2008 - The Consequences of Love. (9 page)

Instead I curled my wet body around the bed sheets and slept, holding her note.

I woke up around 8 a.m. When I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, I expected worse after such a restless night, but instead my features were sparkling, and there was no sleep in my eyes.

She had been looking at me for over a year and I hadn’t been aware of it. If I had known, I would have made sure I looked my best every time I stepped outside, just in case she and I crossed paths.

I wondered what she liked about me. Was it my almond-shaped eyes, or high cheekbones? I knew I was well built because I had received so many compliments in Jasim’s café and the muscles in my arms and chest were well defined from five years of washing cars. Then, and for the first time, I allowed myself to dwell on the words of men in the café. “Naser, I would give everything for your slender and well proportioned body.”

Later that day, before I left my room, I took another shower, put on a new tracksuit and a white T·shirt, and sprayed myself with some of the perfume that I had taken from Jasim’s. But my old doubts resurfaced. How could I be taken in by a few romantic words? Anyone in Jeddah could have written what she did. How many of us were sitting around with besieged feelings; and wasn’t it the case that caged emotions make poets out of all of us, even the illiterate?

Pacing up and down my room, I remembered my past anger at not having had the chance to linger in the street and wait for an unveiled girl to pass and give me a seductive smile; my longing to capture the contours of a girl’s lips in a simple kiss; the sleepless nights where I waited for just one touch of a finger, for her breasts to press against my chest, for her body to twist around mine, her heartbeat drumming against me.

The scorching sun pressed a heavy silence onto the street. Something was happening far away, in front of the nine-storey building. I could see a man standing on the hood of what looked like a big family car. I stopped and looked into the distance, my hand over my eyes to block the bright sun. The man was loading luggage on top of the car. Another lucky family leaving Al-Nuzla for a holiday, I thought.

I was crossing the street when I heard someone call my name. I turned my head and saw Hilal, my Sudanese friend, limping heavily, with a walking stick to support him. He was wearing his long white turban around his head.

“
Salam
, Naser. How are you, my friend?” he said.

“
Alhamdulillah
,” I replied.

“You are looking and smelling very nice, my friend, where are you going? To meet a girl?” He broke into hysterical laughter.

I smiled and shouted over his laughter, “Dear Hilal, isn’t life heavy enough without you wrapping seven metres of cloth around your head?”

His laughter abruptly stopped. He spat out his big
toombak
and some of his yellow saliva lingered on his chin, which he wiped with the sleeve of his
jallabiyah
. He leaned forward and said, “Naser, I just came to tell you some good news. But if you are going to make jokes about my turban then maybe I should say goodbye.”

“No, don’t go. What good news?”

“Very good news in fact,” he said, spitting again.

“Come on, tell me then.”

With a glint in his eyes, he said, “I am going to Sudan with a visa to bring my wife here.”

I embraced him and kissed his cheeks and told him how happy I was for him.

“Yes,” he said, “all thanks to
Allah
and to my
kafeel
. He is a very good man. As well as giving me his sponsorship to obtain the visa, he is paying for her ticket as well.”

His
kafeel
was an old Saudi man, called Jawad Ibn Khalid, who had lived in poverty before oil was discovered in the Kingdom but managed to accumulate a huge amount of wealth after he founded a construction company. He was a very kind and generous Saudi man. Nothing like my
kafeel
.

For a while, Hilal couldn’t stop talking about the generosity of Jawad Ibn Khalid.

Just when he was about to leave, he told me of other news.

“You know Haroon?” he asked me.

“There are many Haroons in Al-Nuzla,” I replied. “Which one do you mean?”

“The smiling servant of your
kafeel
”

“What about him?”

“He fled to Germany.”

“What? Haroon?” I wondered how it was possible for an Eritrean with a UN passport to go to Europe. I had the same passport and had tried to use it to flee Jeddah when I worked in Jasim’s café, but I was refused by all the European embassies. They all told me the same thing: that I was ineligible because I was in a safe country now and there was no reason for them to give me asylum. They also rejected my request for a tourist’s visa, because they told me that when people with my passport were given a visa, they ripped up their passports in the toilet of the plane and never came back.

