by Zoë Ferraris
“Stay with me,” Osama said.
Katya followed him into the sitting room and glanced around. The place was clean and elegantly furnished with a pair of ivory sofas and plush white carpets overlaid with brilliant red and orange rugs. There was a massive TV, an equally pretentious stereo system, and an entire shelf of CDs. Osama went straight to the shelf to read the spines of the CDs.
A moment later, there was a tap on the door, and Katya went to answer it. The woman was standing in the hallway, her face still covered.
“You can speak to my daughter,” she said, motioning for Katya to follow her. Katya glanced back long enough to catch Osama’s look of concern.
Farooha was waiting in her bedroom, sitting atop a stack of books on a chair. Beside her was a desk pushed against the wall. She’d been at her computer, but the moment Katya came in, Farooha quickly darkened the screen and turned to face her inquisitor. There was ink on her thumb, and she snapped up a tissue from a mother-of-pearl-encrusted Kleenex dispenser on the desk. Katya saw that she had been writing notes in a binder.
The girl stood up, nearly toppling the books in her clumsy descent from the chair. She was very small, perhaps even a dwarf. When standing, she barely reached Katya’s chest, and her body had a stocky, smashed-together quality that one associated with achondroplasia. The surprise must have shown on Katya’s face, because Farooha gave a wry grin. “Yes,” she said, “I’m short. Have a seat on the bed and the difference between us won’t feel so dramatic.” She pushed aside a stack of CDs and books to make room for Katya on the rumpled sheets.
“Thank you,” Katya said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Everyone stares. I’m used to it.” Farooha leaned back against the desk, crossing her arms and gazing churlishly at her guest. “I take it this is about Leila.”
Instantly, Katya regretted coming. In all her excitement, she’d forgotten that Farooha probably didn’t know that her friend was dead and that the job of delivering the news would fall to her. Osama’s parting look suddenly made sense.
“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Katya began. Farooha reacted immediately. Her arms seemed to freeze, and that strange frozen quality spread to the rest of her body. “But I’m afraid that Leila is dead.”
Farooha unfroze a bit, looking as if it took some effort to shake herself free. With some awkwardness she climbed back onto her desk chair, situating herself carefully on her stack of books—among them, Katya noticed, was the Holy Quran—and sat there awkwardly, staring at the ground. Katya had the feeling that Farooha had already suspected the worst, already run through the most gruesome possibilities in her mind to prepare herself for a moment like this. When Farooha looked up again, her eyes were clear and sharp. “How did it happen?”
“Her neck was broken. She died instantly.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Katya felt a strong wave of unease. “She was also beaten,” she said, willing only to give that much. She wouldn’t be drawn into telling her about the ‘iqal and the knife wounds or the hot oil. “I don’t suppose you have any idea who might have wanted to do something like this to Leila?”
Farooha looked momentarily taken aback by the abruptness of the question. “I can think of a dozen people,” she said, “but I don’t know their names.”
“What do you mean?” Katya said.
“You do know that Leila was a filmmaker?” Farooha asked.
Katya explained what she knew about Leila’s work, and how she’d found Farooha.
“Ah, then you only know the sterilized version,” Farooha said with a certain grim set of the mouth.
Katya reached into her purse, panicking silently when she realized that she had forgotten to bring a notebook or even a pen. She found a broken pencil at the bottom of the bag and an old grocery store receipt. Oh, very professional, she thought. Farooha eyed the items and smirked.
“New at investigating?” she asked.
“I left my notebook at the office,” Katya replied evenly, although she was sure she was blushing. Without making a show of it, Farooha retrieved a pen and small notepad from her desk drawer and handed them to Katya.
“Thanks.” Katya took them gratefully.
Farooha went on. “Leila was bold,” she said. “She was brilliant and creative and nothing frightened her. However, she pissed a lot of people off. She only filmed B-roll to support her real passion, which was a documentary project she was working on. She called it City of Veils.”
“What was it about?” Katya asked.
Farooha snorted. “Well, mostly it was about Jeddah. She wanted to point out how strange it is that almost every pilgrim who comes to do the hajj at some point has to pass through Jeddah. But Jeddah itself is the least religious city in the country. She loved this contradiction, the idea of sending people to Mecca through the Saudi equivalent of Monaco or Las Vegas.” Farooha smiled grimly. “Uncovering all of this city’s unsavory behaviors became an obsession for her. And you have to give her credit for courage.
“It started out being tame,” Farooha went on. “Leila caught a couple of things on camera and wanted to put them together—women eating spaghetti in burqas, those drivers doing their ‘drifting’ thing on the freeways. But she wanted something bigger. About a year ago, maybe more, she met a woman who claimed to be a prostitute. Leila did an interview with her. It went badly, but Leila kept at it. She started visiting brothels and women’s shelters. She interviewed a lot of women.”
“Did her brother know about this?”
Farooha frowned. “Are you kidding? No one knew but Leila and her cousin Ra’id. And me.”
“So she became interested in women’s rights,” Katya said.
“Well, yeah, but she began going after anything that was controversial. Abused housemaids. Sex slaves. Men who marry twenty wives. And believe me, she had a knack for finding these things. She even filmed a drag queen show at a private villa outside the city. I don’t know how she found that, but she did.”
