Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  Her contract, carefully managed, would give her the means to emulate Amelia Earhart (leaving out the forever-lost-in-the-ocean bit), and live up to her friends’ expectations, perhaps more literally than they had intended. Amelia, no doubt, had carried a stuffed journal or scrapbook as she hopped across the continents. “Yes,” Thea said out loud. Yes. That would be a certificate worth having. She would be a flyer and—it came to her as she stood there—she would fly across Australia’s red desert. Why not?

  A week passed during which her nights, though restless, were undisturbed and her breakfasts were delivered by a parade of waiters, none of whom she suspected. Sachiv, nonetheless, called every evening: he was on night duty and had one eye on the kitchen staff. The harassment had become their courtship. After eleven, when it was quiet at Reception, Thea took to settling on her bed with the phone, no longer awkward, and they talked about their day, their jobs, their lives. Sachiv told her about growing up in Muscat. His father had been a spice trader in Calicut, but during tough times had moved across the Arabian Sea to Oman, where he had established such a successful import business that he was able to send Sachiv to private schools in India. During the summers, while working in the family firm, Sachiv discovered in himself an ease with people and a joy in dealing with everyone from cleaners to buyers. He was not, however, much of a trader, but he thought the hospitality business might suit him.

  “Understatement,” said Thea.

  With a gentle laugh, he went on, “I like to see guests coming to me with their problems or their compliments. If they complain, I will fix it. If they speak kindly, I will pass on their praise to whichever staff member has earned it, and I tell myself every time that whatever they need, I will make it happen. In my job, I can make this person or that person have a much better day.”

  Not a bad way, she agreed, to spend one’s working hours. In turn, she told him that after leaving school, she had taken a secretarial course, found herself a job and a surfer boyfriend, and indulged her sporadic inclinations to shake up her life.

  “Like coming to Baghdad?” he asked. “Good career choice, by the way. First-class.”

  Thea thought that a little flirtatious, but on the other hand—and there was always another hand—the night was long, it was quiet down there, and what else had he to do other than killing the hours by chatting amiably to one of the guests?

  But there was no room for doubt a few nights later when he said, as they hung up, “If he phones tonight, call me and I’ll be there in two minutes,” adding, with that quiet laugh, “I will rush up to protect you.”

  Zawraa Park was dried out and dusty, and along the sandy rim of the comma-shaped lake, paddleboats lay waiting for more peaceful times. There were a few, a very few, people walking, but it felt to Kim and Thea like a post-apocalyptic place, though the women in the office had said that, during Eid and holidays, the park was always crowded with families enjoying the fairground and lining up for rides on the old Ferris wheel. There was an island in the middle of the lake and pergolas along the shore, but it felt so lonely that Thea much preferred their walks along the riverside or strolling down al-Rasheed Street in the evenings, even though it heaved with men and soldiers.

  “I can’t wait for summertime,” Kim said wistfully, “when we can swim every day at the hotel, go to Lake Habbaniyah, come here and pedal around on the water.”

  “That’s what we think now, but when summer comes we’ll probably be hiding indoors, longing for winter, with the air-conditioning on full blast.”

  “Maybe it’s the war that makes everything feel dead. Everyone’s afraid to have fun.”

  Thea glanced at her. “How can they have fun when so many have family at the front?”

  The next morning, the suspect waiter delivered breakfast. Thea glanced at his lapel—he wasn’t wearing a name tag.

  That night, after three, the phone rang. She had no intention of picking it up, but it wouldn’t stop. It went on ringing, bullying her, challenging her. More irritated than fearful, she finally grabbed the receiver and barked, “Hello!”

  “I want to make sex with you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, get your syntax right! You make love and have sex!” She slammed down the phone. “I’ve been wanting to say that for weeks.”

  She made the call. The damsel-in-distress role didn’t sit well with her, but she had braved this long enough, dark hour after dark hour. The guy was persistent and might be goaded by her anger, and she never again wanted to hear the harrowing sound of a key sliding into the lock.

  Sachiv arrived breathless, saying, as she let him in, “This guy! He knows we’re moving you around, but it doesn’t stop him!”

  “It has to be the one I suspect—he brought breakfast this morning and he seemed surprised when I opened the door. Like he’d found me again. Bingo.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Scrawny, thin, a little mustache, curly hair on top.”

  “I know the one. He’s on duty tonight.”

  Thea sank onto the end of her bed, shaking.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. It’s just—you never get used to it. The intrusion. The fright. Waking up suddenly and hearing that voice.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “He won’t be fired, will he?”

  Sachiv sat beside her. “We have to think of other guests. He could do it to someone else.”

  “But his family—he’s probably supporting his parents back home.”

  “This is not your concern.”

  “I just want to be able to sleep.”

  “Now you will. Can I send up something? Some tea?”

  She smiled as he stood up. “That will only keep me awake.”

  He looked thrown, glanced at the wall, and back at her. “Is there anything that would help you to sleep?”

  Your voice, she almost said. I would have your voice for camomile.

