Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 13

  To this day I feel sorrow when I think of the earnest young Saudi Arabs who never had the chance to make a difference. Five years later, King Faysal was assassinated. He was shot by a fundamentalist nephew who killed him in revenge for the killing of his older brother by government troops when he led an attack on the first television studios outside of Aramco in 1965. King Faysal’s secular and economic emulation of the West had disturbed a large number of the Wahhabis, who once more felt threatened in their pact with the Al Sa’uds in running the Kingdom.

  An ailing King Khalid ascended the throne and his brother Crown Prince Fahd became the de facto ruler. To keep the ‘ulema out of his hair as he made yet more concessions to the West with Saudi Arabia’s wealth, he gave the ‘ulema free rein in keeping the Saudis under lock and key with respect to personal freedoms. My Saudi friend whom I’d met by the pool was an activist in Riyadh University, instrumental in bringing about political discussions and social progress between faculty and students. He was rounded up with other ‘opposition’ members and dropped from a helicopter somewhere over the Rub’ al Khali’ Desert. We were bereft at the news, and we knew that we would follow the same silent path of nonexistence should we make our feelings public.

  By then, my brother was attending the University of Petroleum and Minerals (UPM), a spanking new state-of-the-art university that Aramco had built for the Saudis in Dhahran on the other side of the electric barbed wire fence. Colonel Harry Snyder, the former OSS senior intelligence officer in Cairo who had headed the US training mission for Saudi Arabia’s fledgling army and air force and Aramco’s Training Department, was chosen as its first Dean during Marwan’s stint there. I had known him as the jolly father of one of my close friends, who spoke our Arabic language impeccably. News of the young students’ demise reached our ears through the underground grapevine in short whispers traveling from one trusted source to another. The year my friend disappeared, new laws concerning student behavior in the University of Petroleum and Minerals were made, forbidding any conversation between students and professors outside of class, and any student gatherings in a public space. If there were two students greeting one another and a third chanced upon them, they would be roughed up by the security apparatus that was now out in record numbers alongside the muttawa’a. The stride towards social and political progress ground to a halt that remains the status quo today.

  The Princess of Plenty

  While attending a wedding in Dammam in 1961, my mother met Princess Sara, the young wife of the notorious Emir of the Eastern Province, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, who was thirty years her senior. She found my mother’s free association form of conversation entertaining, with the added plus of her being the wife of Fahmi Basrawi, her favorite TV star, and invited her to come for dinner one day. My mother promised she would then let it drop as just another of the niceties Arabs exchange with one another. To everyone’s surprise, a Cadillac showed up at our door the following Wednesday evening with a pleasant-faced driver named Sultan. He was Princess Sara’s personal driver and she was waiting for my mother and all four of us. Mama cheerfully bundled us into our good clothes and into the car and from that first visit on, it became written in stone that every Wednesday evening on the dot of six we went for dinner at the ‘Mir’s wife.

  The half-hour drive took us to Dammam, a dreary, hard-edged town designated as the central headquarters for the Eastern Province government offices and oil administrative center. Every street in Dammam looked like the next and every scene was the same as the one before: rusty cars strewn at the wayside, skinny desperate-looking cats jumping into and out of overflowing garbage drums and little boys playing soccer with their thobes clutched in their teeth for better maneuverability while their sisters in mini abayas looked on. The palace was in a secluded area away from the center of town enclosed by a four-meter-high wall. Two soldiers armed with machine guns stood at its massive carved wooden entrance, which swung open at Sultan’s approach. Within was a large open courtyard where the same scene on Dammam’s streets was repeated, with cats scrounging for handouts, children playing in groups and their parents seated outside their one-room homes that encircled the courtyard. Across the courtyard was Princess Sara’s palace, a one-storey turquoise blue-and-white sprawling cement villa with heavily curtained windows and an ornate gold-gilded entrance door. To enter we went through something akin to a ‘pass the baton’ relay race with us as the baton.

