GIRLS of RIYADH
GIRLS of RIYADH
Rajaa Alsanea
TRANSLATED BY
Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2007
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2007 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Rajaa Alsanea, 2005
Translation copyright © Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth, 2007
All rights reserved
Originally published in Arabic by Dar al Saqi, Beirut.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sani’, Raja’ ’Abd Allah.
[Banat al-Riyad. English]
Girls of Riyadh: a novel / Rajaa Alsanea; translated by Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth.
p. cm.
ISBN: 9781101419939
I. Booth, Marilyn. II. Title.
PJ7962.A55B3613 2007
892.7’36—dc22
2007009389
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials.Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
To my most beloved;
Mom
and sister Rasha
and
to all of my friends,
the
Girls of Riyadh
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Between You and Me
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY OF NAMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It never occurred to me, when I wrote my novel (Banat Al-Riyadh), that I would be releasing it in any language other than Arabic. I did not think the Western world would actually be interested. It seemed to me, and to many other Saudis, that the Western world still perceives us either romantically, as the land of the Arabian Nights and the land where bearded sheikhs sit in their tents surrounded by their beautiful harem women, or politically, as the land that gave birth to Bin Laden and other terrorists, the land where women are dressed in black from head to toe and where every house has its own oil well in the backyard! Therefore, I knew it would be very hard, maybe impossible, to change this cliché. But the success of my book in the Arab world was enough to mark me as a member of Arab intellectual society, which seemed to come with certain responsibilities. Furthermore, coming from a family that values other cultures and nations, and being the proud Saudi I am, I felt it is my duty to reveal another side of Saudi life to the Western world. The task was not easy, however.
In my Arabic version of the novel I interspersed the classical Arabic with language that reflects the mongrel Arabic of the modern world—there was Saudi dialect (several of them), and Lebanese-Arabic, English-Arabic and more. As none of that would make sense to the non-Arab reader, I had to modify the original text somewhat. I also had to add explanations that will hopefully help the Western reader better understand the gist of the text, as it was originally intended in Arabic.
In the interest of fairness, I have to make clear that the girls in the novel do not represent all girls in Riyadh, but they do represent many of them.
I hope that by the time you finish this book, you will say to yourself: Oh, yes. It is a very conservative Islamic society. The women there do live under male dominance. But they are full of hopes and plans and determination and dreams. And they fall deeply in and out of love just like women anywhere else.
And I hope you will see, too, that little by little some of these women are beginning to carve out their own way—not the Western way, but one that keeps what is good about the values of their religion and culture, while allowing for reform.
“Verily, Allah does not change a people’s condition until they change what is in themselves.”QUR’AN, SURAT ALRA’D
(The Chapter of Thunder), Verse 11
GIRLS of RIYADH
Welcome to the Subscribers’ List of
Memoirs Disclosed
To subscribe, send a blank message to:
seerehwenfadha7et__subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To cancel your subscription, send a blank message to:
seerehwenfadha7et__unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
To contact the list manager, send a message to:
seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
1.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: February 13, 2004
Subject: I Shall Write of My Friends
Ladies and Gentlemen: You are invited to join me in one of the most explosive scandals and noisiest, wildest all-night parties around. Your personal tour guide—and that’s moi—will reveal to you a new world, a world closer to you than you might imagine. We all live in this world but do not really experience it, seeing only what we can tolerate and ignoring the rest.
To all of you out there
Who are over the age of eighteen, and in some countries that’ll mean twenty-one, though among us Saudis it means over six (and no, I don’t mean sixteen) for guys and after menarche for girls.
To everyone out there
Who has got enough inner courage to read the naked truth laid out on the World Wide Web and the resolve to accept that truth, with of course the essential patience to stay with me through this insane adventure.
To all who have
Grown weary of the “Me Tarzan You Jane” brand of romance novels and have gotten beyond a black and white, good and evil view of the world.
To anyone who believes
That 1 + 1 may not necessarily be equal to two, as well as all of you out there who have lost hope that Captain Majed* will score those two goals to reach a draw in the last second of the episode. To the enraged and the outraged, the heated and the hostile, the rebellious and the bilious, and to all of you who just know that every weekend for the rest of your lives will be a total loss—not to mention the rest of the week. It’s for you; it’s to you that I write my e-mails. May they be the matches that set your thoughts on fire, the lighter that fuels a blaze of change.
Tonight’s the night. The heroes of my story are people among you, from you and within you, for from the desert we all come and to the desert we shall all return. Just as it is with our desert plants, you’ll find the sweet and the thorny here, the virtuous and the wicked. Some of my heroes are sweet and others are thorny, while a few are a bit of both at the same time. So keep the secrets you will be told, or as we say, “Shield what you may encounter!” And since I have quite boldly started writing this e-mail without consulting my girlfriends, and because every one of them lives huddled in the shadow of a man, or a wall, or a man who is a wall,** or simply stays put in the darkness, I’ve decided to change all the names of the people I will write about and make a few alterations to the facts, but in a way that will not compromise the honesty of the tale nor take the sting out of the truth. To be frank, I don’t give a damn about the repercussions of this project of mine. As Kazantzakis put it, “I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.” Yet a way of life has stood its ground in the face of all you’ll read here; and I have to admit that I don’t consider it an achievement to destroy it by means of a bunch of e-mails.
I shall write of my girlfriends,
for in each one’s tale
I see my story and self prevail,
a tragedy my own life speaks.
I shall write of my girlfriends,
of inmates’ lives sucked dry by jail,
and magazine pages that consume women’s time,
and of the doors that fail to open.
Of desires slain in their cradles I’ll write,
of the vast great cell,
black walls of travail,
of thousands, thousands of martyrs, all female,
buried stripped of their names
in the graveyard of traditions.
My female friends,
dolls swathed in gauze in a museum they lock;
coins in History’s mint, never given, never spent;
fish swarming and choking in every basin and tank,
while in crystal vessels, dying butterflies flock.
Without fear
I shall write of my friends,
of the chains twisted bloody around the ankles of beauties,
of delirium and nausea, and the nighttime that entreaty rends,
and desires buried in pillows, in silence.—Nizar Qabbani
Right you are, Nizar, baby! Your tongue be praised, God bless you and may you rest in peace. Truth be told, though you are a man, you are indeed “the woman’s poet” and if anyone doesn’t like my saying so they can go drink from the sea.
My hair is now fluffed and teased, and I’ve painted my lips a shameless crimson red. Beside me rests a bowl of chips splashed with chili and lime. Readers: prepare yourselves. I’m ready to disclose the first scandal!
The wedding planner called out to Sadeem, who was hiding behind the curtain with her friend Gamrah. In her singsong Lebanese Arabic, Madame Sawsan informed Sadeem that the wedding music tape was still stuck in the machine and that efforts were being made to fix it.
“Please, tell Gamrah to calm down! It’s nothing to worry about, no one is going to leave. It’s only one A.M.! And anyway, all the cool brides these days start things on the late side to add a bit of suspense. Some never walk down the aisle before two or three A.M.!”
Gamrah, though, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She could hear the voices of her mother and her sister Hessah shrieking at the events manager from the other end of the ballroom, and the whole evening was threatening to turn out to be a sensational humiliation. Sadeem stayed at the bride’s side, wiping beads of sweat from her friend’s forehead before they could collide with the tears that were held back only by the quantity of kohl weighing down her eyelids.
The voice of the famous Saudi singer Muhammad Abdu finally blasted from the amplifiers, filling the enormous hall and prompting Madame Sawsan to give Sadeem the nod. Sadeem poked Gamrah.
“Yalla,* let’s go.”
With a swift movement Gamrah wiped her hands along her body after reciting some verses of the Holy Qur’an to protect her from envious eyes, and raised the neckline of her dress to keep it from drooping over her small breasts. She began her descent of the marble staircase, going even more slowly than at the rehearsal with her girlfriends, adding a sixth second to the five she was supposed to count between each stair. She murmured the name of God before every step, praying that Sadeem wouldn’t stumble on her train causing it to tear, or that she wouldn’t trip over the floor-length hem of her dress and fall flat on her face like in a comedy show. It was so unlike the rehearsal, where she didn’t have a thousand women watching her every move and assessing every smile; where there was no annoying photographer blinding her every few seconds. With the blazing lights and all those dreadful peering eyes fixed on her, the small family wedding she’d always disdained suddenly began to seem like a heavenly dream.
Behind her, Sadeem followed her progress with utter concentration, ducking to avoid appearing in any of the photos. One never knows who might be looking at the photos from the bride’s or groom’s side, and like any decent girl, Sadeem wouldn’t want strange men to see her in an exposing evening dress and full makeup. She adjusted the veil on Gamrah’s head and gave a tiny jiggle to the train after each step Gamrah took as her radar picked up fragments of conversation at nearby tables.
“Who’s she?”
“Ma shaa Allah,* God willing, no envy touch her, she’s so pretty!”
“The bride’s sister?”
“They say she’s an old friend.”
“She seems a good girl—since we arrived I’ve seen her running around taking care of all sorts of things—it looks like she’s carrying the whole wedding on her shoulders.”
“She’s a good deal prettier than the bride. Can you believe it, I heard that Prophet Mohammed used to send up prayers for the unlovely ones!”
“God’s blessings and peace be upon him. E wallah,** must be true, because I swear, the ugly ones seem to be in demand these days. Not us, what bad luck.”
“Is her blood pure? Her skin is so fair.”
“Her father’s mother was Syrian.”
“Her name is Sadeem Al-Horaimli. Her mother’s family is married into ours. If your son is serious, I can get you the details about her.”
Sadeem had already been told that three ladies had asked about her since the wedding started. Now she heard numbers four and five with her own ears. Every time one of Gamrah’s sisters came over to tell her that so-and-so had been asking questions, she murmured demurely, “May good health knock on her door.”
It seemed to Sadeem as if Gamrah’s marriage might indeed be “the first pearl to roll off the necklace,” as Auntie Um Nuwayyir put it. Perhaps now the rest of the girls would be just as lucky. That is, if they followed the plan Auntie had concocted.
The strategy of yaaalla yaaalla, which means “get going, but just baaarely,” is the most foolproof path to a quick marriage proposal in our conservative society. The idea is to be energetic and constrained at the same time. “And after that you can be as foolish as you want,” according to Um Nuwayyir’s counsel. At weddings, receptions and social gatherings where ladies meet, especially the old ladies looking to make a match (or “capital funds and mothers-with-sons,” as we girls like to call them), you must follow this strategy to the letter: “You barely walk, you barely talk, you barely smile, you barely dance, be mature and wise, you always think before you act, you measure your words carefully before you speak and you do not behave like a child.” There is no end to Um Nuwayyir’s instructions.
The bride took her place on the magnificently decorated platform. Her mother and the mother of the groom mounted the stairs to congratulate her on the happy marriage she had embarked on and to have their photos taken with the bride before the men came in from where they were celebrating in an adjoining room.
At this traditional Najdi wedding, where most people spoke in the dialect of the country’s interior, Lamees’s sophisticated west coast Hijazi accent stood out as she whispered to her friend Michelle.
“Hey! Check her out. The pharaohs are back!” The influence of Lamees’s Egyptian grandmother was always readily apparent in Lamees’s sharp tongue and manner.
She and Michelle studied the heavy makeup that coated the face of their friend Gamrah, especially her eyes, which had turned the color of blood from all the kohl seeping into them.
Michelle’s real name is Mashael, but everyone, including her family, calls her Michelle. She answered Lamees in English.
“Where the hell did she get that dress?”
“Poor Gammoorah,* I wish she had gone to the dressmaker who made Sadeem’s dress instead of this mess she came up with herself! Just look at Sadeem’s gorgeous dress, though—anyone would think it’s by Elie Saab.”
“Oh, whatever. Like there’s even one lady in this provincial crowd who would know the difference! Do you think anyone has any clue my dress is by Badgley Mishka? By God, her makeup is painful! Her skin is too dark for such a chalky foundation. They’ve made her practically blue—and look at the contrast between her face and her neck. Ewww…so vulgar!”
“Eleven o’clock! Eleven o’clock!”
“It’s one-thirty.”
“No, you idiot, I mean, turn to your left like the hands of a clock when it’s eleven—you will never get it, will you—you’ll never pass Gossip 101! Anyway, check out that girl—she’s got ‘talent,’ all right!”
“Which ‘talent’—front bumper or back?”
“Are you cross-eyed? Back, of course.”
“Too much. They ought to take a chunk off her and give Gamrah a dose on the front, like that collagen stuff everyone is using.”
“The most ‘talented’ of all of us is Sadeem—look at how feminine she looks with those curves. I wish I had a back bumper like hers.”
“I think she really needs to ditch a few pounds and work out like you do. Alhamdu lillah, thank God, I never gain weight no matter how much I eat, so I’m not worried.”
“What luck for you, I swear. I live in a state of permanent starvation to keep my body looking like this.”
The bride noticed her friends sitting at the table nearby, smiling and waving their arms at her while they tried to cover up the question that lurked in their eyes: Why isn’t it me up there? Gamrah was ecstatic, almost intoxicated with this precious moment. She had always seen herself as the least favored of any of them, but now here she was, the first of all to get married.
Waves of guests started coming up to the dais to congratulate the bride, now that the photography session was over. Sadeem, Michelle and Lamees all stepped up and hugged Gamrah while whispering something into her ear: “Gamrah, wow! Mashaa Allah, God’s will be done! So-o-o gorgeous! The whole evening I’ve been praying to God to take good care of you.” “Congratulations, sweetie! You look great—that gown is stunning on you!” “My God, girl, you’re spectacular. A vision! Best-looking bride I’ve ever seen.”
Gamrah’s smile grew broader as she listened to her friends’ praise and noted the envy half hidden in their eyes. The three of them posed for photographs with the happy bride. Sadeem and Lamees started dancing around her while the eyes of all those older women who devote themselves to arranging marriages were glued to all of their bodies. Lamees was proud to show off her distinctive height and her gym-toned body, and she made sure to dance slightly apart from Sadeem, who had expressly warned her beforehand against dancing next to her so that people wouldn’t compare their bodies. Sadeem was always longing to have her curves liposuctioned so that she could be as slim as Lamees and Michelle.
Suddenly the men came shooting through the doors like arrows, the fastest arrow of all being the groom, Rashid Al-Tanbal, who headed straight for his bride on the dais. The women retreated en masse, desperately searching for whatever they or their friends had that would conceal their hair and faces—not to mention any other revealing body parts—from the eyes of those men on the march.
When the groom and his companions were just steps away, Lamees yanked up the corner of the tablecloth to cover her cleavage. Her twin sister Tamadur used a shawl that matched her dress to cover her hair and open back, while Sadeem whipped on her black embroidered abaya* and silk veil, enveloping her body and the lower half of her face. Michelle, though, remained Michelle: she stayed exactly as she was and eyed the men one by one, paying no attention to the mutterings and truly sharp stares that she drew from some of the women.
Rashid plowed toward the stage along with Gamrah’s father, her uncle and her four brothers. Each man tried to download as many female faces as he could onto his mental hard drive, while the ladies, for their part, were staring at Gamrah’s uncle, in his forties, who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the handsome poet Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.
When Rashid reached his bride Gamrah, he flipped the veil back from her face as his mother had rehearsed with him, then took his place by her side, giving way for the rest of her male relatives to pass on their good wishes to her. He settled himself next to her and then the other men crowded around them to congratulate the couple on their blessed, auspicious and fortunate marriage.
The voices of the bride’s friends floated upward in the ballroom’s hot air. “A thousand blessings and peace be upon you, beloved of Allaaaaah, Mohammed!” the bride’s friends chanted, and the piercing sound of women’s trills filled the room. The men, except for the groom, soon left the place heading home as their part in the females’ celebration was over and their own celebration—which was only a big dinner—had finished before the females’ party even started. The couple, followed closely by every female relative, headed toward the food tables to cut the cake.
It was then that Gamrah’s friends started chanting at the top of their voices. “We want a kiss! We want a kiss!” Rashid’s mother smiled and Gamrah’s mother blushed red. As for Rashid, he sent the girls a scathing stare that sliced them into silence. Gamrah cursed her friends under her breath for embarrassing her in front of him, and cursed him even more for embarrassing her in front of her friends by refusing to kiss her!
Sadeem’s eyes welled with tears as she watched her childhood friend, her Gamrah, leave the ballroom with her new husband to go to the hotel where they would spend the night before heading off for a honeymoon in Italy. Immediately after the honeymoon they would leave Riyadh for the United States, where Rashid was to begin studying for a PhD.
Among the group of four girls, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji was closest to Sadeem, as they had been classmates since second grade. Mashael Al-Abdulrahman—or Michelle, as we knew her—didn’t join them until the second year at middle school, after she returned with her parents and little Meshaal—or Misho, as everyone called her younger brother—from America. Her father had gone to college there, at Stanford University, where he met their mother. After college he stayed in America for a few years to work and start his family. Only a year after Michelle came back to her home country to live, she transferred to a school where all the classes were taught in English. She simply didn’t have the command of Arabic that she needed in order to attend Sadeem and Gamrah’s school. At her new school, she got to know Lamees Jeddawi, who became her closest friend. Lamees had grown up in the capital city of Riyadh, but, as her last name implied, her family was originally from Jeddah—a port city with a long tradition of bringing together people from many places and therefore the most liberal city in the kingdom. Gamrah’s family was originally from, Qasim, a city known for its ultraconservative and strict character. Only Michelle was not from a well-known family tribe linked to a certain region.
In college, Sadeem studied business management, while Lamees went to medical school.* Michelle decided on computer science. Gamrah, the only one among them who wasn’t so keen on her studies in high school, needed to use pull from several family friends to get accepted to college as a history major, one of the easy fields to get into in college. But she got engaged a few weeks after the semester started, and she decided to withdraw in order to devote herself full-time to planning the wedding. Since she would be moving to America right after the wedding anyway so that her husband could finish graduate school there, it seemed like an especially good decision.
