Where Pigeons Don't Fly (19 page)

‘I caught this scent that left me light-headed. She was stroking my head and saying, “Seems you're too old for these games.”'

She was on the verge of tears as she looked at Fahd.

‘Must I lose what pleasure is left to me just because I'm thirty-seven? You can't imagine the risk I'm taking with my sisters and family by going into that café, the fear I feel when I'm wiping my face with a handkerchief covered in rose-water and spraying heavy Oriental perfume until the smell goes away.'

Was she missing tenderness and warmth? She wasn't looking for relationships with women, but she needed intimacy and love, to be held tight.

‘What can I do with a man whose entire life is hotels,
shisha
, friends and satellite TV? Shall I look for another man? “Thuraya,” I tell myself, “at least avoid committing a sin!”'

‘What do you mean?' asked Fahd. ‘What sin?'

She looked out of the car window at a fat white cat that leapt off a rubbish bin and scurried off as a Yemeni emerged from his room in a loincloth and white T-shirt and threw the leftovers of his chicken ribs in its direction.

‘My darling Fahd, you know a relationship with a stranger is considered adultery and my relationship with you hasn't gone that far, but I'm scared.'

With a happy childhood and troubled youth in the large family home in Jeddah, Thuraya had been pampered by her late father. In year two of secondary school she had loathed mathematics but the woman who taught the subject, Miss Awatef, gave her such looks of tenderness and admiration that Thuraya followed her lead and passed with flying colours despite knowing nothing at all.

In middle school she had been very interested in her cousin, the son of her paternal uncle. Her brother had married this cousin's sister, and she assumed she would marry the boy. She
went to the house next door, where they lived, and set about ironing his clothes when he was due to travel to Cairo, but she lost hope and consented to marry her husband.

In the beginning her new life was fun. ‘I admit he was handsome. At the start of our marriage he'd drown me in presents but everything broke down after the first year. I remember the time I made up my mind to leave him and go to my family in Jeddah, that thing my mother used to say to me and my sisters came back to me: “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, my girl.”'

Thuraya told how in a modest, working class home in the East Riyadh neighbourhood of Salehiya, near Salehiya Roundabout on the right-hand side after the petrol station, there in the house where her in-laws lived, her husband lay sleeping in the dining room. He was due to get up and attend Friday prayers at the mosque with his brothers, and Thuraya, in obedience to his mother's instructions, laid out the food in the dining room and woke her husband, who opened his eyes with difficulty and then went back to sleep. When she woke him for the third time he sat up on the floor-cushions scowling and sent his meaty palm flashing out towards her. Her soft ear rang and a wobbling tear descended. It was the first time he had laid a hand on her and it wouldn't be the last.

Thuraya stopped and murmured at Fahd, ‘I wish I'd known you ten years ago, back when I had my strength and my desire to take revenge on him. I would have betrayed him and bedded you whenever I liked.'

She married a year before her cousin. When she gave birth to her first son at her family home in Jeddah, and while she was in her forty-day seclusion, she went to the window of her second-floor flat to watch her former sweetheart's wedding
procession. She laughed as she remembered the scene: ‘I was peering from the window like in those television dramas and weeping with grief while my firstborn wailed on the bed. Can you imagine?'

Thuraya spent long years virtually untouched in bed. She imagined her life to be a good one, settled and safe, but from a woman in the neighbourhood and the wife of one her husband's friends she learnt that they had sex more than once a day. One of them said that her husband would come home exhausted and couldn't have his afternoon nap without one; the other confided that her husband used to rouse her when she was fast asleep at night to take his pleasure. Looking at them both Thuraya asked herself, ‘What makes them so special compared to me? Their dark skin? Their ugliness?' But though she might tell herself these things she went through a period devoid of self-confidence, which she gradually began to regain with the adolescent Fahd, before he, too, eventually left her.

Once, she said to him: ‘Don't go thinking that I'm telling you about my problems and his neglect just to excuse my betrayal or get you to sympathise with me. It's not that at all, Fahd. You might not believe it, but ten years ago my husband and I abandoned each other. We don't do any of the stuff that married couples do. My six-year-old girl was a whim of mine. I wanted a little boy or a girl so I went in to see him all covered in perfume, even though he doesn't deserve it, and that was the last time he did it.'

