City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  “First trip to Jeddah?” he asked.

  “No. My second.” Miriam saw the television flicker on, a big arrow showing the direction of Mecca and the time of the next prayer: five hours away, local time. The stewardess came by with amenity kits, followed by a steward passing out coffee and dates. Miriam quickly hid the cup beneath her tray table, but neither of them seemed to notice or care. “What about you,” she said, “is this your first trip?”

  “No. By the way, I’m Apollo.” His smile was teasing. “Apollo Mabus.”

  “Great name.” She smiled back. “I’m Miriam.”

  “Is that a southern accent I hear?”

  “I’m from North Carolina.”

  “Ah, I’m from New York.” He said it the way people say “checkmate.” She was a lesser species, Elvis perhaps, living in a trailer on processed cheese and grits. The slight was so common, so predictable, that it might have been imagined, but her cheeks flushed anyway and she hid the sting by taking a long sip of wine.

  “And what do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a doctor.” She glanced at his reaction, saw his face stiffen, and decided she didn’t like him as much as she’d thought. She certainly wasn’t going to clarify that she had a doctorate in music. “And you? You look like the academic type.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”

  “Well, you’re squinting, which means you probably left your glasses somewhere. And you’ve got a big callus on your third finger and ink stains on your thumb.” He was trying to hide his discomfort with a look of amusement. The wine was warming her up. “But you don’t seem the tweed jacket type, and those are some pretty big biceps, so tell me, what kind of academic pumps iron?”

  “When you spend a lot of time at a desk,” he said slyly, “you need to do something to get the blood pumping.” She thought it was a cheesy thing to say. She took another sip of wine.

  “So what brings you to Saudi?” she asked.

  He set his elbows on the armrests, and she watched him play with his watchband, turning it around his wrist by fourths. “I’m a professor of Middle Eastern studies. My specialty is Quranic scripture. This trip is for research.”

  “Ah.” The first rush of alcohol hit her, and she felt a wave of dizziness. Something on the TV caught her eye, and she glanced up to see that the in-flight movie had been censored. Women’s arms and hair moved across the screen in blurred gray patches.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What brings you to Jeddah?”

  “My husband found a great job —”

  “Of course.” He interrupted her with a smirk. “I didn’t think you’d be going into the country by yourself.”

  Although she had just spent the past four weeks complaining loudly to her sisters, her father, her nieces, and anyone who would listen about the miseries of being a kept woman in Saudi Arabia, she found herself prickling.

  “I think it’s very brave of you,” he went on, “sitting it out in Saudi so that your husband can advance his career. Or are you only in it for the money?”

  “Both,” she said as flippantly as she could manage. It wasn’t strictly true. Eric had taken the job as a bodyguard—or rather as an “executive protection specialist”—even though most of his military training had been as an engineer. He had said he wanted to get out of that, into something more practical and engaging, but he could have worked in security anywhere. She didn’t like that he’d chosen Saudi Arabia, even if it was only for a year.

  “And how long have you been there?” Mabus asked.

  “Six months.”

  “Impressive,” he said. “Most women don’t last that long. Western women, that is—and if they do, it’s with the assistance of drugs. But I suppose you live on the compound?”

  Miriam looked at her cup. “No.”

  “Really? That’s unusual. Do you have a dedicated driver?”

  She pursed her lips, shook her head. This was dangerous territory, and she fumbled desperately for a clever way to change the subject, but she was feeling muddled by the wine.

  “Tell me,” he soldiered on, oblivious to her discomfort, “what do you do with yourself all day when you’re not allowed to leave the house, drive a car, or even ride a fucking bicycle?” He said it loudly enough that Miriam looked around, expecting a few horrified stares. No one seemed to notice.

  His questions had triggered a familiar sensation of self-pity and suppressed rage, and now she was sweating. She didn’t want to think of her confinement anymore, and he was a bastard to ask. Did he want to hear a little whining? She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  He broke her silence with a laugh, an explosion that shot adrenaline through her. “That’s a wonderful answer,” he said, “an answer by demonstration.” Then his face grew serious. “It’s no place for a woman.”