  At the bottom of the short flight of stairs leading to the gilded door were two armed guards in fatigues, one of whom knocked at the entrance door. A disembodied female voice answered, and our presence was announced. Leaving the door ajar, the guard ran back to his position and invited us to enter. The voice gained the body of one of Princess Sara’s personal attendants once we stepped in and the gilded door was shut firmly behind us. We were led down a short hallway to yet another door covered by one-way smoked glass mirrors, with yet another disembodied voice behind it. The mirrored door swung open and we stepped into the receiving salon of Princess Sara, a large rectangular room with white walls, soaring ceilings, three heavy crystal chandeliers and four buzzing air conditioning units. The floor was covered with layers of Persian carpets atop blue wall-to-wall carpeting and a series of identical plush wine-colored velvet sofas with brocade and silk pillows lined against three of the walls. One wall of the extensive salon was taken up by a huge gold framed portrait of the princess’s brother, Fahd, who could have been her identical twin save for the mustache and goatee. She would speak of Fahd far more than she did of her husband, with whom she obviously had nothing in common. Another wall was taken up by three more gigantic gold-gilded frames of King Sa’ud, Crown Prince Faysal and Qur’anic calligraphy in gold-tipped letters blessing the house and its occupants.

  Princess Sara was seated facing the entrance door, staring blankly into space, her plump bejeweled fingers fiddling idly with a string of turquoise worry beads and a group of attendants sat at her feet to entertain her. At our entry, she looked up with a welcoming smile on her full red lips that did not reach her large dark kohl-rimmed and heavy-lidded eyes. Her attendants jumped up, barely disguising their relief at having someone else take over their arduous task.

  Tall and full-bodied, like most of the royal family, Princess Sara wore a multihued satin dress embroidered in sparkly lame thread with a tight bodice and a remarkably plunging neckline covered lightly with the transparent black gauze of the veil she wrapped loosely around her head. One of her wrists was adorned with gold bangles that covered most of her forearm while the other had a gold watch encrusted with diamonds. Why she needed a watch was a mute question. Time had no meaning in the ‘Mir’s wife’s day as she was childless and responsibilityfree. Her stretches of time were punctuated by sleep, meals, television, and the Emir’s visit every fourth night (he had other wives to attend to as well).

  As we shyly shook her limply extended hand, we were hit by the strong fragrance of ‘oud, her musk perfume. My mother was invited to sit next to her and we politely lined up next to our mother. An attendant seated nearby picked up a large incense burner made from teakwood covered with richly burnished hammered brass and passed around whiffs of the fragrant bakhour. We watched entranced as the princess fanned the smoke towards her bosom with several sharp twists of her wrist, then lifted her thick black hair to one side and waved her manicured fingers delicately over the burner, allowing the aromatic bakhour to penetrate each strand. Next she stood next to the burner wand and swished her skirts lightly to and fro through the smoky perfume to permeate her skirts with the sweet and woody smell of the bakhour.

  Trays of fruit juices and soft drinks were repeatedly presented while Princess Sara and Mama exchanged pleasantries until dinner was announced. The large glass sliding French doors to the dining room were rolled aside to reveal a table set for 25 people (we were the only guests) laden with food of every cuisine imaginable: Thai, Indian, Lebanese, the meat and rice dishes of the Saudis, and a new recipe of roast beef and mashed p
otatoes which the princess had seen on Aramco TV. This final dish was cooked in our honor. The Princess abided by the unshakable rules of generosity of the desert in feeding her guests. She sat at the head of the table and personally kept a close eye on what each of us ate, running her poor attendants to the ground by having them carry each and every heavy tray of food to our side at the table. When we had finished, the food was cleared and dessert was served, stretching across the table in the same quantities and varieties as the savory dishes. The meal did not end there. After dessert came the fruit, enormous trays of every exotic type imaginable. After the fruit, the dinner thankfully ended and we carried our overextended stomachs to the sofa unable to budge or think while we tried to digest more food than we needed for a week. Our overeating had been necessary to show our appreciation of Princess Sara’s hospitality.

