City of Veils (7 page)

She hastily collected Eric’s laundry—cursing at the clothespins, which had somehow ruined one of his white shirts—and then made her way downstairs.

The smell of hummus and
shawarma
wafted out the kitchen door. She dropped the bucket on the counter and went straight to the table, peeling the tinfoil from a take-out tray and dipping her finger in. She tore a slice of pita from a giant round and shoved it in her mouth.

“Errrk?” She swallowed. “Honey, come eat!”

She heard no response. “Eric?” A hard swallow. The bug zapper crackled like rounds from a machine gun and she jumped, dropping her bread on the floor. She stooped to retrieve it and took a deep breath. It was probably a lizard; they fried longer than mosquitoes.

She unwrapped a
shawarma
and sat down to eat, pleased that the meat was still hot. “I’m eating without you!” She opened a water bottle and took a long drink.

She heard a noise echoing up the hallway, then the distinctive shuddering of the windows in the kitchen as the building’s front door slammed shut. She set the sandwich on the table and went to the living room.

The front door was open.

She crossed the room and peeked out, but the hallway was dark.

“You left the door open!” She shut the door and headed back to the kitchen but paused to listen. No sound from the bathroom. She went to investigate and found the bathroom door open, the light off. She switched it on and tore back the shower curtain, exposing a meadow of mildew.

“Eric?” The narrow hallway muted her voice. In the bedroom, her suitcase lay undisturbed on the bed. The table lamp glowed, but a sudden confusion gave her the shivers. She flipped on the overhead light. Checking behind the door, she almost laughed at herself: when was the last time Eric hid behind a door to surprise her—their honeymoon?

“Eric, are you here?”

No response. Heading back to the front door, she heard a car starting but decided that the engine was too loud to be theirs. It was probably Abdullah and Sabria leaving for the wedding. She went out the front door and into the men’s sitting room, which overlooked the street. Except for the lamplight filtering in through the shutters, the room was dark. She fumbled for the lights, found a table lamp, and switched it on. The bulb was ancient but it shed enough light for her to navigate around the coffee table, over the embroidered pillows and moldy teacups. She peeked out the window. There was no one on the street.

Don’t panic
, she told herself, trying to believe that her anxiety was really about herself,
her
fears,
her
claustrophobia. She’d been this way before—edgy, even paranoid, like the time his car had broken down on the freeway and she thought he’d abandoned her for another woman. He’d come home in a taxi to find her sprawled on the sofa, weeping. Miriam Walker, MusD—hear her roar.

She went back to the kitchen and forced herself to fold his laundry. The
shawarma
blessed her with an immediate food coma that beat back her panic. He must have gone back to the restaurant for some reason. It was within walking distance. Perhaps he’d left his wallet there. His keys weren’t on the table where he usually left them. He would have taken them to unlock the door—except that he’d forgotten to
shut
the door. She was going to tease him mercilessly when he got back.

Four hours later the anxiety returned. By then, she had tried calling his cell phone a dozen times, but it went straight to voice mail, and the frustration of not being able to reach him was only ratcheting up her panic. It was too late to call his friends. She was certain anyway that if he had gone to see them, he would have told her. She kept thinking back to their conversation in the car on the way home, analyzing it for unusual behavior, something that would make it obvious that he had run away. The longer she thought about it, the more her imagination began twisting his words, his expressions, even the meaning of his new blue shirt.

At one in the morning, she realized she was too exhausted to worry anymore. She sat down on the sofa, where she eventually slept, eyes flicking open every once in a while to gaze at the unlocked, unopened door.

E
very afternoon at around a quarter to five the downtown streets died in the stifling air. Heat rose in waves from the oily pavement and hung, gray and putrid, in the diesel-choked sky. On a quiet side street notable for the proliferation of dry-goods stores that had collected there, jumbling atop one another like honeybees, only the distant sound of a flushing toilet indicated life behind the shuttered windows and closed shop doors. The street, long and narrow, tapered to an ignominious end, where a decaying, lime green grocery store came face to face with a public fountain. Right now, the storefront was completely covered by a large iron grille. The metal bars were black, hot to the touch and sticky with moisture. Behind them stood Nayir Sharqi, waiting to be set free.

‘Asr prayers had rung from rooftop speakers twenty minutes ago, and like all good shop owners, this one had promptly pulled down his gates and locked them. Unlike most owners, however, he had then hurried off to the mosque, leaving Nayir in the darkness holding two cans of fava beans and a tin of coffee.

Normally, Nayir would have avoided such a predicament by being more attentive to the call to prayer, but ‘Asr had sneaked up on him today. And the shop owner had done what he needed to do, locking the store at once in case the religious police should catch him doing business during prayer time. And in case Nayir should be the sort of man who would leave without paying.

Nayir had used the time to do his own devotion, opening a bottle of Evian and performing his ablutions behind the cash register, where the carpet would soak up his runoff. Then he’d knelt on the hard stone floor right next to a low shelf of packaged tobacco and tried very urgently to turn his mind to prayer, but today his body was only going through the motions while his mind, like a bat, flitted silently and swiftly through a dark cave of thought.

If there was one thing he’d learned in the past eight months, it was that there was no use trying to conquer his guilt. He had tested every strategy he could think of, but no matter how often he sought guidance from Allah, no matter how fully he felt his convictions, the guilt remained full and fierce.

