Where Pigeons Don't Fly (26 page)

The following day she told him that a Bedouin had chatted her up after she had got out and in front of the security guards had started chanting, ‘The sure of step walks like a stunner,' unable to recall that the last word of the proverb should be ‘king'. Were women being truthful, or were they making it all up, fantasising that their femininity could arouse a man's lust? They might be being honest after all; men here were maddened by desire, hunting women any way they could. Many women had lived harrowing, painfully blighted childhoods, their formative years swinging back and forth between violence and tyranny, between psychological damage and physical harm. There was little Noha, surrounded by an army and with a mother who counted her breaths even as she slept, Thuraya who spent her days with a neglectful, filthy husband, and mischievous Tarfah who refused to accept the favouritism shown to her sisters.

 

–35 –

T
ARFAH'S CHILDHOOD HAD BEEN
painful and never peaceful, from her name, a sacrificial offering to her deceased grandmother, to its endless, depressing days.

One afternoon, in Class 2/3 at the Twenty-Sixth Middle School in Suwaidi, the gigantic school monitor, Halima the Ethiopian, had come to the door and asked for Tarfah. The grammar mistress standing in front of the blackboard motioned for her to go to the headmistress's office and as a terrified Tarfah crept out from behind her desk Halima added, ‘Bring your bag with you!'

The teenager froze, then snatched up her bag and went outside, cocking her head to the left. In the corridor leading to the headmistress's office Halima said to her, ‘Tarfah, your father's waiting for you at the entrance.'

Pulling the monitor's hand to make her stop she cried, ‘Has something happened to my family?'

‘No. You're suspended.'

‘Why?'

‘What, you don't know?'

At break time a sheikh had come to give the girls a religious lecture. He sat in the security guard's room, took the microphone and began addressing the girls who were drawn up in orderly rows in the playground.

Tarfah was rebellious and domineering and held sway over a little gang made up of Amani, Amal and Jawaher. The girls were sitting next to each other for the lecture and Tarfah started making fun of the sheikh's speech, waving her hands and waggling her head, a living representation of the bewildered old man hidden from view behind the four walls of the guard's room. Her friends, almost dead from laughter, buried their faces in their arms.

The headmistress had been standing on the edge of the playground, and she walked up and pointed with her stick, calling out Tarfah's name. Tarfah stood up and the headmistress signalled for her to move to the end of the row. When the lecture was over and the pupils scattered back to their classrooms Tarfah went to see the headmistress, who hadn't even had time to sit down at her desk.

‘Why was I moved during the speech?' Tarfah asked boldly. ‘They were all laughing!'

‘That is correct. However, moving one girl is quite sufficient and in any case you were the cause of the disturbance. Everything quietened down after you left.'

‘Or maybe it's because they've got connections … teachers or monitors or …'

This was a reference to Amani, whose sister taught maths at the school.

‘That's quite enough insolence!' broke in the headmistress, waving her stick threateningly.

‘I'm not insolent!'

‘Get out of my sight before I beat you.'

The headmistress shoved her.

‘Insolence!' said Tarfah, her mouth twisted in contempt.

‘Come here, you little bitch!' the headmistress shouted.

Tarfah turned towards her, her eyes throwing out sparks and her hands trembling with rage, then spat at her in disgust as she shouted, ‘You're the bitch!'

The headmistress drew up an order for three days punitive exclusion, then called her father and asked him to come over immediately and collect his daughter who was being suspended for misbehaviour.

As the monitor accompanied Tarfah to the exit, Tarfah begged her to let her apologise to the headmistress; she might change her mind. Knocking on the steel gate to make the guard open up, the monitor said, ‘The headmistress has given an order. It's been signed and sent.'

She gave Tarfah a superior, vicious look. ‘Try behaving yourself next time.'

