Keija Parssinen
The Pearl Diver’s Son
My story, like most boys’, begins with my father. With his long, elegant nose and heavy-lidded eyes, the man looked like a prophet from ancient times, so much so that I was often afraid he would call the wrath of God down on me for misbehavior. He had the resting heartbeat of a marathoner and spoke only when he had something significant to say, and this thoughtful demeanor, which I inherited, has helped me navigate many potentially explosive situations.
At night our barasti was a peaceful place, Baba’s slow breath moving in rhythm with the sea which lay just meters from our door, the susurrus of the wind against the palm thatch roof guiding me to sleep each night. We had no glass in the window frames, nor doors in the doorway. Baba preferred it like that, reminding me that we were not townspeople but sea people, and that we, like the Bedouin, had a God-given relationship to nature, unlike our city brethren, and unlike the Americans, who were so alienated from the land that they needed machines to cool the air around them.
I was born in 1938, the same year Aramco struck oil in commercial quantities at Dammam Number Seven. Auspicious, indeed! No doubt you’ve seen the photograph of the King ceremoniously opening up the valve to send that shipment out to the waiting tanker, a small gesture that would change the destiny of a country and thousands of boys like me.
When I was two years old, my mother died giving birth to a baby girl, who perished with her. I have no memory of her, so her absence did not provoke sadness in me, as it did with my father. When pearling season started and Baba left for four-month stretches, I stayed on with my paternal aunt and her large family. Her husband was a diver, too, and when I was around five years old, I recall toddling after Khal Noor and the other pearling wives as they raced to the water’s edge, gripping palm fronds and ululating with joy at the men’s return. They used the fronds to beat at the sea, exhorting her to deliver the men safely to them. The men arrived in small white skiffs, the water being too shallow for the large dhow to anchor close to shore, and they marched solemnly past the wailing women and cheering children, into the room where the captain would distribute their earnings.
As a child, I couldn’t imagine a life superior to the pearl diver’s. The jubilant celebrations with which we bade them farewell and received them upon their return marked them as heroes in my mind. When they departed at the start of the season, we on the shore could hear their singing long after the boat had become a blur against the horizon. And of course, their homecoming was always accompanied by sack after sack of treasure, yellow and white pearls of all shape and size. We children were not permitted to touch them as the merchants used their copper sieves to separate the smaller, imperfect pearls that would be sold cheap to Iran for clothing embellishments from the large, round beauties that were sent to market in Bombay and Europe. I remember the captain, a serious man who negotiated ferociously with the merchants, at one point pulling his dagger and pointing it towards one of the rich merchants from Bahrain, who had apparently insulted him with his price. Oh, how that city fellow’s face drained of all its color in the face of that rough man’s passion!
At night I dreamed of thrusting my hands deep into a sackful of pearls, pressing them to my cheeks to feel the cool smoothness against my sun-warmed skin. I wondered about the elegant men and women who were lucky enough to wear such finery; it would be years until I saw my first pearl necklace, at one of the infamous parties at the Dhahran Consulate. For as long as I live, I won’t forget the way those pearls gleamed against the woman’s skin, nestled in the dip of her clavicle as if she herself had grown them.
When I turned eight years old, after I had taught myself to swim, Baba asked if I could join the crew, to do odd jobs like distribute meals to crew members and toss oyster shells back into the sea. My father and I were shipmates, and I thought of myself as one of the men, though I was still far removed from the hardships that they sang about as we moved from one oyster bank to the next. My father took joy from the work, smiling at me and making funny faces after he had secured his nose plug, just before a dive. Even among those hardy men, he was exceptional, the captain often singling him out for praise when he raised up another overflowing bucket of mollusks: “Ya Abdulrahman! Abu Ghassan! Congratulations on another fine catch!”
The belief in my father’s special abilities was solidified for me on a late May day around my thirteenth year. Baba dove down alongside the other men, but he remained submerged long after the last of the others had broken through the surface, gasping for breath. During dives, I kept track of the minutes, knowing that one of my inhalations was about one second. By my count, Baba had been under water for close to fifteen minutes. Searching the depths for any sign of my father’s white shorts, I saw only the odd jellyfish or bit of flotsam.
“Something’s wrong,” I shouted to the captain. “Please send someone after him!”
