Where Pigeons Don't Fly (35 page)

Fahd dripped sweat and rage, the events of his mother's final days streaming past his eyes like some endless film reel.

He remembered his mother a month before, telling him the story of his father's eldest sister, Haila, a tale she had heard a number of times from Suleiman. She'd never forgotten it: how Haila had died fifty years before out in Wadi al-Rawghani
near Unayza; how the girl's father had fasted for two successive months in penance for manslaughter, or neglect of a ten-year-old child.

Haila had started experiencing frequent headaches. She took to supporting herself against walls as she walked and dragging her feet. The world around her gradually faded and bit by bit the light went out. The traditional remedies and cures offered by a woman called Moudi in Sabakh didn't help; her attempts to cure Haila's dizzy spells and loss of sight were fruitless.

Suleiman had never known his sister—he was not yet born when she died—but he could picture her perfectly from his mother's description: a beautiful, pale-skinned child with two pigtails hanging down her back, a parting that gleamed like lightening and wide eyes with a singular gleam. When she laughed her white teeth showed and she smiled with the watchfulness of a twenty-year-old, though younger by far. She relieved her mother of many of the household duties.

Her father returned after sunset prayers and told his wife that the imam from the mosque in Jurida would come to blow on her. The sheikh came twice and in a loud hoarse voice recited, ‘“By the star when it goes down, your companion is neither astray nor is he misled,”' then blew out forcefully from his mouth until the young girl, fed up, covered her face with a black shawl. She was disgusted now, trying to keep her covered face away from him, so he wrenched her face in his direction and recited in something like a scream, ‘Say: It has been revealed to me that a company of
jinn
paid heed …'

‘Enough!' Haila said more than once, holding out her hand like someone trying to ward off harm.

Afterwards, going out to the front door with her father, the sheikh decreed that she was possessed, which is how the father
came to burn a thumb-sized twist of the black shawl over the spirit stove then puffed on the catching flame. As soon as the white smoke coiled up from the glowing fabric he inserted it into Haila's nose. She cried out at the touch of the searing ember and almost gave up the ghost, pinned down by her mother's arms until both tiny white nostrils had been transformed into something resembling a stovepipe, rimmed with black and open sores.

A few days later her father and his wife drove the old red Ford south out of Buraida, carrying the blinded, woozy child with them. The road to Unayza was unforgiving and rough, the vehicle lifting and dipping through the potholes. Near Urouq al-Nafoud they had to dig and tamp around tyres that had stuck in the soft red sand. At last they reached Wadi al-Rawghani and breathed a sigh of relief.

It was night and exhaustion had left them drowsy as the dead. There were tents for hire in the wadi but the father stopped the car and got out, dragging the box of tea and coffee-making implements from the boot. Opening the wooden crate he took out a long-stemmed brass coffee pot and hunted in the dark for matches and a scrap of cloth which he stuffed in the spout. He took a match from the box marked
Abu Shuala
and illuminated the darkness with a small flame set at the wick of the spirit stove, which immediately gave off a smell of gas. The father needed to set his head straight with a cup of bitter coffee before he slept. In the Ford's cabin nothing disturbed the sound of the mother's snoring save an occasional wail from Haila.

One still summer's night, a few days before her death, Fahd's grandmother revealed that she had put snuff in the water and made Haila take seven swallows in a row. On the third day of
living in the tent and being treated with the dusty-smelling snuff, in the early morning while her father was out negotiating with some men about buying a cow, Haila died in her mother's arms.

Having purchased the cow and tied it to a tent peg the father returned and went in to see his wife. They washed their little girl's body, placed her in a coffin and said the afternoon prayer over her with the other worshippers, then they buried her in the Taeemiya cemetery outside Unayza. Father and mother returned to town with their cow. When his grandmother told this story, she felt a rage and bitterness that robbed her of her voice as it had done every time she had told it over the past fifty years.

Had Soha died the same way? Haila had died at the hands of a sheikh in Wadi al-Rawghani and now Soha had perished at the hands of an Egyptian sheikh. Back then, his grandfather had paid penance for his sin, an admission of guilt, but Fahd's uncle and cousin avoided taking responsibility for killing Umm Fahd. In their eyes they had used their initiative after modern medicine had been unable to cure her.

