The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “ ‘Number three,’ ” Amal said finally, unable to help herself.

  “I apologize for that,” Mustafa said, embarrassed. “I assure you I’ve told Waj nothing about you that would imply an inappropriate relationship. But he has a fertile imagination, and he lacks a proper filter between his brain and his mouth.”

  “So I gather.”

  “Also, he takes a very personal interest in my marital affairs. He’s prouder of my marriage to Noor than I am at this point; he believes he’s responsible for it.”

  “And why is that? Did he introduce you to her?”

  “No,” Mustafa said. “He made it possible for me to afford to marry her. Stock options,” he explained. “Waj sold me some of his shares in eBazaar, a few months before the IPO.”

  “EBazaar! But you must be rich, then. Why are you still in government service?”

  “I would be rich, if I’d taken all the shares Waj offered me. But I decided to hedge my bet by investing in some other Internet stocks that didn’t perform nearly as well . . . Still, it was quite a windfall. I thought I was rich. Rich enough to behave very stupidly, for a while.”

  “Forgive me,” Amal said, “but I still don’t understand how you could do such a thing.”

  “Oh, it’s not hard. There’s actually an 800 number you can call, to get information on the practicalities of taking multiple wives. A website, too, government-funded, courtesy of Al Saud . . . At least that used to be the case. I suppose your mother’s efforts in Congress may have led to some changes.”

  “That isn’t what I—”

  “I know what you meant,” Mustafa said. “The short answer is, you do it by deliberately confusing what is permitted with what is right. Money makes the confusion easier.” He looked at her, then continued in a softer tone: “It’s OK, I don’t expect you to understand. You kind of had to be there.”

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Female infertility

  (Redirected from Barren)

  Female infertility is a condition in which a woman either cannot conceive or cannot carry a pregnancy to term. There are many types of infertility and many possible causes, such as genetic defects, physical abnormalities, hormonal disorders, and the effects of various diseases.

  Female infertility is one of the most common grounds for divorce . . .

  Fadwa was praying to the Virgin Mary on the night Mustafa met Noor.

  Mustafa had known Fadwa since childhood. She was the daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, and whenever Umm Mustafa went home to visit her family in downstate Iraq, or when Fadwa’s parents came up to Baghdad, the two of them ended up playing together. When he was very young, Mustafa’s sisters sometimes teased him by saying that he and Fadwa were going to be married one day.

  Then, just as the two of them were reaching an age when boys and girls were expected to play separately, Fadwa’s father got a job abroad, in America of all places. Umm Mustafa was sad to see her friend leave, but she was also excited, because she thought her own dreams of travel would now be realized. But visiting Fadwa’s mother in her new home proved insurmountably difficult: Americans were stingy with tourist visas, and both times that Umm Mustafa successfully navigated the bureaucracy, the trip had to be canceled at the last minute, once because Abu Mustafa couldn’t get leave from the university and once because of Umm Mustafa’s declining health.

  Mustafa’s mother had been dead three years by the time he saw Fadwa again. He’d just finished college and started working at Halal. He’d heard Fadwa’s family was back in Iraq—her father’s American job a casualty of the Gulf War—but still he was surprised to get a letter from her, an invitation to her brother’s wedding. He almost didn’t go. He was on assignment that weekend, a stakeout in Samarra, but at the last moment he got Samir to cover for him and drove south to the village where his mother had been born.

  Fadwa had grown into a beautiful young woman. Mustafa spent most of the wedding party hovering around her, and late in the day the two of them went for a stroll through the village, visiting their childhood haunts. Little about the place had changed, with the exception of the broad irrigation canal that now ran through the fields to the west. Numerous signs proclaimed the canal a “gift” of the Baath Labor Union.

  Fadwa told Mustafa that her father was thinking of joining Baath. “He doesn’t want to—he doesn’t like or trust Saddam Hussein—but he’s had a terrible time finding work since we got back from America.”

