Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “My God.” Eyes lowered, Kim said quietly, “No wonder you thought the cards were from him.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is, how does Gabriel know about any of it?”

  They made their way to the Friday market, through a jumble of pickup trucks, men in dishdashas and Bedouin women selling goats. Outside the old gate, traders were selling dried fish in plastic bags and cobblers waited for dusty shoes, but the real trade was happening to one side, where a circle had formed around a parade of livestock and men hunkered down, resting their camel sticks against their shoulders. Beyond, other merchandise, bleating and fretful, pulled on ropes—two beautifully coiffed kids, rusty-red with fluffy white fringes, were tied to low stumps on short leashes and didn’t like it.

  Leaning toward Thea, Kim said, “They might have known one another better than Gabriel’s making out. Sachiv could have told him about you.”

  “You think? ‘Hey, I knew an Irish girl once. A guest in my hotel. Slept with her in one of the rooms during my shift. Do bring all your clients to my hotel.’”

  “Hmm. Maybe not.”

  “Besides, Gabriel’s mentioned other things that don’t add up—or, rather, they do add up, and instead of making me wary, it’s making me more damn curious. It’s turning me into you! I want to know more, Kim, but most of all, I want to see more. Do more.” She turned. “Can’t you extend your stay? Then we could take him up on his offer to do another trip. You’ll get to find out what you want and I’ll get to experience some honest-to-God desert.”

  “I’m thinking that’s what Gabriel might call a crowd. And I have to get back. I have deadlines.”

  “I’ll go alone, then. I can’t afford to waste a single minute of this trip. Who knows when I’ll get away again?”

  Kim stopped among the livestock. “You really think that’s a good idea?”

  “Yes. Why would I spend three days alone sitting around in Muscat when I could be off in the sands with my own personal driver?”

  They wandered on. “Do you think you can trust him?”

  “I don’t know about trusting him,” said Thea, “but I can handle him. I mean, I don’t see a string of unresolved murders in this country and Abid clearly thinks highly of him.”

  “Gabriel doesn’t fancy Abid.”

  They stopped beside a solitary camel tied to a tree. Putting her hand on the curve of its neck, Kim looked across at Thea. “Here’s the thing. Cynically, the more we find out about ‘Jibril,’ the better it is for me, but as your friend . . .” she patted the camel’s coarse hair “. . . Gabriel’s got a jinn on his back of one sort or another and if you mess with him—”

  “I wouldn’t mess with him.”

  “You already are, without even trying! And is that fair to Gabriel?”

  “I’m just trying to be fair to me.” The camel blinked slowly at Thea as she stroked its hump. “I have escaped domesticity, Kim. Last time I escaped the norm, I got to go home yellow and my wings were literally clipped. This is too good an opportunity to pass up. Gabriel can help me fill up my haversack a bit.”

  “More than you might want him to.”

  “Stop,” Thea said, smiling. “I thought I was going to be Amelia Earhart, remember? Not taking the personal details of people having hip replacements.”

  “Amelia Earhart died a horrible lonely death in the ocean. You should count your blessings.”

  “I do count my blessings, more than you know, so don’t worry.”

  “It’s not only you I’m worried about. Gabriel is already wounded.”

  “That hasn’t stopped you hounding him. You’re projecting—you want him to be more mysterious than he actually is. I mean, he’s flirting his head off with a married woman and teasing you at every opportunity. He’s not quite the tragic figure you’d like him to be.”

  The camel blinked its long lashes again as a large Ameri-can woman, with big hair and a lime green suit, went past.

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Kim said to it. “Just the kind of person who voted for Bush.”

  Thea stroked the camel. “You know what her last recorded words were?”

  “Who?”

  “Amelia. The last thing the radio operator heard her say was ‘We’re running north and south.’ I’ve often wondered what that means.”

  Abid strode up, looking disparagingly at the camel. “Only good for meat, this one.”

  “No!” they wailed together.

