The guard, Albert (never Al unless you wanted to forfeit a meal or your exercise period), comes to unlock the door. “Your Excellency,” he says, with oily emphasis and a faint bow. Finn can find no response to this daily insult and so, as usual, says nothing. It is exercise time. He has more time to exercise here than he has had in the past fifteen years. Mira was always trying to get him into the pool or onto the treadmill; she even once tried to show him how to do what she called sit-ups, but he couldn’t manage even a few. It was an unnatural movement for his body, long accustomed to remaining upright unless knocked over by a ball. Finn rises from his cot and mutely follows his jailer.
Outside in the courtyard, he joins the slow parade of prisoners across the dusty stones. Never has he spent so much time in pure, undirected thought. This at least is a gift. He can think of it as a gift. All of the unsorted memories, the diplomatic knots untangled and still tangled, they are photographs not yet organized into albums. He spends his days pasting experiences onto mental pages, lining up their corners and pressing them flat.
Mira was always needing distractions, paintings to stare at and absorb, stories in which to soak, but for him the empty, unstructured mental space is a luxury. Free from the demands for “strategic thinking” and business plans and bilateral negotiations, he encounters his mind as if for the first time, like someone he has run into often at parties but to whom he has never spoken. In this new space he has room enough to dream up a possible future. He could teach English in Laos. He could translate for Congolese ministers. He could teach Guyanese children the alphabet. He has days to decide. He has months. He has years. Something will come to him.
AUGUST 11, 2011
Miranda
Culpable. The word curls around her as she sleeps. Defines her. It is her most constant companion, shaking her awake before dawn and pressing her eyelids open at night. It fills up her stomach, leaving her meals uneaten. She is so stuffed with guilt she has room for little else. How could she have failed to understand what would happen to Finn? How could she have allowed her vision to narrow so unforgivably? Her love for Finn, that love that once suffused every cell, has been found wanting. If she had loved him enough, she would have understood. She wants to fall to her knees and beg for some kind of absolution, some way to lessen the cloak of pain draped across her shoulders.
But falling to her knees to beg forgiveness from some kind of deity has never been a habit with her and is now impossible. After everything she has done, has been, she must not also become a hypocrite. So. She paints.
Finn’s apartment—she still thinks of it as only his—has two small bedrooms, a living room–dining room, and a tiny kitchen. She has given the living room to the girls. The second bedroom is too small, too cramped, for the two of them. They should have room to sprawl on their bellies, spreading out their crayons and bears and toy cars around them. They need tables for drawing and overstuffed chairs for reading books. She tried giving Luloah a bed of her own, but the child would not think of it. She will sleep with Cressie or not at all.
Miranda sleeps in the smallest room—she has no need for space there—and has turned the slightly larger room into a studio. It has light, its one saving grace, from a recently installed skylight and two windows on opposite walls. This is where she stands now, windows thrown open, trying to find a way forward, a new way to live. She wants to press promises into her paint, promises and blood. Yet she also wants to untether herself from all of it, if only on canvas.
They have enough money to manage for a while, a year or two, but the precipitous decline of their bank accounts since moving here frightens her. She will find a job. The American school is looking for an art teacher for its primary grades. The work has a certain appeal; she feels weary of adults, fearful of their judgments and bored with their rigidity. If she worked there, the girls could have free schooling. There are also scores of universities across the city that might consider her. Art galleries that might consider taking her on, if she can create anything worthwhile. This time it is not ambition that propels her to the easel but a simple desire to survive—financially, physically, psychologically, emotionally.
Yet these challenges are oddly comforting, as are the daily routines of creating meals for her daughters, soaping dishes, and scrubbing a stain out of a small T-shirt. Something inside her loosens here, alone. This is more than she deserves. There is a relief in their downfall, in the revocation of their life of privilege. A serenity in subsiding into an ordinary life.
She never misses a visiting day at the prison and she always takes the children. The guards and some of the prisoners look at her with curiosity and condemnation. How could you take children into a place like this? their eyes say. How could you have locked your own husband away? But she wants Cressie and Luloah to have every scrap of time with Finn that they can. They are too young to know what a prison is, too young to understand its grimness in its entirety, though not too young to feel frightened, to wonder why their father cannot come home with them. When they arrive, Finn reads to them from The Wind in the Willows. Cressie always assigns everyone roles. “Lulu is Otter, I am Mole, Mummy is Badger, and Daddy is Rat,” she says, making everyone change his or her voice to sound like the assigned animal. “Sweetheart,” says Miranda, “I feel pretty certain that I am the Rat.”
And Tazkia. This person she loved years before swinging a ripe fruit into Finn, years before Cressida and Luloah, years before her entire current life. This love that preceded everything, that made all the rest of it possible, she has betrayed. Every night lying alone in the cold double bed she catalogs the particulars of this betrayal, her failures of vision, as if consciously acknowledging them all will save her friend.
