by Eman Quotah
She’s pregnant, Sadie thinks. She feels a rising anger that they didn’t tell her before they came.
Hamza looks like he wants to take Hannah’s words back, but he’s helpless. His wavy hair is slicked with gel and his goatee gives him a distinguished, professorial look. Sadie likes the kindness in his eyes.
She sees the bundle in Hamza’s arms.
“Oh my God,” she says. Not pregnant anymore.
Hannah points to Sadie’s neck. “What’s that?” she says.
Sadie forgot the slender gold cross she has started wearing. She touches it and nods her head toward Hamza. “What’s that?”
“It’s our baby, Mom.”
“Let’s head to baggage claim, yes, ladies?” Hamza says. “And maybe a stop on the way to change Foofoo.” He pats the baby’s bottom with one hand.
Sadie feels the words she wanted to say—to explain why she’d invited Hannah and Hamza here—slipping away.
“Foofoo?” she says.
“His name is Fareed,” Hannah says.
Sadie searches for a message in Hannah’s voice. What does it mean that she has named her first child after Sadie’s father?
“Do you want me to help change him?” Sadie asks.
“Hamza can do it.”
Hamza clutches the baby, as though Fareed can save him from his wife and mother-in-law, and disappears into the men’s room. Sadie feels sorry for him.
A cart beeps at Sadie and Hannah. The white-haired man in the front passenger seat holds his cane stiff against his knee, and the woman behind him clutches her pocketbook upright on her lap. The uniformed driver lays on the horn again. Hannah and Sadie step wordlessly out of the way and hang close to the wall.
Hannah takes off her sweater and wraps it around her waist. “Where is this ceremony happening?”
“At church.”
“I’m sorry? Why is it at church?”
“I’m being baptized.” Sadie whispers so no one will hear but Hannah. Hannah leans closer; the anger coloring her cheeks and brightening her eyes is contagious. Sadie feels the fever. “I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the real reason.”
“Have we become Christian?” Hannah says.
“You are whatever you are. This is me.” Sadie has been carrying her wool coat and sweater over one arm but the weight of them distracts her. She lets them fall to the floor.
“I can’t deal with you, Mom,” Hannah says as Hamza emerges from the bathroom. He hands Fareed to Hannah and her face immediately calms, though the baby is wailing. She pats his back and he calms, too.
“It’s disgusting in there. No changing table, of course.”
“She’s converting,” Hannah says.
Hamza looks from mother to daughter.
“It’s always lies between us,” Hannah says. “She told us one thing, award ceremony, whatever, but she’s being baptized. In church.”
“That’s wonderful. I guess.”
“You have a baby,” Sadie says.
“We didn’t lie about that. Here he is. You can see him with your own eyes.”
“Thank you. May I hold him?”
“Of course,” Hamza says, but Hannah doesn’t offer baby Fareed to her mother. She holds him tighter.
“Can we please get the luggage?” she says.
It is decided that Sadie will drive home and Hannah, Hamza, and the baby will take a cab to their hotel. They are a family, and she doesn’t fit into the portrait. She writes the church address on a slip of paper and gives it to Hamza as she says goodbye to them. Hannah and the baby slide into the back of the taxi, and Hamza opens the front door for himself.
Sadie’s hungry and tired and drained. “Hannah is so angry with me. Always,” she tells Hamza. “I can’t change it.”
“Maybe you need time.” He kisses her cheek. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
His words don’t reassure her. He’s known Hannah a few years. Sadie’s known her her whole life.
In the morning, Sadie dresses in the pink pantsuit she bought with her Dillard’s employee discount, carefully applies the new pink lipstick and lip liner she chose at the makeup counter. When she walks into the church, people smile and ask if she’s nervous.
She lifts the corners of her mouth into as stiff a grin as she can so she won’t have to lie and say no.
Sitting in the pews waiting for the ceremony to start, she keeps looking back to the entrance. But Hannah never arrives.
