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

was, we sensed, the reason my family were expelled, and I only saw them again a few years ago. My mother was miserable, silent and tearful, but she rinsed her sadness and loneliness in song and night time excursions with my father to cafés and restaurants. On Thursdays and Fridays they would take us with them, while the rest of the week they would go out by themselves after we were asleep.
    Will Fairuz continue to pour out her voice over the walls of our house? Will the aroma of the Turkish coffee to which my father and mother were addicted still ascend? Will the smell of oil paints waft from my room while I paint a portrait of a three-year-old Lulua, her mouth smeared with ice cream? Will my sister ever play again on the little piano my father brought back from Dubai? Will the Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt posters stay on the walls of the salon and the sitting room? Will life carry on in the corridors of our top floor in Ulaya, that life my father made, or will my uncle occupy our house on the pretext of protecting the poor widow and her two little orphans? He will come, and death shall come with him. Fairuz will die; her voice will be choked off, and in her place, Sheikh al-Hazifi reciting surat al-kahf. The Turkish coffee will go, its aroma fading in the face of Arabic coffee and sugared dates. The little piano will be destroyed, its white and black keys flying to the vast rubbish skip at the end of Sayyidat al-Ru’osa Street. My little sister will die and in the portrait that I painted her playful eyes will be ruptured, but the ice cream shall remain about her mouth, a witness. The head of her cotton doll will be severed because it is haram and all the videos put to death; Falounu and Sally will go to meet their fate.
    What was it that Uncle Ibrahim was after? When he came to broach the idea of my uncle marrying my mother, did he mean it? Was it to be an atonement for taking part in a demonstration outside Ibn Battal’s palace against the deputies and the pious, to show his relatives in Qaseem that it had been the error of a teenage boy?
    At the end of that long day, night finally fell and Fahd went out, frustrated and sad. He drove towards Pizza Hut, passing the generator where the black cat hid. He had never liked cats. A shudder would run through his body whenever he caught sight of it hidden away, its eyes staring at him.
    As soon as he was past the restaurant, Sulaimaniya supermarket and the petrol station, he stopped at Tareeqati Café and felt his way into the dimly lit interior. He ordered a bitter Turkish coffee and pondered his life, which since his tenth year had rushed by with frightening speed.
    When he left the café he did not return home but aimlessly roamed the streets.
    Back at the house, at the bottom of the four steps leading up to the front door, he passed the tub full of small roses that he had planted with his father the year before and he recalled his uncle commenting on the flowers: ‘You should grow something useful instead. Courgettes. Tomatoes.’
    The man still thought he was in Muraidasiya; anything related to beauty meant nothing to those villagers. What’s the use of looking at something that you can’t eat? That was how they thought. Why remain a widow or divorcee, stuck at home without a man to put food on the table or share your bed?
    When Fahd came inside, and while he was climbing the stairs with downcast eyes, he was surprised by his mother, who was sitting on the top step waiting for him. She looked at him. He told her nothing of what they had said. ‘They were justasking about the inheritance and dad’s car, whether we were going to sell it or not.’
    She withdrew to her bedroom without saying a thing, but he sensed that she had detected his lie. Perhaps she had been eavesdropping from behind the wooden partition. She would do that a lot and often surprised her children by knowing what they were up to, astonishing them with her insight and