Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

Soha spent most of her time resting but only slept in her bedroom when her husband was at home; during the day she dozed in the dining room next to the kitchen, a small envelope beside her pillow full of folded strips of paper on which were written Qur’anic verses in yellow saffron. Without opening it she would take one and dip it straight into a glass of water until the liquid changed colour and then she would drink, wetting her chest and stomach and intoning prayers to God on behalf of her lungs that trembled like a pair of birds: ‘Oh God, Lord of mankind, send me strength. Heal me, for You are the Healer, who alone has the cure, the cure that never fails.’

Her view of life had changed and become more religious. Had her illness done this, or was it her new husband, the imam, who had turned their life in this house upside down? The marriage was not contracted to protect his brother’s wife or his brother’s children. These hadn’t even been fleeting considerations. It was done for divine reward in return for making devout a home that had once been immodest, wayward and sinful.

‘How do you feel?’ Fahd asked her.

‘It’s women’s troubles, my son; don’t bother yourself about it. Just stay close to me.’

One afternoon, Lulua placed a pot of mint tea before her mother and brother in the dining room with its bolsters and their colourful wool covers. Fahd poured his mother a glass and she asked him to fetch the phone book on the dressing table in her bedroom so she could call a technician to come and fix the air conditioner in the living room, which had started pumping out hot air.

‘Maybe it needs filling up with Freon,’ he said as he went to her room.

Searching on the dressing table and bedside table for the phone book he spied a small religious pamphlet, the kind that were given away free with cassette tapes in mosques and waiting rooms. The glossy cover carried a picture of a tree’s branches against a sunset and the title: The Efficacy of Charms and Herbs in Treating Cancer .

He skimmed through and read a few lines from the introduction that declared that the best treatment for the most dangerous disease of our times — cancer — was prayer, Qur’anic amulets, incantation and blowing. The pamphlet provided testimonies of cancer victims who had turned their back on the lies and fabrications of medical doctors and placed their faith in God. It claimed that one doctor, an American, had been rendered speechless with amazement when scans showed his patient’s body entirely free of tumours, and when he asked, ‘Where were you cured?’ the man pointed heavenwards, the smile of true faith on his lips. Fahd quickly shut the booklet, returned with the phone book and called the repairman, who promised to pass by the following afternoon. The van wasn’t available at the moment.

As he was leaving, his mother embraced him and pushed a note, either two or five hundred riyals, into his breast pocket. Then she kissed his head, prayed that God protect him from all devils, human and jinn alike, and when he objected to her gift, saying that he wasn’t looking for charity from anyone, she was blunt: ‘It’s your money,’ she told him. ‘God rest his soul, your father’s money is your own.’

Since accepting a job as an editor for the Kanoun website’s art section, taking contributions and reviewing articles and comments, Fahd would spend long hours online back at the flat. He was no longer interested in Noha’s phone calls. He had met her again at the Paper Moon in Mamlaka Tower, hurriedly shaking her hand as she uncovered her small painted face and handed him a present wrapped in lemon-yellow paper, and placed in a carrier bag. On the card he read:

My darling,

For your eyes, your mouth and your little ginger moustache: I give you my scent and my femininity .

Back at the flat, as Saeed laughed and shouted ‘To hell with romance’, he broke open the wrapping paper and pulled out a bottle of Givenchy perfume. Giggling, he sprayed it at Saeed.

— 20 —

NOHA WAS YOUNG AND mischievous. Fahd wasn’t her first or last, and he wasn’t her only one, either. She gathered men about her to bathe her long nights with their rough voices and suggestive banter. Fahd enjoyed getting to know her and hearing stories about her family.

Her mother, a strong personality, would flip over from the Showtime movie channels whenever Noha came into her room and was desperately worried about her daughters. Noha told Fahd that she could remember her mother forbidding her to ride the horses at the funfair, even bicycles. She was not to jump around or play too energetically in case she broke her hymen.

‘A girl’s a matchstick!’ she would tell her.

When she was older and understood the implication of this sentence, she would lie beneath her blanket in the bitter Riyadh winter and ask herself, ‘A matchstick? Who will strike me, and when?’

Noha still recalled those moments as a young girl when she would hide beneath the bedsheet and send her little hand to grope around. She felt no pleasure, just the thrill of discovering this buried treasure. One day her mother walked in on her unexpectedly and Noha snatched her hand away in confusion.

‘What are you doing?’ her mother asked, sensing the child’s confusion and panic.

‘Nothing!’ Noha answered in terror.

Her mother wasn’t sure of what she had been up to, but she started dropping hints that it was a sin to play with oneself: ‘If you put your hand there you’ll never have children!’

It was absurd that a mother should threaten her child with the inability to bear children. So what if she did? What does being a mother mean to a girl of seven?

The next time she fiddled with her hand and moved it around down there, she was doing so for two reasons: first and foremost out of curiosity and secondly because she enjoyed its the way it felt. It was at this moment that her mother surprised her again, coming into the room and fully exposing her by uncovering the blanket. She moved closer and questioned her and Noha was stammering that she had been trying on her new underwear when her mother’s hand, burning and heavy, landed on her face.

Although Noha only left the house very rarely all her friends were men. She absolutely never went out without her mother and an army of brothers and sisters. Her mother would never let her go with children or the driver, nor with any of her relatives. In her mother’s absence the only person who could accompany her was her father.

Being accompanied by her father felt like a moment of wild rebellion to Noha, and it was the same on those rare occasions that she was allowed out with her friend. Her mother took her to her grandmother’s house, her mother took her to university, her mother took her to her doctor’s appointments, and so on, so much so that Noha would sometimes feel sorry for her, wrapped up in her daughter and neglecting her husband.

‘It’s wonderful that she’s done this,’ she would tell herself from time to time, ‘because otherwise I would have slept with lots of the men I’ve met. It’s true that I’ve done the deed with three to date, but that was only on the phone. If Mum had let me be for just a bit of the day I’d have done so much …’

It was imperative that Noha dispose of her sister, Nadia, with whom she shared a bedroom and bathroom. She did her best to upset and annoy her. Exploiting Nadia’s fear of the dark she started switching the light off early, leaving her sister quaking with fear. The two of them bickered until at last Nadia moved her books and bed in with her younger siblings, and the little bedroom became the kingdom of Noha’s secret love affairs.

During her first year at secondary school she was pursued by a boy two years her senior. He made her come, bringing her to a climax with just his voice and groans, as happened in the movies. Noha was amazed that her mother never heard her back then. She eventually took care to close her bedroom door and then, as a further precaution, to shut herself in the bathroom. How embarrassing it had been when one of her friends, hearing the echo bouncing off the ceramic tiles, asked her, ‘Are you in the lavatory?’