  Action was taken. Thea never again heard, “I want to make sex with you,” and woke from sleep only when the dawn light, growing warmer and brighter with the year, slid under her curtain, as morning spilled slowly across her carpet.

  The late-night phone calls, however, still came from the office behind Reception.

  There was a sniff of spring in the air. They no longer shivered through the days in the office, blowing on their fingers, and Thea began to look forward to plunging into the pool after work when it was warmer. There were two pools—a huge round one and a smaller one—and from her balcony, the turquoise circles of winter-cold water contrasted with the lazy brown Tigris drifting alongside them.

  The night-time conversations drifted also, eventually coming to Sachiv’s marriage. It had been arranged, he said, and although there had been affection, even love, for a time, these had lifted, then vanished, as his work became more demanding and her life became child-bound. She had understood the demands of his career and conceded that theirs would be a peripatetic lifestyle, but in practice it didn’t suit her at all. She was isolated and unhappy in Iraq, and for some time now had been insisting that Sachiv should seek work in a small hotel in India, where they could raise their children among family and where, more importantly, she could play chess.

  “Chess?”

  “Yes.” His wife—he never used her name and Thea never asked, just as they barely mentioned his children—had played chess since her schooldays and was very, very good. A winner. Beyond her children, it was all she cared about. Now, here, she missed her team, missed the opportunities chess would have brought her in India and, above all, she feared that her promise as a regional and even national player was shrinking as she sat in Baghdad, the hours of her day dictated by her husband’s schedule, with no known chess players in sight. He suspected he should forsake his own considerable prospects for her considerable gift, yet he could not, he told Thea. He had worked too hard and achieved too much in a few short years, and it would be dangerously premature to ditch his own potential for some regional hotel in India
. He had to think of his children’s prospects, also, and the life he could give them. Besides, Oman was more home to him than India, and if ever he were to give up the world for a small business, he could do it only in Oman. And so, behind good parenting, conflict raged. “The queens and the kings and the pawns are stacked against me,” he said. “Checkmate lies ahead, I fear.”

  Another Friday, another trip—troglodyte caves in the desert, and this time Sachiv joined them. It was his day off, but Thea had no idea why Reggie had asked him along until, as they left the Baghdad checkpoints behind, she heard her boss say, “So how long will your wife be away?”

  “About a month,” Sachiv replied. “She’s gone to see her mother. It is lonely for her here, with small children and no family support. I work quite long hours.”

  “‘Quite’?” Reggie glanced at him. “You live in that hotel!”

  “But wouldn’t she prefer to escape the summer heat?” Kim asked.

  “She will go then also. July, August. That is when it is worst for the children.”

  Thea leaned forward. “How bad is it exactly? This heat.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “It becomes very intense.”

  “But air-conditioning. . . .”

  He dipped his head. “Air-conditioning, yes, but air-conditioners often don’t work, and then there are the blackouts.”

  “August is a nightmare here,” said Reggie. “There’s no other way of putting it.”

  “I wanna go home!” Kim wailed.

  “It must be worse than hell at the front,” he added.

  A few hours later they left the tarmac and headed toward an extraordinary square-shouldered sandstone mound, marked by a neat row of openings gouged out of its façade.

  “It looks like a prehistoric apartment building,” said Kim.

  “Or a liner,” said Thea.

  Reggie pulled up. “Welcome to the al-Tar Caves.”

  “Can we get up there?”

  “If the troglodytes could, we can.”

  A scramble up gritty, sliding ground led them to the rectangular entrances that opened onto a warren of cold corridors with caves on either side. Thea shivered. “More like graves than homes.”

  Leaning over to look through one of the low windows, Kim asked, “But what did they live on, stuck up here?”

  “It would have been greener back then,” said Reggie.

  “And it was safe.” Sachiv leaned over to look out also. “They could see their enemies coming.” His watch, slightly loose, was resting against his wrist bone.

  “Let’s go up top,” said Reggie.

  “. . . including a perfect rooftop terrace,” Geoffrey was saying when Thea and Sachiv, breathless, brought up the rear, “with spectacular views.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I’d gasp if I wasn’t gasping already.” Pulling her blazer tighter against the breeze, she wandered farther along the ridge. In one direction, a maze of flat-topped sandstone hills, sculpted by the wind, looped around one another, creating spaghetti canyons, and in the other, the great expanse of Lake Razzaza, bare as a bald pate, shimmered. There was no definition, no way of telling desert and water apart, or where the lake met the dusky sky. The wind pushed strands of hair across Thea’s open mouth. Before her: infinity.

