2008 - The Consequences of Love. (12 page)

When I read that she had made a sketch of me and where she kept it, I could barely breathe. It was as if my whole being was transplanted to that image of me which lay in that secret place between her breasts. I would be the first to smell her morning breath, the first to shower in her sweat, and the first to watch her eyelashes fall like glittering Kashmiri curtains at the end of another day in this world: a sad world where daydreams triumph over reality, the articulate are turned into mutes and their voices replaced by signs; a place where a lover must become a fugitive and hide against the skin of a woman whom he might never meet.

S
ATURDAY MORNING, I woke up early. I opened my window and the day flooded into my room, bringing fresh air and birdsong. As I stretched my arms, the sun painted bright spots on my skin and aroused in me all the desires and hopes of the previous night.

At about 7 a.m., I went to work. I was planning to stay until late morning, then I would go to Ba’da Al-Nuzla, collect her note, and return.

My boss agreed reluctantly. “Just for today, ah, I will allow you to do this. I am happier now that you are back. You look like you are capable of washing all the cars in Al-Nuzla.”

At 10 a.m., I came back home, ripped off my work overalls, took a quick shower and changed into my trousers and shirt and went to Ba’da Al-Nuzla. By half-past ten, I was there, and as I stood next to the rubbish bin, I saw a woman entering the street. I looked down at her shoes, but they were black.

All the girl’s previous visits to Ba’da Al-Nuzla had been between eleven and noon. But midday arrived without her, only with more heat. All the women who walked in the street turned out to be bearers of false hope. By around 12.30 I felt exhausted under the burning sun. I needed to go and buy water but the nearest shop was about ten minutes’ walk. What if she came looking for me when I was at the shop?

I knew I had to go back to work, but I wasn’t going anywhere until she came.

The streets of Jeddah were haxy and hot. Only her most recent note that I held in my hand kept me standing there. I wiped the perspiration from my face and as I stretched my legs I heard the
azan
for midday prayer. I tried to drag myself out of my lethargic state. I had ten minutes before the start of the second
azan
—summoning worshippers to line up behind the imam for the beginning of the prayers—ten minutes before the religious police would start patrolling the street to arrest lapsed men who don’t go to the mosque. The last thing I needed was to be caught, flogged and my name registered in their books as an apostate. Even though I had been in Saudi for ten years, I was still a foreigner and I didn’t want to risk deportation.

With the little energy I could muster, I trudged back home. I got to my door just as the
muezzin
started announcing the second
azan
. As I shut the door behind me, the blind imam began the prayer.

I shuffled to the kitchen and gulped down an entire glass of water, followed by two more. The phone was ringing continuously. It could only be my boss, I thought. I ignored it.

I knew that she was unlikely to be there during prayer time, so I set my alarm for fifteen minutes past one.

I made sure I was better prepared for the afternoon. I took three bananas and filled one of my drink bottles with cold water before I left the house for the dead-end street. I also wore my black baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes.

I arrived in the street in good spirits, but as the afternoon progressed and my shadow grew, I started losing my strength again. The time for the next prayer,
Salat Al Asar
, was approaching and there still wasn’t any sign of her. I dropped down to the floor next to the garbage bin. Just then, the
muezzin
started his call. I pulled myself up from the floor and ran home, my feet almost tripping over each other.

Maybe there had been a change of plan. Maybe it was easier for her to come later on in the day because of some family matter. Or maybe it was getting too hot for her to walk all the way to Ba’da Al-Nuzla in the morning and so she had decided to make her trip during the cooler evenings.

Half an hour later, I was back for the third time that day in Ba’da Al-Nuzla.

But nothing happened. The smell from the bins was disgusting. Gradually, the daylight was disappearing with the departing sun. There were fewer women in the street now, and the black and white movie was coming to an end. I hoped the girl with the Pink Shoes might be one of the few who, for one reason or another, managed to stay out later without upsetting the men in their families. So I continued to hang around for a bit longer.

Night set in. A street lamp was broken and its light was flashing on and off. But I decided to keep waiting. “Just for a bit,” I told myself.

