City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Here!” She pointed to a spot marked in ink. There was no town or landmark, not even a road indicated on the map, just — Thanks be to Almighty God, thought Nayir—a pair of coordinates. Nayir took a pen and paper from the desk and copied them.

  “Are you sure this is where he went?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “but that’s where he went with Mabus the last time they went out there together. Mabus has some kind of—of shack or something. They go camping. They just went a few weeks ago. Oh my God, Jacob!”

  Nayir eyed Osama, who nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Marx,” he said. “Trust me, we’ll do everything we can to find your husband.”

  She gulped, nodded, and watched them leave the room.

  Outside, Osama hustled Nayir into the car, and they drove off. “You know that wasn’t really my office calling,” he said.

  Nayir nodded. “How did you manage to call yourself?”

  “Actually, that was my wife.”

  “Your wife?” Nayir had trouble imagining this. “She was on the phone that whole time?”

  “Yes.” Osama looked chagrined. Nayir wondered briefly what his wife had said, although perhaps she was used to such odd behavior from her husband.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Nayir asked, trying not to sound too curious.

  “I’d better head back to the office and contact the closest police station out there. Have them send someone to check it out. It may be that Eric Walker is hiding out there, and that Jacob has gone after him. It may also be that Mabus is there. Whatever the case, I suspect we’ll find something.”

  Nayir nodded, fighting a rising anxiety. “What do you think happened to Mrs. Walker?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Osama said. “We honestly don’t know where she’s gone. But I do want to find Jacob Marx and see if he’s had any luck finding Eric Walker. That’s who we’re really after.”

  37

  It was all Osama could do not to turn on the sirens and blow through the worst of the rush hour traffic to get back to the station. Chief Riyadh had already tried calling him twice, and there was no doubt he wanted to fulminate about the Nawar case showing up in the paper. Osama also had to coordinate with the police in the desert, which meant that he first had to figure out where the hell the site was and which police to contact for that province. He had the sinking feeling it was somewhere in the Empty Quarter. And while all these worries were preoccupying him, he couldn’t forget the “conversation” he’d had with Nuha.

  The phone call had been a kind of torture. He couldn’t talk to her, of course, not while pretending she was someone else. So he was forced to listen to her. She’d paid no attention to his charade; if anything, she’d assumed he was ignoring her again. But it hadn’t mattered, because she had his ear. And what she’d said had murdered him: That she was sorry, so sorry she’d lied for so long, but that there were things she had wanted to tell him that she could never bring herself to say. That she was overwhelmed. That she couldn’t find it in herself to be a mother and a journalist and a wife and a lover and a daughter and a friend, cousin, aunt, sister, and all the other things she was every day, because it was just too much. She was tired of pretending that she had what it took to impress everyone all the time. She was exhausted. And the funny thing was, she had thought that Osama wanted her to be this way. She knew from the beginning that he wanted her to work, wanted the second income, wanted to be able to tell his friends that his wife did something important, that they were a modern couple and perfectly successful. But now she realized that she had failed him because she had lied. And here was the truth: what she really wanted was to have no more family bearing down on her. No more responsibilities. Osama had fought hard not to reply, not to break the pantomime and reach out to her and say anything to stop her tears. He could hardly remember why he’d been angry at her. He only knew that he wanted to get home and hold her in his arms and apologize for his coldness.

  But he couldn’t talk to her now. Nayir was still in the car with him, and Osama’s phone was ringing again. He listened to what Majdi had to say. When he got off, he turned to Nayir.

  “They cracked the password on the memory card from Miriam’s purse. Majdi said it was pretty straightforward. The card contained a file of Quranic documents that belonged to an excavation in Yemen. Supposedly, it’s the earliest version of the Quran that’s ever been found. For some reason the Yemeni authorities won’t release the documents to the public, so these are stolen copies.”

  “Did Majdi have a chance to look at them?”

  “Not in depth, but there was a file on the memory card that explained the documents. Do you want to see them?”

  Nayir shook his head. He looked tired and hungry.

  Osama dropped him off at the marina and went back to the station. It was getting dark. He went looking for Chief Riyadh, who apparently had left early for a cousin’s wedding. Relieved, Osama stopped in the second-floor hallway beneath a flickering fluorescent light and called Nuha. She didn’t answer her cell, so he called their home number. The phone rang seven times. He began to feel panicked. She answered on the eighth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Nuha…”

  She had been crying, he could hear it in her voice.

  “I’m sorry I’m not there,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I still have a few more things to do here.”

  “But you’re coming home?” she asked. He heard the touch of anger in her voice but didn’t feel like chasing it.

  “Yes, I’ll be home later. Nuha, I’m sorry.”

  When he hung up his whole body trembled, and for a moment he thought he would fall. He braced his hand against the wall, surprised that he’d been so upset, that he’d spent four days not speaking to his wife, and that his will to silence hadn’t cracked before now.

  Katya’s lab was two doors down, and he tapped gently on the glass before entering. She was in the corner, standing on a chair and gazing through a high, narrow window to the street below. Half the room was in darkness. A large machine was glowing with a blue light. She didn’t see him at first.

