A man came out of the prison. He applied a stethoscope to Laila’s battered chest and nodded to a group of guards. Quickly, they carried the body back into the prison, without even wrapping it. Somehow, that final indignity tore at Ami- ra’s heart. Was Laila not to have a decent burial?
The crowd melted away, the angry roar muted now. Still holding Malik’s hand, as young men often did, Amira led him away from the square. His eyes were blank, unseeing; he moved like an automaton. When they reached the car, she released him. Pressing her hands against her cold, clammy skin, she doubled over, vomiting into the dust.
Malik seemed not to notice. Staring straight ahead, he turned the key in the ignition; the car lurched forward, then careened into the road as Malik floored the accelerator. On the drive home, he spoke only once, his face sculpted in cold fury.
“Never again. I swear it.”
Malik
The plane banked, one wing pointing to pure blue sky, the other to khaki desert. Sky and desert. Al-Remal. One night in Marseilles—in a smoky cafe crowded with seamen and the occasional tourist in search of “atmosphere”—a business acquaintance of Malik’s, a middle-aged American well advanced in drink, had become sentimental and sententious. “I’m gonna tell you young fellas something,” he informed the group around the table. “You’re all away from home and think you’re going to make a pile of money and go back in style. But you can’t. You can’t go home again. A famous writer said that. I forget who, but truer words were never spoken.”
“What does it mean?” Malik asked. In all honesty, the remark made no sense to him.
“It means you can’t go home again, damn it, no matter how much you might want to.” The drinker reiterated that the quotation was from a famous writer, also an American apparently, and attempted to explain its meaning for himself, personally. It still made no sense.
One of the party, a multilingual young Lebanese, tried to translate the thought into Arabic. Malik tried, too. They found that it could not be done. Maybe the saying was true in America, but not in al-Remal. Not anywhere in the Arab world. An Arab could always go home, and almost always did, no matter where he had gone, no matter for how long.
Yet, afterward, Malik often thought about what the man had said, and came to see that, in a way, the words applied to him. It was not that he could ever come home a foreigner—another concept that made no sense—but that al-Remal could be all too familiar, like an ill-fitting thobe or bedclothes that tangled and bound.
He felt that way now. He had felt that way ever since the day they killed Laila. Never again. He could not think of Laila without thinking those words, his oath to himself and to God. And he could not think of the Laila he had loved without seeing in his mind the Laila he loved now. An infant when last he beheld her, would she be walking now? Would she know words? Would she know him? It had been a year, a little more than a year.
If all went as planned, he told himself, he would never be without her again. The steward had to remind him to fasten his seat belt for the landing.
Farid was waiting at the gate. Growing up, Malik had never seen a full-length mirror—large mirrors being frowned upon in al-Remal as irreligious, idolatrous—but France was full of them, including one at a circus that had reflected him shorter and broader than he was. Looking at his cousin, who resembled him greatly but in a shorter, wider way, was a bit like that.
Farid kissed him in greeting. “God’s peace be with you, my cousin.” “And with you, Cousin. Your father is well?”
“Yes, by the will of God, and your father, too.” The formalities satisfied, Farid held Malik at arm’s length, squinting at him as if examining a bolt of cloth in the souk. “I see you’ve become an infidel, Cousin, or at least a diplomat.”
Malik turned his palms up, pretending not to understand.
“Your complete your suit,” shouted Farid, using the French and English because there was no Arabic term for it. “Whatever you call these astonishing rags.”
Malik had put on his ghutra aboard the plane but had decided not to change his business suit for a thobe. The combination of ghutra and European garments had, in fact, recently come into vogue among Arab diplomats in the West.
“These rags cost me a month’s pay, Cousin,” Malik exaggerated.
Farid fingered the material and nodded sadly. “Alas, the Christians have robbed you, Cousin.”
But Malik could tell that he admired the exotic clothing.
Farid signaled a Palestinian porter for Malik’s luggage. The airport seemed busier than Malik remembered it. As his cousin escorted him past the customs desk, with a wave to the official in charge, he could feel pity for the foreign businessmen turning out the contents of their suitcases. Heaven help them, he thought, if they had been so foolhardy—or so ignorant—as to bring in such forbidden items as liquor or Playboy magazines.
Here and there, king’s guards, armed with automatic weapons and wearing ghutras checked with green—the color of Islam—stood watch over the milling civilians. He realized that he had never really noticed the guards before. They had been part of the scenery. They would be the ones to intervene, he supposed, if something went wrong, if someone sounded the alarm.
Farid’s car was a Buick, two or three years old—a dream for most Remalis, but not a token of great success for a man of Farid’s family. “I’m on the waiting list for a new Lincoln Continental,” he explained, adding ruefully, “I hope I can pay for it when it arrives.”
He swung onto Airport Road with scarcely a glance, ignoring the blaring horn of a truck that swerved past the Buick with inches to spare. “Your flight was good?” he asked Malik. “These jets are very safe, I hear.”
The flight had been very good, Malik allowed, and, by all accounts, the new aircrafts were very reliable.
“Tell me about France,” said Farid.
