The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

  “I wish. Take a look if you want.”

  Finn stepped into the room and tilted his head. “Holy women?”

  “Ha ha. But yes. In a way. How are the accounts?”

  “Do you really want an answer to that?”

  “I guess not.”

  Finn looked uneasy, his eyes uncharacteristically lusterless. Something twitched in Miranda’s stomach. “What is it?”

  “Could we sit?” He gestured to the sofa.

  “What is it?” She was alarmed now. “Are you breaking up with me?”

  He laughed. “Nothing like that, sweetheart. There’s just a few things I think we ought to talk about. Before next month.”

  Miranda stayed where she stood. “You used to be a woman?”

  “Um…”

  “You’re addicted to online porn?”

  “Sweetheart…”

  “You’re still married to someone else?”

  “Miranda, will you please listen for a minute? It’s nothing that serious.”

  Demurely, she sank onto the sofa, folding her hands in her lap.

  “I’m not sure that you’re fully aware of how much your life is about to change.”

  She waited, silently. Finn sat down next to her, taking her left hand between both of his.

  “You know that once you are official, you’ll have your own bodyguard, for one. Once that happens, you will not be able to leave the house without him. You will not be able to spontaneously meet a friend for coffee. You cannot run to the corner store for butter without giving him an hour’s notice. You can’t go on your long rambles around town unless your guard knows your entire route in advance.”

  Miranda frowned at him, nodding. “Okay. I think I get it.”

  Finn sighed, a hopeless little gust of air. “Think this through, Mira. Today you can go to class on your own. We’re not married yet, protection is still optional. But come February, you’re going to have a mandatory escort. Everywhere. And that means to your class.”

  Something tightened around her solar plexus, a serpent of fear. “But a man can’t come to class. He couldn’t. He’s—”

  Finn searched her face, waiting for some realization she had yet to make. “He wouldn’t need to come into the house with you, into your class. But he would be outside. He would see every woman who arrived, every woman who left. Even if they are covered, they won’t want to be seen.”

  Clarity arrived, like a slap in the face. “You want me to stop my classes.”

  “It’s not what I want…”

  “But that’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it. I can’t do the classes anymore. Jesus.” She leapt to her feet, paced to the far end of the room before spinning back to him. “Finn, those classes are the only reason I stayed here. Those women are why I am here. Without those women I never would have even met you.”

  “I know.” Finn didn’t move, he just watched her, a helpless sadness creeping across his face.

  “Fuck, Finn!” He hated it when she swore, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “You’d be putting them at risk.”

  “And I’d be putting you at risk too, right? Isn’t that what you are saying? That I could ruin you too? The wife of the ambassador, teaching scandalous things to the natives.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it like that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” She studied him. This wasn’t something she had ever wanted to do, to balance her love for Finn on the scales against her passion for her women, for the thrill of witnessing their little leaps forward, the opening of their eyes.

  “So what am I supposed to do with myself? Hold tea parties for the other wives?”

  “Only if you want.”

  “I don’t want. I want—”

  “You can work. Your own work.”

  “I have plenty of time for that already.”

  “You can still see them, Mira. It’s just, the classes…”

  “They could come here?”

  “Not all at once. And as you know, some won’t want to.”

  “Tazzy can come?”

  “Of course Tazzy can come. Just—you’ll need to be careful.”

  She turned away from him, toward the window. Looking out at the slices of garden visible between the bars, she felt a sudden impulse to reach her hands through the glass, letting its splintered diamonds rain around her, and take those iron bars in her fists, to shake them until they came loose. With a jerk of her head, she cast off the vision. These bars were here to keep danger out, not to confine her. She had come to this palace freely, locked herself in with joy.

  Across the lawn, Semere trained a long green hose on his roses. The water arced out, catching the sun in an ephemeral rainbow shimmer. The thing was, Finn was right. Even if he weren’t worried about his own reputation and security, her women were at risk. They were at risk already, but the watchful eyes of a Mazrooqi bodyguard could only further imperil them. Even had she wanted to continue teaching with an armed man in tow, the women were not likely to show up. A feeling of safety was critical for them to be able to work.

