The Gulf Between Us

by Geraldine Bedell

  I wondered whether I should tell her about the theory I’d read, that martyrs (not, of course, that the Ghafir bombers were martyrs) weren’t entitled to seventy virgins in paradise after all, but raisins. White raisins, in fact. It was something to do with the idea having come from Christianity centuries before, and having been clumsily translated from Aramaic into Arabic. White raisins would have been pretty scarce in seventh century Arabia, and presumably before, at the Christian time when the idea was thought up, or maybe even pre‐Christian time (the whole thing had a pagan ring, when you really thought about it). Was there any consolation for Maddi, in thinking of the suicide bombers turning up in heaven expecting girls and getting raisins instead?

  Probably not, right here and now. Anyway, I don’t think it was a very widely‐held theory. I asked her instead if she’d managed to get any sleep.

  ‘I dozed a bit in a chair. Dad wants me to go home tonight. He says there’s no point everyone getting exhausted, and he’s right. But mum thinks she mustn’t close her eyes, because it’s only her powers of concentration making Millie better. Anyway,’ she glanced distractedly at her watch, ‘I really ought to get back in a minute.’

  ‘Sure. Whenever you want.’

  ‘OK. Thanks for coming.’ She didn’t seem to register that we’d only been together for about eight minutes. Her coffee untouched, she stood up, kissed me and went back to the ward.

  Anwar came into my office the next morning and said, ‘Of course, there are reasons why young men want to blow themselves up.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, sarcastically enough that anyone else would have crumpled into a little heap on the carpet. Unfortunately, my scathing wit always passed him by.

  ‘It is wrong when people want to eliminate your religion.’

  ‘No one wants to eliminate your religion.’

  ‘Or your identity.’

  ‘Anwar, if you’re going to tell me there’s something that makes it OK to blow up Millie Franklin, please don’t.’

  ‘You should listen to Mohammed Alireza.’

  ‘We’ve been here before, Anwar.’ I tapped some papers together on the desk. I was obviously incredibly busy. And annoyed, because I was speaking through gritted teeth. Anyone else would have tactfully left the room.

  ‘Why else do the Americans want to invade Iraq?’ Anwar persisted, ‘if it is not to destroy us?’

  ‘Weapons of mass destruction? Oil? To prove something?’ I didn’t know, either, but I didn’t think the main aim was to destroy Anwar’s religious identity. ‘You’re not saying now that Saddam Hussein’s some great symbol of Islam?’

  Anwar had always hated Saddam Hussein. He said he was a bad Muslim.

  ‘Mohammed Alireza explains it: we are at war and we have been since the Crusades.’

  ‘Look, Millie Franklin’s not a Crusader, OK? She was born in Hawar in 1983. She’s not even a Christian – no, she’s not, Anwar, not in any meaningful sense.’

  ‘OK, the imperialism may be a matter of western products now, and western values. But it comes to the same thing.’

  ‘I can’t talk about this, it’s too upsetting. Millie’s in intensive care… I can’t have a discussion about… whatever it is we’re discussing.’

  ‘It is unfortunate what happened to this young woman, but all I am saying is it would be better if you understood why it did… You know, in your year 800, in the first century of Islam, there were fifteen cities of fifteen thousand people in the Middle East and only one in Western Europe, Rome. The west is determined to make sure that never happens again.’

  ‘That was more than a thousand years ago!’

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘Exactly. The west has been at war with us ever since. It cannot bear the thought that Islam was so great. Mohammed Alireza has written on his website this week about Palestine, for example. You should read it. He puts it in English, too. He says that many United Nations resolutions have said that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. Yes, they have said this not once, but many times. Yet 40 per cent of all American aid goes to Israel. What is that, if not an act of war against the Arab nation?’

  ‘We’re not talking about Palestine. We’re talking about the Hawar bombs where no Americans were injured or killed, and even if they had been…’

  ‘The British, they were the same,’ Anwar interrupted. ‘When they were here, they backed people like the Al Majid, who would side with them and keep the population under control, keep us poor and weak…’

  ‘Anwar, I know all this,’ I said, ‘but it hasn’t got anything to do with Millie.’