But the captain only looked around at the other men, a bemused expression on his face, as the others chuckled. I despaired, sure Baba had become wedged between rocks, or perhaps had met with an ill-tempered sea creature, maybe even a shark. I grabbed one of the weights the divers used to reach the sea bottom and was about to dive in when Baba finally surfaced, looking triumphant, a smile eating up his face. The crew cheered, pounding the large drum that accompanied us to dive sites, singing raucously; I suppose there had been some kind of wager on it. They pulled Baba on deck, where he lay spent, lungs heaving beneath a thin sheaf of skin, shorts stuck tight to his skinny legs.
But I, with my little boy pain, would not grant my father his glory. How could he do such a thing to a motherless boy? A boy without siblings, with no tribe other than his father and the rag-tag crew of boys and men aboard the dhow that day?
I think, too, that even as I took pride in his physical strength, I felt the thinness of his victory. There he was, a wispy, practically naked man, proud of a harvest he could not even call his own. It must have been then that I decided against that life, for as much as I loved the feel of salt drying my skin tight, the tickle of an unseen fish against my foot, the thrill of discovering a cache of oysters on an otherwise barren sea floor, I wanted my triumphs to be observed by someone other than my son, a few friends, and a summer-white sky. We all enter the world in much the same way, but how we leave it differs greatly, in part depending on how we have chosen to live. And I wanted to know that my death would be felt by more than the waves.
Although in the middle 1950s Khobar’s status as a city had not yet been secured, it was by then inarguably a town, and it had begun its slow crawl towards the stretch of water where our hut sat. The Aramco men had sunk a deepwater pier off the Dammam shore, and from our doorway we could see the huge container ships coming and going, hulking along the water’s surface like slothful beasts. By this point the world war was over and the Americans who had evacuated came back, this time with their wives and children. Ghawar had been discovered, and Safaniya, too, and the company was scrambling to keep up with production. I didn’t know these things then, of course, but I understood that something exciting was happening. There was a disturbance in the atmosphere, the eternal quiet of the peninsula replaced by the whirring of machinery, the clang of hammers striking metal.
On Baba’s advice, I kept my distance from these happenings. During the warmer months of the year, we spent our time at sea, and so we had little need to venture down Khobar’s precise geometrical streets, which I found pleasant in their order but which father thought an abomination on the land. I later learned the roads had been planned by American engineers at Aramco, and so the company’s reach extended beyond Jabal Dhahran and into the heart of nearby towns, where men like my father uttered lamentations, and boys like me rejoiced.
Baba felt that pollution from oil production had begun to damage the oyster beds, and it’s true that the crew’s buckets grew lighter and sold for less. But the industry had been dying for decades, since the Japanese began culturing pearls in quantity in the 1920s. The Japanese were too far distant, geographically or temporally, to blame, and Aramco was a short jaunt inland, so suffered from what mild wrath Baba could muster.
“It’s not natural, what they’re doing. Have you seen the machines they use to get what they want from the earth? That well explosion was a sign from God. What a man cannot get by his hands, he should not have!”
It was the day after a particularly fruitless dive, and we sat on deck with the crew, who were shucking oysters. It must have been 1951 or 52, though I knew nothing of the Gregorian calendar then. Baba’s fingers moved expertly within the soft folds of the mollusk, searching for the pearl. He didn’t need to look at what he was doing. Instead, he kept his gaze on me, those black eyes that hid his innate gentleness behind a veil of darkness. In the desert you could not be soft, even if you were a man who kissed his son’s forehead each night before bed, who sent into the heavens a daily prayer of love to his lost wife and daughter.
“Ya Ali,” Baba called out. “Do you not agree?”
Ali, a boy not much older than me, waggled his head, an equivocation, refusing to meet Baba’s eyes. When Baba pressed him he said, “My cousin says that they pay you in Maria Teresa silver coins!”
“And are our traditions worth only so many silver coins to you, Ali?”
“What traditions?” Ali answered. “These rickety boats? This work that keeps us from our families?” I saw Baba’s ears pinken, the only outward sign of his anger.
“What’s keeping you here, then?”
“Aramco will only hire you if you’re eighteen. The day they’ll believe me, I’ll go to them.” It was true that Ali was a short, slight boy who looked much younger than he was, which I guessed was around sixteen or so.
