Where Pigeons Don't Fly (12 page)

Laughing hard he said, loud and mocking and speaking in classical Arabic, ‘What ails thee, Akrama? Wilt thou cede the matter to sinful Quraish?'

When they were in the car, Saeed said that he had received a text from his work colleague. ‘It's Rashed, the guy I told you about. He's the one who encouraged me to read up on these groups: a strange person, mysterious and never smiling. You think he hasn't been following what you're saying, but when he speaks you realise he was with you all along.'

They drove to Musafir, an old working-class coffee shop tucked away inside a petrol station and frequented by students, the unemployed and truck drivers. When they reached the entrance a solitary figure in the far corner waved his hand, his beard sprinkled with a little white and an incipient bald patch on his head; he had placed his
shimagh
and
aqqal
on the ground beside him and was gripping the hose of the towering
shisha
pipe. Saeed shook his hand and introduced him to Fahd and the man smiled, his eyes narrowing further.

Saeed ordered apple tobacco and strong black tea. His expression had completely altered; his cheeriness, the laughter and derision, was gone, and he seemed sad as he stirred the coals on top of the tobacco plug.

‘Something's ruined your mood today. Everything OK?' Rashed asked.

Saeed recounted what had happened at the theatre while Rashed, eyes like slits, listened intently. When Saeed had finished and silence had descended, Rashed puffed out thick white smoke, coughed a little, and said, ‘Look Saeed, that lot didn't appear out of thin air. We made them, us and our grandfathers before us, from their first flowering before the Battle of Sabilla finished them off, through to the bombings and armed confrontations of recent years, by way of the assault on the Grand Mosque and the Afghan Jihad, or the Awakening as they call it.'

Saeed interrupted to make the point that Saudi society could not bear sole responsibility and Rashed nodded in agreement, stating that society, the government, America and the entire world had played a role in feeding and propagating their movement: ‘That's right. There are those who fatten them up then get sucked in themselves.'

He took a short drag on the pipe and exhaled skywards. ‘They're a cancer, my friend. Whenever people think the malignant cells have been cut out a new one suddenly appears.'

Despairingly, cursing everyone around him, Rashed unburdened himself. His grief rose to his throat and a long-suppressed tear rattled in his chest as he started to talk about his wife, who had abandoned him years before after a sheikh had given her a ruling that if her husband didn't pray in the mosque then she wasn't permitted to live with him in the same house.

‘They brought my roof down, friends. They destroyed my house and my family.'

On the way home, Fahd seemed obsessed with Rashed's personality, so vengeful that he now spoke openly without looking about to check. Saeed changed the subject, and talked about the preparations for the cup final. They chatted about the match between Hilal and Ittihad and through his familiar, sad laughter, Saeed said, ‘There's nowhere left but the stadium, my friend: it's the only place the beards don't go.'

 

–14 –

A
GLOOMY, ENDLESS EVENING. FAHD
sat in the bedroom that had become his home. There was a gentle knocking at the door.

‘What?' he snapped.

‘Can I come in?' asked Lulua in a pleading voice.

She came in carrying a white sheet of paper and colouring pens.

I know this little scamp. She can be as polite as you like when she wants something
, he thought as Lulua said with the playfulness they both missed, ‘Best brother and greatest artist and sketcher in the world?'

He didn't answer and she added, ‘It seems the prince of men is closed for the night.'

Hunched over his desk reading, he said, ‘What do you want, Lulua?'

She took her piece of paper and spread it out on the floor and he began to write out a prophetic
hadith
along with the meanings of the words, while she fetched him a black Americano and a piece of vanilla cake. When he had finished the inscription in red and black ink and signed her name at the bottom of the sheet, he sat down to try the coffee and cake and asked her if she wanted to play Monopoly.

‘Let's play in the living room,' she said.

‘The only place I like in this house is my bedroom.' Then: ‘I even hate my room.'

