Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  A young Omani family was coming down to the water, but their little girl, about six years old, was stranded halfway, too nervous to tackle the vertiginous steps in either direction. She cried, but her parents teased her affectionately and wandered over to the water’s edge. Unable to bear her isolation—halfway up, halfway down—he went over to the steps and up to her, offering his hand. After a moment’s hesi-tation, her deep brown eyes considering him, the child held out her little hand and allowed him to lead her down.

  As he did so, the woman in the flowing skirt came past them with a cursory nod and made her way up the steps. As soon as the child was safely with her parents, he hurried after her. This required a change of tack, but he didn’t mind—the rules had always been fluid. He didn’t mind about anything anymore.

  The child’s father called up to him in English, thanking him for rescuing his daughter. “Not at all,” he called back from the top. “She’ll be climbing Everest before you know it.” The family’s laughter burbled up from the pit.

  “You’re Irish?” The woman had turned on the landscaped path at the sound of his voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “So we possibly have met, but I’m afraid I . . .” She gesticulated toward her head, as if it wasn’t the one that should have been on her neck. “Must be jetlag—I flew in early this morning. I’m afraid I just can’t place you.”

  Through the dark screens of their shades, his eyes caught hers. She was looking at him sideways, as if playing her life backward and forward through all the people she had known, the places she had worked, in search of him.

  “I knew you’d come back.”

  “Come back? Oh, I’ve never been to Oman before,” she said, with obvious relief that it was he who’d got it wrong, “This is my first time. I gather January is the best month to visit.”

  If she hadn’t been so beautiful still—her auburn hair twisted up in a twirl—and her chin as flawlessly curved, he would have argued, but he was too overcome. “Right,” he said, nodding. He’d play it this way, her way, whatever way.

  She appeared to be alone. Reaching into her bag for her camera, she leaned over the rim of the sinkhole and photographed the water in a distracted manner. Then she looked at her watch and took a deep breath; a nervous breath.

  He tailed her along the path to the parking lot. “Are you. . . here on business?”

  “Holiday. With a friend,” she added, then veered off to the restrooms with a dismissive “Bye, now.”

  When she came out, he was leaning against his 4x4, chatting to her taxi driver, who had confirmed that she had arrived that morning—but where had she been in the interim and why was she here now? Long-standing questions were finally, suddenly, within grasp of their answers.

  With a glance in his direction, she got into the taxi.

  He leaned over and looked in at her. “See you around,” he said, because he would.

  That afternoon at the Grand Hyatt, thanks to the indiscretion of her taxi driver, he found her in the tea lounge, where she was sitting deep in a couch, staring up at the perplexing centerpiece—a life-size bronze statue of a horseman with a falcon perched on his wrist. Newcomers always stared at it in this way soon after noticing that, every time they looked back at it, another angle of the statue seemed to be facing them. They turned so slowly, the horse and the man and the falcon, that people didn’t immediately realize it was revolving.

  Taking a seat under one of the canopies, which aped Bedouin tents on either side of the entrance, he watched her, unseen. She kept glancing around the ornate hall—at the cream and gold décor, the broad staircase and the huge stained-glass window—and seemed even more agitated than she had been that morning. Every time people came over from the lobby or up the stairs, her head swung around in jittery expectation.

  Who? he wondered. Who?

  The Vietnamese waitress, wearing a long skirt with a slit right up the side, placed a cup and saucer, napkin and teapot on his table. Around him, men and women did business, their global conversations spreading out in threads, face to face, phone to phone, wireless to wireless. The world at work.

  “When are you flying back?”

  “. . . not organized like a European market . . .”

  “And this is Thierry—he’s in charge of our after-service.”

  Omanis. Gulf Arabs. Western women wearing Eastern modesty. Prudence also had dressed with decorum, he noted now, and had changed since that morning into a long-sleeved navy shirt and a straight linen skirt, with big earrings and silver bangles—good look, elegant but funky. She had aged even less than he might have expected. It was so thrilling, so surprising, to see her out in the world that his mouth was dry. He couldn’t breathe, quite.

