Girls of Riyadh

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.”