I jumped up and started punching him, screaming, “I know she is alive. She is waiting for me!”
He didn’t fight back. “Hit me, Naser,” he said, “but you must realise that we only have each other. I have no family and you have none. I swear to you I don’t want him to touch you. But let’s support each other. We have to do what is necessary to live.”
I left the room and ran out of the café.
I ran past the shops, the big mosque and the nine-storey building, I took the bus to the Corniche and ran to my secret place. A storm swept across the sea and the beach, and blew for a long time. I felt closer to my mother here, there was only the sea to separate us.
Sitting on my rock and staring at the dark water, I began to wonder why it had all gone wrong. I had no words to describe the feeling inside me. I slowly walked towards the sea. Would things have been different if she hadn’t sent me away? Was she still alive in her hut at the foot of Lovers’ Hill? Maybe Jasim was right. Maybe she was dead. But if she were, I thought, then she must have died a long time ago, the day she sent my brother and me away. Because she had sung to us so often that we were her only reason to live.
That evening, I decided to leave Jeddah. I didn’t care where to. I had had enough. I had no reason to stay. I had made up my mind, and the only way out was to make a lot of money fast so that I could leave as quickly as possible.
I fell asleep on the rock, my rage spent. I returned to Jasim’s early the next morning, wet, dirty and hungry.
I opened up the café and the warm wind flooded the entire place, bringing with it the scent of drains and sewage. In the street, the potholes were filled with water. The school, just down the road from the café, had been forced to shut because of structural damage caused by the storm. We’d also heard that a restaurant belonging to an Egyptian man at the top of the hill had been brought down in the winds. The blind imam of our local mosque praised the destruction of the Egyptian restaurant during his morning sermon. As I laid out the tables and chairs I could hear him ranting, on and on. He started as usual, denouncing the enemies in this world and dedicating the majority of his speech to reminding worshippers of their duties towards their families. Then, after what seemed a deliberately long pause, he seemed to stray off his usual speech.
“We have new forms of evil lurking amongst us,” he said. “This new evil is manifest in a foreign man, a man who came to destroy our morals and values. This man sells satellite dishes.” I shook my head. “Now, oh ya Allah’s worshippers, we have a man who is going around selling these dishes and our people are swayed by this evil and now they are erecting these ugly things on their roofs like minarets. And do you know why? They want to watch prohibited Egyptian films and corrupt our youth. But last night, Allah spoke. He sent his anger and flattened the restaurant of a man who claims to have opened it to feed people’s stomachs, but is only filling their minds with lust and immorality. This was a message from Allah to our government too: if they don’t act, He, the greatest, will.”
The ‘evidence’ of Allah’s vengeance was still visible in the street. Soon after I had opened up, the customers started arriving. The Yemeni cook was in the kitchen and Jasim was counting the money. He said nothing to me.
I saw Rashid spit before he stepped inside, then announce, as if I was his wife, “I am here, get me coffee.”
He sat at his table. A few men followed and scattered around the café, greeting each other. Suddenly Rashid stood up and shouted at his friend, Gamal, sitting in the opposite corner, “Do you see what’s happening to our city? Our government bombards us every day telling us how rich we are, yet look what’s happening—one bucket of rain and Jeddah is drowning. They should install a proper drainage system with the money they have.”
Gamal laughed, and Rashid sat down, pleased with himself.
“Your coffee,” I said, putting it on his table.
At the counter Jasim held my hand and looked at me askance.
I stared back at him.
Taking my hand from Jasim, I turned around saying, “I will be in my room.”
The air was heavy in the back room, and my eyelids were getting heavier by the second. Only the shrieks of the men as they played dominoes kept me in a conscious state. They banged the tables, but I blocked them out. I longed to hear from my mother and Semira that things would be OK.