“It sounds like she was interested in breaking sexual taboos,” Katya said. “Did she ever investigate political or religious corruption?”
“No, not really, but I think she might have started if she hadn’t died…” Farooha trailed off awkwardly. “I’m not sure.” She took a sip of water from an Evian bottle on her desk. “Anyway, she kept going despite the treatment she got.”
“What do you mean?” Katya asked.
“Well, she wasn’t always filming things in private. Sometimes she would just wander around the city. Imagine a young woman walking around alone, pointing a video camera at anything that seems slightly embarrassing. She got attacked twice. One time some guy threw her camera in the ocean and physically assaulted her. He broke her leg. I don’t think they caught the guy, but I know she filed a police report.”
“Yes, we know about that.”
“Another time, some guy grabbed her. If he’d been any bigger, he would have done some damage, but she managed to get away, although the guy followed her until she flagged down a cab. The religious police were always after her, but she could usually get away from them. I don’t know why. If you ask me, she was just incredibly lucky. She also started to toughen herself up. She wore heavy-metal T-shirts and jeans. She let her cloak hang open so people could see that she was the kind of person who would do whatever she liked. Maybe they would think she was a member of the royal family and they’d leave her alone.”
Katya thought of the worn spot on the knee of Leila’s cloak. “This may sound like a silly question, but did she kneel a lot?”
“Probably.” Farooha gave a wry laugh. “She was forever hiding behind things to get a good shot of something. Why do you ask?”
“There was a worn spot around the knee of her cloak,” Katya said. “It was only on one side, and I couldn’t understand it.”
“Yes, that’s probably why. In answer to your previous question, Leila was out in public a lot, pissing people off. There were plenty of people who might h
ave wanted to harm her, aside from the larger-than-average number of men in this city who want to harm women whether they carry cameras or not.”
Katya looked down at her empty notepad. She hadn’t been able to take her attention away from Farooha long enough to take notes. She scribbled a few things down. City of Veils and sexual taboos and physical assault—check police records. “Let’s put the strangers aside for a moment,” she said. “All those people whom she might have angered while she was filming something. What about people she knew? Friends—maybe a boyfriend?”
Farooha’s eyes glittered angrily. “Well, first of all, her ex-husband was an ass. One time, he wouldn’t take her to the hospital when she had a five-day fever. He left her lying on the bathroom floor and took her cell phone away because his was broken. He got angry at her for not cooking his dinner and doing his laundry. And finally he just left because she was boring him. Turned out she had typhus.”
Katya was horrified, but she wrote typhus on her notepad to hide her shock. “How did she end up getting to the doctor?”
“Her brother got worried and went to check on her. He had to have his assistant break down the door. They found her lying in a pool of bloody shit.” Farooha’s nostrils flared and she spent a moment composing herself. “In a way, it was a good thing. It caused her to divorce that stupid monkey.”
“And that’s when she moved in with her brother?”
“Yes,” Farooha said. “Although that was another kind of torture.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were fighting all the time before Leila disappeared. Didn’t Abdulrahman tell you?”
“I didn’t interview him.”
“Ah, of course.” Farooha twirled a pen between her fingers.
“What was the fighting about?” Katya asked.
“He didn’t like that she was doing it, and he wanted it to stop.”
“You mean he didn’t like her working for the news station?”
“Right. He didn’t know the whole story, and now you can see why. If her working for a news station was enough to upset him, then she was never going to tell him about her other projects. He didn’t like her being out of the house, and he thought that filming people was inappropriate. I think he considered it an invasive act. He wanted Leila to get married again, this time to a good Jeddawi man. If he’d had his way, Leila would probably be married and pregnant right now. And she would be totally miserable.”
“Did she tell you about the fights with her brother?”
“I know he kept threatening to cut her off. You know he was supporting her. Personally, I could see him kicking her out completely.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he could be pretty brutal. But he didn’t go too far. He did stop paying for her camera equipment and the cost of all the taxis. This happened right after her camera got destroyed that day at the Corniche. Of course Leila wasn’t going to stop just because of money. She kept pressuring him. Abdulrahman would get angry, and they would get into these terrible fights.”
“And what happened in these fights?”
“Well, I don’t think he ever hit her, but she would come here looking pretty shaken up. When I asked her, ‘Did he hit you?’ she would never answer.” Farooha sighed in a maternal way. “She always came when she needed a shoulder to cry on. But I told her then what I’d told her before: you shouldn’t be relying on your brother anyway. She knew that financial independence was the only thing that would make her a happy person, Leila being who she was. Financial independence.”
“And did she eventually manage to get a new camera?”
“Yes, she did.”
“How did she get the money for that?”
Farooha sighed. “Well, she had some saved up from her job at the news station.”
“And…?”
Farooha let the rest out reluctantly. “And her cousin Ra’id gave her the rest.”
“How much did he give her?”
“Probably most of it. A couple hundred riyals. She didn’t have that much saved up.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Katya said. “Does Ra’id get paid well by his uncle?”
Farooha shrugged. “I only know what Leila told me, which on that subject wasn’t very much. Back to your earlier question,” she went on. “Leila also had a boyfriend of sorts. She’d met him recently, but he was American and I never met him.”
Katya froze. “Do you know his name?”
“Walker. Eric Walker.”
Forcing herself to stay calm, Katya wrote down Eric Walker—boyfriend?
“Leila loved the Americans.” While she spoke, Farooha climbed down from her throne and went to the far corner of the room. She knelt beside the bed, momentarily disappearing from view. Katya heard a grunt and a few seconds later watched as Farooha hauled a metal lockbox the size of a large shoebox onto the bed. She went back to the desk for the key, which was dangling from a hook on a corkboard, and used it to open the box.
“Eric had a car and plenty of free time,” Farooha went on. “He would take her everywhere. I mean, it was great for her, because he could get her into places that she couldn’t otherwise go, like the American compound.”
Now Katya was scribbling furious notes. “How did he and Leila meet?”
“Same way she met anyone—filming them.”
“Is that how you met her?” Katya asked.
Farooha looked as if she might decide to take offense—and Katya heard the implications in what she’d said. A dwarf, who would want to miss filming that? But Farooha shook her head. “We went to school together, before my parents decided to pull me out.”
“Out of school?”
Farooha nodded. “They were becoming too worried about me, they said, and it’s true I put up with a lot of teasing, but it’s more true that they were—and are—deeply ashamed of me.” She was still standing by the bedside but now staring straight at Katya as if waiting for her to protest such a cruel parental decision or to make a weak, insincere, sympathetic remark. When Katya didn’t respond, Farooha went back to her rummaging.
“Do you know where Leila and Eric met?”
“At a mall,” she said. “I can’t remember which one. Leila was filming something and Eric came up to her and asked if she was with the local news station. They got to talking…” Finally, Farooha brought something to Katya. It was a square cardboard box. Inside it three dozen DVDs were lined up in hard plastic cases. “This,” Farooha said, “is the collected work of Leila Nawar.”
Katya accepted the box—it was practically set on her lap—and pawed through the discs with amazement, puzzlement, and the dangerous urge to jump up and shout for joy.
“Whatever you got from her brother,” Farooha said, “was only the clean stuff. This is the rest of it.” She jutted her chin at the box with a mixture of pride and warning. “If someone from Leila’s adventures killed her, I bet you’ll find some evidence of it in there.”
“And you have these because…” Katya asked.
“She was paranoid about losing her work, so I agreed to watch over her backup discs.”
“Do you know where she kept the originals?”
“I don’t know exactly. In her house somewhere, no doubt. And they’d be hidden. She wouldn’t have wanted her brother or his wife to find them.”
“She must have been glad to have you as a friend.”
“As I said,” Farooha responded, climbing back onto her chair, “Leila was very lucky. Aren’t you going to ask me where I was when she disappeared?”
Katya felt like smiling, but beneath Farooha’s funny voice was an edge of viciousness and pain. “Where were you?”
“Here, like I always am.”
Osama sat on the white sofa. Farooha’s younger brother sat on the sofa opposite, babysitting him, which was funny because the boy was six years old. He was the only man in the house at the moment, and so the de facto man of the house. His mother—at least Osama figured that was who had answered the door—had
brought him into the room and told him to keep their guest company. She hadn’t explained who Osama was, and the boy didn’t seem to care. His legs were so short that they stuck straight over the sofa’s edge. He had some kind of computer game in his hands, and he could scarcely take his attention off it for longer than a second, in which time he would glance at Osama, lick his lips nervously, and go back to his game with a vengeance.
The beeping and clanging were the perfect accompaniments to Osama’s foul mood, which was only growing more miserable as the minutes ticked by. He was simultaneously relieved that he didn’t have to watch Farooha learn about her friend’s death, and disgusted that he couldn’t ask her any questions himself and that he’d brought along a woman who might or might not know what the hell she was doing.
Finally, a woman he presumed to be one of the boy’s older sisters came into the room with a glass of orange juice for Osama. She set the juice on the coffee table and held her hand out to the young boy. He stood up, still not taking his eyes from the game, to follow her out of the room.
In the new quiet, Osama’s attention went back to the CDs lining the shelves. It had been a mistake to browse the titles. Many of them were artists that Nuha loved. He’d tried segregating his thoughts of her all morning but now he could feel her slipping in, ghostly quiet, shrouded in a new obscurity.
It was crushing how proud he had always been of her and of their marriage. He admired that she worked at the newspaper, that she could write, and that she got along with people so well. But every night they’d made love over the past two years, she’d let him believe that she wanted another child, that their lovemaking was leading up to that goal. More crucially, when the child didn’t come, she’d convinced him that a woman’s body was a mystery, that yes, she’d already become pregnant once and given birth to a healthy baby boy, but with most women things didn’t happen like clockwork, and sometimes stress and busyness depressed the body so that it wasn’t as fertile as it should be. They’d discussed how perhaps she should cut back on her work hours, and for the first year after Muhannad was born, she’d worked only part time. He didn’t pester her about it, since obviously there was little he could do beyond what he was already doing. He had never once suspected she was using birth control.