  He had always known he would see her again. Even so, he could never have been ready for it.

  Her phone beeped. She reached for it, read a text. Her hands were shaking. No longer composed and unflappable, like in the old days. It confused him. All this confused him, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, as long as he kept her in his sights.

  She held the phone briefly to her chest, before putting it back into her bag.

  “Hello again,” he said, standing over her.

  Her eyes jumped up, but her expression flattened. Disappointment, clear as day.

  “May I?” he asked, sitting down.

  “No.” She stood up. “I’m sorry, I . . . I’m meeting someone.” She slipped past him, left the lounge and headed off to the left, in the direction of the ladies’ restroom. He followed as far as the lobby, where he collided with a woman who, like him, had her eyes on the flash of Irish skirt disappearing around the corner. “Sorry,” she said, and changed direction to follow it.

  Back at the office, he stared at the map.

  The following afternoon, she sprouted like a porpoise from the deep waters of Wadi Shab, just as he arrived at the pool. Without seeing him, she kicked under again and disappeared. Always her strong suit: disappearing.

  His three women, gasping for breath, had collapsed on a rock nearby, and Abid—no better man, he thought—was sitting near the water with an American woman, whose voice droned tonelessly: “The skeleton of a monstrous highway spans the mouth of Wadi Shab, one of Oman’s beauty spots, an eyesore, built by Indians for the Chinese.”

  With one eye on the fluttering water, he wondered why this woman was telling Abid what he already knew, but she went on, “The new colonialism. China is sucking the ores out of Africa and the fish from the Pacific, and here in Oman . . .”

  Seeing him arrive, Abid jumped to his feet to greet him, and it was then he noticed that the American was speaking into a palm-sized Dictaphone. She glanced at him—it was the woman who had bumped into him the day before—and went on talking to herself.

  His luck was in. He had taken a chance that they would set off on their second day, as most tourists did, including his three charges, Heather, Betty and Sue. Back in Muscat, he had grabbed the trio of Englishwomen like a kid grabbing sweets—he had to be on the road in order to run into her again—and had set off along the standard route, confident of eventually crossing paths. His clients weren’t as nifty as he would have liked. It had been slow-going in the wadi, as he led them along a sandy track through a gathering of palm trees, then out into the widening gorge. They had struggled across the stones—he was going too fast—and exhaled relief when they reached the shaded path that ran between the canyon walls. At ground level, the cliffs were smooth as ice, and almost as white, but farther up, beyond the reach of flood waters, they were gnarled and pockmarked with narrow caves. Hetty, as they called Heather, and Betty had rested on a concrete slab under a lip of rock, while Sue, the younger one—at sixty-two—contemplated jumping into the square pool below the path, until he asked how she planned to get out again, given the sheer walls that surrounded it. So they had carried on, dipping their heads to get past overhanging rocks and had finally emerged, hot and sweaty, at this silvery pool, where he had found Abid and the America
n and everything he was looking for.

  The porpoise came up for air, shook her head, wiped her face, and saw him.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  “Hello.” She swam toward the stony, crescent-shaped beach.

  The American looked up. “You guys know each other?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “No,” she said, squeezing her nose. “We’ve never met before.”

  “Now that’s just not true,” he teased. “We were at Bimmah together yesterday.”

  Like a basking shark, she hovered above the stones in the shallows. “But not before then.”

  “If you insist.”

  “Well, if you insist, you’ll know my name.”

  He stiffened. Caught.

  Abid put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me introduce—this is Thea, and here is Kim. And this is my very good friend, Jibril. Like the angel.”

  He leaned forward to shake Kim’s hand, saying, “Gabriel.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Are you like the angel?”

  “My mother clearly hoped so.”

  “There’s a hill in West Cork called Mount Gabriel.”

  All three looked down at Thea. Yes, he thought. Thea.

  “I came across it recently when I’d ended up in Schull by mistake,” she went on, “and had to complete a loop to get back to Durrus—along the back road that skirts Mount Gabriel.”

  “Where were you trying to get to?” Gabriel asked.

  “The last house before America.”

  He smiled, transposed, transported already, by that dry gaze.

  She lowered her face into the water; let her body float like a corpse. Gabriel noted that she had thickened a bit, like him, around the waist.

  He turned to Kim, nodded at her Dictaphone. “Journo?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Special guests of the ministry, then?”

  “Well, I’m the guest.” Kim jerked her head at Thea. “She’s along for the ride.”

  So why the nervousness, he wondered, at the hotel, when she had looked like a cat on the edge of a highway?

  “Thea and I were in Iraq together back in the eighties,” Kim explained unprompted, “and haven’t seen each other since, so I asked her to meet me here.”

  Thea lifted her head and said derisively, “Asked?”

  “Well, lured, I guess.”

  “Lured,” Gabriel repeated.

  “And it worked!” Kim shaded her eyes to look at Gabriel. “How about you? Doing the guided tour too, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  Thea pulled her knees under her. “Chuck over my towel, would you, Kim?”

  Gabriel caught it and handed it to her as she made her way to the nearest rock, where she sat, drying her legs. Her eyes were drawn up, and up, until they found the azure sky. “It’s easy to forget, down here, that it’s a sunny day up there.”

  “You forget a lot of things,” Gabriel said.

  She pulled her towel across her lap. “Excuse me?”

  “How can you not remember me?”

  “Look, maybe it was my sister you knew. Kate? Where are you from?”

  “Cork.”

  “Well, there you go. My sister went to college in Cork. You possibly did too?”

  “I was . . . well, yeah.”

  “That’s it, then.”

  “I don’t know your sister.”

  “You don’t know me either.”

  “We met in Muscat. Twenty-six years ago.”

  “As I said yesterday, this is my first time in Oman, so that’s simply not possible.”

  Some things had changed—the swimming, the energy and body tone (her upper arms were strong)—and this directness. He picked up a stone and skimmed it across the pool. It leaped—once, twice, three times—and hit the chalky wall opposite. “You here for long?” he asked Kim.

  “Six days. That’s all they’d pay for. You?”

  He skimmed another pebble. “I live here.”

  “Oh.” She glanced back at the women. “So . . . you’re a guide?”

  “Sometimes. Tour operator mostly.”

  “But you do your own driving?”

  “He has his own business,” Abid interjected. “And he has many drivers, but sometimes he likes to come out with his friends. Isn’t that right, Jibril?”

  “So you’ve been in Oman for some time,” said Kim.

  “A long time,” he said, with a slow glance at Thea. “A long time waiting.”

  It was quiet. No birdsong, even, as they walked back to the vehicles in single file, just the scrape of stones, and that scraping voice: “Cyclone Gonu has done its worst. There are dead trees everywhere. Some appear to have lain right down in the gush of waters that came through this broad wadi, while others have been uprooted whole and carried downstream, where they’re bunched up in the shallow, torpid water at the river mouth. It’s like walking through a cemetery,” Kim went on, “dead palms lying side by side, their root balls—stringy orange strands—exposed, like . . . genitalia. A Guernica of date palm.” She switched off and said to Gabriel, “You might be quite handy for my article. Mind if I ask a few questions?”

  “Fire ahead.”

  “What makes you so sure you know Thea? She doesn’t appear to know you.”

  He turned to check that his ladies were bringing up the rear. “That has nothing to do with tourism.”

  Kim shaded her eyes to look around, Dictaphone held to her lips. “A solitary living tree, its foliage starry against the orange cliff, offers a flash of green, a splash of life.”

  “Oman Tourism will love you.”

  Thea was standing with her hands on the small of her back, looking up at the mountains pulling away from the wadi floor. “I’ve always wanted to see a place like this—like those old sepia photos in travel books, where you’d see camels crossing a stony plain.”

