Finding Nouf

by Zoë Ferraris

  For years she'd tutored high school students in chemistry. All of her students were from the school for girls just down the street. They came in pairs with their escorts—usually brothers or cousins—who waited while Katya helped the girls with their homework. Every once in a while, as the girls were leaving, she'd hear their escorts tease them: "Why are you studying chemistry? Can you use it for cooking? It's not like you're going to get a job." The comments hurt her as much as they wounded her students. She enjoyed the work; encouraging young girls to become more than good cooks was meaningful to her. It paid decently and it was something she could do at home. But she had longed for many years to have a job where she could put her skills to better use.

  She had received a Ph.D. in molecular biology from King Abdul Aziz University, but like every other woman in her program—an all-women's program—she had finished her degree with the bittersweet knowledge that although she had accomplished a terrific feat, she had precious few prospects for the future. There were very few jobs for women, especially educated women. Women were allowed to work only in places where they wouldn't interact with men, or so infrequently as not to draw attention to themselves, which limited them to girls' schools and women's hospital clinics.

  Fresh out of college, Katya had taken a teaching job. She had survived a year. It had been too much work for too little pay, and she simply wasn't motivated enough. She preferred the quiet of a laboratory, where she didn't have to be around people all the time, where she could experience the excitement of discovery and the pleasures of cleanliness, organization, and control. It seemed that there should be ample jobs for women in environments like that. Yet the country's scientific jobs were filled by men first. Frustrated, and growing more resentful, she'd stuck to tutoring biology and chemistry for nearly two years.

  Just when it became clear that she had no choice but to find a better job, the city crime lab opened a department for women, and she applied. They accepted her immediately, impressed with her educational background. The prospect of working in a laboratory thrilled her, but she dreaded telling her father. He hadn't liked the idea of her teaching, and that was in a strictly female environment. Although the crime lab would be segregated, there was the potential that she would see men on occasion.

  She broke the news to him with enormous trepidation. They were sitting at the kitchen table, peeling carrots and sipping tea. The fridge was empty, the stove wasn't working, and they were both feeling down. When she told him about the job, he jerked upright and narrowed his eyes. "Come on, we're not that poor," he said.

  It had stung her so deeply that she'd wanted to cry. Letting a woman work was a desperate thing to do. They had sunk in the world. Her face must have showed her disappointment, because Abu backpedaled.

  "Wait," he said. "Is this something you want to do?"

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  "Then for now..." He struggled to say it. "Take the job." He smiled sadly at her just as the tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them angrily away, embarrassed by her crying. "If it doesn't work out," he added, "you can always quit."

  She nodded again, feeling deeply relieved. Even though they didn't really have a choice, she was grateful that he'd been big enough not to care what other people would think about his daughter's working. It was exciting that she would have a job in the public sphere, but there was still a secret anguish at the thought that in working, she represented their poverty, and that somehow it shamed him.

  He was careful after that. He told her he was proud that she'd found such a well-paying job and that she was a molecular biologist. Katya suspected that deep down he still felt the shame. It manifested itself as a reluctance to tackle the problem of housework. Every morning he would stop her at the door. "Who's going to cook dinner tonight?" he would ask.

  She promised that she would still do the cooking and keep up with the housework, the cleaning and laundry and shopping that her mother had done before she'd died. It seemed a reasonable deal, because even though it was patently unfair, for Abu it was better to take things one step at a time. For now he was supporting her having a job, and that was enough.

  Katya went to work. Although being around death took some getting used to, she delighted in the fact that she was helping solve crimes. Over the course of the year Abu had realized that she didn't have the time or energy to do everything herself, and he'd begun to take up some of the slack. Now he cleaned and did laundry; he even went shopping. But he cooked dinner only when he was genuinely hungry, and even though he was only sixty-four, he was seldom hungry. He has an old man's appetite, she often thought, and I have an appetite for both of us.

