Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

He was answered by a second youth, whose thaub pocket was ripped: ‘A theatre outside the city and they still won’t let us be. Cafés outside the city and they follow us there. Where are we meant to go exactly? God curse those vampires.’

Fahd searched for Saeed with flickering eyes. He examined the café outside and saw tables full of young men passing around a phone that showed clips of the stage assault.

‘Send it to me on Bluetooth!’ he heard one say.

‘Just a second,’ said a man studying the video. ‘I’ll give it a filename.’

‘The Yamama Raid,’ a third shouted sarcastically. The names of Islamist military operations always included the location where they took place: the Manhattan Raid, the Alhambra Raid, the Granada Raid, the Badr al-Riyadh Raid …

A hand suddenly clamped down on Fahd’s arm and he spun round in fright to find Saeed laughing, sour and sly: ‘Hah! You were scared, coward!’

Fahd took hold of him and led him away. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place is stifling.’

As they headed towards the car, Saeed said, ‘All this open air and pleasant weather and you call it stifling? My friend, don’t be so ungrateful.’

Laughing hard he said, loud and mocking and speaking in classical Arabic, ‘What ails thee, Akrama? Wilt thou cede the matter to sinful Quraish?’

When they were in the car, Saeed said that he had received a text from his work colleague. ‘It’s Rashed, the guy I told you about. He’s the one who encouraged me to read up on these groups: a strange person, mysterious and never smiling. You think he hasn’t been following what you’re saying, but when he speaks you realise he was with you all along.’

They drove to Musafir, an old working-class coffee shop tucked away inside a petrol station and frequented by students, the unemployed and truck drivers. When they reached the entrance a solitary figure in the far corner waved his hand, his beard sprinkled with a little white and an incipient bald patch on his head; he had placed his shimagh and aqqal on the ground beside him and was gripping the hose of the towering shisha pipe. Saeed shook his hand and introduced him to Fahd and the man smiled, his eyes narrowing further.

Saeed ordered apple tobacco and strong black tea. His expression had completely altered; his cheeriness, the laughter and derision, was gone, and he seemed sad as he stirred the coals on top of the tobacco plug.

‘Something’s ruined your mood today. Everything OK?’ Rashed asked.

Saeed recounted what had happened at the theatre while Rashed, eyes like slits, listened intently. When Saeed had finished and silence had descended, Rashed puffed out thick white smoke, coughed a little, and said, ‘Look Saeed, that lot didn’t appear out of thin air. We made them, us and our grandfathers before us, from their first flowering before the Battle of Sabilla finished them off, through to the bombings and armed confrontations of recent years, by way of the assault on the Grand Mosque and the Afghan Jihad, or the Awakening as they call it.’

Saeed interrupted to make the point that Saudi society could not bear sole responsibility and Rashed nodded in agreement, stating that society, the government, America and the entire world had played a role in feeding and propagating their movement: ‘That’s right. There are those who fatten them up then get sucked in themselves.’

He took a short drag on the pipe and exhaled skywards. ‘They’re a cancer, my friend. Whenever people think the malignant cells have been cut out a new one suddenly appears.’

Despairingly, cursing everyone around him, Rashed unburdened himself. His grief rose to his throat and a long-suppressed tear rattled in his chest as he started to talk about his wife, who had abandoned him years before after a sheikh had given her a ruling that if her husband didn’t pray in the mosque then she wasn’t permitted to live with him in the same house.

‘They brought my roof down, friends. They destroyed my house and my family.’

On the way home, Fahd seemed obsessed with Rashed’s personality, so vengeful that he now spoke openly without looking about to check. Saeed changed the subject, and talked about the preparations for the cup final. They chatted about the match between Hilal and Ittihad and through his familiar, sad laughter, Saeed said, ‘There’s nowhere left but the stadium, my friend: it’s the only place the beards don’t go.’

— 14 —

A GLOOMY, ENDLESS EVENING. FAHD sat in the bedroom that had become his home. There was a gentle knocking at the door.

‘What?’ he snapped.

‘Can I come in?’ asked Lulua in a pleading voice.

She came in carrying a white sheet of paper and colouring pens.

I know this little scamp. She can be as polite as you like when she wants something , he thought as Lulua said with the playfulness they both missed, ‘Best brother and greatest artist and sketcher in the world?’

He didn’t answer and she added, ‘It seems the prince of men is closed for the night.’

Hunched over his desk reading, he said, ‘What do you want, Lulua?’

She took her piece of paper and spread it out on the floor and he began to write out a prophetic hadith along with the meanings of the words, while she fetched him a black Americano and a piece of vanilla cake. When he had finished the inscription in red and black ink and signed her name at the bottom of the sheet, he sat down to try the coffee and cake and asked her if she wanted to play Monopoly.

‘Let’s play in the living room,’ she said.

‘The only place I like in this house is my bedroom.’ Then: ‘I even hate my room.’

Although she did as she pleased, Lulua wasn’t stubborn. She never fought with anybody, readily complying on the surface while secretly doing the very opposite of what others wanted from her. When their uncle took over their house in the guise of a husband, gradually imposing his own rules and interfering in the way Lulua dressed, she stopped wearing jeans despite being thirteen years old. Even the regular abaya wasn’t enough, her uncle forcing her to wear a black abaya without any decoration or embroidery, and never as low as her shoulders.

‘Can’t you see what her chest looks like, woman?’ he demanded of Soha as he bullied her into making Lulua wear it over her head.

After a few months he declared that Lulua’s hands were extremely white and were attracting and seducing men, so he fetched her a pair of black gloves. Her mother tried to object, but faltered, feeling that it was inevitable that the man who had entered their house would impose his laws on them, that his word would be the only one heard and everyone would just have to do as they were told.

He even interfered in Fahd’s appearance and forbade him from growing out his hair; he went so far as to insist that Fahd shave it down to the scalp, a demand he had never encountered in his father’s time.

Fahd couldn’t recall his father interfering in the way he looked or ever making any demands of him, except that one time, a few months before his death, when he took him to the Office of Civil Affairs in Washam Street to get a new ID card.

‘Would you mind cutting your hair for the photograph?’ he had said in that lovely, persuasive way of his and Fahd had happily consented.

What a wonderful moment for a boy: to walk out of the gate of the Civil Affairs building beneath the high bridge having attended the afternoon prayer with his father in the small mosque on the street, tucking his new ID card into his pocket as his father ruffled his head, smiling, and said in the manner of teenagers, ‘Sweet. Now you’re a man.’

Lulua came in carrying the Monopoly and laid it out, arranging the Community Chest, Chance and property cards in their places, dividing out their share of cash and putting the rest in the bank beside her. She said she would go first, and took the dice and tossed them in the air. She moved her piece and counted out her cash and Fahd chased after her as he chased after his endless anxieties.