When I was sixteen, and had been working in the café for about a year, I was taken to the shopping mall in central Jeddah by a man called Abu Imad, whom I nicknamed Mr Quiet. He was about forty years old. When we arrived at the mall, there were lots of men strolling across the hall, chatting and laughing, holding hands or arm in arm.
The air-conditioned shopping mall was built to a foreign design. Its five floors were full of shops that sold Western products. “This shopping mall,” Jasim once told me, “is like the glossiest of shopping malls you can find in Paris or London. You can buy all European and American brands of electrical goods, designer shoes and clothes. You can even find Armani and Calvin Klein.”
Right outside the mall was Punishment Square. It was here that heads and hands were cut off and lovers were flogged, beheaded or stoned to death. This was the place where Faisal’s father did his job.
Inside the mall, my companion bought us both a drink and we sat by the fountain. Two religious policemen strode past us. They were both holding sticks, and they were turning their heads left and right, calmly and deliberately.
“Look,” Mr Quiet said, “they are searching for secret encounters between men and women.” Then he leaned closer to me and whispered, “Only the other day I witnessed a scene where a young man and woman were caught by the religious police. Thanks to Allah you are a man. Otherwise, we would be heading towards that Jeep now and Allah only knows where to after that.”
The waiter and Fawwaz disappeared from view. My eyes panned to a woman in full burqa exiting a shoe shop just opposite Jasim’s café. Just then the religious police Jeep approached slowly and parked outside the shoe shop, hiding the woman from view. It reminded me that I had been in this country for ten years, yet I had never talked to a girl or held a woman’s hand.
The woman emerged again from the shadow of the Jeep, crossed and walked down the road. The Jeep remained parked with the religious policemen still inside it, no doubt observing the street from behind its shaded windows, making sure that Jeddah remained a world of black and white.
I drank my tea in a single gulp and opened the envelope. It contained all my recent letters to my mother and as I flicked through them I noticed how the black ink still sparkled. I felt the need to run, to run a long way from Jasim and the memories of his café.
3
I WAS TEN years old and my brother, Ibrahim, was three, when our uncle brought us to Jeddah from the refugee camp in Sudan. We had been living in the camp for five months. My uncle, the elder brother of my mother, worked as a chauffeur for a Saudi family in Jeddah. He had heard about us being in the camp because someone from our village had met him in a café where Eritreans meet and told him about us. The man had told my uncle where in the camp to find us.
When my uncle arrived and said he was here to take us with him to Saudi Arabia, I refused. I wanted to wait in the camp with my mother and stay as close as possible to her. My uncle argued that Jeddah was not so far away. “You see, you will not be far from Eritrea, which is just opposite Jeddah, across the sea.”
He finally managed to change my mind when he said that Saudi Arabia was one of the richest places on earth and that I could earn mountains of money to send to my mother.
We were taken to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and from there we flew to Jeddah.
Our plane landed at Jeddah Airport, in the early evening just a few days before Ramadan, 1979. From the very start I fell in love with the city.
We took a taxi to our uncle’s house. The roads were wide and well lit, and my eyes flicked from one building to another, from one street to the next. Back in the refugee camp, at this time of night, the moon and the stars would shine giving us just enough light to move around. But in Jeddah, there was no need for the moon or the stars. I peered out of the window and saw lamps that hung above the street from tall posts. They were like goddesses aiming their generous light towards the city.
“Oh ya Allah, and the streets are so smooth. There are almost no bumps in the road,” I said to my uncle.
There were tall buildings on all sides, much higher than the one-storey houses I had seen in Khartoum. As we drove alongside the coast road, I hung out the car window and inhaled the breeze that smelt of fish and salt.
The taxi entered a tunnel that went deep in the ground. “Uncle, we are going under the earth,” I said. “Only dead people go there.”When we exited the tunnel, I cheered, “We are still alive.” My uncle smiled and rubbed my head.
When the car stopped at some traffic lights, I looked across to a plaza where there was a huge sculpture of a bicycle. In my imagination, I could see someone riding it. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw two feet on the pedals, wearing red Italian-made shoes; slim legs in blue jeans; and long black hair falling back from a woman’s face.
As the traffic lights turned green and the car engine roared into action, I saw her head tilt slightly and she looked at me. Then a wink. That was definitely Mother, I thought to myself. I held my brother’s hand and lifted him from my uncle’s lap. I pulled him closer to me and kissed him on the cheek. But he leaned his head back against my uncle’s chest: he had fallen asleep.
“Ibrahim?” I urged him to wake up. “Look, look.” I was distracted by the street with its large villas, trees, and beautiful cars in different types, colours and sizes. “Ibrahim, look, look at these cars.” I pushed my head through the space in between the two front seats to take a better look. Then I retreated and whispered in Ibrahim’s ear, “We will have a car like that one day.”
As we continued driving, there was something that puzzled me. Alongside the men in their white thobes, there were figures in black which, under the street lamps, looked like the men’s shadows thrown against the white walls of the houses. They reminded me of the stories about invisible spirits my mother used to tell us, only here, you could actually see them. I knew that Saudi Arabia was a holy country and miracles could happen all the time here. But because I hadn’t seen any women in the street, I had worked out who these figures in black were.