I turned to the wall. I thought about Mother, about Semira, and about their friends, the sex workers, on Lovers’ Hill. I thought about the countless years they gave their bodies to hungry men. I thought about the lonely nights they spent in the arms of men they didn’t know; men who arrived under darkness; men who waited around the hill like wolves to avoid other men and wait for the signal that a woman was free. I thought of my mother and Semira, and how they had raised me and Ibrahim, helping each other with the little money they had earned. I wondered what they would say if they could see me here, in Jasim’s back room. There was a knock.
I drew a deep breath. “Come in,” I exhaled.
Rashid entered the room, closed the door and hung his guim on a hook. He patted down his thobe, looked at his shoes and then, without saying anything, he turned off the light.
In the dark and just before he held my hand, Rashid whispered, “Jasim said you will be my boy until I get married.”
One early morning, four weeks after Rashid started coming regularly into my room, I was smoking a cigarette outside the café, numb to what was going on around me. I saw Mr Quiet about to enter the café. He must have noticed that something was wrong because he came over to me.
“Naser, how are you today?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
He whispered, “Please let me know if you want to talk. I can assure you that quiet people are good listeners.”
He lit a cigarette and walked inside the café, bowing his head.
I was too shy to talk to Mr Quiet about Rashid. It took me a while before I approached him.
As I served him, Jasim peered over at us from behind his counter just yards away, and Rashid watched from his usual table in the front of the café. I whispered that I would like to talk to him but that the only time I was free was before I opened the café and before Jasim and the Yemeni cook arrived.
He nodded and said that he would come the next day after early morning prayers.
Mr Quiet came to my room at exactly half-past five the next morning.
He said he knew what Rashid wanted from me in return for the safeguarding of Jasim’s business. I wasn’t the first boy that had happened to, he comforted me. He knew someone who could find me a new job quickly. His name was Hilal, from Sudan, and he promised he was a good man and would look after me.
It took a while after Mr Quiet promised to help me for Hilal to finally find me a job at a car-wash, and a small flat to live in.
By the time I left Jasim’s, I had been working in the back room for six weeks.
On my last day, when Rashid had just left me with a hundred riyals, I looked up at the ceiling. Jasim’s pressure and my dream to leave the country had led me to accept life in the mirror. But not for much longer. I took one of my shoes and smashed it hard against my reflection.
For one last time, I looked up. My image was cut in two. Then I walked out, leaving my broken reflection behind.
Jasim begged me to come back when he found out where I lived. I told him to leave me alone. “OK,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “but I am your only friend. No one will support you like I did.”
“Just leave me alone,” I said.
My friendship with Mr Quiet continued even after I left the café, and we would meet to talk in the shopping mall, or in the Corniche. I started feeling more comfortable around Mr Quiet. Ever since I arrived in Jeddah, I had never had a friend I could trust, and this was the first time I felt really safe with someone.
He was an illegal resident in Jeddah. He had been deported countless times before, but he’d always come back. Last time, he had learned his lesson, he said.
Since smuggling himself back into Jizan, Saudi Arabia’s main port in the south, he had covered his face with a long beard and dark glasses, and dressed like a typical Saudi. He also stayed away from other foreigners to avoid suspicion.
I also tried to get to know Hilal better, but he didn’t have the time for friendships. Hilal, who shared a room with three Sudanese in a tiny flat in Al-Nuzla Street, worked hard in his job and he never had any time for leisure. “I am in a rich country,” he used to say, “so I am going to take the opportunity and work hard to save as much as I can.” He wanted to save to go back to Sudan and set up a bus service between Port Sudan and the capital of Eastern Sudan, Kassala, where he was born.
Even if I didn’t have many friends, things looked up for me. I felt excited that I could build a new life on my own. I don’t need my uncle or Jasim, I thought.
But no sooner was my smile returning to my face than Hilal brought me the sad news that wiped out the little happiness I had started to enjoy.
One Thursday morning, he came to my flat and told me that Mr Quiet’s flat had been raided by the immigration police and that he was now awaiting deportation in a prison in the centre of Jeddah.
