Saturday morning, and I left my flat for the imam’s house, with a new letter to Fiore in my pocket.
I saw her in the distance, in her Pink Shoes, walking behind her father. They were coming towards me. I walked slowly, so I could be with her on the same street for as long as possible. I saw a beam of pink light reflecting off a piece of broken glass that she pushed aside with her right foot. I imagined that Jeddah’s sky was ablaze with fireworks, as though her shoes were the cannon from which this pink was fired up to brighten a normally sad sky with happiness.
I felt that she was whispering to me with her shoes, “Good morning, habibi. I hope you slept well.” I felt it was like seeing her uncovered with a big smile on her morning face.
I remembered the drawing of my face that lived between her breasts, caressing them with every step she took to her college. I hoped my picture would crawl up along her neck and give her a passionate kiss on her lips and then whisper back, “And good morning to you too, habibati ”
I rejoiced, feeling happy that I had not lost my nerve.
I planned to breathe in the morning air greedily when I passed her, hoping to catch a whiff of the scent of her shampoo and body lotion.
I looked at her father and noticed he was walking as if he was a living king on Al-Nuzla Street. I studied his face, trying to find more clues about his daughter in his features.
I was wrapped up in my thoughts when I saw the familiar Jeep pulling up behind Fiore. It was enormous, taking up almost the entire width of the street.
It drove alongside Fiore, its thick dirty tyres nearly touching the pavement on which the blessed Pink Shoes were walking. Fiore turned her head towards the Jeep, but as she did, her ankle twitched and the side of her shoe touched the dust. Her shoes spoke to me of her fear. “Please, Fiore, hold your nerve too,” I prayed. I kept walking, my eyes fixed alternately on her and the Jeep, but the Jeep passed Fiore and beeped its horn. Fiore’s father looked at the Jeep and bowed his head, touching his chest with his right hand in respect. A hand stuck out of the Jeep to wave back. When Fiore and her father had passed me, I heard my name:
“Naser?”
I pretended I didn’t hear, looked ahead, away from the Jeep, and kept walking.
“Naser?”
Basil’s voice was too loud to ignore, and I turned my head to face the new religious policeman of Al-Nuzla.
“Come over here,” he said.
I did as he asked. In the distance, I could see the Pink Shoes disappearing. That was the right thing to do. We had to be as careful as possible. There was no room for errors, and hasty and frequent back-glances are certainly a big giveaway for the religious police.
Basil leaned out of the Jeep window and smiled at me.
As I walked towards him I wondered again what could have motivated him to become a religious policeman. Revenge or genuine desire? Part of me couldn’t help thinking that all he was doing was posturing, that he was trying to impress me, like he must have done when he was competing for pretty boys’ hearts. It is possible, I thought as I examined his face, hidden by his thick beard. Being a religious policeman would give him the authority to force anything on me, even the very thing I had refused to give him in the park.
Deep inside me, I hoped that this was the case, that Basil was overcome by lust and nothing else. I could handle that, I thought as I approached his Jeep.
But his words didn’t instil much hope in me. “Greet the imam,” he said, “and tell him that Basil will never let him down. That he, with the help of Allah, will crack down on anyone who dares tarnish our blessed way of life and deviates from the right path.”
In my letter to Fiore that morning, I didn’t mention anything about Basil or his becoming a religious policeman. Perhaps it was my fear that I might lose her at any moment that made me want to tell her now about my deep-seated desires. I wrote choosing the most beautiful and precious words, weighing each sentence ten times before I committed it to paper.
For the first time, I realised I had started to think about her sexually. This was a person I couldn’t see, hear or touch, and yet I knew she existed because of the inch of skin she had shown me in the Yemeni shop, her letters and the Pink Shoes. And the longing her sudden presence in my life had instilled in me was making me adore her with the same fastidiousness a pious man might feel towards his invisible God.
