Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  Marwan met me at the airport in a highly agitated state and we drove directly to the hospital in Dhahran. Our father was at his second home in Marbella, Spain with his second wife and was unable to find a plane seat back for another week.

  Mama beamed happily at my appearance at the door. I hugged and kissed her and gave her the perfume she loved, Dolce Vita by Christian Dior.

  “Spray some, please,” she asked, childlike in her request. “I have breast cancer,” she told me simply while I helped her into the new nightgown I had bought for her in her favorite shade of blue.

  “No problem, Mama,” I answered breezily, “You’re in good hands here.” Aramco’s hospital was top-notch.

  “They said it was malignant and want to remove my breast. I told them no,” she continued in the same childlike tone of voice.

  Marwan, seated behind me, could not contain his anxiety any longer. With fear in his voice for his mother’s life, he scolded her harshly.

  “Of course you should remove it. Do you think you know better than the doctors?”

  “No, I won’t remove the breast,” Mama answered with a finality that put a halt to any further discussion.

  My mother would not budge from her refusal to have the operation. She would not listen to her doctor or oncologist or me or Marwan or the sweet Irish nurse who was specialized in treating cases like my mother.

  My father finally arrived. It was difficult meeting him after all that had passed between us. My five children did not know their grandparents or my country or my hometown because of my father’s intransigence. But we had to talk, there was no escape, we needed to help Mama together.

  “Zeina,” he greeted her gently, using the nickname she had called herself during our years in Aramco, “We want you to live a long and healthy life, we want you in our lives. You should accept your doctor’s advice.”

  “Okay,” she nodded compliantly. It was as easy as that; she had been waiting for her husband whom she loved to distraction to tell her that he loved her and was fine with her being without a breast. After all these years of pining for my father’s attention, she got it only after she became seriously ill.

  The doctors were jubilant with this breakthrough, particularly her long-time heart doctor who knew her well. In addition to her diabetes and breast cancer, my mother had undergone a bypass in London for two blocked arteries.

  “She’ll be fine,” he reassured me when I voiced my worries about her other maladies. My mother’s operation went well; she healed nicely despite her diabetes and did not need chemotherapy. Her oncologist had commented in admiration, “Many other women would not have paid attention to such a tiny lump.”

  Now I could breathe freely, my mother was recuperating happily, basking in the rare solicitous care of her husband. My brother and his wife insisted that I leave the hospital and join then for lunch.

  “Fadia,” my sister-in-law, Rajaa, urged me on the phone, “We’re waiting to have lunch with you. Come on, your Mom’s fine.” I had opted to stay with Mama in the hospital during the build-up to the operation, just in case, and this would be my first venture out since my arrival. I blinked my eyes at the bright white sunlight as I walked in the direction of Marwan’s house ten minutes away. He is a civil engineer working for Aramco, the second generation of Basrawis in Dhahran, and from the manner he was raising his sons as American as he was, the possibility of a third Aramcon generation was very likely in the offing. He was having a slight problem with his gentle eldest son in getting him to like baseball. Their baseball practice often ended on a sour note with Marwan fuming and Joudi in tears because every time Marwan threw the ball, Joudi ducked. How changed Dhahran was since I had last seen it. It had grown to five times its original size and had three schools to accommodate the children of its employees. However, Saudis were no longer allowed to study past first grade as per the updated orders of the ulema. Main Street, the Dining Hall and Fourth Street with House 4595-B were all still there. I was steeped in nostalgia. Life had been so much simpler and so much easier then. I thought of my mother; she seemed so uncharacteristically childlike. She had always been childlike but now more so than ever.

  “Oh well,” I shrugged silently to myself, “As long as she’s at peace with the world, it should be all right.”

  I rang the doorbell to Marwan’s house, a modern stucco villa low and sleek with a beautifully landscaped garden. He opened the door smiling happily, with his tow-headed children peering behind him. The combination of his redhead genes and his wife’s Circassian blondeness had produced new Saudis that were even further from the stereotype than we had been. We walked into the TV room and on top of the television I saw a miniature American flag and a miniature Saudi flag entwined. The presence of the children kept me from fully expressing my distaste at what I viewed to be misplaced patriotism. I understood where Marwan was coming from, but I found it hard to accept that he would have no compunction in displaying the American flag so freely. Try as I might, I was unable to resist comment altogether.

  “Marwan, what are you thinking by displaying the American flag?”

  Marwan looked pained.

  “Fadia, come on lighten up. So what? A Marine gave it to me, one of those guys stationed in the desert for the Gulf War. I went there on a special pass out of curiosity. Those poor soldiers have absolutely no clue where they are and what the point of their mission is. All they see is the desert. It’s a job.”

  It was four years since the first Gulf War had ended and the Marines my brother was talking about were those who had fought Saddam Hussein from Saudi soil and with Saudi money, 51 billion dollars of it. Marwan and I were never going to see eye to eye about America, the Arab world, and Saudi Arabia. My brother had spent a total of four years abroad – three in England and one for his master’s degree in Washington, DC. The rest were spent in Saudi Arabia. He had received his engineering degree from the University of Petroleum and Minerals that was right next door to Aramco and immediately became employed by Aramco after completing his education. And he had never experienced war, never been exposed to the crosscurrents of conflict or experienced the unsavory fallout of America’s push for world supremacy. Had I not experienced the heart-wrenching repercussions of that push for economic and strategic control over Arabia in Lebanon, I might have displayed the American flag as lightly as my brother did; who knows?

