I Am Pilgrim(36)

Thank you, Saudi Arabia, thank you.





Chapter Three


DESPITE ITS HUGE wealth, vast oil reserves and love of high-tech American armaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia. The Jeddah bus system, for example.

With his dirt bike wrecked, the zoologist’s son had no alternative means of transport, which meant that – due to the system’s erratic timetable and the worsening dust storm – news of the execution beat him home by twenty minutes.

His extended family had already gathered in the villa’s modest majlis and his mother was filling her relatives with growing terror. Between waves of pain and disbelief, she was railing against her country, the Saudi judicial system and the royal family itself. Although no Saudi man – let alone society itself – had ever been able to admit it, she was almost always the smartest person in the room.

Her bitter assault came to an end only when someone looked out of a window and saw her son approaching. Barely breathing through her tears, she met him in the hallway, desperately worried that – tragedy piled upon tragedy – he had witnessed his father’s execution.

When he shook his head, recounting fragments about the bike wreck in the construction site, she slumped to her knees for the first and only time, thanking Allah for every wound on his body. The boy bent down, raised his mother up and, over her shoulder, saw his two young sisters standing alone, as if marooned on their own private island of despair.

He gathered them all into his arms and recounted the final grief that had weighed on him all the way home but hadn’t yet occurred to any of them – as an executed prisoner, there would be no funeral or burial, no closing of his father’s eyelids, no washing and shrouding of his body under Islamic ritual as their final kindness to him. His remains would be thrown into common ground and buried in an unmarked grave. If they were lucky, one of the workers would lay him on his right side and face him towards Mecca. If they were lucky.

In the months which followed, according to the mother in her long-delayed interrogation, the oppressive cloud of loss that settled over the house had little to disturb it. Apart from close relatives, there were no visitors or phone calls – the nature of the crime meant the family was ostracized by friends and the community at large. In a way, the family too had been cast into an unmarked grave and buried. Even so, the steady passage of the days finally dulled the keen edge of their grief, and the boy – an outstanding student – at last picked up his books and started to continue his studies at home. More than any other thing, it steadied the family. After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.

Then, eight months after the execution, the eastern sky broke with an unheralded dawn – unknown to the family, the grandfather had been working relentlessly on their behalf. Through what little wasta he commanded and the payment of bribes he could ill afford, he had succeeded in obtaining passports, exit permits and visas for his daughter-in-law and the three kids. Certainly it was a testament to how much he loved them, but the truth was the family was an embarrassment to the authorities and they were probably pleased to see them go. Whatever the subtext, he arrived late, gave the family the startling news and told them they would leave early in the morning, before the people whose help he’d purchased had a chance to change their minds.

All through the night they packed what little possessions they cared about, took one last turn through their memories and, with nobody to bid farewell, were on the road by dawn. The convoy of four overburdened family vehicles drove for twelve hours, across the breadth of the country, through timeless desert, past never-ending oil fields, until at dusk they saw the turquoise waters of the Arabian Gulf.

Looping across the sea like a necklace was the glittering causeway that connected Saudi Arabia to the independent island nation of Bahrain. It ran for sixteen miles over bridges and viaducts, a triumph of Dutch engineering known as the King Fahd Causeway. Every mile, giant billboards of the Saudi monarch smiled down on the family as they crossed the ocean, an irony not lost on the boy: he was the man who had signed the decree executing his father. Fahd’s hated face was the last thing he saw of his homeland.

After paying another bribe at the border, the grandfather and three cousins were allowed briefly to enter Bahrain without papers to ferry the family’s goods to a house the old man had rented through a friend of a neighbour. Nobody said anything, but all their hearts sank when they saw it.

The dilapidated home stood in a small square of dirt in a semi-industrial section of Manama, the country’s capital. The front door was hanging open, the plumbing barely worked and electricity served only two rooms – but there was no going back now and anything was better than life in Jeddah.