The Ambassador's Wife (20 page)

SEPTEMBER 18, 2007

Miranda

Miranda teetered on the spiky heels as she sauntered across the worn pink carpet of the small bedroom, dressed in a fuchsia, sequined gown that clung to her legs like plastic film. Tazkia and her two sisters lay sprawled across the rose-patterned velour blankets of their double bed in jeans and T-shirts, laughing at her ungainliness.

“Go on,” said Hind, the youngest sister. “Dance for us. Show us how models walk in America.”

“But I'm not a model! I can barely dress myself.” The sisters had yanked off her dowdy blouse and pulled the dress down over her hips as if she were a giant doll. Usually when she visited they performed comic skits for her, but today they had insisted Miranda take a more active role.

“But models are on television all the time. Aren't they? Like in Egypt? We can get some Egyptian stations.” Hind was even more outspoken than Tazkia, taller and slightly chubbier, with enormous dark eyes and auburn hair curling to her shoulders. Though only sixteen, she was already engaged to one of her first cousins, a man in his early twenties who worked with their father in his grocery stall. Next to her on the bed, their middle sister, Sehr, sat quietly brushing her hair. She worked as a math teacher in a neighborhood school, an unusual occupation for a woman here. Sehr and Tazkia remained unmarried at the old-maidish ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, but Sehr didn't want to stop working, and Tazkia claimed she would settle only for love—though how love could spontaneously occur in a culture that prevented the two sexes from ever coming into contact mystified Miranda.

“We never had a television. But okay, I admit I've seen models. It's kind of unavoidable.” Miranda got the feeling Hind expected Americans to be a little more glamorous than she evidently was.

“So do the walk. Like on the catwalk.”

“Wait!” cried Tazkia. “We need music!” She ran to the plain wooden dresser the three girls shared and picked up a small cassette player. A few seconds later, the wail of an Arabian love song filled the room. Miranda posed, one foot forward, hands dangling as she looked haughtily down her nose at the women. Then, swinging her hips in exaggerated motions, she strutted across the room, not even remotely in time with the music. At the end of the room, she attempted a complicated turn, catching a heel on the hem of the dress and launching herself onto the edge of the bed. “You
Americans
,” Tazkia said in dismay as her sisters convulsed with laughter. “You don't know what to do with your hips.” She leapt up from the bed and launched into the pelvis-swirling dance Miranda had admired at many Mazrooqi weddings. Twisting her hands in the air like a pair of charmed serpents,
Tazkia smiled up at Miranda through lowered lashes. The effect was more seductive than anything Miranda had seen in a Seattle club. “I know!” Tazkia said, abruptly dropping her arms and breaking the spell of her dance. “Let's all do a show!”

In a corner of the room rested a familiar hand-painted metal trunk, its lid thrown open to reveal a slithering mass of lace, feathers, and polyester. This was where the sisters tossed the flamboyant dresses they bought at the discount store DinarMax to wear to weddings. Rarely did a dress get more than one outing—they liked to impress each other anew at each celebration (and the dresses were not sturdily made). But on Thursdays, the women often spent the long afternoons after lunch playing dress-up and acting out little dramas. Tazkia and Hind would pretend to be Egyptian soap opera stars, smearing on thick coats of lipstick and gluing on false eyelashes. “You!” Hind would cry, with a dramatic flourish of her arm. “Don't you think I don't see you making eyes at my husband!”

“Lies!” Tazkia yelled, jumping onto the bed. “How dare you slander my honor!”

“I knew your father should never have let you go to university. All you learned there was how to impress boys!”

“You are just jealous because you were too stupid to go to school. Did you know your mother dropped you on your head when you were still a baby?”