“Uncle, can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, son,” he replied.
“That’s a woman, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“There, look, there.” I pointed to the shadows.
My uncle smiled and said, “Yes. Oh, blessed childhood ignorance.”
“Why are they covered so much? It is not cold here.”
“The women are wearing abayas ”
“Uncle?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t they get hot dressed like that? How do they breathe?”
“It’s Allah’s, request. But He, the Greatest, will reward them in heaven, insha Allah ”
“So, will the girls in my school look like this too?”
“You will be going to a boys’ school. The girls have their own school.”
I thought back to the small school in the refugee camp. All my friends there were girls. In fact the boys would beat me up because they were jealous whenever we played the wedding game because all the girls would choose me. I told my uncle the story.
“Oh ya Allah we ask your forgiveness. I will have hard work on my hands with this one. Listen, Naser, it is bad for boys and girls to mix.”
“Why?”
“It’s haram, son.”
“Why is it haram?”
“Grant me your patience, ya Allah. Because—” He stopped and looked away. After a few seconds, he added, “Because we are like fire and oil, and if the two of us come together, there will be a big flame and thus hell on this earth and in the afterlife. So you see, son, Allah is trying to protect us for our own good. OK?”
“OK,” I said, leaning against the window, not understanding a thing.
“Here we are,” my uncle said, as the taxi parked next to a tall white building. “This area is called Al-Nuzla.”
It had only been a few days since we left our tent in the refugee camp. But it already seemed as though we were on a different planet.
My uncle opened the front door. When I saw the TV, the large black sofa with red stripes, the thick blue carpet, I turned to my uncle, my eyes wide. I kissed his hand and cried, saying, “Thank you, Uncle, for bringing us to this beautiful city.”
But then I imagined my mother all on her own having to hide under her bed from the bombs, like we used to do whenever the fighter planes came over our village at night. “Please ya Allah help her stay safe,” I prayed silently, vowing at the same time that I would study and work hard to bring her and Semira to safety.
But that night, as I ran away from Jasim’s café, Jeddah felt different. It didn’t feel like the same place any more.
In the old days, when the place was only an arid landscape on the fringe of the desert, the inhabitants had called the place Jeddah, the implication being that Jaddah Hauwa, the mother of humankind, was buried in their midst. But that night I thought this was nothing but myth-making.
I remember thinking how the modern city planners had continued with their ancestors’ habit of burdening the city with an oversized name. They started calling Jeddah ‘The Bride of the Red Sea’. And they dressed her accordingly with the most expensive things. There were bronze sculptures decorating every major street; the bride glowed with jewellery. There were the elegant bridges that cut across the city from all directions, like henna drawings on a bride’s hands. And there were the tree-lined avenues that were the petals sprinkled at the feet of the bride.
But despite all this, I thought to myself, Jeddah couldn’t be known as the Bride of the Red Sea. It lacked the overwhelming happiness of a woman about to be married. In Jeddah there were too many people whose days and nights merged into one long journey of sadness. I was one of them.
But back then I didn’t know that my true love was waiting for me in the folds of Jeddah’s wedding dress.
4
IT WAS ALMOST 8.30 when I got home from Jasim’s café. I had arranged to meet my friend Yahya later. He was about to leave for a camping holiday in the mountains of Abha and we decided to spend his last night in Jeddah at our regular place, the Pleasure Palace.
I had some time before our meeting so I decided to do some reading. I sat at my little desk facing Jasim’s sketch of my mother. When Jasim, who was trained as an artist agreed to draw a portrait, he sat in front of me with a large blank paper and a tin of drawing pencils. As best I could, I described every feature of the beautiful face I had missed so much.
I told Jasim that she loved the colour red so he framed the drawing in flames, which made her look like a speeding star. I never tired of looking at this picture.
As I was about to take out my book from the drawer, I noticed my diary. I put the book aside and took it out.
I opened one of the perfume bottles I had brought back from Jasim’s café and sat on the floor. I put the diary next to me and took in a mouthful, holding it in my mouth for a while before I swallowed it. The sparkles on my tongue engulfed the back of my throat and my nose. I could smell the chemical in my nose, and my lips and tongue felt as if they were burning slightly. I grasped my nose and squeezed it tightly in an attempt to control the sensation. Slowly, I started feeling dizzy as I drank more of the alcohol.
Ever since I arrived in Saudi, I had been writing in my diary. As Mr Quiet once said, “I feel you never want to say anything because you are waiting for a special person. Someone who will understand the trapped mutterings inside your chest. Until you find that person, you should write it all down. Diaries are made for people like you.”
It’s true to say that I had no woman to share my life with, no woman to make plans with. In Jeddah there was only the unrelenting drudgery of a world full of men and the men who controlled them. My diary was a link to my hopes, the keeper of my secrets, a sacred place where my heart beat with a soft, hopeful murmur.