  Now it was the turn of the very deserving attendants and those who lived outside in the courtyard to enter the dining room through the kitchen door and eat behind the now closed glass sliding doors. A distinct aura of Arabic coffee spiced with cardamom filled the air as a servant passed it around in a curvy, domed brass coffee pot with a gracefully pointed spout stuffed with fine straw. With a rapid up and down movement of her hand, she elongated the stream of the golden hued brew as she poured it into handle-less porcelain cups embellished in thick gold leaf. Shortly after the coffee a servant entered with a heavy silver pot with sweet green mint tea which she poured into small delicately engraved glasses with a tiny handle at their side. Yet another servant passed around chocolates prettily wrapped in silver and aqua blue foil and sugar-coated almonds in pastel colors of yellow, pink and pale green. After a final round of sweet mint tea and of incense, we took our leave and returned home and the attendants returned to their station seated at her feet.

  On one of our visits, Fatin and I were invited to stay the night at the Mir’s wife’s home. My mother could find no graceful way of saying no although she really wanted to. Yasmine, Emir Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s eight-year-old granddaughter, was visiting Princess Sara and the little girl had started to cry when we got up to leave. She was a year younger than Fatin, and the Mir’s wife had brought her as entertainment which she was rapidly discovered was turning into work. Yasmine’s mother was a Swedish horse breeder who had met and married Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s son, who raised horses. The Mir’s wife did not approve of the marriage and thought that by bringing Yasmine to her house she would persuade her husband’s son to divorce the mother … at least that was the story we were told. So we embarrassedly accepted to stay the night.

  After bidding our mother and brothers goodnight, Princess Sara’s personal attendants, two live-in seamstresses from Lebanon and Syria, invited us to go for a walk in the private gardens that lay in seclusion behind the palace. We stepped into a jasmine-scented paradise, a heavenly garden that we had never imagined existed behind the forbidding four-meter high walls surrounding it. A pebble strewn path led to a cupola-covered swimming pool. Lining the path were orange, mango, and tangerine trees so close to one another that their branches, heavy with fruit, entwined in an intricate embrace. Towering date trees circled the swimming pool and grape vines climbed the trellis enclosing the pool alongside brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea and the jasmine flowers that overpowered the garden with their perfume. We heard our names being called, and turned to see Princess Sara seated in her bedroom that opened onto the garden, inviting us to enter. Dressed in a silk robe and flowing nightgown, combing her thick, long, silky, black hair, she was another person altogether from the bored, vacuous Princess Sara that we knew. We entered diffidently, suddenly feeling very awkward in this informal situation without the backup of our mother who felt at home anywhere. Mercifully Yasmine kept up an excited chatter.

  As we sat on the floor playing with a pack of cards, a large dark figure suddenly loomed at the bedroom’s garden entrance. Yasmine gave a yelp of excitement and we nearly yelped in fright. It was Emir Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, who had come to visit his wife and granddaughter. Tall and imposing with a heavy black cloak he held closely around him and a red checkered ghutra on his head without an agal, he had a frightening, aggressively featured face largely hidden under a black untrimmed beard. His razor sharp black eyes softened perceptibly as his granddaughter ran to him. He turned and towered over us where we sat immobile on the carpet, stupefied by his presence. With a flip of his hand, he released his cloak and a profusion of mangoes, oranges and tangerines tumbled onto the carpet and rolled at our feet onto the carpet. We broke out in giddy laughter, more from relief than amusement while he chuckled, sounding very much like a Wahhabi Santa Claus. Crouching down to our level, he hauled Yasmine onto his expansive knee and asked our names while he picked up a tangerine, peeled it deftly and offered it to his wife who blushed prettily, animation crossing her face for the first time since we had known her. While he listened to Yasmine’s chatter he peeled tangerines for us with a soft smile on his face that remarkably transformed his scary persona. His heart was obviously wrapped around his feisty little granddaughter’s finger.