Close the door, lower the veil, shut the mouth
. His own thoughts about women echoed back to him. Wasn’t that what
he
had been doing all these months? Shutting himself out? For a blinding second, his eight months of guilt crystallized in this brilliant revelation. His justifications for not calling her were flimsy excuses. His reasoning was reduced to nothing more than an outward show of religiosity, empty of meaning. Wasn’t true Islam about showing love to others? About giving generously and fully, even when it meant giving the last of yourself? Wasn’t true Islam about showing respect? And how was he respecting Katya by never explaining why he had let her drift away? By leaving her to guess? It had been an indecent thing to do.

But the argument disintegrated right before his eyes, because what would happen if every man took the liberty of “showing love to others” every time he met a woman? What would happen if every man abandoned the dictates of courtesy and respect to a woman’s family just because he could argue that Islam was about charity, and he needed to give love? That was about as stupid as you could get.

He finished the prayer and his mind returned to his surroundings. A locked cage. A hard stone floor. He pushed himself up and, leaving a bill on the counter for the Evian, the beans, and the coffee, went to the front of the store and stood at the grille. Nothing moved on the street. He tried rattling the cage but there was no one to hear it. Ten minutes later the shop owner returned, looking pleased with himself as he unlocked the gate and lifted the grille with a screech. Nayir left without explanation.

It took him ten minutes to reach the police building. He was halfway down the block before he noticed that women were coming out of its side entrance. He stopped, ducking into a nearby doorway, and peeked out. The women dispersed quickly, climbing into waiting cars, hustling down the street in pairs. The street was empty again.

He was moving closer when one more woman emerged. He froze, his stomach dropping all the way to his shoes as he recognized Katya’s walk. Her burqa was down, and she was alone.

The time was now. He had to act, but he couldn’t. Was it really her? His heart was racing and he felt dizzy. She turned to look down the street and when she saw him, she froze, too. Her eyes locked on his face. He would have given anything to see behind her burqa now, just for a second so he could know what reaction had flashed across her face upon seeing him again after so many months. Her eyes betrayed only a flicker of surprise.

He went toward her unthinkingly. He noticed that she was clutching her purse, but the rest of her seemed relaxed.

“I can’t believe it,” she said when he was close enough. She sounded amused, but beneath it he detected nervousness. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

There was something cold in the words, as if she’d simply put him in a drawer and locked him away. He fumbled, fishing for any response but coming up with nothing.

“How are you, Nayir?”

“Good.” He had to clear his throat. “I’m good.”

“You’ve lost weight.”

He nodded. An expectant silence went by.

“It’s nice to see you again,” she said hesitantly, with something like a question mark at the end.

He felt like an idiot. “I’m sorry —” He twitched. Her name had nearly slipped out. It didn’t feel right to say it anymore. “I’m sorry. I came to ask you something.”

She kept her eyes locked on his, but they showed curiosity. She still wouldn’t lift her burqa, and he had an irrational, frightening urge to reach over and lift it himself. He tucked his hands into his pockets.

“It’s actually about a friend,” he said. “Who died.”

All the kindness in her eyes vanished. He felt his chest tighten.

“I see,” she said curtly.

The anger in her eyes was unmistakable now. He wanted to say anything to make it right again, but he was attempting to speak a language he didn’t understand, and with it came all the humiliated fumbling of the undereducated. Never had he felt so utterly dumb.

He blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “I’m only doing this for my uncle.”

It was clear that it had been the wrong thing to say. She seemed to be trembling beneath her cloak, some low vibration of rage. She took a breath and clutched her purse more tightly, and that’s when he saw it. A ring. On her left hand.

He looked away, but he couldn’t find anywhere to rest his gaze. The ring was everywhere—a small diamond, an ornate gold band. He saw it on the sidewalk, the buildings, the cars. The silence between them dragged on so painfully that he had no choice but to fill it.

“You’re engaged now?” he asked, trying for casual and failing miserably. When she didn’t reply, he offered his congratulations.

Her cell phone rang. She fumbled in her purse and answered it. “Excuse me,” she said and turned away.

Nayir was lost in a desert memory. This often happened when something blew apart inside him. An overload of emotional currents sent him back to a world where his body was not the earth-ridden, lumbering form that crouched along the sidewalk beneath a blinding sun, but rather a kind of vessel for the expansiveness of the world. Typically, he felt this way only in the desert, where the vastness made him feel smaller than he actually was.

Omran, his favorite desert guide as a child, had bragged once that he could make the desert sing. He took Nayir a few kilometers outside the camp, to where the dunes lay in a rippling, spotless infinity. They climbed the highest dune, which was so steep that Omran had to rope himself to Nayir to keep the boy from falling and setting off an avalanche.

When they reached the top, they perched on a narrow swath of sand that formed the upper rim of a magnificent crescent dune. Its great amphitheater was the biggest he’d ever seen. It curved sharply down to a smooth little gully. No prints of any kind broke the wind-stroked surface.

“No matter what happens,” Omran said, “you stay here. I’ll need you to run and get help if I don’t come back. All right?” Nayir nodded, and Omran bent closer. “You’re about to see magic, so be careful who you tell. You know the words of protection from the djinn?”

“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.