by Kim Barnes
The anchored vessel we approached was bigger than the others and sat high in the water, its elegant stern and low bow rising to a jutting prow. Ropes, baskets, casks, mended sails, clothes left to dry in the sun—the boat was piled high with everything the crew needed to work, sleep, and eat for weeks at a time. Two dozen men and stick-thin boys in loincloths lined the starboard and port, diving in shifts from each side.
“Hello, the boat!” Lucky hollered. “Marhaba!”
The dhow’s aging captain, his garments salt-bleached, moved between his divers, aided by a sturdy burled staff. His skin was cured to leather, wrinkled and pinched. When he motioned us forward, Lucky motored in close enough for Mason to throw the ropes, and I was glad for the breeze that carried away some part of the stench of rotting oysters. The men and boys stared at us, their faces slack with amazement.
“He’ll offer us food,” Lucky mumbled. “Take something or you’ll hurt the old fella’s feelings. Hospitality means more to a Bedouin than to Jesus Christ hisself.”
We picked our way through the clutter and sat on the rough boards that crossed the boat, where the shy boys brought us mangoes, pieces of fish, and cups of tea. When some of them slid down and disappeared into the water, I held my breath, let it out. It seemed too long before their baskets were hauled up and they followed, gasping, pulling themselves aboard, weary beyond their years.
The captain, whose long name Lucky shortened to Fahad as he translated, had once dreamed of being a boatbuilder, he said, but his clan was not of such rank within his tribe. He gestured at the boys, said he himself had begun to dive at age seven. He told us that forty, sometimes fifty times a day they would be weighted by the ankles and dropped to the bottom, then slip the nooses so that the stones could be hauled up and readied for the next dive. Just as Fahad was indebted to the ship’s owner, the boys were indebted to Fahad for food and the unpaid obligations of their fathers and brothers before them. Few had any hope of freeing themselves.
One of the youngest boys, thick hair curling at his brow, arms scaled with parasites, settled himself to sort the oysters, his fingers sheathed in leather, protection against the shells’ razored edges. He ducked his head when he saw me watching him. He worked his knife around a mango and offered me a slice.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, mimicking my words.
“You are welcome,” I said.
“You are welcome.” He squatted, his knees scraped raw, his feet barnacled with calluses. His dark eyes seemed to fill his small head. He looked behind him to see whether he was being watched. “America, America,” he said.
I couldn’t help but smile. “America, America,” I echoed, and felt my heart shot through with longing. I imagined what my son might have looked like at his age and felt the pining desire to take the boy home, doctor his wounds, feed him hot soup, save him from his lot in life.
He pointed to the bright square of cloth at Mason’s neck. “Ahmar?” he asked.
“Red,” Mason said, and held the handkerchief out as a gift. The boy hesitated before tying it over his face, then drew his oyster knife and pointed it like a pistol, whispered, “Cinema?”
Mason ran his thumb over his mouth to keep from smiling. “Sure,” he said. “The movies.” We watched the boy return to his place at starboard, noose the roped stone to his ankle, give us a quick wave, then nod to the older man beside him, who dropped the rock over the side, the boy vanishing with it, the bandanna a brilliant splash.
Lucky smirked at Mason. “You’re a real do-gooder, ain’t you?”
“I’m just a soft touch, that’s all.” Mason stood, pulled out his cigarettes, shook one loose for Lucky, who eased into a smile, let the smoke laze from his mouth.
“You just keep it up,” Lucky said. “We’ll see where it gets you.”
I moved to join Ruthie, who was looking over the basket Fahad proffered. He held fast against Lucky’s rough bartering of the shark: he was Muslim and would not eat fish without scales. He gestured to the binoculars that hung from Lucky’s neck.
“What the hell,” Lucky said. “There’s more where these came from.” He handed over the binoculars, which were passed from one diver to the next, each snatching a second’s peek at the magnified world. Even the boy, who had popped back up like a cork, got his turn.
“How about this one, Gin?” Ruthie held a creamy bead between her fingers.
