Read Online Where Pigeons Don't Fly by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Free Book Online

walked towards her she noticed that he was aroused. Embarrassed, she averted her eyes. ‘Do I put the water in this bottle, or another one?’ he asked. She answered with a shake of the head and fled to the shelves at the back of the pharmacy.
    Tarfah laughed noisily. ‘Just imagine! Can you believe this society? These people? That’s real frustration…’ she added sadly. ‘Is it this hard for people to have sex?’
    â€˜What do you mean? You’re not saying that these directives are right?’ Fahd asked.
    Her voice a little calmer, Tarfah replied, ‘No, sweetheart, you know my position, but I can’t imagine what it will be like to work there.’
    He told her that if the legislator who drew up the directives had thought a little differently, he would have issued severe laws that would commit anyone convicted of harassing women to years in prison, enough to make the Bedouin hesitate a thousand times over before exposing himself to her. But the punishment was always borne by the poor woman because she was the one who provoked his pole.
    Fahd did not entirely trust his lover. Despite the fact she worshipped his very eyes, as she was always telling him in her texts, he would have his doubts whenever she called him and he heard the racket and wicked laughter coming from her friends at the Academy.
    â€˜Where’s Tarfah got to?’ a girl might ask.
    â€˜Over there, breastfeeding,’ another would answer and they would burst out into wild laughter. Tarfah would laugh, too, and shout at them to shut up so she could hear him.
    â€˜â€œBreastfeeding” means talking on the phone,’ she would explain.
    Her friends would try to make him overhear their jokes or mocking comments, then attempting to persuade Tarfah to let them say hello to her sweetheart. Tarfah told him that they also tried to make her talk to their boyfriends but she absolutely refused to do so. He wasn’t convinced that she spoke to no one else apart from him, especially since her friends wouldencourage her to live ‘free’ as they called it, simply and happily. ‘The world isn’t up to your complications!’
    One message in particular had left him wracked with doubt:
    I send you a bullet of love, an artillery shell of desire, a bomb-belt of tenderness and a booby-trapped car of roses and jasmine
.
    What do you think of this?!
she had added at the bottom, then told him it had been sent by a Palestinian driver to a friend of hers who took his bus from Suwaidi to Mugharrazat. Fahd asked her how the Palestinian could send her friend a message like that unless she was having an affair with him. She stammered and snapped, ‘Believe it or not I didn’t look at it like you!’
    When Tarfah sent him a video clip of herself gazing from the bus window in her sunglasses, occasionally raising her uncovered hair with her right hand and sorrowfully singing along with Abdullah Ruwaished,
If I had another life, by God I’d live you twice
, he asked, ‘How did you manage to film a clip like that in the bus? Did the driver see you as you drove through the streets?’
    She swore that there was a closed curtain between them and the driver, but some mischievous students liked to hassle him and would sometimes lift the curtain and talk to him, though he remained extremely respectful and courteous.
    At first it would irritate Fahd when she talked to him like this, and her stories of Sameera—or Sameer—and the other ‘boyettes’ would leave him unsettled, but occasionally he would feel that he was taking things too seriously, in a society that was unsmiling and tragic on the outside, but playful and cynical from within.
    What could be more cynical than Sameera bumping her hand against Tarfah’s bottom as she walked past her, only for Tarfah to turn round angrily: ‘Yes?’
    Sameera wiggled her hand and eyebrows in astonishment as though she had done