How proud Saleh was of fighting heresy in Muraidasiya in the 1960s! How proud, too, to breathe into his father’s ear the damaging allegation that his maternal grandfather hid a transistor in his bedroom in Buraida on which he listened to the Voice of the Arabs radio broadcasts. Ali al-Safeelawi, however, held his father-in-law in great esteem, so despite his burning desire to denounce his use of the radio and decry it as a heresy and a deviancy and a blasphemy on a par with harbouring a prostitute, he held the knowledge close and condemned it in his heart.
How Fahd longed for the bravery of his Uncle Ibrahim and his friend the akia, to be able to scream at the Committee man and the thin policeman with his belt and revolver dangling like the head of drowned child, to snatch back the bag of his possessions and demand: ‘When did you presume to own people who were born free?’
What freedom? he asked himself. When his own father tasted the bitterness of long years in jail just for being careless enough to pass out pamphlets to worshippers in the Grand Mosque? Was he dreaming of being a leader in the fight against corruption and the collapse of our values and moral code? Did he dream of silencing song and stilling the instruments, of preventing women and female singers from appearing on television? Were he and his comrades going to fill the earth with justice after it had brimmed with injustice and tyranny? Or did he just want to say to Ali, his father: Here I am! Here I am. The one you mocked and whose fate you saw in the moon! I came to show you that this is more than a childish game, more than a paltry rifle that young boys use to hunt sparrows or, like my older brother, destroy with its puny pellets a loudspeaker in some remote village west of Buraida.
Father, did you want to make them pay attention to you? Did you? Then may you go to hell, you and your senile father and your outdated, backward ideas, for you will bring this ignorant country nothing save more ignorance!
Apologies for this anger, Father. It makes me sad to think you lost your youth when it was you who later taught me the joys of literature and the arts, to watch the films of Walt Disney. You looked after me with love. Saeed, too, son of your friend Mushabbab, who was executed at the dawn of a new year; Saeed, my closest friend who, when confronted with tragedy would always find the strength to burst out in laughter, creating a flagrant, riotous uproar in Tahliya Street.
— 5 —
SO PAINFUL, THAT MOMENT, long ago, when they shoved Saeed’s father, Mushabbab, into the cell. Suleiman al-Safeelawi didn’t recognise his friend, though they had met at the farm a year before to pick up the secret pamphlets. When Mushabbab entered the cell his clothes were torn, his hair was wild and his face covered with dust. Barefoot and utterly exhausted he threw himself down and slept for five hours like a dead man. Suleiman tried to rouse him for sunset prayers but he did not wake, turned on his side like a corpse.
Years later, Suleiman was to wonder why Saeed’s father had deceived his pregnant wife and mother and brought them north on a journey to disaster, to a doomed war in the Grand Mosque. Suleiman hadn’t told his young son, Fahd, a thing. Saeed’s father has gone on a long journey, he’d said. He’s entrusted us to look after his son and keep him safe.
Every Friday morning he would ready himself early for prayers, then Fahd would sit alongside him in the wine-red Caprice as they drove to the neighbourhood of Jaradiya, south of Central Hospital, where he would park in a narrow road and order Fahd to get out and knock on a small steel door beneath a concrete awning. The roar of the air cooler mounted on two pipes in the street would suddenly cease, then the door would open and out would come Saeed in his wrinkled shimagh, his face still drowsy despite the droplets of water that clung to it. He would get in and they would drive to Ulaya, to pray at Sheikh al-Islam Mohammed Bin Abdel Wahhab Mosque near the house.
After prayers, Suleiman would go to the Afghans selling toothsticks and buy a long stick, which he broke into three. He would sharpen each piece and hand one to Saeed, one to Fahd and silently chew the third as he walked to the car, the two boys scurrying behind him like tame kittens. He would drive to nearby Urouba Road, pulling over just before the Layla al-Akheliya traffic lights outside Alban Zaman dairy to purchase a five-litre container of sour drinking yoghurt and milk, before going in to the Sulaimaniya supermarket and picking up a copy of Sharq al-Awsat, while the boys, beside themselves with joy, got a cold can of Pepsi each.
Holding their cans, the paper tucked beneath Suleiman’s arm, they would climb to the second floor of their small rented flat and after lunch the two boys would stretch out in Fahd’s bedroom to watch cartoons—Lady, Sally and Falouna, and occasionally, The Iron Man—though Fahd, making sure Saeed didn’t notice, would move his pillow from beneath his head and hold it in front of his face to hide his eyes, frightened by the creatures that he feared might reach out through the screen and attack him.
Just before sunset Suleiman would take them with his wife and their little sister, Lulua, to Sindbad’s Toy Town next to King Fahd Library, or to Marah Amusement Park on King Fahd Road, where they placed woollen blankets beneath their bottoms and shot with heart-stopping speed to the end of the long, undulating slide before panting back up. No one panted more than Lulua, who suffered severe asthmatic attacks that sent the whole family on frequent journeys to the Children’s Hospital in Sulaimaniya which left Suleiman dizzy, the spinning of his head made worse by the wails of the sick children sat waiting on plastic chairs. The moment Lulua emerged from the oxygen chamber he would hurry away before Fahd could make him stop at the man selling snacks and toys by the large glass door.
Whenever Suleiman was busy, or wanted to meet one of his friends, he would offer to drop the family at the entrance to the Khaima Funfair for women and children then take himself off for two hours or more. Fahd hated this funfair: the vast building and dimly lit halls. He would lose sight of his mother, sometimes for half an hour or more, and when she finally found him, dragging Lulua behind her, she would grab him viciously by the ear and angrily demand, ‘Where have you been, you clown?’
Those times when he was lost, he felt destined to live his life far from his family; he feared a swarthy woman would snatch him up and run off and he would go to live in a gloomy house that never saw the sun. Any mention by his parents of the municipal workers who stole children would set Lulua and him trembling and whenever he caught sight of cleaning staff or the like he would shut his eyes until they had passed by.
‘The ziyoud will get you!’ his mother would tell them.
When he was small he assumed the ziyoud were the men in Punjabi outfits, Afghans or Pakistanis he guessed, but once he was older he realised that they were Yemenis. Every time his father parked outside the supermarket and went in alone, he and his sister would hide beneath the seats in the back, curled up in the footwells out of sight of the thieves.
Could this fear of his date back to the silly rhyme he heard when he was five?
Mummy and daddy loved me,
They went to Jeddah and left me …
He felt that his parents really would abandon the two of them without warning, a fear that grew when they went out at night, leaving them with Asiya, their Indonesian maid. They wouldn’t leave until the children were asleep, but if either woke unexpectedly it was torture. At around ten or eleven Fahd would be thirsty and get out of bed muddle-headed, keeping his eyes barely open, not enough to banish sleep but just sufficient to see his way through the living room to the small fridge in the kitchen. On his return, his anxiety would take him to the door of his parents’ bedroom, which he would open without knocking to find them gone. Was it then that his instincts told him that he would, in fact, lose them at an early age and at more or less the same time?