She has e-mailed Tazkia nearly every day since their departure, hoping that there are Internet cafés left standing in Arnabiya, hoping that Tazkia can find her way to one, hoping desperately that Tazkia herself endures. Her initial responses were terse yet kind. “I am well and at friends. Love your friend always even though how we parted. Tazkia.” Miranda had asked with whom she was staying, but Tazkia had been afraid to tell her, afraid of hostile eyes monitoring the Internet. Not one of her classmates, she had said. It was easier to hide amid the chaos of war, though she was frightened all of the time. Nadia and her family have disappeared, she wrote. No one knows whether they went north to join the rebels or were dragged from their home and shot. Tazkia remains in contact with Aaqilah and Mariam, though they all have to be more careful than ever not to be found together.
Then, shockingly, one day she wrote that she had gone to Adan. “Because I waited my life for him, because I cannot see life without him, it seemed worth risk.” Her friend had driven her to a coffee shop with quiet corners where he had promised to meet her. And she had told him everything, everything. After all, what did any of it matter, if a rebel bomb could split her apart any minute? What did she have to lose, having already lost family and reputation? Somehow, miraculously, he had not convulsed with rage. Perhaps Tazkia had been right, he was not like the others. She had carefully explained that she remained essentially pure, devout, virginal, and was willing to give up painting if it meant he could forgive her and restore her honor. After several days of prayer, he had returned to her, renewing his offer of marriage. Happiness spilled out of her subsequent e-mails. “I will write to you more soon in details because I feel i am a different person now…more deeper and more mature. Apparently, all hardships are there for a reason: to allow the real humans to pop up and to find the cause of our lives.” In late July, she had written Miranda to say that she and Adan were preparing to go see her family, to beg their forgiveness. Several neighborhoods of Arnabiya had been obliterated by explosions, but Tazzy’s family was still safe. “I need to make things right with them before I can move forward,” she wrote.
That was the last Miranda ever heard. After sending a series of panicked e-mails and receiving no response, Miranda had called Tazkia and when there was no answer, had called her brothe
r Hamid, whose number Finn still kept in his phone. Yet when she spoke her name, the line abruptly went dead.
Miranda tries to tell herself that the silence isn’t necessarily sinister. That perhaps Tazkia simply can’t get to a computer, or the phone lines have been blown up, or she and Adan had been caught up in a battle and are hunkered down in some primitive shelter. Perhaps Hamid had hung up on her because he didn’t want her to further influence his sister. Yet she knows, dark in her bones, the truth.
—
MIRANDA SWEATS WITH the uncommon heat of the summer afternoon and the effort of forcing her fingers to move approximately where she wants them. “Let go,” she murmurs to herself. Tazkia had been right about that. As soon as she had begun to think of her hand as that stick, as soon as she had given herself permission not to direct its every move, everything had changed. Those early efforts are not something she will show the world, not even Finn, but they are progress.
Tazzy wasn’t right about everything; painting is life for her. Without it she was insensate, a somnambulist. This paintbrush, the one in her hand, is the only continuity, the one bit of her world that has traveled with her from her parents’ home in Seattle to Mazrooq to this beautiful, melancholy way station of a city. She needs this one small thing.
Shifting her weight onto her left foot as she stands before the easel, she presses the brush into the canvas she has been working on for several days. In a corner are stacked a dozen or so of her previous efforts, none of them right. But she forges on, hopeful of illuminating some shred of her derelict soul.
In front of her now stands an enchantress, naked save for a headdress of slender paintbrushes that fan out behind her corkscrew curls like a halo, each tip dripping a different color. She stands alone on an unmoored island, a dark sea bashing itself angrily against its shores. One hand is raised to the sky clutching a sturdy paintbrush; the other hovers at her waist, cradling a palette. Around her feet are gathered a circle of saffron-colored rabbits with ebony horns, the mythical, man-eating mir’aj. Chimerical sea creatures thrash the waters with teeth bared, while a line of ababils descend from the skies.
From every direction, black-robed women swim or fly toward the enchantress, answering some siren call. As they draw near, their robes slip from their bodies and transform into ababils. Defenseless, the women are seized by the beasts. Two exposed women already dangle from the beaks of the greedy birds. The enchantress sees none of this, her ecstatic eyes trained upward on the incandescent tip of her brush.
Only one woman has made it to shore, her discarded robe transformed into a bird behind her, her palm spiked by the horn of a mir’aj, and her feet seized by a leviathan. Slowly, she is being pulled apart.
Epilogue
SEPTEMBER 17, 2013
Miranda
Stretched on her back on the damp green grass of St. James’s Park, Miranda props herself up on her elbows to watch her children spread out a picnic. Cressie reaches into their string grocery bag to pull out apples, grapes, and wedges of cheddar and Camembert, while Luloah arranges paper plates around the edges of a blanket. “Daddy likes ham,” says Cressida, rummaging in the bag. “Did you get ham?”
“I did,” says Miranda, smiling. They had bought as many of Finn’s favorites as were practical: Dundee cake, saucisson, Cadbury’s fruit and nut bars, Scrumpy Jack cider, and a fresh baguette. Luloah tires of table setting and pulls a stack of colored construction paper toward her, scribbling on it with her washable markers. Funny that she is turning out to be the artist; Cressida has more interest in animals and physical games, racing around the closest park every weekend with a neighborhood soccer team. At home, she spends her time with her pet rabbit and the new chemistry set her grandfather has sent from the United States, making potions to “cure throwing up and broken toes and chicken pox.” Frowning, Luloah draws the stick figure of a man, arms stretched over his head, clutching a bouquet of uneven orbs. When Miranda asks what they are, she says, “Balloons for Daddy to ride.”