Me and God from now on, Sadie thinks.
DETAINED
2003
MEMOIR
The first details Muneer set down, he tells Hannah, were the contents of the Riyadh prison cell he lived in for the six weeks before the liberation of Kuwait on February 28, 1991: The bunkbed pushed against the far wall. The plastic woven prayer mat, spread diagonally facing the qiblah. The cell’s pale green walls were bare, except for a wall hanging of Ayat al-Kursi embroidered in gold thread on black velvet. Muneer wondered if the jailer who hung the ayah there thought about its words: To Him is everything in the heavens and in Earth … He knows what is between their hands and what is behind them.
The men who apprehended him had met him outside the newsroom, on a dark Jidda street smelling of wastewater and, when the breeze blew a certain way, night blossoms. Someone should investigate why the municipality irrigates parks with sewage, he remembers thinking. American parks never have such an odious odor.
Two days had passed since the middle-of-the-night start of the war—timed for American prime-time television. A day had passed since Muneer wrote an editorial column condemning the American invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein should not have invaded Kuwait, of course. He had not yet started dumping crude oil in the Gulf—that would happen while Muneer was in jail—but he should not have done that or a thousand other terrible things he’d inflicted on Iraq, on Kuwait, on Saudi.
But Muneer did not believe this war waged by the American president was the answer for the Saudi nation.
The government disagreed with him. He knew he’d taken a risk. He’d hoped, he’d prayed to God they would let him be and understand he wrote his words because he loved his nation. That’s how he ended the column: by saying his love for country, flag, and king was deep, that nothing could change it.
The men—there were three, maybe four of them, he couldn’t remember exactly—had Najdi accents.
“What’s your news?” one of them said, smirking at his own joke. Muneer knew immediately why they had come.
He assured them he wouldn’t resist. They didn’t need to blindfold him or bind his wrists. He took responsibility for the things he’d written.
At least this wasn’t Iraq. He didn’t fear violence. He worried no one would tell his family he’d been taken to prison.
They didn’t find out for days; Bandar didn’t show up for a week. When the guards brought Muneer out to meet him, Muneer was glad for the first time that his father was not alive to see him in prison.
Muneer wanted to hear about Lamees, the boys and Hannah, his mother, and Operation Desert Storm—in that order. Bandar had brought letters from them, but the police confiscated the pages. He brought word, too, that Hannah’s mother’s father, Fareed, was pulling strings, trying to decipher what could be done to rescue Muneer.
Did Hannah’s father resent being helped by the father of the woman who stole his daughter from him?
For more than a decade, ideas for a book about his experience have swirled in Muneer’s head like white glitter in a snow globe he once bought in the San Francisco airport while attending a journalism conference. Shake the globe and the Golden Gate Bridge was engulfed in a blizzard like it never saw in real life.
It’s this funny, interesting way of putting things that Hannah thinks will make for a good memoir. But despite the blizzard in his brain, until a few months ago he hadn’t written a word of his memories down. Hannah has spent years trying to convince him, but he says no one else would want him to talk about this injustice. He doesn’t regret speaking o
ut against the war, but he’s never been emboldened to cross the line again. Not even after 9/11, when it became clear that most of the hijackers were Saudi. Behind closed doors, Saudis talked about what that meant. But in public? In the pages of a newspaper or online? Never.
Certain stories are best left untold, he has said to Hannah many times. If Hannah doesn’t understand, it’s because she’s American. She shrugs the accusation off. There are a lot of things she doesn’t tell people, and it’s not her fault she was born there. But the lawyer in her wants him to tell this story of her father being wronged by his own government.
“How could they imprison you without a trial?” she’d said once when he called to wish her a happy birthday. She brought up the book regularly. “What law were you breaking? Some unwritten rule about not rocking the boat?”
He insisted he didn’t have the time to write about his days in prison. He didn’t want to argue about it.