Although she did as she pleased, Lulua wasn't stubborn. She never fought with anybody, readily complying on the surface while secretly doing the very opposite of what others wanted from her. When their uncle took over their house in the guise of a husband, gradually imposing his own rules and interfering in the way Lulua dressed, she stopped wearing jeans despite being thirteen years old. Even the regular
abaya
wasn't enough, her uncle forcing her to wear a black
abaya
without any decoration or embroidery, and never as low as her shoulders.

‘Can't you see what her chest looks like, woman?' he demanded of Soha as he bullied her into making Lulua wear it over her head.

After a few months he declared that Lulua's hands were extremely white and were attracting and seducing men, so he fetched her a pair of black gloves. Her mother tried to object, but faltered, feeling that it was inevitable that the man who had entered their house would impose his laws on them, that his word would be the only one heard and everyone would just have to do as they were told.

He even interfered in Fahd's appearance and forbade him from growing out his hair; he went so far as to insist that Fahd shave it down to the scalp, a demand he had never encountered in his father's time.

Fahd couldn't recall his father interfering in the way he looked or ever making any demands of him, except that one time, a few months before his death, when he took him to the Office of Civil Affairs in Washam Street to get a new ID card.

‘Would you mind cutting your hair for the photograph?' he had said in that lovely, persuasive way of his and Fahd had happily consented.

What a wonderful moment for a boy: to walk out of the gate of the Civil Affairs building beneath the high bridge having attended the afternoon prayer with his father in the small mosque on the street, tucking his new ID card into his pocket as his father ruffled his head, smiling, and said in the manner of teenagers, ‘Sweet. Now you're a man.'

Lulua came in carrying the Monopoly and laid it out, arranging the Community Chest, Chance and property cards in their places, dividing out their share of cash and putting the rest in the bank beside her. She said she would go first, and took the dice and tossed them in the air. She moved her piece and counted out her cash and Fahd chased after her as he chased after his endless anxieties.

When the uncle came in through the front door, life and joy leapt out of the windows. The satellite receiver vanished to leave Saudi TV channels One and Two, the news and sport. He regarded the Playstation as a time-wasting frivolity and they hid it from him so they could play when he spent the night with Umm Yasser or Umm Mu'adh; two nights of pleasure then a night of misery when he came back.

And suddenly there he was, poking his head and paunch round the door, eyebrows knotted like Nimrod: ‘There is no strength or power save with God. You don't get it.'

He told them to throw the abomination in the bin.

‘This is just a game; it's for fun,' Fahd responded.

‘A game with gambling and wagers. This is what you call entertainment? I seek refuge with God.'

‘But uncle, there's no money involved. It's just a game.'

‘That's beside the point: it's a snare of Satan and a distraction from true worship. It serves no good purpose.'

The children packed away the game. Fahd knew he would revenge himself on their downtrodden mother who for the past three years had been afflicted with a mysterious illness. Following the death of her husband she had stopped visiting the hospital's specialist clinic; she used to go with Suleiman once a week.

Fahd heard his uncle growling in a low voice to keep his words from reaching the children. He looked into Lulua's eyes, unsure whether she had heard him, and if she had, whether she had understood what was said.

‘You don't fear God.' Then, shaking his hands in Soha's lovely face: ‘How can you leave them together? The Prophet says, “Keep them apart from one another in the bedchambers!”'

‘My dear man, they weren't sleeping together; they sleep in their own rooms.'

‘Even so: they're adolescents and they mustn't be left alone together. Is the ewe safe with the wolf?'

Damn you, Uncle
, Fahd screamed in silence.
What ewe? What wolf? You'll suffocate my sister behind some imaginary wall. Even my orphaned sister's childhood won't be safe from your interference. You'll have us living like wolves and farmyard animals. You lot fool everyone with your studies and qualifications, but the real destruction is burrowing through your innards.

His mother had closed the subject. There was the sound of coffee pouring from a pot while his uncle muttered, praying that God keep the country safe and secure. Then he began talking about the village that had been blessed with great bounty yet showed no gratitude for its blessings, and so God brought down famine, fear and poverty upon it.