  ‘That may be how you see it, but it is not true.’

  After that, I asked him to leave. Sod him being our sponsor.

  It was part of my job to be nice to him and he was so surprised to be ordered out of my office that he actually went.

  After he’d gone, I tried to concentrate on the letter I was supposed to be writing to parents of the year fives. But it was hard, because I kept thinking that at some level Anwar probably felt guilty (after all, one of his countrymen had maimed Millie) and I should try to engage with his philosophical difficulties about it. Still, if he felt bad, he could’ve just said sorry.

  Half an hour later, James called to finalize the arrangements for the next day. I said I didn’t feel I should go now, with Millie in hospital.

  ‘But I thought you weren’t allowed to see her…’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘And you’ve seen Maddi already…’

  It was true that I hadn’t been a great help when I had seen her and I wasn’t expecting to do so again for several days.

  ‘I might be needed.’

  ‘Really?’

  No. He was right. It was very unlikely that I’d be needed.

  ‘Surely you lot aren’t going still, after what’s happened?’

  ‘Seems like it. We’re all pretty desperate to get out of Qalhat. It’s overrun with journalists. Rosie and I did a press call yesterday but they keep asking for interviews and there are photographers everywhere. It was all very pleasantly anonymous until this happened. Please, Annie, I’ve been so looking forward to it…’

  ‘I’d love to, of course, but it feels wrong to be having a good time in the desert when Millie’s in intensive care.’

  ‘You sitting at home and moping isn’t going to help anyone.’

  This was true, so, despite my various misgivings, I drove over to the Al A’ali House the following afternoon and showed my driving licence to the more than usually alert guards on the gate – proper HDF soldiers, not the usual security police – who waved me on up the drive.

  Nezar Al Maraj was waiting on the forecourt and came over to open the door of the Jeep.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about Millie,’ he said, as I jumped down.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘OK. Stable now. Her face is cut, and no one seems to know how it will heal but she’ll be home in a few days. I’m very sorry about your security guards.’

  ‘I went to the funerals yesterday. One had a wife and child here, but the other family was in Karachi…’ He shook his head. ‘How are Peter and Katherine?’

  I was impressed that he remembered their names. But I supposed that was how he stayed in control of things. ‘Understandably distressed.’

  He was about to say something else, but James and Rosie came out of the house on to the top step and we both instinctively looked up. Either of them, on their own, would have been conspicuous; together they were dazzling. Al Maraj and I lost the thread of what we were saying. They were deep in discussion about one of their scenes, and didn’t notice us.

  ‘So I should try touching you,’ said Rosie, ‘and you could ignore it.’

  ‘But there’s that line where I say I want things I can’t have, which I’m sure is about you.’

  They seemed to be arguing about which one of them fancied the other one more. I shuff
led and James saw me, smiled and came down the steps; Al Maraj moved away smartly. He’d been quite friendly up till then, so perhaps it was only when I was with James that I turned into some kind of contaminant.

  Rosie looked as if she was made of flexible wire, rather than the usual bone and muscle. She’d tied her hair in a ponytail and she was wearing khaki trousers that tapered at the ankle and looked frail and strong all at the same time, which was a clever look mainly achieved by being very thin.

  Various other people were coming out of the house now: Brian, the assistant director; Chrissie, his girlfriend, who worked for Gulf Films; Dymphna, who was Al Maraj’s assistant; Jens, her Danish architect boyfriend, who was visiting for ten days; and Fiona Eckhart. Al Maraj divided us up – I went with James, Rosie and Al Maraj – into three cars and we drove out to Umm Hisin, on the edge of the desert, where a dozen camels were waiting with their Hawari handlers.

  We were assigned a camel each and, after the handlers had tied our bags on the back, they helped us on to the wooden saddles. The animals lurched to their feet.

  ‘Nezar, is this safe?’ called Brian. At least, I think it was Brian: we’d all tied gutras round our faces to keep off the sun, so although two of us would have been recognizable to a large part of the world’s population, you couldn’t tell which ones.

