Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

The Egyptian sheikh sat facing her, reassuring her that God had great compassion for His servants and that He, praised be His name, would cure her of what ailed her. From time to time he tugged at his white ghatra as it slipped backwards. Then he approached her, and laying his heavy hand upon her head, began to recite surat al-najm —‘ “By the Star when it goes down, your Companion is neither astray nor is he misled …” ’—first chanting, then muttering, then reciting in his head and blowing so hard that her niqab almost flew off.

Soha felt no relief. She sighed to herself, resisting the rough hand that weighed upon her. It was heavy and his breath stank of rotten eggs, but for twenty minutes she kept her composure until he mixed some oil with caraway seed, stirring them together with his thick thumb. He left, having first prayed for her speedy recovery and told her that to show resistance and steadfastness in the face of God’s test made amends for any sin committed by man.

— 28 —

TWO GUARDS, ONE BALD, the other short and slender, both wearing the uniform of a private security firm, stood outside Entrance Three of Le Mall inspecting the men and women entering the mall complex through the sliding glass doors. Outside, Fahd reduced speed but instead of turning left at the roundabout by the entrance he continued along beside the wall of Ibn Khaldoun School, then stopped and called Tarfah’s mobile. Tarfah, wandering around a shop next to Entrance Three and exchanging a pair of earrings, suggested that he circle the roundabout and stop directly outside the doors. She had taken precautions and entered via Entrance Two on King Abdul Aziz Road and the guards here wouldn’t be the same.

Tarfah, or Scarlet — the name she used in the message boards of Kanoun’s art page — had got to know him two years before but neither had thought of getting any more intimate than interactions on the site’s discussion threads, emails or Messenger.

A phone call had never been an option, despite Scarlet being an active member of the site and her many charming contributions and astute observations. Fahd had even sent her a private message when she first registered, suggesting she change the signature line that appeared at the bottom of her posts— Suwaidi and Falluja are the two eyes in the face of terrorism —and explaining that the website was an art forum and did not permit discussions of security issues and politics. Despite all this irregular correspondence they had never held a conversation until the night he found a request from her to be added to his Messenger contacts. He consented and in the excitement of their late-night exchange she had sent him a mobile phone icon. He paused for a few seconds, unsure whether to write his number.

Forget it! Don’t bother! She wrote, but she had him hooked. He sent the number only for her to respond with a winking smiley.

She was in her thirties, with wide eyes, extraordinary dimples that appeared whenever she smiled, whether shyly or seductively, full lips and a round face of golden skin tinged an olive green. Her hair was black and soft, set in place with the hot air from the blow dryer that never left her room. Her hands, to which Fahd was addicted, were smooth, small and dark with beautiful thumbs; he had once told her that he dreamt of painting a picture made up entirely of thumbs like hers. Always calm and measured, she had an aura of hidden glee about her which hid a profound sadness that lay within her, manifesting itself through bouts of misery and anxiety that surfaced whenever she looked back over her short life: two failed marriages leading to an unshakeable phobia of matrimony, then three relationships, the latest of them with Fahd. During each affair she told herself: this one’s my true love; he’s the most beautiful; or, this one’s my love, he’s the most honest. But after months or years the love, or the sexual desire, would start to fade and die, until, finding herself neglected, she would begin all over again, cocooning herself in the affections of another man.

Fahd had teased her. Why do you have a picture of an elephant in your Messenger window? he’d written. Don’t tell me you’re the size of an elephant!

His taunts provoked her. She started playing a guessing game with him, first putting up a photo of a large eye painted with kohl and eyeshadow, then a pair of plump lips, then a small nose, then an earring hanging from her earlobe and finally her whole face, stunning despite being touched up with Photoshop. Then she restored the little elephant.

In the course of a first phone call full of laughter and noise, she told him she dreamt of riding an elephant and in the madness of the moment he replied, ‘I wish I was an elephant!’ She laughed at his indecency, and he laughed at her laughter, and so the hours passed, first in intimate confidences then in debate over the various artists showcased on the forum and the exhibitions scattered throughout Riyadh, at the Shadda Hall outside the Aziziya branch of Panda in Murabba, the Sharqiya Gallery north of the Takhassusi Hospital and the Faisal Bin Fahd Centre at The Capital Model Institute. She didn’t paint in oils and wasn’t obsessed with buying paintings; she was fond of many pictures but didn’t have the extra cash, so her only option was to collect images of these pictures from the forum and save them in a special file.

At first he was scared and unsure. There were signs that Thuraya wasn’t going to leave him be. She never stopped threatening him for his failure to create an opportunity for them to meet somewhere alone.

Strange , he thought to himself, the smell of her still in his nostrils. Young men are usually the ones who blackmail and threaten girls, so how come this woman’s threatening me?

Although Tarfah had been an acquaintance of his on the website for two years now, doubts continued to attend him, cawing crows hovering over a corpse. Had she been sent by Thuraya to exact revenge? Was Thuraya already online? Was she somewhere in the list of the last ten members to join? He looked over the pseudonyms and found nothing hinting at her name, her personality or the Hejaz origins she boasted about constantly, but still he asked himself why Tarfah had appeared in his life at this moment in particular, just as he was slowly extricating himself from Thuraya’s curse. Why had she only now begun writing to him and trying to get closer to him, when both of them had been around since the website started?

As he stopped by the guards in their sky-blue uniforms outside Entrance Three, Fahd caught sight of a woman, walking with excessive self-confidence and lethal and magnificent composure, swathed in a black abaya with a small white bear swaying from a loop on the side of her black handbag. She opened the car door and got in beside him.

‘Good evening,’ she said shyly, shifting her body and hitching up the lower half of her abaya .

Once the car had started moving, she looked at him with alluring eyes. His heart gave an unexpected lurch and he stretched out the fingers of his right hand so they rested between her succulent palms and the cocoon of her own, dark-brown fingers.

‘Go right,’ she told him and he turned north into the neighbourhood of New Wadi, with its protective cover of darkness that left all living things suspended in mid-air, raucous and honeyed.

Through his laughter he asked her, ‘How come you know the backstreets of North Riyadh when you live in Suwaidi?’

She giggled and said that her older sister Asmaa had nicknamed her Google and now all her relatives either called her Google or Tarfah.com; even the men of the family, young and old alike, were aware that she knew the lanes, main roads and shops, as though a comprehensive map of the city, its roads, buildings and neighbourhoods, slumbered in her little head.