 

–26 –

F
AHD'S TIME WAS DEVOTED
to the art pages of the Kanoun website, his exhibitions, and his worn-out mother and sister, turned in on herself in their house in Ulaya, never seeing anyone and never seen. Her time was divided between caring for their mother, her schoolbooks and writing precocious Islamic anthems. For fun, Lulua would invent rhymes and riddles, raising her voice to make herself feel someone else was in the house as she waited for Fahd to take her out to Cone Zone in his new car to buy toffee ice cream. Their uncle knew nothing about their excursions. They would steal ten minutes to go to some nearby shop in Ulaya Street or Urouba before their uncle returned and so as not to be late back to their mother who had aged painfully quickly in the last two years.

‘Is something wrong with Mum?'

But Lulua never answered. She would dodge the question by starting some new topic of conversation. ‘Have you seen what my uncle's arranged …?'

Once, as they stood waiting for cream cheese
fateer
from the Damascus Fateer House on Layla al-Akheliya Street, he cornered her. ‘You throw me out of the house and hide everything from me, even my mother's disease.'

She told him that their mother had had a tumour in her colon for the last four months. ‘Seems that it's benign.'

‘Seems!' he shouted in anger. ‘What do you mean, “seems”? Listen to me, Lulua, I have to know: is it malignant or benign?'

Gradually she told him and finally conceded that it was malignant, though, according to the doctor, it was in its early stages and a cure seemed likely, God willing. But the uncle said that cures came from God and even Yasser the doctor said that the treatment would be painful and psychologically damaging; herbs were healthier and more effective.

After sunset prayers each day their uncle would open the street door and come inside with his bulk and muttered incantations. The cat would flee from the entrance with her kittens, and he would climb the long staircase panting loudly, short of breath and searching for Lulua, who would prepare a glass of water into which she had dipped a strip of fine Hejaz paper dyed with saffron. Having blown over the water for several minutes he would sit down next to Soha, give her three mouthfuls and start blowing on her as he held her forehead in his right hand, tugging at her roughly while reciting Qur'anic verses and puffing at her face and chest until at last she gave a sigh and forcefully thrust his hand away. His strong grip hurt her and no sooner did he desist than she would slump, her eyes drooping, and sleep with the calm of the dead, as though she had run vast distances during his recitation and now he was done she was seeking out the nearest bench in a public park to stretch herself out to nap.

On their way back to the flat after picking up the
fateer
the message tone sounded on Fahd's phone.

I love you, the sweetest man in all of Sham
.

His conscience painfully unfurled, tree-like, until his limbs trembled. He thought back to how Thuraya had made a fool of him, making him drive to a strange and filthy flat, throwing
her small handbag, patterned like snake skin, on to the living room sofa and embracing him.

Burying her head in his chest she had lifted it up to face him, her narrow, ardent eyes turned towards him. Though he had responded, he was tense and frightened. She pulled him to her by his hair and he surrendered like a suckling infant, led on like a masochist who needs a firm hand to proceed. She gasped and thrust his head down but at the critical moment he leapt up like a cat sensing danger and fled to the kitchen where he opened the tap over the sink. The long stream of water made a loud sound as it struck the bottom of the zinc basin, drowning out the gurgling of the water in his mouth as he tipped his head back then ejected the water in a single spurt, spitting as if hawking up his guts. Thuraya didn't immediately understand what had happened but he motioned to her that they should leave.

Slumped in the living room at Saeed's flat, the smell was still in his nostrils. It had the scent of agarwood oil, and though not in and of itself unpleasant, the sudden image of the dark oil that his uncle had scattered on his father's white casket made him gag. Was this the reason why, to Saeed's astonishment, he had abstained from food for two whole days?

‘Come on man, she'll come right in the end, God willing!' Saeed said, assuming his fast had been precipitated by his mother's illness and recent decline.

