Where Pigeons Don't Fly (31 page)

And with that the offer of his sister Amal was broached. He affirmed his brotherly love for Abdel Kareem and his faith that with him, Amal would be in the hands of one who feared God and sought His reward.

It wasn't Amal that Abdel Kareem sought, however, but Tarfah. He wished to deliver her from Satan's wiles into the kingdom of God and His justice, to bring her back, after two whole years spent astray, to the right guidance of the Creator and His servants who feared Him, His punishment and His vengeance. He would be rewarded twice over: once for his own sake, for completing his religious duty through marriage, and once again for offering protection to a weak woman ensnared by the devil Art.

So he took her and the three months she lived with him were some of the loveliest of her life.

Calm and self-possessed, he never hit or betrayed her. It was only that he sometimes felt he was betraying his religion and neglecting his work: his evangelism and his
jihad
. On warm evenings he would tell her that he appreciated and
respected her but feared that growing used to idleness and comfort would divert his attention from spreading the word, the summer activities and retreats, not to mention his longstanding ambition to commit to
jihad
and not just with financial contributions.

Three times he took her to Jaffal Centre on King Fahd Road and once she persuaded him to go to Faisaliya Tower, but emerging at the end of a tense half hour spent wandering about he informed her it was her duty to remove herself from temptation and that he, too, must shield his sight from those ornamented women.

During the first two weeks he ploughed Tarfah twice daily and showered her with such great passion that she fell in love with him and gradually began to change, dressing as he wanted, placing her
abaya
over her head instead of her shoulders so that her breasts were no longer visible to the naked eye, and replacing her
niqab
with a full face covering lest her beautiful eyes be an enticement to the weak hearted. After two months of this affectionate relationship, without him asking anything of her or making a single suggestion, she bought black gloves and thrust her hands into them whenever she left the house.

Following afternoon prayers Abdel Kareem would stay behind at Sudairi Mosque on Sudar Street in Shubra to study with some of the Brothers, observe the sunset prayers and attend a lesson or lecture at the mosque. Then he would return to his flat, in the same street as the mosque, bringing
tames
bread and either stewed beans or bean paste. These he would eat with his wife after she had brought him stewed tea, two sprigs of mint, a wedge of onion and a couple of slices of lemon. He would fondle her as they ate, then he would take her to bed.

Returning one evening as usual he came across a copy of
Riyadh
in the little living room. He glanced at it and asked, ‘Who was here?'

‘My brother Ayman.'

‘I don't like that guy. Anyway, you know I don't like newspapers and magazines in my house.'

Tarfah asked his forgiveness and kissed his head. He smiled and stroked her cheeks and round face.

Everything about him was wonderful: his delicacy and playfulness, even his anger was serene and self-possessed.

His lovemaking was neither too short nor too long, a delightful balance, yet he wouldn't take her from behind. She had once shifted around during their drawn-out preliminaries, but he had backed off and returned to his familiar missionary position. Tarfah had got in the habit of doing it with her previous husband and learned to relish its pain, knowledge she would pass on to her lover, Fahd, when she slept with him.

One afternoon, talking to Nada on the phone, she said that she had found the perfect man. True, he was an extremist and very conservative, but he loved her and worried about her. Nada laughed and said, ‘You idiot, he's an insecure paranoiac!'

In Nada's eyes, men might act in various ways, but they were all paranoid. Tarfah would not accept this.

‘Abdel Kareem's not like that!'

That's what she thought: that she would live with him forever.

 

–44 –

T
HE MODEST HOUSE WAS
melting into the darkness as Lulua buzzed about on her own like a bee, lighting the oven in the kitchen, putting a kettle of water on to boil and listening out for the sound of bubbling. All of a sudden a fly began circling about. Lulua had no idea why she became so terrified whenever she saw flies and ants swarming together as if about to feast on a corpse.

