City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  When he discovered that she’d cleaned his desk, he had reacted with mild panic, interrogating her about the original placement of the salary stubs and bank statements. Was this chronological order? Why was one out of place? What had she done with the Arabic documents? She hadn’t thought it strange at the time, but now it seemed ominous.

  She hadn’t touched the desk after that impulsive spree, and now it was back to disorder. There were piles of notes that he kept for his job, and she glanced at these briefly before realizing they were useless, filled with a ridiculous technical jargon that might as well have been Arabic. The last sanctuary was a briefcase sitting on the floor. She lifted it onto the desk and found that it was locked. She used the letter opener to jimmy it. Inside were more notes, a recent bank statement, and a single document in Arabic.

  She scanned the document, futile though the gesture seemed. But halfway down the page her eye caught a single word. She recognized it only because Eric had brought home an Um-Kalthoum CD called Alf Leila Wa Leila—A Thousand and One Nights—with the title printed in English and Arabic. Apparently it was one of the most popular songs in the entire Middle East—bells clinking, the strange gramophone sound of a woman’s voice, a fifty-minute epic that sounded as if you’d put an opera singer on a camel caravan and sent her on a trek through the desert. Miriam went into the living room and retrieved the CD. Comparing the two words, she saw that they weren’t exactly the same—the endings were different—but they were close enough, and if she had to guess, she’d say the word on the document was indeed one of the three words she knew in Arabic: Leila.

  Sabria always answered the door with the same hesitant, fearful expression on her face. It said I’m too lazy to look through the spy hole or put on a burqa, so I hope you’re a woman… And seeing Miriam, she’d grin.

  Today the grin didn’t appear. “Come in!” she whispered, snatching Miriam by the arm and dragging her straight to the kitchen. She shut the kitchen door and locked it.

  “Let me guess,” Miriam said. “Your brother is here?”

  Sabria was flushed. “If he comes in, you may have to cover your face.”

  “I won’t stay long,” Miriam said, glancing at the table.

  “Stay as long as you like!” Sabria said defiantly. “He’s the one who shouldn’t be here. And yes, sit down. Sit down.” She pushed Miriam into a chair and went to the stove to make tea. “I wish he would run away to Pakistan.”

  Sabria’s brother, Marwan, was a reformed jihadi. He’d been arrested two years before, during one of the security sweeps of al-Qaeda militants in the kingdom. They had kept him in prison for a year, then judged him eligible for the new reform program that used religious counseling and generous offers of cash to reintegrate jihadis into normal life. Marwan had taken the cash for a home loan, but the counseling didn’t seem to make much of a difference. For the past three months he had been as strict as ever, coming to the house once a week to make sure his family was eating halal meat, praying on schedule, and following the rules for proper womanly conduct. According to Sabria, he still went to the same mosque and still felt the influence of the radicals who’d put him on this path in the first place.

  Miriam had been alarmed to discover that Marwan had been arrested for nothing more than participating in an online chat room, but once Sabria had told her about the glee with which Marwan spoke about killing Americans, Miriam wished they’d kept him in jail a bit longer—at least until she and Eric left the country. It seemed a phenomenal oversight to have rented an apartment above a man who would have liked to see them both dead, though Eric rightly pointed out that Marwan no longer lived in the building.

  Still, every time she left the apartment, Miriam felt a low current of dread that she might run into him in the hallway. The one time she’d seen him on the stairwell, he’d thrown all religious conventions to the wind and stared straight at her with a foul, somewhat juvenile look. She had scampered back into her apartment and locked the door.

  “How is he doing?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh, you know…” Sabria dumped a handful of mint leaves into the teapot. “I still don’t think he’s over it. They treat it like it’s an addiction or something. Put him in a rehab program, give him enough money to buy a house, and then they expect him to go back to normal. Every night he’s angry about something. Right now it’s his stupid job at the gas station.”

  “Do you think he’s getting worse?”

  “Well, I guess he’s been angry for a long time. And I’ll tell you, the government was right not to keep him in jail. That would really have turned him into a criminal. He’s got a crazy temper. He could never be a real jihadi, you know, because he can’t pretend. I mean, could you see him trying to go to America?” She laughed.

  No, Miriam thought.

  Sabria brought the tea to the table and sat down. She smiled. “I’ve been wanting to see you.”

  Miriam congratulated her again on her engagement. Sabria showed her the ring and Miriam oohed. She was suddenly uncertain how much to tell about her own troubles. She couldn’t count the times over the past few months when she had shown up at the door desperately lonely and panicky, or feeling depressed, but unable to admit it. Sabria was always kind and hospitable, and she offered a tempting shoulder to cry on, but basic courtesy and a feeling of motherliness kept Miriam from revealing too much.

  “What about you?” Sabria asked. “How is it, being back?”

  The question was like a needle plunged straight into a water balloon. Miriam exhaled, reminded herself that she was the older woman here, but the tide was already rushing out. She felt the first drops spilling in a clumsy way, then the gushing, the explanations, beginning first with the description of Eric’s disappearance and ending with the police arriving at the house and Miriam’s failed attempt to decipher the landlord’s address. Sabria listened with a stunned, frantic look on her face.