  As they wandered on, Thea scanned the marketplace. A Bedouin woman wearing the leather burqa was haggling with an old man over her goats; a cow, fussed by the push and shove of the crowd, bucked, sending buyers running; and, off to the side, two young women sat on a wall, one of whom was wearing a flamboyant black and pink scarf and a black facemask.

  “Why is one masked and not the other?” she asked Abid.

  “If they wear the mask,” Abid explained, “it means they are engaged, or married. No mask means they are still virgins.”

  “You’d swear she’s proud to be wearing it,” Kim said.

  “No different from flashing the engagement ring, I suppose,” said Thea.

  No sign of Gabriel anywhere. For once, Thea didn’t feel watched—a blessing. A blessing and . . . an itch she couldn’t scratch. For all her flouncing off and snaps of outrage, those declarations he made, the suave cutting words in which he revealed what he knew of her, were nonetheless seductive and intriguing enough to keep her coming back for more.

  They moved through a vegetable market stretched along a street with a great tree at one end. “All locally grown, juicy, fruity veggies, no air miles.” Kim flicked the switch on her tape-recorder. “Low baskets, pale green zucchini, bright orange carrots, cabbages as big as heads, scallions the size of leeks. Also . . .” She stopped by a stack of tin containers. “What are these for, Abid?”

  He opened one and they peered in at a white greasy substance. “Laban,” he said. “A kind of butter.”

  “Buttermilk,” Kim said into her gadget. “Also big bags of tea. Omanis are not traditionally tea drinkers. They once considered it poison. They used dates to sweeten the bitter coffee, so they distrusted tea, which had sugar in it.”

  Thea looked down the street, with its flecks of vegetable color, men and women shopping and bartering. “While I get to do the weekly shop in a supermarket.”

  On the way back to Muscat, Kim worked hard. So did Abid.

  “Why do you think Gabriel’s jinn abandoned him?” she asked him.

  “Because he tried to make her live in our world, but jinn cannot do this. He fought with her, so she has never shown herself to him since that time.”

  “Never shown herself? Are you saying she’s still around?”

  “People say his loneliness is because she is punishing him. That’s why he has never found a wife.” He glanced at Kim. “You like this story.”

  “It breaks my heart.” Her phone went off. “Hello? . . . Gabriel, hi. Hey, you missed a cue—we didn’t run into you at the market.” She paused. He talked. “I’m leaving tonight, yeah. . . . About midnight. . . . That’s right, I do have to eat. . . . We’d love to, thanks. See you then.” She clicked off her phone. “He’s taking us to dinner tonight, Thea.” She looked again at Abid. “So was Gabriel’s companion a good’un or a bad’un, so far as jinn go?”

  “They say she was good. Good for him, at that time. He could be happy with her even now, if he accepted her, but he should have a human wife too. And kids. What is life without children?”

  “Absolutely,” said Thea. “A baby crying all night would certainly ground him.”

  Abid pulled off the highway. “This is nice place for photograph,” he said, as they bumped up to another vantage-point, which overlooked a plantation, beyond which the ancient abandoned village of Birkat al-Mawz stood on the mountain’s toes.

  “Can’t believe you’ll be gone this time tomorrow,” Thea said, clutching Kim’s waist as they posed for a photograph together.

  “I’m so s
orry about the cards. Seemed like such a neat idea. Now it seems irresponsible. Giving you false hope about Sachiv.”

  “Oh, don’t, please. I’ve been an idiot, getting all loved up. It was just something he said when I was leaving that made me suspect him.”

  Kim squinted at her. “‘Don’t be surprised. Don’t be surprised by what I do.’”

  Thea turned. “You heard?”

  “Sure did. I was right behind you guys. Couldn’t figure it.”

  “It’s been going around my head these last months. Too much time on my hands, clearly. I’m sure I was no more than a fling to him.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, I’ll never know.”

  “I know.” Kim turned to take in the view. “There’s something I haven’t told you about Sachiv.”