  She realized that he was slightly depressed—who wouldn't be, after losing a wife of thirty years and quitting a lifelong job? She had hoped that time would heal his sadness, or at least make it more bearable. Sometimes she'd come home to find a whole dinner laid out for her—lamb, rice, eggplant, and bread—and other times it happened like this, eggs in the fridge, an experimental smoothie.

  She squeezed the smoothie glass and took a deep breath. "I've been thinking about Nouf's case all day." Abu turned to face her. Detergent bubbles dribbled down his wrist. "I'm beginning to believe she was kidnapped, like Othman said."

  He frowned. She could see in his face that he was struggling with something. "I wonder how much her family knows," he said.

  She shrugged and set her glass on the counter. "Othman has told me everything he knows."

  "Let me guess—it isn't much."

  "He's dealing with his grief. And besides, he's so busy with his job..." She trailed off, waving her hand to indicate that she'd already said all of this before. "I want to wash before dinner."

  She left the room, hoping to cut short his inevitable criticism of Othman. Abu disapproved of her marriage plans. His disgruntlement took the form of a steady, low-level grumbling, a buildup of petty discontents about Othman and his family. She knew that he was worried for her, worried that Othman didn't really love her or that he would change his mind, cancel the wedding and discard her, because he was rich and because if something better came along, he could do whatever he liked. Perhaps Abu simply couldn't believe that she was worthy of a rich man's love—she, a middle-class girl who was too old to be marrying in the first place. The thought made her uneasy, because she sometimes wondered the same thing herself. Did Othman really love her? Was he disappointed that she was twenty-eight? Would he change his mind once they were married? But in Othman's presence she was always confident of his affection. More likely the source of Abu's tension was Abu himself and his old-fashioned notion that a child's marriage should be a bargain between the parents. In that regard, he was not an equal to the Shrawis, just a statusless in-law who had been stripped of his bargaining power when Katya and Othman had arranged the marriage themselves.

  She had met Othman through her best friend, Maddawi, who had married a close cousin of his and who was a distant cousin of the Shrawis herself. The wedding had been a completely segregated event. In the family's grand suburban home, Katya had crept out onto a narrow balcony to get away from the cacophony of a celebration that involved over five hundred guests, and she'd stumbled on Othman. When he saw that her face was exposed, he didn't avert his gaze. He met her eyes and smiled—sadly, she thought. But he introduced himself, asked her name, and actually shook her hand. His self-possession and quiet confidence pleased her. She was nervous at first, not certain what to make of him, but they fell into conversation as naturally as if they were family, and they talked for two hours before he had to leave. Afterward she marveled at the fact that they had laughed like old friends and told each other stories about their families which she was certain neither of them had told anyone before.

  Over the next few months they continued to meet. They drove around in his car, where they could talk without worrying about religious police. They also met in crowded shopping malls, where the air conditioning made it possible to walk around in comfort and where,
among the bustle of thousands of shoppers, the chances of being noticed by people they knew were extremely slim. At first she thought he was attractive in a smoldering kind of way, but after a while she realized that he seemed to have no sexual intentions at all. He was the sort of man who could look at a woman's face, shake her hand, and introduce himself, and not a single part of it turned him on. He was warm and funny, sometimes a delightful conversationalist, but she suspected that deep inside he was cold. With dismay, she came upon a painful truth: that a modern, enlightened man like Othman, the sort of man who could actually meet a woman in public and not think she was a whore, might not have enough within him to sustain a passionate relationship.

  But when, one evening four months into their friendship, he took her to a secluded strip of highway and finally kissed her, she thought maybe she'd been wrong. He did have passion; he was simply a slow and careful man. And she liked him more than ever. A few weeks later he asked her to marry him, and she said yes.