  Abid turned, his gray dishdasha chalky around the hem. “The Bedouin say that if you think of a place, or if it comes into your mind, like that, for no reason, then you must go there, because it has something for you, and you won’t know until you get there.”

  Coming back into the oasis, into the shade of living trees, they passed more damaged ones—some beheaded, their crowns lopped off and dropped beside their trunks; others leaning, like injured soldiers, folding into the ground. It embarrassed Gabriel, as if it was his fault that this place, this jewel of Arabia, had been left in such a state. The damage wrought by Gonu six months earlier was countrywide, but as he glanced at the dead fronds of one of the trees, he saw a shoot of green poking out. Regeneration.

  He drove too fast around the U-bends that wound down into Tiwi but, delayed by his trio, he had been forced to watch the other party go ahead, Abid—so portly now, but still smart and neat, his silver sideburns complementing his thick mustache—striding on with Kim and Thea. He hoped to catch up with them at Qalhat.

  A curve of bay swept out beyond Tiwi. Beautiful. He reached into his bag for the roll he had made at breakfast and munched it. It was good. Everything was good. This was the best day.

  The palms that had survived the storm were like a torn population, all along the coast. “This is Qalhat,” he explained to the women. “It’s one of the most ancient sites in Oman and was an important port in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was destroyed by an earthquake, and then the Portuguese ransacked it. We’ll head up here to Bibi Maryam’s tomb.”

  They stopped near the square pink-brown mausoleum, which enjoyed a panoramic view of the Gulf of Oman. “So who was she,” Hetty asked, as they walked up to it, “this Bibi Maryam?”

  “She was a Turkish slave who married the Prince of Hormuz and, after he died, she became governor of Qalhat, which was famous for its export of Arabian horses. She built this for herself, and a splendid mosque.” The women looked up at the domed roof. “But this is all that remains,” he said, looking around, “and a water cistern.”

  No sign of the others. If they had stopped here, they had made swift w
ork of it. Apprehension and excitement poked him alternately. He would not lose her again.

  The Bibi’s remains were buried in a vault, now covered with the red and green Omani flag, and, taking his clients around the side of the mausoleum, Gabriel showed them what were believed to be the graves of her maids, who killed themselves after she died.

  “Like Cleopatra’s handmaidens,” said Hetty.

  Gabriel nodded. “Eastern history is full of determined women.”

  “Cleopatra,” said Betty. “Who else?”

  “The Prophet’s wife, Khadija,” he said, “was a businesswoman—the Prophet was one of her employees. Zenobia of Palmyra. The Queen of Sheba.”

  “Hardly a handful,” said Betty.

  Hetty put her hand on the ageless wall. “But how many in Western history, Betty?”

  Gabriel looked down the coast. He knew where Abid would take them for lunch.

  Right again. When he walked into Abid’s favorite Indian restaurant in Sur, their voices came from behind a screen at the back. Kim was saying, “What kind of stories?”

  And Thea quipped, “Gin? An alcoholic? That explains a lot,” and looked up to see him leading the women to the table next to them. He smirked; she blushed.

  “Hello again!” Betty exclaimed.

  “Well, hi,” said Kim.

  Betty maneuvered a roll of belly behind the table.

  “Have you come from the boatyard?” Kim asked her.

  “Sadly, no. Apparently we didn’t have time.”

  “Such a pity,” Sue said primly, “since it is one of the highlights of Sur.”

  “You didn’t miss a thing,” said Kim. “There’s been an inferno. Hardly anything left.”

  Gabriel looked at Abid. “Madha hadath?”

  “Some guy.” Abid tapped his head. “A bit mad. Burned it down.”

  “Instead of a bustling hive of carpenters creating traditional, ocean-going dhows,” Kim rattled on, “all we found were the burned-out skeletons of boats and sheds, with a few men working on carved miniature dhows for tourists.”