Tolstoy in Riyadh
Chris Cryer – United States

Dhahran

It’s a zany image, the idea of Tolstoy in Riyadh, the old or the young Tolstoy, either way, belligerent and scowling, haunting the dusty streets, checking out the action, like the vendors rank with the smell of their spicy meats, always sitting without budging, always too liberated to hear his anarchy or rhetoric, never needing conversion and caring not at all to own even the smallest parcel of Riyadh’s desiccated floor.

I carry him with me there, not really of course, but in my pen that wants to take him everywhere, since he alone can sum up a place properly. My pens are old and still hold Tolstoy ink. I’m just wishing he were still here to explain, better than Lawrence, better than Asad, what everybody’s doing in the Arab world that keeps them wobbling like Sterno in a sea of long, uneasy flame.

Fourteen hours after JFK, I feel the soft air of Saudia. The airport in Dhahran is immaculate and cool, unlike Riyadh later, hellish with hawkers yelling out corporate names to catch the polyglot employees, well-arrived, exhausted and accepting, but unable to understand their company cards on sticks. The curb there is thick with drivers, drivers for women, drivers for executive pools that begin to look like cattle, badly dressed, too many in suits that are unsuited to Riyadh. Riyadh is exciting from the first and stays, of course, that way — palaces popping out from hillsides, signs to Mecca, a few wrapped women on the fringes, tucked into corners so as not to greet strangers like me. Riyadh is a capital of tradition and strength, like Jamestown, Washington, and Valley Forge in one.

But it’s Dhahran that fixates visions in my mind. The airport during Hajj is transcendent. It is the people, the men, the hajjis themselves. Though they should be going or coming, they seem stopped, finished, completed in the moment; so filled, so spoken, they are now almost silent in the white Saudi light. Everyone waits in white draped sheets, standing in lines under a spent and late-day sun that sprays the entire room of glass in its pale, white dusk. It is the whitest moment I have ever known, a white that seems to warm and ground the hajjis. But they know about it and I do not.

Tolstoy knows these hajjis, and I wish I did. For me they’re in a hum, but he knows what they’re saying to each other and why. I need some dialogue badly, when an agent approaches me gently, scooping up the moment with sweeping arms that give the stairway to me, the entire stairway into a small and shiny Saudi jet. “Madame, you should go in now, before these men.” “Oh, I am not alone. This is my son here.” I tell him that I know how to travel. I am a lady, albeit born in the West. “No, no,” he lifts my bag, and is so inviting, I want to follow. “You must both go now, before the men.”

I try to count these men. Can this be right? There are hundreds, humming and fingering their beads, but we go before them. My son and I ascend. It seems a long ascent. They do not see my ankles, as I hold my skirts in close. We leave the sea of white below. The sweeping walls of glass enshrine the hajjis like a hub of orchids in a garden. They are not commuters, travelers, or businessmen, but some kind of Meccan hosts. If Meccan were a language, they speak it now, and it is different. I have not been closer to Mecca yet.

Could Tolstoy know so soon, sooner than I, what the hajjis think and say? My pen says:

One short, dark man wants to show his family pictures to another man, twenty years younger but distantly related.

“This is little Khadija,” he tells him. Khadija’s eyes are radiant and her hair shiny, long, and black. She’s clearly his favorite child. “Ahmad, she has a bike, only two wheels.”

“No. She’s so young. Three? Where can she ride it?”

“She rides it inside,” he says, “all around the house.”

“Not in the kitchen?”

“Well, it’s okay with me, but her mother says no. Not in the bedrooms either, of course. They’re carpeted.”

Ahmad takes out his own small things from inside his swaddling clothes. They must be religious souvenirs. I cannot tell what they are.

 “Hmm,” croons the older man. “Will you keep that one or give it to your wife?”

Ahmad reaches inside again with difficulty and retrieves more. “This one is for you,” he says to the older man. “No, keep it.”

Then they resume their steady drone, which fades into a hajji hum, and my son and I see no more from our ascendance to the door to Arabia. The older man and Ahmad know what thing it is they shared. I don’t know anything about it, but I see and I wonder. There is a soft feeling to this place. It’s agreeable, quiet, and white. Night begins to drain the glow. Finally, adjusted, tucked, belted, and pillowed, we fly.

Riyadh

Riyadh is the cosmopolitan place. Expatriates are pulled there from major centers of the world, and ninety percent are foreigners enslaved to bosses who first hold their passports and second offer water, the liquid that made Wahabis famous in the grand and revolutionary democratization of wells. Some countries nationalized industry, but the Riyadh royals nationalized water, knowing they had the one place in the world that clearly knew its drink of choice could never be alcohol. It is the seat of quiet power, the residence of princes, and the nerve center for Mecca.

We all stop there to be sorted out, in gleaming air-conditioned halls, with a grandeur generally preserved only for the dead. Heads are counted there, and money machines cash out embarrassingly thick stacks of bills to even the newest comers. Pockets stuffed with bills, we all move into streets where there is no crime. I am in the lap of chivalry and company policy, in a utopian nation-state.