  Miriam nodded. Anything she would say would only fuel his diatribe.

  “They hate women,” he said, leaning closer to her. “They fear them and they hate them, and do you know why? Because women are smarter, more biologically gifted, and have always had power over men.” She could smell the wine on his breath, mingling with the crisp woodsy scent of his cologne; it reminded her of a bedroom, closed air, the smell of a man.

  “There’s an old Islamic saying,” he went on, “that heaven is crowded with beggars, and hell is overflowing with women.” She frowned at him. “And you haven’t been through the worst of it, believe me.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Now that you’re ready to go back to the States, good and ready, you’ll find that your husband has fallen in love with the place. I’ve seen it a dozen times. Men love Saudi Arabia about as much as their wives seem to hate it.

  “If you really want to keep your husband’s heart,” he went on, “then remind him that the religious Saudis believe in the ‘duty of dissociation’ from infidels. This means they have a duty to keep you at a distance. They believe that relating to infidels—that’s you—actually removes the person from the realm of religion. They might be hospitable to your husband, they might give him tea and dates, but they’ll never accept him, not there. It’s more xenophobic than anywhere else on earth. Here’s the Quran for you: Ye who believe, Take not into your intimacy, Those outside your ranks, They will not fail to corrupt you.”

  “I’m sure that —” not everyone believes that, she was going to finish, but it was as if he knew she would try to moderate his views, and he interrupted quickly.

  “They say that the Quran is the Word of God,” he said, “and that everything that was written in it is exactly as it was when the message was passed to the Prophet Mohammed. Exactly as it was. Even though it was written down by dozens of different people—and translated from Aramaic. But never mind that, they’re so damn proud that not a single diacritical mark has been changed in the holy book since it was written. Did you know that?”

  “Sort of,” she lied.

  “And are you really going to sit there and tell me that they’re not backward? What if I told you the Bible was the Word of God, and that the way it is today is exactly how God intended it, and not a single thing has been changed, would you believe me?”

  She felt thoroughly annoyed, afraid to speak in case it should provoke him, afraid of the awkwardness of more interruptions and potentially explosive rage. No one was watching them, but she felt as if the whole plane were listening. She reflected morosely that for someone with such a concern for women’s rights, Apollo Mabus had silenced her as effectively as any scornful Saudi had ever done.

  The effects of the wine had worn off in the adrenaline rush, and now she was coming down from that as well. Mabus went on, less angry now, but he seemed to feel it his holy duty to make sure she understood just how cruel and backward the country was, and how foolish she was for allowing herself to put up with it, especially for a man. She let the sound lap over her and wondered where all his rage came from. The curious duality of his appearance—part Arab, part Western—did not
point to an equally intriguing depth of personality. In fact, he seemed to have been flattened somehow; he was the two-dimensional stereotype of a bigoted American.

  She thought about Eric, about his dogged appreciation for Saudi culture, for Islam, and how much stronger it had become over the past few months. She had come to Saudi expecting—half hoping, half fearing—that the intensity of this country would finally turn him off, but in fact his affection for it had only grown stronger.

  “I think you’ve got it wrong,” she finally said, cutting Mabus off midsentence.

  “Oh?” He looked surprised.

  She was sinking inside, filled with the terrible dread one feels when one has just committed to an argument that can’t be supported—certainly not when the mind is fuzzy with alcohol.

  “Yes,” she said, still not certain how she would proceed until the words came tumbling out. “I didn’t come here for my husband. I came for myself. I wanted to see how other people lived. I wanted to understand it.”

  “And what do you understand now?”

  She looked at him, perhaps too sharply. “That I hate zealots.” She picked up her cup, snapped open her seatbelt buckle, and stood up, catching his look of offense as she did.

