by Olivia Gates
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in as his eyes and breath blasted her.
Answering anger snapped her out of her enervated state, made her shake off his hands. “You may be lord of all you survey where GAO missions in your region are concerned, but you have no say outside it.” He smiled, ridiculing, arrogant, almost vicious. She cried out, “You can’t have that kind of reach!”
One eyebrow rose, all malicious challenge. “Can’t I?”
So he could. Now she knew.
“What about all this talk about not abusing your power?” she seethed.
“Oh, I’ll make an exception this time.”
This was a side to him she hadn’t suspected. The ruthless sheikh who thought nothing of forcing people to bow down to his whims. It made her as mad as hell.
“How dare you?” she snarled. “You already deprived me of this mission, but how dare you presume to interfere in my decisions when they in no way impact on you?”
“I beg to differ.” He seemed to expand, his voice taking on a frightening edge. And she wondered what he’d be like with all his refinement and restraint gone. He’d be a destructive force of devastating magnitude. “Missions in Darfur are dangerous. And you will not go where you’ll be in danger. I forbid it.”
Their gazes dueled for a long moment. Then she turned away, processing what he’d said, elation over his concern for her well-being seeping into her soul, warming it after the deep-freeze where seeing the last of him had plunged it.
It didn’t warm it enough to melt her anger. She turned on him again. “Thanks for the concern, but I’ve fended for myself all my life and I won’t let you dictate my actions. Darfur was always my second choice, and I always knew that joining GAO carried risks. I’m not less than the other volunteers who risk their lives daily. At least I have no one who needs me or will be hurt if something happens to me.”
Malek felt her words hacking at him like razors.
That she’d go where she’d be in danger, where he couldn’t reach her, tampered with his sanity. That she expected something would happen to her during her service, that she accepted that it wouldn’t matter—it was beyond endurance.
He roared, “You’re only doing this to force me to change my mind, forcing me to choose the lesser evil!”
A disbelieving, sarcastic sound crackled on her lips. “How could I have been sure you’d find out about my plans before I left tomorrow for them to have the desired effect? And why should I think endangering myself would sway you when I thought your reasons for refusing my assignment had nothing to do with me and everything to do with preserving your honor and your position?”
Would his head burst in outrage? “You think this self-preserving, unfeeling…rot motivated my decision?”
“I think myself too insignificant to have done so.”
And at that moment he was capable of fatal violence. Too bad the bastard who’d damaged her most was already dead.
He finally snarled, “You’re a fool, Janaan, to even think anything so unfounded of yourself. Is that what your father and those siblings made you believe? They’re insignificant. You can’t let their selfish cowardliness affect your self-worth.”
She gave an easy shrug. “I don’t think I’m insignificant to the world at large, just to someone of your status, someone who has to look at the bigger picture. Contrary to thinking you self-preserving or unfeeling, I’ve seen how selfless and compassionate you are…” She stopped, glared at him. “Or, at least, can be.” She walked to the door, opened it for him. “Now, if you’ll, please, leave so I can get ready for my early flight?”
He took the door from her, closed it with great restraint. “You’re going nowhere but under my protection. Whatever your reasons for signing up for Darfur, they worked.”
She gave him a withering look. “That’s presuming I still want to join your mission. Which I don’t. I’m not going where my presence is considered the lesser of two horrors, where I’m considered a liability. I accept the blame for this label as I indulged in an inappropriate level of intimacy with you, but I can’t do anything about it now but promise that you’ll never see me again.”
He grasped her shoulders when she made to turn away. “I take all the responsibility for whatever happened between us. And you wanted to join this mission, wa b’Ellahi’l allei’l Uzeem, you’re joining it even if I have to haul you there and keep you under lock and key.”
He let her go as if her flesh burned him, stalked to the door.
Before he closed it behind him he rasped over his shoulder, “And, Janaan, don’t worry. The three-feet rule is over. During the coming two months, I promise to keep my distance.”
CHAPTER TEN
MALEK KEPT HIS promise. For two weeks so far. They’d felt like two bleak—if madly busy—years.
Jay didn’t know what she would have done without Hessuh and Saeed’s companionship. They’d made it possible to bear Malek’s alienation, and had also become her guides to the ways of the land and communicating with its people.
They’d embarked on their mission the very next day in a convoy of a mobile surgery unit, ob/gyn, dentistry, internal medicine and ophthalmology units, twenty accommodation trailers, six Jeeps and two ambulances. It was mind-boggling the resources Malek had made available to GAO.
They’d reciprocated by sending thirty volunteers, including her. And knowing that Malek couldn’t spare enough medical staff post-disaster, in addition to the logisticians, health educators and cultural experts who made GAO rise above other humanitarian efforts, a good percentage of the thirty were doctors. She was the only emergency doctor. Malek was the only surgeon.
He had brought along the same number, including his aides and core team from the relief efforts. As far as humanitarian missions other than in time of disaster went, this one was a whopper.
They’d traveled south through Damhoor, bypassed all reasonably self-sufficient towns and villages, made their stops at communities of semi-settled Badu in their winter camping grounds along the borders.
