I asked Abla Eftaima if I could take books from the pile. I would have been thrilled with just one, so imagine my happiness when she nodded and pushed the entire pile toward me, saying, “Take them all.” I spent my summer vacation with the five adventurers: cracking codes, taking risks, outwitting the most notorious of criminals, and delivering wanted fugitives to the police. As I read, I decided that I too would write my own adventures, and this time I would be a hero, as would my favorite people from real life: my brother, Muhammad, and my cousins, Amal, Ahmed, Hanan, Hammam, and Hossam.
At that time, there were no personal computers for typing my story, no home printers to print it. Since all the riyals I’d saved from my pocket money during the year went to buy books, I didn’t have the money for a new notebook, so I started tearing out the empty pages from the notebooks I had used at school the previous year. I carefully cut out the subject and date line at the top of each page. I drafted each chapter in pencil until I was satisfied, and then carefully wrote over the words in blue pen. And because I loved drawing, I began to create cartoons of the people and events in my story. My greatest moment of pride was when I set down my pen after writing “The End.”
I would be moving up to the sixth grade of primary school after the summer, and was counting the days until the new academic year began. I couldn’t wait to show my Arabic-language teacher, the much-loved Miss Maqboola, my story. Just a day or two after classes had resumed, I stood proudly and impatiently at her desk, waiting for her to finish correcting our homework. She looked up at me from behind her glasses and smiled. I handed her my story. I explained that I had spent my summer vacation writing it, and I hoped very much that she would read it.
A day passed, two days, a week. Every time Miss Maqboola entered the classroom, I would look hopefully at her, but there was no response beyond silence. After two weeks had passed, I walked hesitantly up to her desk at the end of class to ask about the story I had left in her care. “Miss Maqboola, have you read my story?”
Her reply was angry. “Your story? You liar,” she told me. “It’s not your story. You copied it from others and claimed it as your own.”
The whole class was listening. My cheeks turned bright red. “Could you please return it to me?” I asked, my voice shaky and verging on tears.
“I tore up your stolen story!”
I couldn’t turn around to return to my seat. I stood there, tasting the salt from my tears running down the back of my throat, but under Miss Maqboola’s glare, my eyes remained frozen, unable to cry.
After that, I hid almost everything I wrote. I did not want it to be destroyed again.
The most peaceful period of my childhood occurred during a war. In the summer of 1990, Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, invaded the small, neighboring, oil-rich country Kuwait. Saudi Arabia’s vast northeast border straddles both Iraq and Kuwait. A state of war was declared inside our kingdom, but I was not there. We were visiting my mother’s family in Egypt and Libya. At that moment, we were staying in the Libyan city of Benghazi, in the house of my oldest uncle, Muhammad. The Libyan press was strongly biased against Saudi Arabia: the newspapers wrote about an American invasion of the Grand Mosque, and I remember a caricature of President George H. W. Bush in which he was shown riding round the Kaaba on a camel led by King Fahd, the Saudi king at that time. Worried, we called my father. He told us there were no American invaders and to get our news from BBC Radio London.
This wartime was also the first time that I saw my oldest half brother. My sister, brother, and I were playing Chutes and Ladders with the children of our much older cousins (Mama was the youngest of her siblings and Uncle Muhammad the oldest, making his children the same age as Mama, and their children the same age as us). We heard the sound of a car entering through the gate and stopping. I saw Mama and my grown-up cousins run toward the door. A tall young man with suntanned skin stepped inside and stopped when he saw my mother, smiling broadly. My mother began to cry, and my cousins too. My uncle’s son, Abu Bakr, followed, and when Mama hugged the young man, Abu Bakr began to cry too.
My brother and sister and I sat dumbly watching the scene, waiting for an adult to explain. I turned to Kholoud, the daughter of my cousin. “Who’s this?” I asked her.
“This is Essam,” she replied. It didn’t make things any clearer. Why was everyone crying at the sight of Essam?
But then Mama took his hand and called to us, “This is your brother.”
Mama had left Essam when he was just two years old, forced to return to her father’s house in Egypt after her divorce. Now she was seeing him for the first time since that day, as a grown man. Mama’s head barely reached his shoulder.
The other great event from that summer was small enough to fit in my suitcase.
In Saudi Arabia, the only house where I felt truly welcome was Aunt Zein’s. She was a Saudi woman in the old style. In her home, she wore traditional Hejazi tribal clothes, not the shapeless black abaya, but a bright azure dress, open at the chest, the skin beneath it covered by a high-necked, silver-buttoned white vest. It was still possible to see the part in her hair peeking out from under the white scarf wrapped around her head. She adorned herself in jewelry: rows of engraved gold bangles stacked along her wrist, jangling and announcing her arrival like a cat’s bell. Her palms and nails were permanently stained with henna. And her daughter, my cousin Hanan, had dolls.
During my childhood in Mecca, the sale of most dolls was forbidden. The only acceptable ones were shapeless cloth things without faces, toys that looked more like pincushions than dolls. There were a few Western-style dolls, but they were treated like contraband. They had to be bought under the counter and you had to know the store owner well. Once, accompanied by my mother, I had bought one such doll for five riyals, and the shopkeeper had wrapped it in layers of newspaper to hide its face and shape before we stepped out of the store.
Hanan’s doll was like nothing I had ever seen. She was named Barbie, and had long, luxurious blond hair and beautiful clothes and high heels. She had a car, a bicycle, and a pink-and-white home called a Dream House. She could bend her knees if she sat down. My doll wasn’t blond; her hair was short and fluffy and black. She wasn’t dressed in beautiful clothes, and I couldn’t bend her knees.
“Where did you buy Barbie?” I asked Hanan.
“My brother brought her for me from outside Saudi Arabia,” she replied. And that was that. I would never be able to find Barbie inside the kingdom.