Then suddenly I heard a soft and feminine voice yelling at me. “Is that her?” I asked myself. I looked around. There was no one. Then I heard the voice once again: “Look up. Here, up.” It was the boy with the prayer rug standing on the rooftop. “You again?” he asked. I turned on my heel and ran straight back home.

Back home, and with shaking and tired hands, I washed my trousers and shirt and hung them out of the window; just as I had the previous night. “You must keep presentable, because tomorrow she will be there.”

The following morning, as I made my way to Ba’da Al-Nuzla, I couldn’t care less about the boy or my work. I was more worried about being betrayed by the girl than by the boy with the prayer rug, or whether I might get sacked from my job. All I hoped was that I would see the Pink Shoes again.

But the girl didn’t show up that day either.

I had walked up and down, watching the feet of every woman that walked past in the street, so that by the end of the day the whites of my eyes were saturated with the unrelenting black of their
abayas
and their shoes.

That night, as darkness fell, I didn’t go home. I went down lanes that had no street lights and kicked at the dark with my legs as though it were something I might be able to scare off. But it didn’t work. The night came on, as it always did, and I was left wondering whether the Pink Shoes had ever existed.

Then I heard the boy’s voice again. “Excuse me,” the voice said. This time I didn’t run but turned around to look at him. He was now standing next to me. The boy was small and slim, and his small hands barely fitted around his rolled-up prayer mat. His large black round eyes looked up at me, ready to fire a question.

Not wanting to talk, I looked away. My eyes scanned the street hoping to see her shoes even in the darkness.

But the boy kept nudging me and pulling my shirt down to get my attention.

“What do you want?” I shouted, without looking at him. “Go on for
Allah’s
sake, say what you want and leave me alone.”

“Are you in love?” he asked me.

I looked at him again, trying to act normal.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because,” he said, “my father told me that in our village in Chad, lovers walk day and night aimlessly under the stars, moon and sun. Their bodies look like they belong to those who are dying because they don’t eat; and their eyes are all over the place, because their hearts are always shifting.”

I didn’t reply to the boy. I just staggered through the dusty streets of Ba’da Al-Nuzla back to my room.

Next morning, I still didn’t go to work. Instead, I headed to Ba’da Al-Nuzla and waited there from early morning to late in the evening. At times, I would walk up and down the dusty street, or sit on the burning sand, or stand leaning against the smouldering walls and suffer the sun’s reflective heat, and other times I would just crouch in the corner, wearily looking at every woman who passed down the street. But there were no Pink Shoes.

I felt stupid. Maybe this was all a game to her? Maybe she wanted revenge against men and wanted to make an example out of me, watch me fall on my knees and beg for her reappearance? Or maybe she wanted to demonstrate to her friends that she could bring a man to the brink of madness with just a few romantic notes?
Ya Allah
, maybe, now that she had got me where she wanted me—sitting next to a stinking rubbish bin all day long—she had decided to throw away her stupid shoes and was laughing under her veil.

The hot sleepless nights had taken so much energy out of me that by Friday morning, after another four fruitless days, I thought back to what the boy had asked. Was I in love? How could I love someone whom I had never seen or heard? I was just one of a thousand Al-Nuzla boys, hungry to talk to a girl and yearning to be loved by her.

No, I can’t be in love, I thought. All I have seen of her that makes her stand out from the rest are those Pink Shoes. I had read that men fall for intricate details of a woman’s body: a delicate mouth, or seductive eyelashes, and it is even said that the way women roll their hips can force a man’s heart into declaring instant love. But shoes? I must be the first man in history to fall in love with a woman solely because of her shoes. I needed to step back from this make-believe world and forget about her. “No, I am not in love,” I told myself. “I just dreamed of loving a woman for so long that I am falling in love with the idea of love.”

I tried to convince myself to stop waiting and to stop thinking about her. “I must go back to work tomorrow morning, and beg my boss for forgiveness,” I told myself. “I must forget about her. It’s over.”

