Where Pigeons Don't Fly (24 page)

The passenger trembled, hiding his head between the branches to appear like a tarpaulin abandoned in the scorching midday heat, but the light fell suddenly into his gleaming eyes and one of the guards cried out to his companions: ‘It's him.'

Pointing a pistol at him, the guard shouted for him to get up with his hands behind his neck. Exhausted, his face filthy and holding his hands behind his neck, he rose to his feet. One of the guards came up behind him, patted his pockets, and securing handcuffs around his left wrist first, then his right, he steered the man away. A few minutes later they had found the other man and they took them both back, together with their truck, to the Ruqai Centre on the border with Kuwait.

The pick-up was impounded with seven other trucks, their loads concealed beneath green tarpaulins held in place with ropes wound round the brackets on the vehicles' sides. After stepping forward with two other officers and cautiously uncovering one of the trucks, the border centre's commander ordered the detention of the drivers and their passengers.

They were carrying stacked bundles of small pink pamphlets, on their covers the title:
An Address on the Subject of the Emirate and the Swearing of Fealty and Obedience, and a Judgment on the Duplicity of the Rulers towards the Scholars and the Common People, and the Proper Position with regards to the Rulers in Particular, and People in General
.

The duty commander at the border post sat at his desk, a copy of the pamphlet in his hand. He leafed through it rapidly, reading some of the Qur'anic verses and
hadith
, the first of which was Ibada Bin al-Samit's report of their pledge
of allegiance to the Prophet on the grounds that ‘… we must speak the truth wheresoever we be, for we are with God and so fear not the censure of critics.' Flipping the pages with his thumb he read out loud to the two officers:

Know that some of those who fawn over kings and rulers excuse themselves by pointing to the
hadith
recorded in the Sahih Muslim, when a man addressed the Prophet, saying, ‘O Prophet of God have you not perceived that when princes are set over us they look to their own rights and deny us ours? What do you command us to do?'

To which the Prophet replied, ‘Hearken: they must bear their burden and you, yours.'

But this furnishes them with no excuse, for the
hadith
is concerned with rights of the individual: the rulers' monopolisation of booty and plunder and the like. Religion is not one of the rights of an individual, where forbearance in the face of preferential treatment is urged. In the
hadith
the man says, ‘… and they deny us our rights,' but when the right is that of God, then no: the duty then is to reject the legitimacy of those who fail to implement God's law
.

The commander tossed the pamphlet to one end of the table.

‘God preserve us!' said one of the officers. ‘That's outright sedition!'

The commander nodded his head in agreement. ‘Planning a coup, it seems.'

The third officer remained silent, averting his eyes from the others. Then he excused himself and left the office.

Seven impounded vehicles in a military post on the Kuwait border, were laden with vast quantities of pamphlets churned
out by the Vanguard printing presses in Kuwait and destined for remote villages and farms around Riyadh and Mecca, where they would be handed out to members of the group who, with precisely coordinated and pre-arranged timing, would distribute them through major urban centres such as Mecca, Riyadh, Qaseem and Ha'il.

Suleiman led his own small group, delegating tasks with the spirit of a practised leader of men, his abundant vigour sometimes beguiling other worshippers into helping his companions and himself distribute the booklets, blissfully unaware of the incitement they contained against the government and what they termed
jahili
society.

Seven years later, by a strange twist of fate, Suleiman al-Safeelawi was transformed from a distributor of clandestine literature into a distributor of newspapers for a major company.

He had descended ravenously on newspapers after being denied them during his first period of incarceration. He had often thought of writing his memoirs in prison, believing his time as a member of the Salafist Group had been far superior to the childhood memories recorded by Taha Hussein in
The Days
. Yet despite his love of reading, his writing and his powers of description, metaphor and composition were no match for the great wordsmith. It was as though the
Alfiyya
marked the division between reading for pleasure and enforced study.