Hilal continued, “A smuggler got him a fake passport and a visa. He said he’d met him in the Eritrean café. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, but I have never been. I have always been too scared to find out what is happening in Eritrea.”

Hilal sighed, patting my shoulders. “I understand. I understand, Naser.”

There was a brief silenc.

Then, I asked, “Anyway, Hilal, do you know how much Haroon paid?”

“I am not sure, but he said it was a lot. No one knew that he had such a big plan hidden behind that eternal smile. What a man. Anyway, I will come to say goodbye before I go to Port Sudan,” Hilal said. He spat again on the ground, we shook hands, and he disappeared down a side street.

I decided to sit facing the street, with my back against the tree and my eyes panning from one side to the other, waiting for the girl to appear. But I couldn’t sit still. Would she come at all today? If she did, would she come closer perhaps?

The heat surrounded my face. Bright rays of light bounced off the wing mirror of one of the parked cars. I walked over to the car and bent to take a look at my face in the mirror. Sweat dripped down my nose. I looked around for something—anything—to help me fan my face. All I had was my yellow note.

But instead of bringing a refreshing breeze, the note just brought me more questions. Maybe I should have written to her to tell her how excited I was? But what would I say? I had never written to a girl before. What was the right thing to say to them? Maybe I should compliment her looks?

I tried to picture what she might look like under her
abaya
. To begin with, I tried to imagine what she might look like if she were Saudi. But since I had never seen a Saudi woman’s face either on the street, the newspapers, books or the TV—the only women on TV were old and veiled—I quickly stopped the thought. What if she were Egyptian? I remembered some Egyptian actresses I had seen in films and my favourite actress, with her big, beautiful, expressive eyes and her alluring smile, came to my mind.

There were people of countless nationalities living in Jeddah, many migrants coming to work here, so it was pointless trying to guess. Her looks would depend on whether she was Arab, African or Asian.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by the sound of police sirens.

The civil police cars followed by a convoy carrying my
kafeel
, the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah, drove along the road. I recognised the four grey Mercedes from his palace. The sight of him, even after all these years since that day in his living room when I was fifteen, still made my stomach turn.

I remembered how after he had finished with me that day in his house his servant Haroon hurried me out. I couldn’t go to the religious police; not after what had happened to one of the
kafeel’s
wife’s servants, a Filipino woman who had lived a few blocks down from us.

She had been deported back to the Philippines with her two young children when she reported sexual abuse to the religious police. That had been a year before and I had seen her and her children being dragged out of her house by three religious policemen. She screamed that she was the victim of a rape committed by the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah. But a policeman smacked her on the face, yelling, “We don’t want whores like you coming to this blessed country.”

“Classic,” whispered our Saudi neighbour who lived on the second floor, and who was standing next to me. “I am sure the
kafeel
fabricated a lie against her to the religious police to hide his ugly crime and now she is the one being sent back home.”

“I thought the Sharia law should bring justice in this country?” I protested.

He sighed and said, “The law, son, is only applied to the poor and to foreigners, not to the rich or the royal family.”

I managed to last for half an hour before I had to go to the Yemeni shop for a cold drink. It would only take me a second and I would sprint back.

As I returned with my Pepsi, I couldn’t wait to quench my thirst, even though I was almost back at the shaded spot under the palm tree. I slowed down and flipped the ring pull.

I looked back and saw a woman rushing towards me. It was her, I was sure of it. She almost collided with me as she ran in front. She flicked a note in my direction before running back the way she came. I dropped my can, picked up the paper and ran after her. She didn’t look back as she ran alongside the parked cars, her shadow dancing on their frames. She stopped, opened a door and disappeared inside a building.