  Thankfully, my brother was not reflective of post-Gulf War I Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabs more confrontational and more immersed in Arab culture than Marwan was, were challenging the absoluteness of the ulema’s decrees in street demonstrations, unprecedented in Saudi Arabia’s modern history. It was natural that Saudi women would be amongst the first to demand their rights. Women were a force that the Al Sa’ud’s ulema demanded be kept under control for reasons no one could fully comprehend. And there was no power with clout in the world that cared to discuss this abysmal breach of human rights. Women were barred from major areas of employment in Saudi Arabia such as law, engineering, architecture, and mass communication. A Saudi woman could not study or take a job without the explicit approval of her closest male relative.

  At the outbreak of the first Gulf War, when the widespread exposure of uncovered US women soldiers driving army jeeps went unchecked, Saudi women decided to challenge restrictions on their rights, particularly the right to drive. On a designated day and at a designated hour, fortyseven women got into their cars behind the driver’s wheel and drove in circles around the office of the governor of their city in protest at their lack of civil rights and in protest at the Gulf War. The women were arrested by the muttawa’a, but released that same night under orders of Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh. In a fit of rage at this unprecedented defiance from the female Saudi population, the ulema called their driving a depravity and issued the names and numbers of all forty-seven women, urging clerics to punish these women as they saw fit. The Al Sa’ud royal family was prompted to publicly reassert the ban on women drivers.

  The Sau
di women’s ten-minute drive shook the kingdom and unhappily shook their futures and their husbands’ futures as well. Unable to throw them in jail due to their important families, the Saudi security forces took the electronic information highway instead and circulated an e-mail to all the businessmen of Saudi Arabia with the warning that anyone who countenanced employing the husbands of these women would have hell to pay. The women were vilified as communist whores. Predictably, the bold and daring act of the group was forcibly pushed into the black hole of collective amnesia by the West, with its bottomless appetite for Saudi Arabian oil. No one was heard to mention this incident in public thereafter. In 1998, the British government declared in a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Commission that Saudi Arabia was doing very well with respect to human rights.

  ***

  After lunch, we drove in the direction of my parent’s house in Al Khobar to pick up my brother Ghassan to visit Mama. He had already called five times which was uncharacteristic of him; Ghassan never called anyone. I prepared myself psychologically for the sight of American soldiers roaming freely in my country. After all, I had been raised among their people, hadn’t I?

  “We have to pass by Yousef,” Marwan told me, “He wants to visit Mom too.”

  Yousef, our cousin, a University of Petroleum engineer working for Aramco as well, was married to a blue-eyed, blonde Lebanese relative, Thuraya. He came lumbering out of his house in Dhahran cursing and grumbling as usual. I was familiar with his character; he had a heart of gold but a very short fuse. And, accustomed as I was with Yousef ’s temper, this time it was fiercer than I had ever seen. He threw himself into the back seat.

  “So have you seen the American soldiers roaming around Al Khobar like it’s their Goddamn back yard?”

  “We haven’t gone there yet,” I answered.

  “Man, you’re going to love the scene,” he grinned wickedly in anticipation.

  Our home in Al Khobar was on the outskirts, but Marwan first drove through the center of town and down the Corniche road where all the American fast food franchises were, and naturally the American soldiers. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, Marwan murmured, “Look to the left.” I looked. Three American soldiers were perched on a wall, openly amused at the Saudis walking by. “Look to the right,” Marwan murmured again. I looked. I saw a group of American soldiers, male and female in short-sleeved military fatigues and combat boots lounging outside Hardees, some with their legs up on the tables, others sprawled on the sidewalk as though on the beach. Marines were everywhere, laughing and talking while they ate and drank, fully aware of the attention they were gathering.

  “What do those guys care? They’ve got the ulema’s cover, they’re guests of the Al Sa’uds,” Yousef growled.

  I turned to see his expression. Yousef had loved the Americans; what an about-face.

  “It’s one thing having Americans in Aramco and it’s another seeing them above the law while we get our asses kicked,” he continued bitterly. “A month ago, Thuraya and I spent the night in jail. Know why? Because the genius muttawa’a saw Thuraya’s blue eyes and said I was going around with an American soldier. For God’s sake, she was covered from head to toe. So he demands our marriage certificate. Who, just tell me, who in this world walks around with their marriage certificate in their wallet? Or even knows where he’s stashed it? So we were put in jail while our sons turned the house upside down for it. They finally found it at dawn.”