Malik settled back in his seat. This was not Europe, he reminded himself. It would be unthinkably ill-mannered to broach directly the topic that was on both their minds.
He patiently answered Farid’s questions about French weather, French food, and especially French women. The first two subjects were easy enough to discuss.
The third was more personal; Malik made vague remarks that his cousin could interpret to his satisfaction, then changed the subject. “What is all this traffic, Farid? It looks like the Champs Elysees.”
Airport Road did seem busy, at least a dozen vehicles in view at any given moment; not long ago, to meet three in a mile would have been an event.
“It’s the oil, Cousin. The thing just keeps getting bigger, as you well know, pouring money like the fountain in the royal palace spills water. We’re all going to be rich, God willing.”
“God willing. And may a little of it splash my way in France.”
“And how is your business there, Cousin?” asked Farid, edging closer to the important matter. “Do you do well working for the old Greek pirate?” “Well enough.” Malik laughed; it was not the first time he had heard his employer described in those words. “Well enough, and, God willing, even better some- day—but perhaps not working for Onassis.”
Farid raised an eyebrow. “Better than Onassis, Cousin?”
“That’s not exactly what I said.” Without going into detail, Malik explained that, working in shipping in a place like Marseilles, he sometimes met prospective clients who had special needs. “Sensitive cargoes—you understand, Cousin?— that Onassis would never handle because it would be politically dangerous for him if the cargoes were … intercepted. When you’re as big as he is, you depend not only on your customers but on the goodwill of governments all around the world. That goodwill is worth many millions.”
Farid turned his hands on the wheel to indicate that this was all so obvious that any child would grasp it.
Malik smiled inwardly. “As you will understand, Cousin, what such a client needs is not an Onassis tanker. What he needs is a tramp steamer, a nondescript old workhorse registered in, say, Panama—”
>
“Onassis allows this?” Farid asked.
It was a good question, reminding Malik of the intelligence his cousin often masked with good-natured clowning.
Only three weeks earlier, Malik had finally summoned the courage to ask the old man’s permission to conduct certain outside projects on a freelance basis. Onassis had glared at him for a long moment before clapping an arm across his shoulder. “I should have known that Omar Badir’s son wouldn’t be content to work for anyone else, even me. But I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be young. Someday, you’ll go. Meanwhile, stay with Onassis. Who knows, you may even learn something. As for these special projects, you have my blessing on three conditions. First, you work on your own, on your own time. Second, my name is never mentioned. Third, ship nothing of which your conscience disapproves.” “I spoke with him,” Malik now told Farid. “I owed him that. He has no objection.”
“Ah, good. God wills it, then.” Farid leaned forward, squinting up through the windshield, as if trying to discern some imminent change in the desert weather. “So, you are doing well?”
“As I said, well enough.” At last, they were getting to the point.
“I wonder,” Farid said, “if you’ve had much time to consider the matter of the child.”
Only every waking hour, thought Malik. It was why he was in al-Remal at this moment, after all. “I have,” he said. Suddenly, a panicky thought seized him. “You got my letter, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course. And destroyed it, as you asked, and pretended to have lost it.”
“Good.” Malik relaxed. “Well, what do you think? Will it work?” Farid pulled the car over, stopped, and turned to look Malik full in the face.
Malik understood. It was all but impossible for a Remali to discuss serious matters when he could not look the person in the eye.
“Perhaps you’ve lost touch, just a little, with Remali ways. Also, it seems to me that, in this matter, you may be letting your heart rule your head. You suggested two plans.” Farid raised two fingers, a glimpse of his professor father in the gesture. “First was the idea of pretending that the girl had been sold for adoption to a French man and wife. I think even you can see the flaws in this approach. Children are sometimes sold, true, but Mahir Najjar isn’t of the class who would do such a thing, but even if he were, he would never do it outside the faith. Even knowing the truth, he would also know what people were saying, and the shame would make him resentful, and no matter what you paid him, sooner or later, he would turn against you.”
Malik sighed. “You’re right, of course. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the same conclusion. That’s why I said that the other plan might be better.”
“And it is. But let’s look at it more closely. As I understand it, the idea is that the child has some rare illness. Nothing can be done here in al-Re- mal, obviously—there’s not a real hospital in the country. But an anonymous benefactor arranges for the child to be treated in France. We could even let people assume that the benefactor was Onassis, acting on your plea on behalf of a poor family of whose plight you happened to learn.”
“Well, let’s leave Onassis out of it. Just an anonymous benefactor.”
“All right. But do you see how convoluted this is? For one thing, the child eventually must either be cured or die.”
“But that’s the whole point. After a few months, or a year, or two, word comes back that the treatment has failed. The parents grieve for a time, and then the whole thing is forgotten.”
Farid grimaced. “In that case, we would be very close to telling a direct lie, which I would rather not do. And do you want to send a child into life under the word of death—yet a second time?” Quickly, he opened the car door and spit on the ground—a sign against the evil eye.
Almost involuntarily, Malik did the same. “No,” he said softly.
“No,” agreed his cousin. “And there’s another complication. You know better than I, but isn’t this business about the unknown donor and the sick child exactly the kind of sentimental tale the Western newspapers love to wipe their tears on? What if it came to their attention somehow?”
