She was in her thirties, with wide eyes, extraordinary dimples that appeared whenever she smiled, whether shyly or seductively, full lips and a round face of golden skin tinged an olive green. Her hair was black and soft, set in place with the hot air from the blow dryer that never left her room. Her hands, to which Fahd was addicted, were smooth, small and dark with beautiful thumbs; he had once told her that he dreamt of painting a picture made up entirely of thumbs like hers. Always calm and measured, she had an aura of hidden glee about her which hid a profound sadness that lay within her, manifesting itself through bouts of misery and anxiety that surfaced whenever she looked back over her short life: two failed marriages leading to an unshakeable phobia of matrimony, then three relationships, the latest of them with Fahd. During each affair she told herself: this one’s my true love; he’s the most beautiful; or, this one’s my love, he’s the most honest. But after months or years the love, or the sexual desire, would start to fade and die, until, finding herself neglected, she would begin all over again, cocooning herself in the affections of another man.
Fahd had teased her. Why do you have a picture of an elephant in your Messenger window? he’d written. Don’t tell me you’re the size of an elephant!
His taunts provoked her. She started playing a guessing game with him, first putting up a photo of a large eye painted with kohl and eyeshadow, then a pair of plump lips, then a small nose, then an earring hanging from her earlobe and finally her whole face, stunning despite being touched up with Photoshop. Then she restored the little elephant.
In the course of a first phone call full of laughter and noise, she told him she dreamt of riding an elephant and in the madness of the moment he replied, ‘I wish I was an elephant!’ She laughed at his indecency, and he laughed at her laughter, and so the hours passed, first in intimate confidences then in debate over the various artists showcased on the forum and the exhibitions scattered throughout Riyadh, at the Shadda Hall outside the Aziziya branch of Panda in Murabba, the Sharqiya Gallery north of the Takhassusi Hospital and the Faisal Bin Fahd Centre at The Capital Model Institute. She didn’t paint in oils and wasn’t obsessed with buying paintings; she was fond of many pictures but didn’t have the extra cash, so her only option was to collect images of these pictures from the forum and save them in a special file.
At first he was scared and unsure. There were signs that Thuraya wasn’t going to leave him be. She never stopped threatening him for his failure to create an opportunity for them to meet somewhere alone.
Strange, he thought to himself, the smell of her still in his nostrils. Young men are usually the ones who blackmail and threaten girls, so how come this woman’s threatening me?
Although Tarfah had been an acquaintance of his on the website for two years now, doubts continued to attend him, cawing crows hovering over a corpse. Had she been sent by Thuraya to exact revenge? Was Thuraya already online? Was she somewhere in the list of the last ten members to join? He looked over the pseudonyms and found nothing hinting at her name, her personality or the Hejaz origins she boasted about constantly, but still he asked himself why Tarfah had appeared in his life at this moment in particular, just as he was slowly extricating himself from Thuraya’s curse. Why had she only now begun writing to him and trying to get closer to him, when both of them had been around since the website started?
As he stopped by the guards in their sky-blue uniforms outside Entrance Three, Fahd caught sight of a woman, walking with excessive self-confidence and lethal and magnificent composure, swathed in a black abaya with a small white bear swaying from a loop on the side of her black handbag. She opened the car door and got in beside him.
‘Good evening,’ she said shyly, shifting her body and hitching up the lower half of her abaya.
Once the car had started moving, she looked at him with alluring eyes. His heart gave an unexpected lurch and he stretched out the fingers of his right hand so they rested between her succulent palms and the cocoon of her own, dark-brown fingers.
‘Go right,’ she told him and he turned north into the neighbourhood of New Wadi, with its protective cover of darkness that left all living things suspended in mid-air, raucous and honeyed.
Through his laughter he asked her, ‘How come you know the backstreets of North Riyadh when you live in Suwaidi?’
She giggled and said that her older sister Asmaa had nicknamed her Google and now all her relatives either called her Google or Tarfah.com; even the men of the family, young and old alike, were aware that she knew the lanes, main roads and shops, as though a comprehensive map of the city, its roads, buildings and neighbourhoods, slumbered in her little head.
— 29 —
TARFAH’S VOICE WAS THE same as it had been on the phone, perhaps a little riper and more musical.
It was noon when Fahd first phoned her, anxious and uncertain, and after three rings her drawling voice had come down the line. A woman’s voice in every respect: supremely feminine, pleasant and welling with coquetry and refinement. When she spoke it was like a reed flute sounding sadly in an abandoned palm grove. Powerful and fluid, her voice could detonate passion in anyone’s heart. It was nothing like the throaty maternal utterances of Thuraya, or Noha’s unintelligible mumbling. More than just her voice, it was the warmth and searing honesty of what she said.
From their second phone conversation it seemed to Fahd that they had been friends since childhood. She told him how she had married a relatively unknown actor and separated after two years of suffering and disagreement. He had developed schizophrenia. Before the divorce she had travelled with him to Jeddah, where he forgot to take his medicine and started riding camels and horses on the corniche, screaming dementedly at her, ‘Take my picture!’
Back in their room her ex-husband had put on swimming trucks, crooning with furtive delight, ‘If only the gold market were lined in silk …’ and snatches of famous songs. Pointing from the high window at the swimming pool below, he said, ‘I’m going fishing.’
Tarfah was astonishingly warm and bubbly. She stole Fahd’s heart and made him feel exceptionally close to her, only rarely asking him questions as she told him of her childhood in Dakhna. She only mentioned her first name. He wanted a family name to feel more at ease, and despite her initial hesitation, she gave to him, making it clear that any similarity with the owners of a well-known commercial centre was pure coincidence. ‘Tribesmen!’ she called them.
With her chin resting on her fingers, she was beautiful. Her eyes were splendid, defying comparison with Thuraya’s Javanese slits, and likewise her tender, angelic voice, utterly dissimilar to the husky tones of the older woman. Even the things they talked about were different. Tarfah spoke like Scheherazade of her life, and that of her family and friends, filling Fahd’s heart and memory in the course of single week, while for months on end, Thuraya continued to ask after him and his Jordanian mother, giving him nothing of herself and shielding her life with a man’s caution.
He was eager to meet this angelic voice, and he turned his mind to a close comparison of the three: Noha, Thuraya and Tarfah. Which was to be his Mona Lisa? Tarfah of the wide eyes and the beautiful hands that supported her chin like faces in Salvador Dali’s paintings, propped on sticks and branches so as not to fall? Was it to be Tarfah’s face, burdened with the sorrow of angels, alert and tender and mournful all at once? Would it be Noha with her delicate sidelong glances, snatching fleeting moments to flick out a furtive look from between her Praetorian Guard, single-mindedly marching along the path by the wall of Prince Sultan University? Or Thuraya’s face, bewitched by Fahd’s, and perspiring with the force of her desire for oblivion?