Fahd turned to him with raised eyebrows. ‘Huh! How did you get in here?’
Saeed laughed pointing at the canvas. ‘The door, but it looks like you need to get away from this picture!’
Saeed went inside to sleep while Fahd worked on. The features of masked men and soldiers started to appear. As the time approached one in the morning he felt his chest constrict, as though twenty soldiers had thrown him down and were sitting on his heart. His breathing became irregular. He washed the brush he was holding and quickly cleaned the palette knife, then doused his face in a continuous stream of water at the kitchen sink. He put on his thaub and left without his shimagh. He started the car and drove away, directionless.
Paralysis crept through Riyadh’s body, slumbering like a mysterious woman. The streetlights were faint as they fought against the columns of dust laying their fire over the city. In the murk of the heavy dust the bridge by Mamlaka Tower was invisible, likewise the crystal ball atop Faisaliya Tower. Cars driven by high-spirited young men waited at traffic lights. He pulled up beside one. On the back seat three heads bobbed uproariously as the voice of Rashed al-Fares split the dust of the night. Fahd looked over at them with a smile. In the front seat was a young man, his hair tied back in a ponytail, gesturing at some girls who sat behind the smoked windows of a pearl-grey Cadillac Escalade. One of them opened her window and made an obscene gesture with her middle finger. They erupted with a loud yell accompanied by the squeal of tyres as they chased after the girls’ Indian driver, well-trained in these night time excursions.
Fahd glanced in the direction of Shoe Palace and considered paying a visit to his mother and sister. It was late, though. He took a right on to King Fahd Road and opened the window — perhaps the twenty soldiers slumped over his chest might be swept away — but the surging dust, like a wild squall of rain, whipped at his face and hurt his eyes. He reconsidered his need for fresh air and closed the window.
If he wept softly now, he whispered to himself, it might ease his cramped heart and the smugly squatting soldiers would fly away. Opening the glove box he took out the first tape he found, then pushed it into the slot, and Fairouz’s voice emerged, wounded and sorrowfuclass="underline"
I yearn for you and cannot see you, nor can I speak with you;
From the backstreets, from behind the shutters, I call out to you.
He thought of the nights long ago, his father reading in his room and Fairouz’s voice melting softly in his ears.
He didn’t go over the bridge over Imam Road, but stopped on the far left, by the Abdel Lateef Jameel traffic lights, and looped back round to the petrol station on the corner, stopping in a parking bay outside a Coffee Day kiosk. He ordered a medium-sweet Turkish coffee and a small bottle of water and drove slowly along Qaseem Road sipping his coffee as Fairouz summoned up a sad memory of his father, drawing his final breath on this accursed stretch of road.
When he returned, having driven some seventy kilometres, he wasn’t breathing calmly as he had hoped.
A completely jinxed night, he told himself.
In bed he tossed and turned and drank water until the daylight came and he dozed off, discontent.
Part 7. The jinn’s deadly laugh
A settlement bleak as a buckler’s back
About whose edges sing the jinn by night.
— 49 —
THAT DISTANT MORNING IT was not the cries of his mobile’s message alert that woke Fahd, but a repeated ringing, like weeping. Very sluggishly he opened his eyes, his head weighed down with sorrow, and saw the number of a landline blinking on the screen. With a sense of foreboding and disquiet he pressed the green button and his uncle’s voice, which he hadn’t heard since leaving home, informed him that he was at King Khaled University Hospitaclass="underline" Fahd’s mother was very ill and they were waiting in the emergency ward.
‘What happened to her?’ Fahd shouted frantically.
‘She’s in a coma at the moment,’ his uncle said, ‘and we hope that God will deliver her from harm.’
He hadn’t said that she was dead, but the tone and numb quality of his voice hinted at something dreadful.
Fahd rushed into his thaub and shimagh and drove recklessly to the hospital. At the second roundabout just before the exit for the university, the car swerved violently and he lost control, though luckily there was no one on the internal road except for him. He pointed the car in the right direction and drove calmly on, muttering prayers, until he reached the lights, where he took a left then went right into the bays opposite the emergency ward. He parked and sprinted off, shooting past the parked ambulances like a sand grouse flapping over the desert.
Behind the glass door, his uncle and cousin Yasser were standing with the doctor. As soon as he opened the door and went inside his uncle greeted him and kissed him on both cheeks, then led him to a seating area near the trolley beds by the door. He eased Fahd on to a wobbly leather chair, then sat down beside him and said, ‘May God console you. What God gives and what He takes belong to Him alone.’
He began to talk about his mother’s virtues and piety while Fahd raised his bare feet, which he had freed from his sandals that lay on the tiled floor, and placed them on the edge of the chair in a squatting position. He gripped his head in his hands and his slender body started to shake silently as his uncle consoled him, ‘Weeping cannot help the dead. What she needs from you now is prayer and patience. Umm Fahd was a true believer, a godly woman; she lived like a companion of the Prophet, may God have mercy on her.’
When he had recovered from the fright and shock of the situation, the doctor came over, offered his condolences and told him that she was lying in bed three if he wanted to see her. Fahd instantly recalled standing with Saeed before the receptionist at Shamesi Hospital’s emergency ward, the receptionist suggesting they go to the morgue to examine the body and see if it was his father.
Fahd stood up, disoriented and nervous, and went in, sweeping back the white curtain that hid the bed from the corridor with trembling hands. His uncle came in with him for a little while and Fahd burst into tears as he kissed her head and the golden hairs that spilled from beneath the bed sheet. The doctor gestured at the uncle to go outside and leave her son with his mother. He was kissing her, imploring her, trying to assuage his suffering, his sorrow and his tortured conscience.
Where he got the courage to expose her white brow and kiss it he didn’t know. He searched for her hands, kissed them humbly, then kissed her feet. He noticed that her feet were swollen and saw that the ends of her legs were blotched and bloated with water. He lifted the cover from her glowing face and looked at her neck and shoulders where there were clear signs of bruising. He started shaking and rushed out to the doctor, taking him by hand and steering him to an out of the way spot. He asked the doctor if he had seen the bruises and injuries on his mother’s body. The doctor nodded and stated without being asked that he didn’t believe they had been the cause of her death. But who had beaten her like that? Fahd wanted to know and started yelling down the corridor, ‘My mother’s dead! Someone killed her!’
The doctor calmed him down and his uncle and Yasser came over with Ibrahim, who had just that moment arrived and now embraced Fahd and offered his condolences.
They took him to an empty waiting room. The uncle explained that ten days previously an Egyptian sheikh had blown on her and diagnosed that she was possessed. Moreover the infidel jinn inside her had spoken aloud in a voice heard by Yasser, Lulua and himself; the sheikh had even held a conversation with it, and it had promised to leave her, but yesterday it had reneged on its vow and defiantly refused to come out from her body. The sheikh had been forced to beat it until it did. He kept beating her until the jinn fled and its voice fell silent, then asked them to let her sleep so she could rest. She had slept, her eyes like clouds that couldn’t rain, and failed to awaken for dawn prayers the following day.