by Kim Barnes
Outside, the stone street was cobbled white, and I stepped carefully down the narrow walk. I brushed the snow from the curb, across from the church window, sat down, and lit the one cigarette I allow myself each day, already wishing for another. The doors along the avenue were barred, the roadway free of traffic, not even a bicycle winding the icy street. I wrapped my scarf around my ears and tipped the wine that warmed my throat as the voices rose, the beautiful voices, pouring out through the open window with the light, which was golden, so sacred that I believed I had to witness its genesis.
I hadn’t set foot in a church since leaving Shawnee, and never a church like this one. I rose and stepped to the entryway, but the door was locked. Late at night, and all of the doors of Rome were locked tight. When I lifted my face, the snow shut my eyes. I opened my mouth, took the flakes on my tongue. I stood with my hand gripping the latch. I couldn’t let go. Dear God, I thought, let me in. The snow is falling. The stars are burning.
All I ever wanted was to know.
Acknowledgments
Before I offer my gratitude to the many people who had a role in this book’s creation, I want first to acknowledge that, though this story relies upon and incorporates historical elements, it is very much a work of fiction, its characters and situations conjured from my imagination. The Saudi Arabia of 1967 is gone, a place impossible to go back to, and those readers who are familiar with that land and time may find certain of my details and logistics inconsistent with their memories and experiences. Those readers who know the contemporary Arabian landscape, populated by high-rises and luxury hotels, may find it difficult to imagine that the eastern edge of the peninsula could ever have been so barren. Likewise, the political, cultural, and religious environment of Arabia has changed a great deal since the 1960s. Because of the closed nature of the Saudi society and the doctrine of exceptionalism that directed early Aramco, I often found it difficult to access truly objective accounts of life inside (and outside) the American compounds and oil towns. What I offer you, then, is Gin’s story as I have invented it. All my hours of reading and research brought me to a new appreciation of just how complex the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is. If, as Yash says, the events in these pages add up to the “education of Mrs. Gin,” they also represent the education of this author. Outside of the political gravity of what I discovered, the one impression that remains with me is the spirit of genuine friendship that developed—and continues to develop—between those Arabs and Americans who have worked together over the years.
While researching and writing this story, I have relied upon a blessedly generous circle of family and friends. To Robert Wrigley, the poet who has my heart, shares my tent, and muses with me in our aged hot tub, another glass of champagne to all those nights with our bodies in the water and our eyes on the stars as we trekked through the imaginary desert together, following the windblown trail of this story. To our children, Jace, Jordan, and Philip, and my mother, Claudette Barnes, thank you for your gift of time, support, and inspiration. My aunt and uncle, Coleen and Wayne Cook, and my cousin Terry Cook, whose memories of their years in Abqaiq spurred this story—thank you for the time you gave me, answering my endless and sometimes odd series of questions. William Tracy, former contributing editor of Aramco World, offered his expert reader’s eye and Arabian memories—thank you, Bill and Marjorie, for your confidence, coffee, and cookies. Lois Wolfrum, who lived and worked as a Singles girl in Arabia, brought to this story her love of the Saudi people and her flag of fierce independence. I relied heavily on an engaging personal online journal written by Aramco expat Colleen Wilson, who, even in the face of personal hardship, took time to offer me details of her experience in the camps. Other Aramcons, including those with whom I connected on Facebook, impressed me with their deeply felt love of Arabia and its people.
Sayantani Dasgupta endured a long series of my embarrassingly uninformed questions about India and responded with endearing patience, as did Bharti Kirchner, whose culinary expertise I relied upon and who generously read and responded to sections of the manuscript. Morning conversations with my sister-friend Claire Davis about writing and every other thing in our world became my daily bread, and her uncanny ability to pull me up, dust me off, and point me in the right direction kept me from losing my way. To my Free Range Writers—Collin Hughes, Buddy Levy, Lisa Norris, and Jane Varley—thank you for twenty years of rare trust, good friendship, and hard reads. To Jeanne Amie Clothiaux and Kelly Madonna Quinnett—may the Three Tall Women forever meet to wonder, imagine, and create.
Grazie mille to the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio and the Liguria Study Center at Bogliasco for the glorious gift of time and space, and to my resident mates there, thank you for sharing with me your intelligence, humor, and creative energy. Thanks to my colleagues and my students at the University of Idaho for their faith and support.
To my editor, Jennifer Jackson, and my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, who have journeyed beside me as I made my way through the desert—a thousand thanks for your steadfast direction and reassurance. Many thanks, too, to family members and friends who offered their memories, knowledge, insights, and encouragement, including Greg and Judy Barnes, Keith Browning, Brittney Carman, Betsy Dickow, Anthony Doerr, Bob Greene, Robert Coker Johnson, Annie Lampman, Brian Leekley, Sam Ligon, Martin Mallinson, Daniel Orozco, Joy Passanante, Brandon Schrand, Mark Spragg, Jess Walter, and Gary Williams.