  “Oh, God, you slept with him too?”

  “I came across him one night, out by the pools, about six weeks after you’d left. I went out for a stretch, quite late, and he was sitting on the end of a lounger, jacket and tie off, his chest sort of concave . . . turned in. When he saw me, he blinked those lovely sad eyes in a hopeless sort of way, and said, ‘She will not come back, I suppose.’ I said, ‘I guess not.’ He didn’t say anything else, so I walked on by.”

  “And?”

  “He suffered too, is all I’m saying.”

  “Good,” said Thea, as Kim wandered off to take photos. She stared into the thick canopy below her, where houses poked out, laundry fluttered on lines, air-conditioners hummed, and satellite dishes sucked in their programs.

  Abid came to her side. “Jibril is a good person. A good man.”

  “I know.”

  “We must take care for all people. Whatever they have done.”

  “Done?” Thea frowned. “Has he done something?”

  Abid looked out, hands deep in his pockets.

  “You mean his brother?”

  A head gesture, approximating a discreet nod.

  “I thought no one knew about that.”

  “His sister told me that story before she went away,” he said. “She wanted that I should make sure he is okay.”

  “And is he?”

  Abid wobbled his head. “Sometimes.”

  “And sometimes not?”

  “There will be no peace for Jibril. Every time he has a little happiness, meets a nice lady, it is destroyed. She will not allow it. No one else can have him. This, she makes sure.”

  Thea’s hand went to her neck. “She’s still with him?”

  “I think, yes. She makes him think you look like her.”

  “Oh, God. He really is cursed.”

  “But someone like you, a strong person, even if she tried, you would repel her.”

  “How?”

  “Three times, you send her out. You say, ‘Leave him,’ three times and the jinn will go out. ‘Tell them three times to leave,’ the Prophet, peace be upon him, says in the Hadith, “and if they don’t, we can kill them.”

  “That didn’t work when the exorcist tried it, apparently.”

  “But you are her rival, and you are stronger than she.”

  “Abid, I have a family, a husband.”

  “Yes.” He nodded sadly. “This is his punishment.”

  “And how was your journey?” Fatima asked, when she picked them up not long after their return from Nizwa. “Did you get enough material?”

  “Oh, more than,” said Kim. “It was a wonderful trip, thank you.”

  Fatima al-Kindi worked for the Ministry of Tourism and had organized Kim’s itinerary. A warm, cheerful woman, she had met Kim at a tourism conference in the States and extended the invitation to visit. They had hit it off and spent some time together—and it was she, it transpired, who had sent the misleading postcards to Thea, according to Kim’s instructions. For Kim’s last afternoon, she had invited them to join her and her husband, Salim, on their Friday round of family visits.

  They drove first to Salim’s village, outside Muscat, where his family’s large house was buried in its own plantation. While his father entertained them in the yard, his mother and younger sister brought coffee and delicious squidgy dates. Fatima explained to Thea that the Omani way of drinking coffee was to slurp it, but not too much. “When you have had enough, you wobble the cup from side to side, like this.”

  It was a fresh evening; the sky was pink and, through the tree fronds, Thea glimpsed a sliver of moon. When Fatima and Salim’s father went to pray, Salim walked Kim and Thea through the grove, explaining how the dates were harvested and dried, which trees were male and which female. “We have twenty-five different types of palm here. And you have seen the falaj around the country?” He pointed at a cement channel, through which flowed a thin trickle of water. “It is a very ancient irrigation system, but nowadays we use it on a time-share basis. In one oasis, each family will have running water for so many hours, and then the next farm will have it.”