The sisters could rarely get through a whole scenario without dissolving into giggles. Miranda watched them with a mixture of amusement and envy. They so obviously adored each other; she had never heard them utter a cross word that wasn't in jest. Not only did Miranda covet their easy camaraderie but she also envied them their mother, a smiling, apple-shaped woman devoted to her children. She always welcomed Miranda with a flurry of kisses, clinging to her arm as she led her to the
diwan
for lunch. “Can I believe this? An ambassador's wife in my home?” she had said in wonder after Miranda first moved in with Finn (technically, they weren't married yet, but once they were living together all the Mazrooqis just assumed they were). “I'm the same Miranda you've always known,” she had said, embarrassed at her sudden rise in status. To her relief, after a few more
visits, the awe had worn off. As far as Tazkia's family knew, she had become an ordinary housewife.

Miranda knew the costume trunk well. As a special homework assignment, she had asked Tazkia to draw the same object every single week for six months. It hadn't been easy, as Tazkia was rarely alone in the room. But somehow she had found time to make a rough ink sketch of the trunk most weeks. She hid the drawings in a suitcase full of old clothing underneath the bed until she could get them to Miranda. When the six months were up, Miranda pinned up the sketches across three walls of her studio in the Residence. “What do you see?” she asked.

Tazkia stepped back and stood still, looking at the series with anxious eyes. There were pictures of the trunk locked shut, thrown open, empty, overflowing with dresses, and one of a doll sitting atop the closed lid. “Different details,” she said. “Like the metal hinges on the corners. I didn't paint that the first time. Maybe I didn't see it?” Miranda remained quiet. “I guess I didn't see the little flowers on the lid the first few times either. There are more details toward the end. It seems more alive, later.”

Miranda nodded. “Every drawing you did, you discovered something you hadn't seen before. Or you drew it from a perspective you hadn't used before. It wasn't the trunk that was changing—your vision was.”

“The ones at the end are better, aren't they?”

“Because when you look at something so many times, run your pencil over it so many times, you become braver, attempt things you might have found hard to draw at first. You reconnect with it a different way.” This was one reason Miranda liked to return to places she had once painted, return to people and objects that had inspired her. She had worked on a similar exercise while Tazkia was working on her trunk, every day tracing the bars of their upstairs kitchen window, the leaves and flowers that obscured it. In fact, she couldn't stop drawing those bars, would likely draw them until the day they left the country for good.

“M
IRA
,” T
AZKIA SAID
as Miranda sat on the bed struggling to extract shoe from sequins, “you be in a show with us now.”

“I don't know how.” She didn't feel at home enough in their culture to parody it the way the sisters so often did.

Tazkia was already scrambling into a dress made entirely of white and blue feathers, while Hind tugged a silver minidress down over her soft belly. “You be the man,” Tazkia called through the feathers. “Pretend you want to marry one of us.” Marriage was a popular theme.

“But I'm wearing a dress.” Miranda felt lost in their games, clumsy and out of place.

“Pretend it's a pink
thobe
.” Tazkia's head emerged from the feathers, and she settled herself on the carpet, legs curled demurely to the side.

Miranda drew herself up, standing with legs apart and hands on her hips. “Most beautiful Tazkia, I have come from a faraway land just to seek your hand in marriage—”

“No, no!” Tazkia cut her off. “First of all, I would never marry someone from a faraway land. Our friend Naveen married a man from Dubai, and now she has to live there, with his family. You have to be Mazrooqi.”

“You wouldn't move to Dubai?”

Tazkia wrinkled her nose. “Of course not! My family is here. I could never live where I couldn't see my mother every day. And my sisters.”

Miranda thought about her mother. It would never occur to her to pick a place to live based on its proximity to her parents. Most of her friends back home wanted to live as far from their parents as possible. Was there something they had gotten wrong, something they were missing? Why did they not feel this easy, daily affection for their families? Why were they so comfortable with distance from people they loved?

“But, Tazzy,” she said, falling out of character. “You could be freer somewhere else. Not Dubai, maybe. Somewhere you could—” She stopped herself.

“I wouldn't, though.” Tazkia frowned at her. “Not if I went there with a man.”

There was so much Miranda wanted to say. But instead she looked beseechingly to Tazzy's little sister. “You're engaged to a Mazrooqi, Hind. Will you show me how it's done?”

