Finding Nouf

by Zoë Ferraris

  But two days later, while Hussein was walking around the city looking for work, he suffered a fatal case of heat stroke. He died that night.

  Abu Tahsin took such pity on the boy that he arranged the adoption papers at once. Katya often wondered what had prompted the decision. It wasn't rash, exactly—the adoption itself had taken a year and a half—but it wasn't the sort of action that could later be revoked; it bound Othman to the family for a lifetime. What did Abu Tahsin see in the boy that turned his heart? Why was Othman different from any other homeless child? In any event, Katya mused, it was actually a story about Abu Tahsin and how rare it was to find such spontaneous passion coupled with such long-lasting generosity of spirit.

  After the prayers were finished and the women had returned to their seats, Muruj suggested that they eat some fruit, and the women busied themselves. Zahra picked up the telephone and called the servants. Huda stacked the empty coffeepot and cups on the tray. Abir was idly picking lint from the couch. Katya wondered how Nouf's death had affected them really. They seemed as composed as ever.

  Zahra finished her call and turned to Katya. "You seem tired," she said. The other women were chatting, and Katya felt comfortable giving an honest reply.

  "I am tired," she said. "It's sad being here without Nouf."

  The mention of Nouf brought the other conversations to a halt. Even Abir snapped out of her daydream.

  "It is sad," Zahra said in a soft voice. The conversations picked up again, but without enthusiasm now. "I've been wondering," she went on, "will you quit your job after the wedding?"

  There was another lull and people to turned to Katya, curious to hear her reply. She shrugged. "I haven't discussed it with Othman," she said.

  "But certainly you'll want to have children."

  "Yes. We do." She couldn't help blushing. She knew what came next, what Zahra would say if this were not such a formal sitting room: You'd better start having children before you get too old. You may be too old already! What is a job compared to the value of children?

  But instead Zahra smiled and nodded. "May you have as many children as Um Tahsin."

  "Thank you," Katya said, weighing whether her next segue would be in bad taste or not. "How is Nusra? I imagine it's terrible to lose a child."

  "The worst thing in the world," Zahra agreed.

  There was a moment of respectful silence. Katya was dying to blurt out, Do you think she ran away? But it was Huda's soft voice that split the silence.

  "Allah forgive her. She should have known better."

  No one knew quite how to argue with that. Katya glanced at the women, all looking at their hands. "It's so strange," she said. "I thought for the longest time that she'd been kidnapped."

  Muruj sniffed loudly and sat up in her seat. "No." She looked directly at Katya with eyes full of scorn. "I'll tell you what happened. My sister had a head full of fantasy. Ever since she was a child!" Her voice reached an awkward pitch. The other women were in agreement. Fadilah gave the subtlest of nods, and Abir exhaled sharply, as if to say, Well, of course we knew that!

  "She ran off for the most shameful reason," Muruj said. "For a man! Probably a boy she met at the mall or, Allah help us all, through her driver. She fell in love, or thought she was in love, and when she ran off to meet him, he didn't show up. He left her out there in the desert to die."

  Fadilah shot Katya a look that said, Why did you bring this up?

  "That driver ought to be fired!" Muruj snapped.

  "If you have proof of this," Katya said softly, "then shouldn't the family try to find out who this boy was?"

  "Any way you look at it," Muruj plowed on, "it's the same old story. He damaged her and then he abandoned her. That's what you get when you don't have a marriage contract. Nouf wouldn't be the first poor girl to learn that!"

  "Yes," Zahra murmured. "We are trying to find out who it was. Isn't Tahsin—?" She looked to Fadilah, who raised a hand to indicate that she didn't want to talk about that either and was disgusted with the way the whole conversation was going.

  In the face of scorn from both Fadilah and Muruj, Katya had to summon her deepest reserves of nerve to ask the next question. "Nobody has any idea who it was?"

  No one answered right away, but Huda and Muruj exchanged a meaningful look, which caused Huda to shut her eyes and plunge into a series of whispered prayers.

