2008 - The Consequences of Love. (18 page)

I knew he was waiting for the right moment to trash me.

On Saturday afternoon, I was in a tailor’s with the imam; he had just gone into the back room to have his measurements taken. Yahya stormed into the shop. He dragged me aside, ignoring the sales assistant, and threw me down on top of a pile of fabric. He brought his face right up to mine and threatened me, “If you don’t leave the imam soon, I will break every bone in you. I don’t want to lose any more friends to that imam. You hear me?”

He shoved me in the chest and left the shop, waving his huge arms at people and shouting, “What are you looking at? If you want some of this, tell me.”

The next day,Yahya and Hani came to my flat late at night. They tried to talk me out of being a
mutaunva
. But I stood firm to Yahya’s threats saying that I had chosen the right path and there was no going back. “You can do whatever you want,” I said to him.

Suddenly Yahya jumped at me and started to punch me in the chest on the doorway of my flat. I just received his fists without fighting back.

I had never seen his eyes filled with so much hurt and anger. The more he hit me, the more I realised that he was doing so because he thought he was losing another friend to the imam like he had lost Faisal and Zib Al-Ard. I felt his grief more than the power of his fist. I was sorry not to be able to share with him and Hani why I was leading the imam, sorry I couldn’t explain to them my happiness at finding Fiore. I wanted to stop Yahya’s beating and tell him the truth. “Look,” I wanted to say to him, “I am not going anywhere. I am not going to die in Afghanistan. I am alive. In fact, I have never felt more alive than now. Because I am in love with a woman.” But I didn’t say anything. I received his thrashing in silence. I couldn’t tell him about Fiore. I was living a dream and I knew that had I told Yahya and Hani, it would have been too much for them to hold the secret of a love story between a boy and a girl in Al-Nuzla.

I lay on the floor holding my stomach. Yahya leaned over me. I thought he was going to deliver the punch in my face that would have avenged him for my betrayal. But instead he said, “Our friendship is over. Don’t you dare to call me or talk to me if you see me on the street, you hear me?”

He slammed his clenched fist into my stomach.

“Enough,” Hani yelled at Yahya. “He chose the imam over us. He can go to hell. Let’s go.”

D
AYS PASSED AND I continued to communicate with Fiore via the love-letter courier. Even though being associated with him cost me the last two friends I had left in Jeddah, he was invaluable to me. Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to write to my Fiore and read her beautiful, sensual writings. I was having the best time of my life. I was deeply in love.

Friday afternoon the college was closed and so there was no letter from Fiore. After the Friday prayer, I led the imam to his house and he asked me to stay for lunch. “An important guest is coming to visit me,” he said, “and I want you to be here.”

I had to agree even though all I wanted was to be alone in my room with Fiore’s letters. By the time we arrived from the mosque, the imam’s house already smelt of
kabsa
rice.

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was Basil with a man I had never seen before.

Basil shook my hand enthusiastically, exclaiming, “How are you, Naser?”

I was wondering why he was so happy and what he was up to when he let go of me and introduced me to the man standing next to him. “This is Sheikh Khaleel Ibn Talal,” he said, “he is a chief in the religious police department of Jeddah, may
Allah
bless him.”

I felt cold sweat creeping up my back.

The police chief looked at me without flinching. I stretched out my hand and he slowly raised his. We shook hands and as I kissed his forehead to show my respect, I said with a quiet voice, “It is my pleasure to meet you.”

He was bearded, light-skinned, tall and slim and walked with a slight stoop. He was around the same age as the imam. He was wearing a red and white chequered
gutra
and his
thobe
fell slightly above his ankles.

Inside the living room, we sat in a semicircle. The chief religious policeman sat between the imam and Basil. I sat to the left of the imam, almost directly facing Basil.

I tried to understand what was going on. Although I knew the imam was on very good terms with Jeddah’s religious police department, a visit at the imam’s home like this was highly unusual. Did this have anything to do with me?

