‘Your problem is that you take life seriously, even though it’s not worth it,’ Saeed would always tell him. The truly incredible thing was that Saeed’s extensive culture and learning could coexist with this demented pursuit of lust. When Fahd questioned him about the contradiction he’d laugh. ‘There’s no contradiction: it’s all culture.’
One girl, Noha, was exceptional but Fahd was not in love with her. For her to leave the house meant mobilising the ‘Armies of Christendom’ as he put it; she was unable to go out without being accompanied by her entire family, and so he steered clear, until he discovered some comfort for his own misfortunes in her voice and past. She started calling him every day on the landline in the flat (the ‘den’ as Saeed called it) then got hold of his mobile number.
One day she left home in the company of the horde, all their vast baggage and retinue in tow, and arranged to meet Fahd at Mamlaka Tower in the afternoon. He stood staring nervously at the Rabei flower shop until she appeared before him and, flustered, shook his hand. Fahd grew increasingly disconcerted as she closed her eyes behind the niqab and trembled like a madwoman. He left her after a few minutes. Later, she confessed that she had nearly taken him in her arms: ‘I just love your eyes! she said, then added, ‘Not to mention your golden moustache.’
He chuckled. ‘Golden, or ginger?’
Saeed always said that the girl who wouldn’t go out with you after the second phone call wasn’t worth your time. ‘Love is business, my friend,’ he would say, before delivering his famous line: ‘Do you think a businessman would put all his capital into a project that wouldn’t turn a profit for a whole month?’
‘Of course not,’ Fahd would laugh.
Profit, in Saeed’s eyes, meant holding a hand, giving it a squeeze (sometimes a kiss), a playful slap on the buttocks, a breathless embrace, a deep, long kiss and so on. To call moans and heavy breathing down a phone line ‘profit’ was ridiculous, hardly worth the effort. Why? Because watching porn and doing the job yourself was a sight better than the self-deception of bringing yourself off to a panting, moaning voice.
Fahd didn’t answer the missed calls from his mother and sister but, lifting the receiver of the phone in the flat, he was startled to hear his mother weeping and reproaching him for ignoring them. He gave a deep, tragic sigh and said harshly, ‘It was you who decided where your interests lay. Everything my uncle did was designed to get me thrown out, and you just tried to keep him happy. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who wanted me out of the house!’
Through her tears she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Fahd! I’m still your mother and Lulua’s your sister.’
She wouldn’t hang up until she had persuaded him to come round on those days when his uncle was away, especially now that her illness had become of serious concern. She said, ‘No one knows how long they’ve got, my son.’
It pricked his conscience and he made up his mind to stop by on the nights when his uncle was sleeping with his other wives. They settled into their routine. Sometimes his mother would beg him to stay the night and despite the appeal of life in the ‘den’ he would agree. Everything that was outlawed and forbidden in his uncle’s kingdom was freely available in Saeed’s lair. In Ulaya, there were no satellite channels, no glossy magazines or daily papers, no pictures, music or songs, no computer and no Internet; in the flat, there was all that and more.
Soha spent most of her time resting but only slept in her bedroom when her husband was at home; during the day she dozed in the dining room next to the kitchen, a small envelope beside her pillow full of folded strips of paper on which were written Qur’anic verses in yellow saffron. Without opening it she would take one and dip it straight into a glass of water until the liquid changed colour and then she would drink, wetting her chest and stomach and intoning prayers to God on behalf of her lungs that trembled like a pair of birds: ‘Oh God, Lord of mankind, send me strength. Heal me, for You are the Healer, who alone has the cure, the cure that never fails.’
Her view of life had changed and become more religious. Had her illness done this, or was it her new husband, the imam, who had turned their life in this house upside down? The marriage was not contracted to protect his brother’s wife or his brother’s children. These hadn’t even been fleeting considerations. It was done for divine reward in return for making devout a home that had once been immodest, wayward and sinful.
‘How do you feel?’ Fahd asked her.
‘It’s women’s troubles, my son; don’t bother yourself about it. Just stay close to me.’
One afternoon, Lulua placed a pot of mint tea before her mother and brother in the dining room with its bolsters and their colourful wool covers. Fahd poured his mother a glass and she asked him to fetch the phone book on the dressing table in her bedroom so she could call a technician to come and fix the air conditioner in the living room, which had started pumping out hot air.
‘Maybe it needs filling up with Freon,’ he said as he went to her room.
Searching on the dressing table and bedside table for the phone book he spied a small religious pamphlet, the kind that were given away free with cassette tapes in mosques and waiting rooms. The glossy cover carried a picture of a tree’s branches against a sunset and the title: The Efficacy of Charms and Herbs in Treating Cancer.
He skimmed through and read a few lines from the introduction that declared that the best treatment for the most dangerous disease of our times — cancer — was prayer, Qur’anic amulets, incantation and blowing. The pamphlet provided testimonies of cancer victims who had turned their back on the lies and fabrications of medical doctors and placed their faith in God. It claimed that one doctor, an American, had been rendered speechless with amazement when scans showed his patient’s body entirely free of tumours, and when he asked, ‘Where were you cured?’ the man pointed heavenwards, the smile of true faith on his lips. Fahd quickly shut the booklet, returned with the phone book and called the repairman, who promised to pass by the following afternoon. The van wasn’t available at the moment.
As he was leaving, his mother embraced him and pushed a note, either two or five hundred riyals, into his breast pocket. Then she kissed his head, prayed that God protect him from all devils, human and jinn alike, and when he objected to her gift, saying that he wasn’t looking for charity from anyone, she was blunt: ‘It’s your money,’ she told him. ‘God rest his soul, your father’s money is your own.’
Since accepting a job as an editor for the Kanoun website’s art section, taking contributions and reviewing articles and comments, Fahd would spend long hours online back at the flat. He was no longer interested in Noha’s phone calls. He had met her again at the Paper Moon in Mamlaka Tower, hurriedly shaking her hand as she uncovered her small painted face and handed him a present wrapped in lemon-yellow paper, and placed in a carrier bag. On the card he read:
My darling,
For your eyes, your mouth and your little ginger moustache: I give you my scent and my femininity.
Back at the flat, as Saeed laughed and shouted ‘To hell with romance’, he broke open the wrapping paper and pulled out a bottle of Givenchy perfume. Giggling, he sprayed it at Saeed.
— 20 —
NOHA WAS YOUNG AND mischievous. Fahd wasn’t her first or last, and he wasn’t her only one, either. She gathered men about her to bathe her long nights with their rough voices and suggestive banter. Fahd enjoyed getting to know her and hearing stories about her family.