Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  She found a seat near the entrance where the bridal pair would emerge, at the end of the hall facing the dais. She chose her spot carefully, for this evening she had an important and historic mission to accomplish.

  She moved her eyes among his sisters, assigning the names she had heard to them. This one looked the oldest, so it must be Norah. That was definitely Sarah, the loud one. This young-looking one over here was apparently Nujud, the prettiest of the bunch, as he always described her. And there was the mother again.

  This time, observing his mother from a distance, Michelle remembered her overbearing power and dictatorial ways and also Faisal’s abjectness before her. Michelle would have expected to feel disgust and hate for this woman, and to wish her the worst that life could give, but in fact she found herself respecting her and feeling scorn for her weak son. She noticed that Um Faisal was examining her from afar and seemed to like what she saw. She imagined this woman considering trying to get her for Faisal’s younger brother who hadn’t gotten married yet, or maybe for one of her nephews! Ah, could fate be that twisted?

  Michelle had decided that today she would announce her victory over all men. She would rid herself once and for all of whatever bits of Faisal remained in her heart and soul. She found herself heading for the long corridor of people preparing to dance. This was definitely a first: swirling around the dance floor on the day her true love married someone else.

  It wasn’t as difficult as she had imagined. She had the sensation that she had lived these moments before in her mind, time and time again—so that this was merely a déjà vu. She felt relaxed and happy. That night she danced and sang as if she were the only person in that enormous hall. It was her own special celebration—a celebration in her honor—to acknowledge her survival and endurance despite everything. It marked her liberation from the slavery of deep-seated traditions, which had subjugated all the other miserable, pitiful women in the dance hall.

  She imagined Faisal in bed that night with his bride, dreaming of reaching out to touch his love Michelle, while Shaikhah crouched on his chest with her large body, her folds of fat keeping him from moving and breathing.

  The lights were dimmed in the other parts of the hall, leaving one strong beam spotlighting the entry. The bride crossed it, heading toward the dais, flashing smiles at the invited women, and even at Michelle, who quietly followed her progress from nearby. Michelle was filled with confidence, seeing the bride’s large body stuffed into the wedding gown, which was stretched tightly around her body unappealingly, creating un-sightly folds of skin at her armpits.

  When it was announced that the men were about to come in, a truly devilish idea occurred to Michelle and she didn’t waste any time acting on it. She sent a short message from her mobile phone to Faisal’s: Congratulations, bridegroom! Don’t be shy. Come on in. I am waiting.

  After her message, the men’s entrance was delayed by almost an hour. The hall was awash in the whispers and mutterings of the women guests, and the poor bride was in a state of confusion. Should she go out? Or stay where she was and wait for her groom who refused to come in? After what seemed an eternity the groom appeared, surrounded by his father, the bride’s father and her three brothers. He came in so quickly that no one could really see him. From afar Michelle smiled. Her plan had worked.

  A few minutes later, as the photographer was taking photos of the bride with her groom and the family on the dais, Michelle rose, heading toward the exit, intending to leave. But she made very sure that Faisal would see her, more glorious than he had ever seen her before. She looked at his beard, which had altered the face she was accustomed to. He turned toward her, with a desperate look in his eyes, as if begging her to go away. She raised one eyebrow in challenge, not caring in the slightest about any of the women who were looking at her, and she went on standing there in front of the entryway, playing with strands of her short hair as if to annoy him with her new haircut before turning her face away in obvious disgust and making her way toward the door.

  After getting into her car, behind the Ethiopian driver, she could not keep back her laughter as she imagined how the wedding night would go for Faisal after seeing her there. It would be a “night cursed by sixty curses,” as Lamees would have said. And that was the point.

  Upon reaching the house, she realized that this was the first wedding since her separation from Faisal where her eyes had not become blurry with tears seeing the bride happy with her groom on the dais. Michelle knew now that behind their smiles, many of those brides and grooms were concealing their own sad and yearning hearts because they had been kept from choosing their life’s partner. If she had any tears to shed this evening, they should be for that poor bride whom circumstances would unite tonight, and all the rest of her nights, with a man forced to marry her, a man whose heart and mind were with that other woman, the one who had danced with such abandon at his wedding.

  48.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: February 4, 2005

  Subject: The “Getting Over Them” Phase

  A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she’s dropped into hot water.—Eleanor Roosevelt

  Now, be honest. Haven’t you had enough of me after a year of e-mails? I’ve had enough of myself!

  One day Sadeem read a news item on the society page, congratulating Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi on the occasion of the birth of his first son, Rayyan. It had now been more than fifteen months since she and Firas had parted for the last time. Sadeem tried to think about their relationship, over nearly four years, compared to an engagement, contract-signing, wedding, pregnancy and birth with another woman that had occurred all in a little over a year. It seemed to confirm that Firas was not the extraordinary and discriminating person she had once imagined him to be, but just another ordinary boy, much like Waleed and Faisal and Rashid and countless others. Those claims he used to make about holding his life partner to absolute criteria were nothing more than a ridiculous attempt to flex muscles that were pretty weak in the first place. Or maybe they didn’t even exist at all.

