After she sealed each envelope, Miranda wrote a number (in Arabic) on the front of it. She didn’t think Finn would feel like celebrating his birthday on such a grim day. But she wasn’t exactly throwing a drunken party and tossing confetti out of the windows with whoops of joy. She simply wanted to make her love visual, tangible, to turn it into a gift. This could not be wrong, no matter what the state of the world outside. Having thus reassured herself, she gathered up her envelopes and headed downstairs. She taped the first card to the front door, the second and third to his office door and wall, and the rest throughout the house, from the front hall to the tiny diwan perched on the top of their home. Recently renovated, it had never been used.
The household staff watched her curiously as she fixed cards to the wall in the kitchen. When Miranda explained what she was doing, Teru ran back to the laundry room, returning with a box of Lindt truffles. “The ambassador, he likes chocolate, no?” And she took the roll of tape from Miranda and attached a truffle to each card in the kitchen.
With Desta’s help, Miranda then set up the roof diwan for dinner, with a tablecloth, paper Winnie-the-Pooh birthday napkins (the only celebratory napkins to be found in the stores), plates, wineglasses, candles, and enormous bunches of flowers that her driver had picked up that morning. She had wanted to choose the flowers herself, but Tucker refused to let her leave the grounds.
In the bedroom, Miranda peeled back the comforter and laid a towel over the sheets. Candles and massage oil stood at attention on her bedside table. In their private kitchen she sliced cucumbers and limes, lined up the bottles of Hendrick’s gin and tonic water, and chilled a bottle of champagne. She found an ice bucket, filled it, and stuck it in the freezer. Thus she was able to keep danger and grief dancing on the periphery of her consciousness. The succession of small tasks occupied her until Finn arrived home, at the miraculously early hour of 6:30. For a moment—and only a moment—she considered waiting upstairs while he followed the trail of cards. But she couldn’t keep her feet from the steps. After all, he had thirty cards to read before he even got to the bedroom; it could take a while. He was just setting his briefcase down in his study, the first card open in his right hand, when she came in. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, hugging her. “Beautiful card.”
“Rough day at the office.”
“Not as rough a day as the American ambassador had.”
“Did you talk to the Americans? How is the staff?”
“I’ve done everything I can do for the moment. The Americans are as you would expect them to be. I promise I’ll tell you everything as soon as we sit down.”
“Okay, but did you read the instructions? There are a few more cards…if you don’t mind? Are you up to it?”
Finn looked again at the card, which contained a clue leading him to the next one. “It’s a little bit of a relief to be told what to do for a change,” he said, walking back out into the hallway.
Miranda followed him as he discovered each card, peeled it from the wall, and read it slowly. He stopped after each one to take her in his arms or to kiss her, so they progressed slowly. After the fifteenth card, when Miranda edged him forward again, he said, “Oh, there are more?”
“Well, sweetheart, how old are you?”
When he looked at her with brimming eyes, she knew her efforts had not been wasted.
On the wall next to the kitchen table was a crossword puzzle, which they religiously completed together on weekend mornings. A postcard of Kati Horna’s 1937 photograph from the Spanish Civil War Woman from Madrid in a Refugee Centre in Velet Rubio, of a stout woman breast-feeding a child standing and gazing into the distance, both fear and determination etched in her eyes, hung in the hall between kitchen and laundry room. On the staircase they followed a series of Meret Oppenheim shoe photographs: elegant, ivory high-heeled shoes trussed up like a roast turkey (Miranda’s idea of a joke; she still loathed heels although Tazkia’s lessons had made her slightly less likely to shatter an ankle). Near the top was Jim Warren’s surreal Sexual Explosion, its ecstasy-shattered woman flinging her head back in erotic surrender.
In the bedroom, he followed the instructions on the violet, heart-shaped Post-it notes stuck to their headboard, which read, “Remove clothing” and “Rest here.”
“Drink?”
