I quickly unfolded the paper. It was a note for me. I read it and the few words imprinted themselves in my mind.
I shook my head and sat back on the pavement and looked around to see if anyone was watching. What sort of trick was this? I folded the paper so that it was even smaller and pressed it deep inside my pocket.
The street was deserted again. I lit a cigarette and tried to look calm but thoughts and questions raced through my head. What a mad thing to do. Did the woman not know that the religious police watched our every move? And how could she possibly trust me? What if I were a traditionalist, a conservative; someone who would detest her actions as being un-Islamic? I might have followed her home and informed the man of her household on her. I didn’t even dare to think what men, whose only concern it is to honour their honour, might do to her. Ya Allah, I thought, she must be a crazy, crazy woman to take such risks.
But despite that, I was still excited by the fact that I was sitting there with a girl’s note in my pocket. And at some point, still sitting on the pavement, I started seriously considering the girl’s proposal.
“Why not? It’s going to be a long summer anyway,” the devil inside me said. I stood up and re-read it as I walked home:
My dear,
I am writing to you in secret. No one knows about this except me and Allah. I just want to say that I like you and I would like to write to you again. I will look for you at the same time tomorrow under this tree.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember what she looked like: covered in a wide black burqa, and wearing black gloves and black shoes she looked like any other woman in the street. Underneath, though, anything was possible.
She might be the daughter of one of the royal families or one of the wealthy Saudi families who lived up the road in Al-Nuzla Al Sharqyhya. But if she were rich or a princess, why wasn’t she away like everybody else? Maybe she was a servant or the daughter of a religious man? Could she be the wife of a man who had gone on holiday with his male friends, leaving her behind with their children? Was she a girl, a woman, or a widow? Was she one of the neighbours? She might be the sister of one of my friends? But my friends never talked about the women in their households.
I remembered what Omar had said that morning at Jasim’s café about the girls who threw notes at boys’ feet. Maybe she had written similar notes to other boys. Maybe she had already broken many hearts and was looking for her next victim?
Even if I did pursue this, just one careless moment could have me arrested by the religious police and that could lead to Punishment Square where lovers are lashed and sometimes even killed. How dare this woman put me in danger? Life in Jeddah was hard enough without being teased by someone with nothing better to do. Who wanted this kind of terror wrapped up in a scrap of paper?
I tossed the note into a bin and returned to my room.
That summer, in the absence of anyone to keep me company, I spent my time reading books, and re-reading my diaries and letters to my mother. Often also thoughts and memories would come back, from my time as a fifteen-year-old boy, trapped in Jasim’s café and forced to accept the passion of sex-hungry men. I didn’t need a diary as a reminder; the memories of those days stayed with me in the skin of my body.
It all started a few weeks after the incident with my kafeel, the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah. I was still having nightmares. Once, I woke up in tears in the middle of the night. I was crying and screaming for my mother.
My uncle came into our room.
“Be quiet,” he shouted.
But I continued to call her name. It was enough to set my uncle off in flames.
“I told you not to mention the name of that sinner, may Allah burn her in hell, insha Allah”.
I jumped off my bed and pounced on his chest. I hit him in the face. He pushed me back on the bed, holding me by my neck with both his hands. He was sweating, his upper lip bleeding and his eyes staring at me, fixed as if they belonged to a lifeless doll. I was wheezing and struggling for breath.
As he turned his back, he shouted, “Get up and leave my house. You are ungrateful, you don’t even pray. You are an apostate and I don’t want to waste my money on someone like you. I want you out by tomorrow.”
I protested, I cried, I pleaded, but my uncle was hearing none of it. He closed the door and the next morning he watched me as I packed my bags. He told me there was no hope in me becoming a good Muslim because I was brought up by an irreligious woman. “But look at Ibrahim,” he said, “I am his father now and you can see the difference. He is already showing signs of becoming a blessed Muslim.”
I didn’t know where to go. I begged him one last time to change his mind. “I am only fifteen,” I pleaded with him, “I don’t have any money. Where do you want me to go?”
“Go back to your bad Muslim friends, the glue-sniffers,” he replied, pushing me out of his house and shutting the door behind me. I sat outside the house for a while not knowing what to do next.
The only friend who could help me was Jasim.
By then I had known him for three years. I met him when I went to his café for the first time one morning when I was twelve. When I approached the counter to pay for my tea, he said there was no need to because I was his youngest ever customer who read a newspaper as he drank tea. “And you are reading my favourite paper too,” he said, pointing to my Okaz. He told me that he admired people who liked reading and that instead of buying a newspaper every morning I could come to his café and borrow his.
We got to know each other better over time and as well as lending me his daily paper, he also started to give me presents, mainly novels and poetry collections. But it was when he painted my mother, based on my description, that he became very dear to me. With his beautiful painting of her, he made me miss her less because she was now within reach, because her face, ingrained in my memory, was turned real again, her smile colouring everything on my path, and because whenever I wanted her warm love, I would hold the drawing and embrace it tightly.
“You are my best friend,” I told him on the day he finished the portrait. “You are my best friend.”