“I can’t believe he was caught,” Hilal said. “Abu Imad is the most careful illegal migrant I know, and believe me, I know many of them. I just can’t understand how it happened.”
As soon as Hilal told me the news, I hurried to the prison to try to see Mr Quiet one last time before he was deported.
The prison used to be Jeddahs old airport before it was converted. From the outside, it looked enormous, fenced off by high white walls with windows only on the very top floors. When I arrived, I saw a statue of a small plane just outside the entrance, its rear tyres firmly on the ground but its front tyres slightly lifted, ready to soar. It was ironic that an object like a plane, modelled on a free bird, now stood at the entrance to a building where people were detained because they brought their dreams to the wrong place.
An armed policeman was standing outside the gate. I knew I didn’t stand much chance, but tried anyway.
“Assalamu alaikum,” I greeted him.
“Wa ‘alaikumu,” he replied coldly, stopping half-way off saying the full greeting.
“May Allah prolong your life,” I said. “Would it please be possible for me to see a friend awaiting deportation?”
He stretched his sleepy face into a mocking smile. “Are you a foreigner?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Where is your iqama? ”
I handed it to him. He flicked through it, and then threw it back at me. I caught it against my chest.
“Leave. You can’t visit anyone. The prison is closed,” he said.
“But he is the only friend I have left in Jeddah. Please let me say goodbye, just for once…”
“I said, go. Yallah, what are you waiting for? Do you want to join your friend in prison?”
I bowed my head and walked back home, to my lonely room.
Just as I arrived home, Jasim called. “Naser?”
I put down the phone. But as I lay on the bed, I began to realise that once again he was the only person I knew. I switched off the light and cried.
PART THREE
THE WIND FROM THE RED SEA
9
IN THE DAYS following, I didn’t really think much more about the note, and whenever I did, I tried to suppress the thought. Because there was no point. Where could it take me?
Friday evening, three days after the girl dropped her note, I decided to go to the Corniche to clear my head. I would stay the night in my secret place.
I woke up on Saturday morning, my back aching from sleeping on the hard rock. I closed my eyes, trying to rest for a bit longer, but the bright sunlight was shining through my eyelids. I sat up and yawned.
I walked to the sea to wash. As I bent double, I caught a glimpse of my reflection wobbling over the surface of water. It was as if it was trying to flee, diving to the depths of the sea. The cold water shook up my thoughts.
Why did I allow Jeddah, with its rules and prejudices, to make me passive and afraid? Why was I not out there looking for the girl in the street? I should be chasing her instead of hiding. Maybe there was nothing special under her abaya: yes, she could be a phantom, a madwoman, or a silly girl with too much time on her hands. But wasn’t this still a chance worth taking in a country with such a high wall between men and women?
I looked over the water towards the Red Sea. I prayed that the girl was genuine and hoped that she would come looking for me again.
Back in Al-Nuzla the black and white movie was still playing, but there were even fewer people in the street, just a handful here and there. I felt like an extra on the film set, stealing too much attention in the absence of the main actors.
By the time I got home, I urgently wanted to get out of the blazing sun. I needed a cold drink and a quick meal, then I would wait for her under the shade of my palm tree. Today was not a day to be afraid.
“Salaam,” I said to the shawarma shop owner, a stocky Lebanese man.
“Wa ‘alaikumu salam,” he replied.
“Shawarma, please.”
“Chicken or meat?”
“Since when do you think I eat chicken?”
“A troublemaker, eh?” he chided.
I grinned.
As I reached into my pocket to pay, I read the Islamic quotation pinned up behind him: “Life is Temporary.” And in the mirror next to it, I saw the reflection of Abu Faisal, the beheader. He was coming into the shop.
