Girls of Riyadh (13 page)
Authors: Rajaa Alsanea
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: July 9, 2004
Subject: Michelle Meets Up with Matti
I’m sitting down in my La-Z-Boy with my feet stretched way out, just like I do every weekend when I write down these e-mails. And yes, my hair is fluffed and my lips are painted red…
I
t was about ten o’clock in the morning when the airplane landed at San Francisco International Airport. This was not Michelle’s first visit to the city, but it was the first time she had been there without her parents and her little brother Meshaal.
She breathed in air saturated with moisture and freedom. People in all shapes and colors, from everywhere in the world, were flowing around her in every direction. No one paid any attention to her Arab-ness, or to the fact that the person standing next to her was African. Everyone was minding his own business.
She made sure her visa was in plain sight. That piece of paper confirmed that she was a student from Saudi Arabia who had come to study at the University of California, San Francisco. The woman in Customs told her she was the prettiest Arab girl she had seen in all her years working at the airport.
After Michelle got through all the necessary official stuff, she searched the faces of the people waiting in the reception area. She caught sight of her cousin Matthew at the edge of the crowd, waving to her, and she started toward him, delighted.
“Hi, Matti!”
“Hi, sweetie! Long time no see!”
Matti gave her a warm hug, asking about her mom and her dad and her brother. Michelle noticed that he was the only one from her uncle’s small family who was there at the airport to meet her.
“Where is everyone else?”
“Dad and Mom are at work and Jamie and Maggie are at school.”
“And you? How come you came to meet me? Don’t you have lectures?”
“My morning lectures today were canceled for the express purpose of coming to meet my darling cousin at the airport. We’re going to spend the day together until everyone else gets home. Then I have to go give a lecture in the evening. You can come with me if you want to, and I can show you around the campus, and you can get a quick look at your room in the dorm. By the way, are you still insisting on living in the dorm instead of at our house?”
“It’s better that way. I’m really dying to try it out—living with some independence.”
“As you like, but hey, my condolences. Anyway, I’ve gotten everything ready. I chose a room for you; you’ll be rooming with one of my students who I think you’ll like a lot. She’s your age and she’s as saucy as you are, but you’re a lot prettier than she is.”
“Matti! Aren’t you ever going to stop spoiling me? I’m older now and I can handle things on my own.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He took her on a tour of Fisherman’s Wharf. They spent the day walking and window-shopping. Despite the smell of fish clinging to the air, Michelle took pleasure in everything she encountered: the merchandise displayed in open-air stalls and artists and singers everywhere you turned. When they felt hungry they ordered clam chowder and it came in a huge bread bowl. They enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
Later on, Matti helped her organize her things in the dorm and advised her in choosing the courses to take that term. She decided to begin by following in her cousin’s footsteps and major in communications, after hearing him praise it. Among the classes she signed up for was the subject he taught, nonverbal communications.
Michelle began to immerse herself in her studies and other university activities. She hoped she would forget what had been, and eventually she got her wish. With so much going on, and a new life in a new country that kept her occupied every day, bit by bit she was finally able to think about Faisal less and less.
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: July 16, 2004
Subject: An Adventure Not to Be Forgotten
The Qur’an verses, hadith of the Prophet—peace be upon him—and religious quotations that I include in my e-mails are, to me, inspirational and enlightening. And so are the poems and love songs that I include. Are these things opposite to each other, and so is this a contradiction? I don’t think so. Am I not a real Muslim because I don’t devote myself to reading only religious books and because I don’t shut my ears to music and I don’t consider anything romantic to be rubbish? I am religious, a balanced Saudi Muslim and I can say that there are a lot of people just like me. My only difference is that I don’t conceal what others would call contradictions within myself or pretend perfection like some do. We all have our
spiritual
sides as well as our
not-so-spiritual
sides.
L
amees first encountered her friend Fatimah’s brother one day when she gave Fatimah a ride to the train station. Ali was four years older than the girls were, and was, like them, a medical student. Because his car had broken down, he decided to join his sister on the train. They met at the station.
Fatimah was not very close to her brother Ali even though they were living within the same city of Riyadh. They seemed to spend very little time together. He lived in an apartment with his friends and his sister lived with her friends in another apartment far away. Ali didn’t come to visit her very often and every weekend he took his car or got a ride with a classmate going to Qatif, while Fatimah always took the train with her Qatifi classmates.
