Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

Faisal distanced himself from his beloved Michelle. He put before her the ugly truth and then he fled even from his responsibility to deal with her reaction. He left her sitting in the restaurant silent and alone so he would not see the reflection of his own disfigured image in her eyes. Poor Faisal! It wasn’t his pride that made him abandon her. It was just that in spite of everything he wanted to preserve a beautiful memory of her love for him.

With a great deal of patience and will and a sincere desire to surmount grief, and with the help of God, who knew how harsh her suffering was, Michelle began the process of peeling away the pain. Aided by her righteous scorn and her stubbornness, she decided to let the trailing hems of their beautiful past slip through her hands.

She hoped that time would heal her and that her joy in simple things would return to her life. When this did not happen, she took the uncommon step of seeing a shrink. She went to an Egyptian psychiatrist referred to her by Um Nuwayyir, who had seen him during the first stages of her divorce.

She found no chaise longue to stretch out on there; there would be no “free association” allowed. The shrink seemed quite conservative in the way he dealt with her, and he didn’t appear able to handle her grief-filled question whose answer would remain hidden from her for as long as she lived: What more could I have done or said to make him stay?

After four visits, all Michelle discovered about herself was that she needed a more profound cure than anything she would find in the words she heard from this primitive physician. In discussing Faisal’s deception, the good doctor said it all boiled down to the story of the wolf enticing the ewe to his lair before devouring her. Well, she was no bleating sheep and her darling Faisal was certainly no wolf. Was this the most brilliant and cutting-edge insight that the discipline of psychology had produced among the Arabs? And how could a male Egyptian shrink understand the dimensions of a problem that afflicted her female Saudi self anyway, with the enormous gap in social background that their nationalities entailed, since Saudi Arabia has a unique social setting that makes its people unlike any others? In spite of the wound that Faisal had inflicted, Michelle was sure that Faisal had loved her truly and fiercely, and that he still loved her as she loved him. But he was weak and passive and submissive to the will of a society that paralyzed its members. It was a society riddled with hypocrisy, drugged by contradictions, and her only choice was to either accept those contradictions and bow to them, or leave her country to live in freedom.

This time when she proposed the idea of studying abroad to her father, she did not face an immediate refusal as she had a year ago. It may be that the weight she had lost and the paleness that taken hold of her face in recent weeks had an effect on his decision. The atmosphere of their home had become very bleak with her depression and the departure of her brother Meshaal to Switzerland for his summer boarding school. Her parents agreed to let Michelle go to San Francisco, where her uncle lived. On that very day, she wrote to all of the colleges and universities in San Francisco; she was determined to not lose the opportunity to register before the beginning of the new school year.

All Michelle wanted was to hear that she had been accepted in one of the schools there so that she could bundle up her belongings and turn her back on a country where people were governed—or herded—like animals, as she said to herself over and over. She would not allow anyone to tell her what she could and could not do! Otherwise, what was the point of life? It was her life, only hers, and she was going to live it the way she wanted, for herself and herself only.

19.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: June 18, 2004

Subject: Among the Stars…Above the Clouds

My inbox is on fire with exploding e-mails. Some have warned me that I’m getting too close to the red line. Others tell me that I’ve already crossed it and that I will surely be punished for interfering in other people’s affairs, and (worse) for becoming a role model to others who might be tempted to challenge our society’s traditions with such audacity, brazen insolence, and self-assurance.

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!

On the walkway into the airplane Sadeem wept, as if she were trying to rid herself of whatever tears remained inside before going back to Riyadh. She wanted to return to her old life there, her life before Waleed. She wanted to go back to her university and her studies and her hard work, to her intimate friends and the good times at Auntie Um Nuwayyir’s house.

She took her seat in the first-class cabin, put the earphones to her Walkman on and closed her eyes, as the beautiful music of Abdulmajeed Abdullah, one of her favorite Saudi singers, washed over her.

Among the stars up here,

above the clouds serene

I wash blues with hues of joy

all the anguish I wash clean.

To occupy her time as she flew toward her homeland, Sadeem had chosen a collection of songs that could not have been more different from those that took her to London. This time, she intended to say farewell to the sadness that overtook her when she broke with Waleed. She had decided to bury her grief in London’s dirt and return to Riyadh with the high spirits a young woman of her age ought to have.

After the seatbelt light went out, Sadeem headed—as she always did on any international flight—to the WC to put on her abaya . She could not bear putting this task off until just before the plane landed in the kingdom, when the women were all lined up, and so were the men, down the aisle, waiting to get into the toilets to put on their official garb. The women would put on their long abayas, head coverings and face veils, while the men stripped off their suits and ties, including the belts that they always tightened under their bellies so that one could see how rippling-full of flesh and fat and curds and whey they were, to return to the white thobes that concealed their mealtime sins and the red shimaghs that covered their bald pates.

As she made her way back to her seat, she caught sight of a man who, it seemed to her, was smiling at her from a distance. She squinted and frowned to make out his features more clearly. How much easier it would be if she were able to put in her corrective contact lenses herself instead of depending on the eye specialist at the shop to put them in for her! When she reached her seat, though, only four steps separated her from that young man’s row. She saw who it was! A gasp escaped her, louder than it should have been, loud enough to embarrass her. It revealed her enthusiasm, which of course would have been hard to explain in public.

“Firas!”

She went the rest of the way to him. He rose, welcoming her with obvious delight and then asking her to sit in the seat next to his, which fate had decreed would be empty.

“How are you, Sadeem? What a wonderful coincidence!”

“God sweeten your days! Wallah, seriously, a lovely coincidence. I never imagined I would see you after that day in the bookstore.”

“And you know what? I was on the waiting list for this flight. I mean, I wasn’t sure that I would even be traveling tonight! A God-given grace! But then, thank goodness you got up to go put on your abaya , or I never would have seen you!”

“It’s strange, isn’t it?! And look at you! You’ve got your thobe on before you even get on the airplane.”