“Yes.”
“And?”
Finn runs just one finger across the back of her bony hand. “He was still alive, Mira. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news…”
Miranda straightens in her chair, as if abruptly relieved of a weight. “He is alive?”
“You gave him a pretty bad concussion and a cracked skull, but he’s alive and well and imprisoned in the Central Jail.”
“Where he may not remain for long.”
“Where he may not remain for long,” Finn concedes. “Mazrooqi jails being Mazrooqi jails.”
Miranda considers this. “Surely he wouldn’t stay here? In this city?”
“I doubt it. If he gets out I think he’ll head north. Though you never know.”
“No,” she says. “You don’t.”
She sits staring into her coffee for a moment and then looks up at him and smiles. “It’s good news, sweetheart, don’t you think? That I am not a murderer?”
“Yes,” he says. “Good news indeed.” And he takes her hand.
APRIL 29, 2011
Miranda
Miranda sits, staring at the blank canvas in front of her. Spread out on her worktable are colors and palette, brushes and Zest-it. The stink of oils and oranges wafts memories toward her: long afternoons of toil in her old city diwan, safe in the rocky womb of her house. Painting so seriously, as if the result mattered, as if it could end war or feed a child. Now, she hungers for these instruments of her craft not because she harbors the illusion that she will create something lasting, something important or praiseworthy. But rather because she believes if she can just empty her teeming head onto that blankness, spread out every theory, belief, and opinion before her, she will begin to understand them.
Yet she cannot touch the brushes. She is afraid. Too soon after her surgery, too soon after the bandages had been unraveled, she had tried to transfer an image to paper and her hand had moved as if a stranger to her. No longer an instrument of her will, of even her subconscious impulses, it had moved under the directive of some malign spirit. The result was a splotchy mess communicating nothing, revealing nothing. She remained locked in her own skull.
“Suddenly, I’m a fucking amateur Impressionist,” she’d said tearfully, emptying an entire jar of gesso over her efforts. Later that night, Finn had found her burning the canvas in their garden. Now, the matches have disappeared from the kitchen, along with the knives and any other sharp instruments. Finn isn’t taking any chances on her mental state. She has promised him repeatedly that no matter how despairing she got, she would never harm herself, would never put him and Cressida and Luloah through that loss. So perhaps he is just trying to protect her work—though it no longer feels like her work. Nothing she creates has any relationship to her.
But she is stronger now. Twice a week she goes to the Saudi-German Hospital to see a stout Russian physical therapist who gives her exercises to improve her fine motor skills. She takes these seriously, spending an hour every morning slowly contorting fingers and thumb around a small red ball. Finn has been urging her to return to work. “So many times you have told me that your work is how you process the world,” he said. “And when have you ever been more in need of processing the world?”
“Perhaps I don’t always want to know what I am thinking,” she responded. But she does. She does want to know. She is just too afraid to see how altered her mind—and her hand and her vision and her movement—has become. She is afraid that the voice she once had has been forever silenced.
Pushing herself up from her chair, Miranda picks up her phone from the desk and dials the only person she thinks might understand.
—
THE TWO WOMEN stand next to each other in the studio, staring at the empty canvas. It is the first time they have been alone together since Miranda’s return. Tazkia has visited several times to play with the girls, but never to come to the studio. “I don’t know how to begin again,” says Miranda, wrapping her cardigan more tightly around her. “I don’t know what to do if it doesn’t work.”
Tazkia, still clad in abaya and hijab, is silent. She looks at the easel, at the paints, and out the window at Semere cutting the grass. “After everything,” she says. “This is what matters?”
Startled and dismayed, Miranda turns to her. “Yes. It matters. The mere act of doing it matters. I thought you might understand that. Isn’t that why you haven’t been able to stop yourself for all of these years? Why you kept scribbling in those school notebooks, knowing the possible consequences? Of course it’s not the only thing that matters, of course not. For me there is Finn and Cressie and Luloah. And you. And the thirteen million struggling women of this country. And safety and stopping the momentum toward war and hunger and pain and disease. But there is also this.”
Tazkia looks down, examining her shoes. “I’m not sure I am the right person to help you.”
Miranda turns to her. “Tazzy, I don’t have anyone else. No one else here who knows what it means to speak with a paintbrush.” Her voice is desperate, pleading. She hates the sound of it. What does she think Tazkia can do for her?
“I’m not sure I still know how. To speak with a paintbrush, I mean.” Tazkia shifts uneasily from foot to foot.
Miranda looks at her in surprise. “Aren’t you working?”
Tazkia shakes her head, her brown eyes lusterless. “Not since the paintings disappeared.”
Taking Tazkia’s hand, Miranda pulls her down on the studio sofa. “Tazzy,” she says, stroking the short brown fingers. “We’ll find them. I promise. We’ll keep you safe.”
