The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

  It helped that he listened. Really listened. In meetings with ministers, military leaders, or even with lowly receptionists, he never took his eyes from the face of the person to whom he spoke. (Unlike so many other diplomats, he wasn’t constantly glancing around the room for someone more important to approach.) People instinctively trusted him, for his ease with their language, his attentiveness, his concern for their concerns.

  While he loved each language for its unique idiosyncrasies, Finn had a special fondness for Arabic, for the way it unfurled backward from his pen, looking like the kind of secret code he’d invented to write to boyhood friends in dull classes. And how could anyone understand politics today without a knowledge of Arabic, with its indirect, poetical digressions, its cryptic grammar, its ancient resonances?

  He supposed he would continue in the Middle East as long as the FCO was willing to send him there. He and Cordelia were briefly back in London together while she completed language training for a posting to Beijing (she hadn’t needed Thai after all), and Finn applied for other Middle Eastern posts. They managed to stay together through her four years in Beijing and his eventual posting to Beirut. But ultimately, Finn didn’t want a girlfriend a continent away. He had a long attention span when it came to love, but he wanted someone at his side, in his bed. Marriage was not on Cordelia’s to-do list, nor did she want children. An only child from a quiet home, Finn was unwilling to rule out the prospect of a family. So regretfully, amiably, they split. Cordelia surged ahead of him, becoming an ambassador before she turned thirty-nine—a couple years before Finn won his first ambassadorship, to Bahrain.

  It was difficult for diplomats to find domestic bliss together. One had to give up a career, they had to coordinate their postings, or they had to settle for spending most of their lives apart. In fact, it was difficult to have a partner with any professional life. After Cordelia, Finn kept finding himself dating women—in London, Beirut, pretty much anywhere he spent time—who turned out to have purely domestic aspirations. It took only a few dates for him to be bored witless. An alarming number of the world’s women seemed to think nothing—not even a career of their own—could be more glamorous than to appear at cocktail parties on the arm of a diplomat. But why would any man want a housewife? He had never understood this. He needed a woman with whom he could share thoughts about his work. Someone with ideas of her own, a drive of her own, someone who could introduce him to other worlds. Without this two-way exchange, where was the partnership? What was there to engage him? He didn’t need anyone to follow him; he wanted someone to take turns leading. Finn was doomed to be drawn to intelligent, ambitious women whose passions took them away from him.

  He had lost himself in work after that. When abroad he was often wooed by local women, but he knew better than to believe their affections sincere. Unmarried diplomats were unnervingly popular with the female natives of almost any developing nation. Smelling the chance for a Western visa and an easy life, women cornered him at national day receptions, charity fund-raisers, and once even at a coast guard training exercise, fluttering their heavily mascaraed lashes and unspooling their tragic circumstances. They were in love with his nationality, his security, his prospects. He himself had nothing to do with it. He had a horror of becoming one of the too-numerous unremarkable and aging white ambassadors wedded to dark-skinned beauties half their age. Surely they knew why these women had married them? Had they not also been urged to sleep NATO? He pitied these men. For they would never be loved. Or was he being unkind? Perhaps there was a kind of love involved, the kind of affection one would feel for a fatherly patron.

  But his customary caution blew out into the desert sands that first night Afsoon came to his room, slipped in with the moonlight. She stood there, just inside the door, breathing. He could almost hear her heart beating from the bed where he lay, its metronomic thwack drowning out his precautionary mantra, Sleep NATO. “Tell me if I should go away,” she said.

  “It is not for me to say what you should do,” he answered, English suddenly feeling like a foreign language. He couldn’t encourage her, but neither could he summon the discipline to send her away. It had to be her decision; it was she who had everything to lose.

  She stood silent, unmoving, hesitant. And then slowly, deliberately, began unpinning the scarf from her hair.

  —

  HE HAD LOVED her, as much as he knew how to love anyone then. He had thought he could rescue her, marry her and take her somewhere she would be safe. Afsoon wasn’t like the other diplomat hunters, he reassured himself. She was just two years younger, had a profession of her own, refused any expensive gift, and had ultimately refused to marry him. No one could accuse her of gold digging or status seeking. And she had laughed when he talked about taking her back to England. “To die of loneliness?” she said. “Away from my family in a country where it takes three years to make a single friend?”

  “It doesn’t have to be England; it could be anywhere.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about anywhere,” she said. “And what will happen to my country if every educated woman leaves? There are few enough of us as it is.”

  It was a decent point, and Finn did not argue. But finding a way to lure her abroad kept him awake at night, during the few hours he actually spent in his bed. Work kept him up late most nights, not least because it took him so long to complete all the paperwork. Someday he should perhaps learn to type with more than two fingers. “Why do you not dictate?” Afsoon asked him. “You have a PA. Use her.” But he couldn’t think the same way out loud as he could when he formed the words on paper himself. He might be slow, but the time it took for his thoughts to travel from his brain to his fingertips and be transformed into pixels improved the end result.