“Perfetto.” The voice came from the bow of the boat, where I saw Carlo Leoni in his scarf and high boots rise like an imp from a sacking of sailcloth. He positioned a Brownie camera at his breastbone, looked down, clicked the shutter, then lit a cigarette in one fluid motion.
“Carlo. Never a surprise.” Lucky introduced us, his voice tight. I watched as Carlo kissed Ruthie’s hand, then moved to press his cool lips against my wrist.
“Bella,” he said. “Sei molto bella.” He took in my camera, his dark eyes half-lidded. “We share the same soul, I see.”
“I love your photographs,” I said in a rush. When Ruthie looked at me, one eyebrow lifted, I felt my face turn red.
“And I your beauty, bella,” he said. “Perhaps we can work together someday.”
Lucky growled as though clearing his throat, and Carlo straightened to peer at him, then swung himself up onto a crate coiled with rope so that he stood a head taller. He turned to look at me and Ruthie, raised his chin and then his camera. Ruthie leaned into me as Carlo directed us to move first this way, then that, ordering the boy, still wearing his bandanna, to stand between us. Fahad frowned as he wrapped my pearl in a swatch of leather. When Lucky bent and began unknotting the bow, Ruthie and I stepped back on board while Mason gripped the stern. Carlo helped me, his fingers wrapped around mine, and passed me on to Mason, who steadied me against the roll of water. As we motored off, Carlo stood with his legs spread wide like a swarthy Peter Pan, the tail of his scarf flapping in the wind, then raised his hand and barked a challenge before heeling off his boots, stripping down to his underwear, and diving over the heads of the boys who hung from the dhow’s ropes. When he surfaced, he was only yards from our helm. He began a strong, steady stroke alongside the boat, keeping time, until Lucky goosed the throttle and we shot forward, leaving Carlo in our wake. I looked back to see him riding the swell, his mouth open in a full laugh, cheering us on.
“What’s his story?” Mason asked.
Lucky cupped a cigarette against the crosswind, pointed it west toward Africa. “Came over with the Italians from Eritrea. When Mussolini went down, Brits made the colony an internment camp until the war was over.”
“Fascists?” Mason asked.
Lucky nodded. “Skilled labor. We shipped them in, thousand or so. Wasn’t nothing they couldn’t make. Something broke, they fixed it. Only problem was they didn’t like the Saudis and the Saudis didn’t like them. Didn’t fit into the Aramco family plan.” Lucky checked his direction, touched the wheel. “Once we got the Arabs trained, we sent the wops back out, but Carlo, he wanted to stay, had a camera and a way of getting to people. Nailed up a shack on the beach north of Ras Tanura and called it his studio, got in good with the sheikhs by taking their portraits, and the princes took a shine to him. Now he has the run of the kingdom. Hops trains, tankers, camels, boats. There’s no one he can’t get next to.” Lucky spat tobacco from his tongue. “Little bastard knows it too. Got to watch him around the women.”
Ruthie and I sat with our backs to the cabin, listening and sipping the last of our drinks. I looked to where Mason stood, more serious now, thinking too much, my grandfather would say.
“I worry about him,” I said. “It seems so dangerous out here.”
“It doesn’t do any good to worry,” Ruthie said. “When Lucky was in the war, an officer knocked on my door one day, told me that Lucky’s plane had gone down.” She shook her head, remembering. “I fainted, thinking he was dead. Turns out it was only a broken leg.” She huffed a light laugh. “Lucky is lucky, and Mason is a gold
en boy. Nothing is going to happen to them.”
I looked out over the water. In twilight, the sky and the sea were the same, no longer blue but striations of purple and pink shot through with blue-white like the inside of an oyster. When the mouth of the bay came into view, Ruthie banged on the cabin to get Lucky’s attention and cut a hand across her throat. The boat throttled to a stop, and Mason helped her overboard, feeding the tow rope and skis. We motored slowly until the line straightened and she gave the thumbs-up. The boat churned forward, pulling Ruthie to a stand. Another thumbs-up, Mason passing the signal to Lucky, and we were speeding across the bay.
