to try to find more suitable friends for his sister. Maybe, down the road, Hassan would be a good match for her after all. His stomach growled. At dinner, he’d eaten only a bit of fattoush, some soup, and a piece of za’atar. The taste of sumac on his tongue made him hungry.

FAISAL WAS GRATEFUL
for the sound of the doorbell when Majid came to pick him up for their study group. He climbed into the front seat of Majid’s car, which smelled faintly of cigarettes and stale fast food. Majid’s older brother, Jalal, with whom he shared the car, smoked two packs of Marlboros a day. Majid never mentioned Jalal, but Faisal would often see him cruising around Al Dawoun, his windows down, some European pop group on the stereo, all synthetic beats and sterile harmonies.

Faisal’s phone vibrated with a new text message:
HASSAN’S HOUSE.
They organized meetings this way to lessen the likelihood that group members would be followed. The group was relatively small, just twenty-five men, and casual guests were not allowed. They couldn’t risk dealing with men who were not loyal or discreet, not with the government as paranoid as it was. Faisal thrilled at the thought that he and Majid and the sheikh were part of their own mini-rebellion. It made him feel purposeful, part of something grand. Yes, the Koran and the sheikh spoke to his heart and he believed, but he was also glad of the companionship: Majid’s respect, the sheikh’s large, calloused hand placed just so on Faisal’s thin shoulder. As they waited for the light to change at the intersection of King Abdul Aziz and Al Quds, a beggar approached the window. She cupped her left hand and dipped her right hand into it, gesturing for food or money. The beggars, always women to elicit more sympathy and avoid shaming the men, moved like wraiths through the lines of cars along Al Dawoun’s busiest streets, their eyes and mouths covered, their abayas blowing into car grills with each hot gust. She knocked on his window, but Faisal kept his gaze fixed on the road.

The woman waited. The light lasted. Faisal looked to his right, through the thin pane of glass separating him from this woman who surely smelled of urine and burnt garlic. She had no eyes for him to look into, she had no face. Finally, the light changed and they were moving again, down the wide central boulevard, six lanes of traffic accelerating together with a roar before becoming staggered, the red taillights of vehicles blurring as drivers shifted in and out of lanes. In the glow and whir of the highway, amid the urgent horns, Faisal felt that where he was going, and even who he was, were issues of the utmost importance, and that these people around him somehow had a stake in his passage. He saw the three-story palm tree covered in yellow lights that stood outside of the Mercedes dealership, the glass storefronts showcasing expensive dresses, rugs, chandeliers. The Italian coffeehouses with their men-only sections crammed right up against the low-lit windows so that Al Dawoun seemed to be a city populated entirely by men. The American chain restaurants with their neon signs and brimming parking lots. The Corniche stretched long and dark in the fallen night, the blinking lights of tug boats and oil vessels slowly crossing far out from the land. He rolled down his window to hear the low crashing of the waves and smell the salt. On its more moneyed periphery, Al Dawoun was a crystal city by the sea—diademed buildings, surfaces gleaming with the transparency of modernity, all oiled chrome and glass brick, bevel and sheen.

It was exactly what men like his father wanted in a Saudi city. A haven to do their business, so that the city became a place to send and receive faxes, no longer a place to be
from
. Faisal suspected that this was why Abdullah left Al Dawoun at every possible opportunity. He could sense his father’s relief, and even pride, that Saudi Arabia was now a place that looked more like the rest of the world and less like the limited world it had been, known only to Bedouin, traders, and soldiers. An “Arab backwater,” as a drunk Syrian businessman had once called it while tipping back a white and tonic in their living room.

Now they were headed into the city’s interior, toward Hassan’s neighborhood. Hassan lived in an area that seemed closer to the heart of the simple fishing village that Al Dawoun had once been, that Faisal had seen in his father’s photos from the fifties. Away from the glittering Corniche and the moneyed neighborhoods, Al Dawoun was a place of neutrals, everything fashioned from clay and concrete, the houses cheaply stuccoed. Faisal was surprised that such places still existed, there and all over Saudi Arabia—places stunned and shrunken by the awesome development around them. Places where the people still lived on the Peninsula alone, with no ties to London or Houston or Dubai. In those sheltered locations, Faisal felt the preservation of culture. What Abdullah would call poverty or ignorance or just stubbornness. Faisal wondered how much longer those neighborhoods, those villages, could withstand the strong tide coming in to sweep away the sandstone fortresses in which the people housed their purely Arab lives.

The neighborhood was right in the middle of the city, in one of the oldest residential districts. It was middle-class, the streets riddled with potholes, some of the street lamps broken, their shards fallen in the street and then broken a thousand times by the tires of passing trucks. Despite himself, Faisal felt a wave of gratitude for the wide, clean streets of the Diamond Mile, where the medians were planted with palms and frangipani trees, surrounded by well-tended grass. To avoid drawing attention to the meeting place, members staggered their arrivals. He watched as they trickled in a couple of minutes apart. He knew that in men, these glints, these slight shivers of the eyeball, the light and dark of respect and jealousy, determined power. If you could convince men that righteousness and fearlessness existed in you, then you were master of your fate.