He changed his mind last year after going to a journalism conference in Cairo, where he met Bassam, an up-and-coming Lebanese American agent who asked if he’d ever thought of writing a book. With the hubbub of the conference swirling around them, he was emboldened to say yes and, in the dark, far corner of a hotel restaurant, to spill his secret to this stranger. Confessions, Muneer insisted, are often easiest to make to people who don’t know us, who have no ingrained picture of us to be muddied and mussed by revelations we’ve kept to ourselves for so long they seem impossible to accept, dangerous to believe.
“I suppose so,” Hannah says. She’s a little miffed he listened to the agent and not to her.
On a spring evening, Hannah and Muneer are eating dinner, the two of them, in a fancy seafood restaurant in downtown Seattle, blocks from her office. He insists on treating her, and she knows better than to argue.
“I’m not surprised this agent guy wants your book,” she says. “Everyone everywhere in the world wants to know the hidden details of life in Saudi.”
“Hidden from whom?” He sips ice water. “We know who we are.”
Hannah has agreed to help him write the story of what he lived through in those dark days of 1991.
“Of course I’ll help,” she says. “I’ve been wanting you to write this for ages.”
He says he does not need new trouble, so he has insisted the book be published under a pseudonym. His editor in London doesn’t know his real name.
Hannah asks if he has journals he wrote while he was detained. She wants to know why it happened.
“The government was investing a lot in the war, in convincing us it was the single path possible. They didn’t like the columns I published questioning American motives. They needed silence until the war was won.”
“And you wouldn’t stop?”
“I would have stopped if they asked me. They didn’t ask.”
“Shouldn’t a journalist believe in the absolute right to a free press?”
“Your press is buying the Bushes’ new war hook, line, and sinker—like they swallowed the first Gulf War,” he says. “I met them, the American journalists who came to cover that war. They had never been to our country before—”
“Because the Saudi government wouldn’t let them.”
“And they thought they knew our ‘Arab minds.’ We were not trustworthy. We haggled in the bazaars, we didn’t have a word for negotiate.”
“The Iraqis are who they were talking about.”
“The Arabs. Anyway, the press is treating this new war the same way. They would’ve made up an excuse for it if the government didn’t already have one.”
She picks a sliver of jicama out of her salad and chews on it. Sometimes, she wants to go back where she came from, like the racists demand. But she’s tried that already. Sometimes, it seems like there’s nowhere in the world to be.
“Ours is a good country, with good people. I left the prison cell and went straight back to journalism. The secret police not-so-secretly shut down Akhbar al-’Urus, but no one stopped me from starting another paper. Now, after 9/11, I am saying many things about our country, good and bad, that the world should know.”
“You’re putting that in your book?”
“We’re better off today than we were in the past. We have to stay on the road of modernization our rulers have put us on. But our society wants to forget the past. That’s the root of our problems. We have to know our history.”
“Bad people are the root of everyone’s problems.”
“That’s simplistic.”
“OK, Baba.” This project might be more difficult than she thought. She had hoped for a way to bond with her father, to spend time with him, carve time out of her busy life. But they would not agree on everything he wanted to say. She couldn’t always put herself in his shoes, but she would have to learn to be his conduit.
Tonight, Hannah’s father wants to tell her something else, not related to the book. They order coffee—fully caffeinated for both of them, though it’s after seven o’clock—and he takes a letter out of the breast pocket of his tan suit. It arrived the day before his planned flight to visit her about the book project, he says.
She holds the letter in two hands, as though reading a newspaper. The note appears to be from an American law firm, and she’s unprepared for the punch it delivers.
We are writing to inform you that your son, Fouad Muneer, has been detained illegally by the United States government. We learned of his detention from another illegal detainee, an Iraqi client of ours who has attended Muslim Student Association meetings with Mr. Muneer at the Sullivan School of Business and has not been told his own reason for being detained. We fear the same is likely true for your son.
