2008 - The Consequences of Love. (16 page)

I buzzed at the heavy iron gate and announced over the intercom: “My name is Naser, I am here to bring the imam home.”

I waited by the gate and it opened a few minutes later. Fiore. I knew she was the girl chosen to bring the imam to the gate. I stood still, hoping to hear her voice, hoping that she would wish the imam goodbye or warn him to be careful, or pray a short prayer. But the only sound I heard was the imam as he struggled to pass through the small exit door. He handed me his stick first and then his black bag. I hooked his arm through mine and tucked the black bag under my other arm, close to my chest.

On the way back to his house, all he did was talk. I listened without really hearing anything. My mind was elsewhere: did she find my note? Would she have read it by now already, and did she have the chance to write back? I brought the bag close to my face, as if somehow I would find out by inhaling the smell of the old leather.

As I helped the imam through the door of his house, he asked me to put his bag in the living room. “You order me,
ya
sheikh and I will do it,” I replied.

Once in the living room, I opened the bag and took out the books. There, in between his booklets, a white envelope was hidden. I almost ripped the cover
off
a booklet as I snatched the envelope from its hiding place. I dropped it into my pocket and was about to run when I remembered to replace the imam’s pamphlets and close the bag.

With the envelope safely tucked in my pocket I called out to the imam, who was safely in his study: “I will see you later,
insha Allah
.”

“May
Allah
bless you, son. Walk slowly and make sure you pray with every step you take,” he demanded.

“I will,
insha Allah
.”

As soon as I had closed the door, I sprinted back home.

I got home in no time, ripped off my
thobe
and sat bare chested on my bed. Two whole pages from Fiore. When I read the first paragraph, I looked up at the ceiling. My hand moved across my open mouth in disbelief.

Like me she had Eritrean blood; she was the daughter of a second-generation Eritrean man, the man I had seen her with that morning. How strange, I thought, that I never guessed he was Eritrean. But now, thinking back, I realised it was entirely possible, as Eritreans had mixed for centuries with the people from the other side of the Red Sea.

Her father called himself Saudi even though the government never recognised him and never granted him Saudi citizenship. Even so, he was relatively well off because of his job as a personal assistant to a wealthy Saudi businessman of Southern Yemeni descent, who owned many properties and large shops in Jeddah. Her mother was the daughter of an Egyptian man. But unlike her father’s family, her mother’s side had been granted Saudi citizenship.

I quickly glanced over the rest of the letter and flipped the pages back and forth in my hands.

Fiore said it would be too dangerous to tell me her real name in writing in case any of the notes got lost, but she loved my new name for her—she wanted me to call her that. Fiore. She was nineteen, she said, and the number was underlined in pencil. Then she went on to tell me the story of how her mother and father met and were married.

The marriage happened after my father and my mother’s father met in a café. They started talking and seemed to like each other from the very first word they spoke to each other
.

Just days after they first met, the two men had many deep conversations. It would start off with talking about the weather, but soon they realised that they actually had a lot in common: they thought alike and finished each other’s sentences
.

So one day they both agreed that it was about time that they cemented their relationship. “Have you got a daughter?” my father asked the Egyptian Saudi. “Yes,” the older man replied. “So,” my father said, “I would like to ask for her hand and make her my wife
.”

“
I would be honoured,” replied my mother’s father
.

On the hottest day Jeddah had seen for a decade, the two men stood in front of a sheikh. The sheikh told my mother’s father, “I pronounce this man the husband of your daughter. For a long and happy marriage, insha Allah
.”

But that decision didn’t go down well in my mother’s father’s family. “Make him divorce her,” the elder of the family ordered my mother’s father
.

“
Never,” he replied. “Give me one good reason
.”

The elder stood up and said, “Well, I am in a generous mood today, so I will give you two reasons: he is not an Arab, and he is black
.”

“
But there is no difference between an Arab man and a non-Arab,” came the reply
.

“
That was in the old times. Now there is. If you don’t divorce your daughter from this Eritrean man, you will be kicked out of our family
.”

My mother’s father shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t care
.