IN HER ROOM at the Hotel Giorgione in Venice, Gamrah sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her thighs, legs and feet with a whitening lotion of glycerine and lemon that her mother made for her. Her mother’s Golden Rule was spinning in her mind. Don’t be easy. Refusal—it’s the secret to activating a man’s passion. After all, her older sister Naflah didn’t give herself to her husband until the fourth night, and her sister Hessah was more or less the same. But she was setting a new record: it had been seven nights and her husband hadn’t touched her. Rashid hadn’t touched her even though she had been quite ready to ditch her mother’s theories after the first night, when she took off her wedding dress and put on her ivory-colored nightgown (which she’d put on quite a few times before the wedding, in front of the mirror in her room, provoking the admiration of her mother, who had murmured God’s name over and over to ward off envy as she gave her daughter a few suggestive winks). Her mother’s delighted approval had filled Gamrah with confidence and pride, even though she knew that the expression on her mama’s face was a bit overdone.
But on her wedding night she came out of the bathroom to find him…asleep. And although she almost could have sworn that he was faking it, a theory her mother dismissed in their last telephone conversation as “Satan’s evil whisperings,” she agreed to devote all of her energy to “leading him on,” especially since her mother had recently announced to her on the phone that the policy of withholding had decidedly backfired in this case.
Since Gamrah’s marriage to Rashid, her mother had gotten bolder about discussing “the business of men and women.” In fact, before her marriage contract was signed, her mother hadn’t talked about such matters at all. Afterward, though, Gamrah got immersion training in the art of seduction from the same woman who had ripped pages out of the romance novels Gamrah used to borrow from her friends at school, and who wouldn’t even let Gamrah go over to her friends’ houses, with the exception of Sadeem’s, after Gamrah’s mother had gotten to know Sadeem’s aunt Badriyyah quite well through several social circles among other ladies of the neighborhood.
Gamrah’s mother was a firm believer in the theory that “woman is to man as butter is to sun.” But her strong convictions that girls should be utterly naïve and guys should be experienced melted away in an instant the moment the girl had that marriage contract. As for Gamrah, she started listening to her mother’s anecdotes and treatises on “the enterprise of marriage” with the heightened enjoyment and sense of pride of a young man whose father offers him a cigarette to smoke in front of him for the first time.
2.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: February 20, 2004
Subject: The Girls Rally Round Gamrah’s Big Day, in Their Own Way
First, I have a little message for the following gentlemen: Hassan, Ahmad, Fahad and Mohammed, who made my day with their earnest e-mail inquiries.
The answer is: Uh-uh! Forget it, guys…no, we cannot “get to know each other.”
Now that I have applied my signature bright red lipstick, I will pick up the story where I left off last week.
After Gamrah’s wedding her friends lined up the petite keepsake clay jars engraved with the names of the bridal couple alongside the other souvenirs they had collected from other friends’ weddings. Every last one of Gamrah’s girlfriends was secretly hoping that the keepsake from her own wedding would be the next one to be added.
Well before the wedding, their little clique—the shillah—had made special preparations for its own intimate precelebration celebration. The idea was to put on something like the bachelorette party that, in the West, friends of the bride throw for her before the nuptials. The girls weren’t interested in doing a DJ party, because these days, that was becoming as common as sand. Besides, a DJ party meant that it would have to be a positively massive dance party that might even have involved hiring a professional local taggaga, a female singer, the kind that once upon a time just had a drum backup but now might have a whole band. They would need to send out invitations to every one of their girlfriends and female relatives and everyone that anyone knew, while pretending to keep the bride in the dark the whole time. And, of course, the little shillah of friends hosting the party would be burdened with all of the expenses, which would mount up to nothing less than several thousand riyals.
But Gamrah’s friends wanted to do something new. They wanted to come up with something so bold and so much fun that others after them would imitate it, and then it would become a trend, and everyone would know who had invented it.
Gamrah arrived bright red in the face—and scarlet all over her body—because she had just come from a scrubbing at the Moroccan hammam as well as having the hair plucked from all over her face with a thread and from her body with sticky sugar-paste halawa. They were all to meet at Michelle’s house. The hostess greeted them wearing baggy trousers with lots of pockets and an oversized jacket—gear that artfully concealed any sign of femininity—plus a bandanna that hid her hair. To top it all off, she had on a pair of colored sunglasses that gave her the appearance of an adolescent boy who has escaped parental surveillance. Lamees wore a masculine-style flowing white thobe with a shimagh draped over her head and kept in place with a snugly fitting black eqal.* With her height and athletic body she really did look like a guy, and a handsome one, too. The rest of them were wearing embroidered abayas. But these abayas weren’t the loose teepees that you see women wearing on the street. These were fitted at the waist and hips and they were very attractive! With the abayas, the girls wore black silk lithaams that covered everything from the bridge of their noses to the bottom of their throats, which of course only emphasized the beauty of their kohl-lined eyes, their tinted contact lenses and their outlandish eyeglasses all the more.
Michelle had an international driver’s license. She took charge: she drove the BMW X5 SUV with its dark-tinted windows. She had managed to rent it through one of the car showrooms by putting the rental in the name of her family’s male Ethiopian driver. Lamees took her place next to Michelle while Sadeem and Gamrah climbed into the backseats. The CD player was on full blast. The girls sang along and swayed their abaya-clad shoulders as if they were dancing on the seats.
Their first stop was the famous café in Tahliya Street. But when Michelle parked the vehicle, the SUV’s darkened windows gave them away in an instant: since tinted car windows are only used when women who need to be concealed are inside, all the guys in the vicinity, with their keen hunter eyes and their ready instincts, knew right off that the X5 had to be a priceless catch* They jumped in their cars and surrounded the SUV on both sides. After the girls got the drinks they wanted from the drive-through, the entire parade started to move toward the big shopping mall in Al-Olayya Street, which was the girls’ second stop. Meanwhile, the girls were taking down as many phone numbers as they could. They did not have to work very hard, because these numbers were generously showered upon them by the guys. The girls could memorize those with catchy sequences and repeated digits as the guys stuck out their heads through their cars’ windows while driving and kept repeating them for the girls to write down. The girls also copied from placards the guys had hung on the windows of their cars so that girls in neighboring cars could see the numbers clearly. The truly bold knights among them held out personal business cards, passing them through the windows to be snatched up by the girls, who were every bit as brave as the aspiring Romeos.
At the mall entrance the girls got out. Behind them appeared a rush of young men, but they all came to a stop uncertainly in front of the security guard. It was his job to keep all unmarried men from entering the mall after the call to the Isha prayer that ushered in nightfall. The weaklings fell back, but one lone fellow summoned his courage and approached Michelle. With her lovely face and delicate features, which she was quite simply incapable of concealing in her eccentric attire, Michelle had stood out from the start as a girl who was possibly bold enough to be looking for adventure. The guy asked Michelle if she would allow him to go in with them as a member of the family, and he offered her a thousand riyals for the privilege. Michelle was astonished at his nerve. But she accepted the deal without much delay, and she and her friends surged forward beside him as if he were one of their group.
Once inside the mall the young women split up into two groups, one made up of Sadeem and Gamrah, the other of Lamees, Michelle and the handsome young man.
His name was Faisal. Laughing, Lamees remarked that no guys these days had the old Najdi Bedouin names, like Obaid or Duyahhim. They all pretended they had one of those cool names like Faisal or Saud or Salman just to impress girls. He laughed along with them, swearing that it was his real name, and invited the two girls to dinner at an elegant restaurant outside the mall. Michelle turned down the invitation. Before leaving them, in fulfillment of the agreement, he gave her two five-hundred-riyal notes after writing his cell phone number on one of them and his full name on the other: Faisal Al-Batran.
Women in the mall had an annoying way of following Gamrah, Sadeem and the rest of the girls with their eyes. It didn’t matter that their face veils were in place: the girls could feel the sharp and threatening challenge of the women’s inspections. They felt uncomfortably that any one of those women might as well be saying to them, I’ve figured out who you are, but you don’t know who I am.
That’s the way things are here in the shops and the malls: guys stare at women for their own reasons, while women stare at each other just because they are nosy! And they have no excuse for it. A girl can’t stroll about in the malls under the protection of God without being checked out thoroughly by everyone, especially her own kind, from her abaya to the covering over her hair to the way she walks and the bags she carries and in which direction she looks and in front of what merchandise she stops. Is it envy? The French playwright Sacha Guitry was so on the mark when he said, “Women don’t pretty themselves up for men: they do it to get back at other women.”
The girls made their way toward the elegant Italian restaurant they had picked out for dinner. After eating, they headed for a tiny shop that sold water pipes, or what we call the shisha— otherwise known as the hookah or hubbly-bubbly. The girls bought enough shishas that they would not have to share, and each girl chose her favorite flavor of the water-pipe tobacco mixed with molasses and fragrant essences.
They spent the rest of the evening at Lamees’s, inside a small tent in the house’s inner courtyard where her father and his friends retired to spend their evenings two or three times a week. The men would smoke shisha and hold conversations ranging from politics to their wives or from their wives to politics. As usual, though, the family had gone to Jeddah, their native city, for the summer holiday. Lamees and her twin sister Tamadur had stayed behind to attend Gamrah’s wedding.
But the father’s shishas went with him wherever he traveled. Like many Hijazi men and women, he was addicted to it. So the girls set up the newly purchased shishas inside the tent and the maid got the coals going. The music blared and the girls danced and smoked and played cards. Even Gamrah tried smoking the shisha, though it’s considered inappropriate among Najdi females, after Sadeem convinced her that “a girl doesn’t get married every day.” She liked the grape-flavored tobacco the best.
Lamees tightly fastened her spangle-edged, jingly scarf around her hips. As always, her dancing was exquisite: no one could possibly match her, especially as she shimmied to the strains of a recent version of Um Kulthum’s song “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” None of the other girls danced with her. For one thing, none of them could approach Lamees’s perfection when she danced, but more importantly, they all loved to watch her. Now and then, they would come up with a funny name for a move she made. There was the “blender” move, the “juicer” move and the “follow me” move. Lamees performed these sequences over and over to popular demand. As for the third reason why nobody joined her on the dance floor, Lamees, as they all knew well, would refuse to go on dancing unless she got a good dose of loud encouragement, whistles, clapping and cheers befitting her stature as Queen of the Dance Floor.
Lamees joined Michelle that night in consuming a bottle of expensive champagne. Michelle had filched it from her father’s storage cellar, which held special drinks meant strictly for important occasions. After all, didn’t Gamrah’s wedding deserve a bottle of Dom Pérignon? Michelle knew a lot about brandy, vodka, wine and other such things. Her father had taught her how to pour him red wine with red meats and white wine with other dishes, but she didn’t drink with him except on very special and rare occasions. Since drinking alcohol is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, as it’s against Islamic law, Lamees had never before tasted any of these drinks, except once at Michelle’s, and then she did not find the taste of whatever it was particularly pleasant. But, hey! After all, tonight the two of them were celebrating Gamrah’s wedding! So she joined in with Michelle, since they wanted to make this evening special and unique in every way they could.
When the volume of the music soared, there wasn’t a girl left in the tent who wasn’t on her feet dancing. It was the famous Saudi singer Abdul Majeed Abdullah’s song:
Girls of Riyadh, O girls of Riyadh,
O gems of the turbaned fathers of old!
Have mercy on that victim, have mercy
On that man who lies prone on the threshold.
3.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: February 27, 2004
Subject: Who Is Nuwayyir?
To all of those who abandoned whatever they were doing in order to urgently ask the brand of my bright red lipstick: It is new on the market and it is called: Get your nose out of my business and get back to reading about things that actually matter.
Two weeks after Gamrah’s wedding, Sadeem’s eldest aunt—Aunt Badriyyah—got a number of phone calls from matchmaker mothers asking for her pretty niece’s hand in marriage for their sons. Ever since Sadeem’s mother passed away when Sadeem was a baby, Aunt Badriyyah had tried to act as a stand-in mother figure. She had her own ways of checking out all marriage applicants thoroughly and she dropped those who, in her opinion, were unsuitable. She would only inform Sadeem’s father about the short list of key applicants, she decided. After all, if it didn’t work with them, the rest would still be there waiting anxiously in the wings. There was no need to tell Sadeem’s father—let alone Sadeem herself—about every single man at once. Aunt Badriyyah was anxious to protect the heads of her dear niece and her esteemed brother-in-law from the danger of swelling up larger than her own—no need to encourage them to feel superior to her and her daughters.
Waleed Al-Shari, BA in communications engineering, level VII civil servant. He is the son of Abdallah Al-Shari, one of the truly big real estate magnates in the kingdom. His uncle, Abdul-elah Al-Shari, is a retired colonel and his aunt Munirah is headmistress of one of Riyadh’s biggest private girls’ schools.
This is what Sadeem told Michelle, Lamees and Um Nuwayyir, her next-door neighbor, when she met up with them in Um Nuwayyir’s home. Um Nuwayyir is a Kuwaiti woman who works for the government as a school inspector of mathematics curricula. Her Saudi husband divorced her after fifteen years of marriage to marry another woman.
Um Nuwayyir has only one child, a son called Nuri—and there’s an odd story attached to this Nuri of hers. Since the age of eleven or twelve, Nuri had been enthralled by girls’ clothes, enchanted by girls’ shoes, fascinated by makeup and infatuated with long hair. As things developed, Nuri’s mother became truly alarmed, especially as Nuri seemed to get more and more carried away with creating the persona of a sweet, soft, pretty boy rather than the tough masculine young man he was supposed to turn into. Um Nuwayyir tried fiercely to steer him in other directions. She found various means of discouraging him. She tried tender motherly persuasion and she tried firm motherly thrashings, but nothing worked.
Meanwhile, Nuri’s father was much sterner with him. Nuri was careful not to exhibit his soft side in front of his father, of whom he was in dire awe. The father heard things by way of the neighbors, though, and what he heard put him into a fury. Bursting into Nuri’s room one day, he began to pummel and kick his son. The boy suffered fractures in the rib cage and a broken nose and arm. Following this incident, the father left the household to move in entirely with his second wife, permanently distancing himself from this house and this faggot boy who was such a freak of nature.
After this confrontation, Um Nuwayyir surrendered to the will of God. It was a trial visited upon her by her Lord, she decreed in her own head, and she must bear it with patience. She and Nuri avoided mentioning the subject and stirring up fresh trouble. So it was that Nuri went on just as he had, and people began to call her, instead of “Mother of Nuri,” “Mother of Nuwayyir,” i.e., the girlie version of the name. That’s how she became Um Nuwayyir rather than Um Nuri, and she stayed Um Nuwayyir even after moving to the house next to Sadeem’s, four years before the date on which Waleed presented himself as a suitable match for Sadeem, and after Nuri rejected his mother’s suggestion that they move to Kuwait.
In the beginning, Um Nuwayyir was truly shaken by society’s shallow view of her tragedy, but as time passed, she grew accustomed to the way things were and accepted her trying circumstances with such patience and acceptance that she even started introducing herself to new acquaintances deliberately as Um Nuwayyir. It was her way of affirming her strength and showing how little she thought of society’s unfair and oppressive attitudes toward her.
Um Nuri—or Um Nuwayyir—was thirty-nine. Sadeem often visited her or arranged to meet her friends at Um Nuwayyir’s house. Despite, or perhaps because of, her grief, Um Nuwayyir was an eternal fount of jokes and, if she chose, she could use her humor and insight to cut a person to pieces. But she was one of the sweetest and most truly good women Sadeem had ever met in her life. Sadeem’s mother had died when Sadeem was just three years old, and she was an only daughter, and all of this brought her closer to Um Nuwayyir, whom she came to consider as much more than a neighbor and older friend. Truth told, Sadeem really saw Um Nuwayyir as a mother.
How very often Um Nuwayyir was the preserver of the girls’ secrets! She was always right there with them when they were thinking through some issue or other, and she was always generous about suggesting a solution when one of them set out a problem for the clique to ponder. For her, it was a comfort to have them around, not to mention a diversion and source of entertainment, and her home became the perfect setting for trying out the freedoms to which they had but little access in any of their own homes.
Um Nuwayyir’s place was the safe haven par excellence for sweethearts. For example, the first time Michelle called Faisal after he “numbered” her at the mall, she told him to pick her up from Um Nuwayyir’s place after she gave him the directions. She said she had a couple of hours free and suggested that they go out for coffee or ice cream somewhere.
Michelle did not want to give Faisal any advance notice of her plans. She called him only a few minutes before he had to pick her up. That way, she figured, he would not actually be able to prepare for the date and then she could see him as he really was. When she came out of the house to climb into his car, she was stunned to find how much more handsome he was in jeans and a T-shirt and an unruly, unshaven beard than he had looked in the mall in his classy long white thobe and the Valentino shimagh ringing his head. She couldn’t help noticing that his T-shirt showed off his broad chest muscles and biceps in a very flattering way.
Faisal paid for two cups of iced coffee and cruised around the streets of Riyadh with her in his Porsche. He took her to his office at his father’s company and launched into an explanation of some of his responsibilities at the business. Then they dropped by the university, where he was studying English literature. He circled around the parking lot for a few minutes before a campus patrolman informed him that he was not allowed to drive around the university grounds at this hour of the night. After two hours or so, Faisal returned Michelle to Um Nuwayyir’s. Her head was spinning. He had simply, and surprisingly, swept her off her feet.
4.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: March 5, 2004
Subject: What Did That Jerk Do to Gamrah on That Night?
This culture we claim—
bursting bubbles of soap, of slime
We live on, by the logic of key and lock
We swathe our women in cotton shrouds
We possess them like the carpets beneath us,
like the cows in fenced fields,
to flock home at night’s end,
for our due, bulls and steeds unpenned.—Nizar Qabbani
Sitting in my own silent room, I can practically hear the blasts of condemnation and profanity coming from Saudi and Arab men among my readers when they see this verse posted. I wish you men could understand it as I believe Nizar Qabbani intended it to be understood…Oh, Nizar, in love there’s been no one before you and there will never be anyone after you, even if your compassion toward women isn’t due to a mutation in one of your male chromosomes but rather to the suicidal end of your poor sister’s tragic love story. So it seems, I’m sorry to say, that no woman among us will find her own Nizar until after she has finished off one of his sisters, so that the tale of beautiful love will have to be titled “Gone to Prison” rather than “Gone with the Wind.”
Heart of mine, don’t grieve.
When the honeymoon was over, Gamrah and her husband headed for Chicago where he was working for his PhD in electrical engineering, after getting his BA in Los Angeles and his master’s in Indianapolis.