Fiore,
I hope that you will take kindly to my foolish manners but today I have decided to talk to you not about earthly matters but instead focus my energy to admit to you my desire. The moment for this might be inappropriate and the forwardness of what I will say may make you regret knowing me, and even give you reason to reject me as a man of ill manners. A man who started to twist pure love into a medium for desire. But I have decided that if I am to be as faithful to you as lovers must be to one another then I must convey to you all the feelings inside me.
It has been so often the case that wherever I am, be it walking down the street, waiting for the imam at his house, in the mosque or outside the college, all I think about is you.
On occasions, I travel with my mind far into the distance, to a place where you are waiting for me in the middle of the desert. So I come rushing towards you. At first you appear covered. But as I come closer to you, the black cover turns out to be nothing but your dark skin under the searing sun of the desert. You are alone. Like a plant in the desert, keeping yourself alive, self-sustaining. Your feet stand firmly on the yellow sand like roots with a thousand years of history, and your chest and neck look up to the sky with the pride of an Abyssinian queen.
When I reach you, I am breathless, like a man who has been wandering this earth with only one aim: to find the woman of the legend, the lover about whom men talked, and whom women feared, for thousands of years. The myth that men passed on from generation to generation with the same lust shaking their bodies as when they first heard it from their fathers.
When I found you, your magic was that you were able to fill the sky with countless stars and turn the desert into a bed of flowers upon which we lay naked, our bodies meeting for the first time. As we kissed, you confessed to me the truth. “I might be mentioned in a legend,” you said, “but I am new to the land of lovers because I have been all alone for my whole life waiting for you to come.”
“We are both novices then,” I reply. “Virgins like one another. But we have a lifetime to teach each other how lovers make love, beginning from now, habibati.”
34
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY afternoon, I collected the imam from the college as usual, knowing a new letter from Fiore would be inside his bag. The police Jeep approached and parked just in front of us. I stopped abruptly. “What’s the matter?” asked the imam. I let go of his hand and pulled the black bag tighter under my arm. “Naser, tell me, why are we stopping?”
Two religious policemen got out of the car and headed towards us. One of them was Basil. He shouted, “Ya imam, ya Allah’s lover. Assalamu alaikum.” Both hugged the imam and then Basil turned to me. But this time he didn’t smile as he usually did.
“Masha Allah, welcome to Allah’s eyes and ears on this temporary earth,” the imam wailed, beaming. He rarely smiled, and I never heard him laugh. “Because,” he said in one of his sermons, “too much laughter weakens the heart, a heart that must be always strong to love Allah with all its might.”
“How are you, ya Allah’s slaves?” the imam asked them. “I hear satisfaction in your voices.”
The other religious policeman was taller than Basil, with big hands and broad shoulders. He was young and handsome. He was also beardless, a sign that he was the undercover policeman I had heard about in the imam’s house. Basil addressed him as Hamid.
“Alhamdulillah,” replied Basil. “We need to talk to you.”
He took the imam’s hand and as he guided him to the Jeep, the imam ordered me to wait for him where I was.
“Don’t you need your bag?” Basil asked the imam.
I t
ook a step backwards. I looked out of the corner of my eye to see if I could pick out a way to flee, ideally a lane that was too narrow for the Jeep. I noticed the alleyway around the corner from the bakery. It was only half asphalted. I hid the black bag behind my back, holding it tightly with both hands.
“In fact,” added Basil, “we can give you a lift after we talk in the office.”
The imam paused and ran his fingers through his beard, then tilting his head sideways, he nodded and said to Basil, “Can you take my bag from Naser?”
Basil extended his hand towards me. I stared at it then looked up at him but didn’t react. My hands were still behind my back holding on to the bag.
“Does he have the bag, ya imam?” Basil asked, without blinking. I pulled out my right hand from behind me and shook his hand firmly.
Basil smiled.
“Yallah,” the imam ordered Basil. “Let’s go.”
