‘For shame, Omar,’ Rashed said. ‘You denied them their heavenly reward and the chance to hand out those tapes of theirs.’
‘Can you believe it?’ said Saeed. ‘Everyone’s going to hear about this little session. The minute I get home I’m going to send out the details of what happened.’
Salem agreed. ‘Right. It’s interesting. I reckon it will get a big following.’
Saeed became conscious of Fahd’s unhappy silence and spoke to him as he pointed at Omar. ‘So haven’t you changed your mind about travelling? Instead of pulling out and running off, it’s possible for a guy to confront that lot.’
Fahd shook his head and Saeed went on, ‘I mean, you saw Omar’s bravery; how it made them flee like foxes …’
As Omar preened with pleasure, Rashed objected, ‘Don’t you believe it, my friend. If they could have been certain that Omar wasn’t an undercover cop they wouldn’t have run. They might have made a serious problem for him.’
Saeed agreed with this, as did Fahd. Sipping his tea, Omar pointed out that they were human beings like anyone else: some were genuinely frightened and cowardly, others brave and hungry for fame, well aware that their recklessness might lead to detention or a prison term, and this was what won them supporters and disciples. Some were frankly simple-minded and assumed that these lectures were a way to win heavenly reward. Some even became high-handed and tyrannical, possessed by a need to break and subjugate those around them.
Omar believed that most of his fellow signatories to their most recent statement calling for a constitutional monarchy suffered from a persecution complex that turned them into petty dictators; petty, though their claws were cruel.
‘So I have nothing to lose,’ he said. ‘I can dedicate the rest of my days to exposing them!’
Rashed interrupted. ‘Don’t forget the liberals, Omar. They need exposing, too.’
Omar laughed mockingly. ‘What liberals? Bless you, they’re just lambs to the slaughter. The real game is with the Taliban who are polishing off what’s left of this country, if there is anything left, that is. They’ve invented the liberals out of thin air to justify their iron grip and lead this hapless society of ours to their final solution.’
Fahd gestured to Saeed, who made his excuses to the group, telling them Fahd didn’t have a car and was travelling tomorrow, so they had to go. They went out past the men selling cassettes and CDs at the café door.
The car moved west towards the Dammam Road into Riyadh. It was two in the morning and the traffic around the café had thinned out. Saeed grimaced in disgust. ‘No theatre, no cinema, no public spaces, no streets where you can get a breath of fresh air. Even the cafés have been chucked thirty kilometres out of town. But still they chase after us wherever we go. God help you, where can we go?’
‘What do you expect? The people set free? Left to frolic about unmolested, no one to watch them, no laws to bind them, no rights protected and upheld?’
‘Tell me: where’s the law, anyway? Anyone can stop you and make accusations, force you to sign a confession, or even get you detained or sent to prison.’
Saeed was drumming nervously on the steering wheel as he spoke: ‘Know what, Fahd? There’s this guy at work who was talking about some woman assaulted by the Committee and he says, casual as you like, “Why doesn’t she go and complain to the Human Rights Commission?”’
‘The problem, Saeed, is that a lot of people are simple-minded and naïve. They don’t understand that the Human Rights Commission is a government body, no different to the Ombudsman. It’s not independent. It’s controlled by the same people the government always employ with their salaries and bonuses.’
The car crossed Khaled Bin al-Waleed Street and Saeed suggested they stop in at a Herfy or Kudu and pick up a meal. He wasn’t just disgusted, he explained, he was hungry as well.
‘Don’t you ever feel that this country lives just to eat and shit? The restaurants are the only places open after midnight.’
‘What I feel is that everyone is panting like a dog after a couple of pennies so he can escape for a month or two in the summer and live abroad. He spends his pennies then he comes back to live like a dead man for ten months, making a little bit here and a little bit there, until he flies off again next year, and so on.’
Saeed pulled in at the Herfy drive-through window in the Panda on the north-eastern boundary of Maseef. He ordered two chicken combos and refused to let Fahd pay his share, claiming that travel and life abroad would put paid to the modest sum he had made by selling his car the day before.
Back out on the Northern Ring Road the heavy dust cloud began to drop towards the tarmac until it brushed against the two men. Fahd hid his nose in his shimagh as he got out by the entrance to the building. Saeed said he would stop by the grocery store to pick up a pack of cigarettes and asked him if he wanted anything. Fahd turned him down with a wave of the hand as he climbed the marble steps on his way to the second floor.
— 65 —
THE JOURNEY FROM LONDON to Great Yarmouth was not a long one and it would have been pleasant were it not for the crying jags and painful memories that overwhelmed and upset Fahd the whole way. The route was lined with verdant nature, redbrick houses, rivers and contented livestock, but though he stared through the window and tried to hold on to his pleasure at this delightful journey from London, he saw nothing but the barren desert. When he managed it, that is, when he managed to force his memory like some stubborn goat towards new pastures and away from his former life, he found the threads re-knotting, weaving themselves together until they brought him back once more to the same tragedy.
He had stood for ages before Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square where the Mayor of London had forbidden the feeding of the pigeons that Fahd hated, the vile pigeons whose shit polluted the beautiful square and clung to its monuments. Even Nelson wasn’t safe from pigeons, and nor was Fahd. If the commander of the British fleet, the man who defeated the navy of Napoleon Bonaparte, the legendary Admiral Nelson, couldn’t keep his body free from the shit of some piddling pigeon, then how could Fahd protect himself from the malign effects of a feather?
That pigeon. Fahd remembered it well, asking himself over and over: ‘Why didn’t it take flight like the pigeons in London’s parks? Why didn’t it beat its wings and try to fly away in the courtyard of Abu Ayoub’s house in Buraida?’
Fahd recalled how it had desperately scurried and hopped, yet had never left the ground. Were its wings not strong enough to fly? Had its feathers been clipped, for instance? Was it too heavy, lacking air-filled chambers in its limbs? Maybe its toes were straight, not curved; Australian biologists had discovered that in prehistoric times, birds had spent their time on the ground rather than perched on branches, and fossils showed their feet were flat, suited for walking and not flying. Was life in Buraida still stuck in prehistory?
He had returned his gaze to the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, pondering the ban on feeding the pigeons and the public outrage at the rule, particularly from environmentalists, though their cause was shared by suppliers of birdseed whose business had gone flat.
‘Those birdseed merchants mean nothing to me,’ Fahd thought. ‘The thing that really hurts is that a great artist like Picasso could love this ugly bird and paint it into his pictures. Even Chagall painted a pigeon, descending beak-first from the sky towards two lovers. I love that wonderful painting of his, Lovers and Flowers. How courageous to use that powerful, vivid yellow! Yet what a miserable artist, to paint a pigeon descending from the top of the canvas towards two lovers floating above a jug of flowers. I hate pigeons. I really hate them. Not because they destroyed my childhood and perhaps my whole life, but because it’s a loathsome bird, spiteful and selfish. Even the way it mates is awkward, its stupid circling, its ungainly, graceless hops. So how is it that they’ve proved in their studies that next to the dolphin, elephant and chimp, it is one of the most intelligent creatures after humans? Does it save people from drowning? Can it see colours? Can it recognise itself in the mirror or on TV? When I fail to recognise myself in the mirror does that make me a dumb animal? A curse on scientists, and artists, too.’