After work, I went back to my apartment in Khobar. I threw my abaya on the sofa in the living room and collapsed on its cushions. How could I have been so stupid? How could I forget that I was a Saudi woman, that my society shows no mercy toward girls who uncover their faces and work with men? A man could live his life as he wished. If he decided to get married, his past would never return to haunt him. He was free to have relationships outside of marriage, too, and he would never have judgments slung at him simply because he worked with women. I felt as if I was burning up, remembering every look K. and I had exchanged. Lamia couldn’t understand what had come over me, and brought me water and medicine. I spent the night on our green sofa, delirious; going to work the next day was out of the question.
The next day, at five minutes after five in the afternoon, an hour after work at Aramco had ended for the day, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. The caller’s speech was sporadic, timid, rushed: “I’m calling to see if you’re okay. . . . You didn’t pass by the girls today during the lunch hour, so I went to your office to check on you . . . they said you were sick. . . . May God keep you safe, Manal.”
“How did you get my number?” I asked.
“From my friends at the telecom company,” he replied.
The call was over. But he sent me two texts.
I read the messages a hundred times. But I kept my feelings a secret.
At work, our relationship continued as it was before: glances from afar and cursory exchanges in the hallways. But now I looked forward to leaving the office each day, because that was when I’d receive a phone call and have a furtive, heart-racing conversation, conducted just out of earshot of any others. With the help of cell towers and text messages, we grew more and more drawn to each other. Finally, I agreed to meet face-to-face. Still, I was hesitant; I feared that people would see us together, or that the religious police would arrest us and cause a great scandal. So we agreed to meet an hour before sunset on Najmah Beach in Ras Tanura, a part of another Aramco compound about an hour’s drive away and the location of the Arabian Gulf’s largest refinery. I boarded the Aramco bus that traveled between Dhahran and Ras Tanura. Women were allowed to use it, since it traveled from one Aramco compound to another. (Aramco has compounds all over the country, in every city where it has major operations.)
I arrived first, wondering as I stood there what he would think of me. Would he see me as a cheap girl who had consented to speak to him on the phone and now to meet him face-to-face? I took off my sandals and walked barefoot on the white sand, heading for the remote part of the beach where the refinery stood. The flame from one of its chimneys was shooting up into the sky, seeming to consume the air around it. It seemed an appropriate metaphor. A great number of Saudi love stories end not in marriage but in heartbreak. Most men will not trust a woman who permits him to speak with her alone before their engagement. But I was completely enamored with K. I had ignored Mama’s many warnings; I had shrugged off any sense of betraying my father.
For the first time since I had been a little girl, I lifted my scarf from my hair and draped it over my shoulder. The salty sea breeze touched my face and scalp. I sat on the beach alone and waited. Then a text arrived: “I’m here, I’ll see you in minutes.”
I still had time to back out; I could hide between the houses overlooking the beach and explain this day away as nothing more than a delusion. How had I, a proper Muslim girl, agreed to meet alone with this strange man, with my face showing and my hair uncovered? But it was as if I’d grown roots, deep ones that stretched down into the wet sand. I drew my knees toward my chest with both hands, took a long breath, and gazed at the waves, hoping their repetitive motion might soothe me.
I saw him first as a silhouette, then I smelled his cologne, and finally he dropped down to sit near me, appearing even shyer than I was. We didn’t talk: he simply reached out and nestled my palm in his. It was the first time my hand had touched a man’s. I left it there. We sat in a silence broken only by the waves crashing before us. I decided that day that he would be my husband.
The following months passed in much the same way. We exchanged calls, texts, and quick, superficial conversations at the office, never progressing further; his conservative background and my religious one would not allow it. But things were not as perfect as I’d imagined. The divide between our two ways of thinking became more evident every time we talked. He was strongly opposed to women working at Aramco and uncovering their faces, not from a religious perspective but from a cultural one. If I were in Malaysia, where women walk about with their faces uncovered, K. would not object to me being uncovered. But he was adamant I follow the most conservative practices inside the kingdom. Saudi society judges you on your adherence to tradition; the requirement that women fully cover their bodies is based more on this than on religious precepts. Facial veiling isn’t a specific requirement for Muslim women in the Koran, which describes women accompanying the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) into battle.
Our arguments were frequent and they often ended in my asking how it could be considered acceptable for him to work in Aramco, but not acceptable for a woman. His response was always “I am a man, and nothing brings shame to a man.” My mind urged me to leave him, but my heart would invariably win. I tried to convince myself that if he asked me to marry him, I could put the niqab back on and quit Aramco. But I wanted to work—and my parents depended on me financially. We could not find a way to agree.
I was also consumed by religious guilt. I had broken the prohibitions against having contact with a man outside of my family. I had done wrong, I believed. My inner turmoil was made worse by the gossip spread by the girls who worked in K.’s department. Once I told one of my female lunch companions, “You know, the gossip of the girls in the other department has become so painful that I’ve decided not to be around them anymore.”
Her response stung: “Make sure your enemy has nothing to hold against you, Manal.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “What do they have?”
“I swear to God, you are very well aware of what you are doing,” she replied. “I don’t need to explain any more than that.”
There was another case of infatuation in K.’s department. One of my lunch companions, Dalia, didn’t return the affections of an older colleague, but he pursued her anyway. She complained frequently of his harassment, but that didn’t stop gossip about her from spreading. Someone told her that I was behind it: they claimed that I was calling her honor into question in order to draw attention away from K. and me.
I was sitting at my desk, writing a report, when Dalia stormed in. “Who are you to talk about me,” she screamed, “you slut, you lowlife, you bitch! Look at yourself and K. first before you throw your dirt at other people.” Then she spat in my face.