Bride of the Sea

by Eman Quotah

  At Fareed’s villa, Muneer is buzzed through the gate. In the courtyard, he leaves the garbage-ripe smells of the street behind. Here, jasmine and gardenia perfume the night. Fareed opens the villa door himself. He is casual, the collar of his thawb unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up. As the two men lower themselves onto cushions in the family room, rather than a formal salon, Muneer feels the scratch of his own starched collar and ghutrah. Fareed settles in next to a shisha, its coals glowing orange, and brings the nozzle to his mouth. He exhales and offers the pipe to Muneer, who gestures no.

  There are phrases of greeting people normally pass between them at the start of a conversation: “God protect you and yours.” “How is the family?” “It’s been too long.” “How are the children?” These things go unsaid. Muneer sees no point in stalling. The awkwardness of his topic is unavoidable.

  “Have you talked to them?” Saying their names would be painful. Besides, Fareed knows who they are.

  “She told us she was going to California.” Fareed says the words slowly, as though carefully lifting drinking glasses out of a cardboard box. “You didn’t know that? That was more than a month ago.”

  He offers Muneer the shisha again. Muneer says no. Fareed must know Muneer suspects the family of covering up for Saeedah. But at first, Muneer can’t keep himself from pretending he believes Fareed. He feels the stress of playacting along his cheekbones, through his forehead and his jawline. His face wants to break into a grimace of disgust. But he can’t call this man he’s looked up to for years a liar. He searches Fareed’s face for signs of distress. Perhaps the casualness of his clothing is a sign—perhaps his grief has kept him from getting dressed.

  Muneer hates to be so charitable. He wants someone to blame. If Saeedah was going to California with his daughter, someone should have told him. Randah should have told him. Lie or omission, they have deceived him.

  A young woman in a black headscarf and floor-length cotton dress comes in with a tray of sodas. Muneer was rude to say no to the shisha. To atone, he takes a glass, though he doesn’t want it.

  “Can you learn where they are?” Muneer’s voice chips at the edges. “Saeedah can do what she wants, go where she wants. I want my daughter back.”

  “Young man, I want the same thing.” Fareed sets down the nozzle and presses his fingers into the bones beneath his eyes. “We have prayed. We have spoken to private investigators. We have spoken to the ambassador in Washington.”

  “Thank you, Aminah,” Fareed says as the woman leaves with the tray.

  They’re alone again. The privacy emboldens Muneer and dissolves his mask of respect for a man who raised a daughter who would run away from her family.

  “It’s not possible you don’t know where your daughter is.” He senses how wrong the words are as they leave his mouth, but he doesn’t regret saying them. “You might not have spoken to her, but she must call her mother.”

  The shisha bubbles as Fareed sucks. In Muneer’s eyes, the smoke he breathes out is an obfuscation.

  “We’re devastated. But at least we must believe your girl is with her mother, and that is a good place for her to be.” He touches his heart. “As I said, we have an American looking for her. But there’s no reason for the world to know they’ve disappeared. We’ll find them soon, and this situation will be like nothing.”

  Muneer wishes he hadn’t twice said no to the shisha. He inhales Fareed’s fragrant smoke. He needs something to soothe his nerves.

  Fareed laughs, a sound like a warning. What he is about to say is not what Muneer wants to hear.

  “Don’t forget, we fathers are fourth in respect, after mothers: your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father.”

  Muneer loves this saying of the Prophet. But he wishes Uncle Fareed had not spoken it, and asks God’s forgiveness for the thought.

  “Ya’qub went blind when he lost his child Yusuf,” Muneer says. He understands the English expression of “blood boiling.” Heat surges in his body.

  “God forbid,” Fareed says. “Thank God, we are healthy. We have our sight.”

  “Our sight, but not our children. Let me give you something for the investigator.”

  “I won’t take your money.”

  Muneer sits a beat longer. “You have to tell me when you hear from her. Swear you will, Uncle.”

  “Of course. God willing, we’ll tell you,” Fareed says. “And may God give your upstart paper great success. Competition is good for us newsmen.”

