Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

The sixth photograph: a young boy stands on a white blanket next to another boy holding a bunch of roses; both are laughing at the camera. On the back: Saeed after the operation with Fahd — King Abdul Aziz Hospital, 1992 , and then in a shaky hand in green ink: Memories of an appendix .

The seventh photograph: three boys bashfully stand behind school desks, one of them shyly ducking his head. In the background is a wall decorated with blue paper and flowers and the edge of a row of lockers beneath a high window. Written on the back: Fahd in middle school with Muwaffaq the Iraqi on his right and Ziyad the dwarf on his left — Second year, Middle School, Class 2/2 .

The eighth photograph: a boy belted into a high chair. To his right is a man with a carefully clipped moustache, its red hair mixed with a little white, sitting back with a beautiful smile. To his left is a woman wearing a hijab who laughs as she puts a potato chip dipped in ketchup into the little one’s mouth. On the back of the picture: Fahd with his grandparents, Abu and Umm Essam — Abu Kamal Restaurant, Thalatheen Street, Ulaya .

The ninth photograph: a husband, his wife and their two children, with a handsome young man in a jacket and tie alongside another youth with an open collar and an old man with a white moustache. On the back: Suleiman, Soha, Fahd and Lulua with Essam, Kamal and Abu Essam — Sham Restaurant, Amman, 1995 .

The tenth photograph: a small picture, 6x4 centimetres, of an eager-eyed boy, his red hair combed backwards, fighting back a grin. On the back: Fahd Bin Suleiman al-Safeelawi, 1992 .

This last photograph Fahd remembered well. He recalled his father and the Yemeni photographer in Studio Zaman on Thalatheen Street laughing together at the boy’s eagerness. He had held his breath before the lens to hold back his laughter and appear a man, for a man does not laugh.

It had been after this picture was taken that Suleiman had grasped his son’s hand, and the two of them had walked the length of Thalatheen Street and gone into an art gallery, one of whose pictures Suleiman liked. He had spent a long time arguing with the salesman over the price, then they had walked out without buying it.

Pictures then more pictures, memories coming to life in the photo album Fahd kept in a wardrobe drawer. It felt to him as though they were his memories and his personal history, his whole life, in fact. Nothing took him back to his beautiful past like this album and the songs that summoned up those moments to which they were bound. For Fahd, these photographs were life itself; he had no idea what he would do if one day he couldn’t find them. Would he put an end to his existence? Commit suicide? What would he do if, all of a sudden, he became a person without a past? Was the past only present in photographs? Didn’t memory inevitably lead back to the past? It did, but memory needed a spur to stir its cells awake; like a horse pulling a cart uphill it needed someone to apply the whip.

Some nights after the football match, Fahd was sprawled on his bed thinking back to his early childhood, until the memories and his own oppressive longing led him to his father’s features and the picture of them together, his father playfully pulling his head towards him in front of the ice cream cart in Thamama.

Suddenly panicking he opened the wardrobe door, then pulled out the drawer looking for the album. He couldn’t find it. Maybe his mother or Lulua had taken it to gaze on days that would never return. He rifled through the chest of drawers and bedside table but to no avail. Frantic and frenetic he remembered that he had put it beneath a large suitcase on top of the wardrobe and he mounted a small stepladder and lifted the case. A great cloud of dust billowed out, filling his eyes, and in a single movement he sprang backwards off the ladder and fell on his rump.

Standing before the basin in the bathroom to wash his face and eyes he almost burst into tears. He went out in search of his mother and found Lulua in the living room.

‘Where’s the album, Lulua?’

‘What album?’ she said coldly as she wrote out her homework.

‘My album. The photograph album in my drawer. Who took it?’

She didn’t answer, just shrugged and frowned. He went into his mother’s room. She was in the bathroom. He waited and when she emerged, her wet head wrapped in a white towel, he attacked her with questions about the album. She replied that she knew nothing about it. He hunted through the house like a wounded wolf, inside which other wolves lurked and howled. He didn’t know who he was any more. What was his name? Where had he come from? Where would he go and where would he stay? Who were these people, moving around all about him?

The next day, having searched the yellow rubbish bin without finding anything, Fahd came back inside, his head bowed and miserable, and sat on the entrance steps with their covering of artificial green grass. He was looking up at the neighbour’s window where a pigeon fluttered and perched. He turned his eyes right towards the wall, then left at the basketball net hanging on the long water pipe outside the bathroom; he had gone head to head with his father trying to get the ball in that very net, and sometimes, when Suleiman was asleep, he had played against Saeed. He looked to his left, at the unfrequented space next to the low wall that separated off their neighbour’s ground floor, and spotted a scrap of paper tumbling as if propelled by an invisible breeze. He stared at it for a moment then rose and picked it up. It was a deep shock when he turned the paper over to see Saeed’s eyes and waving hand at Lulua’s birthday party. It was a scrap ripped from the complete photograph. Searching for others he found another piece showing his father’s coy face and part of the white mashlah that he wore on his wedding day. He hunted around but could only find these two pieces. So. One of them had shredded his photograph album, destroyed the lot then taken it out to the street, and these two scraps were all that had escaped the bundle of shredded paper.

He went up the steps, crying and shouting, ‘Who’s the bastard, the dog, the son of a dog, who ripped up my album?’

His mother took fright, murmuring prayers and trying to calm him as he ran blindly about the living room, weeping in anguish. ‘God curse your fathers and your forefathers.’

He was insensible to his surroundings; he could not see in front of him. He didn’t know how he had acquired this vast strength as he tore the pocket of his house shirt, and kicked at the wooden partition until it shook. He threw himself down the steps shouting, ‘I want to die!’

His mother and Lulua rushed after him trying to stop him. The girl handed her mother a yellow infusion from which wafted the smell of saffron, and Soha began sprinkling it on his face as she chanted, ‘In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful …’

A jinn had possessed him, she assumed, and it was the jinn that had rolled him down the steps.

The next day Fahd found out that his uncle had asked Lulua to tear up the pictures in her folders, because they were haram : they delivered their owner to hellfire and prevented angels entering the house. The Prophet, he told her, had said, ‘No angel shall enter a house in which there is a dog or a graven image,’ and had cautioned her about the punishment awaiting those who create pictures: ‘“Verily, those who shall receive the severest torments on the Day of Resurrection are the makers of graven images.”’

Then he had chatted away cheerfully to her until he discovered where the album of photographs was kept and ripped them up one by one.

When he learned of this, Fahd lost his temper and finally resolved to leave the house.