  “Miss Hijazi,” he said. She spun around with such a start that she nearly fell off the chair. He went lurching ineffectually forward; there was no way he could have caught her if she’d fallen.

  Looking flustered, she climbed down and adjusted her headscarf. “Sorry,” she said, pushing the chair back under the desk. “I was just watching for rain.”

  “You’re not married,” he said.

  She froze.

  “When I referred to you as Nayir’s wife today, he didn’t contradict me,” Osama said.

  “Well,” she replied in a tremulous voice, “he’s a taciturn man, but no, I’m not married.” She slid her hand into her sleeve. “I’m sorry I lied.”

  He was angry, but the emotion was blunted by the events of the past few hours. “I suppose you didn’t have much of a choice,” he said.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Do you want me to leave?”

  Grudgingly, he shook his head. “For now,” he said, “this is between you and me. I won’t tell anyone. And if anyone asks, you’re married. Is that clear?”

  She nodded, obviously relieved. Still frustrated, he turned to go. “And tell Nayir he’s not your husband.”

  She looked as if she dreaded that conversation most of all.

  Nayir walked down the pier in a restless frame of mind that only got worse as the minutes passed. By the time he reached his boat, he was distracted enough to stumble on a pile of rope. It was only nine o’clock, but it felt as if he’d lived through several days’ worth of activity. Spending an entire day with the police had been a prolonged exercise in amazement. The littlest things stood out. The way he’d grabbed the woman’s arm when she’d tried to stab him. The way he’d gazed unreservedly at Patty’s face. Above it all, Osama towered like a fortress against a relentlessly crashing sea.

  Nayir had considered becoming a religious policeman once, but the thought o
f spending his days reminding people to pray, to cover themselves, to act modestly and decently, seemed like the most depressing occupation in the world. It would be a constant reminder that people were full of immodesty and vice. The events of the day had made him aware that decency was the least of society’s worries when people were killing, assaulting, shrieking, and stabbing one another every day.

  He was exhausted but perversely full of a wriggling, twitching energy. He tried calling Miriam again, but this time her phone didn’t ring at all. The line simply went dead, an ominous sign. He called Samir to ask about Miriam, but she hadn’t shown up there either. He knew he’d never sleep, so he went to the kitchenette and ate a quick meal of hummus and pita, staring at the cabin walls and trying not to think.

  He kept having to remind himself that Miriam had left the house freely. She had probably panicked and decided not to talk to the police after all. The thought stung him; he wouldn’t have forced her to go. But there was always the possibility that something worse had happened. A small voice insisted that she might really have gone out to the desert.

  On top of that, he couldn’t stop thinking about Katya. Had she told Osama directly—“Nayir is my husband”—or had Osama simply inferred it? Did she tell the administration that she was married, or had they assumed it because she wore an engagement ring? He tried to forgive her by imagining that she hadn’t intended to lie to anyone, and that she wore the ring only out of nostalgia for Othman, but that thought only made him feel worse.

  After eating, he went to the bathroom and performed his ablutions, grateful for the respite. The minute he finished, his cell phone rang. He nearly switched it off, but saw that it was Osama.

  “Did Mrs. Walker show up at your boat?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “No,” Nayir said. “She hasn’t contacted my uncle either.”

  “Same thing over here. I called her neighbors again, and they haven’t seen her. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “I do, too.”

  “We got in touch with the police in the desert. It’s near Qaryat al-Faw,” Osama said. “I gave them the coordinates. They said they’d send someone to check it out.”

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  Osama snorted. “I’m not going to wait up for it,” he said and hung up.

  Nayir returned to the bathroom hoping to regain the fragile state of purity and calm he’d established. A second round of ablutions didn’t help. By the time he knelt on his prayer rug, he was actively struggling to keep his mind in order. After the second rakat, he gave up fighting and simply prayed for her safety:… and wherever she is, Allah, please let her think to call me.

  Nayir woke with a start in the quiet hours of the night. He hadn’t been dreaming. He hadn’t heard a noise. Instead, it felt as if all of the anxiety of the day had wound itself up so tightly inside him that it had finally popped. Of the many burdens the past week had heaped on his shoulders, the one that seemed most grotesque in the moonlight was the juvenile, harshly stated opinion that Majdi had expressed that day in the lab. If you have a rigid interpretation… it reduces… something flat… it can’t keep up anymore… just an ornament. He had been talking about the Quran, but now it felt as if he had been talking about Nayir, about men like Nayir, about a good portion of society, and that Majdi had taken everything Nayir held dear and crushed it between the pitiless stones of logic and progress.

  Without really stopping to consider why, Nayir found himself getting dressed and slipping on his hiking boots. He packed his necessities—headscarf, binoculars, favorite canteen, and an Altoids tin filled with emergency survival tools like matches and a needle and thread—and took them out to the car. In the parking lot, he hauled his largest gasoline and water drums from the trunk of the Jeep and transferred them to the Rover. Ten minutes later he was on the road.

