by Denyse Woods
“You must like it here, to have stayed so long?”
“Love it. I mean, this is a tough landscape; it doesn’t forgive you much, and you have to keep your wits about you—whether it’s flash floods or hiking over escarpments—but with the right client, I can take off into the desert and—”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see the desert again!”
Closing one eye to shut out the glare reflecting off the water, he said, “Again? I thought you’d never been here before?”
“This isn’t the only place that has deserts.”
“Ah, Iraq.”
“Yes.” Her gaze drifted off with her thoughts.
Gabriel cleared his throat. “Wahiba Sands tonight, I suppose?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t see much desert on the tourist hop, you know.”
“Well, it isn’t my itinerary. I’m the official travelling companion. All I have to do is get in and out of the jeep at appointed spots and swim. Wonderful.”
“It must have been lovely,” he said, “meeting Kim again.”
She flicked water about with her fingers. “Oh, it was . . . fantastic. I mean, I’d been getting these mysterious postcards from Muscat for months and hadn’t a clue—”
“Postcards?”
Thea wrinkled her nose. “Long story.”
“Good. Long and mysterious stories go down well in these parts. From the top, please.”
“Wherever that is.” She turned her face up again, begging the sun to hit on her. “A few months ago, I came downstairs one day and saw the white-rimmed corner of a postcard poking out from the buff dross that had been stuffed through the letterbox. I could just see a narrow slice of aquamarine that screamed holidays. I tried to remember who was away, of our friends, you know—and where?—and pulled it out from the rest of the mail, thinking, a Caribbean beach perhaps, a Himalayan sky. But it was neither. It featured the ridge of a sand dune, its flanks lined with neat grooves mussed only by footprints—two sets, one coming over the crest of the dune and joining another on the other side, continuing together. I didn’t turn it over, at first. I was wondering which desert it might be. The Gobi? Namib? Arabia? And when finally I turned the card, the message, written in a sort of childish hand, said, ‘Meet me in Muscat.’”
“Sounds like a song.”
She nodded mildly, but stayed back there in her hall, or wherever she’d gone to.
“So you jumped on a plane?”
“Of course not. I had no idea who’d sent it. But a few weeks later, another card came, and then they kept coming at regular intervals until—”
“Hang on, back to the second card. I signed up for the long version.”
She glanced at him, then back at her toes. “That was delivered in late September. It featured an orange fort with a girth of palm trees and three mountain ridges in the background, stacked one behind the other, each a darker shade of blue than the one before it.”
“Nakhal.”
“And the message read: ‘In January.’”
Gabriel smiled. Thea smiled back. “Someone was messing with my head, but these anonymous nudges were kind of intimate, and I liked the turn of mind of the person who was sending them, even though I couldn’t identify them, so I had to operate on a hunch.”
“And your hunch said Kim? It would have, to me.”
“No, I’m not that bright. Anyway, I thought she’d long since, and with good reason, given up on me. But then another card came, as expected: a gray beach, flat sea, orange cliffs, and a leatherback turtle making her way to the low surf. Message: ‘At the Hyatt.’”
“But who was posting them? Doesn’t Kim live in the States?”
“Yeah. She asked an Omani friend of hers in Muscat to write them.”
Gabriel shook his head, still smiling. “This is wonderful.”
Thea looked over at Kim’s head, resting on the rim of her jacuzzi. “At that point I started looking up flights. We were due to go to the Rockies this summer, but I started thinking the boys could go without me. White water rafting isn’t really my thing—my danger-sports years are long over—and flights to Muscat were equal to the cost of getting to the Rockies. . . . And then those gorgeous postcards and the glassy swimming pools featured on the Omani websites started to do their work. To hell with mysterious meetings, I thought. Just give me that pool, that beach, that desert! The next card read, ‘Three o’clock.’ That one showed the entrance to a mosque, all blue and white mosaics, and mother-of-pearl.”