His presence had an immediate effect. Men swiftly got to their feet and one after the other, they reached out to his famous right hand and kissed it with such passion, as if it were the Black Stone of the holy Kabba. Others showered his forehead and shoulders with more kisses. Someone shouted, “Allah wa Akbar! May Allah bless you, our enforcer of justice.”
I stood looking at him. It felt as if the angel of death were knocking on my door. The thought made me shudder. I put my money on the counter to show I wanted to leave. So much for taking chances today.
Abu Faisal’s eyes, like two soldiers hiding in a trench, were small, rounded and narrow. How could he possibly look at the world with such small eyes?
I collected my food and made my way out through the pack of people. Outside, in the hot air, my stomach turned. I threw my sandwich into a rubbish bin and crossed over to the Yemeni shop.
I pushed myself through the few customers who were clustering around the old shopkeeper’s counter, fanned the incense smoke from my face, and headed to the back of the shop. The amplifier nailed to the top shelf was softly playing suras from the Qur’an. I shoved the empty boxes on the floor aside, opened the fridge and rummaged to find a cold Pepsi.
The shopkeeper shouted, “They all are cold, just take one and leave.” I ignored him and continued looking until my fingers stuck to a can. I picked it up, made my way to the counter and left half a riyal next to his till. As I strolled back to the shade of the tree opposite my uncle’s old house, back to the black and white movie show, sweat rolled down my face.
I sat underneath the wide branches of the palm tree and guzzled the Pepsi, the cold liquid quickly hitting my throat.
I glanced around to my right. In the far distance, I could see a woman coming out of a house. I stopped drinking and focused my attention on her. Was this the girl? But wasn’t that Zib Al-Ard’s house she had just left? If he is fighting a war in Afghanistan, then how would it feel if his sister and I…Does Zib Al-Ard even have a sister? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that his father had a second wife who lived a few yards down the road from Zib Al-Ard’s house. I stood up and glared at the woman again. Maybe it was Zib Al-Ard’s father’s second wife who had dropped the note at my feet? It was possible.
Before he was converted to strict Islam by the blind imam, and when he was under the heavy influence of drink, Zib Al-Ard had talked about his father’s second wife. He told me that one afternoon when his father was at work,
he encountered her in their kitchen when she came over from her house to help his sick mother. She was only sixteen, the same age as him, and he said she wasn’t wearing her abaya because she thought there were no men in the house. The moment they met, Zib Al-Ard said, they fell for one another and before long they had kissed. A few days later, they made love on the kitchen table. He lost his virginity to his father’s second wife while his mother was sleeping in the next room.
The woman who came out from Zib Al-Ard’s father’s first house entered the second house. I sat back down on the pavement, but I didn’t immediately discount the possibility that the second wife might be the girl.
A few more people passed by: a group of four women, two boys, a Yemeni man carrying a dagger under his belt, and an old man who came out from the villa opposite to chase away two pigeons who were mating on the tree overlooking his house. I counted the cars as they drove past. Number three was a Jeep with shaded windows. It drove so fast, shattering the peace, as if it were hurtling towards an emergency; someone was committing a sin somewhere in Al-Nuzla and they needed urgent punishment.
I was starting to nod off, my eyelids slowly succumbing to the soporific breeze that found me under the tree. I tried to force myself to stay awake. And it was when I turned my half-closed eyes to the left that I noticed a woman walking slowly towards me. But my mind was too tired to wonder whether it might be her. I turned my head away and lay on the cool pavement and drifted asleep.
The next thing I heard were busy footsteps close by. Sitting up on the pavement, I watched a scrap of paper falling in front of me. I looked up, but saw only a dark shadow hurrying down the street. I picked up the paper and jumped to my feet. I ran into the middle of the street trying to catch sight of her, but she had already disappeared. Nothing was moving. I looked over to my right and saw four women, all in full veil, moving silently.
I stood still beneath the scorching sun. Sweat ran along my forehead and dripped down my neck.
2008 - The Consequences of Love. Page 6