My father was also disowned by his Eritrean family for not taking an Eritrean wife
.

I was born a year after my mother and father were married
.

I am sad that I don’t have a family from either side of my parents, but at least I have a strong relationship with my mother. She is my best friend and means so much to me
.

She then wrote about what happened after her parents’ marriage. Apparently, she was the only child because her father couldn’t visit her mother’s bed at night any more. When her mother asked him why, her husband thundered, “Because of this,” waving a doctor’s certificate declaring that he had ‘an acute medical condition’.

But, according to Fiore, her mother believed that her husband’s inability to pull his fat legs over to her bed had nothing to do with any medical condition, but everything to do with his lifestyle: too much fatty food, smoking
shisha
, and spending all his time with his wealthy friends in cafes around Jeddah drinking one sweetened coffee after another.

The next morning, in the imam’s living room, I hid my reply to Fiore between the pamphlets in his bag. We walked out of the house and turned right into Market Street. Today he didn’t talk much, which was good as my mind was with the letter in the bag, wondering how she would react to it.

Fiore
,

Beginnings are always the hardest. And it is easy for my mind to succumb to the impossibility of composing even one sentence for you. But I am resting the stricken poet inside me and obey your order, my Fiore, to introduce myself without a moment of delay
.

My name is Naser, but you know this already. I am from Eritrea and I don’t know my father’s name. But in my United Nations Travel Document, my full name is Naser Suraj. Suraj was the name my uncle chose when he came to take me and my brother tojeddah from the refugee camp in Sudan
.

When we first arrived at the camp, I was told to find the man with the red cross on his shirt, to register our names in the camp list as new arrivals. It was only two days earlier that I said goodbye to my mother in Eritrea. My little brother Ibrahim, who was three years old at the time, was strapped to my back
.

Inside a tent, I stood in front of the man who would register us. He greeted me smiling. I told him my first name and when he asked for my father’s name, I replied, “Raheema.” He peered at me through his glasses and asked if Raheema was a woman’s name. “Yes, but it is my father’s name too because she is also my father
.”

He laid down his pen and held my hand, urging me not to be scared because there would be no bombs dropped on the camp. And he tried again to make me tell him my father’s name. “Raheema. There is no father in my life. There is only our mother and like I said, she is our father, mother, and our best friend.” But he insisted that he could only put a man’s name down, and that my mother couldn’t have had me without a man. I said I had only seen that particular man once and it was when he came to visit my mother one night. That man was my father, I told the officer at the refugee camp, but I only knew him as ‘The Perfume Man
’.

When my uncle arrived he insisted I take his own father’s name, Suraj. Even though my mother’s name was not on the forms, I was pleased because Suraj was her family name too
.

After a quiet pause, habibati, I return to the present to wish you all the great things that love can bring. Your Naser

I
KNEW IT would happen some time, but I was surprised it had taken so long. The next morning, I was on my way home after I had delivered the imam to the college, and I bumped into Gamal.

“Naser? Is that you?” he asked.

“Yes, Gamal, it is me,” I replied, confidently. He was one of the men who frequented Jasim’s café and he owned a restaurant just off Market Street.

He was wearing a white apron, marked with spots of red and yellow spice. His most famous dish was tripe and liver with ginger, lime, plenty of turmeric, chilli powder, and fresh garlic.

“You should say,
Assalamu alaikum
” I said, taking in the fresh scent coming from his hands and apron. He was holding four fresh red chillies, and a lime.

He came closer and took another good look at me.

“Your
thobe
,” he said, “it is short. You are a
mutawwa
. I can’t believe what I am seeing. What happened?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Go,” he said, cutting the conversation short. “Don’t let me see your face again.”

Later that afternoon, I collected Fiore’s letter out of the bag of the love-letter courier. But I couldn’t go home to read it, because after I led the imam to his house, he wanted me to stay longer to take him to the mosque later. “I have an important speech to deliver,” he said.