Two days earlier she had made a dash for the can of insecticide and sprayed it at a column of ants marching beneath the skirting board of the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, telling herself that they were trying to devour her mother, whose body had become as lifeless and limp as an autumn leaf. And here she was now, hunting through the kitchen drawers for the plastic swatter and pursuing the fly like girls in fairytales who chase butterflies through the forest, slapping at it as it perched on the upper door of the fridge. The fly exploded, sticky blood and splayed wings, and Soha's voice piped up, asking about the noise.

‘A fly, Mum,' Lulua replied. ‘I was only killing a fly.'

Trying to remove it from the white of the fridge door she felt nausea flip her guts, the opposite of the great satisfaction her father had felt in prison as he executed his cockroaches en masse.

Fahd was taken aback to discover that Lulua had swapped her ring tone for a prayer.

‘God, I am Your servant,' said the humble voice, ‘born of Your servants, man and woman. We are guided by Your hand, Your judgement carried out, Your verdict just: we beseech You in all the names that You possess.'

Lulua was silent for a moment then said, ‘This is my business. Prayer is a comfort and brings one closer to God. Mother needs prayer, Fahd, not Fairouz and Khaled Abdel Rahman.'

Her impersonation of their uncle irritated him. ‘He's made fools of you and ruined you. He's wrecked every loving and affectionate relationship that my father ever made.'

She sighed. ‘For your information, my relationship with my mother is better than it's ever been. Prayer and being close to God increases people's love for one another, but you're stubborn. You've got a head like a rock because you hate my uncle.'

Lulua opened the lower half of the fridge and took a sealed plastic container from inside the door. She had undone it and smelled the mint's green leaves, then plucked off a chilled sprig, washed it in lukewarm water and slowly lowered the leaves into the teapot, before swaying over to the dining room where the forty-year-old body lying on the bed had shifted upright. The woman smiled at her daughter.

‘Fahd hasn't called?'

‘He called yesterday. He asked after you; he says hello.'

‘Do you know if he was able to open the bag?'

‘I didn't ask him. I forgot.'

‘Fine, so you've no idea what's inside?'

‘Treasure maybe? Gold?' Lulua laughed.

 

–45 –

F
AHD DROVE THE CAR
down University Road, inspecting the shops on either side. Tarfah said she didn't like tunnels; despite the dim red lighting she sensed that she would die in one.

He laughed. ‘Don't tell me you're not Tarfah any more. You've turned into Diana without my knowing it!'

Her laughter died away as she moved her head to his right shoulder and whispered flirtatiously, ‘I love you, Dodi!'

He had bought her a mocha from Dr Keif and a Turkish coffee for himself. He didn't like Turkish coffee in paper cups, he said, because Turkish coffee was all about creating the right mood, and that meant somewhere to sit, a porcelain cup and his mother's wonderful laugh as she whispered in his father's ear at sunset in their home on the top floor in Ulaya. The coffee's aroma would steal out of the living room and enter his room, fashioning a warm and intimate atmosphere from his parents' love. Two cosy lovebirds, until King Death, idly circling over Qaseem Road and searching for a victim, had swooped down on two drivers, one sleepy, one fiddling with his mobile phone, and his father had crashed, his soul flying up into the distant skies.

In the last tunnel westbound tunnel before King Saud University she told him to take Takhassusi Road. She examined the shops on the side of the road and told him that this
road had a history: her cousin Umm Samia had lived there. Running south to where it hit Mecca Road at the Aziziya branch of Panda, the street began with construction supply stores and travel agencies and ended with interior décor shops and the offices of the Bin Baz Marriage Project, before running on into undeveloped plots, the very plots where the Committee once ran into her friend Nada.

‘Just imagine, the stupid girl goes for a morning drive down Thamama Road with her boyfriend and on the way back they decide to go into the new developments and suddenly the Committee's vehicle is right behind them.'

As she said this Tarfah little realised that a few months later, on a street near Takhassusi Road, she too would fall into the hands of the men from the Committee and would weep and plead to no avail.

They passed a luxurious décor store and she said the owner's son had proposed to her through her brothers before she married Abdel Kareem, her brother Ahmed's friend.

