Where Pigeons Don't Fly (2 page)

‘Who is she?'

Here he was, aiming his lance at Fahd's eyes and pricking them out, as Fahd thought of all the stories he had read in the papers of people trying to make a run for it. A man in his forties tried to sneak out of a fourth floor window and was smashed to pieces when he fell … A young man fled with his girl and driving wildly they collided with a reinforced concrete barrier and died … Two men and their female companions drove the wrong way down the road in a bid to escape, hit an oncoming vehicle and all four died … A story from Tabuk, another from Sharqiya, a third from Ha'il, and now … This time the papers would write of a young woman from Starbucks who committed suicide by throwing herself into the roaring torrent of King Abdullah Road, the car wheels grinding her to paste in her black
abaya
, her beautiful shoes sent flying.

‘Who is that with you?'

‘My wife.'

He could only lie and Fahd was certain the sheikh had seen the lie for what it was. There was even a small smile forming around his eyes as he said, ‘She's not your wife, young Fahd. Tell me, and don't be frightened. All we do is look after people and correct their behaviour.'

Fahd recalled an interview in the newspaper
Ukaz
, in which the head of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had said they covered up over ninety percent of cases of illegal association between the sexes. Would Fahd and Tarfah be part of the ninety percent? The man's face overflowed with sympathy and compassion, comfort and certitude. With his tall and slender body he was like a man standing
by his son at the edge of a swimming pool, persuading him to take the plunge: right there beside him, ready to rescue him if it comes to it.

‘She's not my wife. She's my girlfriend.'

Just like that he took the decision not merely to dive in but to strip off his swimming trunks and hurl himself at the water's surface.

‘Don't be worried. Come along with me. Just a few simple procedures and you can go on your way with the protection of God.'

‘But what about her? How can I leave her on her own?'

He had scarcely finished the sentence before the man set off, saying, ‘Don't worry, don't worry: this is our job.'

They were joined by a short, plump man with the eyes of a hawk and no
mashlah
.

‘Go with him, my son,' the sheikh said.

The man encircled Fahd's wrist with an iron grip and tugged and it was at that precise moment that he realised today, Wednesday, 13 July, was to be his Day of Reckoning. There was a Day of Reckoning for everyone in this city: you died instantly, or passed safely across its threshold and were saved, or you carried it with you wherever you went, never to be forgotten, like a thief's brand on your face.

The sheikh left them, heading over to where Tarfah was sitting unaware, removing the red rose from the carrier bag where she had put it. She was sniffing it and waiting for her cappuccino, waiting to talk about the terrible week Fahd had spent following his mother's death and his attempts to move her from the emergency ward of King Khaled Hospital to the department of forensic pathology at Riyadh Central Hospital. Now Tarfah would never get to wash away his sadness with
her laughter and chatter. Instead, loathsome black ants would scale her ripe body and enter the chambers of her living heart. Her heart, her love and her life would die, the music and the gentle Gulf dances would die and the sash about her hips would become a hangman's rope.

As Fahd left the coffee shop the yellow sun was beginning to grow harsher and a thin policeman in baggy trousers, belt sagging beneath the weight of his holster, stood waiting by the door of a GMC SUV. He opened the two rear doors and indicated to Fahd that he should climb into the third row of seats. The policeman got in and was followed by the short, plump man who inclined his bulk towards Fahd and opened a bag under his nose: ‘Put your things in here. Everything in your pockets.'

‘Why?' asked Fahd stupidly, then, seeing the man's irritation, added, ‘The sheikh told me it was just a few basic procedures out by the car, and now you're putting me in the car. Where are we going?'

He spoke like a child refusing to go in on his first day at primary school. He put the bag down in front of him as the soldier looked over with evident distaste and shouted in a reedy voice: ‘Do what you're told, boy.'

Fahd took out his wallet and keys and placed them in the bag.

‘Your mobile,' the plump man said coldly, without looking at him.

Shit
, he thought to himself. What would he do if they opened the phone and searched through the names, the messages, the swapped pictures, the Bluetooth records, the …? Why hadn't he asked to go to the bathroom in the coffee shop and chucked it down the lavatory?

