Where Pigeons Don't Fly Read Online Free PDF Page A

Faisal’s palace and denounce the opening of a girls’ school, setting up a tent by the main gate until they were chased away.
    How proud Saleh was of fighting heresy in Muraidasiya in the 1960s! How proud, too, to breathe into his father’s ear the damaging allegation that his maternal grandfather hid a transistor in his bedroom in Buraida on which he listened to the
Voice of the Arabs
radio broadcasts. Ali al-Safeelawi, however, held his father-in-law in great esteem, so despite his burning desire to denounce his use of the radio and decry it as a heresy and a deviancy and a blasphemy on a par with harbouring a prostitute, he held the knowledge close and condemned it in his heart.
    How Fahd longed for the bravery of his Uncle Ibrahim and his friend the
akia
, to be able to scream at the Committee man and the thin policeman with his belt and revolver dangling like the head of drowned child, to snatch back the bag of his possessions and demand: ‘When did you presume to own people who were born free?’
    What freedom?
he asked himself. When his own father tasted the bitterness of long years in jail just for being careless enough to pass out pamphlets to worshippers in the Grand Mosque? Was he dreaming of being a leader in the fight against corruption and the collapse of our values and moral code?Did he dream of silencing song and stilling the instruments, of preventing women and female singers from appearing on television? Were he and his comrades going to fill the earth with justice after it had brimmed with injustice and tyranny? Or did he just want to say to Ali, his father:
Here I am! Here I am. The one you mocked and whose fate you saw in the moon! I came to show you that this is more than a childish game, more than a paltry rifle that young boys use to hunt sparrows or, like my older brother, destroy with its puny pellets a loudspeaker in some remote village west of Buraida.
    Father, did you want to make them pay attention to you? Did you? Then may you go to hell, you and your senile father and your outdated, backward ideas, for you will bring this ignorant country nothing save more ignorance!
    Apologies for this anger, Father. It makes me sad to think you lost your youth when it was you who later taught me the joys of literature and the arts, to watch the films of Walt Disney. You looked after me with love. Saeed, too, son of your friend Mushabbab, who was executed at the dawn of a new year; Saeed, my closest friend who, when confronted with tragedy would always find the strength to burst out in laughter, creating a flagrant, riotous uproar in Tahliya Street.
    Â 
    â€“5 –
    S O PAINFUL, THAT MOMENT , long ago, when they shoved Saeed’s father, Mushabbab, into the cell. Suleiman al-Safeelawi didn’t recognise his friend, though they had met at the farm a year before to pick up the secret pamphlets. When Mushabbab entered the cell his clothes were torn, his hair was wild and his face covered with dust. Barefoot and utterly exhausted he threw himself down and slept for five hours like a dead man. Suleiman tried to rouse him for sunset prayers but he did not wake, turned on his side like a corpse.
    Years later, Suleiman was to wonder why Saeed’s father had deceived his pregnant wife and mother and brought them north on a journey to disaster, to a doomed war in the Grand Mosque. Suleiman hadn’t told his young son, Fahd, a thing.
Saeed’s father has gone on a long journey
, he’d said.
He’s entrusted us to look after his son and keep him safe.
    Every Friday morning he would ready himself early for prayers, then Fahd would sit alongside him in the wine-red Caprice as they drove to the neighbourhood of Jaradiya, south of Central Hospital, where he would park in a narrow road and order Fahd to get out and knock on a small steel door beneath a concrete awning. The roar of the air cooler mounted on two pipes in the street would suddenly cease, then the door would open