  ‘I am so not convinced their skinny legs can carry us,’ Rosie said.

  ‘You don’t weigh anything, darling. It won’t be you who has problems,’ Fiona replied, which I’m sure was exactly the response Rosie had hoped to hear. If you’re not allowed to eat, you probably have to look for pleasures elsewhere. Anyway, it wouldn’t be her either, so it was a mystery whom she might mean.

  My camel seemed alarmingly young and spirited and set off briskly behind Al Maraj’s camel, its smelly head pressed to the other animal’s smelly tail. I’d ridden camels before and I could make mine stop and get to its knees, though it was much easier if Al Maraj’s stopped and got to its knees first, but it was difficult to exercise any other kind of control.

  We processed in single file up a dry river bed, the camels sure‐footed in the rubble. I glanced back at the others, wrapped in gutras and sunglasses. We looked like bandits, and there was something lawless about being out here in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the ancient burial mounds at Al Arish… I stared out over the humped forms stretching towards the horizon, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, left over from some barely‐remembered Gilgamesh‐era civilization. You could feel for a moment here that you were in touch with a different world, of trade in pearls, spices, copper, gold, tortoiseshell, cornelian, with ships plying the Gulf between Mesopotamia and the Indus valley and stopping off at the ancient bustling Hawari port. People had lived here since the start of human time, had fought and traded and loved and died. Had died in very large numbers, to judge from the burial mounds – which were empty now, plundered over centuries, so that Al Arish was desert again, only humpier. Nothing was left of all those people and the things they’d had with them, hoping to take to the afterlife: they had been baked away by the sun and whipped by the wind, so that anything that was left was secreted inside particles of sand.

  The burial mounds aside, there was very little to distract you. A single thorn bush poking up optimistically here, a line of stones scattered down a ridge there. After a time – I’ve noticed this before in the desert – your mind tends to float, big thoughts to drift in. Whole religions have been known to arrive on occasion.

  I was fortunately spared having a new religion revealed to me, though I did wonder what I was doing here. Less in a what‐isthe‐point‐of‐it‐all existential way than in the sense of why was I in the desert with a couple of film stars and a number of people I’d only just met?

  After we’d been travelling for about forty minutes, Al Maraj seemed to slow his camel so mine could catch up. I hoped he wasn’t going to take advantage of the fact we all looked like Bedouin to start speaking Arabic again.

  ‘It’s a relief to get out of Qalhat,’ he observed as I drew alongside. ‘There’s too much politics in Hawar at the moment.’

  This was a bit like saying there was too much weather: I wasn’t sure what I was meant to reply. But I wanted to make an effort, because he had earlier.

  ‘Because of the emir’s stroke?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Yes. How’s Matthew?’

  What? How was that relevant? It’s very hard to make an effort with someone when they keep jumping subjects. Perhaps he’d decided I was too thick to have a discussion about politics – probably the question about the emir’s stroke revealed some catastrophic level of ignorance – and he’d moved on to something he thought I could cope with, such as my own child.

  All in all, it was very difficult to know where you were with him. One minute he was deliberately making fun of me in Arabic, the next he was blustering incoherently because I was on my way to bed with James; now he was presumably making some kind of effort to be pleasant.

  ‘He’s OK…’ I answered cautiously.

  ‘Things are tense here at the moment. Mohammed Alireza’s causing a lot of trouble.’ He’d gone all disapproving again. The pleasantness had just been to get me off my guard. Now he was warning me again that Matthew needed to be careful, even though he was so discreet that his own mother hadn’t realized he was gay until a few weeks ago.

  ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘if the Islamists are prepared to blow up Hawari Muslims and Millie Franklin, they hardly needed a gay person to get agitated about. We’re all symbols of whatever it is they hate – decadence or materialism or whatever. Matthew isn’t any more at risk than I am, or you.’