  "Whoever did this to my sister will find his judgment in heaven," Muruj stated flatly. And with that, all the scorn fell from her face and she sat back on the sofa with a sad, crippled, defeated air that somehow seemed more honest than all the bluster that had come before it.

  Only Abir kept her eyes fixed on Katya, but when Katya met her gaze, there was a knock at the door and Abir leapt up to answer it. Three strange women came into the room.

  Katya felt a sinking frustration; there was no hope of continuing a private conversation. The new arrivals were obviously guests. When they shed their burqas, no one recognized them, and they greeted the company awkwardly. One of the women introduced herself, explaining that her husband had come to make a donation. The other women remained happily anonymous, but Katya guessed that their husbands were visiting the house too. They were a well-dressed group; clearly their husbands were wealthy. The women's purses were Gucci, their high-heeled shoes revealed a daring portion of ankle, and, most telling of all, their cloaks were silk and tailored to suggest the elegance of form beneath them. One woman even wore false fingernails with a bright red gloss. Compared to these paragons of fashion, the Shrawi women looked as if they'd just wandered in from the desert. They didn't wear makeup or silk cloaks or high heels, and they certainly never painted their nails. Abir was staring at the women's hands, but her expression was inscrutable. Was she offended? Disgusted? Envious? Before the door shut again, Abir slipped out of the room.

  Muruj invited the women to sit, and Katya got up, offering her seat and politely rebuffing the protests. She seized the opportunity to excuse herself, saying that she had to get back to work. Fadilah looked at her oddly, and it was only when Katya was out the door and halfway down the hall that she realized why: she'd already said she'd taken the afternoon off. She blushed just thinking how blatantly she'd lied.

  At the end of the hallway she came to a corridor. To the left was the exit, used exclusively by women, and to the right lay the entire unexplored realm of the women's side of the house—their bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and sewing rooms. Katya had been there once, on a brief tour with Nusra, but she had not seen it since her first visit to the house. Abir had probably come this way.

  No one was there now. Katya turned to the right and tiptoed down the hallway, listening for sounds of teenage activity. Would it be the scratching of a homework pencil? The faint strains of rock music emanating from headphones? Did she even have music? It was all Katya could think of—her own life as a teenager, minus the technology.

  She passed an open doorway and saw an empty bathroom. A few meters down the hallway was a complex of doorways. She took the first one and went into a foyer, a quaint box of a room with a tiny square table standing in the corner. On the table was a copy of the holy Quran.

  Gently she tapped on the door. There was no answer, so she pushed it open and peeked inside. The first thing she saw was blue wooden letters spelling NOUF on the wall. Looking back into the hallway to make sure no one had seen her, she stole inside.

  It was a spacious bedroom. The floor was carpeted with a cerulean rug, like a massive sea upon which the various pieces of furniture had been cast adrift. A white canopy bed floated between two matching dressers. The walls were smooth and white, undecorated but for the wooden letters. On the dresser, however, were a few family pictures in ornate golden frames. Two potted palm trees near the bathroom door looked real enough. Like flotsam in a harbor, all the room's smaller items—the stray shoes and stuffed animals and jewelry boxes—had drifted into a corner.

  There were no windows, but two skylights let in the light. A lamp stoo
d beside the bed, next to a small reading table with a magazine poking out of the drawer. Katya approached the bed. A heart design embroidered on the pillows and the softness of the white cotton sheets were touchingly virginal. The fluttery mosquito netting only added to the sense that this bed had held someone innocent and sweet and needing protection. When she opened the drawer to the reading table and took out the magazine, it was open to an article entitled "The Seventy-seven Words for Love."

  Instinctively Katya looked back at the doorway. No one was there. There were doors on every side of the room; all of them were shut. Katya went to each of them and studied the handles, but none had a lock. Someone could walk in at any moment, from any direction. Nouf must have felt exposed here—and yet she'd been comfortable enough to leave an article like this one lying around. Her parents probably wouldn't have approved unless it had been titled "The Seventy-seven Words for Allah." Katya sat on the bed and looked at the article. Perhaps with a blind mother, a teenage girl could do what she liked.