  She turned to look back at Finn, slumped and defeated on her sofa, his hands limp on his lap. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  And she realized there had never been any decision to make. Finn was her home more than anyone or anything ever had been. “Well,” she finally said. “They’ve had me for more than three years.”

  “Almost a university education. You should make them diplomas.” Light tiptoed back into his eyes.

  “Diplomas that they can’t hang on their walls, or show to their parents and grandparents? Diplomas they will have to hide, along with everything else?”

  Finn’s face crumpled. “Right. Sorry.” He unfolded himself from the sofa and came to her, his long arms wrapping around her waist from behind. “How about this,” he said. “When this posting is over, we’ll follow you for a bit. You pick the next country.”

  “And your work?”

  “I can take a leave of absence.”

  “And what would we live on, while we gallivant around Tanzania? Do you know what artists make? How do you feel about lentils and rice?”

  “I have savings. Enough for a year anyway.”

  Miranda twisted in his arms to see his face. “Are you serious?”

  “Deadly. I just don’t want you to get fed up with me. To feel like you’re stuck playing second fiddle all the time.”

  She laughed. “I don’t want to play the fiddle at all.”

  “Stick with me for a couple more years, love, and you can be the conductor.”

  JANUARY 11, 2008

  Miranda

  For her last class, Miranda chose an exercise on releasing control, a lesson she needed perhaps as much as her students did. She had begun to catch herself thinking of these women as her own creations. Tazkia was to be her masterpiece, the culmination of years of sculpting, her Galatea. Had Miranda not taken her untamed talent and given it form, purpose, freedom? Yet it was, ultimately, the women who did the work. Who stood over their own easels and sketchbooks, illustrating their own dreams. Perhaps it was not altogether a bad thing that the classes were coming to an end, before she lost all perspective.

  Miranda stood at the end of her diwan, clutching a bundle of meter-long sticks. They hadn’t been easy to find in this tree-impoverished city; she had been forced to strip still-green branches from fig and pomegranate trees. But she needed only five. On the floor in front of her, the women were staking out their spaces, pouring black ink into pie tins scattered across the plastic tarp Miranda had spread over the floor. The whole diwan was encased in plastic; she wanted her women free to be messy.

  It was difficult to get them to shut up these days. Now that they had relaxed into the routine of these classes and come to trust each other, they almost never stopped talking. Yet today, Tazkia was—most uncharacteristically—the exception. She sat in a corner by herself, knees drawn up to her chest and eyes solemn. Her sketchbook lay in front of
her toes, opened to a blank page. Mariam and Aaqilah sat with their heads bent together, laughing over one of Aaqilah’s romantic tableaux. “He looks like a girl,” Mariam says. “Look at his hair!” Nadia watched them, making a rough sketch of her friends and smiling to herself. She looked tired. Nadia was often in charge of looking after her five younger siblings; she could rarely get any of her own painting done until they were all asleep.

  “Khalas!” Miranda clapped her hands, and the women turned their eyes to her. Mariam and Aaqilah drew apart and picked up their pencils. None of them wore hijabs inside anymore, and their dark hair—uniformly long and thick—spilled across their shoulders and down their backs. “Each of you take one of these.” Miranda began handing out the sticks. “You know what to do. Pick a brush and use the masking tape to fix it onto the end. Make sure it’s secure. I don’t want the brush to be able to move. It should feel like an extension of the stick.” They have done this exercise several times before, but not for many months.

  “We’re going to start with the bush.” Miranda gestured to the potted plant on the floor next to her. “Then I’ll let you do a few of me. Since it’s your last chance.” She had already explained that this would be their last class, had already offered endless reassurances that they could still contact her, that she wasn’t disappearing entirely. Only Tazkia seemed to take her abandonment personally, tears occasionally appearing in her reproachful eyes. Madina and Mosi had offered to let the women use the house without Miranda, to work in private, and Miranda was glad that they would still have each other. If they wanted to continue.