  “He is right not to trust Saddam,” Mustafa said, going on to explain that the canal-building project, pushed through the state legislature with a series of bribes, was really an elaborate revenge plot. “The Shia smuggler gangs along the Persian border refused to join Saddam’s syndicate, so as punishment he’s draining the marsh out from under them.” As for the many innocent marshlanders whose ancient way of life was being destroyed, Saddam didn’t care about them. Neither did the federal government, unfortunately. “My boss has been trying to get the Environmental Protection Agency involved in the case—they actually have more power than Halal when it comes to this sort of thing. But Iraqis apparently don’t qualify as an endangered species.”

  “So it falls to you then,” Fadwa said, smiling at his seriousness. “You’ll have to get the old gangster yourself.”

  “Well, I am going to try,” said Mustafa, smiling back.

  Several months later, Mustafa’s sisters and aunts met formally with the women of Fadwa’s family to hammer out the details of a marriage contract. Once that was taken care of, the men got together and had a barbeque. Mustafa and Fadwa’s wedding was in June. With money from Mustafa’s family, they got a starter house in the suburban district of New Baghdad.

  That first year of their marriage was a happy one, though to Mustafa looking back later it often seemed like something that had happened to another person. Those were the days when he once more strove to be a proper Muslim: praying regularly, giving to charity, fasting during Ramadan. Much of what he did, he did to please Fadwa, just as he’d once done it to please his mother, but pleasing her gave him a sense of fulfillment that felt very much like righteousness. The sense of fulfillment carried over to his work. People sometimes referred to Halal agents as “God’s policemen” because they enforced purity laws; Mustafa preferred to think of his job as protecting the weak against exploitation by the wicked, but either way you looked at it, it was a banner year for the God squad. They seized a lot of contraband and locked up a lot of bad people, and even the old gangster Saddam seemed, for a time, tantalizingly within reach.

  The trouble began the following year, when Fadwa’s family came to visit them in Baghdad during the Festival of Sacrifice. Fadwa’s mother commented repeatedly on the fact that Fadwa wasn’t pregnant yet. What were they waiting for? Was there some problem? Mustafa, figuring these were the pro forma expressions of concern that mothers-in-law were supposed to make, paid them little mind. Fadwa was badly shaken, though. After her parents went home, she broke down and confessed to Mustafa that she’d been keeping a family secret from him. One of her maternal grandmother’s sisters had been divorced by her husband after she proved incapable of bearing children. Not only did he literally kick her out of the house, he blamed her infertility on immoral behavior, a vile accusation that she denied, but that so shamed her she ended up committing suicide.

  Mustafa listened gravely to this story but failed to take it as seriously as he should have. Family honor was important and memories were long, but the events Fadwa described had occurred before either of them had even been born. More importantly, Mustafa had come to take his own good fortune for granted, seeing the past year’s joy as a natural state of affairs rather than a blessing that might not last. This arrogance blinded him to the depth of Fadwa’s fear.

  “Your great-aunt’s husband sounds like a monster,” he said when she’d finished. “And what happened was a tragedy. But it’s got nothing to do with us.”

 
Fadwa looked at him warily. “What if I can’t conceive?”

  “Don’t be silly. You will. Of course you will.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Fadwa, come on.” He cupped her face in his hands. “You know I would never put you out.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded and pretended to be reassured. But after that day things were different between them. Fadwa began demanding sex more often—in itself, nothing to complain about, but the act was tainted by an aura of desperation that grew stronger over time. In matters of faith, Fadwa became a scold, chastising Mustafa for any sign he was shirking his obligations.

  Six months later Fadwa still wasn’t pregnant and Mustafa conceded that there might be a real problem, though he felt sure it was temporary, some biological speed bump that medical science could cure. He told Fadwa to make a doctor’s appointment. She did, but the appointment kept getting rescheduled. After several months of delays, Mustafa placed an angry call to the doctor’s office and found out it wasn’t the doctor who’d been postponing the exam.

