2008 - The Consequences of Love. (25 page)

She stretched her hand out and led me to the table. I pulled her back and drew her in tight until there was no gap between us.

I gently stroked her collarbone as if I were touching the only rose in the desert. I kissed her neck with the thirst of a pious Muslim who has sacrificed alcohol on earth for the rivers of red and white wine that run next to each other in
Allah’s
heaven. Then with her back still resting on my chest, she twisted her head towards me and gave me a quick kiss; she pushed against me with her buttocks and moved off to the table.

When I looked down, I saw the delicious food on my plate: rice and fried chicken, neatly placed with some salad leaves as decoration.

But my eyes were hungrier than my stomach. I thanked her for the meal but I couldn’t stop looking. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked; how her neck would have carried all Nefertiti’s golden necklaces and there would still be room for my kisses; how I loved the way she combined elegance with depth, love with strength, Egyptian blood with Eritrean.

But I couldn’t say anything. It was like learning a new language, her language. And stuttering words would not be the trait of a dedicated lover.

She was wearing pink lipstick that stood out against her dark brown skin, which looked even darker in the dim light. I wanted to see more of her face, so I moved all the candles on the table closer to her until she looked like a goddess in a temple shrine.

Suddenly the
azan
was announced for the Friday prayer and the spell was broken.

Fiore spoke first: “In half an hour the imam will arrive. Let’s hope his sermon doesn’t mess up our date.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” I groaned. She leaned forward, poured juice into the two glasses and passed one to me saying, “For you, darling.”

We started to eat. This was the first time we had eaten together, and we were both transported by the unfamiliar situation. I closed my eyes to listen to the way she chewed her food and sipped her drink. As she poured the last of the juice into our glasses, she glanced at me and looked away smiling.

“What?” I asked softly.

“It is strange,” she said, “how good I feel at this moment. I am just happy that simple and beautiful things can exist in life. All it takes is to go out and search for them.” And then she added, like an afterthought, “Patience and courage are the key to everything.”

After the meal, I complimented her on her cooking, and rested my hand on hers and looked at her in silence.

“Naser?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think less of me for what I did to get to meet you and for inviting you here to my room?”

I answered with a question, “Do you think less of me as a man for answering your calls and for doing what you asked me to do?”

She shook her head emphatically.

“Then nor do I,” I said.

We looked into each other’s eyes silently; only our fingers moved as they crawled on top of one another.

Then: “We have worked so hard to destroy the distance between us; for us to be in my room, yet, there are still obstacles to overcome,” she suddenly said.

“I am sorry about what happened the other day,” I said, “the first time together in your room.”

“I am sorry too,” she said. “To be honest I thought it would be easier. I thought my desire would melt away my fear.”

“Do you think it was too soon?” I asked. “Maybe we should wait…”

“Darling, I have been longing for you for so long and I worry that tomorrow might never come for us. Shouldn’t we take each day as it comes?”

“But…” I stopped, struggling to finish my sentence.

“Do you want to tell me something? Please,
habibi
, say what’s in your mind.”

I hesitated.

“
Habibi?
”

Holding her hand, I scratched her thumb. “OK,” I said, telling her about what Omar told Jasim and me, about how single girls and guys make love in Saudi Arabia. She chuckled.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked her.

“Because it is funny. Your friend Omar seems to speak with authority as if he knows all the young people of this country.
Habibi
, maybe some girls do what Omar said, because they like to have fun with lovers before they are arranged-married. But I love you.” She stopped, as if she wasn’t sure what she was going to say next. Then: “
Habibi
, I want us to make love like a man and a woman.”

She was biting her finger as she waited for my reaction, but I couldn’t manage a word.

She tilted her head, holding my hand.

“Fiore, I am so…I am just so worried about you. If anything happened to us…Just imagine what will happen to you if your father finally manages to force you into a marriage and your husband finds out that he was not your first?”