“And what of the news that they treat the Saudis like dogs? That they pay us only a small portion of what the Americans get? That the Saudi workers live in tin huts next door to the big houses of the American sahibs?”
I did not know how Baba had ascertained these details; he had never spoken to me about Aramco in such concrete terms. I had assumed his prejudice to be superstitious and xenophobic, the close-minded thinking of an old man. I waited to see how Ali would respond. I hoped he would refute Baba’s assertions, would tell him that he was wrong, that the Americans treated Saudis like princes out of fear of the King. Somehow I had got it in my head that this was how things were at Jabal Dhahran, though I had nothing solid on which to base this belief.
“That may be true for now, Abu Ghassan, but my cousin says they are desperate for Saudis. They’ll soon realize they can’t treat us like dogs because we’re the ones doing all the work!”
It was not the answer I wanted, but it silenced Baba. He only nodded as if such a betrayal were to be expected of a boy like Ali. But what kind of boy did he think Ali was? Merely stupid? Or traitorous?
I mimicked Baba’s response, nodding sagely as if perhaps I agreed with him, though in my heart I did not. Like the other boys of the Eastern Province, I had seen the machines he described, not just the ones digging the wells and laying the tapline, but also the ones in town, erecting blockish buildings in anticipation of the Bedouin surrender to this new way of life. And I had seen the automobiles, grumbling, entrancing things with huge, fat tires that spread like camel’s hooves on the sand. I longed to ride in one, though I had heard stories about unlucky Saudis who did not understand the vehicle’s speed and tried to step off at the wrong moment, their bodies breaking against the newly-laid asphalt of the roads.
How Baba would have preferred to maintain the world’s indifference to our peninsula! To him the land was a woman whose beauty was visible only to the chosen few who maintained their lineage here, despite hardship and lack of visible reward. “We have Mecca, Medina, pearls, enough fish and goats to feed the country for generations,” he said. “What need have we for oil? We dig down toward hell to reach something black as the devil’s heart. Any fool can see we are selling our souls to these white sheytans.”
But what to Baba appeared devilry was to me magic. I found it heroic that these Aramco men did not yield to the land in torpid surrender, as we had been forced by brute geography to do for generations. The company men, they dared alter a landscape that had been stubbornly unchangeable since pre-history.
Baba continued working in silence, lightly brushing each newfound pearl over his lips in blessing and thanks. He kept the gleaming seeds in a teak box, and the shells he sent back over the side of the boat, to fertilize the oyster beds for the next dive. On the ride back to shore, the men didn’t sing, as they usually did after a dive. The drum sat dormant in the middle of the boat. These were men accustomed to abundance; they did not know what to do now that the sea did not give to them generously, so they sat quietly, some sleeping, their cloth turbans wound over their faces to protect from the sun. Within the year, the crew, which had worked together for more than a decade, in various iterations, would disband. Some became merchants, rushing to meet the strange needs of the burgeoning Amreeki population; some turned to masonry or the collection of sea stone for construction; others stopped working entirely, eaten by bitterness, reliant on the largesse of the Saudi welfare state and their children. Only my father continued to harvest pearls, seeking out one of the last pearling vessels and joining up with the weary crew.
Back on land the following month, I asked after Ali in town. As I said, he was about my age, and I enjoyed his company, he had a talent for jokes that I began to crave after spending so much time with my increasingly silent father. Another boy told me that Ali no longer lived in Khobar but Saudi camp, a makeshift shanty town that had sprouted up outside of Dhahran. He had gotten a part-time job with Aramco and was also going to school, an idea I had never entertained, having started work so young and grown used to being of value to Baba. I pictured Ali wearing a neck tie, as some of the Americans did, sitting at a desk and reading a book or doing sums, whatever it was that you did in school. Dutifully, jealously, I walked home and reported the news to Baba. “What a loss,” was all he said. I heard no anger in his voice, only a mournful note, for I knew he had liked Ali’s jokes, too, and would miss him.