Every time I looked up, Basil would peel his eyes away from the imam and the chief religious policeman to stare at me with a grin on his face.

Suddenly there was a loud clap. It was the imam’s wife. Lunch was ready.

The imam didn’t like a woman’s voice to be heard in public, and he would often preach that it was
haram
for a woman to speak in the presence of a man who is not her
mahram
. So when the food was ready, the imam’s wife stood behind the closed door leading to the rest of the house, and clapped her hands instead.

“Naser, please get the food,” the imam ordered.

Before opening the door that led from the living room to the corridor and from there to the women’s section, I clapped my hands and announced, “I am here to take the food.” I heard her quick steps hurrying away, so I knew the corridor was empty. I opened the door and picked up the big plate full of fried meat spread over a bed of rice cooked with raisins, cloves and cardamom. There were also four glasses of fresh mango juice.

Back in the living room, I put the tray on top of the cloth on the floor, around which we sat to eat.

We all said, ‘
Bismillah
’, and dug in our hands almost simultaneously.

For a while we were all quietly eating, using our fingers to form balls of rice mixed with meat and throwing them into our mouths.

I wondered whether Basil had finally found out the truth about me and he was now ready to turn me in to the religious police. I ate fast to press away my worries about him and almost choked on a piece of meat inside the rice ball I had made. I coughed loudly to clear my throat. I reached for my glass of mango juice and emptied it in three large gulps.

“Is that you, Naser?” the imam asked.

I gasped for air. “Yes,” I replied.

“Eat slowly,” the imam ordered me. “Don’t you know that eating slowly is a sign of being a good Muslim? Don’t you know that
Allah
entrusted us with our bodies?”

“Yes, my blessed imam,” I said, looking at his big belly which inflated with every massive rice ball he shoved into his mouth. “May
Allah
bless you for your advice.”

We continued to eat in silence.

After a while, the senior religious policeman spoke, “We want to thank you, ya imam, for recommending Basil to be part of our team in Al-Nuzla.”

I put down the ball of rice I had just pressed together and stopped eating. Since I knew Basil, he hadn’t stopped talking about his dreams of becoming one of the leading imams in Saudi Arabia. Becoming a religious policeman had never been part of his big plan to reach heaven.

“In fact,” said the imam, “I wanted him to stay working at the mosque with me and help me guide young boys to the right path. But he volunteered himself, may
Allah
bless him.”

This must be it, I thought. Basil must have found out something. I wanted to look at him to see if he was still grinning at me. But I bowed my head and continued listening.

The senior religious policeman added, “Basil,
ya
imam, will have a very hard but an important and blessed task. Al-Nuzla Street is becoming infested with moral corruption. In fact just last week,
ya
imam, a case was brought to my attention. A woman and a boy were caught, may
Allah
forgive me for saying this in front of you my blessed brothers, committing the ultimate sin. She is married and when confronted with the evidence in court of her adultery, instead of repenting, she said, “Because my husband never gives me love, I have to find it elsewhere.” And this married woman will be stoned to death,
insha Allah
. But can you believe it,
ya
imam, that when we told the boy that since he was single he will only be lashed, he begged us to stone him as well. A stupid man. A colleague of mine rebuked him saying, “If you want to be a martyr why don’t you go to Afghanistan and fight the infidels instead of trying to sacrifice yourself for a cursed woman.” But we will treble his lashings until he forgets her and the fear of
Allah
is sown in his black heart.”

“Curse on them,” said Basil loudly.

I looked up. The imam started to praise Basil. I remembered the park. I wanted to tell them that Basil was a street boy and I wanted to confront him and let the others know what had happened. But now that he was a religious policeman an accusation of this kind against a man entrusted with bringing morality to the streets wouldn’t work. I glanced in his direction. He was smiling broadly as he fixed his
gutra
.

What do I do now? I asked myself. How can I put a normal face over my fear and hold back my sweat? How I wished then I could sprint to Fiore to share with her the danger I felt was closing in on us. But the next thing I heard was Basil’s voice. “Naser? Aren’t you going to congratulate me and ask
Allah
to bless my work?”