  Fareed sucks on the shisha, and then smiles for the first time during this meeting. He lets the smoke come out the corners of his mouth and tells a story Muneer has heard before: how Fareed’s father came up with the idea of an upstart paper in the 1920s while he was smoking shisha with fellow veterans of the Hejazi army, in the open air of a café in downtown Jidda, which was a small yet important port city at the time. Their breath infused with apple-scented smoke, their minds animated by camaraderie and regional pride, the friends imagined a broadside that would tell the truth about everything and reflect their cosmopolitan city, the most vital organ of their beloved Hejaz, which they saw as a strip of land containing everything: mountains, plains, valleys, coastline, oases, agriculture, and the two holiest sites in the world. An English merchant named Fitzworth financed the partners. They told him, “One day, one of us will own Harrods, and we’ll pay it back.”

  “None of those guys ever owned Harrods,” Fareed says. “The Egyptians beat us to it, like they beat us to everything else.” He always tells this joke when he talks about the founding of his paper. Muneer found it funny once.

  At first, they called the paper Voice of the Hejaz, but soon, the Hejaz belonged to the Saudi kingdom, and the paper belonged to the new nation. It became, in the 1930s, al-Sharqiyah.

  “That was my father’s idea, too,” Fareed says. “A paper to unite the people of our whole region.”

  Many years later, Imad and Muneer had started Akhbar al-’Urus—News of the Bride—with big aspirations, too: a paper for the people of Jidda, where Eve was said to be buried, a city affectionately called the Bride of the Red Sea.

  Muneer knows neither paper belongs to the people any longer. Both are bankrolled by the royal family, like every paper in the kingdom. But Fareed has deeper connections than Imad does. He can ask permission to say the things no one else is allowed to say, to say them in such a way that they ruffle no feathers.

  He has money to find his daughter, and Muneer does not.

  Fareed stands, a cue for Muneer to leave, but Muneer remains seated and Fareed is forced to look down at him. What should seem like a position of submission beneath the older man’s gaze instead feels powerful to Muneer. He knows he has the higher moral ground.

  ROUTINE

  When the faithful are called to prayer, they must perform ritual ablution, and when a man is unmarried, his family must find him a bride. Muneer’s family does not let the loss of his daughter keep them from encouraging him to remarry.

  Muneer’s brother Bandar favors a second cousin on their father’s side for him, a tall girl with green eyes inherited from a Turkish grandmother. Marrying her would strengthen ties with that side of the family, which, everyone seems to agree, have weakened since their father’s death.

  Muneer’s sister Lateefah wants his permission to share with her girlhood friend’s younger sister a wallet photo taken of him soon after his high school graduation. The friend and her sister are from a good Jidda trade family, Lateefah says.

  Muneer’s mother comes back from women’s gatherings and weddings speaking of some young woman, as luminous as the moon, who knows at least three Hadeeths for every situation: the importance of patience, forgiveness, cleanliness, privacy, moderation in food and drink, mothers, fathers, avoiding sin, charity, exercise, kindness to animals.

  Lujayn has a new university classmate to recommend weekly, until she marries a second cousin, moves out of Mama’s apartment, gets pregnant, and puts her studies on hold, aga
inst the advice of Muneer and their other siblings.

  He would like his mother and siblings to stop fussing, but they don’t listen.

  The prospective brides are sixteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds, a few twenty-year-olds midway through university. Most Jidda women five or ten years younger than Muneer are married, and no one would recommend a widow or a divorcee.

  “God protect you. You’ve suffered enough already,” his sisters say.

  Muneer might consider marriage under other circumstances, but he can’t afford it yet, he tells them. He is saving his halalas for a round-trip ticket to America. After a trip, he saves again. The family keeps trying, though.

  Soon after Muneer’s visit—the last time the two men will speak—Fareed begins sending a courier to the four-room offices of Akhbar al-’Urus to deliver a PI’s reports, monthly at first, then quarterly. The packets of typed records of the American’s comings and goings across the United States come stuffed in heavy manila envelopes, the pages butterfly-clipped and accompanied by fuzzy photographs. Muneer carries the envelopes home in his briefcase.