  Of course, it was a scandal that she'd been meeting an unmarried man in public. She never told Abu, even after she announced her marriage plans. She simply told him that she'd met Othman at the wedding, that he'd been taken with her and they'd kept up a friendship on the phone. Abu didn't believe her, she could tell, but she couldn't bring herself to admit the truth. In certain ways Abu was still painfully traditional, insisting that she wear the veil when his friends came to the house (friends he'd had for forty years) and making unkind remarks about her two female cousins who had chosen their own husbands. But times were changing, and ever so slowly Abu was changing with them, supporting her job, even doing the housework. She hoped this dislike of Othman was just a last stand of tradition.

  And sometimes she suspected that her age was the real reason he hadn't outright forbidden the marriage: in Abu's mind—and the minds of nearly everyone else she knew—she was lucky at twenty-eight to have found a man who didn't already have three wives and sixteen kids.

  After leaving the kitchen, she went into the bathroom, closing the door halfway. She turned on the tap and pinned up her hair, but just as she was about to bend over the sink, she caught sight of Abu in the door frame.

  "It's too bad about the girl," he said, opening the hamper and taking out the dirty laundry. "You've said she was intelligent. I suspect she would have led a very fine life."

  "I think so too." The water rose in the sink, so Katya turned off the tap and pulled up the drain plug. It was covered with hair and soap. She peeled the glop from the plug, dropped it into the trash, and quickly washed her hands.

  "Who do you think kidnapped her?" he asked.

  "I have no idea."

  "No suspects?"

  "Not yet," she said. "And for all we know, she did run away."

  "But you don't think so."

  Katya didn't reply.

  Dirty towels piled on his arm, Abu leaned against the door frame. "It seems connected to the fact that she was pregnant. But I ask myself, who would be troubled most by the news of her pregnancy? Her mother? Her father? I think Nouf would be troubled the most, don't you?"

  Katya nodded. The question touched on a lurking fear she'd had since she discovered that Nouf had been pregnant: what if she'd been raped? Not on the day she disappeared—the pregnancy was at least a few weeks along—but before that. And what if the discovery of the pregnancy was so horrible that it drove her to run away? Katya had seen Nouf two weeks before she'd disappeared. She would have been pregnant then. It had been no different from any other time Katya had seen her, but she could have been hiding her anguish or despair.

  Yet there was no evidence of month-old rape on the body—no cuts or bruises that had already healed.

  "You may be right," Katya said. "Nouf would have been upset. But I don't think she was suicidal, and the scratches on her wrist mean that even if she did run away, she fought with someone before she left."

  "Maybe," Abu said, "but the way that family raises their children bothers me. You know this, so I won't say any more, except that I think Nouf may have been a victim of her upbringing."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I think she may have wanted to punish herself more than anyone else wanted to. The Shrawis are so intensely focused on appearing righteous. They have to be—it's their job. They take money from everyone in the name of Allah, so they have to be virtuous and absolutely blameless. But that's a lot of pressure, especially for a young girl with a rebellious streak."

  Katya studied her father's big brown eyes. He was right; in some ways the Shrawis were a high-pressure family. But the simple way he'd just described Nouf fascinated her. Is that really what he thought, she wondered—that Nouf was just a regular girl with a "rebellious streak"? It made her sound charming, innocuous even. This was the same man who in another mood might have called her a hoyden or a bad example of a woman. Retirement seemed to be smoothing his edges. She remembered how angry he'd been when, two years ago, after spending weeks arranging a marriage for her, he had discovered that she wouldn't marry the man. He didn't speak to her for a whole day, and when he finally did, his frustration exploded out of him, a blistering tirade in which he'd called her a "wretched ingrate" and warned that she would become a "useless woman." How, she wondered, would he describe her today?

  "Perhaps you're right," she said.

  A minute later, drying her face on a towel, she regarded her father slumped in the doorway, a sad look in his eyes.

  "Aren't you going to make my eggs?" she asked.

  He drew himself up sternly, but then he smiled. "I'm doing the laundry," he said. "It's your turn to cook."