I opened it at a random page. The entry said, “Spring, Saturday, 21st April, 1984.” I took another sip of the perfume and my mind travelled back to that day, when I was fifteen.
That Saturday I woke as usual at six o’clock and was getting ready to go to school when my uncle came into our room. My uncle was a religious man and a conformist who hated my mother. But he was also the only person in the world who cared enough to help my brother and me—still, living with him was only slightly better than our days in a tent in the camp.
“Is Ibrahim taking a shower?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied, with some weariness.
“You’re not going to school today,” he said. I didn’t know how to respond to the news. On the one hand, I hated school and was about to jump with happiness at the thought of spending a day away from lessons. But at the same time, it was too good to be true. My uncle hit me whenever I suggested to him that I would rather miss school than sit through some classes which taught me to hate others who didn’t have the same religion or the same interpretation of Islam.
I was far more suspicious than joyous, and I asked him, “Why’s that? What’s the special occasion?”
“Because—” He was interrupted by my little brother barging into the room, washed and dressed and looking just like a good Saudi boy. He already looked a lot older than his eight years.
“Ibrahim, wait outside. I am talking to Naser now.”
“OK, Uncle,” Ibrahim said, the good little soldier. As he turned to leave, he looked at me and shook his head as if to say: “And what have you done now?”
Uncle continued, “I want you to take our iqamas to our kqfeel, the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah. He asked that you bring it yourself. We need to renew our residency permits.”
I had long known that every foreigner in Saudi Arabia has to have a kafeel—a Saudi man sponsoring their stay in the Kingdom in return for an annual payment. But it only became clear to me that day that the kafeel therefore has full control over the lives of those he sponsors. I found this out when I said to my uncle, “Why don’t you go? You always do it.” I was about to storm out with my schoolbag, when he pulled me by my arm. He began to sweat.
He let go of my arm and said, “Please don’t be stubborn, Naser. We have to obey our kafeel and do as he asks. I need you to renew our residency permits, please. He asked for you to go. If we don’t do as he says he will be angry and that will be the end for us in this country. Please, Naser. I am begging you.”
I hesitated. He had never begged me like that before. My poor uncle, burdened with the sons of a sister he despised, working as a migrant in this rich country, yet barely able to make ends meet.
But then I thought to myself: Why am I resisting? When I come back, I will have the rest of the day to myself.
“OK,” I said to my uncle. “I’ll go.”
He handed me the iqamas.
“What about the money?” I asked him.
“Sorry?”
“The two thousand riyals that I need to pay him when we renew our iqamas ”
“I don’t have the money. But he said he would overlook it this time, may Allah bless him.”
I tried to smile to please my uncle. But we both knew that nothing was ever free for a foreigner in Saudi.
I rang the bell of the villa and a smiling Eritrean servant named Haroon answered in Tigrinya. He asked me to use the back door because the kafeel’s wife and the daughters were about to leave the house. I nodded and walked slowly along the tree-shaded alleyway and knocked at the back entrance. Haroon opened the door, still smiling, and asked me to come into the large and spacious courtyard. He told me to cross the yard by the small path bordered with small fruit trees.
“Ya Ali,” Haroon shouted as he walked behind me, “tell the Blessed boss that the boy is here.”
Ali came out from a room at the other side of the yard and told me to wait. There were toys and small bicycles lined up outside. The wall of the courtyard was painted with fine abstract designs against a bright turquoise background, providing a pretty contrast to the green plants. A strong smell of incense hung in the yard as golden light pierced the g
arden trees. I looked up and counted four floors. Where I was standing was just one tiny part of the kafeel’s palace.
Ali came back and told me that the kafeel was ready for me. “You go,” he said, bowing his head. “Where? Why don’t you take me?”
“It’s OK, just go, over there,” he said, his head still bowed.
I walked ahead, trying to figure out where to go. I turned back to Ali.
“Which of the rooms is he in?”
“There,” he said, pointing to the big door next to a lime tree. “There, there. Enter.”
The door swung open and a large man dressed in expensive heavy robes was standing there on the steps like a statue. I had seen him a couple of times before when I was much younger, but this morning was the first time I had been to his house on my own. He looked at me with great intensity.
“Welcome, Naser,” he smiled broadly.
“Thank you,” I said as I bowed my head to kiss his hand.
I smelt the Arabian incense as I entered the majlis. There were thick mattresses against the wall, piled up with large cushions, and colourful rugs on the floor.
I waited until he sat down.
“Sit,” he said. He seated himself on the mattresses and as he rearranged the cushions behind him to sit more comfortably, he added, “Have you got the papers?”
“Yes,” I replied, as I handed him the forms with our official photographs, and sat down.
He flipped through the iqamas and I looked up to see his portrait hanging on the wall behind him. He was looking down at us, wearing a gold-edged cloak over his sparkling thobe. His face looked calm and serene.
How does he manage to have these boyishly smooth cheeks at his age, I was thinking to myself when he asked me: “And the money?”
2008 - The Consequences of Love. Page 2