  “If that’s a tip, I hope you’re going to share it with me,” Imad says the first few times.

  Muneer wonders if Imad knows the envelopes contain something personal. They never talk about the contents, though sometimes Muneer thinks he would like to. Imad is a good guy. He shaves his face clean, unlike most of the other men Muneer knows, and keeps a fountain pen and a Bic in the chest pocket of his thawb, a pack of cigarettes in his deep side pocket. He speaks English, French, Spanish, and, as more guest workers arrive in Jidda over the years, picks up a little Urdu, Bengali, Tagalog. Sometimes Muneer thinks he catches a whiff of alcohol on Imad’s breath, but he’s never sure. Regardless, Imad talks to people easily, as a reporter should, while Muneer must bolster himself whenever he picks up his reporter’s notebook.

  At first, Muneer is jealous that the PI, a man he’s never met, is doing the searching he daydreams about. He’s ashamed to delegate this duty and not pay for it. Months later, he is angry: Hanadi’s been gone for more than a year. The daughter in his memory and in the few photos of her he possesses stays four, while Hanadi, he knows, is growing older, taller, more out of reach.

  Two years pass. Three years. Muneer waits and waits for real news, true news of his daughter. He would like to shrink, limit himself to his mother’s two-bedroom apartment; his desk at Akhbar al-’Urus; and the fifteen-minute drive between home and work, past the green neon shop fronts of Tahliyah Street. Instead, in these early years of the separation, he wraps himself in other people’s stories.

  Assigned to cover the mayor of Jidda and the growth of the city, he files stories on high-rise apartments going up, the city’s first department store, first shopping mall, first Safeway, first pizza parlor, first hamburger shop, first Henry Moore sculpture on the Corniche, first hotel buffet, first cappuccino.

  Ikea, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola are years away.

  He haunts the Old City, the gold souk, the perfume souk, the miswak vendors, the new discount souk with concrete stalls and no soul. He writes about a historic rainstorm that doesn’t let up for half a day. The city floods, and al-Sharqiyah respectfully calls for King Khalid to remove the mayor. He simply covers the damage, naming no names.

  “We’re the new paper on the block. I don’t trust our royal patron to cover our butts,” Imad tells Muneer, using English idioms, while they’re driving to grab lunch one day. In the car, he can say what he can’t say in the newsroom, where they know there are probably spies and bugs. Imad switches to Arabic for a more heartfelt sentiment: “God is the Protector. I need this paper to survive.”

  So does Muneer. It is his life’s dream to uncover the truth. Digging up half-truths is better than nothing.

  Finding Hanadi matters more than anything. He dreams of a child who looks nothing like his memories of her, and yet he knows her to be his daughter. There is so much he no longer knows: How tall is she? How deep is her one dimple? She was learning her English letters when he last saw her. What books is she reading? How long is her hair? What phrases does she fall back on over and over? Where is she? What will it take to get her back?

  He needs Akhbar al-’Urus to survive, and he needs Fareed to survive, too, to continue to be able to pay for the PI’s search for their daughters.

  Four years pass. Everyone but his mother stops urging him to marry.

  In 1979, when terrorists lay siege to the Holy Ka’bah, no one, Fareed included, has the balls or the permission to run it in his paper. The secret police personally visit the kingdom’s newspaper editors, telling them to keep it hushed until the government says so. As though no one listens to BBC Arabic. Imad never announces it to the staff, but the reporters gossip, and they know the newspaper editors of Makkah and Jidda are the ones who have leaked the news to the BBC and the foreign wire services. Muneer is happy to be a reporter, a lesser person who doesn’t have to make such a tough call.

  He makes a handful of trips to the United States over the years. Near the fifth anniversary of the disappearance—Hanadi’s tenth birthday—Muneer’s younger brother Tariq, newly at work for the airlines, helps him buy a discounted ticket. It is thin, wispy, but it feels like a million dollars in his hand. Muneer walks onto the plane in his thawb. A pair of khaki pants and a button-down shirt are carefully folded in his carry-on. Midflight, he washes up in the tiny lavatory, lifting his foot up and into the sink with his hand. He prays in his seat, though others pray in the aisles. The layover in Frankfurt is purgatory, but when he lands at JFK, he feels more hopefulness than he’s felt since Hanadi’s birth.