I had to give the bag to Basil. He stepped into the police Jeep and took Fiore’s letter with him.
35
THAT DAY ALLAH was on my side, and gave his blessings to mine and Fiore’s love story. No sooner had the Jeep driven off, and before I even had time to kick the wall in frustration, it stopped and reversed to where I was standing.
The imam climbed out saying that he had forgotten that he was expecting a visitor from the Ministry of Higher Education. He wanted me to guide him home.
I never kissed his forehead as warmly as I did that time, and I thought I even felt tears in my eyes.
Habibi,
I call my father a mutawwa who sits in cafes. You would think anyone who dares to call himself a mutawwa would go to the mosque and pray day and night. But my father is no devout worshipper. When a real mutawwa is praying and his mouth is busy remembering Allah, my father’s lips are stuck to his shisha pipe.
A few days ago, I knocked on the men’s door at home.
“What do you want?” he shouted at me. “I am busy.”
“Doing what exactly?” I replied. He came out thundering. That’s the way to get him out of that room and away from his shisha.
“How dare you speak to me like that? What kind of a woman are you?” Then he called my mother, “You see, all of this is your fault. She is becoming disobedient.”
But soon, he calmed down. “What do you want?” he asked me as he sat on my bed.
“I would like to at least have my eyes free in the street. It is not haram for a woman to reveal her eyes. Look, I can read it for you from this book.”
“No, you’ve asked me this before. I told you I went to the blind imam but he said if I let you do that I would—”
“Go to hell?” I said mockingly.
“Don’t be rude and show respect for me and the imam, ya dog.”
“I am sorry, Father,” I said. “I swear to Allah, it is allowed for me to show my eyes, even my face. Look, I am not even a Saudi.”
My mother pinched me for saying this. My father sat on my bed and lowered his head. He stood up and left the room. My mother followed him. After a while, he came back and sat next to me.
It had been a deliberate strategy to mention the thing about not being a Saudi. That’s when he becomes nicer. He held my hand and said, “I am a second-generation Eritrean and they still won’t consider me a Saudi. Look, I don’t need a citizenship document to make me feel Saudi. I am one. And don’t listen to the girls at your college, when they call you a foreigner. You are a Saudi.”
I asked him the same question again, “Can I show my eyes, please Father? ”
He quickly answered saying, “No, you might think you are not a Saudi, but hell doesn’t differentiate.”
He went back to his room and his shisha.
Yesterday, after my argument with my father, my mother tried to make me feel better by saying that women with eyes as beautiful as mine do better to be veiled. I went into my room and locked the door.
I thought about you.
I took a blank piece of paper and a box of coloured pencils out of my drawer and put them on the bed. I took your drawing from inside my bra and put it on the bed too.
Then I stripped off my clothes and stood naked in front of the long wall mirror. I examined my body, from toe to head. To draw a very honest self-portrait, I decided to take an exact reading of my body, with all its birthmarks, spots, unhealed wounds, finger scratches, beauty spots, curves, and the length and width of every bit of me. I even wanted to study my behind very carefully. But as I turned around, my hair blocked my sight, so I pulled it up and tied it together.
But when it was finished, I decided not to send it to you, because I remembered my vow to bring myself to you. I will keep the drawing and will only send it if I fail to deliver on my promise.
Tell me that things go better with you.
Your Fiore
The next morning, I went to the imam’s house carrying a letter that told Fiore of my urge to see her and be close to her, my hope that one day I would see her take a shower, so I could watch the water dripping over her body like the Niagara Falls. I asked her if we could find a way to meet or at least somehow find a way to talk. I was ready to do anything to hear her voice.
At the imam’s house I found Basil in the living room browsing the bookshelf. He was holding a long thin stick. I wanted to confront him and ask him what he was up to. But there was a lump in my throat and I didn’t dare say anything.
I sat on the floor mat, watching him in silence.
He selected a book and started reading; it was as if I wasn’t there.