“So this dribble of details really took effect? I mean, had one card come—‘Meet me in Muscat in January at the Hyatt at three o’clock,’ would that have worked?”
“Oh, I’d probably have discarded it, but these amuse-bouches made me . . .”
“Crave the main course?”
“Absolutely.” She shook her head. “The last one should have given it away: two Bedouin women, swathed in orange and black scarves, holding those leather masks up to their hidden faces. As my niece would say, ‘Duh!’ But I still didn’t think it was Kim. I thought I’d hurt her irredeemably by never replying to any of her letters, after she had looked after me so well, and then we lost track of each other.”
“And the final message?”
“It said simply, ‘Twelfth.’”
“A date. Irresistible, I’d imagine?”
She paused, her thoughts not for broadcast. Then she lifted her hands from the water. “I stand before you—or, rather, slide around before you—so yes, irresistible, but I genu-inely had no idea who was behind it. You mislay a lot of people in the course of an average life.”
“Your husband didn’t mind?”
“Why would he? He was as curious as I was.”
“Could have been an ex.”
“He thought it probably was an ex, but he has more faith in me than apparently you do. And, besides, he knew I needed . . . a break. Something.”
“It must have been nerve-racking,” Gabriel said, “waiting.”
“Yes. Sorry for dashing off on you that day in the lobby, but I was nervous about who was going to show up. I mean, it could have been my worst nightmare—that horrible teacher I had in fifth class or the awful woman I was in hospital with once. But those cards, those images, created their own story and I wanted to get to the end of it.” Behind her shades, her eyes were still; still with disappointment.
She had been expecting someone else, he was sure of it.
“And when it came to it,” she went on, “we met up in the Ladies, of all places. You can imagine the screeching.”
“I don’t have to. I heard it. I was coming out of the Gents.” He tried to sit up. His hips wouldn’t let him. “Look,” he said, slithering about. “I’m sorry for freaking you out with all that talk of, you know, thinking you were someone else. It won’t happen again.”
“You sure?”
“I can do small talk instead. Honestly. I do it all the time in my job.”
“Oh, great. From freaky to chitchat.”
She was cheekier than she’d been before; funnier. She had acquired confidence and character. It was a furious turn-on.
“Forget small talk,” she said. “Tell me about the woman you thought I was, or am, or . . . should be?”
Gabriel looked up at the white cliff that rose from just beyond their toes. “I don’t talk about it.”
“You’ve barely spoken of anything else!”
His shoulder blades were straining with the effort of holding his elbows in place. He looked at her again. Surely she noticed it—the intimacy, the easiness of their exchanges. How could she imagine them to be strangers? “You’ll think I’m mad,” he said. “Everyone else does.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“You don’t make much sense.”
“I never have.”
“That’s true,” she said. “You’ve made very little sense in our short acquaintance thus far.”
Not so short, he wanted to say.
She shivered—he saw it ripple up her arm, like uncertainty. Better, he thought, not to speak of their past here, in the hypnotizing quiet, at the foot of those expressive rock faces, with their mealy-mouthed openings, like angered lips. “What’s wrong?”
Thea looked past Kim, along the gully. “It’s moody here, isn’t it? There’s a sort of foreboding or something. I wish I could shake it off.”
“You can’t. It’s embedded in the rocks.”
Droplets of water drying on her shoulders were turning white. “I blame Abid,” she said. “He’s been talking about jinn. Kim keeps pumping him for stories. I don’t quite get it, though, how some people see them and others don’t.”
“Better to say they reveal themselves to some and not to others,” Gabriel explained. “Although, strictly speaking, according to the Quran, they can never be seen by humans. Depends what you believe.”
“And what do you believe?”
“Call me agnostic.”
“I’ve heard that men can fall in love with them.”
Gabriel finally managed to sit up, and leaned over his knees. “All right, all right. Stop beating around the gully. Abid’s told you, clearly.”
