The Ambassador's Wife (31 page)

Until Finn, Miranda had told no one about the girls. Telling even one person was too big a risk. And no one,
no one
, was privy to her sessions alone with Tazkia. These had started before her marriage to Finn, after one of their last classes. At the end of class, Tazkia had lingered, kneeling up on the velvety red cushions, pressing her palms against the cool circular glass as she watched the limestone of her hometown turn from gray to a gilded rose in the sunset. “We don't have windows like this,” she'd told Miranda. “Our rooms, they are closed.” When the sun had slipped below the buildings, dripping down their sides like the yolk of a cracked egg, she had turned toward Miranda, blinking. “Could I have some tea?”

At first they had talked only about their work—materials, theory, color, balance, frame, light. Tazkia always wanted to know everything all at once. Miranda hauled out the small collection of art books she had managed slowly to accumulate, importing a few in her suitcase every time she returned to Mazrooq from abroad, and the two women bent their heads over the images for hours. At first, Miranda was cautious. There were artists and paintings she skipped. But Tazkia protested the censorship, gripping Miranda's wrist with her stubby but strong fingers as she tried to quickly turn a page. “You are the only one I trust not to keep things from me,” she told Miranda sternly. “Do not protect me. Do not be like everyone else in my life.” Miranda looked at her, at the earnest brown eyes fixed on hers, and slowly nodded.

When they began meeting in the Residence, tucked away from prying eyes on her office sofa, Miranda showed Tazkia everything: portraits, nudes of both sexes, embracing couples. Tazkia was fascinated by the variety of the human form. When Miranda showed her Michelangelo's
David
and other male nudes, she didn't flinch, only gazed with interest. She was curious about the models, about their relationships with the artists. Were they prostitutes? Were they the painters' wives? Where did they come from? Miranda explained that anyone could model for a painter. Nakedness in front of another person did not necessarily suggest a sexual relationship. And modeling was uncomfortable. Miranda told Tazkia about her years as an art
student, when she had modeled several times a week to help pay her tuition. She was often cold, cramped, and bored. “It's very unglamorous,” she said.

“These women,” said Tazkia, waving a hand at Delphin Enjolras's
Nude by Firelight
, “they look so comfortable naked.”

“You forget that your body is your body. It's hard to explain. I sometimes used to forget my body was there at all. Except when it hurt.”

“But she looks like she enjoys her body….I don't know that women enjoy their bodies naked like this here.”

“Are you sure? Even married women?”

“Maybe. Married women talk about these things to each other. But my friends, they are ashamed of their bodies. We are taught that we are ugly down there.” She gestured between her legs. “We are told that our bodies are disgusting and never to look at them—or to let a man look down there. Any man that would put his head between your legs is thought a weak man. This is a problem part of the body.”

“Have you never looked in the mirror?”

“Not—not down there.”

“Never?” Miranda struggled to absorb this. Natural curiosity was apparently no match for religious dictates.

“We are forbidden from looking at ourselves naked in a mirror.”

“Even alone?”

“Aiwa.”

“Okay.” Miranda studied Tazkia's face, the deep sadness rising behind her eyes. “Are you forbidden to look at yourself in a painting?”

Tazkia frowned. Then, a slow smile creeping into the corners of her mouth, “It's not exactly addressed. I guess it's what you call one of your ‘beige areas.' ”

“Gray areas,” Miranda corrected automatically. “Let me show you something,” she said. Uncrossing her legs, she rose stiffly and crossed the
diwan
to pick up another book. Sitting once again next to Tazkia, she turned its pages until she arrived at “L'Origine du Monde, Courbet.”

“Let me show you,” Miranda said. “Let me show you how beautiful you are.”

A
ND THEN ONE
night in the stifling dark of Miranda's prison, her thoughts tumbling around in her skull, she wonders if instead there could be any connection with whatever it was that happened in Afghanistan. That mysterious something Finn would never discuss. Was that even possible? But that was more than seven years ago, she reminds herself. And there are different terrorist organizations here. It is pointless for her to dwell on it when she has no idea what Finn is keeping from her. She should have made him tell her before they married.

