It had taken more than a week for them to find her a toothbrush. When she first asked, they had given her a slender green branch the length of her forearm and told her to chew it. That is for teeth cleaning, they’d said. Miranda had sniffed it, licked it, and stuck it in her mouth. But she couldn’t see how it could be much of a plaque deterrent. She had begged every day, until at last Aisha’s husband had turned up one evening with a blue Oral-B he had found somewhere. It is amazing how much saner and more hopeful she feels with clean teeth.
Aisha dozes just inside the door of the hut. Would anyone notice were she to slip away? The men seem awfully confident that Aisha alone is enough to keep her from fleeing. Or is it Luloah they are counting on? Miranda has no idea how old Aisha is—it seems rude to ask and most people here aren’t sure of their exact ages anyway—but she moves heavily and slowly, as if in pain. Miranda pays close attention to the landscape on their long walks to fetch water, noting the dirt roads, paths, anything that might lead toward civilization. She would have to be able to outrun Aisha; there is nowhere to hide. No massive trees, no dense greenery. Just scrubby bushes, rocks, and the endless dust. Why hasn’t she tried yet? she wonders. Well, there’s the fact that she still isn’t sure whether Aisha is armed. Then it wouldn’t matter how fast she ran. And there is Luloah. She doesn’t know how fast she could move holding the baby, and leaving her behind has become unthinkable. Who else does she have? No matter how she feels about the child—and she already feels far more than she can admit—she cannot abandon her to certain death.
Escape also seems a bit less necessary when no one has hurt or threatened her. True, she has been here for many weeks now and there has been no indication that freedom is in her future. But if they wanted to kill her, wouldn’t they have done it by now?
Continuing to push her finger through the dust, she completes the outline of the nursing baby and begins to draw a small child standing nearby. She wants to be Harold with his Purple Crayon, bringing her daughter to vivid life with a few deft lines. A little Cressida, watching. Miranda has never been able to draw or paint her daughter. She grows and evolves so swiftly that Miranda cannot capture her face and features before they subtly shift. A few times she began a sketch only to find it completely unrecognizable the next day.
Now, she is drawing in the dust and it doesn’t matter. It will be gone in a moment, a memory of a memory. She puts a little dust Corduroy in the child’s hand. Abruptly, desperate longing sweeps through her rib cage, erupting in a hoarse sob. She had not thought this would last so long. She had not considered that she could be kept from her daughter for months. She had not believed that she could be the cause of Cressida’s first heartbreak. And how long will it be before Cressida forgets her? Squatting, she presses her gritty palms to her eyelids, hot tears mixing with the sand. In the mornings, Cressida always called for her first, knowing her father was harder to wake. “Mummy!” she’d yell down the hallway. “MUMUMUMUM!”
Finn will come for her, she tells herself. Not Finn himself, of course, but someone from the embassy. They have to come. They have resources. They have intelligence. She is surprised they haven’t found her yet. Finn will not give up until he finds her. He wouldn’t have left the country. Would he? Miranda suddenly wonders if perhaps fear for Cressida’s safety would have prompted him to leave the search to others. After all, it isn’t likely that he would be able to search for her himself, given that he has probably been removed from post. And remains a target.
Of course, the Americans might come instead. She is registered with the American embassy, which is larger and has vastly greater resources. Finn had insisted on it. “If we ever need to be evacuated,” he said, “you’ll want to go with the Americans. With all due respect to my own organization, no one does it better.”
Then there are the other women, and their respective embassies. Have they been found? Are they alive? She has no way of knowing. Just as she has no way of knowing if her disappearance has made it into the press or if her kidnappers have figured out her identity. If they have, they haven’t let on. Aisha still calls her Celeste, and the men don’t speak to her.
She thinks of Mukhtar. She thinks of Mukhtar every day. Wouldn’t they have found his body by now? Wouldn’t someone have reported it? And thus, wouldn’t her identity have been revealed? There are no answers. All she hears is the echo of her questions in the distorting canyons of her mind.