  Recently it had been more than paperwork and Afsoon keeping him up nights. Charlotte Fernsby, a British aid worker, had disappeared with her translator-fixer on the road between Lashkar Gah and Musa Qala. Two weeks later the embassy had received the ransom request, presumably from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the terrorist group linked to the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl. There was no question of paying the ransom. But there were debates on whether to attempt a rescue mission and if so, how soon. Rescue missions had an unfortunate tendency to fail. Dramatically. Which was why attempts at mediation were usually the first course of action. But in this case, requests for meetings with a mediator had been ignored.

  When intelligence finally informed him that they knew where Fernsby was being held, Finn was tempted. The ambassador was out of country, leaving him as chargé. The impulse to rescue, despite the risks, was strong. He held meetings. He talked through every detail with intelligence, with the political staff. And finally, illegally, desperately, he talked with Afsoon. He had been young back then and in his first posting as deputy head of mission. But not young enough to excuse what had happened.

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2007

  Miranda

  Miranda teetered on the spiky heels as she sauntered across the worn pink carpet of the small bedroom, dressed in a fuchsia, sequined gown that clung to her legs like plastic film. Tazkia and her two sisters lay sprawled across the rose-patterned velour blankets of their double bed in jeans and T-shirts, laughing at her ungainliness.

  “Go on,” said Hind, the youngest sister. “Dance for us. Show us how models walk in America.”

  “But I’m not a model! I can barely dress myself.” The sisters had yanked off her dowdy blouse and pulled the dress down over her hips as if she were a giant doll. Usually when she visited they performed comic skits for her, but today they had insisted Miranda take a more active role.

  “But models are on television all the time. Aren’t they? Like in Egypt? We can get some Egyptian stations.” Hind was even more outspoken than Tazkia, taller and slightly chubbier, with enormous dark eyes and auburn hair curling to her shoulders. Though only sixteen, she was already engaged to one of her first cousins, a man in his early twenties who worked with their father in his grocery stall.
Next to her on the bed, their middle sister, Sehr, sat quietly brushing her hair. She worked as a math teacher in a neighborhood school, an unusual occupation for a woman here. Sehr and Tazkia remained unmarried at the old-maidish ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, but Sehr didn’t want to stop working, and Tazkia claimed she would settle only for love—though how love could spontaneously occur in a culture that prevented the two sexes from ever coming into contact mystified Miranda.

  “We never had a television. But okay, I admit I’ve seen models. It’s kind of unavoidable.” Miranda got the feeling Hind expected Americans to be a little more glamorous than she evidently was.

  “So do the walk. Like on the catwalk.”

  “Wait!” cried Tazkia. “We need music!” She ran to the plain wooden dresser the three girls shared and picked up a small cassette player. A few seconds later, the wail of an Arabian love song filled the room. Miranda posed, one foot forward, hands dangling as she looked haughtily down her nose at the women. Then, swinging her hips in exaggerated motions, she strutted across the room, not even remotely in time with the music. At the end of the room, she attempted a complicated turn, catching a heel on the hem of the dress and launching herself onto the edge of the bed. “You Americans,” Tazkia said in dismay as her sisters convulsed with laughter. “You don’t know what to do with your hips.” She leapt up from the bed and launched into the pelvis-swirling dance Miranda had admired at many Mazrooqi weddings. Twisting her hands in the air like a pair of charmed serpents, Tazkia smiled up at Miranda through lowered lashes. The effect was more seductive than anything Miranda had seen in a Seattle club. “I know!” Tazkia said, abruptly dropping her arms and breaking the spell of her dance. “Let’s all do a show!”

  In a corner of the room rested a familiar hand-painted metal trunk, its lid thrown open to reveal a slithering mass of lace, feathers, and polyester. This was where the sisters tossed the flamboyant dresses they bought at the discount store DinarMax to wear to weddings. Rarely did a dress get more than one outing—they liked to impress each other anew at each celebration (and the dresses were not sturdily made). But on Thursdays, the women often spent the long afternoons after lunch playing dress-up and acting out little dramas. Tazkia and Hind would pretend to be Egyptian soap opera stars, smearing on thick coats of lipstick and gluing on false eyelashes. “You!” Hind would cry, with a dramatic flourish of her arm. “Don’t you think I don’t see you making eyes at my husband!”

  “Lies!” Tazkia yelled, jumping onto the bed. “How dare you slander my honor!”

  “I knew your father should never have let you go to university. All you learned there was how to impress boys!”

  “You are just jealous because you were too stupid to go to school. Did you know your mother dropped you on your head when you were still a baby?”

  The sisters could rarely get through a whole scenario without dissolving into giggles. Miranda watched them with a mixture of amusement and envy. They so obviously adored each other; she had never heard them utter a cross word that wasn’t in jest. Not only did Miranda covet their easy camaraderie but she also envied them their mother, a smiling, apple-shaped woman devoted to her children. She always welcomed Miranda with a flurry of kisses, clinging to her arm as she led her to the diwan for lunch. “Can I believe this? An ambassador’s wife in my home?” she had said in wonder after Miranda first moved in with Finn (technically, they weren’t married yet, but once they were living together all the Mazrooqis just assumed they were). “I’m the same Miranda you’ve always known,” she had said, embarrassed at her sudden rise in status. To her relief, after a few more visits, the awe had worn off. As far as Tazkia’s family knew, she had become an ordinary housewife.

