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

nothing wrong.
    â€˜I told you. I’ve got no time for girls’ silly games!’ said Tarfah in vexation. She twisted her mouth in disapproval. ‘Silly groping.’
    â€˜Dear God,’ answered Sameera mockingly. ‘If only I had you trapped under the stairs or in the bathroom.’
    Life in Riyadh was full of contradictions. No one cared how you were: your poverty, hunger, sufferings and woe; yet at the same time everyone thought that you were easy, that anyone could do with you as they liked.
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    â€“9 –
    F AHD RETURNED TO IT , again and again: his uncle’s visit. When Fahd’s mother knocked on the salon’s inner door her son politely excused himself to his guests. Soha handed him the tray of coffee, cups and dates, whispering, ‘Who is it?’ and, when he had told her, ‘What do they want?’
    Fahd shook his head, professing ignorance. When he poured the first cup for Ibrahim, the man took it, saying, ‘Live long, my boy!’
    The man talked for a long time about decency, about protecting women and their dignity and satisfying their needs, until he finally got to the point, to wit: for the widow to stay single was damaging to her.
    Fahd broke in. ‘But my sister and I live with her.’
    â€˜Your sister is a young girl, Fahd, she needs care and attention, and you’ll get married eventually.’
    Had his uncle heard something? Had his mother complained to someone, and word got out, as it always did with the inhabitants of Buraida? Had his uncle got wind of her dissatisfaction, or her dreams? It was as though the man’s words contained some mystery impenetrable to the boy, who sat listening politely before the shocking sentence hit him.
    No one had any inkling of the terrible impact of this shock; the last sentence his Uncle Ibrahim uttered was like a cannonball crashing through the wall of a perfectly quietlibrary, a volcano obliterating a world at peace, an earthquake in the upper reaches of the Richter scale demolishing a sad and humble dwelling, a shark’s sudden leap splitting the quiet surface of the water. How can one convey the blunt force of that sentence? That an uncle with two wives should come and rescue Fahd’s mother, the widow Soha, from her loneliness and protect her two children from hunger and corruption.
    â€˜Your Uncle Saleh is a safer bet than a stranger to keep the family safe and protect his niece from strangers entering the house.’
    â€˜So that’s how it is. I don’t think so, Uncle,’ said Fahd, adding sharply, ‘My mother won’t find it easy to replace my father’s memory with another, whoever it might be.’
    When the men had left, Fahd crept to his room, closed the door and wept until his soul grew still. He addressed his innermost self like an old man standing on the smouldering ruins of his house remembering happier days.
    In the early morning, mother would wake me to go to school, while little Lulua was still sunk in sleep. I would sit drowsily in the living room as my father had his breakfast of a fried egg and a dish of Wadi al-Nahl honey. The voice of Fairuz, discovered by my father courtesy of Nabeel Hawamla, his Palestinian colleague at the newspaper distribution company, issuing from the kitchen:
    I yearn, but for who, I don’t know;
    At night it snatches me from amongst the revellers.
    How Fairuz used to upset me when I was seven, my mother standing in front of the kitchen sink and opening the north-facing kitchen window, the March breeze buffeting her voice, low, effortless and sad:
    The breeze blew upon us at the valley’s mouth
    O breeze, blow, and take me to my country!
    I used to believe that I would come home from school one day to find my mother gone, especially when her family had left for Amman after Saudi Arabia threw out the Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis. Jordan’s announcement that the war against Iraq was a war on the Arab nation