Gamrah began her new life in absolute fear and trepidation. She felt like she died of terror every time she walked into the elevator that took her up to the apartment they shared on the fortieth floor of the Presidential Towers. She felt the pressure splitting her head open and blocking her ears as the elevator shot upward through the floors of the skyscraper. She got dizzy every time she tried to look out of a window in the apartment. So very far down, everything appeared tiny and fragile. She stared down at the city streets, which looked to her exactly like the streets in the Lego sets she played with when she was little, with their minuscule cars no larger than matchboxes. Indeed, from this height the cars looked like ants in rows: they were so very small and so neatly and quietly arranged in long and slow-moving lines.
Gamrah was afraid of the drunken beggars who filled the streets and shook their paper cups in her face, demanding money. The stories of thefts and murders that she always seemed to be hearing terrified her. Every story she heard had something to do with this dangerous city! She was just as afraid of the huge black security guard at their building, who ignored her whenever she tried to get his attention with her poor English hoping he would help her commandeer a taxi.
From the moment of his arrival, Rashid had been completely immersed in the university and his research. He left the apartment at seven o’clock in the morning, returning at eight or nine and sometimes as late as ten in the evening. On the weekends, he seemed determined to occupy himself with anything he could find to take him away from her; he would sit for hours staring at the computer or watching TV. He often fell asleep on the sofa while watching a boring baseball game or the news on CNN. If he did go in to their bedroom to sleep, he kept on the long white underwear that Saudi men always put on underneath their thobes—we call them “Sunni underpants” (I have no idea why)—and T-shirt. He would collapse onto the bed as if he were a very old man depleted of all his energy, not a brand-new husband.
Gamrah had dreamed of much more; of caresses and love and tenderness and emotion like the feelings that stirred her heart when she read romance novels or watched romantic movies. And now here she was, facing a husband who clearly felt no attraction toward her and indeed had not touched her since that ill-fated night in Rome.
At that time, after dinner in the elegant hotel restaurant, Gamrah had made an irrevocable decision that this would be her true wedding night, something for which she had waited too long. As long as her husband was so bashful, she would have to help him out, smooth the way for him just as her mother had advised her. They went up to their room and she began to flirt with him shyly. After a few moments of innocent seduction, he took things into his own hands. She gave herself up to it despite the enormous confusion and anxiety she felt. She closed her eyes, anticipating what was about to happen. And then he surprised her with an act that was never on her list of sexual expectations. Her response, which was shocking to both of them, was to slap him hard on the face then and there! Their eyes met in a stunned moment. Her eyes were filled with fear and bewilderment, while his were full of an anger the likes of which she had never seen. He moved away from her quickly, dressed hurriedly and left the room amid her tears and apologies.
Gamrah did not so much as see her husband until the evening of the next day, when he sullenly accompanied her to the airport in time to catch the airplane to Washington, followed by another to Chicago.
5.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: March 12, 2004
Subject: Waleed and Sadeem: A Typical Love Story from Contemporary Saudi Life
Men have written to me saying: Who authorized you to speak for the girls of Najd?! You are nothing but a malevolent and rancorous woman deliberately attempting to sully the image of women in Saudi society.
And to them I say: We are only at the beginning, sweethearts. If you are mounting a war against me in the fifth e-mail, then imagine what you will be saying about me after you have read the many e-mails to come! You’re in for a ride. May goodness and prosperity come to you!
Sadeem and her father walked into the elaborate formal reception room of their house to meet Waleed Al-Shari. It was the occasion of the shoufa, that one lawful “viewing” of the potential bride according to Islamic law. Sadeem was so nervous that her legs nearly buckled underneath her as she walked. Gamrah had told her of her own mother’s warning to not under any circumstances offer to shake hands with the groom at this meeting, so Sadeem refrained from extending her hand.
Waleed stood up respectfully to greet them, and sat down again after she and her father were seated. Her father immediately started asking questions on a seemingly random variety of topics and then, a few minutes later, left the room to allow the two of them to talk freely.
Sadeem could tell right away that Waleed was taken with her pretty looks; the way he stared at her made that clear enough. Even though she had barely lifted her head to look at him when she first walked in, she had seen him studying her figure, which nearly made her trip over her own feet. But as they talked, Sadeem gradually gained control of her nervousness and, with his help, conquered her shyness. He asked her about her studies, her major at the university, her future plans and what she liked to do in her free time—all on his way to arriving at that one question every one of us girls fears and considers rude to be asked in a shoufa: Do you know how to cook?
“What about you?” he said. “Don’t you want to ask me anything? Do you have anything that you want to tell me?”
She thought for a few minutes, and finally she said, “Uh…I want to tell you that I have bad eyesight.”
He laughed at her confession and she laughed, too. After a moment, he said to her, a little provocatively, “By the way, Sadeem, you know, my job requires that I travel overseas a lot.”
This time she answered him without a pause, raising one of her eyebrows flirtatiously. “Not a problem. I love to travel!”
He told her that he found her mischievousness and quick wit delightful, and she lowered her head, blushing fiercely and cursing her inability to control her runaway mouth, which might turn out to be the cause of a runaway groom. Seconds later, her father unwittingly came to the rescue by walking through the doorway. She excused herself hurriedly and made straight for the door, giving Waleed a big smile, which he returned with an even bigger one. She left the room with butterflies in her stomach.
She had found Waleed handsome, even if he wasn’t really her favorite type. She preferred darker skin; his complexion was fair with a pinkish hue. His shadowy mustache and goatee and those glasses with the thin silver frames added a lot of charm to his face, though, she thought.
Once she was out of the room, Waleed asked her father’s permission to phone her so he could get to know her better before it was announced that they were officially engaged. Her father agreed and gave him Sadeem’s cell phone number.
Waleed called late that night, and after allowing the phone to ring a decently long time, she answered. He told her how much he liked her. He would speak a little and then go quiet, as if he expected her to comment on what he was saying. She told him that she had been happy to meet him, but said no more. He told her that he really liked her, that in fact he had been bewitched by her and that he found it unbearable to wait until Eid Al-Fitr, after which they could sign the marriage contract.
After that, Waleed called her dozens of times a day—he called the minute he woke up in the morning, before going to work, at work, after work and finally for a long conversation before going to sleep that would stretch on sometimes until the sun was peeping over the horizon. He even woke her up in the middle of the night to have her listen to a song he had dedicated to her on the radio. And every day he would ask that she pick out at the store a pair of glasses for him, or a watch, or cologne—he would immediately buy whatever she dictated, he said, so that everything he wore would be completely to her liking.
The other girls began to envy Sadeem, especially Gamrah, who would become overwhelmed with self-pity whenever Sadeem described to her on the telephone how fond she was of Waleed and how he adored her in return. Gamrah started making up stories about her blissful life with Rashid—how loving he was toward her, how many gifts he brought her.
Waleed and Sadeem signed the marriage contract in a small ceremony. Sadeem’s aunt wept uncontrollably as she thought of her sister—Sadeem’s mother—who had never gotten the chance to see her daughter married. She also cried secretly for her son, Tariq, whom she had always hoped would be the one to marry Sadeem.
During the official proceedings Sadeem pressed her fingerprint onto the page in the enormous registry book after her protest about not being allowed to sign her name was dismissed. “My girl,” said her aunt, “just stamp it with your fingerprint and call it a day. The sheikh says fingerprint, not signature. The men are the only ones who sign their names.”
After the signing ceremony, her father threw a huge banquet for the two families. On the evening of the next day, Waleed came over to see his bride, whom he had not met in person since that one legally permitted viewing. On this visit, Waleed presented her with the customary gift for the engagement period nowadays: a cell phone, one of the very latest models on the market.
In the months to follow, during the milkah period, the traditional time between the official signing of the documents and the actual wedding ceremony, Waleed’s visits to Sadeem grew more and more frequent. Most visits her father knew about, but there were a few little encounters that escaped his attention. During the week, Waleed usually dropped by after the evening prayers, and usually stayed until two o’clock in the morning. On weekends he rarely left before dawn.
Every few weeks Waleed took her out for dinner in a fancy restaurant, and on other evenings he would bring her food or sweets that she loved. They spent their time talking and laughing, watching a film that one of them had borrowed from a friend. Then things began to progress, and they developed far enough that she experienced her first kiss.
Waleed had been accustomed to kissing her cheeks when saying hello and good-bye to her. But one evening his parting kiss was decidedly hotter than usual. Maybe the tragic end of the movie they had watched together (Armageddon) played a role in creating the right mood for him to plant that long, needy kiss on her virgin lips.
Sadeem started preparing for the wedding, browsing around in the shops with Um Nuwayyir or Michelle or Lamees. Sometimes Waleed would go with her, especially if she was planning to buy nightgowns.
The wedding celebration was set to occur over the summer vacation, a week or two after Sadeem’s final exams, as Sadeem had requested. She was afraid to get married during Eid Al-Adha break, worried that it would interfere with her ability to study for her exams—Sadeem was always a top student, vigilant about getting good grades. But her decision upset and distressed Waleed, who was anxious to get married as soon as possible. Sadeem decided to make it up to him.
One evening she put on the black lace nightgown he had bought for her but which at the time she had refused to try on in his presence. She invited him to come over for the evening without informing her father, who was out camping with friends in the desert.
The red petals she strewed across the sofa, the candles placed here and there, the soft music wafting from the well-hidden music system—none of it impressed Waleed as much as the black nightgown that revealed more of her body than it concealed. Since Sadeem had vowed to make her beloved Waleed happy that night, and since she wanted to erase his disappointment over her insistence on delaying the wedding, she allowed him to go further with her than ever before. She did not try to stop him—as she had gotten used to doing—when he attempted to cross the line that she had drawn, for herself and for him, in the early days after the signing of the contract. She was convinced that he wouldn’t be satisfied unless she offered him a little more of her “femininity,” and she was willing to do anything to please him, the love of her life, even if it meant exceeding the limits she had spent her lifetime guarding.
As usual, Waleed left after the dawn call to prayer, but this time Sadeem thought he seemed distressed and troubled. She figured he must be feeling as nervous as she was after what had happened. She waited anxiously for his usual phone call once he got home, since she especially needed to hear his tender voice after such a night, but he didn’t call. Sadeem didn’t allow herself to call him and waited until the next day, but he didn’t call then, either. As difficult as it was for her, she decided to give him a few days to calm down before calling him to ask what was wrong.
Three days passed without a word from Waleed. Sadeem decided to drop her resolve and called, only to find that his cell phone was turned off. She kept calling through the entire week, at different times of the day and night, desperate to reach him. But his cell phone was always switched off and the private line in his room was always busy. What was going on? Had something awful happened to him? Or was he still angry at her, this angry even after all of her efforts to please him? What about everything she had given him on that night? Had he gone insane?
Had she been wrong to give herself to Waleed before the wedding celebration? Did it make any sense at all to believe that that was the cause of him avoiding her? Why, though? Wasn’t he her legal husband, and hadn’t he been her legal husband ever since they signed the contract? Or did getting married mean the ballroom, the guests, the live singer and the dinner? And what she had done—did it somehow deserve punishment from him? Hadn’t he been the one who initiated it? Why had he encouraged her to do the wrong thing and then afterward abandoned her? And anyway, was it wrong, was it a sin, in the first place? Had he been testing her? And if she had failed the test, did that mean that she was not worthy of him? He must have thought she was one of those girls who were easy! But what kind of stupidity was this? Wasn’t she his wife, his lawful partner? Hadn’t she on that day placed her mark in that big register next to his signature? Hadn’t there been acceptance, consent and commitment, witnesses and an announcement to the world? No one had ever cautioned her about this! Would Waleed make her pay for what she did not even know? If her mother had been alive, she would have warned her and directed her, and then none of this would have happened! And besides, she had heard a lot of stories about young women who had done what she did, and maybe more, after signing the contract and before the wedding party! She even knew of cases where the brides had given birth to full-term babies only seven months after the wedding. Among the people who were aware of such events, only a very few seemed to care. So where was the error? Where was the sin?
Who would draw for her the fine line between what was proper behavior and what wasn’t? And, she wondered, was that line that their religion defined the same as the one in the mind of a young man from conservative Najd? Waleed had criticized her every time she put a stop to anything, saying that she was his wife according to the religion of God and His prophet. Who was there to explain to her the psychological makeup of the young Saudi man so that she could understand what went on in his mind? Had Waleed now come to believe that she was a young woman of “experience”? Did he actually prefer it when she told him to stop? She hadn’t done anything more than go along with him, the way she saw things done on TV and heard from her married girlfriends. He had done the rest! So why was she at fault for following his lead and instinctively knowing how to conduct herself? It wasn’t something that required knowledge of chemistry and physics to figure out! What was it that had taken possession of Waleed, to make him so irrational?
She tried to call his mother but was told that she was sleeping. She left her name with the maid and asked her to inform her mistress that she had called, and then she waited expectantly for a call from Um Waleed that never came. Should she tell her father what had happened on that bitter night? How would she tell him? What would she say? If she said nothing, though, was she going to say nothing all the way to the wedding day? What would people say on that day? That the groom jilted her? No, no! Waleed couldn’t possibly be as horrible as this. He must be lying in a coma somewhere in some hospital. To think of him lying in a hospital bed was a thousand times more bearable than to think that he could be deserting her in this way!
Sadeem was afloat in a state of bewilderment, waiting for a call or visit from Waleed, dreaming that he would come to her on his knees begging for forgiveness. But he didn’t visit and he didn’t call. Her father asked her what was wrong, but she had no answer for him. An answer did come from Waleed three weeks later, though: divorce papers! Her father tried hard to find out from Sadeem what lay behind the horrible surprise, but she collapsed in his arms and exploded into tears without confessing. In anger, he went to Waleed’s father, who denied knowing anything and said he was as surprised as Sadeem’s father was. All Waleed had said to his father was that he had discovered he was not comfortable with his bride and he preferred to break the contract now before the wedding was consummated.
Sadeem kept her secret from everyone. She licked her wounds in silence until the second shock arrived: in her first year at the university, she had failed more than half of her courses.
6.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: March 19, 2004
Subject: Lamees, the One and Only!
Many e-mails have come my way that ask me to reveal my true identity. Am I one of the four girls I am writing about in these e-mails? So far, most of the guesses have veered between Gamrah and Sadeem. Only one guy thinks I’m likely to be Michelle, but then he said he wasn’t sure since Michelle’s English is better than mine!
What really got me howling was an e-mail from Haitham, from Al-Madina, City of Light, in which he slams me for my extreme partiality toward the “Bedouin” girls of Riyadh and my neglect of Lamees, his heart’s darling. You people are starting to act as if you know my four friends better than I do! Don’t let it bother you, dear Haitham. My e-mail today will concern Lamees and only Lamees.
Though Lamees and Tamadur looked very much alike, enormous differences in character and in their thoughts and ideas separated the twin sisters. True, they had attended the same classes in elementary and middle school, and even as far as high school and university, where they both studied at the College of Medicine. But Tamadur alone drew the admiration of professors for her intense seriousness and hyperdisciplined personality. Lamees, on the other hand, was the cool A+ student who was also the favorite of her classmates because of her wit and her friendliness to everyone. At the same time, she also managed to maintain her good grades. Lamees had more courage—and also more sheer nerve—than Tamadur, who always described her sister as careless, dare-devilish, and rash, not to mention flighty and a bit flirtatious.
Their father, Dr. Asim Hijazi, was a former dean of the College of Pharmacology at the university and their mother, Dr. Fatin Khalil, had been a deputy administrator in the same department. Dr. Asim and Dr. Fatin were the keys to their daughters’ success and their distinctive academic superiority. Ever since the twins’ birth, the parents had been as careful as could be to parcel out their roles and attention so that the two little girls would get all the consideration and care they needed. As Tamadur and Lamees entered nursery, and then kindergarten, and then real school, the parents’ attentiveness grew rather than dwindled. So did their aspirations for their daughters’ ongoing—and accelerating—academic distinction.
The couple had only these twins, and moreover had had them only after enduring much suffering and medical attention over a span of fourteen years, after which they had been given, by God’s mercy, these two lovely baby girls. They did not try for any more children, since by then the mother’s age was somewhat advanced and any attempts to have another child might be bad for her health and that of the unborn baby.
One of the more infamous episodes of Lamees’s high school career occurred in her first year. She, Michelle and two of their other classmates executed a massive and perfectly planned video exchange. On the appointed day, each girl brought four films to school. The idea was that at the end of the school day, they would parcel out the sixteen films among themselves, but bad luck had it in for them. No sooner had they arrived at school than the girls heard about the administration’s intention to search all of the classrooms and everyone’s schoolbags that day, looking for prohibited items. The list of contraband items was long and included photo albums, diaries, perfume bottles, romantic novels, music cassettes and videotapes.
Lamees didn’t know whether someone had ratted on them or whether it was merely the bad luck that always seemed to chase her. When the news got around, the four girls were thrown into utter chaos, aghast at this unexpected development. And the true disaster was that this wasn’t a question of one or two tapes; it was a matter of sixteen!—found with four of the school’s leading students! What a total scandal—and the possibility hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind!
Lamees gathered up the videos from her classmates, stuck them inside a large paper bag, and asked them all to act normal. She assured them that everything would turn out just fine and that she would handle the whole mess and take care of everything.
During recess, she carried the bulging paper bag into the bathroom to search for a hiding place, but it was a big bag and she couldn’t find a good place to stash it. She worried that any school employee might stumble on it and steal it or take it to the authorities. If that happened, her problem wouldn’t just be a school scandal but—and maybe this was ten times worse—she would have a real issue on her hands with her classmates, none of whom would be particularly happy to have her own tapes seized!
Next, Lamees considered stuffing the bag into the classroom cupboard. But the spot was pretty open to view, not to mention being an obvious place to look. Lamees began to feel desperate. The whole thing was like a dangerous game of hide-and-seek played at a time and in a place that simply were not suitable for playing games at all.
But just then the perfect solution popped into her head. Brilliant! She knocked on the door to the teachers’ lounge and asked to see her favorite teacher, Ms. Hana, who taught chemistry. Ms. Hana appeared in the doorway, full of welcomes for this surprise visit, and boldly Lamees explained her difficult situation. The teacher’s welcoming expression disappeared.
“Shu badik?” Ms. Hana wailed. “So what do you want me to do, Lamees? I have my position to think of! It’s impossible! I can’t help you with this!”