Running from Ibn Malik, he had fallen, seduced and thrilled, for Sayyid Qutb, al-Albani and Hamoud al-Tuwaijri, and then, having emerged from prison, taken a job at the newspaper distribution company, married and enrolled at King Abdul Aziz University, he sequestered himself away with a new series of books, dividing his time between classical
Islamic works such as
The Unique Necklace
,
The Book of Animals
and
The Delicacies of the Caliphs and the Jests of the Refined
, and the Russian classics, getting hold of Dostoyevsky's complete works.
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
,
The Adolescent
and
The Brothers Karamazov
transported him to another world, far from petty doctrinal quarrels.

After he had been promoted and his street level wanderings were behind him he would read all the time, even during office hours. At home, he would steal an hour to himself after sunset, though he still maintained his habit of dropping everything half an hour before the daylight disappeared and driving westwards over Urouba Bridge. It was as if he needed to satisfy himself that the sun had gone down to its resting place, as if he wanted to remember that distant sunrise over Jurida Square, when they escorted him away to be interrogated and from there to a series of long and arduous adventures in prison.

 

–34 –

J
UST BEFORE SUNSET THAMAMA
Road was relatively crowded, the ice cream vans scattered eye-catchingly either side of the road as Fahd drove along, suffering beneath the yellow disc of the sun.

Every sunrise and sunset that passed before Fahd's eyes wrung his heart and reminded him of his father on that final morning, a memory that led him back to thoughts of his two uncles and Yasser. He remembered his childhood, when his uncle took them all to a nearby farm to learn to swim. The pond was deep and shaded by the tops of tall palms and verdant trees. His uncle said that swimming in shady water would strengthen their young hearts, as if he intended to turn them into black rocks, unbreakable and incapable of bringing light to the world.

Whenever Fahd thought of them he wished that one day they would all go on a trip together and that the family car would swerve and flip over repeatedly or smash into a stray camel crossing the road, leaving no one alive. How wonderful it would be to celebrate their deaths! Of course, nobody's death should be a matter of celebration, even those they called ‘infidels', the ones al-Qaeda slaughter like sheep. The time he had opened a video clip on an Islamic website to find members of al-Qaeda butchering a terrified foreigner had terrified him and left him nauseous and he had fasted for a whole week.

He sometimes felt that those around him were the true heirs of al-Qaeda. The only difference was that out there they first trained in arms and laid waste to the West, then turned their attention to their own homelands, claiming they were in thrall to the infidel. In Riyadh and Qaseem, meanwhile, they merely supported their deeds and cheered.

Fahd still remembered September 11. He was in Bassam on Ulaya Street looking for a cheap microwave oven and the televisions were aglow. His attention was drawn by a group of middle-aged men gathering to stand astonished in front of the screens, watching the aircraft as they detonated into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Three of the men were applauding gleefully. Two were clean-shaven and the third had a slight beard and they clapped as though following a video game or some movie where good triumphs over evil. Later, Fahd would think of them and ask himself: where are those joyful men now? Were they amongst those who blew up the Muhiya Compound or the Hamra Oasis Village? The Civil Affairs building in Riyadh, perhaps? Are they in Iraq? Were they amongst those who joined the Fatah al-Islam Brigade in northern Lebanon, their corpses sprawled out in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp?

It terrified him to think that people here were in crisis, hostile to anything advocating progress. When you explained that progress was the inescapable destiny of all things, then talked to them of their errors—from their rejection of the telegram and the radio on the grounds that they were sorcery and devilry, to their refusal to accept television and women's education, to their repudiation of the latest innovations such as identity cards for women—they would shut you up, using force if necessary. They would end the debate on the grounds
that your faith was weak and your doctrine unsound and then, without any hesitation, inform you that you were a secularist preaching degeneracy or a filthy liberal, maybe growing aggressive enough to declare you an apostate whose killing was permissible by law.