Even more than the men's words, more than this death sentence to be carried out at an undetermined time, the silence terrifies her. To keep it at bay, to protect her heart from the sharp edges of memory, she talks and sings to herself. Not too loudly, in case anyone can hear, but loud enough for it to fill her ears and stop them against the emptiness. She speaks mostly in French and Arabic, fearful of being overheard. She wishes she knew the words to more songs. Her repertoire is woeful. But she remembers Christmas carols. These are what have stayed with her over the years. Not the pop songs she sang along to in her bedroom, dancing herself dry after a shower. Not the alternative rock songs she listened to on long car journeys. But the carols, she remembers. She tries to translate them into French or Arabic as she goes along, never managing to get all the words (
manger, Hark! and yuletide
proving particularly tricky) or to make them scan quite right. But it gives her something to do. Something to keep her mind from turning on itself.

It is amazing how close to the surface insanity rises when you are left alone with yourself, thinks Miranda. How quickly that membrane between sanity and madness threatens to melt away. She feels lunacy's dark pressure in her skull, urging unfamiliar sounds from her mouth, strange prostrations from her body. Every day she has to develop new tactics to keep it at bay, to keep it from closing down around her. Music is one such tactic. It's slightly harder to go insane while singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” though obviously not impossible. She thinks of Ophelia afloat on that flower-choked
river, singing the names of plants. Wait, was she singing? Or was she just reciting? Miranda thinks of Ophelia as a singer, perhaps simply because of the position of her parted lips in the painting. She has seen
Hamlet
only once, but the image of Sir John Everett Millais's
Ophelia
was burned into her brain through countless art history slides and trips to the Tate Britain. But Ophelia was not a real person, she reminds herself. She needs frequent reminding that the subjects of paintings are not always living. To her they so often are. Well, she thinks, if singing doesn't keep a person from slipping from reality's grasp, then at least it adds grace to the fall.

Why is it that keeping our own company drives us mad? Why is solitary confinement such a harsh punishment? How feeble our brains must be, to turn on themselves so easily. She can feel her mind salivating to cannibalize itself. To stop this, to distract this monstrous masochism of the brain, she creates schedules for herself. In the morning, she makes herself sing seven songs (or poems) before breakfast. They must be different songs and poems each day. Her selections include nursery rhymes, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Shakespeare, “Deck the Halls,” Tom Lehrer, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” She then does a few dozen abdominal exercises, push-ups, and yoga positions to slow the disintegration of her muscles.

Relief comes when Luloah arrives, often wailing with hunger. Miranda lives for the moments the baby first sees her, her small face radiant with undiluted joy. She draws out the nursing as long as possible, keeping Luloah at each breast, those dark eyebrows knitted together in concentration, until she falls off with exhaustion or satiety. When Luloah is there, Miranda narrows her focus to the child. She strokes the thick black hair, the velvety cheeks, the pinkish yellow soles of her feet. She sings. She tells her stories. And until the child is taken away again, she plays with her: patty-cake, peekaboo, raspberries on her tummy. Luloah is only just starting to laugh, bursting into delirious chortles when Miranda hides her face under her shirt and then emerges again. “Lucky girl,” Miranda tells her. “To forget how little we have to laugh about.”

When Luloah is gone, Miranda returns to her exercises, mental
and physical. She tries to remember something, at least one thing, from every single year of her life, starting with her earliest memory. But chronology is surprisingly hard. The images of her childhood jumble together like photographs in a cardboard shoe box, shuffled all out of order. There is the house itself, of course, an airy blue-gray Craftsman bungalow, with a steeply sloping roof and wide front porch. Was her first memory of standing at the edge of their handkerchief-size back lawn behind their manual lawn mower, straining her plump little arms to push its two rusting wheels forward and failing, until her father placed his hands on either side of her and helped her to push it along the tiny patch of green? Or was it the awe-inspiring population of her ceiling? Surely the ceiling came first, given how much of her childhood was devoted to lying on her back, imagining alternative realities.

