Brilliant (4 page)

“You could say that,” says Mathieu, and Angie feels a catch of anxiety as she tucks the phone back in her bag. Not that she can let her mind go anywhere near that right now. There's something completely pathetic about the girlfriend of a married man suspecting there's
another
girlfriend. Almost as pathetic as being the girlfriend. But she can't think about that either.

“Okay,
MB
, I really do need you,” says Angie, and Maribeth sighs and slips her rosary into her purse. Only now does Angie notice what Maribeth is wearing: her tightest jeans and the yellow T-shirt she and Firaj brought back from Disneyland Paris. Donald on the front; Mickey on the back. “That's us,
MB
,” says Angie, pointing to the shirt and for the first time all day, Maribeth smiles.

Angie drives slowly between the towers until Maribeth tells her to stop. “There,” she says, leaning forward, pointing up. Angie starts to count the floors, then stops: something else not to contemplate. At least there's no police, a good sign. There's also no parking, this being a Friday. What might have been a space right in back is taken up by a Volvo parked diagonally across two spots. She finds a space in front of the next tower, sits for a moment. Maribeth has slipped her rosary out again, the tiny beads clicking.

“I pray do right,” says Maribeth.

They ring the doorbell of apartment 1201. They knock. No one comes. Maribeth points to a few pairs of shoes on the shoe rack. “They out,” she pronounces, and begins to pound on the door. Since they've gotten out of the car, she's back to her old self. “Daisy!” she calls into the door. “Daisy!” And then something in Tagalog.

They hear someone behind the door. Slowly, slowly it opens. And there, standing unsteadily, is a very old man. He's barefoot, dressed in a long, off-white
jelabiya
, a crocheted white skull cap on his head. A stricken-looking Daisy stands behind him. Maribeth goes in, stepping around the man, grabs Daisy's arm, says something sharp to her.

“She don't want to leave,” says Maribeth, turning back to Angie, still outside, suddenly uncertain of what to do. She was armed for a throng of hysterical people, not a feeble old man.

“Daisy, you have to come with us,” says Angie.

“But the old man. I can't leave him. I have to stay.” Thank God Daisy's English is as good as it is. It will make convincing her easier.

“You have to, Daisy. This is a very bad place for you.”

“Yes,” says Daisy. She's not going to argue about that. But she won't leave the old man by himself. “It's my job,” she says pleadingly. “Maybe he die and I be responsible.”

“Daisy, what these people are doing is not only morally…” Angie can't find a word strong enough or clear enough. “It's illegal. You have to come with us.”

With the door open, they hear the elevator being called down. And then Maribeth is racing into Daisy's room to retrieve her purse, her phone, anything of hers they can take, Daisy running after her, protesting. Angie keeps watch at the door. The old man stands guard, too, though he seems to have forgotten what he's guarding. Maribeth reappears, dragging a sobbing Daisy across the length of the living room, through the front door, and together they push her past the elevator, into the stairwell. As they descend, Daisy keeps stopping to argue: “They will punish me!”

“Shut up!” says Maribeth.

Angie only realizes when they reach the ground floor how badly her legs are shaking.

They walk quickly, not looking anywhere but down, to the car. Maribeth gets in back with Daisy, who continues to cry softly, and Angie eases onto Jumeirah Beach Road. She can only ease. The road is completely blocked now. It's Friday late afternoon, time to party, to Do-Buy, as Firaj used to say.

And so it is over. And so it isn't. The Egyptians still have Daisy's passport and her work visa. Daisy will need a new sponsor, a place to live, a way to keep her three sons and sick mother and gay brother in Cebu alive. She will not forget the shame of the sweaty boys. She will not forget the old man standing in his prayer clothes at the open door.

Angie used to love Fridays. They would sit by the pool in Khalidiyah, getting so hot they were nearly unconscious, then slip into the water, coming instantly alive. Firaj would make couscous with chickpeas and feta, mix up a pitcher of sangria. They would talk about sheikh so-and-so who ordered the mangroves dredged so his yacht could squeeze through, about the Pakistani cab drivers who propositioned her when her skirts were too short, about Rapunzel, the Filipina waitress at their favourite restaurant, who had the most beautiful smile in the world and made $2 an hour. People were so kind and so cruel.

 

She shakes her head, the black cotton of her
shayla
whipping back and forth as if caught in a windstorm. The long coil of her braid swings with the fabric. Lord, give me words that will help. My Arabic, still new, feels small next to her need. Her boy, the size of a scrawny baby, lies on the sand between us. He's not moving.