“A gin and tonic would be wonderful,” he answered predictably, struggling to balance on one foot while removing a black sock. “Hendrick’s?”
“Would I ever use another gin?”
“Forgive me.”
“Oh, wait! I forgot the Finn’s Birthday Music!” Miranda ran to the iPod, and the initial notes of the Magnetic Fields’ “It’s Only Time” drifted into the room as she mixed their drinks. “Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now? / It’s only time….”
The ice crackled in the gin as she set the glasses down on the nightstand and shrugged her sundress to the floor. Naked, they sat on the towel together.
“So tell me,” she said.
Reaching for her hand, he described the morning’s horror and its aftermath. “There are too many days like this,” he said. “Too many.”
Tomorrow morning he would hold a staff meeting to discuss increased security at his own embassy. “And I hate to say it, sweetheart, but we’ll have to discuss the possibility of sending spouses and partners home.”
“Home?” Miranda echoed. She no longer had any home other than this, other than Finn.
“I’ll do everything I can to keep you here. But not at the expense of your safety, or the safety of others at the embassy.”
“I’m not going,” Miranda said, gently tipping Finn over onto his back and straddling his hips. “You can’t get rid of me so easily.” And slowly, her eyes pinning him to the sheets, she bent her mouth to his.
—
AFTERWARD, THEY LAY silently, listening to Wilco’s “Reservations.” “I was supposed to give you a massage first,” she finally said.
“It’s not too late.”
She smiled. “Where shall I start?”
“Here,” he said. “And here.”
—
WHEN FINN’S BODY had gone limp underneath her prodding fingers, Miranda slid down beside him.
“I’m so glad it wasn’t you,” she whispered. He rolled onto his side and pulled her toward him.
“I wish it wasn’t anyone.”
—
TO THEIR GREAT relief, Miranda (and every other spouse) was allowed to stay. But after that day she began to imagine things. When she stripped off her gym shorts in the bathroom and climbed into the shower, she had a sudden vision of the men who attacked the US embassy. They were dead, missing arms and legs and heads and viscera, but still pondering their fate. No virgins had welcomed them to the afterlife. No god had commended them for slaughtering innocent people. No reward awaited them except for the slowly dawning realization that they had been had. “Why don’t they come back from the dead and tell people?” She said this aloud, turning on the tap and letting the water run through her hair. By the time she was pulling on socks and shoes, she was rigid with fury that these ghosts had failed to appear.
The anger came out in strange bursts now, when she was not expecting it. The day after the attacks she was absorbed in a painting when the next-door mosque began its midday wail. “How dare you?” her reptilian brain cried out, before she had time to moderate her response. “How dare you pretend to be holy when you massacre people?” It was not a just anger. It was clumsy and blunt. She was not angry at Islam itself, but angry about the way Muslims were too often manipulated. The threatening missives that regularly arrived on the desks of Finn and other Western ambassadors always began with praise for Allah, and just after that, praise for those who had murdered in His Name. When she read a copy of one of these threats late one sleepless night, her heart staggered with rage. These never-ending crimes committed in the name of God, of religion. Wouldn’t a just god want nothing more than peace?
One crisp
autumn evening, as she and Finn (and the team) walked the three blocks to the home of his deputy, Leslie, where they were hosting an iftar to break the Ramadan fast with local staff, she found that even the ordinary details of their life had begun to take on an ominous cast: the absence of cars in front of the Iranian embassy, a white van turning down a side street, a sudden violent gesture made by a black-robed woman sitting on the sidewalk. There was menace everywhere, even in the purple flowers swaying in the evening breeze, thick enough to hide a body. If I saw someone about to take a shot at Finn, she thought, if I saw him raise his gun, which way would I move? The scene unfolded in her head. She saw herself lunging for Finn, wrapping herself around him like armor. Finn had an entire embassy depending on him. He was the most thoroughly decent person she had ever known. He needed to be alive. It took less than a second for all of this to run through her mind, less than the time it took her sandaled foot to take the next step. And with the next step came fresh hypothetical horrors.