It was time for the evening prayer, we could hear the singing of the muezzin coming from the nearby mosque. I watched Baba walk to the water’s edge to perform ablutions, kneeling in the sand and splashing the cool water up to his elbows, on his face. I saw he had forgotten the rag he used to dry himself so I took it to him, holding his hands in mind, one and then the other, as I dried water from the thin webbing between his fingers. Though I disagreed with him about the changes happening in our country, I understood intuitively his fear and sadness. He was, with his lithe swimmer’s body, an extension of the land and water; he was this place, as much as the dunes. Each bore of the drill, each suffocation of sand beneath concrete, he felt as an affront to his being. Perhaps it even caused him pain, for it was around this time that his body, long his trusted instrument, began to fail him, his skillful hands curling up with what I now know was arthritis, his toes swelling like fat cucumbers.
A few days later I met one of the Aramco men up close. It was late morning, before mid-day prayers, and I had wandered into Khobar in order to pass back and forth in front of the mechanic’s shop where I had seen a motor scooter with a “for sale” sign hanging over the side mirror. It was a green Mercedes with enough rust on the front fender to make me think I might one day afford it. Before I knew he was upon me, an extremely tall and pale man began to converse with me. While I couldn’t understand the garble of English words, I ascertained that he needed directions somewhere, and after a brief panic, I understood enough to be of assistance.
Thankfully, I knew exactly where the shop was that he sought, and because I had no English by that point, I led him to the spot. Before we parted ways, the man reached into his pocket and drew out a crumpled brochure. On the front were several smiling Arab faces, and the title was written in both English and Arabic: The Arabian American Oil Company. The man waggled it in front of me in such a way that I knew he wished for me to take it, so I did, nodding my head in thanks. Instead of tossing it away, I folded it in quarters and carried it back to the house, where I hid it beneath my pallet. This was the first betrayal, not unlike the moment a married man realizes he is looking at a woman who is not his wife with covetous thoughts.
The second betrayal came roughly a year later, in November of 1953. It was the off season and Baba had gone to Dammam to see if there was any work to be had there. I was wandering the shoreline prodding at the bodies of fat white jellyfish that had beached themselves and died, a kind of retroactive revenge for the many times their brethren had stung me while I swam. When I tired of this, I wandered in to town, hoping to find some boys my age to play football with. In the last few months, some Aramco men from Egypt had introduced the sport to the boys of Khobar, and now you could find a match in session at nearly any hour of daylight, save prayer times.
It was just after the noontime prayer and the streets were somnolent, a slight breeze the only indication that it was nearly winter time in our part of the world. As I came to the periphery of the city, I noticed that some streets that had been dirt just yesterday were now asphalt, and I looked around, hoping to have my observation confirmed by a passerby, as it seemed impossible that such a shift could happen overnight. But there was no one about, so I stood marveling alone for a few moments, squatting down to feel the solidness of the asphalt beneath my fingertips, looking up and down the street for signs of the machines that had carried out this transformation.
Most of the time in our lives, societal change happens incrementally and we only take note after the fact, when reading about it in the newspaper or a history textbook. Not so in Saudi Arabia in the middle of the century, when such shifts were taking place under your very feet.
Once I recovered myself, I continued on, passing the mechanic’s shop. I was surprised and thrilled to see that my scooter was back outside and still for sale! It had disappeared for a few months and I thought that surely someone had purchased it, but there it was, looking even finer than before. Someone had replaced the rusted fender, or perhaps just given it a fresh coat of paint, and I ran my hand along its smooth surface lovingly, as if it were an animal I might convince to follow me home if only I showed it enough kindness.
“Don’t touch!” The mechanic emerged from the shop, holding a wrench that he was polishing to a high shine. “I don’t want to have to clean your smudges off of the bike, boy.” His voice was not unkind, only practical in the way of a hard-working man who hasn’t energy to spare repeating a completed task. On the wall hung a small portrait of King Abdulaziz looking stately in his gold-lined bisht. I had heard he was blind in one eye, that it appeared a cloudy white up close, but in the portrait both eyes were black and penetrating beneath his white ghutra. A radio played softly in the background.
“Yes, uncle,” I said, and I gave the mechanic a little bow. I respected this man. His shop was almost always busy, brimming with Americans who brought their fat-tired automobiles to him, and even the occasional prince, whose broken-down Cadillacs were said to litter the desert from here to Riyadh.