Hassan’s house was a large white concrete structure, utilitarian, the outer wall topped with cut cinder blocks. Oleander grew through the cinder blocks, the broken leaves oozing their clear poison. Three stray cats circled a garbage can that sat near the front gate, batting chicken bones along the sidewalk. One of them paused to watch Faisal as he made his way through the gate, its single eye glaring from its mangy face.

Inside, he and Majid descended the narrow stairway, and Faisal felt his stomach contract. Though he’d been in the group for more than a year now, he still felt excited to see the sheikh. In Ibrahim’s narrow but muscle-knotted shoulders, Faisal could see the accumulated tension of time spent inching along the frozen paths of the Hindu Kush. In the slope of his skull, the hundreds of nights spent flat-backed on cave floors, lying in wait for the Russians. Next to such indisputable physical testimony, Faisal felt like a pretender to faith.

The sheikh greeted them warmly, placing a hand on Majid’s shoulder and gesturing for them to step into the room. With Ibrahim, Majid was like the mischievous son who asked too many questions, which caused his father fits, but whom the father loved the most of all his children because of his sheer talent for both trouble and glory. Faisal was jealous of the easy rapport that Majid had with Ibrahim, of the bond they shared through their mutilated flesh. Once, when Faisal had found himself alone with Ibrahim in a corridor of a group member’s home, he had gotten a catholic urge to confess all of his father’s failures, and Ibrahim had listened patiently, nodding his head. At the end of Faisal’s sputtering, Ibrahim had said only “Trust in God” and walked away. Theirs wasn’t the familiar relationship of fathers and sons because Faisal could not overcome his crippling sense of reverence for the sheikh.

Faisal left Majid and Ibrahim to their playful greetings and went in search of Hassan. Hassan was younger, closer to Mariam’s age, and Faisal knew he looked up to the older boys. He knocked on his bedroom door, then opened it and stepped inside. Hassan turned around, startled. The room was dark except for the pale glow of his computer screen.

“
True Confessions of a Saudi Teen
?” Faisal said, squinting to read the screen. The font was all different colors, bright and garish. Hassan could act so young sometimes. “What’s this garbage?”

Hassan quickly closed the screen and stood up.

“Nothing,” Hassan said, blushing. “Some dumb thing my sister reads.”

He steered Faisal back out to the meeting space. They both sat down.

“Salaam ya shabab,” Sheikh Ibrahim said. “Keifa halikum alayyum?”

“Alhamdullilah.”

Ibrahim leaned against a near wall, his crutches resting next to him. His foot had been blown off by a land mine during the Afghanistan jihad of the eighties. In the study group, there was no greater symbol of righteousness than the missing limbs of the weathered Afghan Saudis, as those early jihadis were known. Faisal stretched his arms and legs, shook his wrists loose. He didn’t like to feel watched, so he was particularly annoyed when an older man with a lupine face sat down in the seat right across from him. A neat gray beard grew from the man’s narrow chin, and Faisal saw the flash of silver caps when he opened his mouth to yawn. He’d noticed the man on two previous occasions; he was probably an uncle or an older cousin of one of the group members. The man looked at him, but Faisal averted his eyes, embarrassed to be caught staring.

“Allahu Akbar,” Sheikh Ibrahim intoned.

At home, Faisal often tried to imitate the quiet resonance of the sheikh’s voice. In front of the bathroom mirror, or when he asked Mariam to give him the television remote. He could never get it exactly right and determined that it must be like singing. Either you could do it or you couldn’t.

“Men, I am here to assure you that I will not be turned into a menstruation sheikh. The al-Saud have made us into a country obsessed by these small issues, the better to keep us from mulling over the real problems plaguing this country. Listen to our radio programs. Listen to our television shows. Everyone wants to know: Can I sleep with my maid, since she is like a slave, making relations with her permissible under Islam? Can my wife buy lingerie from a strange man in the mall or is it haram? If I fart, do I need to repeat my ablutions?”

A few people laughed, including Majid.

“We obsess over these issues of family, of relationships, of private worship,” Ibrahim continued. “But these questions have little to do with our Almighty God.

“What we should be asking is, ‘Why does my country, a supposedly Islamic state, align itself with the infidels, the Americans, and welcome them into the Arabian Peninsula when the Prophet has said we must expunge them?’ and ‘Why must I be completely obedient to this sultan, this king, when the Prophet, and Abdul Wahab himself, both say to serve God and God alone?’ ”

Faisal moved to the edge of his chair, his right foot tapping in time with the murmurs of affirmation making their way through the crowd. The tea and coffee lay untouched, every face turned toward Sheikh Ibrahim like heliotropes to the sun. The sheikh was not much past fifty, the features of his face dramatic—heavily lashed eyes, unruly caterpillar eyebrows, surprisingly feminine lips that protruded pinkly.

“Why is it, I ask you, that the imam is no longer permitted to say the word ‘
America’
in the mosque? It is because the al-Saud are scared to upset our masters. So I will say it to you now: America! May that country know that we criticize them, that they are harbi, aggressors waging three wars against Muslims, and that our opposition to these injustices cannot be ignored. The most conservative estimates say twenty-five thousand civilians were killed under the occupation in Iraq, and the Americans dare to lament four thousand dead on the eleventh of September, or fifteen hundred American soldiers dead in Iraq? Those numbers are laughable compared to the people that they have slaughtered in Iraq, in Afghanistan.”