He lowered his head waiting for the kiss of congratulation. I stood up with great difficulty. Holding his face with my hands, I kissed his forehead. “May
Allah
bless your work and make you successful in catching decadent people in our streets,” I said in a weak voice.

His Amen and theirs reverberated across the room.

A
S I WALKED home from the imam’s house that Friday, I felt like the most wanted man in Saudi Arabia, a man who has the bounty of a place in heaven for anyone who catches him red-handed expressing love. It felt as if the imam knew everything about my activities and that he was playing a fool but sooner or later he was going to catch me and watch me get punished.

As I walked, I looked over my shoulder, trying to see if Basil was following me, if there was a religious policeman behind a tree, or another suddenly springing up from the corner. Even the white buildings, lined up like soldiers, felt as if they were in disguise, fitted with silent cameras rolling as I passed alongside them capturing my every move and hearing if my heart was beating to show them that I was in love.

Suddenly, I hated life. All I want is to be with this woman, I thought, as I quickened my pace to my flat still looking behind me to see if Basil was following me.

Without realising, I was talking to myself like a madman, sharing with the street everything that was going on inside me. I sped along. The angry thoughts hurried with me. The world turned dark, colourless and full of men and women walking side by side without looking at each other, without touching each other, without whispering, and without even breathing. It was a gloomy world where everyone feared something, a world where laughter was a sin, where kissing a woman was like a theft, where looking at a woman’s face and admiring her was the equivalent to a serious crime that deserved punishment in hell.

I wanted to leave Al-Nuzla and the pain that had been building up all those years behind me. I remembered how much I missed my mother and how my brother and uncle left without even saying goodbye; I remembered what my
kafeel
had done to me and what had happened in the back room of Jasim’s café. I couldn’t go home. It was too lonely. I took the bus all the way to the Corniche.

When I got there, I saw the Saudi singer holding his ‘
oud
, but he wasn’t singing. I walked behind him and down to my secret rock. His head was bowed, as if he had finally been broken and the weight of the memory of his lover had become unbearable, as if the sermons in the millions of mosques of Jeddah had finally convinced him that he would be condemned on both earth and in the afterlife, that men like him who wasted their time on the memory of a woman were destined for nothing better than a place in hell where the worst of criminals belong. That there was no heaven for lovers, as he used to sing, and that he and his lover would never ever meet again.

T
HAT SAME NIGHT, back late from the Corniche, I sat on my bed and kept thinking about Basil. Why did he want to become a religious policeman all of a sudden? I had no answer. After Basil had left with the chief religious policeman I asked the iman about Basil’s decision to join the religious police, but all he said was that Basil was a blessed man and that he must have thought he could do more to help restore morality and obedience to our streets.

I tried to be convinced by the imam’s explanation. I thought back to what Al-Yamani had told me and Yahya about Basil’s hunger to earn more rewards in order to counter his sins accumulated over years of living as a street boy doing anything and everything imaginable. But the truth was that this explanation didn’t entirely persuade me. “If he is only after awards why doesn’t he follow his own preaching, go to Afghanistan and seek martyrdom?”

I thought back to my time in the mosque, and went over every minute I had spent there, wondering if I had left a clue for Basil somewhere or made any slip that would have given him reason to suspect my motive for vying for the imam’s hand. But I couldn’t be sure that I had in no way aroused his suspicion.

Nothing was clear to me.

Suddenly a strange thought came into my head. What if Fiore had told him about us?

My head started aching badly. Maybe she was playing a game? Maybe she was a fully paid member of the religious police and was out to get lapsed men who were prone to fall for women’s advances? How was I supposed to know?

Although I couldn’t dismiss that possibility, inside me I was convinced Fiore had nothing to do with this, and like me, she was a victim of the pursuit of love in Jeddah. Without reason perhaps, but I had so much faith in her.

I did wonder though what would happen if Basil caught us corresponding through the imam.