Where Pigeons Don't Fly (23 page)

‘Maybe because it's a Wednesday,' she said.

They crossed the small roundabout and doubling back to escape the congestion around the mall, headed out to the highway.

Two days earlier, she said, she had gone with her family to an event at a hotel along Qaseem Road in a part of town full of vast building developments, hotels and small farms. She fell silent then suggested they go there. He drove on, past the petrol station on the Medina Road and past Musafir Café and Half Moon Café, then as Yamama College came up on the left he turned right off Quwa al-Amn Bridge and they entered the moonlit night. There were high, long walls with massive locked gates.

‘If only we could go inside one!' he whispered.

‘All this sky to ourselves and you're looking for walls?'

The car crested a rise heading east and descended. To his right he saw a small tarmacked road into which he turned without noticing the barbed wire and open steel gate at its entrance.

‘I don't know this place,' she said, cheerful as ever, ‘so I'm not responsible for it!'

‘Should I go back?' he asked her nervously.

She smiled. ‘No, keep going!'

It was a very narrow, tarmacked farm road, just wide enough for a single vehicle. On the left sat a small cabin, a yellow lamp suspended from a cable over its door, and next to it a white tent and concrete latrine. Beside them was parked an ancient and dilapidated Hilux pick-up that looked as if it hadn't been driven in a long time.

A kilometre and a half further on, the road ran out at a barrier of packed soil. A right-hand fork led to a muddy open space. There was a large piece of agricultural machinery for extracting well water and what appeared to be towering walls of dried alfalfa bales. The tarmac curved to the left and he followed it round until he came to yet another left turn that looked as though it returned to the highway.

‘You're going back to the main road!' she said.

‘We'll stop here.'

He found a track cutting across a field of alfalfa and drove in. He switched off the lights and the engine and an awful silence descended. He raised the armrest between them and pressed her to him, breathing in the perfume on her neck. Gasping, she pulled him towards the foot space beneath her. The smell of the fields came in through the windows, a sudden breeze pushing the scent of the purple alfalfa between them. The fragrance was strongest as they reached their peak.

He plucked out some tissues, handed her the box, opened the door and poured water from a small bottle.

He got to his feet and bared his chest to the mild breeze. Up on the highway the trucks' headlights moved slowly and steadily.

‘You like the field!' she teased. ‘You know, I don't like fields.'

He laughed as he canted the last drop of water from the bottle. ‘What field? You mean your field?'

‘Idiot!' she drawled, her voice languid and embarrassed.

He told her that the sky here had its own fragrance, that the crescent moon being wooed by a star above them was waiting for her to perch on one of its points like a child, her legs dangling down: an image inspired by some place or picture he had seen.

She laughed. ‘Seems the artist inside you has woken up!' she said. ‘But there's not much for you to work with: no morning, no light, no harvesting women with sickles in their hands.'

‘Tarfah!' he cried suddenly. ‘I've just had the most wonderful idea for a picture: a couple making love in a field beneath a rustic straw awning. I'll call it
The Lovers
. What do you think?'

Then he remembered Van Gogh's painting of the peasants resting at noon in the shade of a haystack.

He got in.

‘Shall we go?' he asked.

She was trying to wind her
abaya
about herself and muttering, ‘I seem to have put it on wrong.'

He turned away from the door. She was gazing intensely at him, gratitude in her extraordinary eyes, and a tentative smile forming on her face. He kissed her forehead and she pulled his face towards her and kissed him on the nose.

She urged him to get going so that she wouldn't be late for her brother at the mall. He started the car and turned the wheel. Instead of taking the left that would lead them past the cabin with the lamp, through the gate and on to the highway, he went right, guessing that this road ran parallel to the one that brought them here. There was no need for them to go back the same way.