  Then, down there, far off, the air stirred. In the corridor of desert between the caves and the lake, her eyes caught movement. A flutter. It looked at first like a low cloud, a cushion of dust. She stared, focused. . . . Camels. Though their shapes were indistinct, their gait was not: the long, graceful strides and the easy speed were undeniably those of camels, a line of them, moving across the plain. Stick figures, barely discernible, walked beside and ahead of them in a kind of mist. It was biblical. Astonishing. Here, everything she had ever sought was delivered: the pale kiss of the earth. The void and the grandeur, the singular and the particular, the stillness set around those camels loping across the flat in single file, conquering whole worlds with each step. All this, nebulous as a mirage, made nonsense of time. Lifting her chin to call the others, Thea thought better of it. She didn’t even raise her camera. Better to consign it to memory, this silent tableau, this apotheosis, so that she could savor it later, and often. The silence was peculiar. The herders must have been calling to their beasts and the camels must have been grunting and complaining, but the wind didn’t carry any of that. Standing atop a prehistoric sandcastle, she watched the procession, elated. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Was she looking back in time? Or forward?

  Because of the chill wind, they ate out of the back of the jeep, using the lowered back seat as a counter. Reggie poured the wine; Thea dispensed rice, lamb, and tomatoes; Sachiv stood outside, twisting about to take in the landscape. He was easy company, good to have around, but Thea was distracted by what she had seen from the hilltop. It would never, she knew, be diluted. The slow march of the camels and the desert rising around them would stay with her forever, always in motion. That caravan would never reach its destination.

  “There’s so much I want to see,” she said, to no one in particular. “The mountains in the north, the Marshes in the south. . . .”

  “That we shall do soon,” said Reggie, “before the heat and the mosquitos come.”

  Back in Baghdad, in a traffic jam, they pulled up behind a Toyota pickup carrying two camels, crouched in the back. Unperturbed by the horns and engines, the crush of rush hour, they blinked languidly.

  From the sublime, Thea thought, to the ridiculous.

  A few days later, Reggie took them to lunch in a local eatery—like a diner, with a few tables and a high counter—by one of the bends in the Tigris. Filtered sunlight brightened their table as they enjoyed the thrill of non-hotel food: proper Iraqi food—kubba, a kind of rice patty stuffed with minced lamb, and a flaky pastry sausage for which Reggie had no word.

  “I wish we could get more local dishes in the hotel,” said Kim. “There’s only so much beefsteak a person can eat.”

  “This is good, isn’t it?” Reggie asked, pushing the last bit of pastry into his mouth. “Love this place!”

  “Me too,” said Kim, glancing around. “Even if the hygiene is a little casual.”

  It occurred to Thea, weeks later, that that might have been when it happened.

  Sachiv stood by the window, his shirt undone but still tucked into his neat black trousers, his ribcage heaving with the effort of being there, by the window, away from the bed . . . away from her. The right thing. This was the cost of the right thing: arousal that wouldn’t subside, skin glistening, guts turning. His lovely wife, his beautiful children. . . . The right thing—what physical wretchedness it wrought, but worse, probably, would be the wretchedness of guilt.

  He had arrived only moments before, in the late afternoon, unannounced but expected, muttering that he could lose his job. Kissing and fumbling, they had shuffled, like penguins on ice, to the bed. His jacket was off, already, on the alcove floor; his tie resisted her fingers, his shirt did not, and her straps slipped off her shoulders as if her skin were oiled. It was then, when he was kissing her breast and his hand was deep in the folds of her skirt that his conscience, coming into the room like a sonic boom, found him. It threw him to the floor.

  So he stood by the window, panting. Thea knew, or thought she knew, that she could still have him—break him down, if she gave it one more shot. But compassion, not desire, sent her to the window, where she stood behind him, cheek against his damp back, comforting, assuaging, until her hand slipped inside his shirt and brushed along his waist. Palm on bare flesh. His breathing eased, became less frantic. He put his hand over hers. Then he took her wrist and broke out of their embrace, ripping apart their affair before it had even started. She felt sick, and desperate, when his fingers went to his shirt buttons. One by one, he closed them, each button shutting her out.

  He remained with his back to her for some minutes more. The first time they had kissed had not been cheap like this—a hurried grope in a hotel
room. The setting for that had been a troglodyte cave, with cold walls and a view of caramel canyons—had they noticed.

  He turned, like a dancer, and reached for the jacket in a heap on the floor. “I must go.”

  “At least you leave with a clear conscience.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “It means that when your wife comes back, you can look her in the eye. It means you won’t have the shadow of guilt hanging over you every which way you turn.”

  “The shadow of guilt,” he touched her neck, “or the shadow of love. What’s the difference? Every morning I will see you come by, in your office clothes, and walk past with maybe a look in my direction, or maybe not, as you sweep through the doors and into your jeep. And then the long day will begin, the hours hanging around me like the summer heat, until the afternoon comes and I will be sure to be at Reception, to see you come in again, passing me, with a glance, or not.”

  She put her hand on his shirt, where his heart was.

  “Worse than having parents with expectations is, of course, having parents with none.” Kim smirked at Thea as they wandered by the river in a soft heat that was full of promise, and threat. “Such as mine, who never gave any indication whatsoever that they had even the slightest hopes for my success. Their conviction that the only possibility for my long-term survival was husband-with-job was never rattled, not even mildly! It’s a wonder they divorced, given their unshakable faith in their only child’s hopelessness.”