The Best Intentions in the World

Chapter 1 – Hawwa-4

Zeina sat behind the wheel, looking more resolute than ever. I was sitting atop the farm. At any moment, I could have slipped through the rusty steel sheet. I found a stable position and began immortalizing Zeina’s feats. The sun was coming down, shading a crimson hue over the desert. A red hill with purple sky, a black 15 ton truck and Zeina behind the wheel, looking like some mobster, her right hand sweeping through the air like a cowboy. It was in the bag.

We drove back. Night was creeping on us. Khadija had warned Zeina’s parents that she would come home late. She had been invited to dinner along with some other friends.

We arrived at a respectable time and nobody suspected anything. I went home to upload the pictures to my computer. I was frantic. It was so perfect: the colors, the truck, Zeina’s pose and attitude, the Pirelli calendar feel of it all, the fake Arizona-like backdrop and, underneath a stern cocoon, Jeddah’s most beautiful pinup.

“They don’t want us to feel as we truly are, so they won’t see us at all! This veil they’ve imposed on us will stop their investigations,” said Khadija triumphantly.

She often traveled to the US for business. Sneaking the picture out of the borders turned out to be easy. She could not share them online from Jeddah. The whole kingdom was strictly monitored, with only a few hundred thousand Saudis allowed to use the Internet daily.

Thanks to her friends from Berkeley, Khadija was able to share it all over the social networks. It had been her plan all along: bypassing the press to focus on viral online campaigning. Our work was met with great enthusiasm and this little farce gained momentum.

Between photo ops and open flirtation with Zeina, life was good for me back then. She came from a wealthy family. Her father was a senior civil servant and her mother, a refined woman, taught at the University. She looked kindly upon our relationship. She was happy that her daughter got to experience true feelings.

I liked Zeina. She was a real beauty with a sharp mind. Also, she was very mature for her age, in a country where most young adults have a teenage mentality. But I was cautious. I made no plans for the future—I merely seized the day.

She thought I was patient, gentle, caring. She said I knew how to handle myself and treat her with respect. Her mother was our greatest ally. She made it easy for us to meet up, with the tacit agreement that we were never to venture beyond the limits of decency and good behavior. In other words, s*x was strictly prohibited. If we wanted to do it, I would have to become Muslim and take her for wife. Zeina was aware that relationships between men and women in the West were far simpler, with far less obstacles standing in the way of love. She felt guilty about it and tried her best to soothe my pain.

One night, I took her to a remote restaurant her mother knew well. Zeina was glowing. She looked so thrilled to be with me. I guess she felt some sense of freedom, at last. It was a wonderful night and we were laughing our heads off. When I asked for the check, the waiter made it clear it had been taken care of. I turned to Zeina. She said: “I don’t want you to pay for anything, because I don’t want you to feel remorseful.”

I really liked her. Was it love? The bond between us was undeniably strong. I did not want to admit it, but I was getting used to her cultural ways. Fahd had offered me a copy of the Quran. I went back to reading it. I was actively learning the language, too. I read a lot and gradually morphed into an Arab myself. My love of everything Arab meant I was attuned to this society, to the delight of my friend Fahd. He said my designs were more daring than ever. Bolder but more conformist, I thought to myself.

I could easily win over Zeina’s heart if I became just like the rest of them. I thought about converting so that she could be my wife. We would spend the rest of our days in Saudi Arabia. But the exact opposite happened. As I became more and more Arab, Zeina gradually lost interest in me. It was a mystery to me, but to Fahd it was clear as day.

“She fell in love with you because you were different.”

“All I ever did, I did for her, so we would be closer together.”

“And now you’re no different than the rest of the Saudis. Zeina is smart, open-minded, passionate. This new ‘you’ looks nothing like the man who seduced her a while back.”

Fahd was right. By becoming one of them, I was sacrificing my own identity. Zeina had felt it. Our meetings were not as frequent, and our feelings were slowly fading away.

I wanted to turn things around, to explain myself, but I was caught in a whirlwind working for Khadija. I escaped, but not unscathed.

In the following months, a lot more pictures got published. Insolent but never inappropriate, such was our code of conduct.

For safety reasons, we put some distance between our meetings and the publications. The last work I did for her caused a great deal of commotion in the Middle East.

We had recreated a coffee-shop, a most common sight in Europe, but here in the peninsula, it was considered indecent.

We were in the villa of Khadija’s best friend. She had a great garden, a vast terrace with high walls to keep us safe from prying eyes. It was a Friday afternoon, and Khadija’s friend had been able to send her personal staff home without raising suspicion.

We had to recreate and stage a coffee-shop scenery with three women as customers and a waiter in traditional clothing taking their orders. A wig and makeup did the trick. The ladies were having a blast.

“When I think of all those men wearing abayas to get a glimpse inside women’s public restrooms… Now it’s our turn to play the transvestite,” Khadija boasted.

The disguise was very convincing. I assessed light levels and took the picture from an angle that would not betray our location.

That picture awakened dormant rebels all over the kingdom. We had been bold enough to do it. The women became more vocal and their numbers grew. A journalist filmed herself driving a car in the suburbs of Riyadh, to denounce the absurdity of misogynistic laws and to call for the international community to pressure the regime.

The response came in no time. The Muttawa henchmen multiplied their crack-downs and raids. They abused their power in the hopes of catching the sinners in the act and humiliate them publicly, which was by far the deepest wound they could inflict.

The police came to our workshops. I had not been careful enough with that last picture. The details on a sofa we had designed and sold to a couple hundred customers had given us away. The police was about to cross-check every one of their owners.

Picture in hand, with the help of our order backlogs, inspectors drew the list of suspicious residences and searched them. But our clients were important people. When they realized the chief of police was among them, the case was dropped and they never came back.

But suspicion had taken its toll on our business. The Muttawa had managed to punish us without ever questioning us. Our original designs, once tolerated as the expression of two brilliant creative minds, became the target of a smear campaign. Praised and lauded at first, then dragged down in the mud, along with my reputation and Fahd’s. The local papers were furious. I think some muezzins even dedicated their Friday sermons to both of us. This is not the kind of publicity anyone should ever want.

The very nature of our business was fit for the privacy of boudoirs, not the over-exposure of public controversy. Khadija had enough influence to bend the narrative and counterattack in local papers to defend the artistic value of our work. But it would have been suicide. The police would have linked us all together.

I was put through the wringer. My friendship with Fahd did not survive. My newfound passion for photography had split us apart. Our media setbacks had finished the job. One of us had to go.

Logically, I decided to leave Jeddah. I sold my shares to a Lebanese friend of Fahd, a retailer from Beirut with great business acumen. Now I had to choose my next destination.

It was an easy call. I wanted to stay in the Middle East, but I had to find a city where I could be myself and make a living out of photography. The cosmopolitan city of Dubai, always reinventing itself, was the obvious choice. A haven for democrats kicked out of neighboring dictatorships and a base camp for terrorists looking to recharge their batteries. Yes, it would be Dubai—that small nugget of individual freedom nestled within the world’s most dangerous of straits.