  38

  Osama sat at the kitchen table watching Nuha boil the coffee. He tried to recover the feeling he’d had on the phone: that everything was going to be all right. But for the first time in his life, he felt that the kitchen was a foreign place, that the whole house belonged to someone else.

  Nuha brought the coffee to the table and set it down. There were tears in her eyes, and that was the biggest part of his discomfort. She’d started crying softly the moment he’d walked in the door. He had hugged her, kissed her forehead, led her into the kitchen. He was exhausted, but suddenly the fatigue had burned off in a pulse of adrenaline, and now he was nervous.

  He reached over and took her hand. “Nuha, hayati, we’re going to be all right.”

  She had been staring at his chest, but now she shut her eyes and slowly withdrew her hand from his. “There are some other things I have to tell you,” she said. The words dropped in him like an anchor.

  “Go ahead,” he managed. “I’m listening.” Part of him felt he couldn’t listen anymore. This wasn’t an interrogation room; he wouldn’t bring that crap here. But she began to talk, her voice soft, her head held low. She told him all the things she had wanted to confess before but had been afraid to say. How she spent their money frivolously on clothes and lunches with friends, then borrowed more from her parents so that he would never know how much she spent. How she didn’t actually like the Indian restaurant they went to, the one he loved so much. The food there made her sick. Sometimes she would come home and throw up. And all those Wednesday nights when he thought she was visiting her cousins? She was actually out in the desert with her brother, learning to drive. “Of course I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “You’re a cop. I didn’t want to put you in that position, knowing that your wife was breaking the law.” He didn’t hear everything. It all went by in a blur as he waited for her to tell him the one thing he couldn’t forgive: that she’d met someone else, that she’d fallen in love with another man. But she never got there. She stopped talking and looked at him. Obviously his lack of reaction was frightening her.

  “Thank you for telling me” was all he could manage.

  She went on. The anchor was pulling him ever deeper; he was floundering in her confession. Now she was saying that she didn’t actually like being a mother. Muhannad was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to her, of course, but all the work, the worry, the strain of parenting, was too much. She couldn’t focus, her mind was always on her career. It wasn’t fair to Muhannad when all she could think about was her writing.

  “That’s what I really care about,” she said.

  “It’s important,” he responded numbly.

  She nodded, took a deep breath, and forged ahead. “This has all been a horrible few days, Osama. I’ve hated keeping these secrets from you, and I hate that you found the pills. But I think in the end, it has been a good thing, because I’ve come to a decision. I have to tell you what’s really in my heart.” She wouldn’t meet his eye, but when she pushed ahead, he saw the determination in her face. “I’ve decided,” she said, “that I don’t want to have any more children.”

  It took him a moment to register the weight of her statement. He felt something breaking inside him as he remembered the conversations about children they’d had over the past three years, the times they’d lain in bed picking baby names, discussing how they would handle sibling rivalry, how they’d have to buy a bigger car. It had all been a lie.

  “But you… Nuha…” He forced a grim smile. “You’re twenty-three. You’ve got a long life ahead of you. You shouldn’t make a dramatic decision like this. You might change your mind.”

  She didn’t dispute it, but the look on her face told him everything. She wasn’t going to change her mind. And the fresh tears in her eyes told him exactly how sorry she was.

  Osama sat back. All he could think was that his son would never have siblings. He tried to imagine himself today without his brothers and sisters, and the image was pitiful. It flashed in front of him in an instant: how lonely his life would have been. He saw his son alone. Then it occurred to him that Muhannad wouldn’t have parents
either. They’d both be working. They’d spend their lives working. They might even be divorced. Divorce—the word was like a rock thudding on the floor. He would have to remarry if he wanted more kids; he didn’t believe in taking a second wife. Nuha would never put up with it anyway. He couldn’t imagine even finding one.

  “Osama?” She was looking worried.

  “I need some time,” he said. He resisted the urge to leave her there, to stand up coldly and stalk off. He wasn’t going to follow that instinct anymore; it had done too much damage already. So instead he just sat there, unable to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He nodded. He let a few more minutes go by before reaching for her hand and squeezing it. He stood up, bending down to lay a kiss on her forehead. The familiar smell of her hair nearly brought him to his knees. He ignored it. Looking at her one more time, he repeated what he’d said. “I need some time.”

  39

  Miriam?”

  A groan.

  “Miriam? Can you hear me?”

  Another groan.

  “Wake up.”

  She struggled to open her eyes, but her lids were as heavy as bricks. Her head was throbbing painfully where she’d been struck. The rest of her body was numb. It begged her to return to unconsciousness as the harsh voice continued prodding.

  “Miriam.”

  She had thought it was Eric, but the voice was all wrong. Too guttural, too deep. She tried to respond. It felt as if the inside of her mouth had been caulked.

  There was a clatter nearby. Her eyelashes fluttered and she took a deep breath. A musty smell hit her throat and she gagged. Coughed.

  “Eric?”

  “Eric’s not here.” This time the voice was a hot whisper in her ear. “But you’ll see him soon.” A hand crawled beneath the back of her neck and raised her head. She tried to open her eyes again, but the lamp at her foot was too bright. The man was lifting her, propping her upright against something warm and hard.