Aisha stirs behind her, and quickly Miranda brushes dirt across her sketch. She isn’t sure how to feel about Aisha. The older woman hasn’t been unkind, but there is a reserve Miranda cannot trespass. She is an unsentimental woman, offering Miranda little more comfort than her daily water, tea, and bread. Never does she lean over little Luloah to cluck and coo. Never does she initiate conversation.
“Aisha,” Miranda starts. Could it hurt to ask? “Do you think I could have some paper? Just a bit of paper and a pencil?” Her Arabic still stumbles, and she has to repeat herself several times, with pantomime, before Aisha understands. “Leysh?” she replies. Why would anyone want these things?
Miranda hesitates, searching for the verb. “To draw?” she finally admits.
“To draw?”
“Pictures. Pictures of…” Not people, she thinks. I shouldn’t say people. Or animals. Animals are haram too. “Pictures of mountains,” she finally says. “Flowers, buildings.”
“Why?”
“Because…it is what I do. I draw pictures. I have always been drawing pictures.”
“No letters. You cannot write letters.”
“No. Pictures of things. Mountains. Rocks.”
“You want to draw rocks?” Suspicion creeps into Aisha’s expression.
“Yimkin,” Miranda says. “If they are pretty rocks.” She has a sudden inspiration. “I think Luloah would like to see them. Babies like pictures. My daughter, she likes pictures.”
Aisha looks at her silently, studying her face. “Yimkin. Sawfa nashouf,” she finally says. Maybe. We will see.
A few days later, Miranda is leaning against an inside wall of their hut, feeding Luloah, who now sucks with determination and vigor, when Aisha appears in the doorway, blocking the light. “Here,” she says. Miranda reaches out a hand, fumbling in the dark. At last her fingers touch the edges of a book—no, a pad. A small pad of paper. Aisha moves from the doorway, and Miranda can see that the woman also holds a small packet of pencils. “My sister’s husband has a store,” she says. Miranda sets the pad on the ground in front of her and takes the pencils. “Oh, Aisha,” she says. “Thank you.”
When Luloah has again drifted into the arms of Morpheus, Miranda opens the cover of the notepad and runs joyful fingers across the blank page. She picks up a pencil from the dust. And touches down.
—
NO SOONER HAS the pencil fallen upon the sheet of paper than she feels it straining to delineate a female form. It’s a reflex, rusty yet persistent. Women are and have always been her subject, her objects. It was more than a year before she shared her work with her students. After their initial shock, they became curious. No one had ever punished Miranda for this? Artists in the United States were allowed to draw women? Were there lots of these drawings? Lots of women artists? Were there many women in paintings without clothing? Shown in public? And no one tried to hurt them? They were inebriated with the mere thought of such freedom. And ultimately, they could not resist its lure.
The day she finally allowed her women to draw a human form, they fell silent as Vícenta stepped barefoot from behind the Chinese screen in the corner of the room. She wore a thin silk robe, scarlet, knee-length. Miranda had given it to her on their first Christmas. At the middle of the room she turned, looked questioningly at Miranda, and dropped the robe to the candy-apple-colored carpet. “Something simple at first,” Miranda had told her. “Just stand there. Catch the light.”
For a moment, no one moved. It couldn’t have been shock at the nudity; these women saw each other in the bathhouse and at each ot
her’s homes. No, it was Vícenta’s cavalier attitude, her casual movements, her utter lack of self-consciousness. With her right hand on her hip and her left hanging loose at her side, Vícenta cocked her chin toward the ceiling. She was more than comfortable in her skin, her bones, her stretch marks and moles; she was proud. Vícenta dared you not to admire her.