  How was the outright presence of the American military on Saudi soil going to play out with the Saudis, the non-Aramcon ones that is? The 1979 Mecca uprising denouncing American ties with the Al Sa’uds had occurred without the scenes of American soldiers laughing and talking, with female American soldiers dressed in shorts in fast food joints along the Al Khobar Corniche. Juhayman, leader of the Mecca uprising, had given his life to protest the ‘special relations’ between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And post-Gulf War I, twelve years after the Mecca uprising, in 1991, the ulema gave political cover to the Al Sa’uds through a fatwa which stated that American troops were allowed to remain on Saudi soil because they were the Al Sa’ud’s guests.

  Saudi Arabia in 1991 was full of young Saudis who had spent their youth in Wahhabi-run religious schools that taught them Wahhabi dogma and to hate everything progressive. Not enough had been done to prepare the Saudi youth to work for a living. In 1991, although the GDP was 148 billion dollars and the per capita income was around $5800, infant mortality was as high as 59 per 1000 live births, the life expectancy of women was 68 and that of the men was 65 and literacy was 62.4 percent of the adult population, little more than half.

  I saw my first Saudi beggar on that visit, a Saudi Arabian beggar woman. She sat huddled in a strip of shade against the wall of the mall with one hand out for alms and the other holding her identity card to prove her nationality.

  “I know, I can’t believe it either,” Marwan commented in answer to my obvious look of alarm as we passed by. The billions of dollars of US weapons and the finance of US-led military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had left Saudi Arabia in deep debt. Its youth are at pains to find jobs and cheap enough accomodation. Many families in the capital, I was told, are so poor, they can’t afford electricity. Raw sewage runs through parts of Jeddah. It was hard not to notice the extreme wealth in Al Khobar in the designer shop-filled malls and the dozens of palaces under construction. When ailing King Fahd vacationed in Spain, he took 50 black Mercedeses, 350 attendants, a 234-foot yacht, and had $2,000-worth of flowers and 50 cakes delivered each day.

  Adnan personally encountered the increasing poverty of the Saudis around the time of the first Gulf War. One Friday afternoon in Abu Dhabu, he heard a sharp knock on his office door. He opened it to see a Bedouin with kohl-rimmed eyes staring belligerently back at him, holding out his identity papers that identified him as a Saudi Arabian. Until that Friday afternoon, Adnan had the impression that Saudi Arabia’s Bedouins were the most protected and looked after by the Al Sa’uds.

  “I need money,” the Bedouin ordered Adnan.

  “Why are you asking for money from me, a poor Lebanese? Go and get it from your King,” he replied flippantly and swung the door to shut it.

  The Bedouin forcefully pushed it wide open.

  “Do you see my name? I am not a beggar. I am from North Arabia from the Shummari tribe and I have been abandoned by the King you are talking about. He has only money for America and his harem. My tribe is far more important in the Arabian Peninsula than Fahd or his tribe. We get nothing and I need to feed my family. You are working here and getting Zayed’s money so I deserve some.”

  Of course, the Shummari got his money but from Adnan’s money, as Adnan was sure to make clear to him.

  ***

  Sour Grapes

  I flew back to Lebanon with a far different impression of Saudi Arabia than I ever expected to have. What I had seen and felt, exciting but frightening at the same time, forced me to erase the stereotypes that I had carried with me for years and to reassess everything afresh from a clean slate.

  Lebanon was in the same state of turmoil and political discord as it always had been. However, it too was about to undergo a major change to the stereotypical image which everyone held, including the Lebanese themselves, concerning their ability to stand up to Israel or to the confessional straitjacket that controlled the social order. And the credit for this fundamental and important change goes to the belligerence of Israel and the resistance led by Hezbollah.

  Israel struck Lebanon again in 1996.

  Prime Minister Simon Peres unleashed Israel’s fourth military assault on Lebanon, code named ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ in what he promised would wipe out ‘terrorist’ activity in the south. Hezbollah was the main target. This elite core of 5000 Lebanese resistance fighters was making Israel’s occupation of the south costly and bloody. The guerrilla group’s tight cells of no more than two to three fighters were carrying out unstemmable stealth attacks
on the enemy with a high ratio of success. To Israel’s dismay, the more they attempted to pummel and vilify them, the more passion Hezbollah aroused amongst the Lebanese. Unhappily for Peres and for Israel, ‘Grapes of Wrath’ would mark two unprecedented victories for Hezbollah: the beginning of the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon and the eradication of the Israeli Army’s uncontested image of absolute might and power. Peres would become yet one more of those who fell and floundered in Lebanon’s shifting quicksands.

  On April 11, 1996, ‘Grapes of Wrath’ opened with with a screaming blitzkrieg that carpetbombed anything and everything that had a semblance of life north of the Litani River. Five years after the end of the civil war, Lebanon became a war-zone once more.

  A week later on the morning of April 18, 1996, with the bombing still in full force, we turned on the television first thing in the morning to be met with the sickening image of a headless baby flopping in the arms of a crying UNIFIL soldier. Well-aimed Israeli fire (as documented later by a UN report) had just massacred 107 villagers at the Fijian UNIFIL headquarters in Qana where they had taken refuge from the Israeli blitzkrieg. Turning a deaf ear to the international outcry over Qana, Israel’s fighter jets continued to carpetbomb without reprieve.