  A few weeks ago, a friend of Jameel’s younger brother Rami saw Saeedah and Hanadi in San Francisco. The friend-of-a-friend tip for once corresponds with something the PI sent: photos of a North Bay bungalow half hidden behind bougainvillea.

  On the drive from the airport in Rami’s tan Chevy, there are yellow ribbons on trees and lampposts. On the radio, there is talk of Iran. Rami likes the oldies station. Elvis croons, I can’t help. … Muneer remembers the days of the oil embargo, how he’d hear the word A-rab floating in the air—at the grocery store, in the library, at the gas station and the playground—and wish he could shrink inside his clothes or hide behind a wool scarf.

  “Americans don’t know the difference between Iranians and Arabs,” Rami says. “We’ve been keeping a low profile. But we don’t feel safe on campus.”

  No one would bother a little girl? Would they?

  At a red light, Rami maneuvers the slip of paper bearing the bungalow’s address out of his back pocket. He hands the address to Muneer, who locates it on the road atlas with his finger. With the windows rolled down, the wind musses the pages. He holds the book open with two hands. The air smells something like licorice. Rami drives with one hand on the wheel, the other arm resting on the open window.

  The whole scene is too relaxing, Muneer thinks, too much like a road trip and not enough like a mission. He thinks, Inshallah, inshallah, inshallah, but something tells him before they arrive that there will be no cars in the driveway, the lawn will be overgrown, the house empty.

  BENEATH THE MOTHERS’ FEET

  Nearly ten years have passed without Hanadi when Imad hires two women to copy edit the paper. They have their own entrance through the back and their own office with two desks face-to-face, but they share the men’s assistant, who distributes morning tea and daily copies of al-Sharqiyah, al-Ahram, Asharq al-Awsat, and Jidda’s two English papers. Imad insists the women attend editorial meetings, and they choose to stand on the perimeter of the men’s space, taking notes. The men joke among themselves that Azizah must constantly chew luban gum; they hear the occasional smack of it under her molars at staff meetings. Her red pen is fierce, but her bangs are artfully arranged and curled onto her forehead, her scarf wrapped loosely. Lamees, on the other hand, has a smoker’s voice, but seems too pious to have ever lit a cigarette. Her edits are friendlier than Azizah’s, filled with quer
ies, yet her headscarf is sharply creased down the middle and tightly wound, letting not a wisp of hair out of its grasp. The scarf’s dark outline accentuates her round cheeks and high forehead, the deep brown of her eyes.

  The assistant, Jacob, is a smart-dressed Filipino man who, back in Manila, was a newspaper reporter for ten years. Imad recruited him to help start an English-language paper, but it failed after six months. Jacob, who reads enough Arabic to understand headlines, ferries pages between the women and the men. He can’t jump ship to one of the two English-language newspapers that remain in the city because Imad holds his passport, as employers must do for foreign employees.

  Jacob laughs in the Saudi men’s faces as he hands them their marked-up copy.

  “You can’t be alone with your women, but my countrymen and I can. You don’t think we’re men like you?”

  “This is our culture,” Imad says. There is a shrug in the men’s voices when they talk about the way things are: between men and women, Saudis and expats, Muslims and Christians, royals and everyone else.

  “What would the women say to that?” Jacob says.

  “We’ll ask them,” Imad says. And so the women’s weekly column, “Daughters of Saudi,” is born.

  They write about too-lavish weddings and Saudi men’s marriages to foreigners and non-Muslims, about Saudi mothers’ overreliance on Filipina nannies, and the significance of Laylat al-Qadr. The one thing Imad tells them not to write about is the driving issue.

  “People aren’t ready for that debate.”

  “We weren’t going to suggest it,” Azizah says.

  Muneer tries to guess which of the women the opinions belong to. He wishes he had a way to speak to Lamees, but she isn’t forward like Saeedah was, so he keeps his eyes down and his tongue quiet on the rare occasions they cross paths on the way to their cars.