Her mother, Leonora, who normally produced artwork as abstract and opaque as possible, had covered Miranda's pitched ceilings with all twelve of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. It was a concession to her daughter's interest in identifiable images, this spasm of realism—if painting goddesses can count as realism. Miranda was so absorbed in the lives of the archaic gods that she shelved her Greek myth collections in her nonfiction bookcases. Those quarreling, humanlike deities were more familiar to her than any of her friends from school.

Nearly every night, her father had read to her from Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's illustrated
Book of Greek Myths
as Miranda sat in the bathtub until the water turned cold. She developed a morbid obsession with the illustration of Argus, with his eye-spotted body. How did he bathe when half of his hundred winking eyes were open at any given time, keeping watch over Io? When her father came to that part of the story, she would close her eyes, trying to shut out the distressingly eye-studded body, but curiosity always won out. She'd open one eye and squint at the drawing as she soaked in the fragrance of Leonora's organic gardenia bath beads. How could he lie down, with eyeballs on every part of him? Were there eyes on the soles of his feet? On his bottom? Didn't they get dirt in them? What would it
feel like to get soap in fifty eyes all at the same time? She shuddered to imagine such vulnerability, and was very glad that Argus had been left off her ceiling.

Because Miranda had already read Aesop by the time she was started on Greek myths, she was conditioned to seek morals in literature. The Greek stories confused her. What, after all, was the moral of Argus, bored to death by Hermes' soporific storytelling? Never to listen to a dull story? Never to close your eyes? Decent principles, she thought, though difficult to heed. Miranda's father was unhelpful on the topic. “It's just a story,” he'd say. “There doesn't have to be a lesson.” But Miranda thought that there did. If you didn't learn anything at all from a story, then what was the point? She wanted something she could take with her when she walked away: a compass. She still feels this way about painting, that every square of canvas needs to help somehow in the living of life.

As a teenager she painted over the gods and goddesses on her ceiling, smearing on pure black, as though to erase her mother's influence. She needed to start again, start from nothing. At first she simply retold fairy tales, painting Snow White marrying a dwarf; Hansel and Gretel building a cottage from carrots; and Rapunzel climbing down a rope she had made from her own hair, no prince in sight. I realized I was bisexual, she later told friends, when I wanted to be both Rapunzel and her rescuer.

Is painting helping her now, in the living of this half-life? No and yes. No, in that Magritte's
Attempting the Impossible
is not about to spring the lock on her door and guide her to safety. But without the catalog of artwork in her brain, her arsenal against madness would be greatly diminished. At night, lying on the thin mat, she summons her favorite images, the phantasmagoria of Remedios Varo. She imagines a
Catedral Vegetal
over her head, a ghostly companion in her carriage, sails like dragon's wings propelling her forward. She can remember the day she first discovered Varo in her local library, the way her heart staggered with an almost erotic enchantment. On those pages she watched boundaries fall away, rules of physics alter, and women summon mystical powers. Her mother had found her obsession with the solemn, hollow-cheeked women macabre, but Miranda had defiantly
covered the walls of her room with prints of
Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst
(depicting a robed woman dropping a man's decapitated head into a well),
Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River
(a woman sailing alone in a ship fashioned from a waistcoat), and
Encounter
(a seated woman opening a chest only to find her own face peering out at her).

When her mind wanders from childhood memories, she returns to her first art history class, mentally flipping through the slides. Should she begin with the Paleolithic cave paintings of South Africa? The Sumerians? The Egyptians? It doesn't matter. Today, she starts with the Venus of Hohle Fels. What is older? It hadn't been part of her art history syllabus, of course, given that it hadn't yet been discovered when she was in school. But it's definitely the oldest. She closes her eyes and sees the swollen belly and stumpy legs, adds the strangely gravity-defying orbs of the breasts, imagines the person who first saw this image in that woolly mammoth tusk. For some reason, she thinks the sculptor must have been a woman, despite the belief-straining breasts. Miranda imagines the fat, headless woman as a kind of demigoddess. Perhaps wearing the zaftig female as an amulet increased fertility? But why no head? Was this purposeful or had there been one long ago, a head that had left no trace of its existence? These questions were the parallel bars around which her mind flipped and twisted, kept itself limber and strong.