Broken-hearted, Lulua closed her brother's door and silently made her way back to her own room, while Fahd returned to his books, though he was unable to concentrate or understand a thing. He could think of nothing but the night his mother had woken him, worried because he had fallen asleep on the floor between his bed and the wardrobe. Before he dropped off he had been sitting facing the wardrobe door on which his clothes dangled like corpses and lying behind them a stupidly grinning Suleiman. He had been telling him what had happened and recalling the song he used to sing to his father on those evenings long ago when his mood was fine:

An evening of goodness, fine feeling and kindness,

An evening that none but my loved ones deserve!

Fahd would sing alone at night in his bedroom, worn out by tears and uncertain if his father could hear him concealed behind his clothes. But he did know that Suleiman couldn't do as he used to long ago and take him, singing, into his arms to finish the song against his chest.

No, he didn't hold me to his chest that night. I just slept, drowned in tears and misery and longing for a childhood lost and gone, until my terrified mother woke me.

 

–15 –

A
SUMMER'S NIGHT LONG AGO
. In undershorts and a light cotton T-shirt, hair wild and beard unkempt, Suleiman squatted by the head on the bathroom's broken shower hose, trying to switch off the mains lever so he could replace it. His voice sounded loudly, accompanied by the echoes from the tiled floor: ‘Fahd, bring the toolbag.'

Fahd came, six years old and struggling to drag the green bag in which he had kept his first books and paints for Zuhour Nursery School, before it had become home to the plumbing and electrical tools his father used. He passed him the bag and sat cross-legged at the bathroom door, propping his face in his little hands.

‘Dad?' he burst out innocently. ‘Are you a criminal?'

The pliers clattered on to the tiled floor of the bathroom and father turned to son. ‘No, old man. Why?'

‘Just asking.'

‘Who said that to you?'

‘Aunt Hissa's son, Faisal. He told me, “Your dad's a crook because they put him in prison.” Why did they put you in prison?'

Suleiman smiled. ‘Because …' He fell silent for a moment. ‘I'll tell you when you're older.'

‘I'm older now, look.'

Fahd leapt to his feet to show how tall he was. Suleiman left his work and went out of the bathroom carrying the boy on his right arm, kissing him, and shouting, ‘I love you so much, God curse the devil inside you!'

‘Wiser than your years, little Fahd,' he chanted in a loud, joyful voice, then sat him down on the sofa and tried to explain that he had made a mistake and they had punished him to ensure he didn't do it again.

‘Who are they?'

‘The government.'

‘And what is the government?'

‘Well, if you made a mistake, for example, and broke the vase your mother bought last month or took the iron and burned her new dress, then Mum would punish you, right?'

‘Mum's the government?'

Suleiman shook with laughter, shouting out to Soha who was making coffee in the kitchen. ‘Come and see the little madman of the family!'

Fahd angrily broke in on his laughter and mockery. ‘Fine, so you broke something when you were a boy and they put you in prison?'

Suleiman's hand froze on the child's neck and his eyes reddened. He got up and went back to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Fahd heard a confused sound, like water pouring into a basin or sobbing.

All of this came back to Fahd now. He felt that his father had wanted to tell him that the thing he had broken was his heart, and with it those of his own parents. For Ali, loyalty to the government was of a piece with devotion to God; obedience to God's appointed was a duty and to turn against him was the most evil act a man could commit.

Suleiman had wept bitterly in front of the bathroom mirror. Had he cried because he was thinking of his time in prison and the sorrow in his father's eyes when he came to visit him in the last three years of his sentence? Was it from a private grief at leaving prison only to enter the prison of this melancholy country, having twice failed to commit suicide and put an end to his existence? But his marriage, settling down and the pleasure of his two children had caused him to look at life through new eyes.

Fahd was no run-of-the-mill event in Suleiman's life. He took great pleasure in the upheavals of early childhood. He worried about the boy's precocious, grand ideas. He never forgot the time that Fahd surprised him by asking, ‘Dad? Who was it that occupied Saudi Arabia?' as he turned at the end of Urouba Road on their way home from Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary School. He laughed delightedly while his skinny son said in exasperation, ‘Don't laugh, Dad.'