“Why don’t you get a job, boy? Then you can come back and buy this scooter and be of some use to both of us.”
“I do work, uncle.”
“Obviously not very hard or you would not be strolling the streets in the middle of the day, looking as idle as the devil.”
“Sir, do you think—“
But his attention was on the radio now. “Hush, boy,” he said, reaching for the knob to turn up the volume.
I quieted and we both listened as the broadcaster announced that the King had died earlier in the day, at 10:30 this morning, at the hilltop town of Taif. His body would be buried in the desert that evening before sunset. I don’t know what came over me, for I had never met the King, he was no more real to me than the jinn that Khal Noor told me about when I was young. But in that moment, I had to turn and run away from the mechanic and his shop and that radio, for it seemed to me to be the worst news, and I had started to weep. I imagined men wrapping the King in a white shroud, pointing his feet toward Mecca, and placing him in an anonymous hole in the desert somewhere outside Riyadh, and it struck me as the loneliest possible fate. That it could befall a great man like Abdulaziz gave me a hollow feeling deep in my bowels, perhaps because I had already sensed my father’s decline, knew that he would not outlive the king by very long. For where the king had given up his hardscrabble ways after he had subdued the other tribes of Arabia, had enjoyed the fastidious attention of a dozen royal doctors and the loving hands of four wives and countless concubines, Baba had lived every year as if it were five, asking the maximum from his body, as all poor men of his generation did. Which is to say, as all his countrymen did, save the princes.
Looking back on that moment now, I can see that I wept out of fear, not grief. Fear that, now that the King was dead, the asphalt roads beneath my feet would crumble into the sand, the boys would stop playing football, the scooter would drive itself into the sea, and the Aramco men would board an airplane and disappear into the sky as quietly and mysteriously as they had arrived. Our country was still so new that it struck me as something impossibly delicate which could be broken apart at any moment.
Though it was not a conscious decision, I found myself running in the direction of Dhahran, which sat eight kilometers down the road. I was fifteen years old. If Ali could convince them to give him a job, then I determined that I could, too. I would not for a minute longer stand at the outskirts of revolution; I would charge in and be swept up, swept along, because at least then I would not be left behind.
Of course, it was still quite warm even in November, and eight kilometers is a long way by foot, so soon my charge slowed to a walk and, as blisters accumulated on my sea-softened feet, I wished vehemently that I owned that blasted mo-ped. Twice an autobus bearing the Aramco insignia roared past, but I had heard it was only for company employees, and it did not slow for me.
When I arrived more than an hour later, my thobe was sheer with sweat, my feet slippery inside my tire tread sandals. I passed by Saudi camp, which was nothing more than a few Bedouin tents, barastis, and shacks roofed in corrugated tin, with goats moving listlessly through the alleyways. I looked for Ali among the people gathered there but didn’t see him. Inside American camp, I saw a large crowd of Saudis congregating outside a low-slung building, and I soon realized that they were there for the same reason I was; that, in addition to defying my father, I would also have to elbow my way through dozens of other boys to gain purchase on my dream. There seemed to be a sense of urgency among the boys, one which was not shared by the clerk who attended them, who occasionally looked up from his paperwork to assess us with a violent indifference.
As I stood shuffling in line, I wondered if Baba had been right about the Amreeki and their oil company, and whether my presence there constituted the mortal sin of pride. I was an illiterate, rail-thin pearl diver’s son. What would the Arabian American Oil Company—such a noble name!—possibly want with me? I very nearly turned around, but at that moment another boy, whom I judged to be several years my junior, joined the queue, so I remained where I was. At least I would have company when they turned us away.
Around me, boys spoke about the King’s death.
“They buried him with a thousand coins of solid gold, a last gift from the Americans.”
“I heard he had more than thirty sons and at least twice as many daughters!”
“They needed six airplanes to bring him and the harem to Dhahran from Riyadh.”
“No, stupid, he didn’t bring his harem with him when he traveled!”
“Especially not here. He wouldn’t have wanted any of the women running off with an American!”
“The King had the Americans wrapped around his finger. Do this! Do that! And they did, because otherwise—“ and the boy drew a finger across his neck as if slitting his own throat.
