Girls of Riyadh

SADEEM: Why should she be jealous? Tomorrow her own luck and fate will show up. And by the way, have you noticed how well groomed these Hijaz guys are? Nizar is positively glistening, he’s so clean and tidy! Just look how perfectly trimmed his goatee is. Every Hijazi bridegroom I’ve ever seen has a goatee precisely that shape, and not too heavy. You’d think they all go to the same barber!

MICHELLE: Those guys get a scrubbing, a Turkish bath and facial threading so they won’t be too hairy, plucking and a pedicure and sometimes even a waxing. Not like the guys from Riyadh, where the groom looks just like all the guests except for the color of his bisht.*

SADEEM: I couldn’t care less whether a guy is well groomed or not. In fact, I prefer a man who is a little untidy. It’s so much more masculine—he doesn’t have the time or the vanity to dress up and buy the latest fashions and act like a teenager who has nothing better to do.

UM NUWAYYIR: God have mercy on the old days! The days when you used to fall all over yourself when it came to good-looking men. Even Waleed, how your eyes were full of him!

SADEEM: True, but after Waleed I got Firas, the untidy devil who filled my eyes with nothing in the world but him.

GAMRAH: Basically I’d take any guy, whoever he is, clean or filthy, tidy or messy. Who cares? As long as he’s there. I’m ready to be happy with any man. I’m so bored, girls! I’m fed up and I can’t stand it. A little more of this and I’ll go insane.

When it was time for the bouquet toss, the young single ladies lined up behind the bride, eager to find out who would get to board the sparkling marriage train next. Lamees’s and Nizar’s relatives crowded in, mixing with the rest of her friends. After her mother insisted, Tamadur sulkily joined them. Sadeem and Michelle stood front and center, and were hurriedly joined by Gamrah, who was quick to comply with Um Nuwayyir’s encouragement to stand among the young bachelorettes; even if she was married before, she was technically single at the moment of the bouquet toss and more than ready to remarry again.

Lamees turned her back to the girls, having earlier agreed with her three friends that she would try to throw the bouquet in their direction. She tossed it high in the air and the crowd of girls surged to grab it. After a lot of pushing and shoving and kicking and hitting, Gamrah got hold of what was left of Lamees’s bouquet, a few green leaves tied with a strip of white lace. She raised it high, giggling ecstatically. “I caught the bouquet! I caught the bouquet!”

43.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: December 31, 2004

Subject: Today He’s Back

Today he’s back

as if nothing happened

and with an artless child’s eyes

he’s come back to tell me

I’m his life companion,

his one and only love

He came bearing flowers,

how can I say no,

my youth sketched on his lips

I remember still, flames through my blood,

taking refuge in his arms

I hid my head within his chest

like a child returned to his parents…—Nizar Qabbani

Happy New Year! I don’t feel like writing any little introduction this week. I’m going to let events speak for themselves.

Firas came back!

When Sadeem heard from Firas again, she tore out that day’s page from her little daily diary and enclosed it gently in her sky-blue scrapbook, where it nestled among the pages so full of his photos and interviews.

Firas came back to her, only two days after she had longed for him at the wedding. He came back, a few days after his marriage contract was signed and a few weeks before his wedding was to take place.

Sadeem was in Khobar. After spending the evening at a relative’s wedding, she had returned to her room at Aunt Badriyyah’s, and was unable to sleep. The air of Firas’s city polluted her lungs and the glaring streetlamps that lit the road blinded her eyes, and it seemed as if Firas was everywhere—as if he had spread out his black bisht, the cloak he wore on top of his thobe, in most of the official photographs, over the entire city, so that everything underneath it was cast in his shadow.

Sadeem had been lying in bed awake, sighing deeply, at four A.M when a text message appeared on her cell phone, which had all but died since Firas had gone away: