City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Yes.”

  “Good. This is our secret, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Omran untied the rope that bound them together and in one startling movement, he leapt straight over the edge of the dune. Nayir saw him suspended for an impossible moment, then he dropped twenty feet. His legs plunged into the sand with a supernatural BOOM.

  The force of the sound knocked Nayir backward. He landed on his rear and started sliding down the dune’s lee side but scrabbled onto his stomach and crawled back to the crest.

  Then he heard it, the sound of a small airplane flying toward him, only the note was wrong. In place of a roaring engine he heard a woman’s ululation, which became an unearthly scream. There wasn’t a Bedouin in the world who didn’t have a certain respect for a wicked djinn, a shaytin. He saw the djinni swirling above him, made of smoke and hot metal, their great black mouths opening wider to spew bullets of sand and blistering fire and the shrieking of the dunes. Six years old at the time, too young to believe in physics, Nayir began to cry.

  On his belly he crawled to the edge of the dune and saw Omran still sliding down the ridge like a knife slicing into a large, soft cake. The wind kicked a wall of sand into Nayir’s face. He tasted grit in his mouth, instinctively shut his eyes and spit. Then the sound changed. The shrieking stopped and he heard a groan. When the cloud of sand cleared, he saw Omran struggling at the bottom of the valley. He was on his knees, facing Nayir, but his arms were elbow-deep in the sand. He was struggling. It looked as if some creature under the surface was eating his forearms.

  “Omran!” Nayir shouted, cluttering to his feet.

  The ground gave way and Nayir found himself sliding, slipping, falling down the dune, part avalanche, part wild, hawklike plunge. And with the fall came a screeching noise. It rose from deep within the earth, where his legs were shearing through the sand. The vibrations shook him, traveling up his legs and torso, shuddering through his neck and face. There were so many djinni in the sound that he felt possessed by them. But these djinni were short, stunted versions of the former. At some moment in the fall, he realized that his body and the sand were the sources of the noise. That he was the djinn, afraid of himself.

  For once, it wasn’t his uncle Samir who did the explaining. It was Omran, who was forced to do so when Nayir returned to Samir’s tent shouting about the singing dunes. Omran sat at the table and, in his adult voice, said that the shear stress of a body sliding through the sand caused synchronous vibrations in the sand that produced high-frequency sounds. The crescent shape of the dune acted as an amplifier. He gave a typical range of hertz and even drew a sketch. All very scientific. Samir nodded, pleased to hear something from a man who knew his physics. Feeling deflated, Nayir stopped listening and went outside into the night.

  Only when he’d reached the bottom of the dune did his ear finally recollect the mysterious sound he’d produced and cling to it giddily, repeating it in his mind as a child repeats Quran. The notes were somehow his, as surely as his cells held their essence of life. Occasionally in adulthood those sounds would flash through him, a haunted echo of his own groping in the world.

  Watching Katya talk on the cell phone, he wished he could explain what he was thinking. That not every fall is a senseless crash. That even in our most awkward moments there’s a chord of transcendence. And that no amount of scientific explanation will suffice to reveal what a simple fall down a hill of sand will do. She was whispering into her phone, looking down the street. Only momentarily did she glance at him with what looked like a nostalgic twinge. Finally, she hung up.

  “I’m sorry, Nayir,” she said.

  She was letting him go. Or she was telling him to go. It was all the same thing. He knew he deserved it. But he also knew that he could not accept it. That he’d had enough of this particular suffering. That what had just happened was not a waking memory, but a kind of istiqara—an answer from Allah to the prayers he had been so fervently whispering these past eight months. The path he had chosen was not the right one, but now he would put it right, even if it meant going to her father, making a fool of himself by telling the truth, and proving his unworthiness to her entire family. Did it matter? Wasn’t it only his own ego that needed crushing, his own pride that had kept him from declaring his intentions eight months ago, back when she had been so willing to hear them?