“You are the only man I think and dream about. I am with the man I want and that’s why I want to share all I have with you. I own my own body. My father doesn’t. I choose who I want to sleep with, and I have chosen you.”

As I crossed my arms across my chest to temper the beating of my heart, the second
azan
sounded, announcing the start of the Friday sermon. We looked towards the window as if the imam was standing right there, and braced ourselves for his voice which would thunder through at any moment.

I stretched out my hand and caressed Fiore’s face. The blind imam started his speech. We both fell quiet, absorbed in our thoughts. Only the imam’s voice could be heard; his speech was about jihad.

“
Ya Allah
” Fiore exclaimed, raising her voice. This was the first time I saw her agitated. “He and his virgins! When is he going to stop using us women as bait for war?”

I wanted to tell her that the best thing to do during the imam’s sermon is to think about beautiful memories instead. But I didn’t want to be a preacher myself.

She rose from her chair and came towards me. She put her hands on my thighs. Her necklace dangled before my eyes, and the sight of her breasts beneath her black shirt hypnotised me.

She kissed me on the cheek and straightened up. She slowly undressed. She turned around and began to blow out the candles, those furthest from the bed first. It was like watching a lioness walking in a confined place, rattling the cage from one side to another. I stood up and followed her, a lit candle in my hand, lighting her way from behind.

She stretched out her hand, keen to extinguish the last candle in the room.

“No,” I said, “a goddess should never be covered, not even by darkness.”

W
E MET EVERY day after college and most of the days during the weekends. Fiore did her housekeeping early in the morning, so that she could spend the rest of the day with me. We were so wrapped up in our happiness that we didn’t think about what was waiting for us if we made even the smallest of mistakes. But sometimes I wondered what would happen if we left the room unlocked and her father came in while we were silently lost in each other’s world. But Fiore said that he never came to the women’s section of the house when he was told there were female visitors around. And her father never suspected a thing. Whenever we passed him in the entrance hall, he would bow his head. Her mother never came to the room either. When I asked her about it, Fiore simply repeated what she had said that day at the beach: “My mother understands about love, because she never experienced it.”

We were obsessed with discovering one another’s bodies; in Fiore’s room with the curtain drawn against the daylight it was as if this was the sole purpose of our lives and nothing else mattered. We were taking our revenge on lost time. We would gaze at one another as if we were browsing through a never-ending picture book, which was magically different each time we opened it. With every
azan
that was announced, with every speech we heard from the blind imam, and with every sighting of the Jeep, of Basil and the religious police, I realised that the special world we had created together could be wiped out at any time. But we were determined not to be stopped by anything, not even by the fear of an uncertain future. We were intent that should they cut our love affair short, then they would not leave our bodies aching for more, our desires unfulfilled.

Maybe it was because she had been hidden from me for so long that I preferred her to be naked in the room. When she would complain, jokingly, that I didn’t appreciate the clothes she had picked out carefully, I would teasingly reply that her own skin had long won the battle on the catwalk in my eyes.

We only had freedom in her room and we expressed this freedom with our bodies. And we had much in our armour to inspire each other’s creativity, as we found out.

One afternoon, when the sun was blazing outside and we had shut out the world as usual, I told her that I had an idea that could make every bit of her body glow like Scheherazade.

“Have you got henna?” I asked.

“I’ll bring some from the kitchen,” she whispered and tiptoed through the candlelight to fetch it.

“Naser, where did you learn this?”

“Did you already forget? My mother worked as a henna artist. You have such delicate lines in your hands. They branch out so narrow yet I would like to follow them to their very end.”

“That might take a long time.”

“Not as long as it will take me to draw pictures here and here.” I stroked her legs and feet.

Hours later, and with her head propped up on a pillow, she watched as I sketched henna flower patterns on her thighs. Then I slowly crawled around her on all fours inhaling her body’s fragrance mixed with the earthy smell of the henna then exhaling my warm breath on her skin to dry the little wet rounds of pigment.