He still remembered that episode of
The Other Direction
, a programme he sometimes watched despite hating it for being contrived. On one side of the debate was Sayyid al-Qamani, who opined that there was no democracy anywhere in Islamic history. How could there be, when the Emirate of the Muslims passed from one Caliph to another by means of poisoned dagger or cup? The other guest wore a turban and was called al-Sebaei. Provoked, he roundly abused al-Qamani, describing him as a monkey and an apostate from religion, and all this live on air in front of millions.

The speed monitor began to tick steadily as Fahd exceeded 120 kilometres per hour. He decelerated and his attention was caught by an Egyptian labourer at the side of the road, who was setting out upturned chrome bowls along a board lying across the tops of four barrels. Next to him was a camel pen surrounded by barbed wire and a gaggle of motorists handing over the price of a bowlful of fresh milk. He would squeeze out a bowl in front of them and they would gulp the milk down until the foam filled their noses and covered their moustaches, then continue on their way, belching as they inserted a tape of Islamic songs hymning the former glories of the Muslim world and extolling the Kalashnikov, the grave and the life hereafter.

Summer had begun, he supposed. Ice cream vans were scattered about, along with sellers of Wadi melons, pomegranates from Ta'if and dates and milk from Qaseem. People straggled
down both sides of Thamama Road into the early hours, searching for a cool breeze in the Nejd nights whose like was to be found nowhere else in the world.

His mobile rang and it was Tarfah, promising to wait for him. He had assumed that she was at Granada Mall but she said she would wait for him at a clinic. ‘When you get to Abraj Street call me, and I'll come to you.'

He was returning from a weekend place belonging to friends and had taken Abraj Street heading south in the direction of the Knowledge Clinic where Tarfah was waiting. He drove past it, then turned right down a side street as she had requested, so the people by the door and the receptionist wouldn't notice that she had got out of one car (her brother Ayman's) and left in another.

She got in and they set off for Quds then doubled back to the eastern extension of King Abdul Aziz Road. When he reached the traffic lights by Jarir, his face to the east, she signalled to him, her finger concealed from the eyes of other motorists, that he should turn back in the opposite direction. He turned, driving past Panda then Jarir, and they took the southbound Eastern Ring Road.

On their left, in Quds and Roda, they noticed a number of furnished flats on offer, and picking a complex, Fahd parked the sea-blue Hyundai outside the entrance as the street filled with people emerging from the sunset prayer.

From the glove compartment he took out a folded copy of a forged marriage certificate that Saeed had procured for him that day: ‘This is for you to use in emergencies!' The Sudanese receptionist pretended to inspect it without moving his eyes from a card game on his computer screen. The price of an apartment was 250 riyals, he said. Fahd handed him the money
and he began to enter their details, continuing to click on the mouse and move cards across the screen as though locked in a life or death struggle for victory.

‘Go and get your luggage,' he said, desperate to carry on with his game.

‘I don't have any,' Fahd said. ‘We've only come for a wedding in Riyadh.'

The receptionist returned the certificate and handed him the key to the flat. Fahd went back to the car then they went together into the lift, embracing passionately as he said apologetically, ‘Sorry sweetheart, there are no lights in furnished flats!'

She laughed out loud as he opened the door and they crept into flat 101. Like any nosy woman she headed for the kitchen and opened the cupboards, then the fridge, and inspected the dark brown sofas in the living room.

They went to the bedroom. She removed her
abaya
, revealing her uncovered shoulders and gave her familiar smile, that delicious grin both coy and impudent. Her hair was soft and her breasts were alive with anticipation; part of her bra was visible, an elastic strap covered in striped red satin. As always she rushed to his mouth, devouring it hungrily as she pulled off his
shimagh
and whispered, ‘That's better!' then let out an unexpected laugh as she threw her body on to the bed.

He asked her why she had laughed and she turned her face away, ‘It's nothing!' and busied herself with stroking his chest. He stopped her. Taken aback, he asked her why she had laughed like that. He remembered Thuraya, who as he departed after their first meeting had told him that he looked funny naked, scampering into the bathroom like a rat making for a drain!