  His thoughts had a hysterical edge to them now. He realized he was sweating profusely and that his hands were wet.

  “I’ve got a busy night,” she said, her head down.

  Strangely, her persistent rejection brought his confidence back. “So who’s the very fortunate husband-to-be?”

  She looked up. “Oh! I’m not married,” she said, her voice confused. “This is Othman’s ring…” She trailed off.

  The relief came so quickly that it hurt. So she was still wearing Othman’s ring even though their engagement had ended months ago. “Ah,” he managed. “My mistake.” He gave her a pointed look. “It was my mistake.” He saw a softening in her eyes. It amazed him that what began pouring urgently through his heart was an even more expansive desire than he’d realized, the urge to be with her no matter what. “The case I came here to ask you about may not be a case at all.” A flicker of her eyes showed that he’d caught her attention. He explained about Qadhi’s death. “I was hoping you could tell me about the cause of death and put my uncle’s mind to rest.”

  She thought for a minute.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” It was spoken with the kind of brusqueness that indicated an inner turmoil of her own. He found it easy not to take it personally. She glanced nervously up and down the street again, and he realized that she probably didn’t want her escort Ahmad to see them together.

  “Can I call you?” he asked, nearly laughing at the irony of the question.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

  He felt the first stab of fear. She wasn’t going to call him. She was going to do to him just what he’d done to her. And he would deserve it.

  She read the concern in his eyes. “I promise,” she said sternly. “So you’d better have your cell phone on.”

  8

  Once Nayir was out of sight, Katya let out her breath and scanned the street for Ayman’s car. There was no sign of it, just a lone woman hurrying a young child down the sidewalk. Perfect, she thought. Her cousin was always late, and right now she needed time to think.

  She could hardly believe that Nayir had just appeared on the sidewalk like some wayward djinn come to beg a wish. His face was so drawn! He had lost a lot of weight. She had never thought of him as fat, but seeing him now made her realize just how big he’d been. Guiltily, she remembered the pleasure of being around him back then. She used to feel so tiny in his presence, so encompassed, somehow. Now the wind from a passing truck might lift his scrawny body and blow him back to the mysterious, all-male desert, which is where he had existed in her dark imaginings for the past eight months.

  And yet, there had been a look of pleasure on his face when she’d said she would call him, and she was utterly certain that it wasn’t because he actually needed her assistance, but because it would mean that he could see her again, spend time with her like he used to —

  And that’s where her thoughts came to a screeching halt.

  He had left her. First, he had ignored her. Then he’d gone with her to the Funfair that day on what felt like their first real date and had spent the whole time looking as if someone had asked him to swallow a pig. She had invited him to dinner with her father thinking that this, at least, might lend the “legitimacy” to their liaison that he seemed so desperately to need, but he had gone out of his way to avoid it. She had tried to reach out to him—had left him several messages, but he never returned her phone calls. What, exactly, she used to wonder, was so horrible about talking to a woman on the phone, a woman you knew? But she knew the answer: it wasn’t proper for a good Muslim man to associate with a na-mehram woman. So perhaps he cared
about her, but he cared about his religious proscriptions more. He had made his choice.

  Which is why it was so ridiculous to feel delighted by his return. Was it too much to imagine that his weight loss, his sallow look, was a reflection of the pain he had caused himself in abandoning her?

  A blue Mazda beeped at her from the corner, and she pulled herself together. Twice a week now, Ahmad turned over his driving job to Katya’s young cousin Ayman, who had just moved to Jeddah from Beirut. When he’d come to the house that first night, she’d liked him immediately. He was fifteen, tall and bulky and not much to look at, but his humor had brought a new sense of life to the house.

  Ayman drove slowly closer, pretending not to recognize her, staring at her covered face with a goofy imitation of studiousness. He pulled to a halt across the street and plucked a pair of binoculars from the seat, aiming them at Katya. She began to laugh.