“If the principal finds out, I’m screwed!” Lamees wailed back.
“Are you crazy? Bringing films to school. Sixteen of them at once? Shame on you.”
After a great deal more resistance, the teacher took the enormous bag from Lamees, who had not stopped begging for her salvation for a second. She promised Lamees that she would do whatever she could to snatch her good name from the jaws of disaster.
About halfway through the day, some administrators swooped down on Lamees’s class and began to search through all of the students’ schoolbags. They poked into the desk drawers and the cabinet, searching high and low for any prohibited items. Some students hid the music cassettes that they were carrying, or a bottle of perfume, a small photo album or pager (that was in 1996; cell phones weren’t popular yet) in the big pockets of their school uniforms, and stood with their backs plastered to the classroom wall. The eyes of Lamees’s friends followed the inspectresses in terror, in anticipation of their finding their films in Lamees’s bag.
In the last class hour, one of the office girls came into Lamees’s class to tell her that the principal was asking to see her. Lamees lowered her head. So, Ms. Hana, she thought, is this what it has all come to? You go and inform on me, just like that? You chickened! A grown-up teacher is more afraid of the principal than I am!
Lamees strode into the principal’s office fearlessly. The damage was done and feeling afraid was not going to help her. But she did feel mortified. This was not the first time she had been summoned to the principal’s office for bad behavior.
“Sooo, Lamees, what are we going to do with you? It isn’t enough, what you did last week, when you wouldn’t tell me which girl it was who put the red ink on the teacher’s chair in the class?”
Lamees hung her head and smiled in spite of herself when she recalled how their classmate Awrad had dripped a few drops from her red fountain pen refill onto the teacher’s chair between classes. The teacher came in and immediately panicked when she caught sight of the red splotches on the leather seat of her chair. She froze in place for several seconds as the students tried to control their laughter. “Who had the class before this one, girls?” she finally ventured.
They answered in one voice. “Ms. Ni’mat, ma’am.”
She shot out of the room to go in search of her friend Ms. Ni’mat whom the girls all despised. The teacher ran to tell Ms. Ni’mat about the “blood” drops on her beige skirt. It must have been her “time of the month”! When she got back, proud of the favor she did to save her friend from walking around the school with that embarrassing stain on her skirt, the girls’ stomachs were aching from so much laughing.
That day, dragged before the principal, Lamees had responded to her angrily. “Ms. Elham, I told you, I can’t inform on my friends.”
“This is called a negative attitude, Lamees. You have to cooperate with us if you are going to keep up your grades. Why aren’t you like your sister Tamadur?”
After this cruel threat, and the usual provocative remark about her sister, Lamees had to tell her mother about the incident. Dr. Fatin came to school to meet with the principal. Lamees’s mother cautioned the principal in no uncertain terms against speaking to her daughter in such a way ever again. As long as Lamees herself had not been behind the prank, they had no right to make her divulge the secrets of her friends. It would be more appropriate for them to search for the real culprit on their own, instead of trying to force Lamees to be their spy, and lose her self-respect and her classmates’ great affection for her.
It was true that the teachers were always asking her why she was not more like her sister Tamadur, but, in compensation, her friends would ask her why Tamadur wasn’t more like her!
Lamees had been sure that the principal would be easier on her this time around, especially since it had only been a few days since her mother’s last visit. Dr. Fatin had some prestige and weight to throw around at that school, since for the past five years she had been president of the Mothers’ Association—a Saudi version of the PTA. She had worked hard to further the school’s charitable activities, in addition to the fact that her daughters were among the school’s top pupils and were very often selected to represent it in regional academic competitions.
“As you can see, a certain paper bag has reached me,” the principal said to Lamees, sitting in her office. “However, I promised Ms. Hana that I would not punish you, and I am sticking to my promise. All I will do is take the films with me today, and I’ll return them to you after I’ve watched all of them.”
“Watched all of them? Why?”
“To make sure there isn’t any of that sort of film among them.” She winked.
How rude of her! What sort of film was she insinuating? Each tape had the name of the movie written on it. They were the latest American movies and she was sure that Ms. Elham had heard about each one of them. There were Braveheart, The Nutty Professor and a few others that the girls’ brothers got from Dubai or Bahrain or from American compounds in Riyadh where they sell noncensored movies. She wasn’t carrying sex tapes! Maybe Ms. Elham just wanted to watch the movies for fun! But why didn’t she just ask to borrow them in a direct way instead? In any case, Lamees decided that this horrid principal was not going to get the pleasure of watching her films, after all of the misery she inflicted on Lamees every day.
“I’m so sorry. The films aren’t mine. If my friends knew the films had been taken they would skin me alive, as some of them belong to their brothers.”
“And just who are these friends of yours?”
My God, Lamees thought. Doesn’t this woman ever stop asking these kinds of questions?
“As you know, ma’am, I can’t tell you that.”
“Your problem, Lamees, is that you think you’re the godfather of your own little mafia, willing to take the blame for everything wrong they do. Either you tell me the names of the girls who are with you or I will confiscate the movies.”
Lamees considered the principal carefully. “If I tell you their names, can you guarantee that my friends won’t find out? They will never know that I told on them? And do you promise that you won’t punish them?”
“Yes, Lamees. I promise.”
Lamees divulged the names of her partners in crime, took back the films and after school distributed them to the four of them to watch over the weekend. Where was her hiding place, they wanted to know, and how had she managed to hide this enormous bag? But Lamees just replied with a confident smile and her usual line: “Hey, I’m Lamees! The one and only.”
7.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: March 26, 2004
Subject: The Legends of Street No. 5
Many people have accused me of imitating the way certain writers write, though they say I put all of them together in one big pot and end up writing in an eclectic and strange way. Frankly, this is a great honor as far as I’m concerned, as long as they truly believe I am imitating writers like those whom they mention! Even though, I swear, in truth I am too insignificant to imitate them.
Our Saudi society resembles a fruit cocktail of social classes in which no class mixes with another unless absolutely necessary, and then only with the help of a blender! The “velvet” Riyadh upper class was, to the four girls, the whole world, but it comprised only a tiny fraction of the university world’s enormous diversity.
When the girls entered the university, they got to know for the first time girls who had come from faraway areas about which they had heard very little. If you counted up all of the girls who came from beyond greater Riyadh, they would make up more than half of the entering class of sixty young women. The closer she got to those girls, the more admiration Lamees felt for them. They were energetic, independent and strong. Graduates of public government schools, these girls from the kingdom’s interior had not had a quarter of the resources and support she and her three friends had had in their posh private schools. Yet they had excelled and obtained the highest examination marks, and if it were not for the fact that most of them were weak in English, no one could have told them apart from her friends, except perhaps by the simplicity of their clothing. None of them had ever heard of the famous brands that everyone in the little four-person shillah exclusively bought.
Michelle was surprised and upset one time when she heard one of the students who was walking close behind her and Lamees vigorously start asking forgiveness from God when she happened to hear Lamees’s description of the sexy dress she was going to wear that evening to her cousin’s wedding! And Sadeem told her that one of their classmates was always saying that she was on the lookout for a bride for her husband, whom she had married just one year before, so that she could present him with the bride herself! The reason she gave was that she wanted to find some time in which she could clean the house and dye her highlighted hair roots and beautify her hands with henna designs and adorn herself for him, and care for their child and the children still to come. She’d be able to do all of that, she said, during the times her husband was with his other wife!
Among the four girls, Michelle was the only one who could not stand this type of girl. She wasn’t interested in entering into deep discussion and debate with any of them, and she wasn’t at all happy at Lamees’s obvious enthusiasm for associating with them. She privately accused Lamees of playing the Alicia Silverstone character in the movie Clueless, which had been everyone’s favorite film when they were teenagers. Lamees, she said, was taking the least sophisticated girls on a voyage of beautification and cultivation—giving them complete makeovers—only to make them aware of Lamees’s superiority.
What made Michelle more resentful was that Sadeem shared Lamees’s interest and easy rapport with those girls. With all of their simplicity, the girls were utterly polite and very delicate and, in a way, refined. Their innocent goodness attracted everyone to them, in addition to their sense of humor, a trait that had been all but obliterated in the refined circles of society.
Is there an inverse relationship between one’s social and economic status, on the one hand, and good humor and a merry personality, on the other? In the way that some people believe in the existence of an invariable relationship between being fat and being funny? Personally, I believe in such things. Being disagreeable, dull, constitutionally insufferable or truly odious—these are widespread diseases among the rich. Look at the degree of dullness among blond females, especially upper-class blondies, and you’ll know exactly what I mean!
Lamees began to sense Michelle’s instant jealousy whenever Lamees showed signs of getting close to any other girl at the university. In the first term of their first year, Lamees and Sadeem would meet daily on the sidewalk of Street No. 5, or “the Champs,” as they called it, after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, because it was the street that all girls in the university spent their free time between classes walking down. It had been the two girls’ dream to see the Champs of Olaisha, after all that they had heard about it. And now here it was, nothing more than a few old wooden benches placed in front of Gate No. 5. The Olaisha Campus, one of King Saud University campuses, consisted of just a few buildings on the point of collapse. It was initially built in 1957 and was strictly for male students at that time. Later on, the males were moved to a huge new campus, leaving Olaisha for females. Inside the Olaisha Campus, the streets were layered with the remnants of dried dates that had fallen from the palms that lined the streets. The place was so neglected that even the clusters of hanging dates had despaired of seeing anyone come to gather them. Even after dropping to the ground, they were ignored year after year; no one came to pick them up.
Michelle, who had come from her college in the Malaz Campus one morning expressly to explore the Champs of Olaisha, was so disappointed that she loudly bewailed the fate that had decreed she attend a university in Saudi rather than in America. It was all the fault of her aunts. Her father’s nosy sisters had really gone out of their way in this case to stuff her open-minded father’s head with retrograde ideas. They warned him of the likely consequences of letting her go abroad all by herself to study. Girls who traveled out of the kingdom to study, the aunties argued, found lots of unflattering talk swirling around them when they returned. And then they couldn’t find anyone who would marry them. The greatest tragedy of it all was that her highly civilized father was persuaded by these ridiculous, stupid arguments!
The sidewalk of Street No. 5 had its secrets, many of them having to do with legendary students. Many stories were told, some of them true and some of them highly embroidered.
One of the famous tales of the Street No. 5 sidewalk, transmitted like wildfire among university students within Olaisha Campus, was the story of Arwa. She was a student known for her lovely features and set apart by her extremely short hair and her masculine stride. Everyone sought Arwa out, mainly because everyone was so afraid of her. One of the girls swore that she had seen Arwa one day sitting on the Street No. 5 sidewalk with the white hem of a man’s long underpants showing from beneath her long black skirt. Another student was sure that a friend of hers had seen Arwa slipping her hand around the waist of another girl in a most dubious manner. Sadeem mentioned that she had nearly died of fright when Arwa happened to walk by her while she was gossiping about her. She had never met Arwa before, so she didn’t realize what a fix she’d gotten herself into until another girl mentioned that the girl leaning on the wall with her gaze fixed on Sadeem and a mysterious smile on her lips was none other than Arwa! “Do you think she heard me, girls? If she heard, what will she do to me now?” Sadeem asked her friends, sweat beading on her forehead. Her friends cautioned her against walking alone on the campus grounds from then on, for it was clear that she had been added—seriously added—to Arwa’s blacklist.
“May God protect you, Saddoomah, dear! Stay away from Building No. 4 which is the oldest and farthest away. They say that Arwa stalks the girls who go there—every one of them!—because the place is so out-of-the-way and deserted that even if a girl were to scream or smash everything to pieces out there, no one would ever hear or know.”
Arwa the lesbo! Good God! Could it be true that she really did graduate from Olaisha? I haven’t heard anything about her for quite a long time. Arwa has become a legend, like all the other myths of this ancient and venerable campus.
After that first term, Lamees and Tamadur moved to the Science Department at the women’s campus in Malaz, where Michelle was already studying computer science. That would last only one term, after which they would move to the College of Medicine for Women, also in Milaz, for two years; after which they would move—their final move—to the King Khalid University Hospital to complete their training. This end station on the road through the educational system was what made them the envy of the other girls. For studying in the very same hospital were the guys coming from their own College of Medicine, as well as the Colleges of Dentistry, Pharmacy and Applied Medical Sciences.
The thought of finally mixing with the the opposite sex was a grand dream for many, many students—guys and girls alike. Some joined these colleges primarily for that reason, even if the mixing that they anticipated so eagerly was heavily restricted. Male doctors taught female medical students and male students were allowed to examine female patients, but it was not allowed for male and female students to share a classroom or a lounge. Contact with the opposite sex would never go beyond some coincidental and transient encounter in the breaks between lectures or at prayer times (facilitated by the fact that the male students tended to pray in the prayer area close to where the female students habitually were), or quick glimpses and stolen glances while walking about the hospital or riding the elevators. Still, it was better than nothing.
8.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 3, 2004
Subject: On Those Who Do Not Marvel at the Marvelous
First, I offer all of you my apologies for my unintended tardiness in sending out this e-mail. I had a nasty flu that prevented me from writing yesterday, which was Friday, so you are getting my e-mail on a Saturday instead. Easy on me, Abdullah, because I gave you back your grim Friday afternoon,* after you had grown used to my e-mails lightening Friday’s tedium for you. And, pardon me, Ghada (and by the way I thank you, for being the first girl to e-mail me since this scandal-sheet series began), for not providing you with any material you could talk about all day at the bank this Saturday. And forgive me, Ra’id, you funny guy you, for having messed up your weekly schedule, making you doubt what day it was and what date as well, so you almost didn’t go to work on Saturday morning and your life was a mess and it was ALL because of my late e-mail!
I have brushed on my bright red rouge, and there is a big plate of pickled cucumbers next to me. This time around, I really need some munchies with bite, to keep me reminded of the sharp flavor of what I am about to write in this e-mail.
Gamrah accustomed herself to her new life. It had become clear to her that Rashid’s behavior toward her was not just a matter of feeling shy or embarrassed with the wife who had suddenly assailed his life. It was something more. Gamrah did not have it in her to actually give a name to his doings—not, anyway, the name that echoed in her head, even if a certain string of words kept on seeping out from her mind in spite of herself, and then creeping into her troubled heart: My husband, whom I love, hates me. He wants to throw me out.
Just a few weeks after their arrival in Chicago—and after Rashid’s grumbling about her laziness and how she never left the apartment had grown louder—Gamrah got used to going out by herself to shop for household goods at the end of every week. Rashid himself was not prepared to teach her to drive, but he had no confidence that she could understand and be understood by a foreign teacher with her poor, broken English. So he turned for help to the wife of one of his Arab friends who had offered to teach Gamrah how to drive, for a fee. After Gamrah failed the driving test three times in a row, however, Rashid put a stop to the driving lessons and ordered her to learn how to use public transportation to do what she had to do.
Whenever she went out, Gamrah wore a long overcoat with a hijab.* Even her clothes became a source of irritation to her husband after a while: “Why don’t you wear ordinary clothes like the other women here? It’s as if you are trying to embarrass me in front of my friends with the things you wear! And then you wonder why I don’t take you out with me!”
Neither Gamrah nor her mother could really understand why he was so annoyed. What was the source of the constant irritation and tension that seemed to have overcome Rashid? Yet, in spite of her distress and misery, Gamrah was prepared to do anything to make the marriage work. Or at least to keep it going.
On one of the rare days when they were both at home, Gamrah kept after her husband to take her to a movie, and he finally relented. After they arrived at the theater and he found two seats for them, she surprised him by taking off her coat and hijab before sitting down. She gave him a shy smile, trying to read his thoughts at that crucial moment. He studied her with a sidelong stare, and after just a few seconds, he said, “Taking them off isn’t making you look any better. So just put them on again.”
Before the wedding, her delight about the engagement, and about the groom, who was such a good catch—so totally elegant—and all of the bridal finery from Lebanon with a dowry that no girl in the family had been able to top—all of this was too much to allow any doubts to creep up on Gamrah. But now there were plenty of doubts and even more questions.
So why would he marry me if he didn’t want me? Gamrah asked herself time and time again. She asked her mother whether she had heard anything from Rashid’s family to suggest that he had been forced to marry her. But did it make sense that a man—and he was every inch a man, whatever else he turned out to be—would be forced to marry a woman he didn’t want, no matter how compelling the reasons?
Before the wedding, Gamrah had seen Rashid only once, and that was on the day of the shoufa, the day set for the bridegroom’s lawful viewing of the bride-to-be. The traditions of her family did not permit the man seeking the engagement to see the bride again before the contract signing. Moreover, in this case there was no more than a two-week gap between the signing and the marriage celebration itself, and Gamrah’s and Rashid’s mothers agreed between themselves that Rashid would not see his bride during that time, so that she would have no interruptions as she prepared for her wedding. It was all completely logical in Gamrah’s eyes, except she did find it a little odd that Rashid had not asked her father’s permission to talk to her on the phone so that he could get to know her better like all men do these days.
Gamrah had heard that most young men these days insisted on getting acquainted with their fiancées by telephone before the contract-signing, but her family’s particularly conservative practices didn’t allow for that. As far as they were concerned, marriage was—as they always said—like the watermelon on the knife, you never knew what you were going to get. Her older sister Naflah’s watermelon had turned out to be one of those extra-sweet ones, while her own watermelon and her sister Hessah’s were more like dried-out, empty gourds.
Gamrah kept cataloging instances of Rashid’s difficult personality and they began to grow and mass like a snowball rolling down a mountain, swelling to more and more gigantic proportions. Gamrah kept up her investigation, turning over in her mind every little detail, trying to unearth the real reason why he was hostile to her—even, it seemed clear, repulsed by her. What, Gamrah puzzled, was the truth behind his contempt? What was it that had driven him, through all of these months, to positively insist that she take birth-control pills, even though she was dying to have a baby with him?
Real, serious doubts began to sink into Gamrah’s heart and soul after she had been married for a few months. The way Rashid treated her was not a whole lot different from the way her father treated her mother. But it was different from the way Mohammed treated her sister Naflah, and even from the way Khalid was with Hessah, at least when they had first been married. And it was thoroughly unlike the way their Emirati neighbor behaved toward his wife, whom he had married just six months before Rashid and Gamrah’s wedding.