The first thing that really pleased Lamees about Ali was his height. At five foot seven, she was taller than most of the guys she came across. But Ali was a full six feet tall, maybe even a little bit more. And then there were his looks! He had a tanned complexion and very thick and dark eyebrows, and he positively exuded masculinity. He even seemed to Lamees to be, strangely, a little magical.
A week after they met, Lamees bumped into Ali in the hospital where she and Fatimah had gone to buy some reference books. It was before they had their rotation in that hospital later on. Many of the girls in the freshman class had met nice guys—colleagues—there by pretending they needed tutoring to understand the difficult medical courses, and Lamees used the same ploy with Ali, who was a senior. They met within the confines of the hospital at first and later on outside in one of the nearby coffee shops.
Somehow none of her friends caught on to their relationship. In front of her friends, Lamees acted as if nothing were going on between the two of them, that he was just tutoring her every now and then. Only Fatimah knew, because her brother told her. It turned out that he had asked her to arrange that meeting at the train station. He had seen Lamees’s photo framed in his sister’s room at their home in Qatif and he was smitten with her. In the photo, Lamees, Fatimah and some other classmates, all dressed in white lab coats, posed next to a corpse they had dissected in the anatomy lab of the Medical College for females in Malaz—a horrifically depressing room in which you could smell the mingled odors of formalin and cheap
bukhour
*
that the workers burned all the time in their attempts to mask the strong odor of the preserved bodies.
Ali was in his final year of medical studies and he was supposed to start his internship immediately after graduation. He would be assigned to one of the hospitals in the eastern part of the country. Lamees and Fatimah were still in their second year of university.
One day, as Lamees and Ali sat together in a café on Al-Thalatheen Street, a band of men from Al-Hai’ah
**
swooped down on them and led the pair off swiftly to two separate SUVs and headed immediately for the organization’s nearest bureau.
There, they put Lamees and Ali into two separate rooms and began interrogations. Lamees could not bear the hurtful questions put to her. They asked her in detail about her relationship with Ali. They used coarse language and they forced her to hear words that would have embarrassed her even in front of her most intimate girlfriends. After trying for hours to appear self-confident and completely convinced of the rightness of everything she had done, she collapsed in tears. She really did not believe that she had done anything that was cause for shame. In the next room, the interrogator was putting pressure on Ali, who lost his cool completely when the man asserted that Lamees had confessed to everything and that he might as well come clean.
The senior officers contacted Lamees’s father. They told him that she had been apprehended with a young man in a café and was being held at their headquarters and that he must come and get her after signing a promise that his daughter would never again engage in such an immoral act.
Her father arrived, his face so pale from the sudden call. He signed the necessary papers and then was allowed to take her. On the way home, he tried to suppress his anger and to console, as much as possible, his sobbing daughter. He vowed he would not tell her mother or sister what had happened, on one condition: she must never again meet that boy outside the hospital building. Yes, he admitted, it was true that she was allowed to go out on her own with her male cousins and the sons of his friends and her mother’s friends in Jeddah. But in Riyadh, things had to be different!
Lamees worried about Ali. At the headquarters, she had heard a policeman whispering into her father’s ear that they had found out the boy was “from the rejectionist sect.” He was a Shiite from Qatif and so his punishment would certainly be worse than hers.
That day marked the rupture of Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah as well as Ali. From then on, every time their eyes met, Fatimah repudiated her with a burning stare, as if she blamed Lamees entirely for the whole thing. Poor Ali. He had been such a sweet guy, and frankly, if Lamees had been allowed to continue seeing him, and more important if he hadn’t been Shiite, she might actually have fallen in love with him.
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: July 23, 2004
Subject: Firas: The (Near) Perfect Man!
I am so tired of getting these boring responses that try to dissect my personality after every e-mail. Is that really what matters most to you, after everything I have written? Whether I am Gamrah or Michelle or Sadeem or Lamees? Don’t you get that it doesn’t matter who I am?
I
didn’t know that shopping for the baby could be so much fun!” Sadeem said to Gamrah, her voice laced with enthusiasm. “These baby things are
so
adorable! If only you would agree to ask your doctor about the sex of the baby during your next ultrasound—then we would know what we are shopping for!”