  Seemingly satisfied that he’d located the right woman, he tossed the binoculars in the backseat and pulled the Mazda to the sidewalk.

  He tumbled out of the driver’s side, his long, gangly arms swinging like an ape’s as he loped around the car. He opened the back door and hastened her inside with a monkey’s oook-ook. He even paused to scratch his armpit and sniff his fingers, which caused her to bury her head in her hands.

  “You are so shameful!” she cried. “How can you do that in public?”

  He cocked his head to say No speak human and loped back to the driver’s seat.

  “Hello, monkey,” she said.

  “At least I found you this time!” he said with a grin once she was settled comfortably in the backseat. His previous attempt to pick her up had seen him approaching a strange woman on the street who’d panicked when he’d said, “Hello, cousin,” and moved to take her elbow. The woman had swatted him with her purse and started screaming. He tried to apologize but she whacked his face.

  “How’s the black eye?” she asked, peeking at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Much better,” he said, using a hand to raise his hair from his face. “It’s turning yellow.”

  His elbow knocked the mirror out of alignment, and he almost swerved off the road trying to adjust it. Katya shouted before he hit a parked car.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, and turned his attention to the road with a look of desperate concentration. “I have a surprise for you.”

  “You’re going to get me home alive?”

  “Your father and I roasted pigeons for dinner.”

  “Mmmhh.” She tried to sound appreciative, even though pigeons had never been her favorite dish. “That’s very sweet.”

  He cocked his head. “I know.”

  She had to laugh. It was hilarious to watch him at the wheel of the Mazda. Did cars come any smaller than this? Did men come any bigger? He was like an overgrown dog stuffed into a travel cage. If he’d had a tail, it would have been wagging.

  As soon as Ayman had come to the house, her father had put him to work. It was Abu’s opinion that a man was only as good as the labor he could do, so in the past two months, Ayman had done more than his share of the dishes, the floors, even once—to her acute embarrassment—the laundry.

  It was never awkward sitting in his backseat. If Othman had been driving, or even Nayir, she would have hated it. But Ayman’s irrepressible humor made it comfortable, even easy, to sit here. She felt like a queenly older sister.

  “Your father said that if I get you home on time, he’ll let me do your laundry again.”

  She laughed. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop making me laugh. You are not doing my laundry ever again. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, madam.” He sat up straight and clutched the wheel.

  “And remember,” she said, “when you approach a woman on the street, look at the purse.” She held up her handbag, a red leather bag with a shiny silver buckle on each of the front pockets.

  “I can never remember what yours looks like,” he said. She shook her head in exasperation.

  As she relaxed into the ride, her thoughts kept returning to Nayir. His scent had lodged in the back of her throat, a smell of cedar and sand. She hadn’t known him long enough to fall in love with him properly—at least that’s what she’d told herself when they’d stopped talking. But the truth was that in their final phone call, he’d broken her heart all over again, and so soon after her failed engagement to Othman. It was like watching a community die of the plague. She lost everyone but her father. Somehow losing Nayir hurt the worst, because he had been the one good thing she’d managed to salvage from the whole tragedy of Othman and his family, the thing she’d least expected to save.

  When she’d started her new job, she’d been overjoyed—eager for the distraction and the independence. Thanks to a government initiative to get more women into the workplace, a number of positions had opened at the crime lab in the police headquarters downtown, and she had been hired. She was still holding her breath, unable to believe that she worked in a beautiful new building where she had her own lab. She’d spent the first few weeks fearing that she’d wake up one morning and find that it had all been a dream, but then she had spoken to Nayir on the phone that fateful day and realized the greater threat to her happiness. He hadn’t congratulated her on the new job; his only concern had been whether she would be interacting with men or not. The censure in his voice had crushed her. The government could do what it liked to enable women, but if her father ever found out just how closely she was working with men, his reaction would be just like Nayir’s. If both men had their way, she probably wouldn’t be working at all.