I see my corporate card on a stick, “King Saud University,” and gesture as women will who are drowning. It’s the sea of humanity I am drowning in, all of my foreign literature abandoned behind me, incarcerated for the tasteless things it says and TIME magazine shows. I am free of it, really, if they will only spare Tolstoy, more my companion than I could explain to those who allow no idols at all.

Can I live without him if they take him? Will they honor his dying words — “What must I do now?” Will they see him as I do, not as a distraction but as a centering force, the most mature of mahrams, a cross between the most protective brother and the wisest grandfather? Not really, because they throw him on the floor. I actually step on my own grey, half-bound copy of Master and Man before I realize it is not just another piece of security trash.

“Can I keep this one?” It sounds like a question, but the truth is, I’m getting back on the plane if the belted guard says no. In fact, he loses interest in my question and the whole trash heap. He is holding the nastier materials in a special bin and seems to consider my floor pile like chicken feathers at a barbecue. I scoop and run, stuff myself into the KSU jeep, and sit as tightly as I can. I try to reflect that my stuff at this point is my stuff or I am going home.

We start to rumble over unpaved, rocky hills, and my fourteen-year-old just loves it. This jeep trip sets his first reaction to Riyadh on a positive note. At the end of the year I’ll be advising him that “you can’t go home again,” when he realizes his nights cruising with young adults in BMWs are over. His salaried buddies will regularly make the rounds of juice bars together after work till eleven or twelve at night, schmoozing their way through balmy, starlit cafes. He only has ten months before returning to Alabama, where fourteen-year-olds are confined to riding their bikes down the block for a Slurpee. It will be as though someone has given him the keys to a Harley Davidson and said, “Son, there’s no need to ride with your parents in Riyadh.” We bump and fly over what seem like boulders, and everything hits the air except the rest of my books, which I’ve stuffed underneath my body and stretched out over to hold them down and me in.

The guest house is glorious after a day and a half of travel. Our room is full of soaps, chocolates, and whispering servants. It even comes with a charming man from Austria, who is quiet too and never says that we are not married, which the servants, we come to find, assume we are. We have to part once the truth is discovered; sadly, never to meet again. It seems a place of dreams, including that one.

We’re in the mood of a marathon slumber party, in which the longer you stay up, the livelier you get. In spite of ourselves, it does finally begin to seem that Day One has come to an end. We gradually notice that everything around us is silent, every room in the guest house as well as the vacant space left by the long-gone Austrian. The servants have disappeared too, and there is no buzz of cars at all outside. We can’t see anything out there because all our windows are narrow and designed to meet the ceiling instead of people. It hits us that we’ve also lost all sense of time, even of the day (fourteen hours ahead), Thursday starting the weekend here instead of Saturday. Even the annual calendar bears no resemblance to the western Gregorian. We are well beyond jet lag.

Just as we coalesce into the end of one thing and the start of another, deciding that we are the only ones still awake in the city, my son looks up to the streetlit sky outside our ceiling window strip and says, “It might be dawn.” We chomp on chocolates and smell our soaps, wallow in the linens, and consider the significance of the question, the significance of Day One passing and of the arrival of Day Two.

But there’s a sound. It draws us out of bed. It’s coming from the windows, so we look up. My son gets onto the desk chair, the desk, and finally the top of an armoire. I follow him and we scrunch there, half-sprawled, staring into the empty streets.

There’s a thread of light on the horizon, and we just look hard. There’s nothing to see. But we still hear it and freeze to hear it well. The adhan. It’s the adhan, the Call to Prayer. We know about it but never stopped to think that we would hear it ourselves, at dawn, like this, right now. We don’t budge till it’s over.

The adhan needs to be described, but is indescribable. It is not just song, or prayer, or culture. I have heard some say it is annoying. Others complain about one voice versus another. I’ve known people who especially attend the call to prayer in certain neighborhoods famous for their muezzins. But it is not a fashion or competition. Really, it is always the same, one voice calling all voices. My son says nothing about it, climbing down and into bed, declaring only, “It is dawn.”

I don’t know what to say either, but feel the adhan is something Tolstoy knew. For his Eastern Orthodox moments of sacrament, candles, and incense, for the funerals and births he’s described of circling friends, repeating their desperate, begging prayers from deep within their souls, he knew about the adhan. He knew the Chechens and he knew their adhan to be a most stirring and important of reverential cries. In his novella, Hadji Murad, his Chechen characters find,

With that the song ended, and at the last words sung to a mournful air, [a] vigorous voice joined in with a loud shout of “Lya-il-lyakha-il-Allakh!” … Then all was quiet again except for the … whistling of the nightingales from the garden …

I remember that, and climb down and into bed. It’s hard to sleep. I want more than ever to know where I am and what is happening around me.

The above two chapters are excerpted from the author’s work-in-progress, tentatively titled Tolstoy in Riyadh, which recounts her travels in Saudi Arabia.