Mr. Muneer is being held at the federal facility in Miami, Florida. We would be happy to assist with his legal counsel. Please contact us at the number included on this letterhead.
“You buried the fucking lede, Dad. My brother’s in jail?”
“Don’t swear, habibti.”
That word: My love. My dear. It still has the power to slay her, to surprise her. It’s the dream she worries she’ll one day wake up from: her father is alive, and he loves her.
GONE SOUTH
Hannah never finds out for sure if her father has worked on Hamza behind the scenes, but in the end Hamza convinces her to take on Fouad’s case. Her firm’s partners agree to let her do it pro bono.
She’s seen Fouad a few times since she first met him in Jidda when he was six. A couple of summers later, her dad brought the kids and Lamees to visit her. When Fouad started college, she meant to go see him in Florida. She regrets she hadn’t gone down before.
Foofoo wants to meet his “Young Uncle,” as Hamza and Hannah start calling him.
“Is he five like me?” Foofoo asks.
“No, he’s nineteen.”
“That’s not young.”
For the past year and a half, since the United States invaded Afghanistan, Hamza has been saying Iraq would be next. With the war there started, Hannah can’t sleep more than a few continuous hours. She wakes up sweating from dreams in which she dives into the Red Sea with her clothes on.
“That dream has nothing to do with war,” Hamza says.
But it does, because the last war was happening when she saw the Red Sea.
“Everything has to do with the war,” she says. “My brother in custody has to do with the war. It’s a war on us.”
A war on us even though she is not religious. They are not religious. Which sounds like a cliché, something many of her Christian and Jewish friends say whenever anything vaguely God-related comes up. But the problem runs deeper for her, taps into how weird her childhood was. Lack of religion was part of the disguise her mother created for the two of them.
Hamza’s got the opposite reason for not caring much for faith. He says he was suffocated by it growing up. After 9/11, he shaved his goatee and told her to call him Ham at the grocery store, the movie theater, the pool. “That’ll throw the Islamophobes off,” he said at the tim
e.
Because Hannah’s a sleep-deprived mess, Hamza takes over planning her life. He buys tickets for her and Muneer to fly from Seattle to Miami.
In the airport, as expected, her father is pulled aside.
She waits while the TSA folks spend fifteen minutes patting him down and questioning him in a separate room. When he comes back she shoots him a question with her eyes.
“I’m taking my daughter to Miami on vacation,” he says. “That’s exactly what I told them.”
Thank God. He knew better than to say what they were up to.
When they arrive, she’s struck by how Miami light is so similar to Jidda light. Every scene is a paradise Hannah would like to paint. She’d create the bluest sky and most turquoise sea, the most graceful palm trunks and greenest fronds, the clearest light and the most distinct shadows, suggesting coolness and respite.
Muneer is calm through renting a car and driving to the detention center. As they approach the gatehouse, he loses it.
“Bismillah, bismillah. Allahu akbar.” And other words she can’t make out.
Hannah feels shitty for saying it, but he can’t talk that way here. “Dad,” she says sternly, hoping he will notice she is not calling him Baba. “You cannot speak Arabic here. You especially can’t say any religious stuff. OK?”
He cups his hands and mutters something under his breath, finishing with “Ameen.” Amen.
“I’m done,” he says. “No more religious stuff.”
At the gatehouse, the guards’ dark sunglasses cut their faces in two. They check IDs and point to a section of the parking lot.
Hannah backs into a space, pulls up hard on the parking brake, and leaves the engine running.
“Stay here. Keep the AC on.”
Inside, the guards tell her the facility holds no one by the name of Fouad Muneer or Fouad Muneer Abdullah or Fouad Abdullah or Fouad Al Shaykh or Fouad Muneer Al Shaykh.
“Are you sure?” she says.
On the way back to the car, she’s enveloped in humid heat and the sunlight no longer impresses her with its beauty. It attacks her, and a headache flares behind her temples.