  Seeing Nayir had stirred up a dozen uncomfortable emotions. She’d been secretly happy, then traumatized by the fact that he’d come only on business, then nearly angry enough to lash out at him when she realized that he wasn’t even going to mention their last conversation or make the slightest gesture of apology. Instead, though, she’d found herself agreeing to help him, because she couldn’t imagine saying no even to hurt him, and certainly not after all the pain she’d gone through of having lost him in the first place. But her disappointment and hurt were still right there, and coming back stronger every minute, especially when she thought about just how remote Nayir could be, how rigid in his beliefs. She glanced at Ayman, his goofy, smiling face looking back at her in the rearview mirror, and resolved never to let herself get hurt like that again.

  9

  In the company of the crinkled take-out trays, Miriam sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of lukewarm tea and staring at her cell phone. There was still no word from Eric, and he wasn’t answering his cell. Although the muezzin hadn’t called noon prayer, she’d spoken to the office twice already, and both times the secretary had harped, He is not in the office yet. Would you like to leave a message?

  What could she say: Tell him I’m waiting? So what else was new? As humiliating as it was, she finally broke down and admitted to the receptionist that Eric was gone. Actually, she admitted that “Abdullah” was gone, because that’s what they called him. “Eric,” it turned out, was a slang term for “penis” in Arabic, so his boss had asked him to come up with a suitable alternative, and he’d chosen Abdullah. It meant “slave of Allah,” which troubled Miriam when she bothered to think about it.

  The receptionist made nervous noises, the guttural equivalent of a plea to leave him out of her marital troubles, until she begged him to find Abdullah’s address book and give her all the numbers in it. She already had his partner’s number, but that was only because she knew Jacob’s wife, Patty, who’d promised to have her over for tea but who never seemed to have the time.

  “I’m afraid I can’t get into his office,” the receptionist said.

  Miriam fumbled. Then find someone who can, she wanted to say. She had never been to Eric’s office, so she had no idea what it was like. Did he have a separate address book or only his BlackBerry? He must have had a computer somewhere, so maybe there was a password—but there was no way he would have given it to
a receptionist. Or anyone else, for that matter. He was doggedly private.

  “Okay, thanks,” Miriam said. “Just let me know if he shows up.”

  A short while later she called Jacob and acquired a single piece of data, not wonderfully interesting: Jacob had seen him the day before. They’d had coffee together, and everything had seemed normal. Eric hadn’t mentioned that he was picking up Miriam that evening from the airport.

  Once she realized that Jacob was being his usual taciturn self, Miriam agreed to speak with Patty, who had stood beside her husband for the whole conversation, inserting her indiscreet comments: Eric’s gone? Well, where on earth would he go? and Do you think he’s been arrested?

  Patty didn’t say hello, she simply gasped. “Miriam, do you think he’s run away?”

  “No. What? He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I knew a nurse from Australia whose husband left her. He disappeared just like that.” Patty snapped like a gunshot. “Turns out he was having an affair with his maid. Some girl from the Philippines.”

  Miriam swallowed her anger. “We don’t have a maid.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a maid, honey.”

  “I think something happened. An accident maybe. He could be —” She stopped, took a long breath. It was no good feeding her own paranoia.

  “Have you called the police?” Patty asked.

  “Yes. They said I had to wait two days before I could file a missing persons report. At least I think that’s what they said. The guy had a pretty heavy accent.”

  “What about the hospitals?”

  “No,” Miriam admitted.

  “Then call the consulate,” Patty said. “You have to report this.”

  Miriam didn’t want to tell her about the last time he’d disappeared. “Just call me if you hear anything, okay?”

  “Sure bu—”

  Miriam hung up. She could handle a hundred disappointing phone calls but she couldn’t handle her anxious mind, which attached itself to a problem like something vicious in a neighbor’s yard. Visions of Eric came quickly to mind: his corpse in a sewer, bloated and drowned. An eye torn from a socket. Spurts of blood from a sucking chest wound.