Taking the phone from his pocket he made an attempt to at least remove the SIM card. His hands were concealed behind the armrest but the man caught him at it and with unexpected strength plucked the phone from his grasp and put it in the bag. The man opened the ID and read out the name: ‘Fahd Suleiman al-Safeelawi …'

‘Nice to meet you,' he added, with mocking relish.

He opened the wallet and found a photograph of Fahd's father in his forties, just before his death.
That's my father, may God have mercy on his soul.
He switched on the mobile phone and paused at the password. He handed Fahd a pen from his pocket and the folder he was carrying.

‘Write down the password.'

‘No.'

Surprisingly, the man didn't become angry; he didn't slap Fahd or set the skinny cop on him. Instead, he said quite simply, ‘No problem: it's up to you.'

Tarfah emerged following the sheikh, stumbling in her
abaya
as she wept and pleaded. From the other side of the window Fahd saw the hands he had kissed so often lifted to the sheikh's face as though she were begging.

She would be kept waiting outside the Starbucks for half an hour, even after the Committee's vehicle carrying Fahd had left. Every luxury vehicle that passed by would slow down, the young drivers peering curiously out, while some of the café's customers turned to the window to enjoy the show as though they were watching some drama from the natural world on the Discovery Channel. The lioness stalks her unsuspecting prey through the bush, moving her paws very slowly so as not to make the grass rustle, and thus did the sheikh move his paws, quiet and assured, as he guided his quarry to the ambush.

Fahd put his head between his hands as he sighed and said, ‘There is no recourse nor strength save through God.' Then, firmly and with a faint tremor, he muttered, ‘Oh Lord! Oh Lord, help us!'

The short man with the eyes of a hawk and a brown spot on his forehead rebuked him. ‘You discover God after you've committed the sin.'

With no apparent humility he recited from the Qur'an: ‘“Now, when they embark upon a voyage, they call on God and worship him alone, but when He has delivered them to dry land, they give a share of their worship to others.”'

On the verge of tears, Fahd said, ‘Protect us, God help you! At least keep her from harm!'

And so it was, in this country of fear and confusion, that Fahd was transformed in an instant from confident and collected to flustered, uncertain and defeated. Perhaps it was the sight of Tarfah weeping that so affected him, and then again, what might her brother Abdullah do, he who had so very courageously defied her desire to enrol at nursing college before finally surrendering to her limitless obstinacy? What would her poor mother do? How would her little girl, Sara, sleep at night? What embrace would compensate Sara for the warmth of her mother's arms?
What embrace will comfort me?

 

–2 –

W
ITH HIS EXAGGERATED AIR
of exquisite dignity and grace, the sheikh with the cream
mashlah
looked exactly like the man who had whispered in the ear of Fahd's father, Suleiman, twenty-five years before. As Fahd climbed into the back seat of the Committee's GMC he couldn't help thinking of his father getting into the secret police jeep in Buraida's Jurida market all that time ago. His father had told him the story many times.

The morning of 3 November 1979 was mild and a light breeze bathed the faces of the rural vendors spread through the marketplace. Fahd's father noticed two men dressed in black winter clothes. One had his
shimagh
wrapped across his face and the other wore a black overcoat and dark glasses—and it was this man who approached him, whispering in his ear in front of the customers that he wanted him for a moment. So, leaving his neighbour Ibn Qanas in charge of the crates of courgettes and tomatoes, he walked off with them. He would never return to his crates.

Fahd learnt later that the journey his father endured was exhausting. He was sat before an investigating officer who interrogated him bluntly and unnervingly about his role in the Salafist group whose ambitions had extended to overthrowing the country's rulers. Smelling of fresh vegetables pulled
from the fields of Khabb al-Muraidasiya, his sleeves rolled up and his
shimagh
cocked back like a truck driver, a worried Suleiman sat there and answered the questions honestly and clearly while the clerk beside the officer wrote it all down.

Suleiman had explained that all he cared for in the world were his crates of courgettes, tomatoes and beans and that for over a year he'd had no connection to the group which two days before had assaulted the Grand Mosque on Mecca. The interrogation ran for six hours and when he asked if he might perform the afternoon prayer the scowling officer only asked him if he thought he was on holiday.

‘Don't assume you'll be going home to your mother any time soon.'