I looked up and had to step further back to see where we were. I was standing in front of the famous nine-storey building. I crossed the road and took a better look. I looked at the folded note in my hand. It was on the same yellow paper as her last note, but this one felt bigger.

I pinned her letter on my wardrobe and gazed at it from my bed. It was written in beautiful calligraphy—every letter gave life to the next and the words all clung to the page like the flowers in the hanging gardens of Babylon.

I moved closer and blew lightly on the note, hoping that I might unchain the words and make them tell me the secret of the girl who wrote them—how did she look when she bowed her head and inscribed each one of them? I closed my eyes and imagined how her fingers moved with her pen from one side of the page to the other, from one line to the next; and how her waist, carried by her strong hips, must have danced with her words.

I stood up and read the note again:

Habibi
,

It has taken me a long time to cram the infinite thoughts I have gathered about you over the past months into this small letter. So please understand if some words appear naked of meaning to you
.

When I first saw you, I felt the planting of a seed in the middle of my heart. Since then, every time I have had a glimpse of you in the street, it is as though little drops of rain have watered that seed. And now, the seed has grown into a flower and its bud has opened
.

I am proposing my love to you. Will you accept it?

Maybe you are the type of man who wishes hell on a woman who steps outside her house on her own, let alone roams the street seeking the man of her dreams with a love proposal in her hands. Maybe you don’t believe in love and only accept an arranged companionship between a man and a woman
.

It feels like a wide and treacherous sea of uncertainties separates us. But I am ready to take a voyage on this stormy ocean if, at the end of the journey, we might meet on the same island
.

Please don’t write back to me. It is too dangerous for me to bend down in the street. People might get suspicious and the risk is not worth it
.

Salam from the heart
.

The beauty of her words made me think there was a chance that she might be the girl I’d been waiting for. All these years I had been complaining that I was living in a country ruled by fear, by men who sought to take the joy out of life. But here was this girl who came to me with a proposal of love. Why was I hesitating? What was I scared of? Isn’t life short? With a life as empty as mine, what did I have to lose?

That same night, I couldn’t eat or sleep. With my eyes closed, I ran the tips of my fingers across the words in her beautiful note, over and over again.

I
T WAS NOON. The afternoon prayer had just started and I could hear the blind imam’s loud voice. I wanted to storm out, but I couldn’t because the religious police roamed the street at prayer time to look for men who weren’t at the mosque. So I stayed indoors until the imam finished his prayer. I paced up and down my room begging him to hurry up, to read shorter verses from the Qur’an. When he started the
takbeer
for the fourth and last set of the early afternoon prayer, I slid the key into the door lock, and turned the knob. When he said the
tasleem
, ending the prayer, I burst through the door and headed for my palm tree.

The street was suddenly full of men returning home from the mosques. But soon the busyness passed, and the street was reclaimed by silence once more.

I saw a veiled woman approaching.

I got up.

She slowed down.

I wanted to walk towards her, but that would be too risky. So I waited.

She beckoned me towards her with her hand and turned around.

I walked in her direction.

She turned left almost immediately. I hurried after her. As I followed her on the turn, we arrived at the shop famous for the over-sensitive Indian tailor. He had the habit of shouting and spitting every time he was challenged about his claim that he was as good a designer as those who lived in Milan.

The girl was going straight ahead. She turned a corner into the street that would lead us back to Al-Nuzla Street. A short distance from Al-Nuzla, she turned and cast a quick glance in my direction. She dropped a note and walked slowly on. I raced to pick it up. I continued to follow her without stopping to read it. She must have sensed that I was almost breathing on her neck, because she quickly looked back and pointed with her gloved hand at the note. She wanted me to read the note.

Habibi
,

Read this quickly and follow me from a distance. When you walk behind me, look down and take a look at my shoes. I bought them especially for us. I asked my Egyptian friend to get them for me from Cairo when I saw them in her fashion catalogue. They are unique shoes and no one in Al-Nuzla has them. They will set me apart from other women in Al-Nuzla—when I am in the street, you will be able to recognise me
.