The third tribe they were with, Bani Hajjar, was like the other two before it, leading their lives according to customs that hadn’t changed in millennia. But while that was efficient for the most part, it hadn’t done their health much good.
In the desert you survived if you were born robust and stayed that way. Acute illnesses and injuries were usually fatal, and chronic diseases that modern medicine had long since found cures for or controlled were treated with tribal remedies, but it was accepted that the afflicted would be aleel, sickly, and remain so until they withered and died.
They still had a major job of convincing the tribe to accept what modern medicine had to offer them. When they succumbed, she felt it was only due to their awe of Malek.
He organized both teams’ efforts, gave her the leader’s position within GAO’s medical team. When she wasn’t fulfilling the demands of her position, she was sharing the ob/gyn unit with Hessuh, her trailer-mate, and together they’d taken care of hundreds of women, in an incredible variation of conditions. More incredible was what these women put up with health-wise, and still functioned well, practically supporting the whole tribe’s way of life.
Although they were less segregated than town and village women, and weren’t generally veiled, they had a much lower status than men but certainly worked the hardest. Tending flocks, doing housework, cooking, raising children, drawing water, spinning and weaving, setting up and dismantling tents. She’d invariably overestimated a woman’s age by ten to fifteen years. It was accepted here that a woman would be worn out and old by forty.
With each case Jay felt her blood boil at their conditions and, worse, their acceptance of them.
Hessuh had just finished examining a woman who, after looking her and Jay over, had launched into a defense of their way of life, extolling how women were protected by a strict code of honor, could move about relatively freely and were allowed to sing and dye their long hair with henna.
“Pro
tected, strict code, relatively freely—allowed!” Jay mumbled as soon as the woman stepped out.
Hessuh gave her a placating pat. “It’s too entrenched. They know nothing else, think there’s nothing else to know, or should be known. So don’t you start preaching women’s lib.”
“You’re saying they should be left as they are?”
“I’m saying it’s sometimes not right to import our views of what’s right or fair,” Hessuh said, making Jay feel like an over-zealous fool. Her next words defused the feeling—on purpose, Jay bet. Hessuh was an astute, thoughtful woman. “And then time and the march of civilization work wonders. This woman was my grandmother. Look how far I’ve come since her generation.”
“If you’re the example of what waiting for natural progression to install changes brings, I’m all for it,” Jay said. “You’re one amazing woman, Hessuh.”
Hessuh laughed. “The way you speak your heart and mind, whether it’s good or bad, never ceases to amaze me, Jay. We’re not big on that here and it’s aib…shameful to express what you genuinely feel or think. Another reason it’s such a pleasure to be around you is that you don’t make digs at me.”
“Who can make digs at you? You’re great, all around.”
Hessuh smirked. “Other women, of course. Feminine jealousy is elevated to an art here, so it’s something to bear in mind when you’re judging women’s conditions. Some of women’s worst and most vocal enemies here are women. I am unmarried, so a danger to every woman’s husband, especially as I’m also loose and naked.” She looked wryly down her modestly attired, lithe, curvaceous body. “I’m a doctor so I make them feel under-achieving and so on. But instead of wishing or trying to change their status, they attack mine.”
“A case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, huh?” Jay chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I guess every victim has some responsibility in perpetuating their suffering.”
Hessuh sighed. “Apart from the social ranks at the top, it is women who single-handedly raise children here. It’s they who raise their male children to think of women as lesser beings.”
“Why?”
“As I said, patriarchal conditioning has become a part of the female psyche here. And then there is another feminine side to the equation. A man here brings his wife to the family home. A mother wants to make sure her son will bring her a subordinate as she’d been to her own mother-in-law.”
“But—that’s sick!” Jay cried.
“It’s how it works. But as I said, time is changing things. My sister is married to a Damhoorian engineer who thinks her more than his equal. So it’s not all doom and gloom. The less advantaged classes are where social rigidity and injustices are most perpetuated, not only here but all over the world.”
Jay gave a slow nod. “I guess you’re right. Wow, Hess. You keep giving me insights into the culture I would have never come to see on my own. Getting to know you is one of the best ways I’m learning about Damhoor today.”
Hessuh’s lips twisted. “You mean an unmarried woman in her early thirties in a land where marriage is viewed as a woman’s only reason for existence and where a woman over twenty-five is an ajooz, a hag? An obstetrician when marriage is considered a woman’s only viable ‘career’?”
“Yeah, all that. Also unveiled when all the local women I’ve seen wear veils to one degree or another. How come?”
“That’s another example of what time and the right people in the right places can achieve.” Hessuh smoothed the gleaming wealth of her long mahogany ponytail. “I personally owe being unveiled to Sheikh Malek. He made a decree that women who work in the medical field can dress however they choose—but only a handful took him up on his offer. He also lets girls enter medical school here when our only local female doctors had their education abroad, like I did, also thanks to the vision of another man—my father. In the last six years the number of females in medical school has risen to almost that of the males.”
So it had come back to Malek again. As it always would.
Hearing about him and his achievements, which was constant when everyone, even her GAO partners, had something new to relate about him, only slashed at her rawness.