  Now it was Mustafa’s turn to play the chastiser. “You need to stop being foolish and get this checked out, Fadwa,” he said. “Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get it fixed.”

  The verdict, when it finally came, was devastating. “Premature ovarian failure.” Mustafa repeating the doctor’s words felt sluggish and dumb. “Premature ovarian failure, that’s, what is that, early menopause?”

  No, it wasn’t; it was much worse. A woman in menopause knows she cannot have children. A woman with premature ovarian failure knows only that she is unlikely to. Between five and ten percent of women with the condition still managed to conceive, the doctor said; but because the underlying causes were still poorly understood, there was no way to predict who would be in that lucky minority. And while they could treat Fadwa for some of the related symptoms, about the condition itself there was nothing to be done.

  “And you’re sure that’s what’s wrong with her?” Mustafa said this several times, not so much because he doubted the diagnosis but because he needed time to get used to it, this new reality that was not at all what he had expected. Meanwhile Fadwa was sitting right beside him, watching him, absorbing his every word, every facial tic. If Mustafa had it to do over again, he would have insisted on meeting with the doctor alone, first—not the act of an enlightened husband, perhaps, but one that would have allowed him a chance to sort his own feelings in private. As it was, Fadwa suffered the double torment of hearing the bad news herself while observing Mustafa’s reaction to it—and projecting, into that reaction, all of her worst fears. By the time Mustafa had collected himself enough to try to comfort her, it was too late.

  Fadwa called her mother that night in tears. Within twenty-four hours, the whole family knew. Fadwa’s father was the first to offer advice, saying that of course they mustn’t put all their trust in one doctor. They needed a second opinion—at least!—and he knew just where to go for one: a hospital with a first-rate family planning clinic that had recently opened in Adhamiyah.

  Mustafa knew the hospital he was talking about. It had been financed by donations from Baath and the Saddam Hussein Foundation, and was already under scrutiny by Halal for possible narcotics violations. But Fadwa’s father, now a fully employed union member, no longer regarded Saddam as a bad guy, and when he offered to arrange an appointment at the clinic, Mustafa couldn’t refuse without insulting him.

  The Baath fertility specialist confirmed the original doctor’s diagnosis but added a measure of optimism. There were a number of experimental therapies, he said, that might increase Fadwa’s odds of conceiving.

  Mustafa quite naturally suspected a scam. “If the treatment is experimental, I assume it’s not covered by Blue Crescent. Will Saddam’s foundation be paying the bill?”

  “Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear the expense yourself,” the doctor replied. “And I won’t lie, these therapies aren’t cheap . . . But really, how can one put a price on parenthood?”

  “You seem unashamed to,” Mustafa said. Then he felt Fadwa’s hand on his wrist and knew he had been overruled.

  The doctor knew it too: “Let me get someone to take your financials.”

  While they waited to see whether the clinic would deliver more than hope in exchange for their savings, Mustafa and Fadwa received other therapeutic suggestions from family and friends: folk remedies, charms, foods to eat and foods to avoid. Mustafa’s uncle Tamir, with the authority granted him by the eight children he’d sired, said that getting a woman pregnant was mostly a matter of proper positioning during the sex act.

  And there were religious therapies, too. In addition to her regular attendance at mosque, Fadwa began making weekly pilgrimages to an Armenian church dedicated to Umm Isa, the mother of the prophet Jesus. Mary, revered by Muslims as well as Christians, was believed by some to be able to intervene on behalf of the faithful; pregnancy issues were, for obvious reasons, one of her specialties. A few of Mustafa’s Sunni cousins grumbled that this was idolatry, but Mustafa was more concerned that, like everything else they tried, it would prove ineffective.

  “Fadwa,” he said one evening, as she prepared for her visit to Umm Isa’s house, “you know I’ll never stop praying for you to be able to have a child, but if . . . if it doesn’t happen, will we—”

  She looked at him as if he were an idolater—or a blasphemer. “How dare you say that! How dare you say that! God can do anything!”