OCTOBER 19, 2010

Finn

Finn is in the kitchen with Cressie when the first notes arrive. His sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he is kneading bread dough, folding it in half and pushing it into the tiled counter with angry thrusts. Two months. It has been two months now, and his embassy seems to be getting nowhere. He rings every day, aware of the staff's growing reluctance to take his calls. At least once a week, Celia updates him on the progress of the case.
Progress
. If you can call a flurry of false leads and lies
progress
. “We're keeping an eye on the chatter,” said Celia in one conversation, meaning the mysterious phone and e-mail networks used by terrorists. It isn't just Al Qaeda here. In a country this poor and desperate, there are all kinds of terrorists with all kinds of causes. But no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for this one. It is inexplicable. Often there is at least a ransom request, or a demand for prisoners to be released. But they have heard nothing.

“And the mediations?” Finn asked Celia. “They're continuing?” After locating his wife, this is his main preoccupation. The country must not disintegrate. Not now. Not ever, if that is possible. He had met with Celia several times to bring her up to speed on the mediation he had been conducting with sheikhs from the North and South, but how could she truly replace him when he had personal relationships with these men? When this project had been
his
from its inception? When the other EU ambassadors had looked to
him
for leadership?

“It's slow, Finn, you know how it goes. Some of the sheikhs aren't wild about a woman moderator.”

“But they're meeting with you?”

“Some of them.”

“Christ, Celia. It will never work without all of them. Can I help? Do you want me to talk to them?”

She sighed. “You know what the Office would say about that.”

“Celia, this doesn't count as ‘going rogue.' I
know
the sheikhs, they trust me. These negotiations are too important to fail now.”

“I'm sorry, Finn, but you're going to have to trust me to do the job. We don't have a choice.”

Finn was gripping the phone so tightly he was surprised it hadn't crumpled in his fist. “But the other ambassadors? They're being helpful?”

“As much as they can be. I promise I'll ring if I have questions. You've been a
star
, Finn, I know how hard you've been working on this. And I do understand what is at stake.”

“
Do
you? Because—”

“Finn. I've got to take this call from London. I promise I'll call if there is news.”

Finn glared at his phone, listening to the drone of the dial tone, before hurling it across the kitchen.

H
E HAD NOTIFIED
Miranda's family and close friends immediately after her disappearance, before the news had a chance to break. Every Sunday night Finn phones Miranda's father, Lloyd, with updates; the two men had met on a monthlong holiday in Seattle and bonded immediately over a shared affection for the works of Carl Sagan. Lloyd had absorbed the news of his daughter's disappearance with a stunned silence. Then, his voice faltering a little, “Miranda is gone? Not her too?” Finn hasn't been able to locate her mother. But he'd found Vícenta; her number was in the worn address book Miranda kept on her bedside table. At first, he hadn't been sure whether or not to ring her. It wasn't as though she could do anything to help, should she even want to. But he knew that she and Miranda still wrote to each other regularly; Vícenta at least deserved an explanation for her sudden silence.

“Vícenta, this is Finn,” he'd said when she answered. “I'm, um, I'm—”

“I know who you are, Finn.” Her voice had been low, almost gravelly.

“I'm afraid I am calling with some bad news.” As simply as he could, he'd explained what had happened.

Silence. Finn had waited. Then, “I'll come.”

“No,” Finn had said quickly, panicking. “Don't. Miranda would never forgive me if you put yourself in danger. I promise I will tell you if there is anything you can do.”

“I can't just sit on my ass here in Seattle and do
nothing
.”

“You have to. Please, Vícenta.”

“Have you talked with her women?”

“Just to tell them the news.”

“Talk to them, Finn. They have many relatives. They adore her.”

“Right.” But he had remained unconvinced. He had plenty of his own sources. “Listen, I promise to keep you updated. And if you think of anyone else we might contact…”

Silence again. And then, faintly over the long-distance line, he could hear her stifled sobs.

“It would be naïve to promise you that I will get her back,” he'd said softly. “But we will do everything humanly possible.”