Trembling with nerves, Miranda sits up and cracks open one of the ciders, welcoming the cool fizz down her dry throat. Done with setting out the food, Cressida is ripping up blades of grass and building tiny houses for her toy bears. Miranda hopes she has properly prepared her daughters, that they will welcome their father rather than resist his unfamiliar authority.
Slipping her feet from her sandals, she wonders how she and Finn will come together this time, how they will unearth their interred intimacy. Those charmed early years in Mazrooq, those gilded hours of ardor, leisurely debate, and indulgent painting, are a distant mirage.
They are free now, all of them, though freedom has its own terrors. So much remains to be decided. She and Finn have agreed to wait until they share a home once more before taking their next step. They could stay here, where Miranda has begun to make a modest name for herself and the girls have started school. They could travel to Oceania or Ghana or Bolivia or even somewhere as close as Norway, start again where no one knows their names. Or—or what? Does it ultimately matter? No matter how far they travel, a small, dark ghost will not be far behind.
During Finn’s incarceration, he and Miranda fell into the habit of writing to each other several times a week, scraping their days and souls for more to slip between the bars dividing them. Miranda wrote him about her work, the girls, and the agonies of her conscience, while he unfurled musings on their future and tales of his fellow inmates and guards. On visiting days there was never enough time to talk, not with the girls there. But she had his letters. Charmed anew by his language, his funny turns of phrase, the clear pathways of his thoughts, she once more dares to hope.
“Don’t come to the prison to collect me,” he had said. “I don’t want to meet you anywhere so grim.” So they planned to gather by the duck pond, where the girls are now crumbling stale croissants in their fists to toss to the birds.
A book rests by Miranda’s right hand, but she doesn’t have the presence of mind to read. Glancing away from the girls for a moment, she spots a familiar gait on the winding pathway. A tall man in jeans and a blue button-down shirt strides toward them, swinging a small case in one hand. In the other, he carries a bouquet of balloons. Even before she can make out his features, she can see he is smiling.
“Girls,” she calls. “Girls.” Abruptly, they look up from the pond, pastries falling from their astonished hands. Cressida moves first, taking a few steps and then stopping, making sure it is him. Then she is running, her striped skirt flying up behind her. Eager to catch up with her sister, Luloah follows.
Rising, Miranda presses her toes into the cool grass, the ground becoming solid under her feet.
Acknowledgments
Infinite gratitude to the following people for their counsel and assistance:
My indefatigable agent Brettne Bloom, who encouraged me to write a novel and patiently edited several drafts
Kris Puopolo, my brilliant editor at Doubleday, whose thoughts vastly improved the story and writing
Assistant editor Daniel Meyer, for his perceptive comments
My copyeditors at Doubleday, unsung heros, for their meticulous reading
Author and Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith, for assistance with the Arabic and bits of mythology (any mistakes are my own)
Rosemary James and Joseph J. DeSalvo Jr., for their belief in this book from the first draft, their New Orleans–style hospitality, and their friendship
Dave Deacon and Lloyd Paterson, two reasons I lived long enough to write this
Mohammed, Yusuf, and the rest of the team, who saved me
The entire staff of the British embassy in Sana’a
Marina and Adria Merli, who catered to my every whim at Arte Studio Ginestrelle, the idyllic Italian residency where I finished the first draft
Nina Ball-Pesut, Bill Homewood, Dirk Lee, and Dana McCain, for their thoughts on the earliest and roughest of drafts
Rebecca Steil-Lambert, MSW, LICSW, MPH; Joanne Ahola, MD, PC; and Michelle May
, MS, for their expertise in trauma
The Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program, for time and space
Crown Prosecution Service, for its guidance on identity fraud
Several nameless hostage negotiators whose stories proved invaluable
The dozens of British diplomats who helped me with technical details and questions of procedure (again, any mistakes are my own)
Irish artist Keith Wilson, who not only talked with me about painting and art, but took me to his studio and handed me a brush
Australian writer Anna Hedigan, for her encyclopedic brain
Roasters Boutique, for the best cappuccinos in Bolivia and a worktable
Ana Maria Yapu, without whom I would have no time to work
Maria Teresa Torres, for her friendship and support
Maria Cecilia Torres, for space and silence at a critical moment
BOSE noise-canceling headphones
My hiking companions Ingebjørg, Michele, Miruna, and Esmé, for bravery and serenity
Irene Colquehuanca and Hugo Márquez, for sustenance and good humor
The women of the A Room of Her Own Foundation, for their brains, artistry, and unflagging advocacy
Jill Conway Mehl and Marc Mehl, for their open door
Negesti, Alem, Emebet, Salaam, Yoseph, and Girma, who nearly ruined me for normal life
The Ambassador's Wife Page 43
