Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

‘Goodness!’ the balding man said sarcastically. ‘All this in your pockets?’

‘Yes, sheikh.’

‘The brother is a Saudi?’ he asked, scrutinising Fahd’s features.

‘Of course! The ID card’s in front of you!’

‘I know that. I can see it. But you don’t look right.’

‘Maybe your mother isn’t Saudi,’ said the strongman with the massive face.

‘That’s right, she’s from a Jordanian family.’

‘So you’re a mongrel?’

‘Half Saudi, then!’ he said, chuckling happily.

Staring at the papers and receipts the balding man said, almost in a murmur, ‘Half a man, in other words …’

Fahd sat there, trapped by the three men. One of them studied his ID card. ‘Which branch of the al-Safeelawis is this?’

‘The Qaseem lot.’

The balding man peered at him mistrustfully. ‘Where in Qaseem?’

‘My family is from Muraidasiya.’

‘Do you know Abu Ayoub?’

‘Sheikh Saleh …’ the hawk-eyed man said by way of explanation.

‘He’s my uncle!’ He almost added, ‘And my mother’s husband!’ but a lump rose in his throat and he fell silent.

‘Blessings!’ said the hawk-eyed man, then added offensively. ‘On him, not you.’

‘As for you, who cares?’ said the strongman.

Pips of sweat had started to appear on the bald patch of the man with the uncovered head. He drew a pen from his pocket and sliding the point beneath the string linking the widely spaced prayer beads he lifted them towards his nose and gave a tentative sniff, his eyes blinking rapidly and anxiously, then slowly moved them across to the hawk-eyed man and lifted them to his nose. The hawk-eyed man sniffed twice, moved his head back, then leant forward and sniffed again, his eyebrows raised. The balding man slowly transferred them to the nose of the strongman.

‘What’s this?’ he asked Fahd.

‘Prayer beads.’

‘Why are they all coloured like an African necklace?’

After a period of silence Fahd replied, ‘I painted them. I’m an artist.’

The balding man slowly raised his eyes towards him. ‘You draw human beings?’

‘Everything.’ Even nudes, he almost added.

An Indonesian entered carrying pots of tea and coffee, placed them on a table in the corner of the room, then poured coffee for the three men. Having put the prayer beads into a small envelope, the balding man rose to his feet and tipped a few drops of coffee on to his thumb, unwilling to wet it with his tongue after it had touched the beads lest the black magic pass to his mouth, then into his body, and he die. He wiped the moistened thumb on to the glued flap on the envelope and pressed it shut.

The strongman whispered a few words in his ear and he nodded in agreement. The hawk-eyed man, who had heard nothing of this but clearly understood the secret message, nodded in turn.

Fahd stayed staring towards them anxiously. He remembered a newspaper report he had read a year back about a witch who had been seen by the men from the Committee, fleeing her flat on a broomstick after they had raided it and discovered prayer-beads, amulets and charms.

Witch arrested in Medina; Den of black magic raided

Ukaz, 29 May 2006

Yesterday morning (Monday) members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice received a surprise when they raided a den of black magic in the neighbourhood of Ard Mahbat, near Seeh in Medina, and found more than twenty women in the company of an African witch, naked as the day she was born.

The real surprise was not her refusal of the blanket provided to cover her nakedness, but that she flew from the room like a bird and disappeared from the flat to the amazement of more than twenty members of the Committee who were present.

A terrifying landing

The chase was on.

Committee members set out in pursuit, hunting for the witch through the upper and lower levels of the four-storey building, the sorceress having vanished from the second floor. During their search they came across a citizen in his pyjamas with his children behind him, appealing for help from his fellow residents. The citizen informed them that a naked African woman had dropped from the bedroom ceiling into the middle of his sleeping children, terrifying them and setting them screaming and wailing.

‘When I went to see what was going on in the bedroom,’ he added, ‘my children told me about the bizarre scene they had just witnessed and when I realised it was a witch we all fled from the flat.’

Witch hunters

Ascending to the fourth floor the Committee members located the completely naked witch in a citizen’s flat and loudly recited the call to prayer and the Ayat al-Kursi to paralyse her. One Committee member then threw a blanket over her until her clothes could be recovered, and once dressed she was arrested.

A source at the Committee stated that the operation to arrest the witch and her accomplices was led by Sheikh Faheed al-Oufi, head of the Committee’s centre in Harra Gharbiya. Recovered from the witch’s room were prayer beads, amulets, written charms, magical knots, instructional videos for the practice of black magic and a belt of the sort worn around the skirts of female primary school pupils, indicating that a schoolgirl had been bewitched. A Qur’an was also found beneath the witch’s chair.

— 37 —

IN THE MONTHS THAT followed his father’s passing Fahd discovered drawing in pastels and for some time afterwards he stayed devoted to the technique. At that time he didn’t use an easel.

Closing the door to his room he opened the box of colour-graded sticks and with lunatic preoccupation pushed the pastels in every direction over the paper; at times he even felt that the pastels were moving of their own accord, guiding his hand about. Here a long road, shadowed with a storm cloud, there a solitary bush, an old upturned cart and a murder of crows wheeling at the top of the sheet.

He laid the pastel aside and used his thumb to smudge the road’s far end into the darkened sky. The horizon merged. His fingers became tinted with colour until they almost turned into pastels themselves and he was unable to judge which was his forefinger and which the chalk. He was eager and felt that he was panting as he pulled and pushed the pastels.

Just before dawn he grew drowsy and his heavy head slumped over the page. He came to mid-morning, his drool spread out over the sheet in the shape of a rectangular trunk, a jinn ’s smoky body sprouting from the upturned cart.

After giving up pencils, then pastels, Fahd became addicted to oil paints, brushes, easels and palettes, but here he was, sketching away with his pencil as he sat at the Tea and Coffee Pot Café, across from Carrefour in Granada Mall.

He had chosen a seat next to the window, its opaque plastic film shielding the customer inside from the mall’s bustle. By the chair he had selected this film had split, a small gap through which he could spy on the shoppers.

He ordered Turkish coffee and water, took from his pocket a piece of paper and a 0.5 millimetre gauge pencil and surveyed the scene through the window. Women in abayas that failed to hide their jeans, some pushing trolleys that were empty or contained a sprawling, playful child clutching the string of a helium balloon, others trailing an Indonesian maid pushing the trolley after them, while yet more clustered around the ATM machine by Samba Bank, ringed with mischievous children.

The Filipino waiter set down a small brass pot on the table and as Fahd gripped the handle to pour the thick coffee the waiter peered at the page and said that it was beautiful. Fahd thanked him, and sipping at his green porcelain cup he stared at what his hand had made.