  “God can do anything,” Mustafa agreed. “He can say no. If He does—”

  But Fadwa didn’t want to hear If He does.

  Mustafa went to see his father. Alone among the relatives, Abu Mustafa had refrained from volunteering advice so far, but now Mustafa asked him the question that Fadwa refused to consider: “What if nothing works? What if we simply can’t have children?”

  “Do you love her?” Abu Mustafa asked.

  “Yes,” said Mustafa.

  “And how will you feel if you never become a father?”

  Mustafa had to think about it. Since the initial shock of the diagnosis, he’d been so focused on reassuring Fadwa, he was no longer sure of his own feelings. “I will be disappointed if that happens,” he said finally. “Probably more disappointed than I can imagine now. But I believe I could learn to live with such disappointment. What concerns me is Fadwa. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to accept it. Or trust that I have.”

  “A marriage without trust is a failed marriage,” Abu Mustafa said. “There’s a simple solution for that.”

  “No.” Mustafa shook his head. “A divorce would crush her. It might even kill her. I won’t do that.”

  Abu Mustafa smiled sadly. “So what is it you’re asking me, then? How to live with a wife who can never be satisfied? You want my expert opinion on that?”

  “Father,” Mustafa said, abashed. “I don’t—”

  “No, it’s all right. My answer is simple enough: Be kind.”

  Mustafa frowned. He’d been hoping for something more detailed. “Be kind . . . That’s it?”

  “If you can do it consistently, you’ll be a better husband than I was,” his father told him. “And Mustafa? If you can’t be kind, be honest. The sooner the better.”

  He did what he could. He acceded without complaint to whatever baby-making regimens Fadwa proposed, no matter how hopeless or absurd they seemed. He cultivated patience, and kept his own frustrations to himself, and tried not to be drawn into arguments. But here already he wasn’t being honest, and the problem only got worse.

  To help pay for the experimental fertility treatments (all worthless, and each series more expensive than the last) Mustafa began volunteering for extra assignments at work, as much overtime as he could get. This meant being away from home a lot, something that Fadwa couldn’t reasonably object to. She objected anyway, saying that Mustafa was running away from her, which he denied.

  The denials weren’t lies, at least not exactly. Yes, there were times when he needed t
o get away from Fadwa, but his ultimate goal wasn’t escape, it was renewal. Whatever the discontents of his marriage, Mustafa continued to find fulfillment in his work. It wasn’t as easy as it had once been—like many a drug warrior before him, Mustafa had become a cynic about prohibition—but bringing down a villain, avenging (or more rarely, saving) an innocent: These things still gave him a jolt of righteousness, a sense that he was contributing, in some small way, to God’s plan. Sometimes the sense of righteousness was infectious: He’d go home after a particularly good day and Fadwa would smile and laugh and be almost like her old self.

  These moments of grace never lasted, and in the long run, the idea that the joys of one sphere of life could compensate for the deficiencies of another was probably poisonous. But it kept Mustafa going for quite a while.

  Then in the fifth year of their marriage, at the end of another failed series of fertility treatments, Fadwa fell into a depression that lasted for months. Mustafa went out and arrested Saddam’s chief lieutenant in Anbar Province, catching him red-handed with a truckload of whiskey and convincing him to give up his entire distribution network in exchange for leniency. This was a major coup for Halal Enforcement—a career-making success—but it didn’t improve Fadwa’s mood in the slightest. Mustafa, unable to contain his feelings for once, ended up shouting at her: Why could she not be happy for him?

  That night he lay awake, thinking about the wedding party where he and Fadwa had reconnected as adults, wondering what his life would be like if that day had never happened. What if Fadwa’s letter of invitation had been lost in the mail? What if his car had broken down, or he simply hadn’t gone? What if, what if. Of course it might not have made any difference. It could be that he was fated to marry Fadwa no matter what. But it was possible to imagine a world in which that wasn’t so. What if, what if.