Suleiman never thought he would return to Buraida, especially with the wretched memory of his detention there, but return he did one dawn in January 1990 with his little family in tow, fleeing the indiscriminate Russian missiles that could flatten his house in a heartbeat and because, following his experience in jail, he had come to believe more than ever in his father’s judgment that he was ‘defective’. He asked his wife what would prevent the erratic and unseeing missiles from turning away from the airbase and the vast fortified palaces in Maadhar and landing on a rented top-floor flat in Ulaya, home to an exhausted father, a miserable mother whose happiness was already deserting her at a young age, and a pair of children like pet kittens who knew nothing of life other than the fantastical, dreamlike stories they watched on a small screen.
The family stayed for several months with Uncle Saleh, in the big house in Buraida’s Bashar neighbourhood where he lived at that time. He had three sons, the eldest of whom, Yasser, was ten, while Fahd was six and his sister, Lulua, three. How different their house was! Extremely spacious, with a courtyard where the children played football, a small cornershop that sold ice cream on the street outside, and in a secluded corner of the building next to a bedroom for female visitors, a guest room set aside for the Riyadhis — Suleiman and his family.
Soha would quake when Fahd went missing for more than an hour, maybe because he was young and pale-skinned with an eye-catching coppery tone to his hair. She feared for him in the streets and alleys and from the attentions of her uncle’s children.
When the children were standing in front of the tall, hand-cranked washing machine, Yasser would play a game that Fahd found hard to understand, or rather he understood it, but enjoyed it, and so pretended he didn’t.
Yasser would try to pick him up from behind, lifting him so he could see his face in the mirror as he roared gleefully. But it was more than childhood fun and games. At noon one day, while the men snoozed before the afternoon prayer, Yasser led Fahd up to the roof to ‘fly pigeons’. He laughed when Fahd said, panic-stricken, ‘I’m scared!’ He assumed Fahd was scared of him, but what frightened him were pigeons, cats and any domesticated animal. Yasser pointed through the coop’s netting to the nest boxes.
‘The one with the fat breast: see her? That’s Velvet. The one standing over there is Fickle and next to her is Dancer. Look at her chick inside the shelter.’
‘Where?’ cried Fahd, backing away from the netting. ‘I don’t see it.’
Yasser followed him, throwing his dirty white ghatra on the ground.
‘You’re a dwarf. You’ll never grow,’ he said, and started pulling at Fahd from behind, lifting the little feet in their Riyadhi shoes off the ground so he could see the tiny fluffy chick. Fear started to prick at Fahd’s young heart, not only because of the pigeons, but also because of his cousin’s pigeon, which stirred wildly and hungrily rubbed against him. Fahd stood there silently then climbed downstairs, alarmed and bewildered.
His mother was not asleep like he had thought, but had put on her headscarf and the hooded robe she wore to pray and was standing by the door that opened on to the courtyard. The instant she felt him enter the room where his father was sleeping, she crept after him and beckoned him outside. He came out of the room and she led him to the empty women’s bedroom and started to interrogate him. ‘Where have you been?’
He lied to her for the first time in his life, telling her that he had been in the men’s majlis waiting for a guest of Uncle Saleh, but she looked for a moment at his green woollen thaub. He was wondering what she was looking at when she surprised him by asking, ‘Who were you with on the roof?’
Then suddenly Fahd broke down and wept and told her what had happened. He felt guilty, scourged by sin, as his mother plucked up a small white feather stuck to the bottom of his clothing.
— 11 —
THE AFTERNOON OF THE day after his uncle’s visit, while Lulua lay on her back watching Sally, Fahd was in the men’s majlis with his schoolbooks, revising for his end of year exams. His mother slipped silently into the room so as not to break his concentration, placing a pot of tea on the table next to him, and before she could leave he invited her to sit for a while.
He had no idea how he would tell her what had happened. She might feel guilty herself for upsetting him and involving him in her problems, she might not be the slightest bit bothered, and she might lash out at those around her. He had no idea how she would respond. She had been suffering bouts of breathlessness since Suleiman had passed away three months previously.
‘Do you know why my uncles came yesterday?’
‘You lied to me, Fahd? My heart told me you were hiding something!’
He started to tell her what the men were planning: how her well-being had become a legal duty, as though they had evidence of her conducting secret liaisons with strangers, or someone had said that they saw strange men entering the widow’s house at noon, while her children were at school.
There was a long and dreadful silence, as though she were looking back over her life and what had happened to her. Her distracted air was intensely provoking to her son, and wheedling suspicions began to circle his heart, goading him like a switch on a stubborn donkey: Was there something linking her with a man other than his father? Had she been so sad and silent these last few years because she was torn between his father and another? Was it possible that his uncle had won her heart, and she his, all those years ago when they were staying in his house in Buraida, fleeing the madness of war? Fahd raised his face to the ceiling: No. I take refuge with God from doubt and uncertainty!
After a full minute of silent contemplation Soha suddenly started to wail. How could they think of this with her husband so recently laid to rest, the soil over his grave not yet dried by the sun? How could she forget Suleiman’s smile, his playfulness and his laughter? How could she forget his voice as he read her verses by Abu Tammam and al-Mutannabi and the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, especially Ahmed the Arab and Praise for the Lofty Shadow, which he had memorised from a cassette tape given to him by Nabeel Hawamla? And how could they forget how they had mistreated Suleiman from the day of his birth to his death? Were they intent on wronging him even after he was gone?
After Suleiman left prison and was back in Buraida, and once Eid al-Fitr had come to an end, his family arranged a job for him as a correspondent for a small contracting company. Ali al-Safeelawi dashed round to all the families he knew and whose men he trusted in order to get his son engaged in quick order, lest he be drawn after some new dream and lead his family into even more trouble than before. Ali wasn’t that worried about Suleiman going to jail, or even being killed, but he did fear the scandal that had caused one man in Buraida to mock him in a packed majlis. He had walked out and now avoided male company.
The families did not answer his plea. A very few confronted him with reality: the reality of the jail in which the expectant groom had languished and the fact that people like that never gave up their ideas, which flowed from them like blood.