“You see only the dangers, Farid,” Malik said, more sharply than he would have wished. “It’s true that the dangers are real,” he added placating. “But the point is that something must be done—and soon. My daughter is more than a year old and wouldn’t know me from Mahir. After a certain point, she’ll always be the Najjars’ child, never quite mine.” “You’re absolutely right, no question,” Farid said, placating in his turn. “That’s why I asked if you had given more thought to the matter. Because it seems to me there’s a solution that dodges all the swords and arrows.” “Forgive my bluntness, Cousin, but I have only these two days before returning to Marseilles. What do you have in mind?”
Farid stroked his mustache thoughtfully. It was a gesture Malik would never have noticed a year ago, but living in France, where clean-shaven men were not uncommon, he had come to see how much masculine pride his own countrymen took in the hair on their upper lips. In al-Remal, except for oil-company foreigners, men without mustaches were as rare as comets, and he who had only a thin or scraggly growth suffered a certain diminution of status regardless of his other accomplishments.
“It seems to me,” said Farid, “that our plans so far have held to one star, that of bringing the girl out alone. But wouldn’t it be simpler to bring them all?”
“All? Who is all?”
“Mahir Najjar and his wife, along with the child. Surely, a man in your position needs servants, or will need them, and who could serve you better than a good Muslim couple from your own land?”
Of course. Malik could only wonder why he hadn’t thought of it himself. Obviously, he was too close to the problem, heart over head, as Farid had said. “Mahir Najjar can drive, I’m told, although, of course, he doesn’t own a car,” Farid continued. “Couldn’t a rising businessman like you use a driver?” At the moment, Malik owned a little Peugeot that he had bought second- hand and that he drove himself. But certainly, if things worked out, he would soon possess more impressive transportation, and having a chauffeur was not a bad idea at all. It would enhance his prestige, be good for business.
“Besides everything else,” said Farid, “the wife has a certain reputation as a cook. I know the French boast endlessly about their cuisine, but when was the last time you had a good kabsa?”
Malik raised a hand. “Enough, Cousin. The stars do not need painting. Your idea is perfect. You’ve taken the world off my back.” Indeed, he felt almost light-headed with relief.
To Malik’s surprise, Farid pulled a long face. “It’s a serviceable idea, if I say so myself, but not perfect. It has one flaw: Mahir Najjar may not agree to it.”
“What? Why not? Have you spoken with him?” “Only casually, of course.”
“And what’s the difficulty? Surely, he knows I’ll treat him fairly—more than fairly.”
“Part of the difficulty is that he’s from Oman, and you know how Omanis are—as soft-spoken as doves but as stubborn as camels. And as proud as hawks—in a dovelike way, that is.”
“Well, what does he want?”
“For one thing, he wants to talk directly with you, not me. Pride, as I said.
But the real problem is not with him but with his wife, Salima.” Farid consulted his watch, then looked to the sun to confirm the timepiece’s accuracy. “We’d best move along, or we’ll have to stop for prayer.”
Malik appreciated his cousin’s need to put the conversation on a less formal level. One of the first things that had struck him in France was the readiness— and the crudeness—with which men spoke about their women. In al-Remal, men never mentioned their wives in ordinary talk with other men, and to speak even of a third party’s wife, Mahir’s in this case, was discomfiting.
“Now and then,” said Farid, “you see a man who is a slave to his wife. I don’t say that about Mahir, but his concern for her wishes does seem extr
eme. It’s interesting that he hasn’t divorced her though she’s borne him no children. It’s also interesting that he hasn’t asked you for the money to take a second wife. Perhaps that is why he wants to speak to you, but I doubt it. I think Salima influences him against the idea.”
Malik shifted impatiently. “All this is interesting, as you say, Cousin, but what does it have to do with whether or not they come with me to France?” “Well, I gather that Salima simply doesn’t want to go there or anywhere else. She’s happy here, among her kin and friends.”
“But the move wouldn’t be permanent. A year or two, no more.” “Mahir knows that. But apparently she’s adamant, and he bends to her.”
“If it’s a question of more money, I can come up with it—up to a point.” “Perhaps that will do the trick after all. But to tell you the truth, I think only one thing would convince them both.” “Well, what is it?”
“The possibility of having children of their own—a son, of course, especially.”
Malik threw up his hands. “Unfortunately, Cousin, there’s not much I can do to help them with that.”
“Ah, but perhaps you can. Mahir and his wife are still young. Perhaps their problem is a medical one. Aren’t there doctors in France who specialize in this sort of thing?”
“Yes. I’m no expert, of course, but I hear that they’re making new discoveries practically every day.”
“There’s your lever, then, for moving the immovable Salima and her husband.”
“I can’t promise them anything, Farid.”
“Of course, you can. You can promise them hope.”
On their left, the town loomed up. For a moment, Malik hardly recognized it.
New concrete buildings lined the highway like so many gray elephants. Between them, though, he caught glimpses of the old quarter, the upper floors of the buildings wreathed with mashrabiya, the latticework screens from behind which the women could look out on the streets without themselves being seen. Even the buildings, thought Malik, are veiled.
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