Because Gamrah’s two older sisters, Naflah and Hessah, were so busy with their husbands and because her little sister, Shahla, was so preoccupied with her high school studies, Sadeem offered to go with her pregnant friend to buy whatever would be needed for the newborn. And occasionally, when Gamrah’s mother’s arthritis was acting up, Sadeem would take her place and accompany Gamrah to the gynecologist for the periodic checkup.
“It doesn’t matter to me if it is a boy or a girl. Let’s buy the basic stuff now and the rest can come after it’s born.”
“Don’t you have any feelings about all of this, Gammoorah? You sound so cold. If I were in your place, I couldn’t wait to know what sex it’ll be!”
“Sadeem, you just don’t understand. I’m not eager to have this baby! This little thing is going to change my whole life. And then who will be willing to marry me? Nobody wants a
full package!
So tell me—is this the way my future is supposed to be? I’m going to live out my life saddled with this kid whose father doesn’t want it and doesn’t want his mother, either? Rashid goes off to live his life free and without any ties. He can fall in love, he can get married, he can do whatever he wants, while I have to live with this aggravation and trouble the rest of my life! I don’t want this baby, Sadeem.
I don’t want it!”
They were in the car, on their way back to her house. Gamrah burst into tears of utter despair. Sadeem couldn’t find anything convincing to say that might comfort her. If only Gamrah would return to the university to study with her! But Gamrah had been insisting that she didn’t have the energy for it. Her body, which used to be so perfectly slender and sleek, was bursting at the seams from so much lying around. Of course, she suffered from boredom, imprisoned in the house as she was. Even her younger sister Shahla had more freedom than her! That’s because
she
was not
a divorced woman.
Meanwhile, Mudi, her cousin who came from the conservative city of Qasim to live with them while going to college in Riyadh, never ceased to annoy her with all her criticisms. She disapproved of Gamrah’s neatly tweezed eyebrows and the fact that she wore an over-the-shoulder
abaya
instead of the
abaya
that you drape over your head that covers your figure completely. As for her older brothers, Mohammed and Ahmad, they were completely engrossed in their friends and the adventures they had endlessly inundating girls with their phone numbers. There was no one left to entertain her but Nayif and Nawaf, who were only ten and twelve. Pitiful!
What could Sadeem possibly have said to Gamrah? How could she have comforted and distracted her? After all, there was nothing worse than a person who claimed to be filled with sympathy, to be
all there
for someone drowning in grief, when streams of happiness were so obviously glistening in her own eyes! If only she could have faked a little misery, thought Sadeem. But how could she possibly have managed that when she had Firas?
Yes, in Firas, God had answered her prayer. After she went through the breakup with Waleed, how often had she begged God to return him to her. But the fever of her prayers had cooled gradually, until finally, praying for Waleed’s return turned into praying for Firas’s presence. This Firas was no ordinary man! He was an extraordinary, marvelous and divinely made creature, and Sadeem felt she must offer her thanks to God for him night and day.
What did he lack, after all? He must be missing something. There must be some hidden defect—something, anything, to detract from his total gorgeousness. No human being could be this perfect, for perfection belongs only to God! But Sadeem was unable to figure out just what that crucial defect could be.
Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi was a diplomat and a politician, widely connected and respected. A successful man with a fertile brain and a forceful personality, he was known to be someone who leads and is not led, who rules and is not ruled. Very soon after his return from London, Firas’s reputation spread. In his capacity as a counselor in the king’s cabinet, the royal
diwan,
his face often shone out from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Sadeem regularly bought two copies of every newspaper or magazine containing an interview or a news item about him. One copy she bought for herself and the other for him, since he was too endlessly busy to follow his own coverage in the press. Moreover, from what Sadeem could pick up, his parents weren’t particularly intent on reading newspaper stories about their son. His father was a very old man who suffered terribly from various physical ailments, and his mother was a housewife who didn’t read or write very well. As for his sisters, the last thing to interest them would be politics and its great men.
In Sadeem’s eyes, such family circumstances only made Firas’s stature seem even higher. Here was the man who had risen by his own efforts, who had crafted so much from nothing! Here was an extraordinary individual who would one day ascend to the very highest positions. She made a point of reading to Firas every single word she could find that anyone had written about him. Secretly, she made a scrapbook of articles and photos of him. She had a plan: she would give him the scrapbook on their wedding day.