She grabs my hand, clutches it to her chest. Her face is covered, but I can read everything in that grip. She wants me to change the world, nothing less. I do what I've been taught, place my hands on the child's bony chest, compress once, then again, again, put my mouth over his blistered lips. His eyes flutter and the young woman — a girl, not more than fifteen — lets out a cry that carries as much grief as relief. “Doctora, Doctora!” I can't correct her, not when life and death have just collided, but I feel like a sham. I am no doctor.

Later, Dr. Kennedy has to hold me, I'm shaking so badly. “Happens,” he says. “And don't worry about being called doctor. Doesn't bother me,” and he laughs. Pat laughs like he talks: short, quick, no time to waste. He and Marian, doctors from the States, look like desert rats already, sun-bleached hair, wind-tough skin, although they've only been here at Oasis Hospital for two years. Still, they're old-timers compared to yours truly, fresh off the plane from Dunelm, Saskatchewan. “Must have sand in our veins,” says Pat, by way of explaining their adaptability. The Bedu call them Kenned and Mariam. What will they call me? Gertrude? Nurse Dyck?

Later, as we set up our cots under the moon, Marian takes me aside. “How are you?” She has the softest voice, even when issuing orders to Aslam, their Pakistani houseboy and our all-around helper. Marian's a true Christian and a mother herself with four children. “I don't know if Pat told you about our first night here, how we hadn't even unpacked, didn't have our supplies, and in comes a woman, fully dilated, ready to go. I delivered her nearly on the spot — an uncomplicated birth, thank you, Lord — and two hours later we had her and her brand new baby boy in the Land Rover on their way home. They named him Mubarak.”

“The blessed,” I say. It's one of the first Arabic words I learned.

“He was our little blessing too, because the women in the villages began coming in after that. They began to trust us.”

Trust. This is what I need, I tell myself, pulling the sheet over my head. Trust in God, trust that this is where I should be.

It's much cooler out on the sand than in the mud-brick buildings of the hospital or our pre-fab residences. And quiet. I am still getting used to the quiet of the desert, so different than the quiet of the prairies. Soon, though, the silence will be broken by Bedu on the move. Dressed in clothing that has barely changed since the time of Abraham, they will walk past our cots and bedrolls, pulling their camels, the women chattering away as
salukis
yap at their heels. A joyous, clamorous dawn.

 

You practically need a magnifying glass to find the Trucial Oman States on a map of the world. Dad had never heard of the place. “Saudi Arabia? You're not going to Saudi Arabia, Gert!” I tried to explain that it wasn't Saudi, but an area on the Persian Gulf between Oman and Saudi, a protectorate of Britain. “It's becoming something, Dad. After a thousand years of poverty, they've discovered oil.” They needed hospitals, doctors, nurses. I needed a place to put the gifts God had given me. How could it not feel providential?

I read Wilfred Thesiger's book,
Arabian Sands,
and felt the desert pull me. The Bedu were people I wanted to meet: brave, friendly and sturdy. I fashioned my version of a veil, cutting out holes for the eyes, to see what it was like to be a woman in that world. I felt anonymous, but free, too.

With my family's cautious blessing, I accepted a nursing job at Oasis Hospital in Al Ain, an oasis equidistant from Dubai and Abu Dhabi, about two days by camel caravan. Bundled in two sweaters, a heavy winter coat and snow boots — it was, after all, minus 30 in Swift Current — I flew to Bahrain last December. From there it was a twin-propeller flight to Dubai via Doha, then an eight-hour Land Rover ride to Al Ain. Our driver, a local, forded the sand dunes in the four-wheel drive. Or tried to. Clouds of fine sand billowed up as our tires churned, the grains sticking to my face, blowing into my eyes and nostrils and mouth, finding every crevice. We stopped to push the car and I took off my new sandals. They say once you get sand between your toes, you can never get it out.

 

A man came in with a snake bite this morning. Snake bites, scorpion stings, these are common, the downside of sleeping under the stars. Pat was in Dubai ordering medical supplies and Marian was in the middle of a delivery, so it was just me. The man, who'd parked his camel behind the hospital, was in obvious pain, though he kept smiling, placing his hand over his heart and bowing his head. I gave him the antidote, though he didn't seem to understand that he had to swallow the pill, not rub it on the bite itself. Finally, I held a glass of water to his mouth and he understood. Pill down, he pointed to himself:

“Mohammed,” he said.

“Gertrude,” I said, pointing to myself.

“Grapefruit,” he said.

“Gertrude,” I repeated, trying not to laugh.

“Latifa,” he said.

“Gertrude,” I said.

“Doctora,” he said, nodding as if this was the final word on my name.

When I told Marian later, she nodded too. “Latifa means kind and merciful in Arabic. That man must know something, Gertie. And Doctora…well, take that as the sign of deepest respect.”

From Gertrude Dyck to Doctora Latifa. Quite the leap.