Although her husband was rough and rude to her sometimes, Gamrah loved him. She was even devoted to him, in spite of everything, for he was the first man she had ever spent time with outside of the company of her brothers, father and uncles. He was the first man who had come forward to ask for her hand, and by doing so he had made her feel as though there were someone in this world who knew—maybe even appreciated—that she was alive. Gamrah did not know if she had come to love Rashid because he was worthy of being loved, or if she simply felt it was her duty as his wife to love him. Now, though, the doubts that began to overtake her were troubling her sleep and darkening her days.
One day as she was shopping in the Al-Khayyam Arab Grocery on Kedzie Avenue, she heard the owner singing along with the famous Egyptian singer Um Kulthum. He was obviously enjoying himself and was completely immersed in a trance brought on by the music. Gamrah listened to the melancholy tune and the words that pressed hard against a wound that sat deep inside of her. Her eyes filled with tears as the idea hit her: Can Rashid possibly be in love with someone else?
When Gamrah visited Riyadh during the New Year’s break, Rashid did not go with her. She spent nearly two months with her family, hoping that Rashid would ask her to come back once he had had enough of being alone. But he never did ask her to return. In fact, her feelings told her that he was hoping she would stay in Riyadh and never come back. How many hundreds of times each day he stabbed her to death with his icy coldness! She had tried everything to win him over, but it was no use. Rashid was the epitome of the Leo man, in his innate stubbornness and his elusiveness.
Lamees had always served as astrological consultant for their little shillah. From Beirut she would bring books on the signs of the zodiac. For each of the girls, Lamees would read out the personality traits for her sign and the degrees of compatibility between that sign and all the others. It was a given that the girls would consult with Lamees before launching into any relationship of any sort, and so during the engagement Gamrah had gotten in touch to ask her how much compatibility there was between her sign, Gemini, and Rashid’s, Leo. Sadeem, too, went to Lamees for advice when Waleed the Aries guy asked for her hand. Even Michelle, who had never shown much enthusiasm for such things, contacted Lamees as soon as she discovered that Faisal was a Cancer. She wanted to hear from the experts how successful their relationship would be.
Before Gamrah got married and went to Chicago, Lamees gave her a photocopy of one of her priceless zodiac manuals. Gamrah would reread it regularly, underlining whatever applied to her:
The Gemini female is attractive and alluring and her beauty turns people’s heads. Energetic and lively, she lets her small reservoir of patience rule even in matters of love. She is the truest type of the capricious whimsical fancy-free woman who won’t settle on anything, or on any one person. She’s an emotional one—indeed, her emotions blaze if she meets the right man who is capable of satisfying her heart, mind and body all together. In spite of herself, the Gemini woman is a complex person. She is high-strung and has many fears. But she is always stimulating and entertaining, and those who know her don’t know what it means to be bored…
The Leo male is a practical guy, clever and careful with his money, who doesn’t like to waste his time with unprofitable games. He is nervous and quick to react, egotistical and stubborn and he roars when angry. When Leo loves, he is jealous and possessive of his beloved. Expect him to be dominating in his love, but he is also exuberant and impetuous, like a volcano pouring forth the lava of passion. The woman he loves must close her eyes; she must not be upset when he interferes in her personal business and she must not magnify things out of proportion. The Leo man does not hesitate to show his violent side if the slightest doubt assails him about her obedience and loyalty to him…
The worst sentence of all that Gamrah read before her marriage spelled out the degree of compatibility between a Gemini woman and a Leo man: “No more than fifteen percent!”
It’s difficult to find agreement and harmony between the Gemini woman and the Leo man. They can work together for a fixed period of time, for the sake of achieving a practical success. As for emotional relationships, however, they are likely to be lukewarm at best, to stagnate, resulting in mutual dislike and liable to end in undeniable failure.
Before her marriage, reading these lines Gamrah would mutter, “These things are a bunch of lies, even if some of them turn out to be true.” But now she read the same lines with more conviction as she remembered their North African cook in Riyadh, who used to read the inside of the coffee cup for her, finding meaning in the patterns of the thick and black Turkish coffee grounds. The cook also read her palm and said it was as clear as day that her marriage to Rashid would be one of the most successful marriages the family had ever known and that she would be blessed with many children. She even described them to her as if she could see their features in the splotches of coffee across the hollow of the cup or inside the folds of her palms.
She thought about the Ouija board, which she had played as a teenager with her three friends after Michelle brought it back from one of her trips to America. The board told her that she would marry a young man whose name began with the letter R, and that she would travel abroad with him. She would have three sons and two daughters. The little glass piece, which she touched lightly with her fingers, moved over the letter-filled game board in the darkness of the room that night, guiding her to the names of her children, one by one.
Gamrah tried to rid herself of the wicked thoughts that were growing like a tumor inside her head. To calm herself, she called her mother in Riyadh and asked her how to prepare jireesh, a traditional Saudi dish. She stayed on the phone the whole time it took to cook, listening to the latest news of her relatives and her neighbors. There were a few new stories about Naflah’s clever naughty little boys, and the usual commentary about Hessah’s patience with her husband Khalid.
9.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 9, 2004
Subject: Treasure in a Poem
A lot of angry e-mails came my way last week. Some were angry at Rashid for his cruelty. Others were angry at Gamrah for being so passive. And the rest—and that was most of them—were angry at me for talking about the sun signs and the Ouija board and reading coffee cups which not so many believe in.
Okay. I accept your anger. And I also don’t. As you can see, and as you will see, I am an ordinary girl (Okay maybe a little nutty, just a little!). I don’t analyze every move I make, and I don’t worry about every act possibly being taboo and against social or religious laws. All I can say is that I do not claim to be perfect (as some people do).
My friends are standard examples, and they are pretty good ones, of who we all are. Some might purposely ignore what their stories show us about ourselves, while others are just blind to it. I am forever hearing people say to me: “You will not reform the world and you will not change people.” They have a point, a very good point, but what I WON’T do is to give up the attempt, like everyone else does. There is the difference between me and other people. As the hadith,* the words of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, says, “Deeds are measured by the intentions behind them.” May God consider my writings as good deeds, as I only have good intentions. Let me say it again in case someone didn’t get it the first time around: “I do not claim perfection!” I confess to my ignorance and flaws, but “Every child of Adam commits errors, and the best of those who commit errors are those who repent.” I work hard to correct my errors and to cultivate myself. If only those who find fault with me would turn around and straighten themselves out before they start agitating to straighten me out.
May all repent for their sins after reading about them on the Internet. May all discover some hidden tumors and extract them after having been shown some ugly examples under a microscope. I see nothing wrong in setting down my friends’ problems in my e-mails so that others will benefit—others who have not had the opportunity to learn in the school of life, the school that my friends entered from the widest of gates—the gate of Love. The true and shameful wrong, the way I see things, would be for any of us to stand in each other’s way, disparaging each other, even though we all admit the unity of our goal, which is reforming our society and making every one of us a better person.
On Valentine’s Day, Michelle put on a red shirt and carried a matching handbag. A large number of the other female students did the same, enough of them so that the whole campus looked bright red, by means of clothes and flowers and stuffed animals. In those days, the holiday was still a really new fad and the guys liked it; they cruised the streets stopping every girl they saw to give her a red rose with their phone numbers wrapped around the stem. The girls liked it, too, since now they had finally found someone to give them red roses the way they always saw it done in films. That was before the Religious Police banned anything that might remotely suggest a celebration of the holiday of love, Saint Valentine’s Day, as in Islam there are only two holidays, or Eids: one is Eid Al-Fitr, the day following the month of Ramadan, and the other one is Eid Al-Adha, after the days of pilgrimage to Mecca. Saudis started celebrating Valentine’s Day in the late nineties after they heard about it through satellite TV channels broadcast from Lebanon and Egypt. It was before punishments and fines were instituted for owners of flower shops who gave out red roses to their VIP customers by the most intricate and convoluted ways as if they were smuggled goods. Although celebrating this holiday in Saudi Arabia was prohibited, the celebration of Mother’s or Father’s Day was not, even though the principle behind both ideas is one and the same. Love was treated like an unwelcome visitor in our region.
Faisal’s chauffeur was waiting for Michelle at the university entrance to give her Faisal’s Valentine’s Day gift. It was an enormous basket filled with dried red roses and red heart-shaped candles. Nestled in the middle sat a little black bear holding a crimson velvet heart. When you pressed on the heart, the tune of Barry Manilow’s song “Can’t Smile Without You” came floating out.
Michelle sauntered toward the lecture hall, feeling really special. She looked benevolently down at her girlfriends, whose hearts were slowly disintegrating from total jealousy as she read to them the poem Faisal had written on the card accompanying the gift. They were so jealous, in fact, that quite a few of them brought in dolls or stuffed bears and flowers the next day, just to prove that they had been surprised with gifts like hers after returning home from school.
On that day, many girls cried for a lost love or mourned for an old crush. Many gifts were confiscated and the girls who had worn red clothes or accessories had to make pledges that they not repeat their behavior next year. In the years that followed, clothes were subject to inspection even before the girls were inside the campus gates where they could take off their wraps. That way, the inspectresses could return the culprit to her chauffeur, who still would be waiting there, to be taken immediately home if there was the slightest sign of the Crime of Red on her person, even if it was a mere hair tie.
But Faisal’s gift to Michelle did not end with his romantic poem. On her way home, as she was tossing the soft black bear from hand to hand and breathing in Faisal’s elegant Bulgari scent, which he had sprinkled over the bear, she suddenly caught sight of a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that Faisal had hung in the bear’s cute little ears for his cute little Michelle to hang in hers.
10.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 16, 2004
Subject: When Grief Becomes Pleasure
He said to her one day, All a man wants from a woman is that she understand him. And so the woman snapped loudly into his ear, And all a woman wants from a man is that he love her.—Socrates
Among the many criticisms that have begun flooding into my inbox are a large number slamming me for quoting lines by the late poet Nizar Qabbani and—way back in my first e-mail—asking God’s mercy on him. I quote Qabbani for a simple reason: There isn’t anything out there today that could compare. I’ve never read any modern poetry that has the simplicity and the clear eloquence of his. I have never felt even slightly moved or influenced by those modernist poets who compose a qasida of thirty lines in which they talk about nothing! I do not get any pleasure from reading about the festering pus on the forehead issuing from behind the haunch of eternal grief. I am in sync only with Nizar’s essential lines, lines that not a single one of those new poets (with all due respect to them) has been able to compose, despite their simplicity.
After Sadeem flunked out of school, which came as a huge surprise to everyone since she was known for her academic excellence, her father proposed that the two of them travel to London for some fun. Sadeem asked him, though, to let her go alone and stay in their flat in South Kensington. She wanted to spend a stretch of time by herself, she said. After some hesitation, her dad agreed, and he furnished her with some telephone numbers and addresses of friends of his who, accompanied by their families, were spending the summer in England. She could contact them if she wanted a little break from herself. He urged her to occupy her free time by signing up for a computer or economics course of some kind so that she could benefit from her time away once she returned to her college in Riyadh.
Sadeem packed away her wound along with her clothes and carried it all from the Dust Capital of the World to the Fog Capital of the World. London was not new to her. In fact, spending the last month of summer there had become a familiar yearly ritual. London this time around was different, though. This time, London was a huge sanatorium where Sadeem had decided to take refuge to overcome the mental maladies overwhelming her after her experience with Waleed.
Before they began the descent at Heathrow airport, Sadeem headed for the airplane bathroom. She took off her abaya and head covering to reveal a well-proportioned body encased in tight jeans and a T-shirt, and a smooth face adorned with light pink blush, a little mascara and a swipe of lip gloss.
Coming from Riyadh’s heat, Sadeem had always enjoyed walking beneath London’s summer rains, but on this trip, all that poured over her was misery. London was nothing but gloom, she decided; the city was as dark and cloudy as her mood. The silent apartment and her empty pillow added to her unhappiness, leading her to shed more tears than she had known it was possible to produce.
Sadeem spent a lot of time crying. She wept tears that burned her eyes, for the wrong, the darkness that had enveloped her, that had shrouded her defamed femininity. She cried and cried, mourning her first love, buried alive in its infancy before she could even find pleasure in it. She cried and she prayed, she prayed and prayed, in hopes that God would set guidance before her in her plight, for she had no mother to comfort and reassure her, no sister to stand by her side in this trial. She still did not know whether to tell her father what had happened between her and Waleed on the last night they had been together. Or whether she should carry the secret to her grave.
All that she had the power to do was seek God’s forgiveness and send one prayer after another into the air, imploring that the despicable Waleed would not scandalize her by revealing why he had divorced her; that, having dumped her, he would not say anything that would drag her name through the mud. “Allah, shield me! Keep his evil from me! Allah, I have no one but You to come to, and You are the most knowledgeable of my condition.”
It was during this difficult time that Sadeem became addicted to songs of grief, pain and parting. During those weeks in London, she listened to more sad songs than she had ever listened to in her entire life before. She would feel transported, even elated, whenever she listened to one of the classic love songs by famous Arabic singers that were full of romance and melancholia.
These songs would drench her in sadness and envelop her like a warm, clean bed. As the days passed, she no longer listened to such songs to give herself comfort, but rather to keep herself immersed in the intoxication of grief that she had discovered after the failure of her first love. This was an experience she had in common with most lovers who have suffered loss or betrayal; a masochistic ordeal where pain becomes pleasurable. The trauma leads us to create a tent of wise thoughts in which we sit to philosophize about our life that is passing by outside. We are transformed into tender, hypersensitive beings and the teeniest thought can make us weep. Our damaged hearts dread the next emotional break, so they stay inside their lonely tents of wisdom, avoiding ever falling in love again. One day another Bedouin comes along. He shows up to mend the tent’s tendons…When this other man passes by, we invite him in for a thimbleful of coffee and keep him there, only for a little while to warm up our sad solitude, but unfortunately, this other man always ends up staying—for too long, and before we know it our tent of wisdom falls down around us both! And then we are no smarter than we were before.
After two weeks of solitary confinement in the apartment, Sadeem decided to eat her main meal of the day out, as long as she could find a restaurant not inhabited by streams of tourists from the Gulf. The last thing she wanted, when she was in this state, was to meet a young Saudi man who would try to chat her up.
She didn’t feel any better in the restaurant than she had inside the four walls of the apartment. The atmosphere inside the Hush Restaurant was, as its name might suggest, quiet and romantic. Sadeem thought she came across as the victim of some contagious disease whose family had abandoned her. There she was, eating her meal in solitude, while couples all around her were talking and whispering in the glow of the candlelight. Sadeem couldn’t help but recall her poetic dinners with Waleed and the way they had planned for their honeymoon. He had promised to take her to the island of Bali. She had asked that they spend several days in London before returning to Riyadh after the honeymoon was over. For so long she had dreamed of someday going with her husband, whoever he might be, to the places she had been going to alone for years.
She had had it all planned. She would take him to visit the Victoria and Albert, the Tate, and Madame Tussaud’s. Even though art did not appeal to Waleed the way it did to her, she had figured she would change all of that after their marriage, just as she would force him to stop smoking, a habit that annoyed her greatly. They would drink shoga apple and eat sushi at Itsu on Draycott Avenue. They would slowly drown themselves in Belgian chocolate crepes at the shop near her flat. She would take him to shows at Ishbilia, the Lebanese restaurant, and—of course!—she would not forget to take him on a sea cruise to Brighton. At the end of their time in London she would take him shopping in Sloane Street. She would get him to buy her the latest fashions in clothes and accessories, just as Gamrah’s mother had advised her to do, instead of buying them in Riyadh in advance of the wedding with her dowry.
How very painful these memories were now! Her fancy wedding dress and gorgeous wedding veil (which had been shipped custom-made from Paris) were still lurking in her wardrobe in Riyadh, sticking out their tongues at her in derision every time she opened the closet door. She could not get rid of them. It was as if something inside of her were still waiting for Waleed’s return. But he would not return. And her wedding dress and veil were ugly and ever-present witnesses to her beloved’s low-minded and despicable nature.
Her destination the next morning was an Arabic bookshop. She bought two novels by Turki Al-Hamad, Al-Adama and Al-Shemaisi, after seeing a man from the Gulf who looked to be in his forties requesting them from the clerk. She also bought Sheqat Al Horreya, or Freedom’s Nest, by Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, which she had seen as a TV series on some satellite channel a few years before and liked very much. She took a bus back home to find a voice message from her father. He told her that he had arranged things so that she would have a summer internship in one of the London banks that he dealt with regularly. It would begin in a week’s time.
She liked the idea. Summer work, added independence, and some self-improvement. Beyond the books she had just bought and—now—working at the bank, she had no other plans for the summer. Well, she did have one: to study psychology under the guiding hand of Sigmund Freud, aided by the books she had brought with her, so that she could better analyze Waleed’s personality and arrive at a clear understanding of those factors that had pushed him to no-fault divorce. Meaning, no fault of hers.
Reading the books she had just bought was a pleasure, but it depressed her that she had no idea what she ought to read next. She wished she had a list of must-reads for the cultured and intelligent person.
In the novels of Al-Qusaibi and Al-Hamad, she found a lot of political allusions that reminded her of the novels of the Egyptian writers she had been addicted to as a teenager. She recalled suddenly the demonstration she and her classmates had been prohibited from participating in, in those days, when all of the Arab nations were protesting to show support for the Palestinian Intifada and the Al-Aqsa Mosque uprising. She remembered how a lot of countries started boycotting American and English products a while back, but only a few of her friends in Saudi participated and even the ones who did didn’t stick with it for more than a few weeks. Had politics been within reach of everyone once upon a time, but were now accessible only to generals and rulers?
Why had none of her relatives, male or female, gotten involved in a political cause, supporting it with their very souls as had been the case when Ghazi and Turki were young? Why was it that young people these days had no interest in foreign politics unless it was the scandalous behavior of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? Or, in domestic politics, only the flagrant corruption at the Saudi Telecom Company? It wasn’t just her, Sadeem—all of her classmates and everyone at their age were on the margins when it came to political life. They had no role, no importance. If only she understood politics! If only she had a particular cause to defend or one to oppose! Then she would have something to keep her occupied and to turn her away from thinking about Waleed the bast…!