  The stewards had vanished. No one stood among the rows, and the lights had been dimmed. Miriam stumbled through the small partition laid out for Muslim travelers to pray in and pushed her way into the restroom, fumbling with the folding door.

  Bolting the latch, she sat on the toilet seat and put her face in her hands. Her rib cage was thumping. She rubbed her forehead until the beating stopped.

  Don’t be stupid. What’s wrong with you? He’s obviously a crackpot. Standing up, she saw herself in the aluminum door—she seemed squat and dismal in a gray skirt from Penney’s, long enough to be modest, now with a liver-shaped stain on the front where she had, inexplicably, spilled wine on herself. Her reflection was warped so that her head was tiny and her feet were large. She looked like she felt—ugly and helpless.

  She filled the basin with water, splashed her face and dried it with a stiff paper towel. Mr. Apollo. She wished someone would send him to the moon. She stared at her hands, and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t feel Eric. She could hardly even remember his face, just general features like the color of his hair and the shape of his shoulders.

  The smell of Mabus’s breath lingered around her, only now it was the rancid smell of old wine. She bent over the sink and rinsed out her mouth, washed her hands, and rubbed down her hair. She washed again and again, because she found it soothing and she wanted to get rid of the smell of the wine. She was, after all, going back to Saudi.

  Encumbered by a black burqa covering her face, Miriam clutched her purse to her chest and stumbled down the narrow walkway to immigration while men rushed around her in a blur of white. Mabus had been eyeing her as they’d gotten off the plane, so she’d put her burqa down, hoping to avoid a conversation with him.

  Twice she tripped on the bottom of her cloak, the second time jostling an unsuspecting male who made a low hissing noise in response. She stopped. Let them rush past until all of them were gone. Then she’d lift her scarf and indulge in the luxury of vision.

  The hallway grew quiet and she pulled up her burqa. Outside, the last brush of sunset was fading from the sky. The monster Saudia jet that had brought her from New York glowed green in the tarmac lights. Three stories high, it flouted gravity in the same way the Titanic had once flouted the dimensions of the sea.

  She drew the cell phone from her purse and glanced at the messages: no calls from Eric. She hoped that meant he’d left work on time and would be waiting for her at immigration.

  She fumbled behind the other stragglers down a series of carpeted hallways and into the enormous customs hall, lit fluorescent white, where passengers queued in immigration lines like orphans in a soup kitchen. Aside from the religious sites, this was one of the places where Saudis rubbed shoulders with their foreign workers—their Filipino janitors, Egyptian taxi drivers, and Indonesian housegirls.

  Getting into line for what promised to be an interminable wait, Miriam adjusted her attire—a floor-length black cloak, a headscarf to cover her hair, and a burqa, a rectangular piece of black fabric to cover her face. The burqa fastened at the back of her head with a simple piece of Velcro, but somehow hers never stayed on. Some women wore their gear with innate ease. They swanned through the streets, happily at rhythm with the swing of their fabric, swishing along. Among strangers, they simply cut strides through the crowd. They knew that men would retreat from them like courtiers from a passing queen, reverent, wary of touching them. These women had X-ray vision, they could see through black, see the curb coming up, see the teenage driver careening down the alley, see every single item in a gift shop window without ever having to lift their burqas.

  And then there are the women like me, Miriam thought, the ones who seemed to get stuck in their cloaks like plastic dolls in Saran Wrap on a hot summer day. Always fussing and adjusting, yanking, tripping, catching their headscarves before they could slide to the ground. Not to mention that her burqa had no slit for the eyes, just a thinner patch of fabric through which she could sometimes discern large shapes. Eric had bought it for her. He hadn’t noticed the eye-slit detail until he had brought it home and she had put it on. Embarrassed but amused, he had encouraged her to think of it as sunglasses. Bastard.

  Despite herself, she smiled at the memory.