I knew what was disturbing him. The previous day, he had a visit from a sheikh working in Jeddah’s largest court. The official had told the imam: “Women,
ya
blessed imam, are becoming disobedient. They are finding ways to entice our boys into their web of evil. I am worried about our young men. A few days ago, may
Allah
forgive me for saying this in front of you my blessed brothers, a woman from Al-Nuzla unveiled her face in the middle of the street, a face full of powder and paint, to Hamid and winked at him. But
Allah
was with us, because this cursed creature didn’t know that Hamid is one of our religious policemen. Even though it is
sunnah
to have a long beard, his won’t grow, but it is a blessing from
Allah
. Please,
ya
imam, remind our youngsters how to avoid the enticement of women, tell them that a loose woman is the path to hell.”

“Now, stay with me but keep quiet as I prepare for the sermon,” the imam ordered, sitting on the floor mats.

I looked at him. He was deep in his contemplation. I knew he was soon to make a lecture warning boys to be careful of immoral women. But it was too late for this boy. If only he knew that a proud lover was sitting next to him in his very living room. The thought made me smile.

As I guided the imam to the mosque from his house, he was panting. It was as if I was delivering a raging bull to a ring. I looked up at Fiore’s building. I still didn’t know which floor she lived on, but I hoped she lived as high as possible from the ground floor, because the imam’s speech was going to burst through all the houses. I remembered what Jasim once told me about this imam’s speeches, “You can hide from rain by running under a tree, and if there is a storm you can barricade yourself inside the house and you will be safe, but this imam’s voice is so powerful that not even those inside their houses are safe from his lectures.”

I sat in the front row. I looked to my right and caught Basil staring at me. He clenched his jaw and looked away.

The imam started his speech: “Oh
ya
Muslim brothers. My heart weeps today. My soul is hurt, my ears are ringing with unbelievable pain. How, I ask myself, did the Prophet’s
umma
reach such destitution of soul and mind; how, I ask myself, can people whom
Allah
led to the right path, descend to this unforgivable level of sinning? You are asleep and your daughters and wives are walking around the streets unveiling their faces seeking out your boys, seeking to spread their ills on our future generation, seeking to entice our men into despicable evil. Where are you, oh men of Islam, who once ruled with iron fist from east to west? Where are you, oh men of Islam, who used to be the eyes, ears, heart and soul of your households?”

As I was listening to the imam’s lecture, I felt Basil’s eyes many times on me. Whenever I turned my head to face him, he smiled at me mockingly, shaking his head at the same time.

O
N TUESDAY AFTERNOON I received Fiore’s reaction to the imam’s speech of the previous day. I had managed to sneak a look at her letter in the imam’s house lavatory, but only could read it properly once I reached home in the evening.

I started to read, knowing that only a hundred metres away from my house, Fiore was in her room, probably doing her homework. How I wished I could order a magical messenger to infiltrate her building, creep up the staircase, tiptoe through the men’s section, slide under the door to the women’s section and into her room, slowly crawl up to her desk and take her voice and run with it as fast as it could, faster than all the men in this city, and bring it to me.

Habibi
,

I heard the imam’s speech yesterday. It’s funny he says that the problems in our society stem from women having too much freedom. If I had any freedom, I would come right now to your room and tell you these words in person instead of this rigmarole of writing at night and having to wait a day before they get to you
.

Did the imam forget that Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, the trader and businesswoman, was Muhammad’s employer before he became a Prophet? Didn’t she take him under her wing when he was only twenty-two years old and teach him the skills of the business trade? How can he say that the reason women can’t work is because they are inept? Doesn’t he remember that Khadijah was one of the most successful business people in those old days, days in which her tribe buried babies alive if they weren’t boys? Wasn’t she successful in a time when the ruthless bandits filled the path of the trade route from Mecca to Syria, when the traders had to go through swathes of deserts, and when the unforgiving terrain was difficult to negotiate even for the toughest of men? How can he forget that Prophet Muhammad himself always talked about Khadijah’s financial support? As well as being the first convert, she had the wealth that was used to finance the Islamic expansion in those days. Her money helped Prophet Muhammad to free slaves, assist his male companions when they went bankrupt, and it was her wealth that the Prophet used to help with his followers’ migration from Mecca to Medina. How can he have forgotten all of this?