Where Pigeons Don't Fly (28 page)

It came to him that there was a spiritual cure that might save this ravaged body; even holding her hand, still beautiful, warm and soft, could give her new impetus. She adjusted herself and began to tell him about his childhood, then his father. Her tears flowed and she was silent. She had remembered the bag, maybe. She asked him to call Lulua.

‘I'm making tea, Mum. Just a minute.'

‘Your father bequeathed it to you.'

She grabbed Fahd's hand and squeezed it.

Choking back a sob, Fahd said sternly, ‘Let's have none of that talk; it's no good.' Then he added, ‘God give you a long life. You'll be there for my wedding and you'll see your grandchildren.'

Wearily, Soha described to her daughter where the old black leather bag was kept on top of the wardrobe. She would need the little stepladder behind the kitchen door.

 

–39 –

T
ARFAH SENSED THAT FAHD'S
usual high spirits were dampened; she missed the touch and tenderness she had come to expect. He was going through a crisis, she felt, but wasn't telling her. Wasn't she the queen of trauma and tragedy? How many dreadful things had happened to her, and she hadn't gone under, rising phoenix-like from the ashes every time and telling Fahd in lavishly sarcastic tones: ‘Smile! You're in the Kingdom of Human Kindness!'

She thought of the despondency that sometimes overwhelmed her when she was with him.

She was sitting in the dark of her top-floor bedroom in Suwaidi listening to the sunset call to prayer from a nearby mosque; it was the first time she had listened to it in such a downcast state: how could it be calling for peace of mind when she felt such hopelessness? As a child, whenever she'd felt sad or a strong urge to cry, she would creep into her wardrobe like a cat, closing the door on herself, shutting her eyes in the dark and letting her tears flow unchecked until her soul was purged and she could emerge to play and stampede about crazily.

All she remembered of her childhood was the bad and the sad, starting with being named Tarfah and, perhaps too, the superstition with which her immediate family and relatives poisoned her early years: that any woman called Tarfah was
destined for bad luck in life. Though she hadn't believed it, the years that followed had proved them right.

It was a mystery to her why her entire family should prefer her older sister, Asma. Was it because of her utter docility, the very opposite of Tarfah's naughtiness? Or because Tarfah excelled at school while her older sister failed and had to repeat one year after another until they ended up together in the fourth year at primary school, before Tarfah overtook her and went to middle school first? Tarfah relied on her own talents, while her sister received assistance from private tutors, all to no avail. Was that really sufficient to make her family hate her, so that as a girl she often felt that she wasn't their daughter at all, that she was in the wrong family? Neither their ideas nor their way of life tallied with her own and comparing her dark skin to her four fair sisters only made her more doubtful. When she was older and her father had died she would ask herself, ‘Did Mum sleep with someone else?'

Not a day passed without her being beaten for some reason, or for no reason at all, by her brutal father and her brothers. Even her youngest brother took pleasure in hurling his sandals at her when she walked by, as though she were a cat in the doorway that he wanted to drive off.

Nor was this confined to the immediate family; even her aunt preferred Asma. Yet despite her father's harsh treatment he would call no one else when he wanted food, drink or clothes. Was it because she was more scrupulous than her sister, or because he wished to put Asma at ease and have the little servant girl Tarfah perform her tasks for her?

Her father had not loved her mother. She would complain about him, never letting him alone and always suspicious. One morning, months after his death, she told Tarfah that he had
cheated on her, and the whore he'd cheated with had borne him a child.

‘That's enough, Mum!' Tarfah had cried. ‘Please, stop it! God rest his soul!' Then added in a subdued tone, ‘Speak well of your dead.'

But the terror she felt at night as she looked back over her long life and her sense of alienation while surrounded by her family only grew stronger. She remembered that it had been her father's dream to be blessed with a daughter who mispronounced her ‘rs' to sound like ‘ls'. Maybe his lover had had this flaw of speech and he had longed to see it embodied in front of him at home. Tossing and turning in bed, Tarfah whispered to herself, ‘So why did he hate me if I fulfilled this dream of his?'