  Miranda knew the costume trunk well. As a special homework assignment, she had asked Tazkia to draw the same object every single week for six months. It hadn’t been easy, as Tazkia was rarely alone in the room. But somehow she had found time to make a rough ink sketch of the trunk most weeks. She hid the drawings in a suitcase full of old clothing underneath the bed until she could get them to Miranda. When the six months were up, Miranda pinned up the sketches across three walls of her studio in the Residence. “What do you see?” she asked.

  Tazkia stepped back and stood still, looking at the series with anxious eyes. There were pictures of the trunk locked shut, thrown open, empty, overflowing with dresses, and one of a doll sitting atop the closed lid. “Different details,” she said. “Like the metal hinges on the corners. I didn’t paint that the first time. Maybe I didn’t see it?” Miranda remained quiet. “I guess I didn’t see the little flowers on the lid the first few times either. There are more details toward the end. It seems more alive, later.”

  Miranda nodded. “Every drawing you did, you discovered something you hadn’t seen before. Or you drew it from a perspective you hadn’t used before. It wasn’t the trunk that was changing—your vision was.”

  “The ones at the end are better, aren’t they?”

  “Because when you look at something so many times, run your pencil over it so many times, you become braver, attempt things you might have found hard to draw at first. You reconnect with it a different way.” This was one reason Miranda liked to return to places she had once painted, return to people and objects that had inspired her. She had worked on a similar exercise while Tazkia was working on her trunk, every day tracing the bars of their upstairs kitchen window, the leaves and flowers that obscured it. In fact, she couldn’t stop drawing those bars, would likely draw them until the day they left the country for good.

  —

  “MIRA,” TAZKIA SAID as Miranda sat on the bed struggling to extract shoe from sequins, “you be in a show with us now.”

  “I don’t know how.” She didn’t feel at home enough in their culture to parody it the way the sisters so often did.

  Tazkia was already scrambling into a dress made entirely of white and blue feathers, while Hind tugged a silver minidress down over her soft belly. “You be the man,” Tazkia called through the feathers. “Pretend you want to marry one of us.” Marriage was a popular theme.

  “But I’m wearing a dress.” Miranda felt lost in their games, clumsy and out of place.

  “Pretend it’s a pink thobe.” Tazkia’s head emerged from the feathers, and she settled herself on the carpet, legs curled demurely to the side.

  Miranda drew herself up, standing with legs apart and hands on her hips. “Most beautiful Tazkia, I have come from a faraway land just to seek your hand in marriage—”

  “No, no!” Tazkia cut her off. “First of all, I would never marry someone from a faraway land. Our friend Naveen married a man from Dubai, and now she has to live there, with his family. You have to be Mazrooqi.”

  “You wouldn’t move to Dubai?”

  Tazkia wrinkled her nose. “Of course not! My family is here. I could never live where I couldn’t see my mother every day. And my sisters.”

  Miranda thought about her mother. It would never occur to her to pick a place to live based on its proximity to her parents. Most of her friends back home wanted to live as far from their parents as possible. Was there something they had gotten wrong, something they were missing? Why did they not feel this easy, daily affection for their families? Why were they so comfortable with distance from people they loved?

  “But, Tazzy,” she said, falling out of character. “You could be freer somewhere else. Not Dubai, maybe. Somewhere you could—” She stopped herself.

  “I wouldn’t, though.” Tazkia frowned at her. “Not if I went there with a man.”

  There was so much Miranda wanted to say. But instead she looked beseechingly to Tazzy’s little sister. “You’re engaged to a Mazrooqi, Hind. Will you show me how it’s done?”

  OCTOBER 19, 2010

  Finn

  Finn is in the kitchen with Cressie when the first notes arrive. His sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he is kneading bread dough, folding it in half and pushing it into the tiled counter with
angry thrusts. Two months. It has been two months now, and his embassy seems to be getting nowhere. He rings every day, aware of the staff’s growing reluctance to take his calls. At least once a week, Celia updates him on the progress of the case. Progress. If you can call a flurry of false leads and lies progress. “We’re keeping an eye on the chatter,” said Celia in one conversation, meaning the mysterious phone and e-mail networks used by terrorists. It isn’t just Al Qaeda here. In a country this poor and desperate, there are all kinds of terrorists with all kinds of causes. But no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for this one. It is inexplicable. Often there is at least a ransom request, or a demand for prisoners to be released. But they have heard nothing.

  “And the mediations?” Finn asked Celia. “They’re continuing?” After locating his wife, this is his main preoccupation. The country must not disintegrate. Not now. Not ever, if that is possible. He had met with Celia several times to bring her up to speed on the mediation he had been conducting with sheikhs from the North and South, but how could she truly replace him when he had personal relationships with these men? When this project had been his from its inception? When the other EU ambassadors had looked to him for leadership?

  “It’s slow, Finn, you know how it goes. Some of the sheikhs aren’t wild about a woman moderator.”

  “But they’re meeting with you?”

  “Some of them.”