The boys around me laughed with gusto, and I joined in with them, though I found the familiarity with which they talked about the King disconcerting. It had been some time since I had been in a group of my peers and their risible energy was catching, so that I found myself dancing back and forth from foot to foot, made giddy by the possibilities of this new life.
As I crept closer to the clerk’s desk, I was able to better assess the man who sat there. He didn’t look Saudi to me, but perhaps he was from the Hijaz. I had heard that people on the west coast often possessed the hodgepodge characteristics of a millennia’s worth of tradesmen who had made their way down the Red Sea to Jeddah. The man standing behind him, though; he was a Saudi, with a formidable mustache and a round, good-humored face, not handsome, exactly, but expressive and self-assured. What impressed me the most about Mohamed Dossary on that day was his Western attire. I had never before seen a man in a shirt and neck tie, and although I now understand that many Westerners deride this professional male uniform, on that day I found it to be incredibly spiffy, the pants suggestive of masculinity in a way the loose, prudish thobe could never be.
Mohamed wore an immaculate white dress shirt that closed in front with a series of marvelous buttons, which at the time I mistook for pearls, so gleaming were they. The shirt was corralled by a black leather belt fastened with a shiny silver buckle. From behind the clerk’s desk, Mohamed surveyed the room around him as if he were the crown prince and successor to the deceased king, occasionally giving firm-voiced instructions to the clerk, who showed momentary signs of life at the sound of Mohamed’s voice. Sheikh Dossary had a way of making even middle management magisterial, and seeing his dignity that day gave me courage. Here was a Saudi in a position of power, however meager, and though he likely wasn’t the son of a pearl diver, he couldn’t have started that much further up the ladder of life from me since, before the advent of oil, Saudi fathers could be one of only a handful of things—shepherd, merchant, subsistence farmer, fisherman, imam, prince—none of which, with the exception of merchant and prince, yielded much of an income. Across the sea of heads, he saw me staring and gave me a smile, and I couldn’t help observing that this smiling Aramco Saudi seemed far happier than Baba.
The clerk’s eyes roamed lazily to the clock on the wall—yet another miraculous technology I had never before encountered—and all of a sudden he stood and shouted that he would register only five more boys and that the rest of us would have to come back on Saturday because of course they were closed on Fridays and we should all be at the mosque with our fathers, praying like good boys. A great clamor arose among the boys, and I found myself caught in a crush of bodies as we fought to be among the final five. Some in the crowd were legitimately eighteen or even older, and they used their bulk to their advantage, pushing the smaller among us, myself included, to the floor. I felt a sharp pain in my leg as someone stepped on my shin bone, and I cried out, a squeal of pain that would have embarrassed me if I hadn’t been in such anguish.
As I was about to yield to my pathetic position, eye to eye with the other boys’ feet, I felt someone take me by the shoulders, lift me up, and carry me as if I weren’t any more substantial than a sugar sack. I couldn’t see who was responsible for my levitation until the party had set me down at the front of the roiling group: Mohamed Dossary.
“This one,” he instructed the clerk, who asked me how old I was.
“Yimkin eighteen,” I said, as I had heard you were supposed to do.
“We’ll have to take an x-ray of your wrist to be sure,” Mohamed said, a serious expression settling on his face. Horrified that I might be caught in a lie, I turned to leave but Mohamed seized my arm. “Don’t worry, little brother. They don’t do that anymore. Not since they realized that even our eighteen year-olds have the bone structure of a twelve year-old American boy raised on hamburgers.”
He chuckled and the clerk raised an eyebrow but didn’t make a fuss, instead scribbling on his sheet of paper. When he asked me for my skills I told him that I could swim about ten fathoms deep, but that my father could do seventeen. The clerk shot me a befuddled expression, as if I had just told him that I had a talent for breaking wind. It must not have mattered much, for he took my photograph—for which I was unprepared, and in which I bear a terrible grimace— issued me an Aramco ID, and pointed to a number in the upper right hand corner of the card. “This,” he said, “is your badge number. Forget your birthday, if you ever knew it. Here you live and die by this number.”
He told me to report to the adjacent admin building on Saturday, where I would begin my tenure as a tea boy. He also informed me that all new Saudi employees would be offered complimentary part-time schooling just next door, that I should arrive early and ask for Mr. Fahtin Hijazi. I was overcome with joy knowing that I would see Ali again, and that perhaps we could navigate through this strange lunar landscape together as comrades-in-arms.