B
UT ON SATURDAY morning I woke up smiling. I had had a beautiful dream and it had given me my strength back. Some dreams you can easily let go of, but others get hold of you so tightly that even as reality uproots them, you can find another spot to replant them and start all over again.

I had an idea.

I will go where she lives, I thought. I will go to the nine-storey building and wait for her. I would write her a note myself. There must be a way to get a message to her safely. “That’s right,” I told myself enthusiastically, “it is my turn now to tell her that she has cast a spell on me ever since she told me I was the only flower in the garden of her heart for all these weeks and months.”

And that day, another journey started, as I went in search of the girl. “This time, I will not fail,” I said to myself as I rinsed my dirty clothes.

Just then my boss phoned me. He said he had been ringing me for the last few days and shouted, “What kind of a foreign worker are you? Do you know how many people across the sea would give their lives to come to this country to work? I have men coming to me every day begging me for a job and you treat me like this.”

I said nothing. I just listened to him venting his anger; my mind was elsewhere. I was already beginning to compose a letter to her, struggling over whether to scorn her for her disappearance or dedicate the entire letter to how much I missed her words and shoes.

“Naser? Naser?” he kept yelling. Just before he slammed down the phone, he shouted, “I am tolerating you because of the loyalty you have shown me over the years but if you don’t show up tomorrow, you are fired.”

I hurried to my desk, took some paper from the back of my diary and wrote my first love letter. It wasn’t easy, but I wanted to write something that a poet might be proud of. Like the poems that made our poet in the camp great, and maybe even like the poetry that helped Antara Ibn Shaddad—the pre-Islamic poet and the son of a noble Arab father and an Abyssinian female slave—win the heart of the beautiful Abla. It took me various attempts to write something on paper that I was finally happy with. Antara would have been proud of me and wish me luck, I thought gleefully. I folded the letter until I could fit it in the palm of my hand, and got ready for a lover’s walk to the place where she lived.

I
T WAS SUNNY; a beautiful start to the day. Al-Nuzla was bubbling with life. People filled the street, and a chorus of voices swept across it. On my way towards the nine-storey building, a small child raced past me carrying a watermelon.

I arrived at the building, my folded note in my hand, intent on staying there until she appeared.

I stood opposite her building and looked up. The roof was covered with large antennae. Every floor contained two flats, each with a balcony. Air conditioners were attached to the outer wall, in the same place on each storey, forming a vertical line of black boxes. The water dripping from them had made blotchy streaks on the bricks.

All the people entering or leaving the building were dressed in full Saudi clothes. And none of the women were wearing Pink Shoes. I lamented that in all those times I saw her in Ba’da Al-Nuzla, I had focused only on the shoes and not on her other attributes. Why didn’t I take a mental measurement of her height? And why didn’t I notice something else about the way she walked, the width of her shoulders or a particular scent—anything that could have helped me find her again?

At exactly one o’clock, I heard the announcement for the early afternoon prayer beaming over the tannoys from the large mosque. I didn’t move an inch. Even though the second
azan
had started and the blind imam was already praying, I was still standing there. The only fear I had was that I was maybe chasing an illusion, that there was no girl any more, only a mirage of love in a loveless place.

I turned my head when I heard the heavy sound of an engine pulling up. It was the large, threatening black Jeep of the religious police. I turned away to look at the building. There was another car parking up outside the building.

The black Jeep stopped right in front of me, blocking my view. The shaded windows scrolled down and a man shouted. I heard what he was saying, but I didn’t bother to answer. I craned to see two women getting out of the other car. Just before they went inside, one of them turned her head towards me. She faced me for a few long seconds, before she quickly turned away.

Could that have been her? I thought. Should I try to pass her my note?

“What are you doing here?” shouted the religious policeman from inside the Jeep. I realised the note in my hand was incriminating evidence. I crumpled it and shoved it inside my mouth. I chewed it, mixing it with lots of saliva so the ink would start running, and turned my head away from the Jeep and spat it out. The sweet words I had written for
habibati
had dissolved in my mouth.