  Some kids ran about. Family life. Normalcy. A Sunday afternoon, or the equivalent thereof. Thea felt herself dropping onto firm ground, as if parachuted from a height. No roving Gabriel, no talk of jinn. She was reminded of Brona and the stories she told them when they were small. Before bed, they would sit around the fire to hear her tell of fairies, banshees, and the evil pookas; fairies lived under mounds and hills, and in the ring forts dotted about the countryside. They loved music and dancing, and although they could do good magic, like bringing babies to parents who had none, they could also be willful and play tricks if they were angry. This was why, Brona used to say, there was a tradition among rural folk to call, before throwing used tea leaves out of the door, “Uisce Salach! Uisce Salach!”—dirty water—just in case a fairy was passing.

  Thea, like her brothers and sister, had longed, but longed, to see a fairy, to search the hillocks around Brona’s house or visit the nearest ring fort, but their aunt had advised that it was best to leave them to go about their business undisturbed so that they too would leave her undisturbed. After story time, with fresh milk settled in her tummy and the last taste of a custard cream cookie on her lips, Thea would climb up the stairs feeling as if she were coming down. Down to the normal world where there were rules about bedtime and brushing teeth. In the same way now, at Fatima’s, she was landing, shifting back to the reasonable after being too long off her feet.

  But Kim was not yet done. In the yard, unable to let up, she asked Fatima if it was true that humans could sometimes see jinn.

  “Of course not,” said Fatima. “It is in the Quran: humans cannot see jinn. They live alongside us, not with us. They are created, like humans, to honor God.”

  “That’s not what we’ve been hearing.”

  “If you are going to write about this subject, Kim,” Fatima said, a little tartly, “you must take it from a purely Quranic perspective. It is a religious matter.”

  That drew a line right under the topic, and with a scrape too, but Kim didn’t hear it. “How about young people?” she blundered on, turning to Salim’s teenage sister. “Do you believe in jinn?”

  Thea wished Kim would stop. This was delicate ground, private, a matter of faith. She had gone from being curious to being downright rude.

  It was Fatima who took Kim in hand. “Why are you interested in this? It is not tourism.”

  “We met a man, an Irishman, who apparently fell in love with a jinn lady. I’m trying to understand, that’s all.”

  Fatima ran her finger between her chin and the fabric of her tightly bound scarf. “In love with a jinn?” she said, with a dismissive chuckle. “Jinn feed on bones and feces, and sometimes people leave dead animals, just like that, to decompose, so the jinn can have the bones! I don’t think this is very lovable.” Everyone laughed. “In the stories, men marry jinn! How handy it would be—one minute your wife could be Madonna, then Posh Spice.”

  “Because jinn can be whatever you want them to be?” Kim asked. “That would explain some of the strange things that happened to our friend.”

&
nbsp; “Listen,” said Fatima, “this is how it is. If you told someone two hundred years ago that men could get in a great steel bird,” she waved her arm in the air, “and be in Tehran two hours later, they would call it magic. If you’d said a hundred years ago that you could write someone a message and they would have it straight away, they would have said, ‘Never! Only Allah can do such things!’ One day, we will find the answers to strange happenings. What used to be magic is not magic anymore. It is science. And in the future we will explain things we cannot explain now.” She stood up. “Come, come, we must go to our uncle’s.”

  And so, in another roomy house, more extended family welcomed them.

  “Irlanda?” the old uncle said to Thea. “James Joyce!”

  “Yes.” She smiled.

  He spoke; Salim translated. “He says that many young writers try to be like Joyce, but they fail, because they are not true geniuses like him.”

  Sipping her coffee, Thea tried to remember when last she had been asked about Irish writers and not the country’s booming economy. It was a welcome relief.

  “He lived in Italy, didn’t he?” Salim asked. “A Portrait of the Artist—I love this book. He chose exile. Exile from nation, religion, family.” He shook his head. “I cannot really understand it. In Oman, family is everything, religion too. This is against everything I believe in, so it is fascinating to me.”

  “I believe he felt these things restrained him creatively.”

  The conversation then became a general moan about President Bush, the war in Iraq, and the media in general. The West, the uncle declared, had become empty because it had lost all spirituality.

  “There’s something in that,” Kim agreed.