My eyes ranged expectantly between Mohamed and the clerk.
“On your way, then!” Mohamed commanded at last.
“But…” I stuttered.
“What is it boy?” the clerk snapped. “You’re wasting our time.”
“So I should turn up on Saturday?”
“Yes, as I said!”
“Even though the King…” I let my voice trail off. It seemed somehow insolent to say “king” and “death” in the same sentence. I watched Mohamed’s face and saw that my meaning had registered.
“We’re not going anywhere, little brother,” he said, by way of reassurance. “This is as much a Saudi company as an American one now.”
And while that wasn’t exactly true at the time—in fact, far from it—hearing Mohamed’s certainty was enough to convince me. I smiled and nodded, and then said, “Shukran!” a bit too loudly, almost shouting, so that again Mohamed laughed.
I waited a week to tell my father, enough time for me to earn my first paycheck, or rather, my first sackful of Maria Teresa coins. I went to the mechanic’s shop, where I paid an installment on the scooter. Next I went to a small shop next door that sold antique knives and jewelry, and there I purchased a small brass pocket watch, holding the thing to my ear and giggling in delight over the tick tick tick.
That evening I told my father about my new job and gave him the watch as a gift, hoping to ease the blow. I saw tears form in his eyes, and at first I was moved by the sight, as I thought that perhaps he realized what an important step this was for my future—our future, for at that point I very much looked forward to the day when I could care for my father and restore to his body a peace it had not known in its decades of diving. Only when he turned away from me to face the wall, waving me out of the house, did I understand that he persisted in looking toward the past, and I wanted to take him by the shoulders and shout at him that while 7,000 years of pearling was a formidable history, it was best to accept death when it arrived and move along with the living! Instead I left without a word.
In the early months of my Aramco employment, I saw Baba less and less. I began spending work nights in Saudi camp, where Ali had secured one of the company’s newly constructed masonry rooms. It proved to be not so terrible as I’d imagined, and I found that I rather enjoyed being crammed in to a living space with so many others. I see now that it probably filled some psychological hole left by my mother’s death and consequent lack of siblings, but at the time I only felt it to be more lively than the barasti, where Baba broke his silence only to say that he hoped I was remembering to pray during the work day.
One Thursday afternoon, payday, after I’d again collected my sackful of silver riyals, I rode the bus back to Khobar intending to spear a pair of hammour and grill them for supper for Baba and me. I wanted to celebrate my promotion from tea boy to commissary stock boy. I had been with Aramco nearly a year now, I was approaching seventeen years of age, and I felt that in the last year I had passed through some secret doorway and into the realm of men. I was in a fine mood, feeling that all was right with the world and that nothing but good things awaited me, channeling the kind of unadulterated joy that only the young can muster.
One of the American administrators to whom I served coffee each morning had taught me to whistle, and this is what I was doing when I entered the barasti that afternoon. I knew instantly that something was wrong. Baba lay curled on his pallet, facing away from the door, and when I knelt beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder, I felt a hard lifelessness beneath my fingertips. Still, I spoke to him, refusing to believe. Baba, I’ve been paid today, look! He hadn’t cared for money when he had been alive, what made me think that he would become interested in death?
At last I forced myself to shut up, remembering what Khal Noor had said about our souls, how they often lingered near our bodies for hours after death. I grew silent, listening for any sign that my father was nearby, but none came. Gently I rolled him onto his back and took his hands, and it was then I discovered that he was clutching the pocket watch I had given him that first payday. At the sight of it, I buried my face in his neck and wept. I wept because he was gone, and because I had not been by his side when he passed from this world. But I wept most mightily because I would never be sure if he had reached for the watch in his last moments as a comfort, or as a final reminder of all that he felt he had lost.
Keija Parssinen is the author of the novels The Ruins of Us and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis. She is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Award and an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and her work has been supported by fellowships from Yaddo, the Truman Capote Trust, Playa Summer Lake, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing has appeared in Slice Magazine, Salon, Five Chapters, New Delta Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, the Lonely Planet travel anthologies, and elsewhere. A professor of creative writing at the University of Tulsa, she lives in Oklahoma with her husband and sons.