And indeed, he didn't return for four years, during which time he was moved from Buraida to Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca. He entered a temporary prison on Airport Road in Riyadh, then a new facility outside Mecca where he made friends. There was Mushabbab the Southerner, Salah the Egyptian, Bandar Bin Khalaf and Deifallah, and there were the guards, whose shifts might change, though their eyes, frozen like the eyes of the dead, never did. They were like those who ready bodies for burial, who wash the corpses indifferent and inured, and so they never knew his woe and his regret at having turned down his father's plea that he do as his brother did and continue his education in Buraida, taking himself off instead to a run-down house in the Riyadh neighbourhood of Umm Sulaym.

How small and tame Umm Sulaym had been in the 1970s. From the roundabout to the old neighbourhood facing Al-Jahiz School it was a considerable distance, the whole way lined with street-vendors and students. He did not enjoy studying
at the Imam al-Daawa Institute in Deira: studying Ibn Malik's
Alfiyya
in his grammar classes rattled his brain and left him dizzy and he was encouraged to rebel when they taught him that studying in government schools was dishonourable and that he must seek true and lawful knowledge from sheikhs and scholars in the colonnades of mosques and the galleries of Mecca and Medina.

That afternoon, as their son Suleiman quitted the Jurida market for the last time, his mother, Fahd's grandmother, was in the village of Muraidasiya setting down the coffee pot and a few sugared dates in front of her husband. Throwing her shawl over her head and shoulders and sitting before him to pour the first cup, she thought nothing of her striped green
thaub
, but he flung the dregs of the coffee behind him in the direction of the old mulberry tree, and cried, ‘Your
thaub's
on inside out, woman.'

At this, the grandmother was perturbed and examined her sleeves, muttering, ‘God, make it well.'

The following day they sent Suleiman's brother Saleh to the market to ask after him and Ibn Qanas told him that two strange men had turned up and spoken with him. Suleiman had gone with them and had not yet returned.

Suleiman reached Riyadh cuffed hand and foot and accompanied by a young policeman, returning once more to the accursed city that had destroyed his modest dreams of learning and wealth and introduced him to a strange world of religious groups and parties.

It had been a simple enough beginning: murmuring invocations after the afternoon prayers and listening to the silken voice of the imam as he invited anyone who wanted to take
part in a retreat that coming Thursday to register his name with the muezzin. So it was that his name first found its way into the records of a small mosque in Umm Sulaym.

They left for the Hassi River in two cars, Suleiman riding in the Volvo belonging to the mosque's imam, an upright young man from Beir. When they arrived they set up a tent, cooked some food and formed a
dhikr
. Then they listened to selections of the prophetic
hadith
, played a bit of football and returned home the next day. After two months of these trips a benefactor from the congregation sponsored an
umra
to Mecca and taking the decision to abandon the Imam al-Daawa Institute and the hated
Alfiyya
of Ibn Malik, Suleiman's arduous journey began. He dropped in on the owner of the petrol station where he worked and handed in his notice, saying that he was going to travel in search of knowledge, and received one hundred and fifty riyals, two months wages, which he put in his pocket and departed with the others in a small microbus.

Inside the Grand Mosque, making his way to the ambulatory around the Kaaba, Suleiman passed a gallery where a sheikh was debating with his students and, joining them, heard the name of Sheikh al-Albani for the first time. He hunted for his writings in the bookshops around the mosque, read up on the prophetic
hadith
, both authenticated and doubtful, and studied the prayer habits of the Prophet. He had no idea what Divine Reward Salafism meant, but was embarrassed to ask the Brothers. He read a lot and understood little. He pored over his two-part study of
hadith
authenticity,
Instigation and Dissuasion
, and leafed through
The Night Ride to Jerusalem and the Ladder
about the Prophet's miraculous flight from Mecca to Jerusalem and his ascent to the heavens. He loved the books of Nasser al-Deen al-Albani and little expected that one day
he would meet him face to face, so the first time he saw him in the flesh within the Grand Mosque, his astonishment was considerable: his mouth gaped and he was rooted to the spot. He had felt much as his son, Fahd, felt when he was joined in the lift at Mamlaka Tower by the singer Rashed al-Fares with his brown skin, long black overcoat and manager, to whom he chatted away. Each of them was encountering his idol: Suleiman had read much of Sheikh al-Albani and loved his ideas, while Fahd listened to al-Fares and adored his rapid music, a taste he tried to impose on his girlfriend Tarfah.