Dhows dotted the shallows, and I wondered whether the pearlers were watching us, whether what they saw was a woman tethered or simply flying, skin burnished by sun, hair a dark banner against the last fold of light.
Chapter Eight
This was Ruthie’s talent: to take any dog-day afternoon and turn it into something special.
Over the next several weeks, when Mason was on the platform, I spent hours with Ruthie at the pool and hours more with her in my kitchen, eating the meals that Yash prepared for us, drawing him into our conversation. Ruthie’s houseboy never returned after finding his bride, and the recent immigrant she hired, a shy young man from Sudan, kept to the farthest corners of the house when we were around, as though he feared contamination. The few times we sat at her Formica dinette to smoke and drink cocktails, flanked by the curio cabinet filled with porcelain bells from various nations on one side, the clock in the shape of a peacock on the other, we both knew something was missing, and we knew that something was Yash.
Mornings, I began to lie in bed and listen for the rattle of his bicycle timed to the muezzin’s first call, to regret when the evening song sent him home again. I sometimes felt like a child in his care, and at other times I felt strangely wedded to him, as though I were the husband going off to earn the wages and Yash the keeper of the hearth. When I grimaced at the bitter martini he made me one day when I returned home from the newspaper, he met me at the door each afternoon thereafter with an iced glass of sweet tea and encouraged me to relax, put up my feet while he brought me the mail and finished preparing my meal.
The first time I asked him to sit down to dinner with me, he demurred.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It is not appropriate,” he said.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” I said, and pointed to the blinded windows. “Besides, who will know?” I asked.
“Only those we tell,” he said.
“I won’t if you won’t,” I said.
He considered, his face grave, before reluctantly acquiescing. He sat stiffly in his chair, responding to my attempts at conversation with small tidbits of his life before arriving in Arabia but never anything that I really wanted to hear—nothing more about his wife, about why he had left her behind. As our meals together became more habitual and familiar, we sometimes didn’t talk at all but listened to the BBC until he rose to gather our dishes and clean the kitchen before pedaling his bicycle home. When I showed him the pearl I had gotten on the dhow and wondered what to do with it, he took it as one of his errands to have a jeweler in al-Khobar fashion the pearl into a pendant. I hadn’t expected him to be so pleased by my delight or so embarrassed when I turned my back to him, bent my head forward, pulled up my hair, and asked him to clasp the thin gold chain. I felt the brush of his fingers, heard his murmured apologies for his fumbling. When I turned to face him, the color of his cheeks had deepened to umber, and he quickly excused himself to the kitchen.
By late spring, the flowers that had erupted from the desert floor were nothing but memory, the purples and pinks and cornflower blues devoured by the camels and goats before they could be burned to cinders by the harsh summer sun. As the heat hit triple digits and Mason’s schedule ground into routine, my days became defined by meals, afternoons writing articles for the newspaper, drinks with Ruthie, late nights of reading, sometimes until dawn. After his long absence, Mason’s sudden presence felt like an intrusion, a rupture in the space I had made for myself, and I began to understand why Ruthie and Lucky had to fight. Instead of welcoming Mason with open arms, I sometimes resisted his affection, our first round of intimacy a push-me, pull-you bout. When he left again, it felt like I was being torn open, and I would cry myself to sleep, rise the next day back into my other life, begin once again to mend myself against the pain of his absence.