The fourteen-year-old Tarfah went out, tripping over her
abaya
and holding her school bag and the suspension order. Her father took her away. Her mother was in hospital, having given birth early that morning to a little girl, Ilham. No sooner did he reach the house than he dragged her inside like a piece of livestock and pelted her with blows without knowing why he did so himself. He was panting, hitting and shouting,

‘You want to show us up in front of other people? God destroy you!'

He left her crumpled up in her grimy
abaya
and went out, locking the front door and Tarfah burst into noisy tears, wailing, ‘God curse you! May He bring you death! Please God, let me die and leave this life.'

She hated her father very much; she hated living with him. It tormented her that the only reason she had spat at the filthy
headmistress was for his sake. The woman had called her a bitch, which made him a dog. She'd been defending him!

After she had calmed down, having woken from a nap that lasted the whole afternoon, she stood in front of the mirror and said to herself, ‘The headmistress is right: I am a bitch!'

Giving a sigh, she added, ‘And my father's a dog, too, a dog sixty times over!'

They were taught in their lectures that flirting was a serious matter, one of the greatest sins:
a disgrace in this world and in the world to come an exceeding torment
—words that fell heavy on the soul. Just considering the possibility (i.e. of talking with a young man) would strike the young girls not only with fear, but with outright terror.

After that day, however, Tarfah longed for the chance, if only to defy her father, though she was not in need of a man, or a woman for that matter; she needed to speak and spill it out, if only to a mirror, so she might bring a halt to the oppression that had begun to eat away at the edges of her two beautiful hands.

Her father was troubled by her. Her mischief and insubordination made him anxious. She wasn't like his other daughters, who were utterly calm and cold. There was a hidden fire within her. She loved people, mixed with them and made friends with all the other pupils. Everyone knew her for her rowdiness and good humour while at her sisters' schools their fellow pupils were scarcely aware of their existence.

It was a shameful day for her father when he first introduced a telephone into their house in Suwaidi, where the family was at that time going through something of a crisis. Nobody was to answer when it rang except him, or their mother if he was away. Having taken the caller's name and handed the receiver to one or other of his daughters, he would remain next to her,
listening in. The reason for all this angst over the telephone was a mystery to the girls. Of all of them Tarfah was the most resentful of her father and mother; how she longed to leap up at the first ring and answer!

The only thing that recommended her to her father was her excellent marks at the end of each year, which made him happy. Neither did he have any worries about her gang of friends at primary school—where they were taught by a paid tutor who was known to the family and who also gave lessons to the daughters of neighbours he knew—most of whom came from villages around Riyadh such as Sudair, Huraimla and Thadiq or from the traditional city neighbourhoods of Old Shamesi, Sabala, Umm Sulaym and Jaradiya. But when he registered her at the Twenty-Sixth Middle School he became uneasy. It was an excellent government-run establishment, part of a complex that included primary, middle and secondary schools, but its pupils were utterly different to those at her fee-paying primary. They were fearless.

Tarfah gradually grew apart from her village friends and extended the circle of her acquaintances until she came to lead a small gang of her own. She was in charge, the one who performed all the most daring missions. Hearing stories of girls' relationships with boys, she was amazed and aspired to do likewise. She would see the secondary school students, with their clothes, their sexiness and their shameless gestures, and returning home would be shocked by her mother's refusal of her reasonable requests:

‘Mum, I want to cut my hair.'

‘Mum, all my friends are dying their hair.'

But her mother refused and refused until she grew weary and thinking of a way to shut Tarfah up, told her to ask her
father, at which point Tarfah's demands instantly ceased. That wasn't so important, however; the difficult part was how to broach the subject of her teachers' demands with her father because he would meet them with abuse and invective until, resolving to have done with his insults, she made her older sister Asma ask in her stead, at which he responded instantly.

Tarfah hated them all, starting with her own name, which had been given to her in memory of her grandmother. Her sisters, Asma, Amal, Ahlam and Ilham, had modern, pretty names that started with vowels, while hers stood out like a mark of shame. Why Tarfah?