  “Listen,” she said, taking Miriam’s hand, “it could be anything.”

  “I know,” Miriam said. “I know. He could be with the religious police. Something stupid.”

  Sabria nodded. “But you have to call the consulate.”

  “I did,” Miriam said. “A few times now. But I’ll try again this afternoon.”

  Sabria nodded and picked up the lease that Miriam had laid on the table. “This is old information. Mr. Nabih lives in Dubai; he has a local guy who manages the property now.” She stood up. “I’m going to get you his address. Be right back.”

  “Sabria —”

  Sabria paused at the door and looked back meaningfully at her guest. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t say anything.”

  The minute she left, Miriam felt waves of calm wash over her, alternating with splashes of guilt and embarrassment. She took a sip of cold tea.

  Sabria returned a few minutes later. “My father says he can find the address for the local manager, but he has to make some calls,” she said. “He doesn’t remember it. Anyway, I told him to hurry. It shouldn’t take too long. The guy’s name is Mr. Mabus.”

  Miriam froze, teacup in midair. It shouldn’t have shocked her; it should have clicked into place, because the suggestions had already pointed her there, but with a naïveté that was, she thought, just so typical of her, she couldn’t come to terms with how boldly Mabus had lied to her on the plane, with his American accent, his claim that this was a business trip, and the casual way he’d inquired about her and Eric as if he didn’t know them.

  She thanked Sabria and headed back upstairs, fighting panic. It was only when she got to her apartment that she remembered the strange document with the name “Leila” on it. She’d had it in her purse the whole time. It wasn’t too late to go back down to Sabria and ask her to translate it, but now Miriam felt too scared to show it to anyone.

  20

  Pretending to be a scholar, Nayir sat at the laboratory table with masahif stacked in front of him. They were two collections of papers that contained the Holy Quran. He was sure i
t wasn’t the entire Quran—it didn’t look big enough—but a partial Quran was still holy. He had performed ablutions before touching it, because he hadn’t purified himself since that morning. The lab tech Majdi had watched Nayir indelicately as he had cleansed himself at the sink in the corner.

  Majdi explained the two stacks of papers. The first, composed of maybe fifty sheets, was made up of photographs that they’d found taped to the underside of one of the dresser drawers in Leila’s bedroom. Presumably, the photographs showed Mr. Nabih’s private collection of Quranic documents. The other stack came from the Internet. There were only ten pages in this pile, but they were similar to the first documents—so similar, in fact, that Majdi believed they came from the same codex. He had done only a cursory comparison. He had found the second set of documents on a Kuwaiti website. Apparently, they had been up for auction.

  Once Katya had introduced Nayir to Majdi, she had left for a meeting with her boss, Zainab. Nayir wasn’t sure what to think of Majdi. He was as Katya had described him, young and geeky, but where she found him endearing, Nayir simply felt awkward around the young man. He didn’t talk much and was absorbed in his computer. Nayir quickly got to work, trying to determine whether the photos from Leila’s bedroom matched the ones from the auction site.

  “How’s it going?” Majdi asked, not even bothering to turn around from his computer screen.

  “It’s fine,” Nayir replied. A preliminary study of the two stacks confirmed that Majdi was wrong: the documents from the Internet did not match the photos Leila had taken. There were only a few similarities, and the handwriting was different. Nayir focused on the stack from Leila’s room. This was easy reading, the pages no more than photographs of what appeared to be a very old copy of the Quran. He read slowly, recognized the verses as they came, and tried to stop his mind from wandering back to the problem of Miriam.

  Katya was right—it was suspicious that Miriam’s husband was missing and that the landlord didn’t officially exist. Both of those problems could easily have nothing to do with Leila’s death, but put together they seemed ominous. And yet he still didn’t think it was a good idea to inform the police about Miriam’s situation and to drag a frightened foreigner into a criminal investigation. She didn’t even speak Arabic, which alone made him feel inexpressibly sorry for her.

  He forced his attention back to his reading but soon began cutting a new path through the overgrowth of worry: why had Leila been asked to photograph these documents? They were obviously very old and no doubt worth preserving, but the photos themselves were somewhat sloppily done, blurred on the edges and framed slightly off-center. And why had they been hidden in her bedroom?

  “Are you noticing any differences between the old texts and the modern Quran?” Majdi asked.

  Nayir tore his eyes away and processed the question. “No,” he said. “However, the Internet documents don’t appear to be from the same codex as the one found in Leila’s bedroom. I’m reading hers now.”

  Majdi turned back to his computer. Nayir bent over his reading again as the implication of what Majdi had just asked washed over him: the Quran was the same now as it had been fourteen hundred years ago. Exactly the same. Not a single diacritical mark had been changed. The Quran said The words of the Lord are perfect in truth and justice; there is none who can change His words. This meant the words on the page were Allah’s, exactly as they had been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him.