  ‘Even so…’

  He trailed off: even so what? Definitely, he was homophobic. It was the only possible explanation. He didn’t like the thought of Matt being gay but he knew that wasn’t an admissible position for a sophisticated person, so he kept implying something dire could happen if Matt did anything about it. He wanted me to believe that if Matt didn’t stop being gay now, something awful could happen.

  ‘Just tell him not to be reckless,’ Al Maraj urged as we reached the top of a jebel; below us in a hollow, a young man in a thobe was tending a fire. The camels picked their way down towards him – mine fell behind again – and then when we reached the bottom, collapsed in their lolloping fashion so we could all dismount. Everyone unwound the scarves from their faces, making a lot of noise about saddle soreness and about the scenery, which was spectacular now that the sun was setting and turning the rubbly landscape rose.

  A whole lamb, the local feast dish, ghouzi, was roasting slowly on the fire. The boy who’d been looking after it strolled over to me and introduced himself as Hamad. ‘Thank you,’ Fiona said officiously, alarmed that anyone might assume I was in authority, ‘someone will come and talk to you in a minute.’

  ‘I was at nursery with Matt,’ he told me, ignoring her. I shook his hand, trying to place him in the photograph I still had of Matt’s nursery class. ‘Hamad Al Khalifa,’ he added, and then I did remember because Al Khalifa was the name of the Bahraini royal family, of which he was a member of a junior branch, and all the western and Indian mothers at nursery had laughed about marrying off one of their small daughters to Hamad.

  ‘Perhaps you should get back to work?’ Fiona suggested. Her voice conveyed contempt, as if it was typical that I’d know the staff; but then Al Maraj came over and said, ‘Oh, great, I see you’ve met my nephew.’ It turned out that Hamad was his elder sister’s son; he was on his gap year, and had a place at medical school in London for next year.

  ‘Nezar said he couldn’t trust just anyone to do the ghouzi,’ Hamad explained. ‘He thought you’d do this all the time and have very high standards.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I was concerned that Annie would know, for example, that it’s perfectly possible to get to this place in a four wheel drive,’ Al Maraj said, putting his arm round his nephew. ‘D’you really have to go? Won’t you stay to eat?’


  ‘Can’t, it’s a girl thing,’ said Hamad, pulling a set of car keys from his pocket. He grinned and said he had a Land Rover parked behind the hill, opposite where we’d come down.

  I went off to organize my bedroll in the spot that James had selected for us. Not that it really made any difference whether our brand‐new, top‐of‐the‐range, film‐company‐provided sleeping bags were together, because we’d be surrounded by the rest of the group, and out here noise carried for miles, even the slightest disturbance of stones.

  ‘Has he changed much?’ Jens the Danish architect asked, straightening up from arranging his sleeping bag on my other side and looking over to where James was standing by the fire, still deep in conversation with Rosie.

  ‘Not really.’

  Al Maraj called us over to eat. ‘I’ve ignored all special diets and Hollywood fads unknown to the Bedouin,’ he said as he sliced off juicy pieces of meat.

  ‘So no eating only foods beginning with “p” or whatever the latest thin people’s craze is,’ I said cheerfully to James, as we helped ourselves. He smiled, but asked Fiona for some nutritional advice on the chickpea salad anyway. When we sat down he admitted his nutritionist had taken him off carbohydrate for five months.

  ‘So Nezar, you still think you can get us all out of here before we’re blown up?’ Brian asked, once we were all settled round the fire.

  ‘They should lock up that imam or whatever he is,’ Rosie said. ‘He was on the television earlier saying we’re at war. Does that mean I’m at war with you, Nezar?’

  ‘Depends whether you remember you owe me your last two jobs.’

  ‘I can’t understand why he’s so popular,’ Chrissie said.

  ‘He gives people something to blame,’ Al Maraj answered.

  ‘Although blaming a load of twelfth‐century knights does look a bit desperate,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Why do they need someone to blame anyway, with all their oil money?’ James said, ‘doesn’t make sense.’

  Al Maraj explained about the ruling family and the Swiss bank accounts and the uncertainty about how to compete internationally, to be modern, without abandoning Arab and Muslim identity.