11.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 23, 2004
Subject: Um Nuwayyir’s Classification of Human Populations
There is no God but Allah, the Mighty and the Clement One. There is no God but Allah, Lord of the Great Throne. There is no God but Allah, Lord of the Heavens and Lord of the Earth and Lord of the Throne most gracious. Everliving, Everlasting, there is no God but You; and in Your mercy we seek succor.—Prayer to release worry, trouble and grief
Over the past two weeks, I have read what has been said about me in some of the famous Saudi Internet forums. Some of the talk was as soft as the granules in my daily facial soap but some of it was as rough as the black stone I use on my perennially problem knees. As I followed these discussions swirling like a sandstorm around me, I felt as though I were watching a bullfight—that is, two bulls fighting. Can any of you out there believe that someone would call for my blood? Well, fine, that’s enough to deal with, but then there is the one who claims to be my sister, which is a whole other deal! She claims to have observed that, every Friday, starting early in the morning, her sister secludes herself in her room, in front of her computer screen. One time when this sister of hers was out of the way, the “sister” who is writing says she searched through her sister’s files for evidence that would confirm her suspicions. And, listen to this! She stumbled across all thirty e-mails. And she is ready to sell them to the highest bidder!
After reading Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, On Narcissism and Totem and Taboo, Sadeem gradually realized that Freud, with all his totems, tomatoes, cucumbers and green salad vegetables, was not going to be much help in solving her problem! Sigmund was not about to yield an explanation of why Waleed had left her.
Sadeem had stumbled across two of Freud’s works, translated, in the Jarir Bookstore in Riyadh. The rest she had asked a university friend to bring her from Lebanon before her own departure for London.
She did not find Sigmund Freud’s thought nearly as convincing—at least, not in explaining Waleed’s behavior—as she had found Um Nuwayyir’s classification of human groups. In a happier time, with Sadeem as her audience, Um Nuwayyir had explained her own analysis of men and women in the Gulf states. It was a complicated system of groups and subgroups that covered just about every personality type, and Sadeem had taken notes so she could remember it all.
Um Nuwayyir classified people of the Gulf and Arabs in general based on a number of factors, including strength of personality, self-confidence, good looks and so forth. These general categories applied to both men and women and were then further subdivided.
For example, “strength of personality” is subdivided into two groups: the strong and the weak. In general the strong usually show a lot of motivation for economic self-improvement. These people watch the examples of success they see around them and seize their opportunity to benefit. The weak, led-by-the-nose types lack initiative and only get off their butts when their family or their entire environment gets an upward kick. But these groups are also subdivided as follows:
1. The Strong
A. The logical type who respects the views of everyone he (or she) encounters even when he has a different point of view.
B. The person who has to have his own way and doesn’t care about the views of others.
2. The Weak
A. The person whose family can easily bend him (or her) one way or the other. This person is incapable of acting independently because, as Um Nuwayyir points out, “Without his family he isn’t worth a penny.”
B. The person who is easily swayed by his friends and can’t stop swaying. This case is even worse than the first one because this person is convinced that his family is against him and only trusts his friends, who, in general, are likely to be in even worse shape than he is.
Um Nuwayyir worked out the same kind of analysis under the heading of “self confidence.” Here also there are two main groups, the secure and the insecure, and, of course, each group is divided by Um Nuwayyir into subgroups as follows:
1. The Secure
A. The sensible type. People belonging to this group are at peace with themselves, displaying a clear degree of confidence that makes everyone respect them and even hold them in awe. But at the same time, they maintain the love and affection of others due to their modesty and genuine accomplishment.
B. The Overconfident
This includes people who really don’t have anything to be proud of. They have an excess of self-confidence, though they lack any reason for it; no great achievements or outstanding personality or even appealing looks. This type is abominable and, unfortunately, more common than the first one. But both A and B together are less common than the second main group:
2. The Insecure
A. Those who claim to be secure. They affect a self-confident pose that isn’t matched by any sincere belief on their part. They take every word said to them with extraordinary sensitivity and reply with great aggressiveness, shielding their failures with their loud personalities. They make mountains out of molehills, or, as we say, “a dome out of a seed.”
B. Those who are really insecure. People in this group don’t act or claim to be something they’re not. It’s apparent from the first that they are pitiful and they make you feel sorry for them. Sometimes they have an obvious physical problem that lowers their self-esteem, like obesity, short height or even a big nose. Or it could be a social problem like poverty or even a mental one like stupidity. Or sometimes it could be a hidden problem that no one else is aware of, like a broken heart from a lost love that never healed.
Sadeem’s favorite classification was that of “religious types before and after marriage,” and this was the only one that strictly separated men and women. There were three categories: The extremely religious type, the rational moderate religious type and the wild type, who mostly ignored the strictures of their religion. The men and women are mirror images of each other. Let’s look at the men first:
1. The Extremely Religious Type
A. He was once wild but he turns religious.
B. He fears wildness so he becomes religious.
Both fear they will degenerate morally after marriage, so they often end up in polygamous marriages, preferring their wives to be at least as zealous as they are.
2. The Moderate Type
A. A strictly religious man who differs from the first group in the way he treats women: tenderly and without interference. This type can marry a relatively liberal woman as long as he is confident of her love and certain of her morals.
B. The seculars. This man believes that Islam is built on five and no more than five basic and compulsory beliefs. He only attends the assigned five prayers and fasts only during Ramadan. After he has gone on the Pilgrimage to Mecca, he feels he has done his part, as long as he has also adhered to the declaration of the faith and given alms to the poor. This kind of man does not marry a woman unless she is on the same level of liberation as he is. He wouldn’t marry someone who wears hijab, for example, and would insist that his wife be pretty, open-minded and stylish so that he could proudly show her off in front of his friends, who share his point of view.
3. The Wild or Escapee Type
A. Gradual escapee. Someone in this group may have grown up in a very strict religious atmosphere and “escaped” in a religious and moral sense. His escape is a gradual one, happening whenever he gets a chance to be away from the authority of his community. This type might pretend to belong to the first group to prevent any social embarrassment.
B. Liberal upbringing. This type has been brought up in an extremely liberal home to the point of atheism in his religious beliefs and the absence of any kind of bulwark against “bad behavior.” And as we all say in these parts: “He who grows up doing something, grows old doing it.” The problem you find in this type of man is pathological suspicion. Unfortunately, and due to his experiences with some cheap girls, whom we will be discussing later, he believes that every girl is guilty until proven innocent. This is why a man in the “wild” category always prefers to marry an inexperienced girl; she will always view things from his corrupted point of view. Sometimes a man of this type marries a girl who is a flirt but knows how to play the game. She knows perfectly well what her husband is really like and she knows how to manipulate and pretend so that her actions won’t end up being misinterpreted. This is exactly what happened to Sadeem, who didn’t realize who Waleed really was until it was too late and after he had made up his mind that she was “bad.”
Now we come to the matching categories for women.
1. The Extremely Religious (“Bowing to the Faith”) Type
A. The sheltered one. Brought up in a strict religious family, a woman of this type has never been exposed to any conflicting outside forces. If she’s very lucky, she will marry someone equally religious. As long as both are able to accept and be happy with what fate has brought them, they can live “happily ever after” in a peaceful and secure life. But if she ends up marrying a man more liberal than she is, she will be miserable because she will never understand how to please him, since she has no knowledge of his way of life.
B. Sheltered, but with fantasies. This woman also has grown up in a sheltered setting, except that fantasies of bursting out into something new, into some kind of liberation, have always pursued her. She is also pure, not because of ignorance of the world “out there,” but because of her own will, her self-discipline or the surveillance of her family.
2. The Moderate Type
A. Fashion victim. This woman changes her behavior according to the current fashion. If the trend during a certain time is to act all spiritual, attend religious gatherings and wear the hijab outside the kingdom, she will do it and “go with the flow.” But if the trend is to dump your hijab once you get outside the country, and when you are inside to spend a lot of time in the malls wearing a tight-fitted abaya that shows off the features of a woman’s body, then she will go with that flow, too. These trends are usually under the control of men’s preferences during their search for suitable wives, or mothers who are hunting for future daughters-in-law.
B. Not religious, but not liberated, either. This woman is less strict than the extremely religious woman but more observant than the more liberal one. A woman from this group tends to resist sinning because of her morals and principles rather than her actual religious belief. She often has a strong personality, so she might mistakenly be listed as a liberal because she doesn’t submit to all the rules of the more zealous groups.
3. The Wild Type (or “Escapee”)
A. Wild before marriage. This woman normally reforms after marriage. She might turn into a very committed woman (or at least one of moderate commitment). That depends on her husband. If she marries someone who isn’t right for her, she remains in the wild category even after her marriage.
B. Wild after marriage. This woman is usually a member of one of the sheltered groups, but she goes “bad” after marriage because she can’t acclimatize to the demands of a liberated husband, or because of a rocky marriage or an unfaithful husband.
These were some of the complicated sets of categories that Sadeem took down while Um Nuwayyir dictated. Even months after writing it all down, Sadeem was still trying to absorb everything. The soundness of the whole complicated scheme became clearer and clearer with the passing of every day that Sadeem lived in the school of life. After all, that was the school where Um Nuwayyir had gotten her information and formulated her theory.
Sadeem’s thoughts about Um Nuwayyir reminded her of the evening gatherings at home with her three friends. She could almost taste the Kuwaiti desserts—the syrupy sweetness of the zalabya and the smooth powdered darabeel—that Um Nuwayyir used to ply them with, together with hot tea. Her memories flew her home to Riyadh, all the way to the metallic gate with its gilt-edged bars, where she had so often stood after the evening prayer time waiting for Waleed to arrive. She saw in her mind’s eye the swing by the swimming pool where she had spent evenings with his arm around her; the formal living room where guests were received, and where she had seen him for the first time; the television in the family living room where together they had watched all of those films; and the room that witnessed the birth of their love as well as its death. Had her love for Waleed truly died?
She got up to turn on the cassette player. She picked up a tape from among the many that were scattered across the floor. She pushed it into the machine, crept back to her bed and rolled into a ball like a fetus in its mother’s womb. She listened woefully to Abdul Haleem’s* mournful voice:
Rid yourself of woe and tears
Instead of crying years and years
Oh you who’ve wept the traitor man
Weep on today, if you well can.
But watch that no one sees tears fall
For such will please the traitors all.
Sadeem cried and cried, and cried, alone in her London flat, wishing and hoping to rid herself of woes and tears, instead of crying years and years. Instead of crying spring and fall, bringing joy to traitors all.
12.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 30, 2004
Subject: A Life That…“Could Be Worse”
I asked Aisha “Prophet Mohammed’s wife,” What did the Prophet—peace be upon him—do in his home? She said, He was occupied in the vocation and service of his family…—The hadith collection of Al-Bukhari, verse 676
Frankly, I did not anticipate all of this flurry, all of this back-and-forth, around my modest little e-mails!
A number of you ask how I conceived of this project.
It all started in my mind about five years ago in 1999, that is, around the time when the story of my friends, as I am writing it to you and for you now, started. I didn’t do anything to turn this idea into a reality until very recently, however. What got me going was that I saw my brain’s capacity to hold anything reaching DISK FULL. The time had come to squeeze out the sponge of my mind and my heart, to really wring out that sponge so that I could absorb something new.
The marital relationship between Rashid and Gamrah was not exactly the cinematic ideal. However, it wasn’t so utterly miserable, either. Preoccupied with his studies, Rashid left the responsibility for taking care of things at home to Gamrah after he realized how completely unenthusiastic she was about enrolling at the university. Even though it was difficult in the beginning to shoulder all of the household-related tasks, gradually Gamrah learned how to depend on herself. She began to find the courage to ask people on the street where an address was, or to ask salespeople in shops how much this or that cost.
She didn’t actually see Rashid very much, but she got the money she needed whenever she asked for it, and most of the time without even asking. Even her own private needs—those “miscellaneous” needs—he gave her enough cash to meet, from time to time, anyway.
Gamrah wasn’t able to compare what Rashid was giving her with what other men would offer their wives. What she did obtain, though, seemed satisfactory enough. The only needs she wasn’t attending to were her emotional ones, and if that was all that was left out, she figured that she ought to consider herself a lot luckier than many women of her age and circumstances.
Once she had lived with Rashid for a while, Gamrah began to see his good side revealed, even though this goodness never emerged openly in his dealings with her. She could glimpse it in his treatment of others: his mother, his sisters, people out there in the street, and children. Rashid would become a happy little child himself in the presence of children. He would play with them fondly and very gently.
She became convinced that with time, Rashid would come to love her. After all, at the very start of their married life, he had always been remote and even a little rough with her, but as time passed he seemed more accepting of her and less severe, although he still sometimes blew up at her for reasons that seemed to Gamrah trivial. But aren’t all men from Najd like that? If she thought about her father or brothers or uncles and their sons, she did not think that her husband was any different. This was his nature—and that was what gave her patience with him.
What bothered her most in Rashid was that he never sought her advice or consulted with her about anything having to do with their home. When he decided to put in a receiver for cable TV channels, he chose the bundle that included his favorites, without considering the fact that HBO, which ran her very favorite show, Sex and the City, wasn’t among them. Gamrah followed that show avidly, even though she could only understand a little of what the characters were saying to each other. So what Rashid did, not taking her into account, as if she didn’t even exist, really angered her, especially when he made it clear that her irritation didn’t give him a moment’s pause. He might as well have said that she had nothing to do with any of the important and basic household decisions, as though this were his apartment alone!
It went on like that. Every day, he would get her worked up about things of this sort. And yet she would be in for a terrible time if she were to forget in the evening to prepare his clothes or to iron them first thing in the morning before he was even awake. Furthermore, she had no right to ask him for help in tidying up or preparing meals or washing dishes, even though he had been accustomed to living the bachelor life all those years of studying in America. As for her, in her family’s home in Riyadh there had always been servants around to do her bidding, furnishing whatever she and her siblings might request from moment to moment.
Rashid spent long hours at the university. When Gamrah would ask him why he was always so late getting home, he would simply inform her that he was carrying out research on the Internet using the easy-access computers in the university library.
In their early months in Chicago, Gamrah spent her time in front of the television or reading the romance novels she had brought with her from Riyadh, which Sadeem had introduced her to when they were in middle school.
Rashid had a computer in the apartment which he did not use. He allowed her to use it if she wanted to, but it was not connected to the Internet. Gamrah spent months learning how to use it. Rashid would help her sometimes, but she tried to rely on herself as much as possible. She noticed how quickly Rashid would insist on helping her as soon as he realized her determination to teach herself. The fact that she didn’t come to him for every single little thing—or every single big thing, either—as she had done at the beginning of their marriage seemed to make him more receptive. Do men sense a threat to their authority when they begin to catch on that a woman is developing some real skills in some area? she wondered. Are men afraid of any moves toward independent action on the part of their wives? And do they consider a woman reaching independence and working toward her own goals an illegal offense against the religious rights of leadership God bestowed upon men? And so Gamrah discovered a crucial principle in dealing with men. A man must sense the strength of a woman and her independence and a woman must realize that her relationship with a man shouldn’t just be built on needs: her need for his money, his share of domestic responsibilities, his support of her and her kids, and her need to feel her own significance in the universe. It is very unfortunate, isn’t it, that a woman has to have a man to make her feel this sense of importance? Sitting at the computer, Gamrah was going through some files containing screensavers when her eyes fell on a file that appeared to hold a great many photos of an Asian woman. She was Japanese, Gamrah learned later. Her name was Kari.
Kari was petite and slim and appeared to be about Rashid’s age or perhaps a little older. In some photos they were side by side. In fact, in one photo they were draped across the sofa in this very apartment in which Gamrah was living.
Here was something that didn’t require any deep analysis! These photos were the missing link in Rashid’s inexplicable behavior toward her. Rashid had had an affair with this girl before marrying her, Gamrah saw, and it wasn’t a stretch to think that he was still having a relationship with her.
After that, the evidence mounted. In addition to the time he spent with Kari every day on the Internet or the phone when he was at school, Rashid was in the habit of spending two days every month away from the apartment with his “friends” on some excursion. She had welcomed those trips because they seemed to have had a magic effect on Rashid; he always returned to her in a state of delirious rapture, in a good mood and outdoing himself to show his affection, to the point where she had felt real gratitude toward those friends and would await the next month’s trip impatiently!
How had he managed to hide his relationship with this woman for all these months? And how could Gamrah have been oblivious to her husband’s affair with another woman? The first month after their wedding had been really difficult, for sure; but then he had changed gradually, turning into a traditional Najd husband very much like her sister Hessah’s husband. How had he been able to keep up this acting in front of her for all this time? Did he meet that woman regularly? Did she live in the same state or did he travel somewhere every month to see her? Did he love her? Did he sleep with her and make her take birth-control pills like he made his wife do?
If anyone had told me that this resigned and unassertive woman Gamrah would do what she did, I would not have believed it. Not before I saw it with my own eyes, anyway. This young wife took up arms, intent on fighting to defend her marriage and struggle for the sake of its survival. She told no one of her painful discovery except her friend Sadeem, who had let her know about her abandonment by Waleed. This friend of hers who had fled into a London exile, Gamrah felt, was the person most capable of really understanding her feelings at such a time, even though she didn’t know why Waleed and Sadeem had split up until a year later.
In their daily phone conversations, Sadeem cautioned her not to say anything to Rashid about her discovery. Follow a defense strategy, Sadeem advised, rather than an attack plan for which she had not amassed a large enough stock of weapons.
“You don’t have any choice. You’ll have to meet her and come to terms with her.”
“What would I say to her? ‘Stay away from my husband, you husband thief’?”
“Of course not! Sit down with her and try to find out what sort of relationship she has with your husband and how long it’s been going on. You don’t know! It may be that he’s even hiding from her the fact that he’s married.”
“I’d die to know what he saw in her, this hussy with slitty eyes!”
“More important than finding out what he saw in her looks is finding out what he saw in her personality. Don’t they say, Know your enemy?”
Was Gamrah right when she decided to fight for her marriage? Or is a successful marriage fundamentally a relationship that doesn’t need war to guarantee its preservation? Is a marriage that demands warfare one that is preordained to fail?