  Sadeem was in Riyadh for the celebration of Michelle’s and Lamees’s graduation, and the four girls gathered at Sadeem’s old home. As usual, they launched into their various complaints on the woes of lost love.

  “Sadeem!” said Lamees, “how could you have accepted—even run after—a sweetheart who tramples you underfoot? You know what your problem is? Your problem is that when you fall in love, you lose your mind! You allow the one you love to humiliate you and you let him get away with it! No, even worse, you say to him, I like it, baby, give me more! This is the truth, unfortunately, and if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have stayed with Firas all those years when you knew he had no intention of marrying you.”

  Everyone was hard on her these days. They were blaming her for getting into a relationship that was bound to fail from the start. At the time none of them predicted that her relationship with Firas would end as it did; they had been as optimistic, basically, as she was. But now, naturally, all of them claimed to have known it all along! She had no recourse but to remain silent. At one point Michelle, who had gone through a similar thing a few years before, shot her a wink. Michelle, of course, had taken a firm and severe decision to walk away from Faisal the moment he revealed his parents’ position on their relationship. And so she had sidestepped the agony and humiliation Sadeem endured up until the bitter end, when her love finally drowned itself in a sea of emotional mendacity.

  Sadeem did wish Firas had proven his superiority to the passive Faisal. She had wanted to demonstrate to Michelle that Michelle had made a mistake in letting Faisal go. She wanted to prove that she, Sadeem, a believer in the power of love who upheld the principle that she had a right to marry the person she loved, would end up smarter, more successful and happier.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. Having refused to sacrifice her love, she had received the stunning blow
that her beloved had sacrificed her. And Firas’s deception had run deep: he had hung hope’s sparkling pendant around her lovely neck and taught her to recite love’s anthem of struggle and persistence long after he himself had stopped reciting it.

  “The luck you’ve had, Michelle—you don’t have to constantly see a photo or read an article in some newspaper about the guy you were in love with. The worst thing is for a girl to fall in love with someone famous, because no matter how hard she tries to forget him, the whole world keeps reminding her of him! You know what I wish sometimes, Michelle? I wish I could have been the man in this relationship. I wouldn’t have let go of Firas, I swear I wouldn’t have let go.”

  “See? So you haven’t lost a real man, have you?”

  Her friend’s sarcastic comment made Sadeem more disgusted than ever with Firas. Did that selfish man even realize the rough treatment she had received from society, on top of the way he had mistreated her and then had abused her further by walking out?

  “Sadeem, I didn’t drop Faisal because I was no longer in love with him, as you imagine. I was crazy about that guy! But everyone here was entirely against him and against me. I have complete confidence in myself, and I know I can face whatever hassles stand in my way, but frankly I don’t have the same confidence in Faisal or in any other guy in our sick society. For our relationship to have succeeded, we would have had to be strong. Both of us. I couldn’t have done it all on my own. And even though Faisal went on pursuing me and every so often I got an e-mail or a text message begging me to come back to him, I knew it was only one side of him—the weak side—talking. I knew he hadn’t come up with a solution to our problem. That’s why I went on refusing him and denying my feelings and not letting myself be sucked into his weakness. One of us had to be the strong one. I decided it was going to be me. You can be sure, Sadeem, that Firas and Faisal—even though there’s a big difference in age–are stamped out of the same mold: passive and weak. They are slaves to reactionary customs and ancient traditions even if their enlightened minds pretend to reject such things! That’s the mold for all men in this society. They’re just pawns their families move around on the chessboard! I could have challenged the whole world if my love had been from somewhere else, not a crooked society that raises children on contradictions and double standards. A society where one guy divorces his wife because she’s not responsive enough in bed to arouse him, while the other divorces his wife because she doesn’t hide from him how much she likes it!”

  “Who told you about that? Gamrah?” Sadeem asked, aghast.

  “Sadeem, you know I’m the last person in the world to even think about gossiping about my friends. Don’t be afraid of me, because I wasn’t raised in this society which doesn’t know how to discuss anything except who said this and who that.”

  “If what you’re saying is true, if your refusals only have to do with our young men, then why didn’t you defy everyone and marry Matti or Hamdan?” Sadeem countered.

  “Simple. Anyone who has gone through love and knows how far it can go can never ever be satisfied with a love that’s just so-so. Now I can’t settle for less. I just can’t! My love for Faisal—that was the love of my life. Look, even though I threw him out of my life, he still stands there inside my mind like a statue that I measure every man up against, and unfortunately, they all come out short. And of course I’m the one who really loses after such comparison.”

  “I wanted a number one, Michelle. The way I saw it was, like, I don’t deserve anything less than Firas. But my number one was satisfied to be with someone less than me, and so now I’m forced to be satisfied with something less than him.”

  “I don’t agree with you there, Sadeem. For me, my number one is gone, but someone who’s even better will come along! I will never sell myself short and I can never be satisfied with the crumbs.”