  There was a sound and one of the doors swung open. Katya quickly stood up, shoving the magazine into her purse by some idiotic force of instinct. She instantly regretted it—now she was a thief.

  Abir stood in the doorway. "What are you doing here?"

  "I, ah ... sorry. I was looking for you, actually, and I found this instead." She motioned to the room.

  Abir glanced down and saw the magazine stuffed awkwardly into Katya's purse. "Why were you looking for me?"

  "Well, I got bored in the sitting room, and I saw you leave, so I figured..." She shrugged.

  Abir eyed her as every teenager eyes an adult who seems to understand her, not certain that the understanding is genuine but fearing that it won't be, and repulsed in either case. Katya met her gaze. She was wearing a headscarf—she must have been praying—and she held a copy of the Quran, open and clutched to her chest. Abir was the same age as Huda.

  "Which sura are you reading?" Katya asked.

  Abir lowered the book, shut it, and set it on the bedside table. Awkwardly, she sat on the bed. "Actually, I was only trying to read."

  Katya felt a bleakness steal over the room. She glanced at the photographs lined up on the dresser and noticed that Abir was not in any of them. There were four frames; two contained pictures of Abu Tahsin and Nusra; one was a picture of Nouf at a younger sister's birthday party, cutting cake and grinning happily. The remaining picture showed a pair of saluki dogs, their tails wagging happily. "I'm sorry about your sister," she said.

  Abir didn't respond.

  "You must have been close," Katya prodded.

  Abir slid her hands nervously beneath her thighs. "You saw her body, didn't you?"

  Gently Katya sat down on the bed beside her. "Yes, I did."

  "So you know how she died?"

  "Yes," she replied, looking down at her hands. She had a sense where this was going. "She drowned."

  Abir clapped a hand to her mouth. "Oh."

  "I'm so sorry." Katya could see that she hadn't known. Had her parents felt that she was too young for the truth? What was the shame of drowning, when the position of Nouf's body at the funeral had practically been an announcement of the worse crime of fornication? Or had Abir not noticed? Still, it was a kind of relief to learn that Katya wasn't the only victim of secrecy in the family.

  Abir's hands were shaking, and she seemed to be trying not to cry. "They won't tell us anything. I know she ran away. She got lost in the desert and she died, but I don't know the details. And I have to know. I keep worrying..." She clasped her hands into tight balls and jammed them into her lap. "I keep thinking she—what if she—what if it wasn't an accident? What if she ran away and didn't want to come back? Maybe she wanted to..."

  "You mean, did she kill herself?" Katya offered.

  Abir nodded, and tears slid down her cheeks. "I don't want to think that her soul is in hell. She was my sister." At this, her voice trembled, and she started to cry harder. Katya resisted the impulse to wrap her arm around the girl's shoulders; she sensed it would be unwelcome.

  "I don't know exactly what happened," she said, "but I'm fairly certain she didn't kill herself."

  Abir swallowed and glanced at her.

  "She was hit on the head," Katya said. "It wasn't what killed her, but it may have knocked her unconscious, so when the floodwaters came, she had no defense."

  Abir's face went white. "But I don't understand. Who hit her? Was someone with her?"

  "I don't know." Katya hesitated. "Listen, Abir, can you think of any reason that she might have run away?"

  Abir shook her head. "I know that she was nervous about her wedding."

  "Why?"

  She shrugged. "She didn't know Qazi that well."

  "Did she ever talk about leaving?"

  "No. Only sometimes, as a joke." Abir wiped her eyes again. "Did she run away?"

  Katya hesitated. "I don't know."

  Abir seemed to regain her nerve. She sat up straighter and her shoulders stopped shaking. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  There was an awkward silence, and Katya fumbled through it. "I'm sorry I've been asking so many questions about Nouf. I don't mean to upset you. I know it won't bring her back."

  Abir nodded.

  "I wish I'd had the chance to know her better," Katya said.

  Stiffly, Abir stood and went to a door in the corner. She opened the door, switched on the light, and motioned Katya inside.