  Nayir flipped a page and kept reading. When he had first sat down to study the documents, he had recognized the Quran immediately. He had not assumed that there would be errors. In the early days of Islam, all the poorly copied texts had been destroyed. What did surprise him was that there were no diacritical marks to indicate vowels. In its modern, printed form, the Quran contained every single vowel marking, so it was easy to comprehend a word’s meaning. For someone like him, who knew the Quran so well, it wasn’t difficult to read an unvoweled text. But had he been reading it carefully enough?

  He was halfway down the page when he stumbled on a word. At first he thought he had misread it, the mistake was so obvious. He shook his head, thinking he had brought the confusion on himself. He went back to the beginning of the verse and read it again. Indeed, the mistake was glaring.

  And We shall marry them to a companion, with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes.

  The verse was a promise that the blessed would reach paradise and be rewarded by truth and beauty. The word companion was supposed to be hur, a plural form of houri, which meant grapes. It also meant young virgins. Of course, the choice of meaning was clear, because who married a grape with beautiful eyes? But instead of hur, the text showed the word ahwar. It meant a single male companion, which didn’t make sense.

  And We shall marry them to a single male companion, with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes

  His head was swimming. He mistrusted his eyes. “Do you have a copy of the Quran?” he asked Majdi.

  Majdi left the room and came back a few minutes later with a worn copy of the holy book. He passed it to Nayir.

  Nayir opened the book to the appropriate sura, feeling ridiculous but determined to hold the real Quran side by side with the mistake. He set the book beside the paper, comparing the two with Holmesian thoroughness.

  “There’s a mistake here,” he said. His voice came out pinched. Majdi came over and Nayir showed him the phrase.

  Majdi looked unsurprised. “I thought so,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there had to be some reason Leila hid these under her dresser drawer.”

  “Well, yes,” Nayir said. “But where did she get them? And why have they been altered?”

  “They weren’t necessarily altered,” Majdi said. “It’s probably a bad copy. I mean, a thousand years ago they didn’t have white-out.”

  “Then it should have been burned,” Nayir said.

  “Burned?”

  Nayir reminded himself that not everyone kept up to date on fatwas. Still, it seemed like something everyone should know. “The Hadith says that when ‘Uthmaan produced the first standard and complete version of the Quran, he burned all the excess, incomplete copies. It protected them from being stepped on or desecrated.”

  Majdi looked unimpressed.

  “He buried them, too,” Nayir went on. “But I think when a document contains a mistake like this—especially something that would lead to a misinterpretation—the general agreement among sheikhs is that it ought to be burned.”

  Majdi was one of those people who thought with his whole body. His eyes were scrunched up, fingers drumming his chin.

  Katya came in the door behind them. She looked slightly frazzled, probably from the meeting with her boss. Majdi greeted her and proceeded to explain the inconsistency in the text.

  “So somebody made a mistake copying it,” Katya said. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, Nayir and I were just discussing the fact that when mistakes are made in copying the Quran, the bad copies are usually burned.”

  “Do you know how old these documents really are?” she asked.

  “No, but I’ve got an archaeologist from the university coming in this afternoon. He should be able to help.”

  “Okay, but we can assume they’re pretty old.”

  “That’s what we’ve been assuming,” Majdi said.

  “Let’s say that they are, and they didn’t get burned,” she said. “Someone overlooked them, or they were hidden somewhere.”

  “Or…” Majdi sighed and glanced nervously at Nayir. “It might not be a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?” Nayir said. An awful premonition was forming. “It would have to be a copy mistake.” He wanted to say more, but they already knew that the published Quran in front of them was the Quran.

  Majdi plunged ahead: “Have you ever heard of the Yemen documents?” he asked.

  They shook their heads.

  “About thirty years ago, an archaeolog
ist in Yemen came across a paper grave. It was a site where old copies of the Quran were stored; it was actually in the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana’a. The archaeologist, I can’t remember his name, realized that the documents were very old, and the antiquities people brought in some German scholars to work on the preservation. There were a lot of documents—thousands of pages’ worth—and it took them about twenty years to sort them all out and get everything cleaned and treated and assembled.

  “Anyway, the German scholars have claimed that the documents are authentic early copies of the Quran. In fact, they’re the earliest copies ever found. Except that there are many minor differences between those old pages and the modern text today. In the old codex, the verses were out of order, and the text itself was different in places. Some of the documents were palimpsests; they showed obvious signs of having been edited.”

  “Someone edited the Quran?” Katya asked, clearly surprised.

  “Yeah, well, the scholars are fairly certain that because these documents were so old, they represented an earlier and more authentic version of the Quran than the one we currently have.”

  Katya glanced at Nayir just as he said, “There are no ‘versions’ of the Quran.”

  Majdi looked uncomfortably at Katya before going on: “Obviously, this idea didn’t go over too well. I don’t know what’s happening with their research now. I’m only telling you this because I think it’s possible that these are part of the cache that was found in Sana’a—or at least, they’re something very similar.”

  Katya shook her head, looking slightly overwhelmed.

  “And it’s obvious,” Majdi went on, “that Leila was hiding them. No matter where they came from, they wouldn’t be well received in this country if they contained mistakes—no matter what the reason for the mistakes was.”