She groped desperately for a change of subject. “So, to continue my curiosity—what does Hessuh mean?”
“Share,” Hessuh said briefly, a challenging expression on her face, as if she was daring Jay to make a comment.
Jay obliged. “So that’s why you share everything with me!”
Hessuh let out that ready, tinkling laugh. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. My name is the noun, not the verb, dear lady. Though don’t ask me what my father was thinking when he named me. Share of what, b’Ellahi? I always asked him. After thirty years of racking his brains, he came up with a satisfying answer. I’m his share of life’s happiness.”
“And you’re my share of this mission’s,” Jay teased. “I wouldn’t replace you with the lion’s share.”
Their banter was interrupted by their next patient, a woman of sixty who Jay mistook for almost eighty, with a jarring pink and violet dress and blue dots tattooed all over her face.
After careful examination they looked at each other and nodded. This woman was there to check them out, no more. As Jay punched in her data on the computer, the woman insisted on enlightening them that electricity was trapped jinn whom God had enslaved in the wires to serve humans.
As the woman left, Jay stared after her open-mouthed.
Hessuh burst out laughing. “Wait until we go back to Halwan where your patients will make stock-market transactions from their cellphone internet connections while waiting for their CT session, then tell you you made them late for their hegamah and roggiah sessions. The first is the so-called cure-all by leeches and bloodletting and the second is the jinn-powered method of warding off the evil eye and extracting malevolent influences.”
Hessuh laughed again as that expression took over Jay’s face on just imagining the incongruities. “I should have my camera ready at all times. Your reactions are delightful.”
“You’re making me sound like a clueless tourist here!”
“Well…” Hessuh spluttered at Jay’s mock indignation. “Oh, you’re just a newcomer. Your wonder is very…refreshing.”
Jay poked her. “That was ‘laughable’, wasn’t it?”
Hessuh giggled again. Jay couldn’t remember when she’d made friends with another person more easily or quickly. Except for Malek…
Malek. How she missed him, ached, burned for him.
God. Everything came back to him. Every thought, every hearbeat, every impulse streaking through her nerves.
It was far worse to see him and suffer his distance and formality after she’d basked in his nearness and spontaneity than not seeing him at all again.
All she could do now was count down the remaining weeks, pray she’d toughened up enough by now that they wouldn’t hurt as much.
Oh, who was she kidding?
“Doctorah Janaan, we have an emergency!”
Saeed! Janaan jerked out of her torment, swung around.
“Here, or are we responding to a distress call?” she gasped.
“A distress call. A cave-in in a quarry around forty miles away.” He rushed to carry her suitcase-sized emergency bag then rushed out after her, giving her that penetrating look that read her down to her last secret. He knew how she felt about Malek, probably even pitied her for the hopelessness of it all.
“Did you alert Ma—er, Sheikh Malek?” Jay asked, remembering that no one called him Doctor, that his sheikhdom superseded his medical status, and that here people called each other by their first name, not their family name, even in formal situations.
“Yes, he said to get you, ask you to organize an appropriate team. He’s organizing the rescue operation.”
And there he was. Malek. Taking charge of the surgery unit. Would he let her work with him again? Would he even look at her?
Get a grip, you pathetic fool. See to your job.
Angry, crushed by longing, humiliated by it, she rushed about, gathering the team best equipped for the emergency.
She jogged to the ambulance as Hessuh caught up with her. Steve and Elaine, her GAO nurses, followed, while one of Malek’s aides took the wheel. Two more GAO nurses as well as Malek’s Lobna and Alyaa went to the other ambulance, with Saeed driving. Then she realized they’d be following a camel-riding messenger!
“That’s a racing camel,” Hessuh said, reading her alarm. “He can do 40 miles an hour, easily keep up 25 miles an hour for an hour. On this terrain, we won’t be able to top that speed ourselves.”
Jay exhaled. “I hope the rescue choppers arrive before us.”
Hessuh sighed. “Sheikh Malek says the quarry is uncharted and only this guy knows the way. Sheikh Malek will relay its position once we arrive—in less than two hours, hopefully.”
Jay felt her stomach knotting. Less than two hours when every minute might mean someone losing their chance to be saved.
She could do nothing but sit and watch their guide prodding his galloping camel, and watch as the endless desert sped by.
She had a feeling this was very much what her life would be like from now on.
An endless desert speeding by.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MALEK READ THE co-ordinates on his GPS as soon as the quarry came into sight and barked them in his cellphone to the rescue helicopters.
He brought his trailer to a halt as close as he could get and jumped out, his eyes taking in the scene.
A two-hundred-foot-high rock-cutting, gravel-extracting quarry hewn out of Aj-Jalameed mountain, now almost unrecognizable after the the massive avalanche.
Just imagining the effect it had had on flesh and blood, that there were people below that rubble, dead or dying or even only injured, in pain, trapped in horror for the long hours it had taken to alert them and bring them here. His blood boiled.
He hadn’t known this quarry existed. And neither had any officials. This was an unsanctioned project, erected with no safety protocols. Those responsible for this exploitation of workers and resources would answer to him in person. But that would come later. He had to save their victims first.