I wanted to leave, run before it was too late, but I tried to concentrate on him and pick up any clues. But he didn’t say anything else. He just closed the book and shouted to the imam in the other room that he was leaving and would see him later in the evening.
Basil was killing me slowly. When he smiled, it was as if every tooth was a bullet he was firing at me. Every time we met, he created new holes in my body. I was being drained of everything that made me live, and Basil was watching me vanish with that smile on his face.
When I was about to leave his house that afternoon, the imam asked me to stay again because he wanted me to take him to see his friend, a sheikh who lived on the way to old Jeddah, after he’d taken a nap. I had already taken the letter from Fiore out of his bag. I was still thinking about my encounter with Basil early that morning and I wanted to be in my room by myself with Fiore’s letters. I had no choice but to obey.
When the imam lay on the that and his soft snoring assured me he was fast asleep, I started reading her letter.
Habibi,
I feel so sad. Sadness, which has been knocking on my door for a long time, has finally burst inside and inhabited me last night. Normally, I would stay up most of the night re-reading your letters, but tonight I will be in my bed with my eyes closed, giving myself up to the illness of sorrow and loneliness. I wish you were here next to me. Anyway, I am sorry this is a short letter, but my hands don’t have the energy to write much more, my darling.
Salam from the heart.
I brought her letter close to my lips and kissed it, not knowing what else to do with all the sadness of Fiore in my hands. I had the urge to avenge habibati, to burn everything and everyone who stood between me and her. But I could do nothing. I felt useless and angry with myself. Habibati was hurting yet there was nothing I could do. What was the use of words written over half a page offering heartfelt support if all she needed was someone to be there next to her, to listen to her and to give her a hug.
Tuesday morning, my mind was preoccupied with Fiore’s sadness. I went to the imam’s house with a letter to try to console her. I slipped my letter inside the black leather bag and we set off to the college as normal.
As I helped the imam through the gate, I could see Fiore’s gloved hand stretching to receive his cane. I wanted to touch her again, but she withdrew her hand quickly. I put the black bag under the imam’s arm. But he banged himself accidentally against the door and the bag fell t
o the floor. “Please, Naser, get the bag,” he ordered. I knelt, expecting her to take the opportunity and stoop too. She didn’t. She stayed hidden.
I felt like crossing the gate to take her hand and run away with her. A voice inside my head kept encouraging me: “The door is opened. It is not an electric gate. It is not wired or booby-trapped. It is not manned with armed soldiers ready with their bullets to empty them in your chest. What is it you are afraid of? It is just a gate and behind it is your sad Fiore. Hold her hand and run with her.”
But I looked at the imam. Even though his eyes stared at an undefined point in the distance, and I knew they were not of use to him, I still feared that he would know if I broke the rules. It could mean I would hold Fiore once and then never again. So all I did was put the bag on the other side of the door and scuttle home.
Two weeks had passed since her last note, and Fiore still hadn’t sent me a letter. My last proper letter had been the one where I admitted my deep-seated desires, but I had passed her a few short love notes via the imam’s bag, asking her to write back soon. Even though I couldn’t be sure, I could only hope it was she who stood behind the black gate receiving the imam. When I opened the black bag I found nothing from her, but still my notes were gone.
I was in the dark as to what was going on. The gate at her college seemed to grow higher and wider every time I delivered the imam, and the men standing around in the street seemed to have got bigger and more aggressive. The Pink Shoes had disappeared from Al-Nuzla.
I was waking up in the mornings with a heavy heart. I began to feel angry with her. She doesn’t care, I started to think. If she did she would have written to me at least once just to say she was OK. If she loved me she would know I would be worried about her.
Tuesday, 17th October, a month after Fiore had last written to me with her sad note, turned out to be my last day at the mosque.
There was a cool breeze blowing that evening; the leaves and litter shifted softly from one side ot the pavement to the other.
2008 - The Consequences of Love. Page 15