 

I'd always imagined an oasis as a single palm tree perched by a pond. Perhaps the image came from a Bible story Mother read to me as a child. Clearly that illustrator never saw Al Ain. The whole area is an oasis: vast palm groves, sweeping fields irrigated by the most ingenious water system I've ever seen. (And I
am
a prairie girl.) They call them
falaj
, aqueducts that are both underground and above ground, and which bring water from the Omani Hajar Mountains to the plains. Our lifeline.

And our lifesaver. How hot does it get? family and friends keep asking in their letters. The hottest day here — easily 120 degrees — is more intense than the coldest January night in Saskatchewan. What to wear in this heat, especially for a Western woman, is a challenge. I've settled on cotton dresses, with light
shalwar
trousers underneath. Modesty is like a religion here, so I'm vigilant, especially as a newcomer. After all, we're the first uncovered women many of our patients have ever seen. And probably the first Westerners to use our
falaj
as a swimming hole. With dimensions of four feet by six feet and a depth of eighteen inches, none of us are exactly doing the back stroke. We sit, blessedly cool at last, under a palm roof, little fish nibbling at our legs.

 

Sheikh Zayed, who rules Al Ain under his brother Sheikh Shakhbut, ruler of Abu Dhabi, is our hospital's patron saint.
Mafi fayd mal bedon al seha
, he says. Wealth without health is useless. He is so dedicated to his people, so concerned about their welfare. He's the brains and will behind the construction of the
falaj
irrigation system. He's the vision behind the construction of three schools here, a leap ahead of Abu Dhabi, which still has no formal education system. Many members of Sheikh Zayed's family live in Al Ain, and Marian tells me some have already come here to have their babies. Future sheikhs, part of the royal lineage, are being born in our little hospital. Imagine.

Until recently, only 50 percent of babies survived and only two in three mothers came through childbirth alive. While we were folding sheets a few nights ago, Marian told me about a fourteen-year-old bride who came to the hospital last summer. “She knew nothing about conception or the birthing process. All she knew was that she had a swollen belly and there was a baby in there.” The girl, terrified when her water broke, walked for kilometres over the dunes. She'd heard that on the outskirts of Al Ain a concrete building housed kind strangers who helped the sick. “She was afraid the baby would come out of her mouth,” Marian said, trying not to smile.

“Lord, what did you tell her?”

Marian hesitated, as if this was perhaps too personal to share. “How could I explain to this innocent what actually happens? ‘Consider me your mother,' I told her. Two hours later she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.”

 

How do our patients pay for medical care when so many have so little? The sheikhs have thought of this too, issuing nationals a
burwa
, something like our new national health insurance in Saskatchewan. But instead of a plastic card,
burwas
are just small slips of paper. Sometimes they're rolled into a ball and tied into a corner of a
shayla
or stuck in a man's
sufra
, his turban. Of course, sometimes the
shayla
gets washed in the
falaj
or the
burwa
gets eaten by a goat. We laugh ourselves silly over the tales we're told.

There is nothing charming, though, about the serious disease still rampant here: advanced cases of
TB
, children with pernicious, life-threatening diarrhea. There's a stoicism in these people. As Pat said to me the other day, “In the desert there isn't much you can do but submit.”

 

Everywhere we are greeted with open arms. Families who've had babies with us issue pressing invitations. “You must come to see your baby.” Marian says that whoever cuts the cord is honoured forever as The Mother, sweet compensation for the children God has chosen not to bless me with. When we arrive, our patients run out to meet us at the car, then walk with us to their homes. Sometimes these are beside a dune or inside a date garden. There is always food to share, and, of course, coffee.

At first I found the coffee impossibly strong — thank goodness for such small cups — but the longer I am here, the more I love the smell and the ritual. It can go on for ages — the roasting of the beans over an open fire, the crushing with mortar and pestle, the boiling and foaming up of the liquid two, three times, then the pouring over pounded cardamom seeds. My new friends tell me that when they travel by camel, the coffee pot is the last thing packed and the first thing unpacked.

 

It's difficult for me to write anything about Sheikh Zayed that doesn't sound like overstatement. But if anyone can carry his people into the twentieth century, it is this man with the long stride, children always running by his side to keep up. He is a man as large as the desert. But I was surprised to discover he's also a practical joker. Once when Marian and I had gone to visit Sheikh Zayed's mother, he was there, standing by the car. As we said our goodbyes, he played with his camel stick in the sand. “
Haneesh
!” he called out suddenly, the Arabic word for snake, meanwhile scribbling a wavy line in the sand. We jumped back and he roared with laughter.

Whenever Sheikh Zayed sees me now, he calls out, “
Marhaba
, Latifa!” Hello, Latifa!

My identity, it seems, is sealed.