“Who told you about that? Gamrah?” Sadeem asked, aghast.
“Sadeem, you know I’m the last person in the world to even think about gossiping about my friends. Don’t be afraid of me, because I wasn’t raised in this society which doesn’t know how to discuss anything except who said this and who that.”
“If what you’re saying is true, if your refusals only have to do with our young men, then why didn’t you defy everyone and marry Matti or Hamdan?” Sadeem countered.
“Simple. Anyone who has gone through love and knows how far it can go can never ever be satisfied with a love that’s just so-so. Now I can’t settle for less. I just can’t! My love for Faisal—that was the love of my life. Look, even though I threw him out of my life, he still stands there inside my mind like a statue that I measure every man up against, and unfortunately, they all come out short. And of course I’m the one who really loses after such comparison.”
“I wanted a number one, Michelle. The way I saw it was, like, I don’t deserve anything less than Firas. But my number one was satisfied to be with someone less than me, and so now I’m forced to be satisfied with something less than him.”
“I don’t agree with you there, Sadeem. For me, my number one is gone, but someone who’s even better will come along! I will never sell myself short and I can never be satisfied with the crumbs.”
49.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: February 11, 2005
Subject: Graduation Ceremony
If only I had known how very dangerous love was, I wouldn’t have loved
If only I had known how very deep the sea was, I wouldn’t have set sail
If only I had known my very own ending, I wouldn’t have begun.—Nizar Qabbani
A bittersweet fact. The story that began nearly six years ago is coming up to the present time, and so the end of my e-mails is drawing near.
In one of Riyadh’s grand hotels, a dinner was held to honor the graduates, Lamees and Tamadur Jeddawi and Mashael Al-Abdulrahman. The guest list was restricted to the three of them, plus Gamrah and Sadeem, Gamrah’s sisters and Um Nuwayyir.
Lamees was the unchallenged star of the party with her expanding belly; the fetus was in the twenty-eighth week. Lamees’s rosy cheeks and confident smile announced to her friends that hope still existed somewhere in this troubled business of life. Everything about her, on this graduation day, showed them that at least one of them was a young woman bursting with happiness. Even her fellow graduates, Tamadur and Michelle, didn’t have a quarter of her joy. And why shouldn’t she celebrate and exude all this radiant pleasure? As Michelle said, “She’s got it all!” A successful marriage, a diploma with honors, the promise of a professional future. She alone among her friends had not suffered for trying to obtain what she longed for.
A few moments before leaving the hotel, Gamrah and Sadeem ran into Sattam, the obliging bank employee whom they had met through Tariq. He had worked out the bank transactions for their party-planning business and they had conferred with him a few times after that at the bank. Sattam came into the restaurant with a group of businessmen. He smiled and nodded from a distance, but of course he couldn’t come over to greet them in the company of all those men, nor could the two young women return his greetings when they were in a group of women or, to be exact, when they were in the presence of Gamrah’s sisters, spies who loved nothing more than to snitch on inappropriate behavior.
At the men’s table, Firas asked his friend Sattam in a low voice about the women who had just gotten up from the table not too far away, and whether he knew them. He had caught a whiff of a certain rare dehn oud* that he was very familiar with coming from their direction. Sattam informed him that two of the women were regular clients of the bank and successful businesswomen, even though they were so young. Firas felt his heart tighten sharply when he heard Sattam mention the name of Sadeem Al-Horaimli.
If only he could have searched their faces and not have averted his gaze, he would have noticed that his Saddoomah was among them! His Saddoomah. Could she possibly be his after all he’d done? Sadly he let his eyes follow the backs of their abayas as they moved farther away, his imagination sketching a beautiful innocent face so dear to his heart.
No one knows what went through Firas’s mind that night after the brush with Sadeem. What is certain, though, is that his thoughts ran on for hours as her fragrance continued to tickle his nose. Did it confirm for him that she still loved him, if she was still using the scented oil he had given her two years before?
Firas had never experienced such a wealth of feeling for any woman except Sadeem. His wife, who loved him very much, wasn’t able to make him happy as his Sadeem naturally had. Firas made a sudden decision that night, while he was lying in his marriage bed, next to his wife—the mother of his first son and now pregnant with his second.
50.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: February 18, 2005
Subject: Advice Spun from Gold: Take the One Who Loves You, Not the One You Love!
Click here to listen to the song
So you ask: What’s new?…
Nothing has changed, ever since you left me.
Are you happy to hear that?
Nothing has changed, alas,
To this day I’m in your hands.—Thikra
I confess that my immersion in the story of my friends for an entire year has made me one of those women who know exactly what they want.
I want a love that fills the heart forever like the love of Faisal and Michelle. I want a man who is tender and cares for me the way Firas took care of Sadeem. I want our relationship after we marry to be rich and strong like the relationship Nizar and Lamees have. I want to have healthy children like Gamrah’s child, and to love them, not just because they are my children, but because they are a part of him, my love. That is how I want my life to be.