Gamrah came upon Kari’s telephone number and address in Rashid’s pocket diary. She had a number in Japan. She also had a number in the next state over, Indiana, where Rashid had studied for his MA. Gamrah called Kari at the second number and asked to meet her. She introduced herself first. Kari answered calmly, saying she was willing and ready to come to Chicago to see her at the next available opportunity.
That was about two months after Gamrah had discovered this illicit relationship between her husband and that woman. In the interval, Gamrah had worked very hard to control her clashing emotions. She did not want Rashid to sense any change in her before she had her appointment with his lover.
During those two months, Gamrah stopped taking pills without consulting her mother, whose opinion she knew anyway: “All you’ve got is your children, my dear. Children are the only way to tie a man.” Gamrah did not want children to be the one tie between them—or, to put it plainly, the one thing that forced Rashid to stay with her. But he was forcing her into this—let him bear the consequences of his own deeds! And let their children bear the consequences of the deeds of them both.
Dizziness, queasiness in the morning and even vomiting, which was really annoying: here were the well-known signs of pregnancy for which Gamrah had been waiting impatiently. She wanted these symptoms to appear before she called Kari. She went to the supermarket on the ground floor of their building to get something that would confirm her suspicions. She did not know exactly what she was looking for, so she turned to one of the girls who worked there, pointing at her belly with both hands and sketching a round tummy in the air.
“I…I…I bregnent!”
“Oh! Congratulations, ma’am.”
Gamrah had never liked the English language and she had never gotten as good at it as her friends. Every year she had passed English class with difficulty, and one year she had to retake her final exam and then only passed because the teacher felt sorry for her and gave her marks higher than she deserved.
“Noo! Noo! I…bregnent…haaw?” She flattened both of her palms in a gesture as if to ask, how?
The shop attendant’s brown face showed bewilderment. “Sorry, my dear, but I don’t get what you mean!”
Gamrah kept pointing at herself with her index finger. “Mee…mee…haaw bregnent? Haaw baby? Haaw?”
The shopgirl called over two of her colleagues, and they, together with a shopper who had overheard the exchange, labored to solve the riddle of what Gamrah was trying to say. After ten more minutes of effort, Gamrah finally obtained what she was looking for: a home pregnancy test!
13.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: May 7, 2004
Subject: The Face-off: Between She Who Is Worthy and She Who Is Worthless
The Prophet—the blessings and peace of God be upon him—did not beat a single servant of his nor a woman, nor did he strike anything with his hand.—The hadith collection of Ibn Maja, verse 2060
I heard that King Abd Al-Aziz City* is trying to block my site to dam up the channels of communication and ward off malicious acts, scandalous deeds and all causes of corruption or evil. I know that most of you know a thousand ways to get into blocked sites. But I just might die of electrocution if this blockage happens before I can empty out (and load onto you) the charges—positive and negative—I carry in my chest, which have refused to balance each other out to neutral inside of me. I only ask for a small space on the World Wide Web to tell my stories through. Is that too much to ask?
After spending several long hours at the hairdresser’s and after putting on some of her expensive jewelry that she had not worn once since leaving Riyadh, Gamrah headed for the hotel where Kari was staying. On her way there, she warned the wicked little demon in her head against persuading her to strangle this fallen woman the moment she saw her.
Kari—and Gamrah later showed me a picture of the Chinese actress Lucy Liu, telling me Kari was the spitting image of Lucy—came down into the lobby. The waiting had been killing Gamrah. This woman put out her hand, but Gamrah didn’t take it. Gamrah was still fighting a battle with the little devil in her head.
The meeting took a direction that wasn’t exactly the one Sadeem had predicted. It was Kari who steered the conversation, beginning and ending her words with firmness and confidence, without any sign of confusion, and without stumbling over her English even a little. Unlike her adversary.
“I am happy to meet you. I have heard a lot about you from Rashid. I think your wanting to meet me shows wisdom on your part.”
This blasted woman! How dare she!
“It pleases me, naturally, for you to see me, so that you can form an idea of what your husband loves. Rashid has suffered a lot, and you must work to improve yourself, from the inside and out, so that you can move up to the standard he wants and needs. So that you can come up to my level.”
Gamrah, who had never expected an offensive such as this, found that the cat had gotten hold of her tongue. Even without understanding Kari’s speech completely, what Gamrah did absorb was enough to make her suddenly snap out of her stunned silence and explode in Kari’s face, cursing in weak English and in Arabic, too. Kari burst into shameless laughter at the furious sentences that made absolutely no sense, and Gamrah felt herself getting smaller and weaker in front of her. Utterly brazen, Kari took out her cell phone and called up Rashid while his wife watched. She told him that she was in Chicago and was on her way to see him, and would come to wherever he was.
Gamrah didn’t need any astrology book to tell her what sort of an expression Rashid the Leo would have on his face when he showed up at home after his lover had personally told him everything that had taken place between her and his wife. That was the reason Gamrah had delayed meeting the fallen woman until she was sure that she was pregnant. She had long heard her mother and female relatives repeating the wisdom of previous generations, that if all else fails, pregnancy was the only way to ensure that a marriage continues. (Notice that I say continues and not succeeds.)
Less than an hour after Gamrah had seen Kari, Rashid came home. If only he had not.
“C’mon. Get up!”
“Where are we going?”
“You’re going to apologize to Kari for what you did to her and for the garbage you said to her. These stupid things you do aren’t going to work with someone like me. Got that? If your family didn’t know how to raise you, well, then I’ll have to do it myself!”
“You’re not going to tell me what to do! I will never apologize to that Filipino! And for what? And who should do the apologizing?”
Rashid grabbed her arm and yanked. “Look, lady! You’re the one who is going and you’re the one who is apologizing. And after that you are getting on the first airplane out of here and you are going back to your family and I don’t want to see your face here ever again. I’m not a man that a woman like you is going to order around!”
“Yeah, right! So I’m the one who wasn’t raised properly! And what about you, mister? Cheating on me with that Asian housemaid!”
The slap landed on her right cheek, and the sound of it echoed in her head.
“That ‘maid’ is as good as you, and she’s worth your whole family, too, do you understand? At least her father didn’t come kissing up to my father so he could marry his daughter to a man who he knew loved someone in America and had been living with her for seven years! This housemaid loved me and stood next to me and gave me a place to live when I wasn’t getting a penny from home, when my family refused to let us get married and cut off my money for three years! She didn’t run after me because of money and my family’s reputation! The one you hate so much is more honest and more honorable than you are and more than your family is, much, much more!”
After the painful slap, Gamrah’s mind stopped taking anything in. Everything Rashid said after that, all the insults, were just a continuation of that never-ending slap. Without realizing what she was saying and that the timing was all wrong to confess such a thing (is it ever okay to use children as human shields during marital wars?), she said, amid her tears, touching the spot on her cheek with one hand and putting the other on her belly, “I’m pregnant.”
Gamrah’s voice started to fade as the scene grew more tense, while Rashid’s voice got louder. Rashid had become a mass of anger, his eyes glowing like a pair of bright-red coals. His voice boomed out:
“What? Pregnant? You are pregnant! How did that happen? Who gave you permission to get pregnant? You mean you’re not taking the pills? Didn’t we agree there would be no pregnancy until I finish my PhD and we go back to Saudi? You figured you could twist my arm with these filthy tricks!”
“Me? I’m the one with dirty tricks? Am I the one who wanted to keep an innocent wife dangling for two years, having her work for you as a servant until you get your diploma, and then planning to throw her out like trash? Was it me who married a good girl from a good family while I was playing around with a cheap whore?”
The second slap came and she fell to the floor, sobbing painfully. Rashid left the apartment to run into the arms of the “unworthy one,” leaving Gamrah cursing and slapping her cheeks and spitting at him, in a state of hysteria, close to madness.
14.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: May 14, 2004
Subject: Of Michelle and of Faisal I Will Tell You
Love is a matter of the heart, and a person has no control over it. Human hearts lie between two fingers—the fingers of Allah the merciful—and He tilts them as He wills. If love were not so very precious and fine, then so many people, ever since the time of the prophets, would not have ventured there. The Prophet—may the blessings and peace of God be upon him—stressed that the flame of love can only be quenched by marriage. For love which is bound by the reins of chastity and piety gives no cause for shame. But if the marriage does not occur, then patience with the bitterness of disappointment is the only solution.
We have to distinguish between love as a practice and a behavior, on the one hand, and love as an emotion, on the other. It is right Islamic practice i.e., Halal to feel love, but if love turns into acts of love, such as a touch or a kiss or an embrace, it is against the law of Islam i.e., Haram. Many bad things will result, because it is difficult for the person in love to keep that love in check. So what is the love that we do want? We want love that changes hearts and souls. We mean love that pushes those who have it to perform deeds that will then get documented in history as a beautiful love story.—Jassem Al-Mutawa’*
I have begun to get really engrossed in reading your comments on the story, all of you out there! After my last e-mail, I received nearly one hundred messages! And I read every last one. That is because I want to be sure that we are a people who agree to disagree. From the one who sympathizes with Gamrah to the one who finds her pitiful, and from Rashid’s supporters to those who are really angry at him and ready to swing a blow, I can assure you that I thoroughly enjoyed reading every one of your varied opinions, even those I disagree with. But to those of you who ask about Michelle and say I have neglected her for too long, I must say that I agree, and I apologize. Things are looking good for Michelle, and how easy it is to ignore happy people!
In Faisal, Michelle found everything she had been looking for in a man. He was not like any of the young men she had met since settling in Saudi Arabia. The strongest indication of this difference was that their relationship was still going strong after nearly a year, when the longest of her relationships before Faisal had not lasted more than three months.
Faisal was a truly cultivated guy. He knew exactly how to treat a woman, and he didn’t jump to exploit opportunities like all the other guys did. He had quite a few friends who were women, just as Michelle had male friends, but they both made it clear to everyone that they were a serious couple.
Faisal’s gentleness and refined behavior made Michelle rethink the bad impression she had initially formed of young men in her home country, following a number of very short-term relationships. Before getting to know Faisal, it did not even occur to her that a young Saudi man could be as romantic as young men everywhere else in the civilized world. For example, every morning when her driver took her to the university, Faisal would follow them in his own car as a sign of his devotion. She had to admit to herself that seeing him at seven-thirty in the morning maneuvering the streets of Riyadh and working hard to fight off his drowsiness just so he could be almost in her company tickled her heart and filled it with joy.
Michelle had never been able to explain to any of her friends, not even her close girlfriends, the sense of loss she had felt when she had to move back to Saudi Arabia from America. Even though her girlfriends understood how intensely she loathed Saudi society and its severe traditions, and even though they knew how much she mocked the restrictions that the society placed on young women, the battle of two civilizations that raged within her was so contradictory and complex that only someone with an acute intelligence and an enlightened, open-minded thinking could truly comprehend it. And then Michelle found herself in the company of Faisal, who seemed to understand exactly what she was going through. Soon, every time they were together, she told him more and more about what troubled her. After finally stumbling across a young man who understood her, after years of groping around for something that didn’t seem to exist, how could she not grab the opportunity to reveal who she really was to someone?
She would meet him at Um Nuwayyir’s house. Um Nuwayyir believed in love and never once tried to represent it to the four young women as something that one should be ashamed of. She was well aware that genuine love had no outlet or avenue of expression in this country. Any fledgling love relationship, no matter how innocent or pure, was sure to be seen as suspect and therefore repressed. And that, in turn, might well push the lovers over the edge and into a whole lot of bad choices. So when Michelle told Um Nuwayyir that she was determined to invite Faisal to her home in her parents’ absence, since she had gotten so tired of meeting him in cafés and restaurants where they had to hide behind protective curtains as if they were fugitives, Um Nuwayyir opened the door of her own home to the hapless lovers. She did this to keep their heretofore innocent and respectable relationship from turning into something bigger before any official acknowledgment of their union was established.
Faisal grabbed Michelle’s pampered little dog, Powder, and played with the tiny white poodle as he listened to Michelle tell one of her stories. She spoke English, because she felt less constrained that way.
“When I was five and we were still in America, the doctors discovered that Mama had cervical cancer. She had to have chemotherapy and then she had a hysterectomy. So she couldn’t have any more babies.
“We returned to Riyadh after she finished the radiation therapy but before her hair had grown back in. As soon as we arrived, instead of consoling us, my aunt—that’s my father’s sister—suggested, right in front of my mother and me, that my dad should marry another woman who could give him a son to bear his name. As if I’m not enough! What’s the use? If I were to try to talk about every crime committed in this hypocritical society, I would never stop talking! Daddy stood his ground and refused to marry another woman. He loved Mama and was totally attached to her, he loved her from the first time he saw her, in America, on New Year’s Eve, which he was spending at a friend’s. He met her that night and married her two months later. My father’s family was never reconciled to that marriage, and my grandmother would grumble every time my mother visited—and she still does.
“Less than a month after we left America my father moved us back there—my father, who had dreamed of returning to his homeland so that I would grow up as a Saudi girl! But he couldn’t get his relatives to respect his privacy and stay out of his business. So he emigrated again.”
Every so often, Um Nuwayyir came in to check on things. She was so sweet and kind. Even though she didn’t care much about tradition, she was always as protective of the four girls as if they were her own daughters, and she was completely committed to them. Um Nuwayyir would sit with the two of them for a few moments, asking Faisal about the health of his mother and siblings, none of whom she knew, of course. She wanted him to know that she cared about Michelle and that he would have to be on his best behavior. She did not want him to get “too close” to Michelle physically, either. He had to feel that they were not left alone in the house, that the caring auntie could come in at any second. After Um Nuwayyir left the room, Michelle returned to her story as the two of them munched on the special mixed nuts that Um Nuwayyir had brought from Kuwait.
“Three years later, when I was thirteen, we returned to Riyadh, and Meshaal was with us. Can you believe that it was me who chose him, from out of hundreds of children, as my brother? I really had the feeling, at the time, that I was shaping fate! I loved his black hair, which was nearly the color of mine, and his little innocent face. I felt somehow that he was close to me. He was seven months old when we adopted him. He was so cute. As soon as I saw him, I told my mother and father that this child was my brother, he was the one they were looking for.
“When we returned to Riyadh, my father had a meeting with his parents and brothers and sisters. He said to them straight out that little Meshaal was the son God had not wished to give him through Diane—my mother—and that they were all to respect his choice, and that they were not to reveal this secret in front of Meshaal, ever. Close relatives were the only ones who knew about my mother’s illness because no one had seen her here throughout her illness and treatment, and my father did not permit the news to get out.
“My father gave his family a choice: if they wanted him to stay, they could accept his decision and his family. If they didn’t accept, he would return to live in the States. After a week of family conferences, the family agreed to accept little Meshaal as one of their own. My father was sure that they would agree, not because they loved him but because the family business urgently needed my father’s expertise. We went back to America just to tie up everything there, and one year later, the four of us were back in Riyadh, beginning a new stage of our lives.”
She had gotten used to Faisal’s silences when she was speaking, especially if it was something moving and sad like this, but she was a little afraid of his silence this time. She started searching in his eyes for some reaction, some response that would hint at what he was thinking about after hearing her story. When she didn’t find anything to reassure her, she added sadly, “We’re not afraid of anyone. We didn’t hide where Meshaal came from out of embarrassment or anything. Believe me, my father was ready to broadcast the truth on the pages of national newspapers and magazines, if it were not for his sure sense that his society in Saudi would not accept his adopted son with the same welcome that his wife’s society in America would welcome him. Isn’t it sad to have to hide a truth like this from Meshaal and from my friends? I wish I could tell them, but they wouldn’t understand. They would call him painful names behind his back and treat him badly. And that is what I won’t accept! It is my father’s and mother’s life and they chose to live it in this way, so why did everyone try to interfere in their business? Why am I forced to act a part in front of others? Why doesn’t this society respect the difference between my family and other Saudi families? Everyone considers me a bad girl just because my mother is American! How can I live in such an unjust society? Tell me how, Faisal!”
She burst into tears, which she had found she even enjoyed when she was with him. He was the only one who knew how many tears exactly he had to let her spill before he could gently tease her to get her to stop crying. He was the only one who knew that she would laugh in spite of herself if he brought her the soft butter milk candy of her childhood or a can of her favorite strawberry soda from the nearest grocery shop.
Faisal, this time, was keeping his thoughts to himself. He comforted her gently as he imagined the conversation he would have with his mother as soon as he returned home. He had tried to postpone this conversation many times, but this time he was determined to open (or close) the subject with his mother once and for all.
God help us! he said to himself, and left.
15.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: May 21, 2004
Subject: My Heart! My Heart!
I know that all of you are dying to know what happened between Faisal and his mother, and so we return today to the chapter of Faisal and Michelle. Dear Michelle, who is such a source of gossip because people are convinced that I am her (if I am not Sadeem)! It seems that I am Michelle whenever I use English expressions. But then, just the next week, when I type out a poem by Nizar Qabbani, I become Sadeem. What a schizophrenic life I lead!
The minute Um Faisal heard the English name Michelle, one hundred devils swarmed into her head. Faisal hastily tried to correct his mistake. People called her Michelle but her real name was purely Saudi, Mashael, he assured his mother.
“She is Mashael Al-Abdulrahman.”
A searing look from his mother’s eyes scared him and halted his tongue. He worried suddenly that some ancient quarrel existed between the two families. But it quickly became clear to him that the problem was that his mother had never before heard the name of this family.
“Who do you mean, Al-Abdulrahman? Abdul is the servant and Rahman is the Merciful, one of Allah’s several names. So she comes from the family of the servant of God, just like any Abdullah or Abdullatif or Abdulaziz. All are names of God. But do you know how many servants of God there are? We all are! So what makes this Abdul Rahman special?”
Michelle’s family name—“Servant of the Merciful”—was as common as the epithet suggested it could be. Apparently, the name had never ascended to the ranks of families who formed alliances with—or even mixed with—the family of Al-Batran. Faisal tried to explain to his mother that Michelle’s father had only been settled in the country for a few years, and maybe that was why his name was not yet known to many in Riyadh society.
His mother didn’t get it. “Who are his brothers?” she demanded to know. Faisal answered energetically that Michelle’s father was the most successful of the Al-Abdulrahmans. It was just that, since returning from America, where he had lived for many years, this Al-Abdulrahman had customarily mixed only with people who had the same cultural outlook and ideas.
That just made his mother angrier.