At first the road was good, then the smooth surface gave out abruptly on to a track through the fields, two straight lines, evidence of where cars had gone before. The crops were high but he decided to risk it and pressed on at a moderate pace so as not to get stuck and sink into the soil or sand. Suddenly the field ended and he emerged on to a bumpy track. Concerned that the car might stall he kept going. Then he realised they were on the wrong road. Tarfah, who had been enjoying his devil-may-care approach, began to show signs of anxiety.

‘Why don't you go back to the other road?'

After a few minutes spent circling around, lost and panicking, he said, ‘I don't think I can find it.'

He parked the car on a patch of firm and level ground and looked over at the nearby road and the barbed wire. His heart beat faster.

‘Take this road,' she told him. ‘We came from here.'

And though he knew she was pointing in the wrong direction he did as she suggested, telling himself that her encyclopaedic knowledge of Riyadh's roadmap must cover even this wilderness. All of sudden he found their way blocked by a vast expanse of ploughed earth and coming to a halt next to the huge furrows he slipped the car into reverse and stepped on the accelerator. The rear wheels spun but the car stayed where it was.

‘We're stuck.'

He tried again, pressing harder on the accelerator and the car sank deeper. Getting out he bent over the rear tyre. When he touched the soil it was soft as paste.
Damn
. What was going on?

He glanced at her face. She seemed pensive. Was it fear that rendered her speechless or confidence that they would get free? Did she expect him to blame her for getting them into this situation? His first thought was how to get her out of here, how to return her to her brother now they were stuck in some remote agricultural area fenced in by barbed wire. Then again, how was he going to free his car from this trap?

Terrifying scenarios began wheeling through his head. What if he walked to the highway and flagged down a car?

The car stops; the driver is bearded. He's suspicious—some guy hanging about in the middle of nowhere with a frightened girl—but he seems concerned and pulls over.

‘You go back to your sister and I'll find a shovel so we can clear the earth around the car.'

He moves away and conducts a whispered conversation on his mobile. Is he calling the police? The men from the Committee? Either would cause a scandal beyond Fahd's worst nightmares.

‘Let's dig!' declares the man, his eyes on the road. Damn him; he's waiting for one of Committee's SUVs.

He'll see it signalling with its brights from a distance, then two men will approach and take Fahd to one side, calm and reassuring: ‘Who's that with you? Don't be scared: just tell us. If you're honest with us we'll make sure you're OK.'

He admits that she's his girlfriend. They question her and suddenly she bursts into tears.

Those wonderful eyes; how can they shed tears?

His feverish contemplation was interrupted by Tarfah.

‘Why don't I call my friend Nada? Get her to send her driver?'

‘It's an idea … At least I'd be able to concentrate on getting my car out without having you on my conscience.'

‘You mean you wouldn't come with me?' she said, her eyes welling. ‘I have to go with the driver on my own? Perhaps you could come with me to the mall,' she added. ‘Find someone to tow your car.'

He cleared some of the soft earth from behind the rear wheels then returned to the driver's seat. ‘Have you called her?'

‘She's not answering!' replied Tarfah dejectedly.

‘Her phone's switched off?'

She gazed out at the furrowed horizon. ‘No, it's on. She's just not picking up. Perhaps she's asleep.'

Leaving his door open he tried pressing gently on the accelerator and leant his head out to watch the wheels. The car moved a couple of metres backwards then the wheels spun in place, digging into the dusty ground.

Tarfah's mobile rang and she picked it up, thinking that maybe Nada had noticed her missed calls. But when she looked at the screen, blinking on and off in the darkness, her face fell and she didn't answer. ‘What does he want now?' she spat.

‘Who is it?' asked Fahd nervously.

‘My brother, Ayman.'

‘If you come back to the mall with me,' she said, ‘I could tell Ayman that you're a brother of one of my friends and that you need help. What do you think?'

He breathed deeply and went back to digging. His heart began to beat faster; his white robe was smeared with dust.
He noticed a gaping hole next to where he was digging in the dark.

What if a huge snake suddenly slithered out from that burrow and bit him while they were all alone in the middle of nowhere?