It had taken a long time to get here. While Tazkia and Nadia had both been clandestinely drawing figures for years, they were initially terrified of anyone finding out, even each other or the other women. Guilt and doubt had become constant companions. We don’t ever have to do figures in class, Miranda had reassured them all at the start. We don’t have to do animals, we don’t have to do humans. I don’t want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. It was the women’s own increasing appetites that had driven them forward. You said other Muslims have done this, Tazkia had reminded her. Tell us about the Muslim figure drawers.
And Miranda had. It had taken a fair amount of study, as she had known very little about art from this part of the world before she came here. In a dingy little copy shop in Shuhadā’ Square, she printed out articles on the Turkish miniatures of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, detailed depictions of Turkish military victories, men on horseback raising swords, elaborate processions, and circumcision feasts, all created for the personal use of sultans. Figures, imagined by Muslims. Then there were the countless works from India and Persia, some of which Miranda managed to print in color. A Lady Prepares a Meal, a vivid depiction of a woman in the Himalayan foothills. Sulayman Enthroned Above the Orders of Mankind and the Jinn, a Turkish illustration for the Book of Solomon. An Intoxicated Prince Woos a Chinese Maiden, an illustration for the Gulistan, by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’di.
What had truly shocked her students though, what had sent them home with their worlds upended and certainties shattered, was Muhammad and His Army March Against the Meccans. The Prophet, on paper, on the page of a book. His face was veiled and his body obscured by green robes, but it was unmistakably him. The painting came from a much longer work, the illustrated six-volume Life of the Prophet. None of her students had heard of this book, of these splendidly rendered, deeply respectful images of their prophet. It was several weeks before they began to believe her and months before they started thinking of what they themselves might do.
Tazkia had been the first to broach the subject of drawing a nude. “Every artist who ever lived has done it,” she told her friends. “Since the beginning of time. Miranda has books of them.”
And now here they all were. Tazkia was too animated to sit still, rising up on her knees to inspect Vícenta more thoroughly. Her pencils were sharpened and set smartly in a row next to her open sketchbook. Nadia was nearly as fidgety, but Miranda suspected that this was a result of apprehension rather than joyful anticipation. Mariam shuffled her papers, lining up all of their edges, trying to look bored. Only Aaqilah seemed to have mentally left the room, staring vacantly at a corner of the ceiling. Miranda hadn’t been sure all of them would come, but they had.
“Before you start,” Miranda said. “Here is what I want you to do. Forget, for a moment, that she is a woman. Forget that you are drawing her shape. All I want you to do is to draw the light. Observe the way the light falls on her body, which lines it erases. Notice which parts are shaded, which parts exposed. Keep focusing on the light.” They have done this before with objects, with vases and chairs, but nothing real, nothing breathing.
“Yalla,” said Miranda, smiling at her students. “She’s not good at standing still.” There was a rustle of sleeves brushing across sketch pads, and the pencils came to life. Miranda sat on the carpet behind her women, drawing her knees up in front of her. She had again covered the windows against prying eyes. A single, naked bulb lighted the room, casting stark shadows across Vícenta’s face. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Finding a room with both natural light and privacy was impossible. The light flattened Vícenta’s forehead, hollowed her eyes, and drew a line down the bridge of her nose. The top slopes of her breasts and belly were bleached white by the glare, her left arm and pubis fading into shadow.