When I arrived with my bag, Jasim immediately took me to the kitchen away from the customers. I persuaded him to let me live in the small room at the back of the café, the one with the mirrored ceiling.
“Look, Naser,” he said, “I can let you live in this room. But you have to understand that to me it is more than just a room.”
I interrupted him, “Jasim, don’t worry. I will beg my uncle to take me back. I am sure he will agree. Trust me, I will move out before long.”
“No, no, don’t worry about moving out so soon,” he said, “I want to help you. But I want you to help me too.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.
“Work in my café. I will sack the waiter. The boy is so unreliable. I feel you will be a better one. And don’t worry, I will pay you the normal wages.”
It didn’t take me long to agree. Because, I thought, if I had had money I would have paid our kafeel in cash for the renewal of our residency and not with my body. “I can now save enough money for me and my brother,” I mumbled.
“Are you OK?”Jasim asked.
“Yes I am,” I said, smiling and feeling happy that from now on I was going to take responsibility for myself.
“I love it when you smile, my dear,”Jasim said. He held my hand and looked at me with gleaming eyes.
I turned my head away.
He let go of my hand and warned me, “But you know working here means you will have to leave school?”
In return Jasim promised me that I could read whatever I liked from the books he smuggled from abroad. He smuggled them on request of people who wanted to read books banned by the authorities. They were banned either because they challenged the government or because they were thought to be un-Islamic. His customers’favourites were books by the Saudi writer, Abdul Rahman Munif, who was stripped of his Saudi citizenship because of his political
writing, and lived in exile in Syria.
I thought that my stay at the café would be short because I was convinced that my uncle would take me back if I offered him most of my wages as a contribution to the household. But a few weeks after I moved to the café, my uncle’s boss relocated to Riyadh and he moved there with my brother. I found out only when I visited the caretaker of my uncle’s building. He was a Sufi from Pakistan—an outsider like me—and he kept me up to date about Ibrahim and how he was doing.
But that morning, when he opened the door, he lowered his head and said nothing. Then he embraced me and said, “Allah is now your only companion in life, my son.”
I thought something terrible had happened to my brother. I shouted at him to speak up, begging him to tell me at once. But Ali firmed his grip around my hands and said, “Nothing happened to him. But they left. They left you for good. But you are not lonely, son, Allah is with you.”
“What do you mean they left? Where? Which neighbourhood? Have you got their new address?”
“No, Naser, they left for Riyadh. For good.”
“Why didn’t they at least say goodbye?” I cried.
“I am sorry,” he said, “I am sorry.”
From that moment on, the café became my life. I woke up at six o’clock and worked until ten at night. After a full day’s work, I didn’t have any energy left to venture outside the café. I ate the food our Yemeni chef cooked in the café and it was Jasim who bought me new clothes. I started living a life completely opposite to the one I had lived with my mother: instead of women, I was now surrounded by men.
One morning, a few months after I arrived in the café, Jasim asked me to wear tight beige cotton trousers under my thobe. “It is your new work uniform,” he said, as he sipped his coffee. It was early morning and we were in the back room.
“Look, Jasim,” I protested. “I can’t even zip up the fly. You got the wrong size.”
“No, I am sure they will fit. Just pull them up harder. Let me help you,” he said. He held my trousers by the waist and grabbed hold of my briefs.
I shivered at the warmth of his hands on my body. His eyes caught mine. “Sorry,” he murmured. Then, “Here, ah, you see, my dear. Perfect!”
He lit a cigarette and I could see his gaze running over my body.
“Look, Jasim, I can’t wear this to work. It is bad enough wearing a thobe, I can’t imagine what it will be like wearing something as tight as this. I’m tired of customers pinching my bottom all the time and promising gifts if I agree to their propositions.”
I could smell the cardamom on his breath as his face came closer to mine. “Don’t worry, you will wear it under your thobe. But can you blame them, Naser?”
“What?”
“My dear, in a world without women and in the absence of female glamour, boys like you are the perfect substitute. Why hide your attractiveness and your tender physique like a veiled woman? You are the closest my customers have to a beautiful and sensual person roaming freely in their world. So why sit on your beauty like a bird without wings, when you can fly?”
I sat on the bed not knowing how to respond.
“Naser, I want to make my café like a paradise, where everything one desires, one gets. They can lock women away, but they can’t cage our fantasies. I want to find other ways to set passion free.”
For a while, we didn’t say anything to each other. And I did what I always did in Saudi when there was nothing else I could do. I closed my eyes.
Rashid was always watching me around the café, as he smoked the shisha, as he drank, and ate, and even when he talked to his friends. Although he wasn’t the only person who glared at me, he was the most persistent. He was the man known in the café for having a big meal every two hours, a routine he kept despite having been warned by his doctor to lose weight.
“What are you wearing today, handsome?” Rashid asked me one day.
“A thobe, of course. Are you blind?”
“Come on. You know what I mean.”
“Just leave it, please,” I said. “The usual?”
“Yes. Don’t forget to make the beans swim in oil,” he said, winking at me.
On my way to the kitchen to get his order, I grumbled to myself.