She never won his love and was helpless before her siblings' mockery whenever she uttered a word that contained an ‘r'. They would mimic her and one would always shout: ‘I dare you to say, “Rabbits run right to rocks”!'

Tarfah was exceptionally brave and had a sharp tongue, but she never had it in her to tell her mother what she went through as a child for fear that she would punish her and step up her surveillance. She couldn't find the courage to tell her about her cousin, some five years older than her, who had asked her to come to his house to see the hawk his father had bought. She went off with him and he had shown her a hawk of his own.

For days afterwards she felt irritable and guilty and when she saw him at the door would hate and blame herself, as though he had been perfectly within his rights and it was she who had done wrong. She was scared that he would tell on her; the sin was her own.

Tarfah neither hated nor loved her father, though by rights she should have loved him because he was her father. Whenever she grew angry with him and whispered to herself that she hated him she would quickly become flustered and fearful of divine retribution, even though she couldn't remember him ever holding her or hugging her or stroking her hair; the very opposite of her uncle, who adored her, showering her with praise in front of her family and his own daughters, too, and never hesitating to give her a hug every time he saw her. In his tender embrace she found all that she lacked in her family home.

When her father died, Tarfah wept dementedly and cried in silence for a whole month, so that the women who had come to pay their condolences pitied her and called back later to ask after her. She cried like a child, repeating over and over, ‘Bring back my father!' But with the passing of days she grew reconciled to circumstances and on the final day of her mother's mourning period, as she sat with her in the still night, her mother told her what had never been told: how he had once made accusations against her honour, how he had done her wrong and abused her.

She talked of the girl he had loved before he had got married and how his family had refused to let him wed her, forcing him to marry her mother because she was a cousin and an orphan and his financial circumstances were weak enough that only his cousin, cheap and no bother, was within his means and he within hers. She told Tarfah how he had betrayed her with the girl he got pregnant and Tarfah had been unable to stop her until she had convinced her daughter that it had really happened.

Her mother had shattered that dazzling aura, the barrier of sanctity surrounding her father. What disappointment Tarfah felt! How she hated her mother for destroying the image of a strong father that she carried inside her! Yet she hadn't blamed her.

To this day, Tarfah was amazed that her mother had observed the mourning period and carried out his last instructions (for the woman who observes the prescribed period of mourning shall make for her husband a dwelling in Paradise), continuing to give alms on his behalf and refusing to remarry. If his name ever came up she would praise him and perfume his memory before her sons and daughters, who came to feel proud of him.

Tarfah almost wept when she learnt of his betrayal and the pride felt by her brothers and sisters never touched her. She would laugh to herself to see them squirreling his portrait away in the wallets they carried in their pockets. She was the only one who didn't keep a picture of him; she wouldn't even look at one. She feared herself and she feared him. She sensed she would catch a look of reproach in his eyes, a reproach that would seize on the doubts that swirled inside her, stirred up by her revulsion at what her mother had told her.

These things kept Tarfah awake at night as she grew older and the passing of time eroded her hostility towards her family. She began to draw closer to them, to live alongside them in peace, until she married Sami and divorced two years later to return with quite different feelings. The gulf between them had grown and she felt more estranged than at any time before. Her room became her refuge and her world. True, her brothers certainly appeared to treat their sisters with kindness,
alarmed and jealous for their well-being, but Tarfah thought them selfish and fake.

Over the years she tried to bridge the chasm dividing them. She was, undeniably, disobedient and foolish with an ungovernable tongue. She was incapable of keeping her counsel for anyone, answering back fearlessly. For that is how she saw herself: fearless and restoring what was rightfully hers. They, meanwhile, regarded her behaviour as vulgar, as a shamelessness and insolence that contrasted with her calm, well-mannered sisters. Tarfah thought them naïve idiots, mocking their staggering stupidity and laughing herself silly when they failed at school, and so nobody was ever happy for her when she did well.