A very special note of gratitude to the independent booksellers who keep me in their hearts and on their shelves.
Finally, I have researched a small library’s worth of material over the years of this book’s composition and have been informed and directed by the novels, memoirs, scholarly texts, government reports, articles, journals, letters, diaries, blogs, and oral histories I have read. I want to make special mention of the brilliant Italian photographer Ilo Battigelli, whose artistic (not personal) life inspired the creation of my character Carlo Leoni. You can learn more about Mr. Battigelli’s masterful photographs and biography through the searchable archives of Arab News (http://archive.arabnews.com), Aramco Services (http://www.aramcoservices.com/news-publications), and the Center of Research and Archiviation of Photography (http://www.craf-fvg.it/eng/index.asp).
Along with archival issues of Aramco (now Saudi Aramco) publications—Sun and Flare, Aramco World, the 1960 edition of The Aramco Handbook, and the 1981 edition of Aramco and Its World—the following is a list of selected sources that I found particularly poignant and from which I drew details and descriptions of life in the desert: The Belt, by Ahmed Abodehman; In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, by Qanta A. Ahmed, MD; At the Drop of a Veil: The True Story of an American Woman’s Years in a Saudi Arabian Harem, by Marianne Alireza; Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong; Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia—1937 to 1940: A Young American Geologist Explores the Deserts of Early Saudi Arabia, by Thomas C. Barger, former president and CEO of Aramco; Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut, by Fadia Basrawi; Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, by Geraldine Brooks; Big Oil Man from Arabia: From Camel Back to Cadillac—or the Amazing Adventures of Aramco, the American Overseas Oil Company That Is Transforming Saudi Arabia, by Michael Sheldon Cheney; The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, by David Dean Commins; The Arab of the Desert, by H. R. P. Dickson; A Bedouin Boyhood, by Isaak Diqs; Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea; The Qur’an, translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem; Behind the Veil: An Australian Nurse in Saudi Arabia, by Lydia Laube; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence; Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean (from which comes a slight paraphrasing of “No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing,” spoken in the film by Feisal); Honey and Onions: A Life in Saudi Arabia, by Frances Meade; Home: The Aramco Brats’ Story, a documen
tary film by Matthew Miller, Todd Nims, and Zachery Nims; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison; the Cities of Salt trilogy, by Abdelrahman Munif (which inspired Abdullah’s description of the destruction of the wadi and a play on this quote: “You go to bed a warrior and wake up a slave”); Black Tents of Arabia, by Carl R. Raswan; Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih; Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, by Wallace Stegner, who first described the American explorationists as “tinkerers and gadgeteers”; A Vanished World and Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger (“A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live. The cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die”); and America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, by Robert Vitalis (which includes an extensive bibliography and in which I found the quote, “[A] King who thinks like an oil company and an oil company that thinks like a King,” attributed to United States State Department desk officer Richard Sanger). Mason’s articulation of what the Arab workers were striking for is a paraphrasing of a quote from a 1955 Time article titled, “Alchemy in the Desert,” reported by Keith Wheeler.
Additional selected and suggested titles include Crescent, Arabian Jazz, and The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu-Jaber; the writings of Ayaan Hirst Ali; The Girls of Riyadh, by Rajaa Alsanea; Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke; Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, by Robert Baer; Disfigured: A Saudi Woman’s Story of Triumph over Violence, by Rania al-Baz; Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, by Rachel Bronson; Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings, by Anthony Cave Brown; Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, edited by Edmund Burke III; Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark, by Jane Fletcher Geniesse; A Land Transformed: The Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco, by William Facey, Paul Lunde, Michael McKinnon, and Thomas A. Pledge, and edited by Arthur P. Clark and Muhammad A. Tahlawi; Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution, by Sattareh Farman Farmaian; The New Encyclopedia of Islam, by Cyril Glassé; The Price of Honour: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World, by Jan Goodwin; The Writing on My Forehead, by Nafisa Haji; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid; Mother Without a Mask: A Westerner’s Story of Her Arab Family, by Patricia Holton; The Jewel of Medina and The Sword of Medina, by Sherry Jones; Black Light, by Galway Kinnell; The Kingdom, by Robert Lacey; Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren; Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women, edited by Judy Mabro; Not Without My Daughter, by Betty Mahmoody; Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi; Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V. S. Naipaul; The Energy Within: A Photo History of the People of Saudi Aramco, edited by Kyle L. Pakka; Persian Girls: A Memoir, by Nahid Rachlin; Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), by Huda Shaarawi; Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia, by Peter Theroux; Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, edited by Judith E. Tucker; and The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin.
“Boredom is the desire for desires” is a paraphrase from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two previous novels, including A Country Called Home, which received the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in fiction and was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, the Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian. She is the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction, and her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of publications and anthologies, including The New York Times; MORE magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Good Housekeeping; Fourth Genre; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Barnes is a professor of writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.
ALSO BY KIM BARNES
FICTION
A Country Called Home
Finding Caruso
NONFICTION
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
Hungry for the World: A Memoir