‘A curse on my grandmother and my grandmother's father!' she would say to herself when the intoxication of her rancour reached its peak. ‘Their names all begin with A or I—soaring, confident letters—and I get a T, squat and heavy as a toad.'

‘It's enough that you have the honour of bearing your grandmother's name and keeping her memory alive,' they would say and she would weep.

‘Damn her and damn her memory! Who is she, Lady Diana and no one told me?'

Despite the strong, undaunted image she presented to her sisters, Tarfah's existence was fringed with tears. The thought of running away had often got the better of her as a teenager, but to actually take off? Where to? Not to mention the fact that the idea was insane and extremely difficult to pull off. It was perhaps her greatest fantasy.

She would be the last person in the house to go to sleep and she found herself in the grip of a strange habit: she would make her way to the front door and, opening it, would look up the street in both directions, though mostly peering to her
left where the street stretched furthest with a mysterious turning at the far end.

For several nights she went on opening the door and looking left, as though waiting for someone or something, until one night she felt the sharp edge of a leather sandal strike the top of her head, then a meaty palm twist her face round and a savage kick to her body. It was her father, beating her and swearing at her, biting his tongue to muffle his voice for fear of waking the household or creating a scene.

She ran to her bed and crept beneath the blanket, stuffing her sleeve in her mouth to silence the sound of her sobs. Catching up with her he stood before her body interred in the blanket, then kicked at her foot.

‘Cut it out! Understood?'

She cut it out and fell silent and in the morning he came to wake her up as usual, with a sudden prod from his foot.

Whenever Tarfah remembered those times she would ask herself,
Why was I standing there at the door? And even if his suspicions that I was waiting for someone were correct, why didn't he ask me who it was?

Two days after the incident her father brought it up again. He hadn't told her mother, but he impressed upon her that she had better watch out. His attentions became so oppressive that if he sat to sip his cup of coffee at sunset and Tarfah wasn't there in front of him he would dispatch Amal or Ahlam to find her and report what she was up to.

Sometimes, she would watch their neighbour as he stood outside the door to his house, patting the head of his young son or even sitting him on his lap, though he was really too old for it. Occasionally, he would take the boy's hand and laugh and play with him. Whenever Tarfah saw this she either
laughed or felt scornful. From her parents she had learnt that patting on the head was a sin; it was a form of sexual harassment and molestation, even when it was the father himself that did it.

Now, grown up, with her second husband gone and her only daughter, Sara, sharing her bed, she still woke every morning with the feeling that any moment a foot would strike her where she lay, even now, a full ten years after her father's death.

Her father had been so tender and jolly with his brother's daughters. She would be consumed by jealousy to see him laughing and joking with her cousin Maha, who openly prayed that God grant him a long life instead of her own father.

‘If only God had taken you with him!' Tarfah would mutter to herself.

 

–36 –

If only God had taken me with him!

F
AHD HAD REPEATED THESE
words to himself many times through his endless misery in the week that followed his father's burial beneath the soil of the Naseem Cemetery. He said them again after his mother's marriage, against his wishes, to the uncle he couldn't stand, and after learning of his mother's death by torture. And, finally, he said them as he sat there in the detention cell of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, where he was merely a rich joke in the mouths of the bearded men who brought him for interrogation: the hawk-eyed man and with him a muscular fellow, cheerful and mocking, and a third individual with an uncovered head and an incipient bald patch at the front of his pate.

They sat him on a chair at the far side of the room and the hawk-eyed man scattered his belongings on the table, tipping the bag and letting them fall: his wallet, a gift from Tarfah with the Givenchy logo, a cheap pen, the 3G Nokia mobile phone, various bits of paper (mainly receipts from Maktaba), a fob in the form of a small silver elephant from which hung the keys to his Hyundai, Saeed's flat and the inner and outer doors of their house in Ulaya, and the primitively-worked olive-stone prayer beads.