  It was an enormous walk-in closet stuffed with clothes—on racks, hangers, stacked in plastic drawers, clothes in trunks and lining the overhead shelves. Shoe racks were filled with shoes. Everything was clean and pressed. Katya stepped into the closet with amazement.

  "Wow," she whispered. "Was she always so organized?"

  "No, no. After the funeral, my mother arranged for everything to look neat."

  Katya was afraid to touch anything, but Abir began to hold the clothes out for inspection. A motley assortment it was. A pinstriped blazer rubbed shoulders with a siren-red negligee. There was a slinky ball gown with sequins, a fluffy pink mohair sweater with a cable knit, and a pair of pink leather pants. Shorts and T-shirts were stacked on a shelf, and the undergarments seemed ridiculously skimpy, ribbon panties and see-through bras. For the first time Katya felt that she was seeing some of the personality she had hoped to encounter in the room outside. This lavish closet—probably hundreds of thousands of riyals' worth of clothes—was a fantasy world where Nouf could actually wear a man's blazer or a pair of shorts. There were jeans, of course, and dozens of black skirts and blue button-down shirts, private school uniforms from the looks of it. But right beside them was a tremendous white floor-length coat made of the softest fur.

  Katya stopped at the coat, struck with a fierce, instantaneous longing to have a coat like this and a world to wear it in. It was something her eponym would have worn. On the hanger beside it were two gloves, a muffler, a scarf, and a large fur hat. She buried her fingers in the hat's furry pile. It was cool and smooth, and for the briefest second she was Nouf standing in the closet, reaching across the gulf of time and space to touch a clear lake of ice, or the very zenith of a glacier.

  Turning, she saw Abir holding out a formal hot pink gown. The skirt was wide enough so the dress was almost able to stand on its own. Katya realized what it was.

  "Her wedding gown?"

  "Yes."

  "It's extravagant." Katya looked around. "Wait a second—how much of this is her trousseau?"

  "Everything on this side, and about a third of that." Abir motioned to all that was interesting in the closet. Katya looked at the fur coat again and felt a stab of disappointment. Nouf hadn't bought these clothes; Qazi had. What remained of Nouf's original possessions was a row of cloaks, a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, and a dozen housedresses.

  Katya motioned to the trousseau. "I thought she'd chosen all of this."

  Abir shook her head. "She didn't like pink."

  Qazi, of course, would have had
no idea. Did he buy the clothes thinking that all women liked pink? Or was that what he wanted: a woman who belonged in it? Katya thought of her own trousseau. Othman was still putting it together, but she hoped he would avoid this order of clothing, tantalizing items whose only functional purpose was to symbolize what the wearer would never be.

  When she looked back at Abir, she saw that the young girl was ready to leave. Katya followed her back into the bedroom. Abir's expression was cold and formal now. She picked up her Quran.

  "I'd better go," she said.

  "Yes, of course."

  There was a moment of awkward silence before Abir turned to leave.

  "I'm sorry," Katya said again. Abir looked back and shook her head as if to say, It's not your fault. With a gentle rustling of robes, she left.

  19

  KATYA PEEKED into the laboratory. It was lunchtime, and she'd joined the other women in the ladies' lounge for fifteen minutes before making a pretense of needing to use the bathroom. Slipping back through the corridors on her way to the lab, she'd gone unnoticed. The men usually left the building for lunch, and the place was deserted.

  In the laboratory, she sat down at the counter. Over the past two days she'd surreptitiously prepared the DNA samples, extracting the variable DNA and mixing it with a buffered solution of polymerase and primers. This morning she had put the samples in the thermal cycler. The machine always took a few hours to process the samples, and she had to be there right when they were ready so that nobody else would take them out by mistake.

  There were two samples, one from Eric Scarberry and the other from Nouf's escort, Muhammad. She watched the machine whir into its final phase and glanced back at the door.

  She had just enough time to put the profile printouts in her purse and hide the evidence of her work before Maddawi came back into the lab, followed by Bassma. The women sat down to resume their work, undisturbed that Katya was already there. They seemed happy and continued their lunchtime chatter.