For two days the smell of oils never left him. He squeezed the paint tube, moving the rough brush distractedly over the paint and staining the canvas the purest black then suddenly attacking it with red, sketching out a small bird hovering in the top left corner that almost escaped the edge of the canvas to fly around the living room ceiling. When Saeed asked him if
he wanted anything from outside, he handed him the wrung-out, empty tube of white paint and told him they could be found at Maktaba on Ulaya Street or any branch of Jarir. He returned to the painting. Along the bottom edge he painted a bunch of hands, just hands held aloft, impossible to tell if they were pointing to the sky, bearing witness to something, threatening someone or raised in supplication to the bird in the top left corner.

By dawn the next day the paint had dried a little. With Saeed still sound asleep, Fahd opened a small tube of white paint and selected a one millimetre brush with a rounded, tapered point. Very delicately he swept up the white paint and in the centre of the canvas, right in the eye of its stormy blackness, began to draw exceptionally fine white lines, bunched together and bowed like swords. At first he imagined he was painting palm branches, bent and flying through the air, but after an hour spent hunched over the canvas in the quiet of the hateful city the outlines of a little feather started to appear, rocking in the heart of the painting; a bird's feather falling from the lofty heavens to a sickeningly silent city. It seemed to be swaying between two skyscrapers, but it was bigger than both of them, the artist's lens held close against it, rendering the vast towers no more than a distant backdrop to the scene.

Fahd painted with precision and perfection while in his mind an old memory unfurled of his Aunt Heila's house in Buraida, of the wood fire in the coffee room where one cold winter's night he had been playing with cousin Faisal, Hissa's son, and Heila's daughters, Shareefa and Lateefa.

The elder daughter, Shareefa, ordered them to all place their hands on the floor then suddenly lifted hers: ‘The car has flown!'

They kept their hands on the floor, alert and repeating warily and suspiciously,

‘It has not flown …'

Whoever got it wrong and raised their hands saying, ‘It's flown,' was out of the game, and so on until there was a winner.

‘My mother Noura's flown.'

‘She hasn't flown …'

‘The cat has flown.'

‘It hasn't flown …'

‘The pigeon's flown.'

‘It's flown.' and everybody raised their hands as one, while Fahd wavered for a moment before lifting his own.

‘Fahd, you're out,' screamed Shareefa.

‘No I'm not,' he shouted angrily.

‘You didn't lift your hands fast enough.'

‘Pigeons don't fly!' he said, swaying.

‘Pigeons fly, you idiot!' said Lateefa, laughing.

‘Fine, Fahd gets a let-off,' said Faisal sympathetically. ‘Let's carry on.'

Sharifa thought for a bit then shouted, ‘The palm tree's flown!'

‘It's hasn't flown …'

‘The feather duster's flown!'

‘It hasn't flown…'

‘The feather's flown.'

‘It's flown,' said Fahd.

‘It hasn't flown,' shouted Faisal and Lateefa together.

The children began arguing in the still of a night broken only by the chirrup of cockroaches on the tall palms in the courtyard. Shareefa said that feathers don't fly and Fahd objected loudly and angrily, saying that feathers flew.

‘No, no. Wrong,' yelled Faisal and Lateefa. ‘Feathers don't fly. It's the pigeons that fly.'

Did pigeons fly? In his friend's flat in Maseef, Fahd peered at the painting and thought back, spreading the wings of his memory and flying away to where the velvety pigeons in his uncle's yard in Buraida scuttled on red legs, pursued by Yasser or Faisal. They dashed about flapping their clipped wings, tipping forward on to their breasts and righting themselves, then continuing their scampering and pecking at the tacky earth floor.

He remembered an old folk story from Buraida that he had heard as a child, about a young carpenter whose mother lived with him in a house with a yard where a large thorn tree rested against the top of the wall. The young carpenter sat in its shade all day making doors and windows, until his mother grew sick of his constant presence, which prevented her from meeting her lover and being alone with him. She wracked her brains for a way to make her son go to work outside the house. One day she summoned up her old woman's cunning and came up to him, mumbling and mortified, to complain that the birds in the thorn tree were watching her naked and that the only way to get rid of these peeping fowl was to cut down the tree. She got her wish and her son lost his cool shade. He left to work beneath a distant tree and she, free of his constant company at home, could have her lover visit whenever she wanted.