Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

— 29 —

TARFAH’S VOICE WAS THE same as it had been on the phone, perhaps a little riper and more musical.

It was noon when Fahd first phoned her, anxious and uncertain, and after three rings her drawling voice had come down the line. A woman’s voice in every respect: supremely feminine, pleasant and welling with coquetry and refinement. When she spoke it was like a reed flute sounding sadly in an abandoned palm grove. Powerful and fluid, her voice could detonate passion in anyone’s heart. It was nothing like the throaty maternal utterances of Thuraya, or Noha’s unintelligible mumbling. More than just her voice, it was the warmth and searing honesty of what she said.

From their second phone conversation it seemed to Fahd that they had been friends since childhood. She told him how she had married a relatively unknown actor and separated after two years of suffering and disagreement. He had developed schizophrenia. Before the divorce she had travelled with him to Jeddah, where he forgot to take his medicine and started riding camels and horses on the corniche, screaming dementedly at her, ‘Take my picture!’

Back in their room her ex-husband had put on swimming trucks, crooning with furtive delight, ‘If only the gold market were lined in silk …’ and snatches of famous songs. Pointing from the high window at the swimming pool below, he said, ‘I’m going fishing.’

Tarfah was astonishingly warm and bubbly. She stole Fahd’s heart and made him feel exceptionally close to her, only rarely asking him questions as she told him of her childhood in Dakhna. She only mentioned her first name. He wanted a family name to feel more at ease, and despite her initial hesitation, she gave to him, making it clear that any similarity with the owners of a well-known commercial centre was pure coincidence. ‘Tribesmen!’ she called them.

With her chin resting on her fingers, she was beautiful. Her eyes were splendid, defying comparison with Thuraya’s Javanese slits, and likewise her tender, angelic voice, utterly dissimilar to the husky tones of the older woman. Even the things they talked about were different. Tarfah spoke like Scheherazade of her life, and that of her family and friends, filling Fahd’s heart and memory in the course of single week, while for months on end, Thuraya continued to ask after him and his Jordanian mother, giving him nothing of herself and shielding her life with a man’s caution.

He was eager to meet this angelic voice, and he turned his mind to a close comparison of the three: Noha, Thuraya and Tarfah. Which was to be his Mona Lisa? Tarfah of the wide eyes and the beautiful hands that supported her chin like faces in Salvador Dali’s paintings, propped on sticks and branches so as not to fall? Was it to be Tarfah’s face, burdened with the sorrow of angels, alert and tender and mournful all at once? Would it be Noha with her delicate sidelong glances, snatching fleeting moments to flick out a furtive look from between her Praetorian Guard, single-mindedly marching along the path by the wall of Prince Sultan University? Or Thuraya’s face, bewitched by Fahd’s, and perspiring with the force of her desire for oblivion?

These were the questions that attended Fahd as he met Tarfah at Le Mall. This time he was prepared for a romantic assignation of a completely different sort: a divorced woman of about his age who shared the same hopes and jokes and cultural references. Her text messages had brought them even closer and encouraged him to leapfrog the standard preliminaries.

When will I see my dear elephant? she asked, to which he mischievously replied, With the trunk or without?

The mall was close to the flat and he called her to say he was just setting out.

She whispered down the phone, ‘I love you!’ and there was the sound of a ringing kiss planted on the mouthpiece. Brazen as always he asked, ‘Where does that go?’ and she laughed.

‘On your mouth, my little lunatic!’

When he arrived he called her. She didn’t pick up, but sent a text telling him she was with her brother Ayman and would let him know when she was on her way.

He drove past the mosque in Ghadeer as the sound of the imam chanting the first rakaa of the evening prayer swelled from its speakers. He got out and went inside. The smell of Pattex glue filled the mosque’s interior and offcuts of new carpeting were scattered about the floor. Prayer, he felt, might summon God’s protection from the troubles he faced. How will He save you and deliver you from sin, O man?

He left the mosque and returned to the car, his phone ringing ever louder.

‘Listen: don’t come from direction of the main entrance.’

He stopped and doused the headlights. A few cars were stopped outside the entrance and he took a space by the wall of the Ibn Khaldoun Schools.

‘Give me a ring just before you come out,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be outside; it’s a blue Hyundai.’

When she called he did a U-turn and stopped right outside the entrance. A young woman emerged, wrapped in an abaya , walking steadily, neither hurrying nor dragging her steps. She opened the door and got in: ‘Evening.’

She was breathing rapidly, panting, as though she had been sprinting over the gleaming porcelain tiles inside the mall, her high heels rapping at the lamps reflected in the floor like stars.

Fahd noticed her hand: the living image of the one he had seen on Messenger, resting on the keyboard with rare splendour. He reached out his hand and enfolded her long, slender fingers. Raising her hand, he kissed it passionately and she let out a muffled groan.

At the traffic lights next to the mall he turned left down King Abdul Aziz Road, passing the Leen furnished flats, and as he approached the lights by the Panda supermarket in Maseef, he asked, ‘Shall we look for somewhere dark and quiet so I can see you?’

Her enchanting eyes watched him from behind her niqab . In contrast with her boldness over the phone she hardly said a word. When he asked her, ‘Which of these three roads shall I take?’ at the Panda lights she pointed with her hand held low, concealing it below the level of the window:

‘This way?’

‘Why are you pointing in that furtive way?’ he asked.

She gave her wonderful laugh. ‘My brothers warned me not to lift my hand when I point so people in neighbouring cars don’t see it!’

‘I don’t blame them!’ Fahd said mildly through his laughter. ‘If you were my sister I’d make you wear black gloves.’

She said that her mother and older brother, Abdullah, had once tried making her wear black gloves so men wouldn’t see the naked flesh of her hands, but she had fought back and refused.

She knew the city very well. Perhaps her knowledge of Riyadh’s more recent roads and neighbourhoods came from rides with her former lover around the new residential zones of North Riyadh, but she was reluctant to direct him there for fear he would find out about her past adventures, despite the fact that he had said on a number of occasions that he respected her openness and honesty.

After half an hour aimlessly circling Maseef and Murouj she said, ‘Go back towards Le Mall.’

So he went back, crossing the traffic lights heading north then turning left into the residential zone where the road twisted round and driving on a little further until they entered the darkness. He looked over at her and she unfastened her head covering. Her face bore the promise of eternal Paradise: round and full with soft cheeks, a small, pretty nose and a mouth that hinted at breathtaking lechery. She would smile and her amazing eyes would become more alluring still. How had her eyes acquired such magic, such splendour?

When he praised her she smiled and taking his hand between hers, kissed his knuckles one by one, then the tip of his thumb, and he felt the dampness of her saliva. Each looked at the other in the same instant, as though her eyes were calling out to him, and he leant towards her, pulling her head over with an audacity that would later amaze him when he remembered it and caressing it with infinite delicacy. He didn’t understand how he had been liberated from his old fears and he descended on her passionately until the wheel slipped from his hands and the car veered right and left.