“Naser?”Jasim called. He was behind the counter, doing some paperwork. “What’s wrong?”
“Him.” I pointed to Rashid with my head.
“Try to be calm,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief and wiping his forehead.
“I am tired,” I said in a low voice.
Jasim put his other hand on my shoulder and patted it softly. “My dear, whenever you feel it is too much, always remember what I told you the other day. Be proud of who you are. Share what you have with others.”
I would stop complaining and do what he asked me to do because I felt I had no real choice. His café was where I lived too. And now that my uncle had deserted me taking my brother with him, Jasim was all I had.
The next morning another customer, Mr Quiet, lifted his ring-filled hand to get my attention. I smiled. He was one of the few men who had never tried to touch me. He always sat at the back of the room, the only table with one chair, which was always reserved for him. His face would disappear behind the haze of his smoke, his sunglasses and his own silence. I would serve him his usual: basbousa cake with coffee. He never spoke to me beyond saying, “May Allah enrich you.”
Jasim was the only person he would speak to, and their conversation was always brief. He was tall, had a thick grey beard, and always wore a blazer on top of his thobe.
“Never ask him questions of any sort,”Jasim had warned me about the man. “He likes to be on his own.”
“Not even his name?”
“I’ll tell you his name. He is called Abu Imad.”
I laughed. “He is even hiding behind his son’s name.”
I hurried to Mr Quiet’s table. “Assalamu alaikum,” I greeted him.
“Wa ‘alaikumu salam,” he responded in his melodious voice.
“Anything else besides basbousa cake with coffee for you today?” I asked him.
“No, thank you,” he replied. “May Allah enrich you.”
Moments later, Rashid walked in and sat at his table as usual.
“Ya boy?” he shouted.
“Oh, ya Allah,” I muttered, walking to his table.
“You are very slow today,” he said.
“If you want a faster service, maybe you should go to another café,” I responded.
“Just clean the table, my friends will be here soon.”
“I cleaned it a moment ago.”
“It is not done properly,” he said. “Look, here, here and here. Didn’t Jasim teach you that you should never talk back to the source of your living? Now shut up and keep cleaning.”
I shook my head, and as I leaned over the table he slid his hand under my thobe and slipped his hand between my thighs.
I threw the cloth on the table and stormed off to the kitchen.
In the kitchen, I washed my hands and started grinding the cardamom with the coffee. The Yemeni cook, holding the coffee-pot by its sharp curved spout, stood next to me waiting to add the spicy grounds.
Jasim burst into the kitchen and asked what I was playing at.
I ignored him and snatched the coffee-pot from the cook and poured some water inside it.
“Naser, I am talking to you,” Jasim said loudly.
“Just leave me alone.”
He asked the cook to leave us for a moment.
At that moment, Rashid entered the kitchen, yelling, “Jasim, all I did was to ask this boy to wipe the table properly.”
Jasim turned to Rashid and said, “Rashid, I know that as a healthy man you have your needs, but you have to be gentle with Naser. If you need anything from him, just ask him.”
I hit my fist on the table and shouted at Jasim, “If you want to sell my body, you will have to be a man and tell me to my face.”
I looked at his eyes
to see if he was feeling ashamed. There was nothing. I pushed him out of my way and hurried to my room. I took down my mothers picture from the wall and sat with it in my lap. I wanted to cry, but I shouted to myself not to. Instead I sat on my bed looking at her in silence, clenching my teeth.
Jasim barged into my room. He looked at me in a way that made me uneasy.
“Jasim, please forget it,” I begged, as he came closer. “Please leave me alone.”
He sat next to me and whispered, “Naser, it is hard for me to ask you to do this not least because…” He paused, sighed deeply and then he said, “Naser, Rashid likes you. He said he must have you because he wants you to…”
“Let me guess. He wants me to be his boy until he gets married. I have heard it many times before but I am not going to do it.”
“Naser, we can’t refuse Rashid. He might not look it, but he is a very important man for this café. I didn’t tell you this before, but for me to keep my business open, I have to do certain things, obey certain rules. I am a foreigner like you; I could be kicked out from this country any minute if I don’t follow the rules. You are very dear to me, I will only ask you to do things for a reason. If this shop is shut, where will you go? Who will open their house to you? Naser, your uncle and brother are living in Riyadh now. They will never have you back and soon you will have to renew your iqama. Where will you get the money for the renewal? If you don’t pay and your residency is terminated, you will be deported. Is this how you want to repay your mother?”
“Leave me alone,” I yelled at him.
“Naser, listen to me. If you give Rashid what he wants, you will have nothing to worry about. Allah gave him everything but looks and manners. I’ll offer him etiquette lessons and you will have to give him some of your beauty. And I can assure you that we will get some of his wealth.”
“Just stop it, Jasim,” I said, putting my mother’s portrait aside.
But he must have sensed I was breaking, because like a killer peering at his victim, Jasim twisted his knife inside me: “Think how much your mother had to go through to send you away from the war to safety. And now you want to go back to the war zone, to death. I am sure she misses you, if she is still alive.”
2008 - The Consequences of Love. Page 5