 

–40 –

I
N SPITE OF HER
relationship with her father, Tarfah still wished that he had been there when she got engaged to Sami.

She wanted to marry Sami, but something told her that her father would have refused the match because she was yet to finish her studies and also because he evaluated men quite differently than her brothers, unmoved by material concerns and never flattering anyone. He hoped to see every one of his girls at university and in the best departments. He had no patience with absenteeism from school and would turn into a tyrant whenever his wife asked him to let Ahlam or Ilham take a day off. But after his death, anyone who wanted to go to school could go and if they couldn't be bothered than no one would blame them. The house was transformed into a little city of chaos within a city beset by chaos.

One night, Tarfah read the little advertising slogan blinking on the ATM screen, which described the country as the Kingdom of Human Kindness. Putting the notes in her wallet she thought to herself, ‘Incredible! They're calling it the Kingdom of Human Kindness! Wouldn't the Kingdom of Chaos be better?'

‘Find out about him? He's our child! We've known him since he was little!'

This was her brothers and sisters, speaking about Sami. They were delighted whenever he came over, sitting beside
him in a fever of excitement like someone having a photo taken with a minor television star. Only Ahmed, the second oldest of her brothers, remained unimpressed. Actors, singers and sports stars, he said, led dissolute lives and were unsuitable for marriages; that went for Sami, too, regardless of the fact they knew him.

Ahmed wasn't extreme in his beliefs but he observed the daily prayers at the mosque, the first and only person to perform the dawn prayer in their neighbourhood mosque for many years. He disliked gossip, hated nobody and was affectionate and devoted towards his family, his sisters and his widowed mother.

Before her father passed away, Tarfah's cousin, son of the uncle who lived in Khobar to whom, or to whose family, she was partial because she felt that they were more civilised, asked for her hand in marriage. Her father refused on principle to countenance an unemployed man, even though his family were only suggesting an engagement, and gave them to understand that her future would never be linked to a man who couldn't tell how long he might be waiting for a job.

As for Sami, Tarfah knew no more about him than the average television viewer or what could be gleaned from his photographs in the press, but she was quite certain that she disliked his inquisitive, vulgar family whose general manner and way of speaking lacked sophistication and breeding. When his mother and older sister came to present her with the offer her reaction had not been good, but his maternal aunt, who happened to be Tarfah's cousin, spoke with her and managed to convince her, telling her that he had confided his love for Tarfah to his sister, recalling the lovely eyes she had had as a child before she had covered up.

If he couldn't marry her, he declared, then he would never marry.

She didn't have a clear childhood memory of him. She had seen him in the flesh just once, a few months back when he had visited her uncle's house. With her cousin Samia, Tarfah had spied on him through the opening in the tent. She had thought that he was just a vain young man, inordinately proud of the pair of curls that flopped across his brow. He was talking to his aunts and moving his hands about confidently, maybe arrogantly.

Their phone conversations after the engagement never went further than his television appearances, his minor stage roles and his friends in the industry. They never touched on any relationships with other women. He was just an actor playing supporting roles, who got his break on Channel One, in instructional slots that advised the viewer not to waste water, to exercise financial prudence, and to show respect to the disabled and assimilate them into society, and so on.

Tarfah didn't take the business of marriage terribly seriously. She sat watching a foreign film with subtitles at noon on her wedding day while Asma shouted, ‘From now on you'll get him in the flesh!' from outside the room, assuming that she was gazing at Sami on screen. This lack of excitement on her wedding day left her family in shock. Her appearance didn't change until after the evening prayers in the wedding hall. She wore a blouse and skirt and her hair was carelessly tousled; in the end Abdullah shouted at her, bewildered at her indifference and lack of emotion.