  One by one, the women began dipping their brushes into the ink and dabbing them onto the paper clipped to their small easels. “Don’t be fussy about it,” Miranda reminded them. “Remember that just a suggestion of a leaf or an ear is enough for us to recognize it. You don’t need to paint every swirl.”

  The first time she had done this exercise with them, Mariam and Nadia had ended up in tears. It was impossible to have complete control over the brush when it was so far away from a guiding hand. The inexactitude of their marks frustrated the women, drove them to tear up their pages. Aaqilah had refused to do it again for nearly a year. “You have to stop being so precious with your brushes,” Miranda had exhorted. “Let go of your need to control. Freedom is letting go of control. Go with where the brush lands, make something from what is there, not from what you wish were there. Be fearless.” Slowly, over the years, they had grown comfortable with the exercise, even found delight in unexpected strokes across their pages.

  Miranda watched Tazkia’s hand, waving the stick like a conductor’s baton. Her potted plant looked electrified, fuzzy. Even her melancholy didn’t dampen her painterly zeal. Nadia’s plant spun on the page like a dervish. Even timid, laconic Mariam swished her brush with vigor, dabbing oversized leaves onto her paper. Perhaps they didn’t actually need her anymore; perhaps she had given them enough.

  When fifteen minutes were up, Miranda switched places with the potted plant, standing before her women with her arms raised to the sky and feet apart. She was clothed, in black jeans and an oversized T-shirt. It had never felt appropriate to model nude for them. There had to be some kind of boundary between teacher and student. “Go now,” she said. Watching their serious faces, Miranda wondered—not for the first time—what was possible for them. If any of them wanted to be an artist, a professional artist with a gallerist, exhibits, and catalog, she would have to leave the country. So what was it she had been doing? Training women to be capable of leaving their country behind? Surely that wasn’t what she had set out to do. She had wanted to make this country better, to help the women living here. Yet she had given them skills that were useless in Mazrooq. Worse than useless—dangerous.

  “Mira, look.” Tazkia turned her easel around, derailing Miranda’s train of thought. It was a good likeness, a few squiggles suggesting Miranda’s hair, loose strokes delineating her form. But what drew Miranda’s eyes more than the work itself was the glow of confidence on her student’s face. I put that there, she thought. At least I’ve done that.

  OCTOBER 2010

  Miranda

  Miranda squats in the dust outside her small hut, Luloah a warm, sleepy ball against her back. Cautiously, as though she is doing something forbidden, she pushes a finger through the dirt. A line. Just a line. But that is where everything begins. Looking up to make sure she is free from observers—only the mountains gaze sternly down—she extends the line, curves it, adds another.

  Of all the privations, the absence of books, paper, and drawing materials is the worst. In her real life, rarely does she leave home without a sketchbook and a pencil. She hardly knows how to think without a blank page reeling images from her mind down through her elbows and wrists to her fingertips. Unable to think through her hands, through color and shape, she feels semiconscious, almost brain-damaged. How foolish was she—in the free and privileged life that feels a decade away—to believe those gallery openings constituted the most thrilling part of her career. The anxiety and adrenaline, the desperate craving for praise, the euphoria of receiving it. But here, now, this is not what she hungers for, not what is missing. She has hardly thought of those champagne-soaked evenings in uncomfortable shoes. It’s surprising how quickly the trappings of her career have ceased to feel important. What she is left with, what courses through her more strongly than anything except her longing for her daughter, is a craving for the process itself: setting ideas on paper or canvas, making them tangible, giving them form. Never in her life has she been denied access to the tools of her trade—not since she could hold a Crayola crayon steady and drag it across a sheet of construction paper.

