Sleep Well, My Officer. I’m Your Hijazi Sweetheart.

An Egyptian soldier in 2015 War against House of Saud & their Salafis
clerics.With a Hejazi virgin of a secular family who loved Egypt and its secular values and hated House of Saud and their Salafis clerics.


To the memory of Princess Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud



He was asleep again.

Masha-il put her book of Nizar Qabbani poems on the floor and looked to the bed, where he lay. Darkness covered the window in the tiny room, and beyond it, crisp hot air, fields of sand and heat, sandy dunes rising like ramparts into a moonless sky. The only light came from the bedside lamp, which cast an amber glow onto his face. She could sit here for hours. All night, if she dared, just gazing at him.

Her officer.

Sometimes he cried out in his sleep. Words she couldn’t understand. Some of them sounded like names. At night they stabbed through her dreams and brought her to the doorway, where she watched him toss and mumble like he wanted to throw off the blankets and get back to his mission, whatever it was.

Slipping off the stool, she crept closer to his mattress. He lay on his back, mouth slightly open. The yellowish light washed away the pallor of his skin, the shadows under his eyes, made him look younger and healthier. And he did look healthier now that the hollows of his cheeks had filled out thanks to Mother’s hearty mutton shorbo.

She straightened his pillow and pulled the red wool blanket closer to his chin. He might be cold, she reasoned, even though the fever was almost gone and he had stopped shaking like he had malaria. His black hair tangled around his face, touched his shoulders. She should brush it for him. He smelled of soap and tea leaves, anise mixed with sweat. A manly smell.

Around her finger she twisted a long black ringlet, one of the two that trailed from underneath her crimson headscarf. A habit when she was near him. Delicately, she stroked a lock of hair from his forehead, as she often did while he slept, feeling her breath tighten at the scar carved through his right eyebrow, ending at the top his cheekbone.

There was so much she wanted to know. So much to learn in a shrinking amount of time.

The memorable morning had happened in early February, almost a month ago. Would she ever forget it? Nahar, her eight-year-old brother, had bounded into the valley, AK Kalashnikov rifle bouncing around his neck, shouting that a Saudi spy had tried to shoot one of the sheep.(Because we do not consider ourselves Saudis but Hijazis, the original and proper name of our country and our nationality).

When he was convinced that Nahar wasn’t playing a joke, Father had taken the family gun and gone off to investigate.

He came back half an hour later with a black-haired man slung over his shoulder, unconscious. Found face-down in the snow outside a cave, gripping the barrel of an AK, more dead than alive. Not a Saudi, in fact, but an Egyptian army officer—declared by the copper Saladin Eagle insignia on his military beret. On their side in the war against the (House of Saud), Saudis & Salafis clerics spreading through the region.

Although it didn’t matter, Father stressed. When you were sick or wounded you didn’t have a “side.” You belonged to everyone.

And so he belonged to them, this mysterious stranger. No telling how he had come to be in the Hijaz Mountains, or what he was doing there. During those early days they weren’t even sure if he would live. His breathing was shallow and laboured—tuberculosis, they assumed—and whenever his eyes fluttered open, he was too feverish to speak or make any sense.

Frightened for him, she hovered while Mother sponged his forehead and pressed poultices to his chest to rid his lungs of the infection. Anxious to be of some use, she would sing to him, lullabies she remembered from her childhood, ones she had sung to Nahar when he was a baby. She would have liked to hold his hands, to comfort him as he sweated and shivered, but that would not have been proper.

Two weeks had passed before he woke up. A wonderfully happy day for Father, Mother, and herself. Less so for Nahar, since he had to apologize for almost shooting him.

At last he had a name. Abdel-Nasser. Lieutenant colonel Abdel-Nasser Mohammad Ali from a special unit of the Egyptian Army. He wanted to leave immediately, but Father insisted that he stay with them. It was decided that as soon as Abdel-Nasser was well enough to travel, Father would sell some of his yaks and buy a satellite phone so that Abdel-Nasser could contact the army and go home.