Thuraya sighed.
‘My sisters asked me what I thought of her, and I said her signing was incredible, that her voice was wonderful, strong and expressive, that she chose sad, romantic songs, but I didn’t tell them that she had a face like a child, or that her hand slapping the drum was sublime.I wanted to press her to me in a long embrace and smell her breath. Oh Fadwa! My poor Fadwa!’
She turned to him, pressing her lips together.
‘You know, Fahd, I’d love to be with you and her together.’
Her wish took him completely by surprise. She desired Fahd and in the same instant longed to have Fadwa for just one night.
‘I want to see her in front of me, smoking and blowing smoke in my face. I love her voice, her face, her body.’
Fahd put the mocha on the café table. His troubled train of thought, uninterrupted by the al-Arabiya report on Saudi stocks and shares on the television, came to end and he left.
— 25 —
FADWA WAS A YOUNG woman in her late twenties with the features of a boy. Thuraya was captivated by her eyes and brown skin and loved her firm breasts.
‘Lovely and feminine,’ she told Fahd, adding that she had pursued her until Fadwa had finally consented to meet at a café on the Corniche in Jeddah.
‘She ordered a grape-flavoured shisha and said, “Shall I order you one?” I apologised saying that I didn’t smoke, even though I’d like to, and she took a packet of Marlboro Lights out of her silver handbag and handed me one. I hesitated, but her wink and captivating smile hypnotised me into taking it. She changed her mind and took it off me, putting it in her mouth, swiftly lighting it with her silver lighter and blowing a thin stream of smoke into my face.’
Fadwa’s eyes were grave as she handed her the cigarette. Thuraya saw her lipstick on the filter and put it between her lips with pleasure, feeling dizzy as she tasted the butt that had been in Fadwa’s mouth. She drew in smoke, filling her chest, and coughed violently, resting her head on the table until Fadwa was almost dead from laughter and her eyes wet with tears. She came over and sat next to Thuraya and pulled her head to her breast.
‘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 —
FAHD’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.