  And how desolate is a life devoid of a drawing pinned to the wall, a watercolor, a painting, even a graphic novel. A life without a portrait’s silent gaze, the eloquence of eyes. Without geometry, without color, without the language of shape and motion. Without even the forms of words. She has asked for a Quran, because it’s the only book anyone owns, and after all she has been meaning to get through it for years. It’s agonizingly slow going, as she struggles to make out the tiny words without her reading glasses. Her Arabic isn’t nearly good enough, and she has to keep stopping to ask Aisha for help. This pleases Aisha, who grows uncustomarily animated when attempting to explain the language of the Quran to an uncomprehending Miranda. So far, Miranda finds it rather nerve-jangling reading, dwelling as it does on the unimaginably horrific fates of unbelievers.

  But the Quran is also one of the only things keeping her sane, rescuing her mind from its endless dizzying circles. If she had a pencil—and if she dared—she would be tempted to sketch in the margins. It’s the only paper she has seen. Though the last thing she needs is to be caught desecrating the holy book. Absently, she continues moving her finger, watching an image unspool itself in the dust. The curve of a breast, the curl of an infant.

  The men don’t seem to be around today. They never speak to her directly. They shout orders to Aisha, who accepts them with a nod. Miranda isn’t sure how many there are. One of the men is Aisha’s husband, another is her son. They sleep separately, in the other huts they share with the rest of the men. In the morning she watches them gather for breakfast, squatting around a fire to take their tea and beans and bread, their AK-47s resting across their thighs. She and Aisha eat when the men are through, when Aisha carries over their own small pan of beans. In the late morning the men gather in a rocky stretch of dirt beyond the houses to conduct a mystifying set of exercises, jogging in circles with their rifles pointed to the sky, dropping to the ground, and squirming through the dust on their stomachs. She has even seen them performing push-ups and rigging up makeshift monkey bars. Miranda isn’t sure if this is meant to keep the men fit or if it is preparation for some kind of attack. She tries to remember a terrorist attack that had required physical fitness. Walking onto a bus wired with explosives? No monkey bar practice required for that. Flying a plane into the World Trade Center towers
? No wind sprints necessary. Perhaps they are simply interested in maintaining good health, so that they may live long enough to carry out their mission.

  Miranda looks down at her own wasting thighs and almost smiles. To think that her mornings were once organized around her exercise routines. Now, without the gym or pool or yoga DVDs, she is thinner than she has ever been. Now she is at least as terrified of losing weight as she used to be of gaining it. She needs to keep enough on to be able to feed this child. She needs enough food in her body to turn into the necessary nutrients. When she was nursing Cressida, she had been vigilant about every mouthful. Every day she ate generous helpings of dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, beans and nuts, tofu, whole grains, figs and pomegranates from their garden, and plenty of yogurt.

  There are hardly any vegetables here, unless you count beans. If they are lucky there are onions and jalapeños. Once in a while Aisha’s husband brings her dates or bananas, which she shares with Miranda. No one ever offers her meat. If someone were to offer her a piece of chicken or goat, Miranda is almost hungry enough to eat it. She is always hungry.

  It’s odd how alone she feels. Almost unwatched. The air is still and silent. She can smell the acrid scent of her unwashed armpits, a reminder she is still alive, that her body is continuing to function. Occasionally she manages a furtive rinse when she and Aisha are fetching water, but it is difficult without removing her clothing. She has never seen Aisha disrobe. After her first couple of weeks she had asked Aisha to cut her hair. Without a brush, showers, or conditioner, it clumped together in dirty dreads and stuck to her skin. Aisha had obligingly hacked it off with a sharp blade, leaving just a curly scrub to cover her scalp. “You are a boy now,” Aisha had said. She disapproved of short hair but had finally agreed to cut it when Miranda told her she thought a swarm of biting bugs had colonized it. This wasn’t far from the truth. The itchy red bites that appear on her skin at night keep her awake more often than does Luloah.