  Back in the kitchen, she took off her engagement ring and set it carefully on the window frame. She finished washing the dishes Abu had left in the sink and pondered how to talk about Nouf without bringing Othman into it. The case really was beginning to obsess her. Whom had Nouf been fighting with before she disappeared? Was it the same person who had hit her on the head? Why had they found manure on her wrist? And wood flakes in the wound in her skull? This was obviously more than an accidental drowning, and Katya felt compelled to string the facts together, if not to prove murder, at least to satisfy herself—and Othman as well—that it was an accident.

  But no matter how hard she tried, any theories about Nouf would bring up Othman—or, worse, her job.

  A few minutes later Abu joined her in the kitchen. He leaned against the counter and picked up her smoothie. "Didn't you like it?"

  "It was fine," she said. She could tell that his mood had improved since she'd come home, and she wondered exactly how lonely he was when she was working. "How was your day?" she asked again.

  He shrugged. "It was all right." He came and stood beside her at the sink. "That coworker of yours isn't still bothering you, is he?"

  "No, it's fine," she said. He was referring to Qasim, one of the lab techs in the men's section, who had come into the women's laboratory one day and demanded that the women start wearing socks. There were too many ankles showing for his comfort.

  "Do men often just walk into the women's section?" Abu asked.

  "No, no, Abi, it's not like that. And don't worry. They're putting a lock on the door."

  "So you still don't interact with men?"

  "That's right." Instantly she thought about Maamoon and Nayir and felt a twinge of guilt. Yes, she had met men, but Maamoon was a grouchy old medical examiner, and Nayir didn't seem to count. He was a lackey for the Shrawis and, judging by the way Othman talked about him, something of a holy Bedouin guide. Every few months he and Othman went to the desert to commune with nature.

  She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Except for the eggs, it really was empty. She plucked four eggs from the box, set a frying pan on the stove, switched on the burner, and poured a dollop of oil in the pan. She had to admit that before meeting Nayir she'd been intrigued by Othman's description of him—pure and noble, a romantic Bedouin figure. He'd turned out to be such an ayatollah. He hadn't been able to speak to
her without blushing, he wouldn't meet her eye, and he had fainted when he saw Nouf's body, as if he'd been exposed to the face of the devil himself. Nayir was just the sort of man who stopped women on the street to complain that they weren't wearing gloves or that he could see too much of a face through a burqa.

  Meeting Nayir ought to have made her appreciate Othman all the more, but instead it made her apprehensive. Was Othman really so clueless about his friends? Or was Nayir completely different with Othman? Perhaps he really was a spiritual model and Othman felt inspired by that. In a way it disgusted her—not having to worry about righteousness in your friends was one of the luxuries of being a man.

  Abu stood beside her. In silence they watched the eggs until they were done. Skillfully she slid them onto plates, put the frying pan back on the stove, and switched off the flame. Abu motioned to her hands.

  "Reminds me of your mother," he said. "The way you handle the pan."

  A sudden spasm in her throat prevented her reply. Her mother had been dead for more than two years, but Katya still couldn't think about her without a threatening grief. These days, when she allowed herself to linger on thoughts of her mother, it was inevitably to mourn the fact that she wouldn't be there for the wedding. Mother, who'd been unable to have more than one child of her own, had wanted grandchildren—as many as possible. She believed that marriage should be a woman's highest goal, and Katya's resistance to the idea had disappointed her profoundly.

  They ate in relative silence, and when they were done, they sat on the patio overlooking the street. Abu gave her a mildly chastising look for not wearing a burqa, and she mumbled something about being too tired to go back into the house and get one.

  The day crowds were gone, the souk vendors' carts were folded away, and now the local residents wandered by, some of them waving or calling greetings to Abu, others avoiding him for fear of seeing Katya's unveiled face. She counted them as they passed—the men who wouldn't say hello to a friend because she was there, because looking at her would have been as dangerous as staring at the sun—and she got to four before she went inside.