‘Dear God! Had mother ever imagined for a second that she would die one day beaten with a stick and unable to breathe, drowned by drinking water until she vomited? Can it be that science and the study of medicine have had no effect on my cousin with his big, close-set eyes, like an owl lurking in the dark?'

Yasser withdrew from the heated argument, rapidly punched the buttons on his mobile phone and conversed in a low voice. The senior detective was explaining that the right of Soha's descendants to withdraw their case was their right as individuals, but that the state's right to pursue the charge remained
with the police. In other words, the Egyptian sheikh would not escape punishment just because they withdrew their accusations.

Fahd insisted that he would never back down where his mother's rights were concerned and he would sign nothing to that effect. Abu Ayoub returned to the subject of fate and how Fahd didn't believe in it—‘My brother, fear your Lord'—as though laying the ground to accuse his nephew of being a secularist, an infidel and an atheist.

The phone rang in Fahd's pocket. He looked at the number and saw Tarfah's name blinking insistently. He refused the call and noticed an unread message from Saeed:
Fahd, don't surrender your mothers' rights to these dogs!

He turned and saw Saeed sitting on the white plastic chair, one leg crossed over the other and jiggling to a jittery, remorseless rhythm.

Escaping the suffocating atmosphere, Fahd went outside to the ambulances' covered parking lot to light a cigarette between two of the vehicles. He blew out smoke and wept bitterly. A gentle hand fell on his shoulder. It was Saeed, comforting him and urging him on.

 

–52 –

F
AHD'S EYES WELLED
. saeed held his arm and tried to comfort him as he burst into tears and rested his head against the driver's wing mirror on the side of the ambulance. He wept aloud: he needed to be outside in the fresh air, to light the tip of a cigarette, to receive comfort from someone other than the killers: the Egyptian sheikh, his uncle and his cousin. To not only lose his mother, but to lose her in such awful circumstances … His father had never hit her, yet some stranger had flogged her to death with his son's assistance. What gall his uncle had! For that matter, what gall his sister had to snatch the broom from behind the kitchen door and hand it to Abu Ayoub as he galloped up in a fright at the voices of infidel
jinn
.
Has your little heart died, Lulua?
Heartbroken, anguished, sad and tearful, Fahd muttered, ‘The best way to honour the dead is to bury them, and I don't believe a man can honour anyone in this world more than his mother!'

Back inside, Abu Ayoub spoke at length, standing with Ibrahim, Fahd and Yasser and directing most of his words at Fahd as he rolled the toothstick in his mouth and clicked prayer beads over his thumb with a rapid mechanical motion.

‘“When it is their time to die they shall not delay the hour nor shall they hasten it,”' he said. ‘Her day has come, may God have mercy on her, and her hour has struck. It falls to us to
keep faith in fate and divine decree. Brothers, everything we are doing now is the work of Satan and will not restore the dead to life.'

‘But it will restore her rights!' Fahd broke in. ‘Otherwise, we might as well be living in the jungle! My mother was murdered, never mind if she was ill. Even if the doctors said she was going to die in a few months, or a year, no one knows how long she would have lived.'

‘I know,' said Abu Ayoub, his eyes fixed on Saeed who was standing on the other side of the glass. ‘But the sheikh means well and follows the
sunna
, and he who forgives and makes peace will be rewarded by God. That's one point, the other point you seem to be forgetting, Fahd, is that transferring the corpse of your mother, God have mercy on her, to the dissection table and the tender mercies of the surgeons will cause great pain both to her and to us. Do you not mind—can you even imagine—your mother being subjected to the surgeon's scalpels after her death?'

‘No!' said Yasser. ‘We do mind!'

‘Don't talk of what doesn't concern you!' Fahd said.

Abu Ayoub grabbed Fahd's hand and led him out of the ward. ‘But it does concern me, Fahd. I was her husband. Then there's the fact that we're in mourning at the moment. And don't imagine that anything will happen to us: each one of us gave her the traditional cures with the best of intentions. Even your sister played her part. In a case such as this sacrificing an animal or a couple of months' fasting should be enough if our approach was in error.'