I gave up learning the difference between tricks and trumps, neglected to call Candy about golf, and concentrated instead on my photographs and articles, covering social events, gathering meeting dates, and posting club minutes. I discovered that although the company’s children might live in the barren desert, there was nothing that they were denied. They were instructed in marksmanship, archery, and field hockey. They were flown to Lebanon to ski the unlikely snow, sail the Mediterranean, spelunk the Jeita cave. The Hobby Farm stabled the finest Arabian ponies; the Little League teams sported customized uniforms. I interviewed the members of the Dive Club, who had just returned from the Farasan Archipelago, where they searched for silky sharks. I reported the names of Boy Scouts receiving their merit badges and youth delegates selected to attend the national convention in Portland, Oregon, for Teens Aid the Retarded. When the children graduated eighth grade, they left the compound to study abroad at the finest boarding schools and universities in the world, tuition subsidized by the company. “Little princes and princesses,” Ruthie said. “They wouldn’t know real life if it bit them in the ass.” But when I interviewed a handsome young American man who was visiting after his graduation from St. Stanislaus in Bathurst, Australia—a place he had chosen because of its excellent surf—he seemed less like a scion than a homesick child. “I didn’t want to leave,” he told me, “but they shipped me out anyway, just like they ship us all out.” He chewed at the rawness of his thumb, where a pinhead of blood welled. “No one gets it, man. You grow up in the desert, nothing else is real.” I listened, took notes, but I knew it wasn’t anything that my readers would want to hear.
When Nestor put me to work drawing the crossword puzzles, I holed up in Mason’s study, scouring old editions of Aramco World, expurgated dictionaries, and censored encyclopedias. I loved the ephemeral feel of immersing myself in strange knowledge, my awareness of the world enlarging with each down and across, but when I quizzed Yash with my clues, he already knew the answers. “What do you think I do with my evenings?” he asked. “I could fill them out in my dreams.”
I carried my camera everywhere, found that things looked different through the lens, and began to understand how Carlo Leoni might come to fancy himself invisible, move more easily through this world. I rode the bus for no other reason than to capture what images I could through the windows: a silver Cadillac sleek as a shark, beside it a donkey carrying three young boys bundled between rickets of wood, their mouths caked with dust; our Muslim driver bowing in prayer alongside the road, each window behind him framing the face of an Aramco wife. I had watched him, remembering my grandfather on his knees beside his bed, in the door of the kitchen, in the field in the middle of pitching hay—wherever the spirit moved him, that was where he fell—and stepped out quietly to take the picture, the women inside scowling their disapproval. I dropped my film off at the newspaper office, waited impatiently for the days it took to be developed, eagerly sorted through the prints. Framed, contained, the desert became more knowable, its variegations and movement captured in split-second shots that I studied like the pages of a primer.
I stopped by the newspaper office one day and found Nestor at his desk, my photographs spread out before him. I was pleased, expecting praise, but he pushed them aside and rested his weary eyes on me.
“Maybe you don’t know any better than this,” he said. “You can’t just take photos of whoever or whatever you want unless what you want is to be deported.” He shuffled the pile into an envelope, thumbed down the clasp, and handed it to me. “
I don’t want to see these kinds of prints anywhere near here,” Nestor said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” I tucked the envelope against my chest, wishing I had my own darkroom, a private place to do my work without anyone looking over my shoulder.
He took a deep breath, tapped his pencil. “Maybe it’s better if you stay with ‘Memory Lane.’ ”
“But I want to write about what’s happening right now,” I said. “Something that matters.”
Nestor settled back. “Just where do you think you are, Mrs. McPhee?” He took off his glasses, rubbed the sore spots on either side of his nose, then pushed forward a photo of a royal-looking Arab man, maybe a sheikh, his son sitting at his knee. “See anything wrong with it?”
I studied the portrait. “It looks fine,” I said.
“Except for one very important detail the photographer overlooked.” He pointed to the man’s bare feet. “We can’t use it because the censors say it’s degrading. What are we supposed to do, buy him a pair of wing tips?”
I stood there, stubborn, my packet of photos clutched tight.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m not saying you don’t have an eye for this. I’m just saying you’ve got to tighten your blinders. Hunt down Carlo Leoni. See if he can teach you a thing or two.”
I left in tears, not just because I was angry but because I knew that I didn’t have any way to hunt down anybody, and especially not a pirate who had the run of the country. I rode the bus back to Abqaiq, found Yash in the kitchen, and sat glum while he made me dinner. He seemed quieter than he had only hours before, and I wondered whether it was because Mason was due home that night, if, like me, he found the transitions the hardest.
“I need an adventure.” I sighed.
“Mrs. Gin,” Yash said, “you are in Arabia. Do not wish for adventure.”
“At least you can drive out of here,” I said.