It was not in the least bit unreasonable for Sadeem to be thinking of marriage. Even her friends did not think she was rushing ahead of herself. It seemed the inevitable, fated outcome. His allusions were crystal clear, weren’t they? Even though he didn’t ever say “marriage” right out loud, the idea had been circling around inside his head starting from that day he circled around the Kaaba in Mecca, performing Umrah.
*
From inside the sacred enclosure at Mecca he had called her. He was accompanying a small group of VIPs. He asked her what she wanted him to pray for on her behalf. “Pray that God gives me what is in my heart,” she said. And then, a moment later, “And you know
who is in my heart.
”
A few days later, he told her that hearing this shy confession of hers had submerged his heart in an ocean of pure delight, a feeling he’d never experienced before. Her boldness led him to grow bolder in his own thoughts. From that day on, he began to float along in private fantasy, always moving closer to an attachment to her. A composed and steady man who considered every step a thousand times before taking it, he was unaccustomed to the emotion of being swept away. He began to show his solicitude, his desire to know every little thing happening in her life. He vowed to her that she was the only woman who had been able to slip into his life, manipulate his precise daily schedule and prod him (with barely any effort on her part) to stay up late, neglect his work and postpone his appointments, all for the sake of spending more time with her on the phone!
What was a little odd about Firas was his utter devotion to religion in spite of having spent more than a decade abroad. He showed no signs of Western influence. He didn’t seem at all ill-disposed toward the way things were in the kingdom, unlike many others who spent a few years abroad and came home to despise everything they saw, no matter how fervent they had once been in their praise of their country’s customs and practices. Firas’s attempts to steer Sadeem this way or that on the path of righteousness didn’t annoy her. To the contrary! She found herself strongly inclined to accept all his ideas of making her a better Muslim and primed to embrace them, especially since he didn’t make a big deal of anything. That really pleased her. It was simply a matter of delaying a good-night phone conversation because the time for the dawn prayer had come, or maybe an innocent little hint about wearing the
hijab
and
abaya,
like the one he had come up with when they were sitting on the airplane, or an earnest observation about how annoying the young men who followed girls with uncovered faces in the malls must be, suggesting that the face cover protects a girl sometimes from such encounters. That was his way, and gradually Sadeem found herself trying to move closer toward religious perfection so that she would be worthy of Firas, who was so much closer to that perfection than she was.
Firas never made her feel that she needed to work hard to keep him.
He
was the one always making the effort to remain in touch with her and be near her. He never traveled without telling her where he was going and when he would be back, and he always gave her addresses and telephone numbers to contact him. He begged her pardon for calling her so much to see that she was all right. For them, as for so many other lovers in the country, the telephone was the only outlet, practically, for them to express the love that brought them together. The telephone lines in Saudi Arabia are surely thicker and more abundant than elsewhere, since they must bear the heavy weight of all the whispered croonings lovers have to exchange and all their sighs and moans and kisses that they
cannot,
in the real world, enact—or that they do not
want to
enact due to the restrictions of custom and religion, that some of them truly respect and value.
Only one thing disturbed Sadeem’s serenity, and that was the relationship she’d formerly had with Waleed.
When they first got to know each other, Firas had asked her about her past and she had immediately poured out everything about Waleed, the only false step she had ever made, the injury whose wounds she hid from everyone. Her explanation seemed to satisfy him; he seemed very understanding and sympathetic. What bewildered her was his request that she never again talk to him about it. Did talking about her past upset him that much? She wished he could turn the pages in her heart with his own hands so he could see for himself that they were blank except when it came to him. She wished she was allowed to share absolutely everything inside of her, including her history with Waleed, but he was as determined and firm in this decision as in any other. That was the way he was.
“So, what about you, Firas? Do
you
have a past?”
She didn’t ask in order to uncover a wound in his heart that might match hers and put him on the same footing. Her love for Firas was too strong to be affected by a past, or a present, or a future—and anyway, she knew that of the two of them, she would always be the one furthest from perfection! Her question was merely a simple and perhaps naïve attempt to see if she could find some little scratch on Firas’s knee that would prove he was as human as she was.
“Don’t ask me this question again if you really care about me.”
Just drop it!
she told herself.
Who cares about his past? He is mine now. And to hell with curiosity!