Where Pigeons Don't Fly (29 page)

No one understood that Sami needed her to be able to show her off at events, while people whispered, ‘That's Sami's wife!'

‘He cared about my dresses and how I looked, not for my sake or his, but for those women whose comments he always looked forward to.'

She was led to him by her gossiping sisters who spent the time comparing Tarfah to her cousin or her aunt, and despite her happiness to see her family gathered together in one place, especially the women, her mother-in-law began to isolate her bit by bit from the rest, claiming to be worried about the jealous eyes of the other women.

Sami travelled a lot for work, moving with various camera crews around Egypt, Syria and Jordan where the studios were, but he missed her and at night he would woo her endlessly down the phone. He bought her gifts and beautiful antiques on which he inscribed poetic sentiments and the words of favourite songs expressing how he felt inside. Indeed, when he came home he would bring scraps of paper on which he'd recorded his longing: receipts and bills, a ticket stub from a bus or train, film and theatre tickets. Every scrap of paper he kept in his jeans was a blank page for the words and thoughts he addressed to his beloved Tarfah.

The strange phone calls didn't bother her at first either when Sami answered and told the caller it was a wrong number or the times she answered and the caller hung up. It didn't make her angry, but doubt took root in her heart, especially when he would lower his voice during phone calls he didn't want her to hear. She ignored it, though, because she trusted him.

All this she let pass without a fuss, but not so his peculiar attempts to isolate her from other people, to keep her as far as possible from his relatives and in particular, his aunt and her cousin Samia in whom she had discovered two new friends. He didn't like her calling them when he was away, as though
he wanted to hear every word she said to them and they to him. It got to the point that on entering the flat he would immediately ask her who had called and what they had talked about, even sneaking a look at the list of received calls on her phone and rampaging about the house, enraged and consumed by suspicion, if he found that the list had been deleted.

Yet at the same time, returning to their flat after taking Tarfah to see her family in Suweidi, he would spend hours on the phone with his aunt. He was uneasy about his aunt's manner and he was worried about her influence over his wife. She had something on him. His surveillance of Tarfah reached a point where instead of checking her incoming and outgoing calls he felt the need to place a small listening device beneath a couch in the men's
majlis
that sat alongside the table where the phone lay. So suspicious was he in fact, that before they went out together on some errand or other he would wait for Tarfah to go to the bathroom, then rummage through her handbag.

Sami was paranoid, but life went on, slow and unchanging, until the day he returned unexpectedly early from Amman, before the end of a shoot for a new soap opera. The production manager had fired him for molesting a young Palestinian make-up artist. As she bent over him to apply cream and make-up at the start of each day he would start praising her eyes and mouth. Then he went further, sliding his hand along the armrest, to make the movement look accidental, and letting his elbow brush her thigh. She finally screamed at him one day and everyone gathered round, the actors, the director, the assistant director, the set designer and the wardrobe master, to find the girl in tears, casting her powder brush aside and refusing to work.

After this, Sami was forced to accept the minimum wage for soap actors, and remained without work for a year; they even had to give up his flat and go and live with his family. A new and painful episode in Tarfah's life began. She argued with his mother over trifling matters and Sami would stalk out of the flat in a temper and be gone for a day or two, while Tarfah stayed behind in the family home, mistreated and downtrodden as a slave. She grew to hate his selfishness and poor behaviour and his running away infuriated her.

Around this time another a major change took place in Tarfah's life. One day she came across a small, blackened spoon on top of the shade for the bathroom light. Naturally enough, she threw it into the kitchen bin. Two days later she found another spoon, slightly singed. She suspected that he was on something, what she didn't know, and then she noticed brown crumbs scattered on the carpet beneath his side of the bed. The carpet was light in colour and the crumbs that darkened it she recognised as hashish. He was rolling joints.

She had never noticed the way he smelled before, but after the first year she began avoiding his embraces; he stank and every time he took her to bed it was as though she were a virgin. It felt like rape.