Yasser, who had caught up with them, now interrupted. ‘We weren't wrong. The sheikh is well-known; his books are in the Rushd bookshop!'

Abu Ayoub went on as if he had heard nothing. ‘To be brief, what we need to do now is withdraw our case against the Egyptian, get that withdrawal endorsed in court and try and prevent the body being referred for autopsy. We won't sleep tonight until she's been put in the refrigerator and tomorrow we'll wash the body and say the afternoon prayer over her grave.'

It was a day as turbulent as a dream, streaking by before Fahd's eyes.

Till now, his days had been spent between the reek of oil paint, the rough, pimpled canvas, brushes of all shapes and sizes, memories of college, the corridors of King Saud University, the central library, Granada Mall, Le Mall, his friend Saeed and his girlfriends Noha, Thuraya and Tarfah. Days both uncomplicated and formulaic, sitting at Shalal Café on Dammam Road, or Tareeqati Café on Urouba Road. He loved Fairouz and Khaled Abdel Rahman, loved dancing and painting, went to art exhibitions at Shadda Hall in Murraba and Sharqiya Hall north of Takhassusi Hospital. His jaunts with Saeed never went beyond Tahliya and Ulaya streets and for food he alternated between the Damascus Fateer House in Layla al-Akheliya Street and Zeit wa Zaatar in Tahliya: with the exception of McDonald's, he disliked all fast-food restaurants.

True, before his uncle had taken over their home he had managed to establish some fleeting connections with people around him, like Abdel Razaq al-Hindi from the Sulaimaniya supermarket who had opened a deferred account in Fahd's name and Abu Rayyan, owner of the Sufara bakery on Urouba Road, but the contact had always been swift and evanescent. Now, he had moved beyond his small and intimate world, as if dropped from a helicopter into the thickets of a dark and
untamed jungle, forced for the first time to look at the dense foliage, to hear the calls of new and terrifying creatures, to confront reddened eyes aglow with treachery.

He was in a dream. One morning he would wake to find nothing left of it save dry leaves stirring in Zuhair Rustom Alley before a light September breeze. He would stand in the street, the budding yellow sun at his back already striking the soaring bridge by the vast Mamlaka Tower, stretch his arms wide and call, ‘God, what a beautiful morning!' then go on his way, slowly dragging his tattered leather sandals whose metronomic slap on asphalt lacerated the morning's stillness. He would be received by Sayyidat al-Ru'osa Street, parallel with Urouba Road, and head east, walking down from Ulaya's old police station to stand sleepily before
Fahih al-Tanawwur
, the stocky torso of Abdel Moula the Afghan baker swaying as he lightly tapped the rounded baker's peel against the oven wall and wiped sweat from his brow with the filthy towel that dangled from his right shoulder.

The hospital, the emergency ward, his mother's death by torture, his fight with Abu Ayoub and Yasser, the conversation with the detective, all the talk of withdrawing his case and of judges, courts, refrigerators, washing corpses, the mosque and cemetery: none of this was routine or familiar to Fahd, but rather the occasion for consternation and fear, as novel and intimidating as exiting the gloom of a small flat in Maseef into a void both desolate and formless, oppressive and painful, that filled him with doubt and suspicion.

Chaste and meek, he had been addicted to the smell of oil paints, had loved flowers and music and art and a life as simple and untainted as the sun itself, and he had loved Tarfah, too. Now, he had taken the first step into a mysterious and
unfamiliar world that held him up to judgment and conspired against him. He had been in the midst of a warm romantic scene, part of some endless film reel, that had suddenly cut to the thunder of hoof beats, brandished blades, gunfire and battle, heads and limbs flying to all quarters.

The detective had suggested that were they to withdraw their case the autopsy would be a superficial one: there would be no deep cuts into his mother's body and it would take at most two hours. Abu Ayoub tried to get the whole matter of pathologists and autopsies dispensed with entirely ‘to save time', but the detective refused, promising to hasten the process. He made a call and told them he had tried to get the doctor in Shamesi to come to them instead of taking the body to him, but had failed. Nevertheless, he assured them, he would make sure the business was wrapped up inside two hours. Smiling and unfailingly polite, the detective said his piece, took the interview file from the policeman and went on his way.