“Told me what?”
“My own personal folklore.”
She hooked her big toes together.
“What did he say?” he asked, adding, in spite of himself, “You have nice toes.” In truth, although her legs were still slim, her feet had not improved with age.
“He said you’re a sad man.”
“Ah.”
“He said you came to Oman in the eighties to stay with your sister, because the woman you wanted to marry loved someone else.”
Gabriel let out an involuntary cough. This still had currency? How effective had been Rolf’s myth-making!
“But then you fell in love with a jinn, and that’s why you’re still here, still alone.”
Gabriel nodded.
“So it’s true?
“Except the jinn bit. I did fall in love, but she wasn’t a jinniya.”
“So why did Abid say she was?”
“Because . . .” How, where, to go with this? He sighed. “Because no one else ever saw her, even when they were in the same room.”
Thea slid her sunglasses down her nose to look over them. “No wonder they think you’re a bit deluded.”
“Oh, they don’t think I’m mad because I fell in love with her—lots of men fall for jinn and take them as wives. No, they like to tease me because I managed to lose her and haven’t replaced her.”
“But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Some things can never be left behind.”
Thea pushed her sunglasses back up. “That’s true.”
A light cloud dimmed the sun, then let it out again.
“And that affair saved me,” Gabriel said.
“They call this work.” Kim’s voice echoed along the gully.
He turned to Thea. “You saved me.”
She sat up. “Stop doing that.”
He reached out, touched her elbow. “I’m sorry. I’m trying, honestly, but I’ve . . . I’m totally thrown. The resemblance is—”
“The resemblance to whom? Your jinn person?”
“You even sound like her.”
“Oh, Christ.” She turned. “Kim! Lunch is ready!”
Kim twisted around in a slithery spin. “Hi, Gabriel. You been sneaking up on us again?”
“More like arriving with a great splash.”
The teenagers clambered over the rocks and came across the stones. Thea gingerly got to her feet. Gabriel offered his hand, but so too did Khaled and she took his instead.
Kim joined them, muttering to Gabriel, “Who’s the old guy?”
Thea looked back. “What old guy?”
Kim turned. “Oh. Gone. He was standing on that rock up there, watching us.”
“That’s the old boy who guards the cave,” said Gabriel.
“Where’d he go?” Kim twisted around. “He was leaning on a camel stick, clear as day.”
“He didn’t go anywhere. He’s one of the local jinn.”
“No way!”
“Let’s get back,” said Thea.
“Are you messing with me?” Kim nudged Gabriel.
“If I am, where is he?”
Unable to take her eyes from the cliffs, Kim said, “You mean I’ve actually seen one? How cool is that? Those years in Iraq, I never got as much as a whisper from the other world.”
“We go this way,” Khaled said, helping Thea across the nipping gravel to a stream that had forged its own smooth slide into the lower pool. He sat, pushed off, slid away and landed with a plouf in the water below. His friend followed.
“Oh, God,” said Kim. “I have to do that?”
“Nothing for it,” said Gabriel. “It’s the only way back.”
“Right.” Kim seated herself on the rock and slithered down its back, screeching.
Thea insisted Gabriel went ahead of her, but when she dropped underwater right beside him, her hand touched his shoulder and his caught her waist. The fleeting contact gave him a kick, just as her heels kicked her back to the surface. She wouldn’t be as easy, this time.
They swam slowly through the corridor of limestone, its smooth white walls curved and soft. Kim reached out to touch the chalky surface. “We’re in one of the earth’s creases,” she said, “deep in the groove of one of its wrinkles. It’s like being embedded in our own planet.”
Gabriel said, “Pity your tape recorder isn’t waterproof.”
An Everest-like peak, ice-free, glowed in the evening light as they made their way out of the wadi. On the roadside, women in veils splashed with color walked along the street, their mobile phones gripped to their ears. Gabriel had left the other party behind, feasting on barbecued barracuda under an awning next to a large pool in the evening sun. With difficulty, he had torn himself from her side, leaving her pulling chunks of fish from its bone with her greasy, nimble fingers.