  “You don’t have to wear a burqa, Miriam,” he had said. She knew that, but there were times when she actually preferred it. It gave her a sense of privacy. Anyway, she simply adjusted to the problem by pulling the fabric down so that it covered only her nose and mouth. When she did this, it left her forehead exposed, but it was better than nothing.

  Half an hour later, she dropped her passport in the well beneath the bulletproof window and reluctantly removed her burqa so the guard could see her face. She felt suddenly exposed and could feel the stares of the men around her. To her right a husband and wife were going through the checkpoint, and she noticed that the wife didn’t raise her veil.

  The guard compared her face at length to the picture on her document. It couldn’t be that hard to match the face to the picture, but she waited him out and reminded herself that he had every right to take his job seriously.

  “Point of origin?” he asked, rubbing his finger beneath his nose.

  “North Carolina, USA.”

  “Date of return to America?” he asked.

  As soon as possible. “January.”

  “Will that be a vacation or a permanent return?”

  “A permanent return.” She blinked. “God willing.”

  The guard looked up. “God willing.”

  He flipped through the twenty-four pages of her passport, then rubbed his nose and blew little bursts of air out of his nostrils. “Well, Mrs. Walker —”

  “Dr. Walker.”

  “Mrs. Walker.” He closed the passport and passed it through the cage. “You have no work permit yourself. I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed to enter without your hu—”

  “My husband’s here. I’m sure he’s on the other side of the barrier right now.”

  The guard glared at the top of her head. “And this… husband… where does he work?”

  “SynTech Corporation,” she said, feeling the stare of the man in line behind her. “His name is Eric Walker. He’s in th—”

  “Who is his sponsor?” The guard turned to the keyboard at his wrist.

  “His name is Mr. Mohammed al-Saeed.”

  The guard typed something and then studied his computer for an interminable time before he frowned. He motioned her through with a jerk of his chin.

  She wasn’t in the mood to thank him.

  “Ma’am, please to pile your belongings here.” The customs officer pointed to a specific spot on the table. “Here,” he repeated. She felt like part of a preschool game to test her fine-motor skills. He couldn’
t be older than fifteen. There was no hair on his face, and his eyes were liquid with youth. Still, there was something ridiculous about him, an arrogance inappropriate to his age. His AK-47 swung down off his shoulder, and he hitched it up like a woman adjusts a purse.

  She heaved her suitcase onto the table. The officer unzipped it and, after a thorough inspection, asked her to remove the books. She piled them on the table, but he slid them into a plastic bin and swept them away.

  “They’re only thrillers,” she mumbled. She’d been careful not to pack books with pictures of people on the covers, which would have been considered too indecent. She could have bought the same books on the black market here, but she didn’t want to break the law. She closed the suitcase and locked it.

  They checked everything but her handbag, a beige leather affair with a fake Gucci stamp. It was really a bag of toiletries masquerading as a purse, a foil for potential bag-snatchers; she kept her money in her shoe. Walking through the metal gates, she wondered why they hadn’t asked to inspect it. Perhaps they were afraid of handling tampons or lipstick. Now her purse was indecent, too, but she clutched it, her last port of privacy.

  Miriam sighed. Almost there. She scanned the crowd on the other side of the barrier but there was no sign of Eric. Heading toward the entrance lounge, she became aware that her white face was visible to every man in the room. They never met her gaze, but on the periphery of her vision she could see them staring. Well, too damn bad. If she put on her burqa, Eric might not be able to recognize her.

  Between herself and the white partitions of customs there was only one figure—a uniformed guard striding briskly in her direction. He carried a semiautomatic on his shoulder, and although he averted his gaze, his trajectory indicated that he was aiming for her. She froze. People stared from the other side of the barrier. It almost seemed that the guard might walk past her, he was marching so rapidly, but instead he seized her arm and yanked her into his stride, scooping her along like a carousel ring. She offered no resistance but seized her suitcase and scurried beside him, amazed by the strength of his grip.