Then he noticed the place was full of burrows. This city was all burrows—burrows upon burrows—and you never knew which burrow would swallow you up next.

With the long nail on his little finger he squeezed the valves on the rear tyres and the air rushed out. Deflated tyres gripped better in sand. He set the car in reverse: a metre backwards then the wheels spun again.

What was this? Was this the curse of Thuraya, with her feverish, miserable messages? She had already threatened to expose him as an artist who led women astray. Was it his mother's, from whom he had fled and failed to call? Perhaps her health had reached breaking point and she needed his help.

He was about to open his mouth for the thousandth time to tell Tarfah, ‘I was worried about this ploughed land; it's cursed for sure!'

Suddenly he stopped. If he walked into the field now he would never return.

He asked her about Nada. ‘She answered yet?'

‘I sent her a message,' she replied in a soft voice, low with fear.

He stripped off his robe. His body had begun to sweat. A short while before this body had delighted in the paradise of alfalfa blooms as it gazed at the smiling, playful moon. Now the field had become a ploughed wasteland, empty and desolate, and the moon the brow of a wrathful demon gazing down gloating and mocking at a puny, isolated, powerless human being trying to extricate himself from disaster.

As he dug away and smoothed the ground behind the car her phone suddenly rang. It was her brother and she didn't answer. Fahd tried to shift the car again, opening the door and watching the wheels as he repeated, ‘Oh God, oh God,' over and over. The car moved a further two metres and sank again. This time, he felt despair take hold.

Her phone rang and she answered, smiling.

‘Listen, I'm in this place miles away. Get your driver to take Qaseem Road to Quwa al-Amn Bridge. He takes a right at the flyover then goes straight until he sees lights from a car.'

She fell silent and listened. ‘I'll tell you later. Now's not the time.'

Nada must have asked her what she was doing there.

By his efforts he had succeeded in moving the car backwards a total of seven metres.

‘I'm going to try going forwards,' he said to Tarfah. ‘If the car gets free I'll turn right and drive off.'

He put the car into first gear then stepped on the accelerator, wrenching the wheel left and right and screaming in English, action-movie style, ‘Come on!
Come on
!' It moved slowly, then surged and he pulled the wheel to the right, straightening out and rocketing towards the highway like a lunatic until he reached the field of harvested alfalfa, where he proceeded calmly along the firm ground at its edge, unable to believe that they had escaped.

‘O wholesome harvest girls!' he bellowed. ‘How great thy charity, harvesting this crop that I might proceed along the path to deliverance …'

And Tarfah, aping his pomposity with magnificent derision, cried, ‘What ails thee, Abu Jahl?'

 

–33 –

T
HE WHITE PICK-UP TRUCK
, stuck in the sand a quarter of a century before, on 30 July 1979, was nothing like the sea-blue Hyundai that Fahd drove with Tarfah beside him. In this vehicle sat a man, his
shimagh
wrapped into a filthy red-and-white checked turban around his head, driving like a lunatic through the dark of the night to escape the border guards, now dousing the headlights and proceeding on instinct, now guided by the light of his passenger's small flashlight that prevented the guards tracking their Datsun. They were waiting for gunshots to catch them from the rear but the onslaught of the demented sand was swifter than any bullet; it held them firm, the pick-up's lights suddenly froze and they fled in opposite directions, each man panting as he laboured to pluck his feet from the sand's snare.

The passenger got furthest and when he heard the sound of the border guards' pursuing vehicles and the powerful lamps begin sweeping the desert in search of them, he ran for the cover of a small and straggling
ramth
bush and lay still, his heart straining. He was like a bird grazed by a rifle, that flees flapping its one good wing, bleeding and hopping as it hunts for the shade of a tree or rock to hide from the hunter's gaze.

The guards stopped their vehicle by the pick-up in the soft, paste-like sands. Their voices were strident in the night and the searchlights' beams wandered about like cudgels cocked
over bare flesh. They fanned out in three directions, away from the route they had come, and like swords drawn for the kill, four beams of light circled the desert.