He had no real money, just a modest sum he earned from bit work in television, no more than 3,000 riyals, not even enough to cover his secret budget for a single week. Though they were living with his family he began harping on at her that she should take her expenses from her family and his refusal to shoulder any responsibility caused her irritation to peak.

Then his mother started to unleash her arrows at Tarfah, attributing every new incident, crisis and sudden disappearance to her failure to give birth. She said that if Tarfah had had children Sami wouldn't leave the house after every argument, as though he wasn't running away from her sharp tongue and their swapped insults. In order to stop his mother's crazed assault Tarfah was forced to make repeated visits to a gynaecologist, until after numerous examinations and consultations he threw her out, saying, ‘If your husband isn't with you next time, don't come!'

Sami kept promising to come to the doctor with her, and didn't. He kept promising to start over with her in a flat away from his family, and didn't. He tried summoning up the spirit of the happy times they had spent together in the flat in Wuroud but she had become a wife in name only and in the end she went back to her family in a rage.

He tried to get her back, making up stupid excuses for why his life had turned out so badly: there were people conspiring against him in television, people in production companies who hated working with him and people plotting to abort his promising start on stage. It was these people who had got him hooked on the delicious giddiness of hashish cigarettes. Even his family hated him for his success and his popularity with the public. With this he lost possession of Tarfah's respect and her soul. Unable to bear being shut up with him in one place for longer than half an hour she returned to the family home in Suwaidi to put her old room in order, a tiny space more like a cupboard, no larger than twelve square metres.

Though she missed him and longed for him for the first few months, Tarfah eventually got used to living on her own,
despite her brother's badgering her to go out and see her friends. Her brother Ahmed, meanwhile, felt that his unshakeable conviction that artistic and celebrity circles were filthy and depraved had been vindicated and whenever there was slightest problem at home he would chastise his sisters and mother for casting Tarfah into such iniquity.

 

–41 –

S
TOPPED AT THE UWAIS
Mall traffic lights on Ulaya Street, Fahd tried opening the bag and discovered that it was secured with a combination lock. He entered a few guesses. Three numbers wasn't difficult, but nor was it easy. The year of his father's birth, minus the millennium: 956. No response. He put in 985, the year of his own birth. No response. After a few more failed attempts, the year of the mosque's occupation occurred to him, 979, but it didn't open to that, either. What if he tried a nice round number? Fahd asked himself, like the
hijri
date of the same incident: 400. To his surprise, it opened.

He was parked in Ruman Street just off the Northern Ring Road, beneath the building where Saeed lived. The smell of rot spread through the car's interior, masked by the reek of cheap perfume. His nostrils twitched and he started to sneeze, then he switched on the light and gazed upon the bag's secrets.

He began to leaf through the documents and diaries, the books marked with their date of purchase from Mecca's bookshops and the pamphlets containing Juhayman's addresses, one of which his father had distributed that Ramadan to the worshippers in the Grand Mosque. Fahd read the titles. A weighty tome turned in his hands:
Apprising the People of the Signs of Discord and the Portents of the Hour
by Hamoud al-Tuwaijri. He opened it and a light cloud of dust rose towards his
face. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and on the page before him read:

Concerning the man of Qahtan

Qais Bin Jaber al-Sadafi relates a
hadith
handed down from his grandfather, by way of his father, that the Prophet, the blessings of God and His peace be upon him, said:

‘After me there shall be Caliphs, and after the Caliphs, Emirs, and after the Emirs, Kings, and after the Kings, Tyrants. Then shall come a man of my House, to fill the earth with justice after it has been filled with tyranny. Then shall the man of Qahtan be made Emir. In the name of He who sent me the True Word, it shall be no other.'

This account is given by al-Tabrani; Al-Haithami said of it:

‘In its chain of transmission are names I do not know.'

We also have the account of Abdallah Bin Amr Bin al-Aas—may God be content with him and his father before him—in which we find the following:

‘Then shall come the Zealous Emirs. Six shall be born of the line of Kaab Bin Luay, one shall be a man of Qahtan and all shall be righteous and without equal.'

Abu Harira, may God be content with him, relates that the Prophet, the blessings of God and His peace be upon him, said:

‘The Hour shall not arrive until a man from Qahtan comes forth and drives the people before him with his staff.'

Fahd shut the book and hefted another, which he recognised from the cover: Sayyid Qutb's
Milestones
. He took a number of small pamphlets and read some of their covers:
The Emirate, The Oath and Obedience
,
Exposing the Rulers' Deception of Scholars and Men
and
Sincere Advice and Justice in the Life of Man
.
He lifted a small, yellow booklet of only a few pages, whose cover proclaimed:
A Vindication of the Religion of Abraham, Upon Him be Peace
.

In the margins of these pamphlets he read the comments in his father's shaky hand:
The position on civilisation … peaceful evangelising … jihad … compliance … the Religion of Abraham … obedience …

Lifting these books up, Fahd came across a series of letters to his father, a small folder with diary entries and a number of documents. One was a
fatwa
dated 20 November 1979:

In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful, Praise be to God alone and Peace upon His Prophet, His family and His companions:

On Tuesday, the first day of the month of Muharram in the year 1400, we, the below signed, were summoned by His Majesty King Khaled Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud to attend him in his office in Maadhar.

His Majesty informed us that directly following dawn prayers that day a group had entered the Grand Mosque bearing arms and demanded the oath of obedience be given to one they called the Mahdi. They swore the oath and prevented people from leaving the mosque, fighting those who opposed them and opening fire on people both within the mosque and outside.

Fahd replaced the document and took up another yellowed sheet of paper, which he realised was a long poem in the classical style. He read the opening:

Through a dark night a servant ran,

With his piety, fleeing the faithless,

Fleeing the feuding that beset him round,

The warring of happiness and woe.

He scanned the page and turned it over: there were more than forty lines of verse.

Closing the bag he switched off the car's overhead light and got out.

He turned the key in the lock. The flat was dark. Saeed hadn't returned yet, and he decided to open the bag again, picking out the small folder of diary entries. He read on, wide-eyed.

 

–42 –

Mecca, 1979

After two days of questioning I was transferred from Buraida to Riyadh accompanied by a soldier who stuck to me like my own shadow, leg irons at my ankles and handcuffs about my wrists. The bolted truck drove down what I think was the old airport road until it entered a gate at the back of an old building and I was placed in a cell no more than 1x2 metres in size.

Fifteen days deprived of sleep. Whenever my head nodded they'd hammer on the cell's steel door and I would jerk upright in panic. These desperately cramped cells were laid out along a narrow corridor where I was brought, first descending four steps into a room full of soldiers and guards then dragging my leg irons down another four steps to the grim cells themselves.

After they locked me in I amused myself by reading the graffiti on the back of the door: names, dates, a calendrical table for one of the
hijra
months written by a prisoner to count off the days, a variety of contradictory political slogans reflecting the prisoners affiliations, penises and arses, sexual positions and obscenities. Pushing it in to enter, the cleaner hadn't noticed what lay behind the door, while the cell doors that opened outwards were subject to constant scouring.

After two weeks I was transferred to Jeddah and from there I was taken to Mecca in a jeep. They bound my eyes with a blindfold made of fabric and did not remove it until I had been sitting in the cell for
three hours. When at last I could open my eyes, I saw an old friend of mine, a fellow student from the Grand Mosque Institute.

The cell was about 6x4 metres and was home to five of us. Its walls were covered with a white paint that gave off an acrid smell. It was the new prison in Mecca and I stayed there for five months knowing nothing, without the faintest idea where I was, nor whether I was above ground or below, with no book, newspaper or wristwatch to indicate the time, day, or date. It was as though time had stopped on the first day of Muharram, 1400 AH.