A week after they met, Lamees bumped into Ali in the hospital where she and Fatimah had gone to buy some reference books. It was before they had their rotation in that hospital later on. Many of the girls in the freshman class had met nice guys—colleagues—there by pretending they needed tutoring to understand the difficult medical courses, and Lamees used the same ploy with Ali, who was a senior. They met within the confines of the hospital at first and later on outside in one of the nearby coffee shops.
Somehow none of her friends caught on to their relationship. In front of her friends, Lamees acted as if nothing were going on between the two of them, that he was just tutoring her every now and then. Only Fatimah knew, because her brother told her. It turned out that he had asked her to arrange that meeting at the train station. He had seen Lamees’s photo framed in his sister’s room at their home in Qatif and he was smitten with her. In the photo, Lamees, Fatimah and some other classmates, all dressed in white lab coats, posed next to a corpse they had dissected in the anatomy lab of the Medical College for females in Malaz—a horrifically depressing room in which you could smell the mingled odors of formalin and cheap bukhour* that the workers burned all the time in their attempts to mask the strong odor of the preserved bodies.
Ali was in his final year of medical studies and he was supposed to start his internship immediately after graduation. He would be assigned to one of the hospitals in the eastern part of the country. Lamees and Fatimah were still in their second year of university.
One day, as Lamees and Ali sat together in a café on Al-Thalatheen Street, a band of men from Al-Hai’ah** swooped down on them and led the pair off swiftly to two separate SUVs and headed immediately for the organization’s nearest bureau.
There, they put Lamees and Ali into two separate rooms and began interrogations. Lamees could not bear the hurtful questions put to her. They asked her in detail about her relationship with Ali. They used coarse language and they forced her to hear words that would have embarrassed her even in front of her most intimate girlfriends. After trying for hours to appear self-confident and completely convinced of the rightness of everything she had done, she collapsed in tears. She really did not believe that she had done anything that was cause for shame. In the next room, the interrogator was putting pressure on Ali, who lost his cool completely when the man asserted that Lamees had confessed to everything and that he might as well come clean.
The senior officers contacted Lamees’s father. They told him that she had been apprehended with a young man in a café and was being held at their headquarters and that he must come and get her after signing a promise that his daughter would never again engage in such an immoral act.
Her father arrived, his face so pale from the sudden call. He signed the necessary papers and then was allowed to take her. On the way home, he tried to suppress his anger and to console, as much as possible, his sobbing daughter. He vowed he would not tell her mother or sister what had happened, on one condition: she must never again meet that boy outside the hospital building. Yes, he admitted, it was true that she was allowed to go out on her own with her male cousins and the sons of his friends and her mother’s friends in Jeddah. But in Riyadh, things had to be different!
Lamees worried about Ali. At the headquarters, she had heard a policeman whispering into her father’s ear that they had found out the boy was “from the rejectionist sect.” He was a Shiite from Qatif and so his punishment would certainly be worse than hers.
That day marked the rupture of Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah as well as Ali. From then on, every time their eyes met, Fatimah repudiated her with a burning stare, as if she blamed Lamees entirely for the whole thing. Poor Ali. He had been such a sweet guy, and frankly, if Lamees had been allowed to continue seeing him, and more important if he hadn’t been Shiite, she might actually have fallen in love with him.
24.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: July 23, 2004
Subject: Firas: The (Near) Perfect Man!
I am so tired of getting these boring responses that try to dissect my personality after every e-mail. Is that really what matters most to you, after everything I have written? Whether I am Gamrah or Michelle or Sadeem or Lamees? Don’t you get that it doesn’t matter who I am?
I didn’t know that shopping for the baby could be so much fun!” Sadeem said to Gamrah, her voice laced with enthusiasm. “These baby things are so adorable! If only you would agree to ask your doctor about the sex of the baby during your next ultrasound—then we would know what we are shopping for!”
Because Gamrah’s two older sisters, Naflah and Hessah, were so busy with their husbands and because her little sister, Shahla, was so preoccupied with her high school studies, Sadeem offered to go with her pregnant friend to buy whatever would be needed for the newborn. And occasionally, when Gamrah’s mother’s arthritis was acting up, Sadeem would take her place and accompany Gamrah to the gynecologist for the periodic checkup.
“It doesn’t matter to me if it is a boy or a girl. Let’s buy the basic stuff now and the rest can come after it’s born.”
“Don’t you have any feelings about all of this, Gammoorah? You sound so cold. If I were in your place, I couldn’t wait to know what sex it’ll be!”
“Sadeem, you just don’t understand. I’m not eager to have this baby! This little thing is going to change my whole life. And then who will be willing to marry me? Nobody wants a full package! So tell me—is this the way my future is supposed to be? I’m going to live out my life saddled with this kid whose father doesn’t want it and doesn’t want his mother, either? Rashid goes off to live his life free and without any ties. He can fall in love, he can get married, he can do whatever he wants, while I have to live with this aggravation and trouble the rest of my life! I don’t want this baby, Sadeem. I don’t want it!”
They were in the car, on their way back to her house. Gamrah burst into tears of utter despair. Sadeem couldn’t find anything convincing to say that might comfort her. If only Gamrah would return to the university to study with her! But Gamrah had been insisting that she didn’t have the energy for it. Her body, which used to be so perfectly slender and sleek, was bursting at the seams from so much lying around. Of course, she suffered from boredom, imprisoned in the house as she was. Even her younger sister Shahla had more freedom than her! That’s because she was not a divorced woman. Meanwhile, Mudi, her cousin who came from the conservative city of Qasim to live with them while going to college in Riyadh, never ceased to annoy her with all her criticisms. She disapproved of Gamrah’s neatly tweezed eyebrows and the fact that she wore an over-the-shoulder abaya instead of the abaya that you drape over your head that covers your figure completely. As for her older brothers, Mohammed and Ahmad, they were completely engrossed in their friends and the adventures they had endlessly inundating girls with their phone numbers. There was no one left to entertain her but Nayif and Nawaf, who were only ten and twelve. Pitiful!
What could Sadeem possibly have said to Gamrah? How could she have comforted and distracted her? After all, there was nothing worse than a person who claimed to be filled with sympathy, to be all there for someone drowning in grief, when streams of happiness were so obviously glistening in her own eyes! If only she could have faked a little misery, thought Sadeem. But how could she possibly have managed that when she had Firas?