No one in the family said anything when Ahmed insisted on Abdel Kareem. Tarfah had become a guinea pig in her brothers' experiments and she loathed them all with the exception of Ayman. He was sweet and calm; nobody felt his presence in the house and nobody called him by his name.

‘Come here, goat!' they'd say. ‘Go there, goat!'

Anyone sitting with them for the first time would assume they were mocking how tractable he was with his mother and sisters; any one of them could set him trotting ahead of her like a goat.

Their older brother Abdullah's fabricated story was another matter. He claimed that when their mother, Qumasha, gave birth to Ayman her breasts had dried up and his desperation
for milk had prompted her to hire a black woman as a wet nurse. Unable to continue paying the woman, Abdullah would say, Qumasha had finally let her go after her older brother came up with an ingenious solution: he took the two-year-old and gave him a she-goat's teat, from which he drank until he became so inoffensive and pliable that on first acquaintance anyone would think he was mentally ill.

But Qumasha, who smiled whenever Abdullah told this tale of his, said that when Ayman's uncle found out that he was the only one of the children to be raised on powdered milk, he started calling him ‘son of a cow'. This became ‘son of a sheep' and the children took up this nickname and toyed with it like a lump of clay until it turned into ‘son of a goat'. His siblings almost forgot his real name, and he became ‘son of a goat', until his mother became exceedingly cross at the indignity of being described as ‘the goat' and his name changed again, becoming simply ‘goat'.

Ayman had left her by the Paris Gallery entrance of Granada Mall and she went in, giving the impression that she was late as usual for her two friends, Nada and Fatoum. But instead she snuck out of the mall: going into a couple of shops then leaving via the main entrance where her lover waited for her. She took great care that no one recognised her. Though enveloped in her black
abaya
and veil, there were those who might guess it was her from the way she wore her robe, from her slow, funereal steps, from the exaggerated confidence with which she looked about her and from the plump white hand which Fahd was addicted to kissing.

Fahd switched on the car's secondary lights as she walked out, happy that there was no security guard at the entrance,
not that he would have noticed that she had arrived in a black Camry and driven off in a blue Hyundai Accent. Given her fear of the average security guard's keen powers of observation she was careful to go in by one entrance and leave by another; when she entered by the Paris Gallery she would go out by Carrefour, Extra, the main entrance, or the rear door that led to the neighbourhood of Granada.

‘I worry that my aunt and her daughter might drop by the house, decide to join me at the mall and call me on my mobile to find out where I am,' she had said, but the only call she got was from Ayman, which she answered immediately, convincing him that she would be late and would give him a ring as soon as she'd finished walking with her friends.

Fahd was parked outside the mall's main entrance and he started the engine as she approached. She walked slowly over, her handbag in one hand and a pink carrier bag in the other. Climbing in she said that she didn't want to do anything with him, they would just talk, but his hand mounted hers and she took it, bringing it beneath her black veil and slowly kissing it. In no time she was sucking his fingers one by one.

Fahd slowed outside the entrance to some furnished flats and saw a fat, young, bareheaded Saudi sitting on a chair in reception. He didn't stop. Saudis scared him because they were more curious than Sudanese or Indian receptionists. He might co-operate with the Committee or inform for pay and turn them in.

They entered the bedroom of another furnished flat like a pair of thieves. She started to kiss him as usual and, intoxicated, he surrendered. She took a red rose from the pink carrier bag. It had no cellophane wrapping, as though it had been freshly plucked from a garden. She said that she had taken it from a
flower shop inside the mall. He handed her a small, container and a carton slightly larger than a matchbox. Smiling shyly she opened the container and looked at the strip within: three bubbles sealed with tinfoil. He told her to rip one open and smell it. She broke the seal, sniffed and said, ‘Oh! Wonderful!'

It was the smell of fresh strawberries.

She took hold of him by his head and as though it might be their last time together, moved over every inch of him until every pore in his body came alive and his mouth sprang forward searching for the rain cloud. Her rain cloud. She rained torrents, he would tell her, and her soul laughed lightly as she mischievously asked, ‘Even in summer?'