  Eventually Princess Sara tired of Yasmine, who became a demanding handful the longer she stayed away from her mother. The little girl was finally released and Princess Sara went back to her life as she was accustomed to living it, duty free and focused only on her own needs and demands. Our visits returned to being uneventful slots of time we had to endure until one Wednesday evening, almost six months later. As we entered to greet the princess seated as usual on her velvet sofa clutching her turquoise prayer beads, I noticed a new face among the group of attendants who sat to the side waiting for orders. Her dress was different from the rest, a knee-length tunic over long embroidered pantaloons. She was a little older than I was with light olive-colored skin and delicate features framed by a black veil wrapped under her chin and over her head. Princess Sara called out to the girl, “Fatin come here.” We giggled at the novelty of having someone else with my sister’s name. There already was a Fadia, the Syrian live-in seamstress. But our giggles shriveled into silence when Fatin came forward to sit dutifully at Princess Sara’s feet, unsmiling and hostile, her head held high as she looked straight into our eyes. “I bought her today,” Princess Sara casually informed us. I swept my hand to my mouth before I said something rash. A slave! This was 1962.

  We sat in silence. What can you say to someone who shows off a human being she has just bought? How can one buy a human being and show it off like a new watch? So who else was a slave amongst the gaggle of attendants who served us silently with eyes averted? That evening we uncovered one slave after another. The little girl we had been playing with since our first visit, Sheikha, was a slave’s daughter. Her parents had never mentioned it during the long hours we spent in their one room concrete box watching television and cracking jokes while we waited for our mother’s visit to end. We had pored over their wedding album and they had informed us that the Princess had decided they would marry one another; the father was in charge of keeping the royal cars in running order and the mother was in charge of the princess’s private quarters. I discovered that they were both slaves from Ethiopia which meant their daughter Sheikha, their bubbling mischievous daughter who was invited to keep us company, was a second-generation slave. Princess Sara played with their lives like we played with our dolls.

  I went home that evening unable to get Fatin out of my mind. I wanted to know more about her and I counted the days until our next visit. Sheikha who was nine, old enough to understand gossip and young enough to relay it for the sake of friendship, told us all she knew. Fatin was two years older than me and had been proving difficult to control since the day she had been bought. She was kept under the close watch of the older attendants as she was obviously going to attempt to escape at her first opportunity.

  I finally got my break to speak with Fatin. My sister and I had stepped outside for a walk in the courtyard, as we often did with Sheikha, and spotted Fatin by the door. I invited her to join us. She walked jauntily
up to us and asked abruptly: “Why do you speak in English with one another? Aren’t you Saudi?” We told her yes, we were Saudi but did not have Saudi friends. “All the better,” were her bitter words. “I am a Yemeni. I am not Fatin. I hate the name Fatin. My name is Aysha. I was stolen from my father in Yemen while we were herding our goats and now I’m here. I hate the Princess, I hate her family, I hate it here, I hate everything about Saudi Arabia.” Silent tears slid down her cheeks, which she angrily wiped away. We stood around awkwardly at a loss for words while Sheikha wrung her hands. Her mother relayed everything to the Princess, and she would have to tell her what went on between us. As though reading her mind, Aysha turned viciously on Sheikha: “Run to your mother and tell her everything. She should know how I feel. I have nothing to hide. It’s wrong for one human being to own another.” Now Sheikha started to cry. She was a sweet, harmless little girl and until now did not have a care in the world. We were a group of girls with the oldest, Aysha, at thirteen struggling with a human rights issue beyond our scope of comprehension.

  On our way home I discussed the situation with my mother. It had disturbed her too. But she looked at it as an issue that went with the territory. Princess Sara’s driver, Sultan unexpectedly dived into our conversation. Sultan never ventured any words other than the niceties of asking after our health and describing his home in Asir, the Garden of Eden of Saudi Arabia, an independent kingdom until King Ibn Sa’ud conquered it in 1925. He spoke longingly of its mountains, rainy weather, green landscapes and of his wife (only one), who worked side by side with her man with face uncovered. Now he was saying vehemently, “This poor girl has been wrongly sold into slavery. If Princess Sara was a good Muslim she would free her and get her retribution from God.”

  Aysha was a very lucky girl. Her period in slavery was mercifully cut short. A decree banning slaves was announced the following year and she was the first to demand repatriation. The Princess could not understand her ungratefulness. Aysha had chosen to return to her family of goatherds rather than spend her years in luxury serving her. Of course the Princess was not a person who would understand the priceless value of freedom.