Tazkia avoids her eyes, staring down at her lap so that the folds of her hijab fall across her plump cheeks. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“But we haven’t heard anything at all yet. If someone had seen them, if someone wanted to expose you—expose us—wouldn’t they already have done it?” Finn hasn’t been able to track down the secret paintings. Late one night, fortified by a few gin and tonics, he had cornered Norman in the club. But the OSM had denied any knowledge of the paintings. “But you’re the only one with a key,” Finn had insisted. “Who else could have taken them?” Norman had shrugged. It is maddening, waiting for them to turn up. Terrifying for Tazkia. Thank god Norman is leaving in May; Miranda feels sick every time she sees his face.
Tazkia looks up then, but without hope. “What else would they do with them?”
Miranda sighs. “I don’t know.”
Tazkia looks away from her, toward the open door.
“What are the chances anyone would even know the paintings are of you? Maybe whoever took them doesn’t know who you are.”
Tazkia finally looks at her, with the first hint of hope in her eyes. “Maybe,” she says. Only then does Miranda remember she had stupidly written Tazkia’s name on the back of the canvas, in tiny, perhaps illegible letters. She does not say this.
“Why don’t you paint with me a little? Add a little beauty to the world? Try to think of something else?”
“No.” Her voice is firm. “Not me.”
Miranda looks at her, leaden despair tugging at her gut. “Okay,” she says, deciding not to press the issue. “I’m sorry, Tazzy. I’m sorry to bring you here if it upsets you.”
“I wish I could help you, if this is what you really want.” Tazkia looks again at the canvas, then down at Miranda’s scarred left hand. “Do you remember the stick exercise?” she says abruptly, her tone lightening. “When we taped the sticks to our paintbrushes and you said we needed to let go of control?”
Miranda stares at her former student, disconcerted by the change in direction.
“This is what you need to do! Now your hand is the stick. It is keeping you from controlling your brushes in your usual way, no?”
Miranda turns her palm over in her lap, examining it as if expecting to find it sprouting leaves.
“Can’t you let your hand talk in a new way, even though it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like you? B
ecause it is still you. A damaged you. An uncontrolled you.”
Miranda looks up from her hand and stands. Without her customary control, perhaps her unconscious will finally take the lead. Perhaps there are wonders to discover, surreal juxtapositions she cannot purposefully invent. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, she steps toward her easel. Tazkia remains sitting as Miranda smears a paintbrush in a dish of black ink and holds it over the void. “Nothing is precious,” Tazkia whispers, quoting her teacher. “What comes from your hand is not important.” When Miranda touches down, begins moving the ink in shaky lines, Tazkia slips out the door. It is nearly an hour before Miranda notices she is gone.
MAY 5, 2011
Norman
Norman sweats his way to the check-in desk. He’s wearing too many clothes for the afternoon heat, but his bags are stuffed to overflowing and he hadn’t had room for everything. He is relieved to be heading home. It has unquestionably been an action-filled posting, and he is looking forward to a few months in the relative safety of his Clapham Common flat before heading off to Mali. His wife has gone on ahead to London, leaving him to organize the packers and their airfreight, and he relishes the prospect of a solo flight. He can already taste that first gin and tonic. A family of nine pushes ahead of him, dragging a tower of ragged suitcases and cartons. Damn these Mazrooqis. Why can’t they learn how to queue properly? They all rush the ticket desk in a mob, and you have to fight your way through them to the front if you want a decent seat. Doesn’t matter if you’re flying business class; there’s no business class until you’re on the plane. Fucking third-world airports. These he won’t miss when he retires. Heathrow has its drawbacks, but at least people there know how to queue.
At last at the front, he heaves his three suitcases one by one onto the scales, hanging on to the oversized paper-and-string-wrapped parcel of paintings. He hadn’t known what else to do with them. He couldn’t leave them behind, had been unable to think of anywhere to leave them that wouldn’t give himself away. And he certainly couldn’t have sent them ahead with the rest of his luggage for his wife to unpack back in London. He had to take them with him, and checking them seemed too risky. The airport people weren’t supposed to check diplomats’ bags, but the Mazrooqis were not renowned for doing the things they were supposed to do.
He is ashamed of his own weakness. He’d had no malign intent when he removed them from their hiding place. It was just—they were captivating. He had wanted to take them somewhere he could sit and look at them for a long, long time. It was the painting of Miranda that had first caught his eye, of course. But then he saw the other one. A woman, small, dark, clearly Mazrooqi. He’d never even seen an exposed female Mazrooqi face, let alone all that lay below. Not that she was anatomically different from any other woman; it was the knowledge of where she came from that made it so especially titillating. He wondered who she was. Obviously a friend of Miranda’s. A good friend. And then it occurred to him—was she a friend? Or something more?
He had discovered the paintings while doing an inventory of the safe room just before Celia moved into the Residence. Finn must have forgotten them in his distraction over the kidnapping. Before Norman had time to properly examine his motives, he was stuffing them into bin liners and toting them to his car. Perhaps it had been merely erotic fascination that prompted him. But he’d be a liar if he didn’t admit he’d briefly wondered if he could somehow use them against Finn. Then again, the kidnapping seemed punishment enough. Finally, Finn was suffering. It was a relief to Norman that he felt no need to make things worse.
While he has certainly enjoyed studying these works of art, if you could call them that, these works of primitive pornography, he almost regrets having taken them. What is he going to do with them in London except discreetly try to get rid of them somewhere? It isn’t as though he could keep them in their flat. What’s worse is that Finn knows he was the one to take them. No one else had keys. He was a fucking idiot sometimes.