The family of that girl was not of their sort. They must ask Faisal’s father, since he knew infinitely more about genealogies and families. But from the start, his mother suggested, this line of conversation did not augur well. The girl had tricked him! Aah, the girls of this generation! How awful they were! And aah, for her young, green son—she never would have expected him to fall into the trap of a girl such as this! She asked him who the girl’s maternal uncles were and as soon as she heard that the girl’s mother was American, she decided to bang the door shut for good on this fruitless dialogue around this utterly ridiculous topic. So, like countless mothers before her, she resorted to the oldest trick in the book:
“Quick, son! Get up, hurry, get me my blood pressure medicine! My heart, oh, my heart! I think I’m dying…”
Faisal tried hard. It must be said that he really tried hard to convince her, to get her to see Michelle’s many exceptional qualities, or, in the horse-trading language of mothers looking to make a match, her “fine attributes.” He went on and on about things that meant nothing to her. Mashael was a cultured, educated girl; she was a university student whose potpourri of Eastern and Western thinking he really liked and admired. The girl understood him; the girl was sophisticated and not straight out of the village like all of the other girls he had met or those his mother had hinted strongly about marrying him off to. The simple truth of it was the one thing that he could not say plainly to his mother: the girl loved him and he loved her. He loved her even more than she loved him, he was sure.
Faisal’s mother gulped down her pills. (If they didn’t help, at least they didn’t hurt.) She wept hot tears and she stroked his hair gently as she talked about her great hopes to marry her youngest son to the best of girls, to give him the best home there ever was, and the best automobile, plus all-expense-paid tickets to spend the best honeymoon ever.
Poor miserable Faisal! He cried, too, poor Little Faisal under the feet of his cherished mother. He loved no one in the universe more than his mother, and he had never opposed her, never ever, never in his life. He wept also for the sophisticated girl, his beloved who understood him and whom he understood, more than any two people in this world could ever understand each other, Michelle with her Najdi beauty and American personality, who would not be his.
16.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: May 28, 2004
Subject: Is This Emotional Stability?
Lots of you folks out there simply did not believe what Faisal did. Or, to put it more accurately, what he did not do. Let me assure you, though, that this is exactly what happened. He told Michelle the sordid details of the back-and-forth with his mother—which I in turn conveyed to you—but only after several weeks of confused mental meandering, several weeks of self-punishment, several weeks of war between a passionate heart and a head that knew exactly what the limitations—set down long ago by his family—were in the choices he would have in life.
I can’t understand why all of you are so surprised! Such tales happen among us every day, and yet no one has an inkling of it except the two people who get scorched at the scene of the fire. Where do you think all of these sad poems and wailing, melancholic songs of our heritage came from? And today, poetry pages in newspapers, radio and TV programs, and literary chat rooms on the Internet all draw their nourishment from such tales, such heartbreaks.
I will tell you the things that happen inside our homes and the feelings that grip us—we, the girls of Riyadh—when such things happen to us. I will not attempt to access the contents of the manly crocodile chests out there because to put it simply, I don’t know enough about the nature of crocodiles. Frankly, crocodiles are not among my spheres of expertise or interest. I speak only of my female friends; the rest is up to someone who is feeling crocodilish enough to want to say something about his friends. That crocodile should definitely write to me and inform me of what goes on in the swamps they inhabit, because we—the lizards—are in truly desperate need! We really do long to know their thoughts and understand their motives, which always seem to be so deeply hidden away from us.
All hell broke loose for some after my last e-mail about Faisal and Michelle. Unfortunately, some people can always be heard over everybody else because they are proud practitioners of the questionable philosophy that the loudest voice beats all. If they are so eager to stir things up, wouldn’t it be a better use of their time for these vengeful types to wag their tongues against repugnant ideas and outdated traditions like tribal prejudice,* rather than against people who merely try to get some discussion going about how offensive these practices are?
Everyone is condemning my bold writing, and perhaps my boldness in writing at all. Everyone is blaming me for the fury I have stirred up around “taboo” topics that in this society we have never been accustomed to discussing so frankly and especially when the opening salvos come from a young woman like me. But isn’t there a starting point for every drastic social change?
And this I believe: I might find a few stray people who believe in my cause right now, or I might not, but I doubt that I would find many people opposed to it if I were to look half a century into the future.
Gamrah’s permanent return to her family’s home was billed as a routine visit. Her mother, who knew everything that had happened, thought it wisest to hide the truth from everyone. “A summer cloud”—that was how she described her daughter’s quarrel with Rashid and his threat to divorce her. Her mother decided not to tell even Gamrah’s father, who was in North Africa on holiday. After all, the man had never taken any interest in the personal lives of anyone in the household and he never would. Gamrah’s mother had always been the organizing mastermind, the mover and shaker of the household, and she always would remain so.
When various women visited, pouring out their congratulations on her pregnancy, Gamrah repeated what she had rehearsed with her mother:
“Rashid, poor man, is at the university night and day—he won’t even take any time off on holidays. The minute he realized I was pregnant, he insisted that I must give my family the good news in person, the darling! A month or so here, and I’ll go back. I know he can’t stand waiting for me any longer than that!”
In private, her mother would say, “There will be no divorce in our family. I don’t care if your brother did divorce his wife. Al-Qusmanji girls never get divorced!”
But Rashid the jerk did not let things go long enough to give Gamrah’s mother time to think of a solution. In a virtual reenactment of Sadeem’s tragedy, the divorce papers were delivered to Gamrah’s father two weeks after Gamrah landed in Riyadh, effectively blocking all possible maternal machinations. It appeared as though Rashid had just been waiting for the moment in which he felt he could justifiably rid himself of the wife that had been imposed on him by his family.
The divorce document was not particularly gruesome-looking in itself, but its contents were indeed pretty horrifying. When her brother handed it to her, Gamrah read the lines of script and collapsed onto the nearest chair, screaming, “Yummah!*Yummah, Mama, he divorced me! Yummah, Rashid divorced me! It’s all over, he divorced me!” Her mother took Gamrah into her arms, weeping and cursing the wrongdoer with vile invectives: “God burn your heart to ashes and the heart of your mother, too, Rashid, like you’ve burned up my heart over my little girl.”
GAMRAH’S SISTER HESSAH, who had gotten married a year before Gamrah and had been eight months pregnant at Gamrah’s wedding, joined her sister and mother in hurling curses, but in her case they were directed at all men. She, too, had suffered since getting married. Her husband Khalid, who had been mild-tempered and tender through the entire engagement period, had turned into another person immediately after marriage, when he became completely aloof and uninterested in her. Hessah complained constantly to her mother about his neglect. When she got sick, he would not take her to the doctor. And when she got pregnant, it was her mother who accompanied her to the standard pregnancy checkups. Once the baby girl arrived, her older sister Naflah had to go with her to buy the necessary baby products. What infuriated Hessah most in Khalid was his lack of generosity with her, since she knew he had a lot of money and he certainly was not stingy about his own expenditures. He refused to give his wife monthly expense money the way her sister Naflah’s husband did and the way her father did for her mother. Instead, he handed money over for each specific item she wanted to buy, and even then only when she had harassed him to the point where she felt humiliated.
If she needed a new dress to wear to her cousin’s wedding and asked him for three thousand riyals, he would come up with whatever excuse he could find to avoid giving her the money: “No need for the dress, you have lots of dresses.” Or, “Didn’t I buy you a dress six months ago?” Or, “I have barely enough money. Go and get it from your father, he’s always buying one of your brothers a new car, or did they dump you on me so they could rid themselves of your ridiculous demands?” Or some other equally outrageous comment that generally succeeded in getting her to turn her eyes away from whatever it was she happened to need or want. On those rare occasions when he did give her money, he would give her five hundred instead of the three thousand she had asked for, or fifty if, hoping to spare herself his humiliating response, she had only asked for the five hundred in the first place. And for some reason that escaped her, his mother encouraged him. In fact, the Scorpion (as she had nicknamed her mother-in-law) positively applauded her darling son Khalid for being so stingy with his wife. That’s how a good Najdi man should be. It was how her husband, Khalid’s father, treated her all those years.
Gamrah suffered a great deal of pain as a result of her divorce from Rashid. Though Sadeem had told her how excruciating her official separation from Waleed had been, Gamrah was overwhelmed in a way that Sadeem had not prepared her for. Nighttime was the worst. Since returning to the family home, she had been unable to sleep for more than three hours a night—she, who had never found it hard to sleep ten—or twenty—hours at a stretch before her marriage, and even during it! Now she would wake up tormented in anguish. Was this the “emotional instability” that was such a popular topic of conversation among her unmarried girlfriends? She had never once been aware of the importance of Rashid’s presence in her life until he left it.
Lying in bed on her side, she would extend her right leg full length and when her foot would not collide with Rashid’s, she would turn over restlessly. She would recite the two talismans and the protective Throne Verse from the Qur’an and all of the bedtime prayers she had ever memorized, and then she would clutch her pillow and lie on her stomach. Finally, she would doze off, her head at the upper right corner of the mattress and her feet stretched down to the bottom left corner. Only when she lay down on the diagonal like this could she fill the big emptiness that Rashid had created in her bed, but only a small part of the emptiness that he had created in her life.
17.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: June 4, 2004
Subject: All I Need Is Another Saudi!
Have We not laid your chest open for you, and put aside your burden for you, that burden which weighed heavily on your back even as it exalted your mention among people? For with hardship comes ease; indeed, with hardship comes ease.—Qur’an, Surat Al-Sharh
(chapter of easing), verses 1–8
During the past few weeks, I have been reading news stories that talk about me, or let’s say, about my e-mails! Eminent national newspapers are writing about
a prevailing uproar here, and behind it is an anonymous young woman who sends an e-mail every Friday to a large number of Internet users in Saudi Arabia. In these e-mails, she tells the stories of her four female friends, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji, Sadeem Al-Horaimli, Lamees Jeddawi and Michelle Al-Abdulrahman. The girls belong to society’s “velvet class,” an elite whose behavior is normally kept hidden to all but themselves.
Each week, the writer reveals new and thrilling developments, leading her ever-widening circle of eager readers to await Friday noon prayers breathlessly. Every Saturday morning, government offices, meeting halls, hospital corridors and school classrooms metamorphose into arenas for debate about the latest e-mail. Everyone weighs in. There are those who support this young woman and those who object to her. There are those who believe that what these girls are doing is perfectly natural (and also is no secret) and there are others who boil with rage at the revelation of what they consider to be the excesses that are going on around them in our conservative society.
Whatever the outcome, there is no doubt whatsoever that these strange and unusual e-mails have created a furor in our society, which has never before experienced anything like this. It is clear that these e-mails will continue to furnish fertile material for exchange and debate for a long time to come, even after the e-mails cease to appear.
Sadeem began to enjoy her job at the HSBC Bank. Everyone treated her affectionately and politely. She was the youngest worker there, and people went out of their way to offer her help and advice. She was especially comfortable with Tahir, a Muslim Pakistani colleague who was the cheeriest and most fun of everyone.
The work was not burdensome. Her duties were limited to receiving people who came into the bank for information and helping them to fill out forms, or sorting and filing papers.
She wasn’t attracted to any of her fellow workers, so she behaved unself-consciously with everyone. Even better, there wasn’t a single other Arab among them, so she felt free to act as if she were one of them, joking with this one and laughing with that one, and putting no constraints on herself as she normally did when she was with a group of Arabs, especially people from the Gulf and particularly Saudis.
One day as the bank was closing, Edward, a colleague with blue eyes, black hair and a charming Irish accent, suggested that they all go to the Piano Bar on Kensington High Street. Sadeem agreed to come, since a whole group of people including Tahir was going and since the bar they were heading for was not far from her apartment. Tahir had planned to meet a friend at the bar and then go on to the movies. Sadeem announced that she would leave whenever Tahir did. He had become like a big brother in whose presence she felt relaxed and secure.
At the bar, Sadeem’s eyes kept straying over to the piano. A line of glasses sat on the piano’s transparent glass cover. The piano made her think of the white piano in her aunt Badriyyah’s old home in Riyadh. Tariq, her aunt’s son, had taken piano lessons and had taught her everything he learned.
Sadeem made the bold decision to try to play the piano even though it had been seven years since she had last played. She apologized in advance and began to attack the keys almost at random until she found the right note. She went back to the beginning and this time played a recognizable tune, a piece by Omar Khayrat, her favorite composer.
About to enter the pub where he was to pick up Tahir, Firas was stopped in his tracks by the familiar Arabic melody coming from within. From his position on the stairs, he peered through the glass window and caught sight of a very attractive young woman sitting at the piano. He stayed where he was, listening to her play until the sound of applause rose and the girl returned to her seat.
Firas descended the remaining steps and walked over to his friend’s table. He gave a quick greeting to the group and asked Tahir to hurry up so that they could get to the film in time, leaving no time for Tahir to introduce him to the group.
Tahir turned to Sadeem and asked if she was sure she didn’t want to come to the nearby Cinema Odeon with them. She declined, wishing them a pleasant time, but gathered her things to walk out with them, as she didn’t want to stay at the bar without Tahir. Outside, they headed left toward the cinema while she turned right, walking toward her flat.
A WEEK LATER Tahir threw a party for his thirtieth birthday at the Collection Pub and Bar at South Kensington. There, Firas saw Sadeem for the second time. He walked over to her just as she settled herself down on one of the chairs.
“My sister here is an Arab?”
Sadeem’s eyes flew open. “You’re an Arab?”
“Saudi, in fact. My name is Firas Al-Sharqawi.”
“I’m Sadeem Al-Horaimli. I’m so sorry, I assumed you were Pakistani like Tahir.”
He laughed at her embarrassed frankness. “What about you? Anyone looking at you would swear you’re Spanish! Even your English—ma shaa Allah! It’s perfect.”
“I’m Saudi, too.”
He smiled. “It’s an honor to meet you.”
Sadeem was not at all so thrilled to meet him, now that she knew he was Saudi. “Yes, well, hello; nice to meet you, too.”
“I heard you the other day playing the piano and I knew you must be Arab, and then when I asked Tahir he told me you’re Saudi.”
“Really? I don’t recall you being there when I was playing.”
“I stayed hidden on the stairs and watched you through the glass. It’s the first time I’ve heard Eastern music in the Piano Bar. I thought your playing was amazing.”
“Thank you—that’s very kind.” Sadeem picked up her handbag from where it was resting on the chair next to her. “Well, I have to go now. Excuse me.”
“It’s early!”
“I have an appointment.”
“Okay, but why don’t you wait a little—at least until you have had a chance to say good-bye to Tahir? He’s probably downstairs at the bar.”
“I can’t. Please, if you see him, give him my best and tell him I’m sorry, I had to leave.”
“Good-bye, and I hope I didn’t bother you. Anyway, it was nice to have a chance to see you again.”
Bother me? You could say that! Just a few words from you and I can feel all my old bitterness rising up inside me like a volcano. What do you expect, though? You’re Saudi!
“It was very nice indeed. ’Bye.”
Sadeem returned home, cursing her luck at the revelation that Tahir’s friend was Saudi. She began reviewing in her mind every single thing that had happened that night at the Piano Bar the week before. Had she committed any of the transgressions that a young Saudi guy must not see coming from a daughter of his country? Had she said anything opinionated, bold, inappropriate? Had she been wearing something that was respectable enough?
God pluck him from this earth! What brought him here anyway! So, even in this place I can’t relax and behave naturally? These Saudis are always after me! Always in my face! Almighty God. I bet he makes a scandal out of what he’s seen, and tomorrow every breath of mine will be broadcast in Riyadh! God not spare you, Tahir, you and your friend. What was it he said: Our sister here is an Arab? Ahh, what a line!
Early the next week, Sadeem asked Tahir about Firas and scolded him for not telling her where he was from. Tahir vehemently denied that he had done it deliberately. Firas was not the type of guy that should worry her, he reassured her. He had known Firas, he said, for a long time—they had gone to the University of Westminster together. Firas had been studying for a doctorate in political science while Tahir was finishing his master’s thesis in accounting. They had shared a room in the university housing in Marylebone Hall for six months. What they liked best about the residence hall was its closeness to the major mosque in Regent’s Park, where they were regulars at Friday prayer service. After Tahir had gotten his degree he moved to his own flat in Maida Vale. A bit later, Firas also moved, to live in the rooms he still had in St. John’s Wood. Firas had remained a dear friend and Tahir felt lucky to have him.
In the days to follow, Tahir did not volunteer any more information about Firas and Sadeem did not ask. She was apprehensive, though, that Tahir had told Firas of her discomfort at the birthday party. How mortifying that would be for her! In general, everyone understood that Saudi girls were more at ease mixing with men who were not Saudi. Firas would not be the first, or the last, to experience the shock of finding that a girl from his home country would much rather hang out with his Pakistani friend than with him.
Though Sadeem was, relatively speaking, free of the kinds of constraints and worries of most Saudi girls because she had a somewhat liberal father and though normally she really couldn’t care less about what others said or thought, she did wish, this one time, that she could have the opportunity to meet this particular man again so she could get a sense of the impression she had made on him. It troubled her to think that perhaps he thought badly of her, for even though she didn’t know him, he was a Saudi, after all, and he might just stir up a storm of talk around her that could blow from London as far as Riyadh.
Sadeem had gotten into the habit of spending every Saturday morning shopping in the stores on Oxford Street and then spending a few hours at Borders. She liked to browse through all the nooks and crannies of the enormous five-story bookstore, reading magazines and listening to the latest CDs, after getting a light breakfast at the Starbucks inside.
That’s where she found him. For the third time in a row, fate had arranged a suitable and respectable chance meeting for her with this stranger. That must mean something, thought Sadeem, and one of Um Nuwayyir’s favorite expressions popped into her head: The third time’s a charm.
Firas was absorbed in reading a newspaper, a cup of coffee in his right hand. Papers and a laptop lay in disarray on the table in front of him.
Should I go over and say hi to him? What if he decides to be rude and pretends he doesn’t know me? Yallah, whatever. I haven’t got anything to lose, so… She turned toward him and greeted him nicely. He got up and shook her hand respectfully, and his “How are you, Sadeem? How nice to see you” erased whatever ill thoughts she had had of him. They stood beside his table chatting. After a few minutes, he helped her move her coffee and cheese croissant from her table to his so that she would not have to eat alone.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги