Where Pigeons Don't Fly (3 page)

On the back seat of the Committee vehicle Fahd watched the drivers hurtle down the roads in their cars and thought of his father's ordeal. Suleiman had been questioned interminably until it was finally established that he had not taken up arms to hijack the Grand Mosque when they stripped his clothes off and one of them examined the front of his shoulders to determine if the butt of a Belgian rifle had jarred against them and left a bruise.

He was sentenced to jail then transferred to a new prison outside Mecca whose walls gave off the smell of fresh paint. He and his companions were the first guests to enter that now venerable building. How Fahd wished that his father had not bequeathed him this part of his life and revealed to him his secret papers.

Suleiman left a part of his secret life to Fahd for one reason: his fear that his son might become embroiled in the activities of extremist groups and that he might not stop at distributing pamphlets in the court of the Grand Mosque, as his adolescent father had done back in the dying days of Ramadan in August 1979, but take up arms or strap an explosive belt to
his body. Fahd came to understand that Suleiman had been afraid, that his fear became an obsession, and before he passed away he set aside a few possessions for his son, instructing his wife to hold them in trust and hand them over when he had grown, as though anticipating a sudden death in the midst of his young life.

So it was that Fahd got his hands on his father's old books:
Apprising the People of the Signs of Discord and the Portents of the Hour
,
A Vindication of the Religion of Abraham, Upon Him be Peace
, and pages written in a shaky hand, memoirs and diaries. There was a small and dirty string of prayer beads made from olive stones and a blue biro with a grubby plaster stuck on for a grip. There was a photograph of Suleiman and a man with long hair sitting together in the terraces of Malaz Stadium, another of him with a group of young men around a fire on a sand dune in Maizeela outside Riyadh, and a third and final picture in black-and-white of Suleiman alongside his father, Ali, old and oblivious of the camera, and his brother Saleh.

As he sat in the back of the vehicle looking out of the window, Fahd recalled when his sister, Lulua, had handed him a leather bag, black, ancient and falling apart. Their mother had asked her to give it to him as a bequest from his father. Inside he found the timeworn, personal effects that his father had insisted be handed over to him only once he had come of age. Why his mother had waited until he was in his early twenties he didn't know. Maybe because of their relationship, which for the last three years had been bleak. He had opened the bag in a fever of excitement. There was no money, no treasure, just his father's stupid journals: his years in prison and words of wisdom for his son.

 

–3 –

T
HE GMC WITH THE
Committee's logo on the driver and passenger-side doors moved off and headed down a side street in Wuroud, the driver looking to skip the traffic on King Abdullah Road. Fahd thought of how many times he had crossed this road with Tarfah, the two of them staring at the vast advertising hoardings by the corner of the Ministry for Municipal and Rural Affairs and laughing, their fingers entwined.

‘Remember your aunt's house that's up for rent in King Fahd?' he had asked her one night. They had gone to the house and stretched out naked in a sitting room devoid of furniture, the echo bouncing from the bare walls parroting their voices, their laughter and their moans.

He twisted about, looking for Tarfah.
Where have they taken her? Where will they take me?
His fearful muttering was interspersed by the hawk-eyed man's directions to the driver.

At the Owais Markets traffic lights the driver crossed straight over instead of turning left into the King Fahd neighbourhood. The streets were very quiet; there was none of the usual bustle around Haram Mall, which lured shoppers in with its cheap, low-quality goods.

Fahd sighed and muttered a prayer; perhaps these moans and murmurs might move the hawk-eyed man to pity him. But it was no use: the man was like a butcher at Eid al-Adha,
dragging the animal by its foot, the handle of a sharpened knife clamped between his teeth as he listened to the latest joke from his colleague.

‘It's just a few papers to sign and you'll be on your way.'

That is what the man had said, encouraging Fahd to talk briefly and clearly. Fahd sighed and directed his gaze to the street, thinking again of Tarfah.
What are you doing now? Where are you? Has the sheikh in the cream
mashlah
, his eyes full of calm and warmth, taken you off in his colleague's car to the Committee or the women's shelter? Don't put your faith in his deceptive courtesy, his claims that it's just a few official documents, just a signature on a pledge and you can go home. They'll tell you that they are looking out for you, but they lie. He'll trick you as he tricked me. He'll lock you up or ask your family to collect you.
The scandal!

Fahd imagined Tarfah bobbing on the back seat like a freshly slaughtered pigeon, her door secured with a safety catch that could only be opened from outside while doubtless the sheikh in the cream
mashlah
rode up front, reciting
hadith
on the virtues of the chaste, inviolable woman who stayed at home. He longed to call her and make sure she was all right, but they had taken away his phone and all his papers.

The GMC stopped outside a building. The man with hawk-like eyes opened the door and glared at Fahd, who remained inside with the policeman and the driver. There was a short delay then he emerged from the building accompanied by a bulky man, a toothstick poking out of his thick lips, which he bit on every now and again as he muttered and spat and looked over at Fahd. The short man gestured at the driver, who got out with the bag containing Fahd's possessions and stood next to them. Then the big man came forward, opened
the rear door and took Fahd to the building while the bag swayed in his other hand.

He sat down facing the men. There were three of them, waited on by an Indonesian, who brought them tea. The big man came over and stood in front of Fahd.

‘Stand up. Lift your hands in the air.'

Fahd raised his hands as though he were at a custom's check or airport security and the man began to pat down his pockets and body, front and back; he even felt beneath his balls. The hawk-eyed man gave a shout, springing towards Fahd and yanking at his upraised left hand.

‘What's this?'

He removed the prayer beads that had been left to him by his father, a small string of beads that he had wrapped twice about his wrist the week before: olive stones that had been stored in his father's bag for nearly twenty-five years.

In his diaries, his father had told him that he had kept the beads as a reminder of the long prison nights and their boredom: the darkness, the isolation, the sadness. He wanted to remember how he had passed the time fashioning prayer beads from olive stones or breeding cockroaches, letting them multiply before destroying them all.

My son, keeping hold of that which reminds you of tragedy will prevent you forgetting it, and so you will be able to avoid the things that led me into its trap. All I ask of you is that you keep it safe after I am gone and remember that the ultimate destiny of the political parties and religious groups that vex the government is extinction, failure and psychological torment. While your contemporaries are seizing their opportunities and succeeding, you will have wasted the best years of your youth chasing after lost dreams.

 

–4 –

T
HE MEN WHO WERE
artfully guiding Fahd into the Committee's detention cells reminded him of his grandfather, Ali. These men took him into their snare where they unleashed accusations like maddened horses and set about destroying his life with malice and spirit. But had he been alive, his grandfather might have done worse: he might have flogged his grandson before the people in Tahliya Street for consorting in private with a strange woman, he might even have approved of beheading him with a sword.

When his grandfather had been sent the news of a baby boy he didn't go straight home to his wife's family after evening prayers. Instead, he stayed in the mud-brick mosque with the congregation, praying through a watch of the night until his misgivings had abated and the moon had reappeared, for that night, fifteenth of Shaaban, 1379 AH, there had been an eclipse.

Ali was miserable, distraught and full of foreboding. An eclipse of the moon as a child entered the world! For a newborn to arrive accompanied by the wrath of God was terrifying; the baby's whole life and future was in doubt.

‘I said he was defective from the day he was born.'

Words he repeated throughout his son Suleiman's life, until the boy's childhood became filled with injustice and misfortune and he lived all his days with a sense of guilt for what had befallen his family.

At first Suleiman's mother, Noura, told her husband, ‘Seek protection from the Devil and stop prophesying like a pagan!' But just a week later she herself was shouting in fear and every member of the household wailing when they were told that her younger brother, Ibrahim, and his school friends had been seized by the police outside Muhanna Palace and taken to Riyadh, where he remained for two whole months before returning to Buraida to be flogged before the crowds with his companions. Only then was Noura persuaded that her son Suleiman truly was a curse on her family.

Noura's family in Buraida maintained a somewhat open-minded household, unlike that of her husband's family in Muraidasiya, who were said to be so excessively credulous and superstitious that they gave their cockerel a ritual washing to cleanse him of impurity before he mated with the hens. Her father was one of the great itinerant merchants of the Nejd, who had spread out to Egypt, Iraq and Palestine in the early twentieth century, while in the early 1920s her brother Ibrahim and his friends had despaired of the extremism of the parliamentary deputies who walked the streets carrying long staffs made from the branches of the
shauhat
tree, white turbans on their heads. The deputies exhorted people to pray, warned against gatherings of young people, denounced the wearing of the white
ghatra
and
aqqal
and decried the spread of cafés serving tea and
shisha
. They banned the motorbike, which they referred to as ‘Satan's steed', and whenever they found a young man in possession of one, they would confiscate it.

At this, Fahd's Uncle Ibrahim and his friends, nineteen young men all told, decided to march in a demonstration to Muhanna Palace, the residence of the city's governor, Ibn Battal, carrying on their shoulders a young man acting the
clown and dubbed the
akia
. They came to a halt outside the palace shouting fearlessly and wildly, ‘Down with Ibn Battal! Long live the youth! Down with the deputies! Long live the
akia
!'

Seven years passed, during which the heart of Ali and Noura's youngest child, Mohammed, was weakened by measles and he passed away aged four. ‘If death let me choose between them, I would ask he take the bird of ill omen,' Ali muttered bluntly, pointing to his middle son, Suleiman.

Ali's face never brightened again. As everyone in Muraidasiya knew, Mohammed was the apple of his father's eye, while his eldest, Saleh, was his right hand, his tongue and his support.

Fahd had been told so many stories about his grandfather. Who could forget Ali's opposition to the village muezzin? Ibn Dakheel had mounted the first-ever loudspeaker on the village mosque, his voice ringing like thunder when he cleared his throat at dawn. Ali tried urging the congregation to reject this heretical innovation on the grounds that all innovation is deviance and all deviance leads to hellfire. He went further: ‘To remain silent over the truth is to be a devil without a tongue.'

The loudspeaker was affixed to the roof of the mud-brick mosque, facing out over the houses and farms of the village. After dawn prayers the men parted ways, shuffling homewards with drowsiness hovering over their heads, Ali amongst them, leading his sons, Saleh and Suleiman, like two befuddled puppies. No sooner had he stretched out his legs in the breakfast room, sipping at his morning coffee, than Suleiman fell asleep in a warm corner, while Saleh slipped outside carrying the hunting rifle, the .25 calibre pellet gun.

It was his habit to surprise birds in their nests at first light, but now he passed Abu Rashed's fields, ignoring the calls of the songbirds in the massive thorn trees. He broke the gun's barrel and taking a small wetted pellet from beneath his tongue, blew hard to remove the last vestiges of his spit and thumbed it into the breech. He clicked the barrel straight as he approached the mosque, took aim at the loudspeaker for a few seconds, then, whispering ‘God is great' over and over, he pressed the trigger and struck it dead centre. He repeated the dose three times.

The afternoon prayers came and went with no terrifying thunder and no heretical innovation that leads to hellfire. From that day forward, Saleh became a family hero and champion of the Faith, acquiring both social standing and an enormous confidence in himself and his actions, no matter how wrong or reckless.

Suleiman, meanwhile, was little more than a heap of tattered summer clothes bundled up by his mother's side, confused and uncertain and beset by a sense of injury, injustice and ill-treatment. No sooner had he finished his basic education than he decamped to Riyadh to complete his studies. He did not go to Buraida where his brother had been for years, living with his uncles and studying at the National School—‘the Brothers school' as it was known—until his father finally moved with his wife and three daughters to Quwai in West Buraida, escaping before God could wipe the village of Muraidasiya from the map. After the business with the loudspeaker, there could be no remaining amongst a people who, as the Book said, ‘have changed what is in their own souls', for now God would surely change the grace he had bestowed on them with a mighty flood to drown the village, with an earthquake to shake it and turn it on its head, or something similar.