In a small town near the Sands, he let down his tires, watched by six old men sitting in a semicircle on plastic chairs, chewing the cud, their beards as white as their dishdashas, their wise faces relaxed. Then he bought the ladies tea in paper cups, which was sweet and delicious, they said, as they worked their way through a packet of cookies, while rollicking toward the Sands. They were growing on Gabriel. Slow, they might be, but they were earthy and honest, and unreasonably fair to him in view of how badly he was conducting their not inexpensive tour.
The ragged mountain peaks had softened into rusty, rounded dunes, which moved toward them like a welcoming party until they were ahead, behind and all around them. Leaving the road, Gabriel headed into a funnel, a sandy superhighway, broad and track-marked. Bedouin holdings were spotted along the way, with animal enclosures, kids and goats, and an occasional camel.
“Heavens, look,” said Betty. “Greenery.”
“These are good times in the desert,” Gabriel explained. “The cyclone brought rain for the first time in years.” At a random spot, he turned off the valley floor and headed right up into the dunes. They were running late for one of the advertised highlights—the desert sunset, so he careered across the sand, throwing the jeep up slopes and over ridges, looking for a spot. Betty squealed, Hetty gripped the handle over her door, repeating, mantra-like, that she was fine because her eyes were shut, and Sue, beside him, put her feet on the dash and sat rigid. It always gave Gabriel a rush, this bit: being in control of people’s fear.
They drew to a halt high on a crest, just in time to see a wink of sun slink behind the horizon, which had the outline of a reclining woman. Thanks to his dallying, they had effectively missed the sunset, but the evening sky got him off the hook—its bruise-colored clouds were rimmed with a luminescent, multicolored aura. It darkened here and brightened there, so that the view kept dazzling, and the photos had to be taken again and again, while the desert, with much less ceremony, vanished into darkness.
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Down on the flat, a 4x4 rushed by, its headlights beaming and sand spraying up behind it. Abid. The barracuda had cost them this magnificent sky. Pity. Gabriel would have liked Thea to see it.
“Ooh, look,” said Betty. “He turned off his headlights!”
“The Bedouin way,” Gabriel explained. “They see better in the dark, or so they say.”
At the camp, goat-hair tents, randomly spread out and each with its own roofless brick bathroom, surrounded a large communal area, lit by gas lights. Gabriel carried the ladies’ bags to their appointed tent, where they were charmed by the heavy timber beds, the dresser, table and chairs. Then he walked back to the restaurant, his eyes scanning the compound until he saw Kim coming out of a tent and stepping across to the bathroom. She didn’t appear to see him. He changed direction and did an about loop—it was pitch dark now—which brought him around to the back of their tent, just as Kim came out of the bathroom.
“This is lovely,” he heard Thea say to her. “I can lie here on the bed and see that amazing sky through the flap.”
“He’s proving quite hard to lose, your ex,” Kim said.
“My ex?”
“Gabriel.”
“Don’t you start! So he’s here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s got to the point where I’d be surprised if he wasn’t.”
“It’s a bit like being stalked,” Kim went on, “except he’s so sweet on the eye that I don’t actually mind. Unless you’re bothered?”
“I’m getting used to him.”
“And I quite like the way he turns up and then vanishes.”
Thea chuckled. “Maybe he’s the jinn.”
Their words were clear, even though their voices were low.
“That guy has a back story, I’m telling you,” said Kim. “This jinn woman is about some whole other thing. I’d put money on it.”
“Me too.”
“Be careful, though.”
“Why?”
“He can’t take his eyes off you.”
“Probably waiting for me to get sucked back into the lamp like the last one.”
They giggled again. “I’m not kidding, Thea. He’s attractive. Dangerously so.”
“And I’m married.”
“How married?”
