‘Just asking.’
‘Who said that to you?’
‘Aunt Hissa’s son, Faisal. He told me, “Your dad’s a crook because they put him in prison.” Why did they put you in prison?’
Suleiman smiled. ‘Because …’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older.’
‘I’m older now, look.’
Fahd leapt to his feet to show how tall he was. Suleiman left his work and went out of the bathroom carrying the boy on his right arm, kissing him, and shouting, ‘I love you so much, God curse the devil inside you!’
‘Wiser than your years, little Fahd,’ he chanted in a loud, joyful voice, then sat him down on the sofa and tried to explain that he had made a mistake and they had punished him to ensure he didn’t do it again.
‘Who are they?’
‘The government.’
‘And what is the government?’
‘Well, if you made a mistake, for example, and broke the vase your mother bought last month or took the iron and burned her new dress, then Mum would punish you, right?’
‘Mum’s the government?’
Suleiman shook with laughter, shouting out to Soha who was making coffee in the kitchen. ‘Come and see the little madman of the family!’
Fahd angrily broke in on his laughter and mockery. ‘Fine, so you broke something when you were a boy and they put you in prison?’
Suleiman’s hand froze on the child’s neck and his eyes reddened. He got up and went back to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Fahd heard a confused sound, like water pouring into a basin or sobbing.
All of this came back to Fahd now. He felt that his father had wanted to tell him that the thing he had broken was his heart, and with it those of his own parents. For Ali, loyalty to the government was of a piece with devotion to God; obedience to God’s appointed was a duty and to turn against him was the most evil act a man could commit.
Suleiman had wept bitterly in front of the bathroom mirror. Had he cried because he was thinking of his time in prison and the sorrow in his father’s eyes when he came to visit him in the last three years of his sentence? Was it from a private grief at leaving prison only to enter the prison of this melancholy country, having twice failed to commit suicide and put an end to his existence? But his marriage, settling down and the pleasure of his two children had caused him to look at life through new eyes.
Fahd was no run-of-the-mill event in Suleiman’s life. He took great pleasure in the upheavals of early childhood. He worried about the boy’s precocious, grand ideas. He never forgot the time that Fahd surprised him by asking, ‘Dad? Who was it that occupied Saudi Arabia?’ as he turned at the end of Urouba Road on their way home from Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary School. He laughed delightedly while his skinny son said in exasperation, ‘Don’t laugh, Dad.’
‘That’s a political question, Fahoudi.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It means,’ answered his father as he pulled away from the junction of Urouba and Layla al-Akheliya, ‘that it’s a tricky question. Look,’ he explained. ‘In the beginning there were the tribes.’
‘What are tribes?’ Fahd asked.
His father answered hesitantly. ‘Tribes are people who lived together in groups, in Riyadh, Qaseem and Ha’il and so on. Then King Abdul Aziz came along …’ He suddenly fell silent, without adding, ‘…and occupied them.’
As they drove past the arcades, Fahd shouted, ‘I wish I were a king!’ He stretched out his hand in a military salute. ‘I’d tell them, “Knock the schools down.”’
Suleiman burst out laughing, then Fahd asked, ‘Dad? If you were king, what would you ask for?’
Suleiman was quiet for a bit. ‘Maybe I’d resign!’ he said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean I’d say that I don’t want to be king.’
‘But why, Dad? You could ask for any toy you wanted.’
There was nothing more beautiful than those distant childhood moments. The only thing that could wreck their happiness was the presence of Soha, who sometimes tried to curb the generosity and child-like lunacy Suleiman displayed around his son, claiming that he was spoiling him and making him unfit for polite company. Even after Suleiman was lying in his grave she continued to reproach him for not raising his son properly, for being unable to refuse Fahd anything and ruining him.
A Sudanese artist called Kamal, whom his father once met in an art gallery on Thalatheen Street in Ulaya and whose pictures, with their searing African palette, had gripped Fahd’s gaze and mind, said of the boy as he stood pointing at the canvases: ‘The soul of a great artist sleeps in his depths and it must be awoken.’
Fahd’s father gave full credence to this myth — or insane lie — and bought him sketchbooks, watercolours and oil paints while his mother, irritable and seething, muttered that it would distract him from his studies not to mention that the fumes from the oil paint gave Lulua asthma attacks. How Fahd missed him.
Possibly in exchange for penetrating and pleasuring her last thing at night, Fahd’s uncle chivvied his mother into ambushing her son and nagging him to put a stop to this outrage with oil paints that his late father had involved him in. But was it his father who got him involved, or had Suleiman himself been drawn in by the chance remark of a random Sudanese artist?
Stretched out on his bed, Fahd pondered: How can I become an artist, Father, now that you’ve betrayed me and left me all alone? How is it, my dear Kamal, that you managed to embroil both me and my father in your prophecy? If only you knew how my pores open and the hairs in my nostrils quiver when I smell the oils; how dizzying it is, how fatal. How worked up I get at the brilliance of the artists I love; how I flow into the tumult of their colours. Do you even realise, painting away so creative and conceited, that I have had to rip the sheet from my sketchpad into pieces no bigger than a postage stamp so that my mother does not find them and lose her temper as she warns of my uncle’s rage? I draw trees or birds on those small shreds. I love birds when they’re circling in the heavens with rare delight, but I hate them too. I fear them approaching me; I’m scared to touch them. I really hate their feathers: I gag when I see an abandoned feather floating on the water’s surface. I can feel them moving over my tongue, the scratchy tip creeping to the back of my throat and I choke on it, like it was a clinging hair, so much so that sometimes I almost throw up.
— 16 —
THE AFTERNOON OF THE following day Fahd told his mother that he would be going to the stadium with Saeed. She tried persuading him to watch the match on television, then started in with her old lament that he would never do well at his studies and wouldn’t get the marks he needed to go to study a respectable subject.
‘Look at Yasser studying medicine. He’s going to be a doctor one day.’
He hurried down the front steps cursing Yasser and Abu Yasser as her voice came from the living room: ‘Don’t be late.’
Wearing his thaub and his team’s cap, Fahd walked until he came to Tareeqati Café. When he turned off Urouba Road he didn’t see Saeed’s Honda and he went into the café and started leafing through a copy of Riyadh. He read the provocations and challenges exchanged by the two coaches and club presidents and a few of the statements by former players. His mobile blared out Fairouz’s Remember the Last Time I Saw You? It was Saeed to say he was on his way, and minutes later Fahd saw the car through the café window. He went out and got in.
They were very late and the stadium was full of spectators. They went in but could only find space in the South End next to the Hilal supporters. As they climbed the terraces the loudspeakers were playing the national anthem: