Two more rose up with him and they headed to the three steps that led to the stage. At first, some of the audience assumed that this was part of the play, A Moderate without Moderation, which addressed the issue of a middle ground in Islam. After all, modern plays were prone to incorporate such scenes. But the auditorium lights came on and security guards struggled to hold off the vandals, who were trying to get on to the set and rip up the pictures of women. Then others clambered up on the left and the destruction began. Whenever the security men managed to block one of them, another would pop up on the opposite side of the stage and smash whatever he could lay his hands on. One man, with a short beard like pubic hair, was pulling the bulbs from the light emplacements beneath the stage and smashing them against anyone who got in his way. Another strongly resembled Yasser. He was in a rage, his open mouth disgorging curses and obscenities.
Fahd watched as the fundamentalists smashed up the set. Some tussled with the actors and members of the audience jumped up in protest at their behaviour. In the back row sat an American critic who had come to speak about contemporary American poetry at a literary festival. He was dumbfounded, his eyes moving between the stage and the upper circle where some female audience members, sitting in a designated area separate from the men, had started to scream. This was true theatre, performed on life’s stage. Chairs started to be raised on both sides, light fittings hurled like swords on some Islamic battlefield of yore, and in one depressing scene punches were exchanged, while the American followed proceedings with the camera in his mobile phone.
After an hour of active combat and struggle to control the rampant extremists, one of the security guards fired two shots in the air, and everyone stampeded for the exit in alarm.
Fahd looked around for Saeed but couldn’t see him. He sat down between two rows of seats high up at the back, waiting for the hubbub to die down and a few minutes later made his way down to the exit. One of the men had been arrested and Fahd watched as he was forcibly led off to a security vehicle between two security officers, who then returned and fetched another detainee. Most of them had fled at the sound of the gunshots.
Outside stood three young men. One was wearing a tracksuit and had his hair drawn back and fastened with a rubber band. His voice was loud and angry: ‘What do they want? If they don’t like the theatre then they shouldn’t come!’
He was answered by a second youth, whose thaub pocket was ripped: ‘A theatre outside the city and they still won’t let us be. Cafés outside the city and they follow us there. Where are we meant to go exactly? God curse those vampires.’
Fahd searched for Saeed with flickering eyes. He examined the café outside and saw tables full of young men passing around a phone that showed clips of the stage assault.
‘Send it to me on Bluetooth!’ he heard one say.
‘Just a second,’ said a man studying the video. ‘I’ll give it a filename.’
‘The Yamama Raid,’ a third shouted sarcastically. The names of Islamist military operations always included the location where they took place: the Manhattan Raid, the Alhambra Raid, the Granada Raid, the Badr al-Riyadh Raid …
A hand suddenly clamped down on Fahd’s arm and he spun round in fright to find Saeed laughing, sour and sly: ‘Hah! You were scared, coward!’
Fahd took hold of him and led him away. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place is stifling.’
As they headed towards the car, Saeed said, ‘All this open air and pleasant weather and you call it stifling? My friend, don’t be so ungrateful.’
Laughing hard he said, loud and mocking and speaking in classical Arabic, ‘What ails thee, Akrama? Wilt thou cede the matter to sinful Quraish?’
When they were in the car, Saeed said that he had received a text from his work colleague. ‘It’s Rashed, the guy I told you about. He’s the one who encouraged me to read up on these groups: a strange person, mysterious and never smiling. You think he hasn’t been following what you’re saying, but when he speaks you realise he was with you all along.’
They drove to Musafir, an old working-class coffee shop tucked away inside a petrol station and frequented by students, the unemployed and truck drivers. When they reached the entrance a solitary figure in the far corner waved his hand, his beard sprinkled with a little white and an incipient bald patch on his head; he had placed his shimagh and aqqal on the ground beside him and was gripping the hose of the towering shisha pipe. Saeed shook his hand and introduced him to Fahd and the man smiled, his eyes narrowing further.
Saeed ordered apple tobacco and strong black tea. His expression had completely altered; his cheeriness, the laughter and derision, was gone, and he seemed sad as he stirred the coals on top of the tobacco plug.
‘Something’s ruined your mood today. Everything OK?’ Rashed asked.
Saeed recounted what had happened at the theatre while Rashed, eyes like slits, listened intently. When Saeed had finished and silence had descended, Rashed puffed out thick white smoke, coughed a little, and said, ‘Look Saeed, that lot didn’t appear out of thin air. We made them, us and our grandfathers before us, from their first flowering before the Battle of Sabilla finished them off, through to the bombings and armed confrontations of recent years, by way of the assault on the Grand Mosque and the Afghan Jihad, or the Awakening as they call it.’
Saeed interrupted to make the point that Saudi society could not bear sole responsibility and Rashed nodded in agreement, stating that society, the government, America and the entire world had played a role in feeding and propagating their movement: ‘That’s right. There are those who fatten them up then get sucked in themselves.’
He took a short drag on the pipe and exhaled skywards. ‘They’re a cancer, my friend. Whenever people think the malignant cells have been cut out a new one suddenly appears.’
Despairingly, cursing everyone around him, Rashed unburdened himself. His grief rose to his throat and a long-suppressed tear rattled in his chest as he started to talk about his wife, who had abandoned him years before after a sheikh had given her a ruling that if her husband didn’t pray in the mosque then she wasn’t permitted to live with him in the same house.
‘They brought my roof down, friends. They destroyed my house and my family.’
On the way home, Fahd seemed obsessed with Rashed’s personality, so vengeful that he now spoke openly without looking about to check. Saeed changed the subject, and talked about the preparations for the cup final. They chatted about the match between Hilal and Ittihad and through his familiar, sad laughter, Saeed said, ‘There’s nowhere left but the stadium, my friend: it’s the only place the beards don’t go.’
— 14 —
A GLOOMY, ENDLESS EVENING. FAHD sat in the bedroom that had become his home. There was a gentle knocking at the door.
‘What?’ he snapped.
‘Can I come in?’ asked Lulua in a pleading voice.
She came in carrying a white sheet of paper and colouring pens.
I know this little scamp. She can be as polite as you like when she wants something, he thought as Lulua said with the playfulness they both missed, ‘Best brother and greatest artist and sketcher in the world?’