Miranda never got tired of looking at Vícenta. They could be in the middle of one of their fiercest arguments, and Miranda would find herself distracted by the jut of those birdlike hip bones above the waistband of her trousers, the flat expanse of her brown belly, the unusually upturned nipples. Vícenta never wore a bra, not even here, though she draped herself in enough layers not to scandalize their neighbors when she left the house. Vícenta had the sharp cheekbones Miranda had fantasized about as a teenager, eyes the greeny black of a night in the forest, and shiny ebony hair cut chin length, Cleopatra-style. Half-Argentine, half-Italian, she had moved with her mother and older sister from Buenos Aires to New York as a toddler. “My father was never in the picture,” she’d told Miranda on their first real date, a sweaty hike up to Hidden Lake. “I think he’s on his fourth or fifth wife by now. Sometimes I get a birthday card, but the return address keeps changing.” She grew up in the South Bronx, won a scholarship to attend a private secondary school in Manhattan, and studied art at Hunter College. A New Yorker at the cellular level, she had never planned to move away. But after a dispiriting year of trying to interest Chelsea gallerists in her work, she took a year off to travel across the country, stopping to do odd jobs and sell her art on street corners. Which was how she ended up at the Pride march one June in Seattle, sitting on a stranger’s front stoop drinking Emerald City lager out of a paper bag. Miranda had been wandering through the crowds, dressed in not much more than pasties and body paint, trying to find a colleague from Cornish when an impatient elbow had knocked her into Vícenta’s lap. “Well look at this,” said Vícenta, setting down her beer to sling an arm around Miranda. “And it isn’t even my birthday.”
—
MIRANDA PICKED UP her own pencil and pad. She wondered how much trouble she would be in if anyone found out. (Not as much trouble as her women, she reminded herself.) At least she wasn’t using a male model. Surely that would be the end of everything. But how were they to learn? These women were no different from the women artists of the early 1800s, whose careers were thwarted by their lack of training in anatomy and life drawing. God forbid women learn how their own bodies worked. God forbid their pure minds be contaminated by male nudity. Here, Miranda found women who had no idea where the uterus was, or how ovaries functioned. They bled every month without understanding its significance. She made a mental note to pick up a copy of Gray’s Anatomy the next time she left the country.
While reading the sparse literature available about early women artists, Miranda had fantasized about going back in time to teach these women how the body worked. Just as when she was very small she had fantasized about touring Laura Ingalls Wilder around the modern world, showing her cars and airplanes just to see the astonishment on her face.
“Cramping,” said Vícenta, shaking out her long legs and flexing a foot. “Can I sit?”
At Miranda’s nod she lowered herself stiffly to the ground, curling her feet beneath her and leaning on her left palm. Miranda walked around to look at her students’ first sketches. Mariam’s sketch was surprisingly good, a starkly delineated Vícenta emerging from her tiny, neat cross-hatching. Aaqilah had softened her model, giving Vícenta’s tomboy body a few additional curves, and her eyes a most uncharacteristic gentleness.
“Do you see?” Miranda asked, peering at Nadia’s sketchbook, which she had drawn up close to her chest. “How the light, how drawing just the light gives the body volume? It’s not just a silhouette now, it’s a whole person.”
Miranda had sketched and painted Vícenta a thousand times. It was one of their early games, drawing each other posing in imitation of women in famous works of art. Miranda drew Vícenta as a narrow-hipped tomboy Gérôme Galatea, a lascivious Bouguereau baigneuse, an elegant Degas dancer. Her favorite was Vícenta as Sargent’s Madame X; the lines of her chin and neck were per
fect. Once, in response to antigay slogans posted on the message board of a local Baptist church, Miranda and Vícenta had stayed up all night rubbing their pastels on the church’s front walk. Together, they had painstakingly re-created—with the help of large flashlights and a print of the original—Courbet’s Le Sommeil, a dreamy vision of two naked women dozing in an erotic embrace. They had contemplated creating an original work, perhaps featuring the two of them, but hadn’t wanted it written off as mere pornography. Courbet was a famous painter. This was a famous work. Legitimate. It had been their best collaboration, and Miranda had regretted that it couldn’t be preserved. Still, they had taken photographs, and alerted a local journalist who ran a photo and story in the art section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following day. By noon, the sidewalk had been scrubbed clean.
“Mira?” Tazkia squatted by her side, interrupting her reverie. “Like this?”
Miranda looked at her sketch pad. Tazkia had sketched Vícenta’s body quickly, simply, but lingered on her face, capturing not only the play of light on her bones but the sensual invitation in her eyes. Miranda looked up at Tazkia’s earnest little face and wondered if she even knew what she had done.
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