  49.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: February 11, 2005

  Subject: Graduation Ceremony

  If only I had known how very dangerous love was, I wouldn’t have loved

  If only I had known how very deep the sea was, I wouldn’t have set sail

  If only I had known my very own ending, I wouldn’t have begun.—Nizar Qabbani

  A bittersweet fact. The story that began nearly six years ago is coming up to the present time, and so the end of my e-mails is drawing near.

  In one of Riyadh’s grand hotels, a dinner was held to honor the graduates, Lamees and Tamadur Jeddawi and Mashael Al-Abdulrahman. The guest list was restricted to the three of them, plus Gamrah and Sadeem, Gamrah’s sisters and Um Nuwayyir.

  Lamees was the unchallenged star of the party with her expanding belly; the fetus was in the twenty-eighth week. Lamees’s rosy cheeks and confident smile announced to her friends that hope still existed somewhere in this troubled business of life. Everything about her, on this graduation day, showed them that at least one of them was a young woman bursting with happiness. Even her fellow graduates, Tamadur and Michelle, didn’t have a quarter of her joy. And why shouldn’t she celebrate and exude all this radiant pleasure? As Michelle said, “She’s got it all!” A successful marriage, a diploma with honors, the promise of a professional future. She alone among her friends had not suffered for trying to obtain what she longed for.

  A few moments before leaving the hotel, Gamrah and Sadeem ran into Sattam, the obliging bank employee whom they had met through Tariq. He had worked out the bank transactions for their party-planning business and they had conferred with him a few times after that at the bank. Sattam came into the restaurant with a group of businessmen. He smiled and nodded from a distance, but of course he couldn’t come over to greet them in the company of all those men, nor could the two young women return his greetings when they were in a group of women or, to be exact, when they were in the presence of Gamrah’s sisters, spies who loved nothing more than to snitch on inappropriate behavior.

  At the men’s table, Firas asked his friend Sattam in a low voice about the women who had just gotten up from the table not too far away, and whether he knew them. He had caught a whiff of a certain rare dehn oud* that he was very familiar with coming from their direction. Sattam informed him that two of the women were regular clients of the bank and successful businesswomen, even though they were so young. Firas felt his heart tighten sharply when he heard Sattam mention the name of Sadeem Al-Horaimli.

  If only he could have searched their faces and not have averted his gaze, he would have noticed that his Saddoomah was among them! His Saddoomah. Could she possibly be his after all he’d done? Sadly he let his eyes follow the backs of their abayas as they moved farther away, his imagination sketching a beautiful innocent face so dear to his heart.

  No one knows what went through Firas’s mind that night after the brush with Sadeem. What is certain, though, is that his thoughts ran on for hours as her fragrance continued to tickle his nose. Did it confirm for him that she still loved him, if she was still using the scented oil he had given her two years before?

  Firas had never experienced such a wealth of feeling for any woman except Sadeem. His wife, who loved him very much, wasn’t able to make him happy as his Sadeem naturally had. Firas made a sudden decision that night, while he was lying in his marriage bed, next to his wife—the mother of his first son and now pregnant with his second.

  50.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: February 18, 2005

  Subject: Advice Spun from Gold: Take the One Who Loves You, Not the One You Love!

  Click here to listen to the song

  So you ask: What’s new?…

  Nothing has changed, ever since you left me.

  Are you happy to hear that?

  Nothing has changed, alas,

  To this day I’m in your hands.—Thikra

  I confess that my immersion in the story of my friends for
an entire year has made me one of those women who know exactly what they want.

  I want a love that fills the heart forever like the love of Faisal and Michelle. I want a man who is tender and cares for me the way Firas took care of Sadeem. I want our relationship after we marry to be rich and strong like the relationship Nizar and Lamees have. I want to have healthy children like Gamrah’s child, and to love them, not just because they are my children, but because they are a part of him, my love. That is how I want my life to be.

  Two days after the graduation party, Sadeem returned to Khobar and invited Tariq to have coffee with her in his house, on an evening in which she pretended to be sick so she wouldn’t have to go with her aunt and her daughters to a dinner party at the home of a relative. For the first time ever, she found herself completely paralyzed about what to wear in his presence! She stood in front of her mirror for hours and changed her outfit and put her hair up and let it down twenty times. The whole time, she was still trying to figure out what to say to him. He had spent more than two weeks in Riyadh waiting for her to make up her mind about his proposal. Not wanting to rush her by coming back before she was ready. She had begun to feel very embarrassed about how long she was taking, and so she asked him to come back to Khobar, without telling him that she still hadn’t made up her mind.

  Sadeem remembered Gamrah’s advice, which Gamrah would give her over and over whenever they were together. “Take the one who loves you, not the one you love. The one who loves you will always have you in his eyes, and he’ll make you happy. But the one you love will knock you around and torment you and make you run after him all the time.”

  But then Sadeem would recall what Michelle had said about how true love can never be made up for with any ordinary, run-of-the-mill love. And then the image of Lamees laughing happily at her wedding would come into her mind and confuse her even more. At that point, Um Nuwayyir’s prayer for her would ring in her ears: “May Allah give you everything you deserve.” Then she would calm down a little bit and feel a little reassured. She was sure she deserved a lot and she was sure that Um Nuwayyir was a good person and that God must give her what she was praying for.