“Sir, that parcel is too large for a carry-on,” the pretty black-haired girl behind the counter tells him, nodding at the paintings. “You’ll have to check it.”
“Surely not,” he says. “I’m flying business.”
“Nevertheless,” she says. “It must fit in this.” She gestures to the wire display indicating the proper size for a carry-on. You have got to be joking, he thinks. Of all times to follow the fucking rules.
“Surely you can make an exception? I’m a diplomat, and this is an important package.”
“You will have to check it.” The woman picks up one end of the parcel, apparently with the intention of heaving it onto the conveyor belt behind her. Sweat soaking his armpits, Norman lunges at the package, catching just the edge. The thick paper tears. He watches in horror as a triangular strip of brown paper peels away to reveal, in all of its naked glory, a vagina. And not just an ordinary vagina, but a monstrously oversized vagina seemingly crafted from sweets, from the ribbons of red-and-white peppermint he had loved as child and a well-placed lemon drop.
For a moment, the airport is, for the first time in its existence, silent. Then a roar of outrage erupts. Two men grab Norman’s arms, holding him still while someone shouts for security, for the police. His Arabic isn’t good enough to understand all that swirls around him. The check-in counter girl has stepped away from the package in revulsion, as if afraid it will contaminate her. In front of him, several men tear open the rest of the package, exposing the sugar-sticky thighs, the dark hair, the sweetest and most sacred places of those two untouchable girls.
MAY 5, 2011
Finn
Finn is at the office when he gets the call from the airport. As soon as he has figured out what the angry man on the other end is shouting at him, he hangs up the receiver, waits for a dial tone, and rings Tazkia.
“Where are you?” he says. If it didn’t involve gearing up an entire armored convoy, he’d be tempted to head out to get her.
“Home. We’re in the middle of breakfast. What is it?” Her voice is anxious; she already knows the only reason he would ring her.
“Listen carefully. As quickly as you can, pack a few things, whatever is most important to you, and get to the Residence. You may not be able to go back. Do you understand me?” If only those paintings hadn’t been titled and signed.
“I do.” Her voice is small, terrified.
“Tazkia, do you have a passport?”
“I’m on my father’s.”
Finn winces. Damn these countries that don’t allow women their own passports, where women are treated as perpetual children incapable of managing their own lives.
“All right. We’ll think of something. If you have any identification papers at all, try to find them.”
“I will try.” She sounds doubtful.
“You are going to be all right, Tazkia, we will take care of you. Don’t cry. Your parents mustn’t suspect anything until you are safely here. Miranda will be at the Residence waiting for you.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“As soon as you can, do you understand? I don’t think you have very long.”
“I understand.”
Finn rings Miranda next to ask her to prepare a room for Tazkia before calling airport security back, bracing himself for a diplomatic shitstorm.
MAY 5, 2011
Miranda
Miranda sits watching Tazkia mangle one of Finn’s blue silk handkerchiefs. Her tiny friend is curled in a ball in a corner of her blue studio sofa, as hysterical as Miranda has ever seen her. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” What else is there to say? She has ruined the life of the one person she cares most about, outside of her family. If only she had said no, it wasn’t a good idea for them to make the paintings. If only she had burned them as soon as they were finished. If she hadn’t been stupid enough to go off hiking in the hills in the current security situation. If only one of Tazkia’s many cousins didn’t work at the airport.
“Tazzy. Tazzy, we have to talk
about what to do.” There is no response. Miranda gets up and makes her a cup of tea, with seven spoonfuls of sugar and lashings of milk. When she carries it back to the sofa, Tazkia accepts it with shaking hands.
“Where will I go?” she says finally. “Where is there for me? Nowhere. I have no family anywhere.”
“You have us.”
Tazkia looks at her skeptically. “I can’t stay here.”
“No. Not for too long. You can stay here for a few days, but I think we need to get you out of the country before your family figures out where you are.”
“To where?”
“To wherever we can get you a visa. Do you have a passport?”
Tazkia’s face crumples.
“Okay, okay. Look, Finn will help us. He will think of something.” Miranda has no idea if this is true. “Taz. Would your family really hurt you?” She knows Tazkia’s family, has eaten her mother’s homemade flatbread, borrowed her sisters’ sequined dresses for wedding parties, and discussed politics with her father. She cannot imagine any of them wanting to harm their youngest child.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Nothing like this has ever happened. Probably not ever in this country. I don’t see how they can ever forgive me.” She blows her nose vigorously in the hankie.
“Maybe someday, maybe if you go away for a while, mightn’t they someday forgive you? You can write to them, try to explain.”
“They won’t understand! And how could I explain to Adan?”
“The same way you explained to me why you wanted to do it?”
Tazkia just shakes her head. “He is the kindest, gentlest, most loving man I have ever met. But he is Mazrooqi. He is Muslim. There is no way for him to understand this. He lacks the—what is it you are always saying? The cultural subtext?”
“The cultural context. Oh, Taz. I have ruined everything for you.”
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