These were the things she fantasized about now. When she was waiting for Finn to come home from work, it was hard to believe that he still existed. That they existed, that she hadn’t dreamed their entire life together. “He wears striped shirts,” she would remind herself. “He comes back to bed every morning smelling of lemon shaving cream. He has the funny, slump-shouldered walk of a tall person. The first thing he will do when he comes home is ask me if I want a cup of tea.”
At home without him, she watched for signs. A garbage truck went by one mid-October morning, stopping near their door. She watched from their bedroom window, pulling aside the curtains that their security manager insisted they keep shut. A man with longish, curly hair stood on top of the refuse in the back, catching plastic bags of garbage. If it was garbage. There was no way to know what was really in that mound. Why couldn’t it be explosives? She wondered if the guards had searched it, or if they had decided they would rather not explore trash. The curly-haired man hauled up a bag from in front of their gate. She could not see who handed it to him, whether it was one of their guards or someone else. He tore it open, let the garbage tumble on top of the heap, and bent to retrieve something. As he stood, polishing an empty wine bottle with his sleeve, staring at the label, Miranda’s stomach clenched in fear. We’re doomed, she thought. He knows we were drinking during Ramadan.
The anger erupted even in her Arabic class, with her sweet, gentle teacher, Mahmoud. She arrived one morning sweating under a long-sleeved black blouse, long skirt, and hijab, her Mazrooq drag. “Antee mareedha?” one of the teachers asked when she walked in, pulling off the scarf.
“No.” She hadn’t thought she looked that bad. She rethought her decision to forgo lipstick.
“Ta’bana?” She was neither sick nor tired but finally admitted to the latter, so he had an explanation for her apparently unhealthful appearance. She couldn’t very well say, “No, I’m enraged and terrified and nothing helps.”
She was happy to see Mahmoud. Which was why she was surprised when she sat down at the desk to work and burst out with “Why aren’t people taking to the streets? Why are there not newspaper headlines condemning this as against Islam? I don’t understand! If someone were using my religion to murder people, and my religion were as central to my life as it is to the lives of most Mazrooqis, I would feel a desperate need to publicly say, ‘This is not Islam! This is against the Quran!’ Why are religious scholars not racing to be quoted in newspaper headlines condemning this, so as to prevent others from following in their footsteps? Why are they letting their religion be disgraced? Why are they not outraged when these murderers use God as their excuse? Do they secretly approve or what?”
Mahmoud was calm. Mahmoud was always calm, and he knew her. He had been subject to passionate outbursts before. He looked at her with his tranquil brown eyes and nodded in sympathy.
“And why is it that when something like this happens, everyone I know outside of this country sends me immediate e-mails to find out how things are here, how I am, but not one of my Mazrooqi friends contacts me? The Mazrooqi response to terrorist attacks seems to be something along the lines of ‘Oh.’ ”
Mahmoud bowed his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “You are right. I wanted to call you, but I thought I would talk with you today. I think we are just quiet because we don’t want to make trouble.”
Was that it? she wondered. Were they just cowed? Afraid of drawing attention to themselves? Perhaps they thought that to step forward was to put themselves in the sights of the next bomber. It didn’t occur to them that they could change things. She had forgotten the learned passivity of a people accustomed to their powerlessness. She had forgotten their religious fatalism. She had forgotten that for them, change had always been violent.
Her anger was gone, as quickly as it had overtaken her. She felt deflated and sad. Pulling her textbook toward her, she switched into Arabic. She hadn’t yet learned to manage her outbursts in Arabic. Mahmoud tilted his new pen toward her so that she could see the purple circle on the cap. “Banafsaji!” she said. Mahmoud knew that purple was her favorite color for writing Arabic. “It’s yours,” he said. “After this lesson.”
—
ON HER WAY home, she passed a woman’s pink leather shoe, its inside worn and blackened, its outside still shiny, with rhinestones winking in the sun. Someone had loved it, someone had danced in it. And now it lay at the side of the road, without a partner, near a dead orange cat and a handful of plastic water bottle caps. Bougainvillea petals had sifted down on top of it all, as if they had decided they were garbage too. Somewhere a would-be Cinderella was waiting in vain.
It was funny how often boredom and terror went hand in hand. How much they both made you notice. She was overwhelmed now by the infinite details of the world. Her world, here. Times like this, she spent all day at the easel, just to stay sane. Otherwise, her brain swelled with fearful fantasies, rages with no outlet, and images of AK-47s laid out on prayer mats, and she ended up not being able to do anything but stalk the house, a caged panther.
Every evening, when the garden outside her studio window darkened and dissolved into the night and she switched on her lamp (never, ever before pulling the shades, as per security instructions), the familiar fear started up in her belly. Every time she heard the gate clank open, she started from her easel and ran to the window. At least a dozen times it was a false alarm. The guards walked in and out of the gate all day long. She sat back down and tried to work, but when she was waiting, it was impossible. She made herself cups of tea and tried not to imagine the countless ways to die between the embassy and the Residence. At last she would hear the blare of the Mazrooqi police car horn that augured Finn’s arrival. There was one long honk, followed by the growl of two armored cars sweeping around the corner of their house and whipping into the gate. This was followed by the unmistakable clatter of the bodyguards leaping out of the car with their AK-47s and scanning the rooftops, escorting Finn for the final leg to the house.
She willed herself to wait upstairs; he liked to find her at work. But at the sound of his cheery “Hiya!” echoing up to her as he took the steps two at a time, she shoved her easel away and started for the door. He was in her arms, he was real, he was smiling. “Fancy a cup of tea?” he said.
Worry always seemed foolish then, until the next morning, when he picked up his red cloth bag of sandwiches and kissed her good-bye. That was when the movies started up again in her mind and she didn’t know how to stop them. All she could do was to somehow pin her fears down in paint and hope they stayed there.
JANUARY 4, 2008
Finn
Miranda was in her studio, daubing the final streaks of paint onto a canvas before preparing to meet her students at Mosi and Madina’s, when Finn knocked on the frame of the open door. “Could I have a word?” He wore khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt with the logo of his Afghani CP team, his weekend outfit. On Friday afternoons while she was painting or at class he usually read by the pool or pla
yed tennis with the US ambassador, if he didn’t have too much work.
“Hang on, just finishing.” She stepped back to consider her canvas, still unsatisfied. It was crowded with naked women, as usual, but these women had gaping holes riddling their torsos. Some had voids where their lungs should be, or their hearts, wombs, breasts, bellies, livers, spleens. In each of these holes something rotten had begun to grow, a fat worm, shiny roach, or long-toothed rat. Nature Abhors a Vacuum, she wanted to call it.
“I have class, but not for an hour or so.” Wiping her sticky hands on a damp rag, Miranda turned to Finn. Her eyes burned, from either the paint fumes or the hours of intent looking.
“I’m not interrupting a burst of inspiration?” Finn was always fearful of disrupting her work and so rarely came to her studio, though he had created it. As soon as she had agreed to marry him, he’d stripped the front corner room on the second floor of its mismatched, overstuffed furniture and Persian carpets, leaving the wood floor bare. Somewhere in the Old City he’d found a carpenter to make two easels for her, to the same specifications as the one she kept in her former home. In the far corner was a plain blue sofa and round wooden coffee table, next to a long wooden bookcase. Along the back wall was a worktable Finn had covered with the full range of Michael Harding oil paints, boxes of charcoal pencils, and a stack of new sketchbooks. Next to those were cans of Zest-it (she preferred its citrusy scent to the toxic fumes of turpentine) and gesso. Rolls of unstretched canvas leaned against the table. He’d made her walk from the bedroom with her eyes closed, leading her by the hand. She had looked around her, at the paints, the easels, and the space—all of the space!—and wept.
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