I pulled her up and sat on her chair, drawing her closer until she sat on my lap, spreading her legs over mine. She wrapped her arms around me. And with her buttocks anchored on top of my knees, I wrote my name in henna down the inside of her thighs, a letter at a time.

It took a while for the henna to dry. We lay on her bed, waiting patiently. But when the henna was fixed we made love and her thighs, hands and feet glowed, like a Fiore blossoming in eternity.

Some days all we did was play games, like foolish lovers. Her favourite was when I pretended to be a detective, tasked to find a mystery object.

“Thank you for coming at such short notice,” she would say, bowing her head.

“Always at your service,” I would reply. “You have told our department that there is a mystery object somewhere in your kingdom that needs to be found. I am the best detective in the world, better than Holmes the Inglesi. I will find the object, my Queen.”

“Come in,” she would say. She would turn around and walk into her empire.

I would follow her in and standing next to her bed, I would say, “My Queen, the mystery object can be anywhere in your kingdom, it might take a long time to find and therefore you have to be patient. Please lie down on the bed and wait.”

Then I would start the search, my lips hovering over her feet and kissing her toes; I would look up to see what lay ahead, and would see her kingdom lying stretched out in front of me.

D
URING THOSE BLESSED few weeks, I spent the afternoons with Fiore and the evenings at the Pleasure Palace with Hani, Fahd, Yahya and their friends. I didn’t want to raise Jasim’s suspicion that I was up to something, so I made sure to visit him now and then. But he complained that I had changed. “I am regretting that I have introduced you to books,” he would say with a smile. “I have turned my dearest into a hermit.”

In the absence of a phone in her house, Fiore and I had devised a routine to contact one another: I would be in Al-Nuzla Street dressed in my
abaya
by late afternoon on school days and early afternoons on Thursdays and Fridays, Saudi school holidays. I was to approach when I saw the Pink Shoes. But that routine was almost blown one day in December.

That afternoon, I looked through the peep-hole in my front door just as I always did before I left fully veiled to go to Fiore’s. There was no one in the hallway. I opened the door and rushed down the stairs. But just in front of the buildings main door, I bumped into Yahya. I was knocked back. I held the wall and steadied myself. “I am sorry,” he said, bowing his head.

I watched him as he made his way up the curved stairwell to my flat on the first floor. I heard him knocking on the door. I stood still and watched him through the gaps in the balustrade. But when he turned his head to look at me, I hurried out of the building, sweating more than usual under my
abaya
.

Later that evening, when I got to the Pleasure Palace, there was a gleam of happiness on Yahya’s face. He was playing a drum. Hani was clapping his hands and Fahd, dressed as usual in striking colours, was dancing. He was cutting the air with his hands as he rotated, and made little jumps up and down.

I joined Fahd on the dance floor. We stood in front of each other, our left hands behind our back, waving our right arms in the air.

“I wish we had swords,” Fahd said, laughing. “Then we could have done the sword dance.”

Yahya started singing in his throaty voice. “Soon I will find love. Soon I will find love.”

He stopped singing and clicking his fingers. He then opened his mouth and rolled his tongue to emit a long and loud ululation like a cheerful high-pitched cry of happiness.

After a few more songs and dancing, Hani and Fahd started racing after each other in front of the palace, and Yahya and I sat on the pavement.

Yahya suddenly said, “I will fall in love soon.”

“Who is the lucky boy?” I asked.

“It is a girl,” he said.

“A girl?”

“Why are you surprised?” he asked.

“Well, weren’t you laughing at me every time I told you I would find a girl in this country?”

“I know, but today I have realised that miracles can happen,” he said.

He told me about a woman he had bumped into in my hallway earlier that day. The moment she touched his chest, he said, his heart was reawakened. With a smile, he added that the girl was so affected that she couldn’t move and she kept watching him. She was nervous, he told me, he had seen her hands trembling. “Naser, I swear to you even though she was wearing a veil, I know she was smiling underneath it.”