Married to the Sheikh (6 page)

“Rasha’s not my relative,” Sarah replied. “And she’s not my friend.”

Ajira and the others looked relieved.

“Everyone knows Rasha’s a slut. The way she walks around swaying her hips, trying to catch men’s eyes,” the other woman went on.

“And did she catch your husband’s eye?” someone asked the woman with the squint. “Are you jealous of Rasha with her beautiful dark eyes?”

“Why would I be jealous of a slut like that? I may have one bad eye, but at least I have a husband. Who would marry her?”

“Enough!” Ajira called out and she moved the conversation to more general topics. However, the atmosphere remained stilted and Sarah was glad when it was finally time for her to leave.

“How was your visit?” Akbar asked in the truck on the way back. “The food was excellent! Didn’t I tell you that they would give us a feast?”

Sarah agreed that the food was tasty.

“I hope the women at the Al-Mashid camp weren’t as quiet as the Mansooris,” he said.

“No, they definitely weren’t as quiet. We had quite a lively chat.”

“Excellent! I knew that everything would go well. How could people not like you?” He put his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze through the black covering of her abaya.

“We chatted about Rasha.” Sarah looked at Akbar to see his response.

“Ah, Rasha,” he said. Sarah watched his face soften and a certain twinkle come into his eye. “Who hasn’t heard of the lovely Rasha?”

“Apparently the other women have heard quite a lot about her and it wasn’t very positive.”

“Women will always be jealous of girls like Rasha. I can imagine the kinds of things they said about her, but I bet the women who said them were ugly.”

Sarah thought about it for a moment. The woman who called Rasha a whore was certainly not attractive. As well as the squint, she was heavily overweight. “They said that Rasha goes after other people’s husbands.”

“Women always say things like that about younger, more attractive women. I remember hearing that sort of thing all the time when I was a little boy, when I used to hang around my mother and aunties. However, Rasha is your kinswomen—one of the Al-Zafirs. I hope you stood up for her.”

“The dinner arrived before I had a chance.” She lied and dropped the subject.

Several months went past; Sarah and Akbar visited and revisited various camps, and slowly Sarah came to know the other Bedouin women. Although she never really felt that they fully accepted her, they did start to open up and tell her about their medical problems, which Sarah did her best to treat. Many of the issues were connected to pregnancy and childbirth and as the months wore on, women began to ask her about when she was going to have a child. Sarah had stopped taking any form of contraception months before, but she knew that conception wasn’t automatic. However, she promised herself that if she wasn’t pregnant after a year, she would take her own medical advice and go to the Women’s Hospital for some tests.

One afternoon, just as the weather was starting to get cooler, Sarah heard a Jeep drive into the camp and screech to halt. Instinctively, Sarah threw on her veil and abaya. Something that had once been so alien to her was now as normal and as routine as brushing her teeth in the morning. Once covered, she rushed outside. Akbar was already talking to the stranger who had arrived in the Jeep. They both looked very agitated.

“Sarah, get your medical bag. We have to go at once. This man’s from the Al-Mashid camp. He says his brother, Fawad, has fallen off his horse. It sounds as if he’s badly hurt.”

Sarah grabbed her things and went with Akbar to help the injured man. However, by the time they got there, the man was in a terrible condition. Apparently his horse had reared, throwing Fawad, the rider. He’d landed hard on some small rocks and as far as Sarah could tell, he’d broken his neck. In a misguided attempt to help him, his family had moved him about several times, first into the camp and then to his tent in. This had made the injury worse. Sarah did her best to alleviate the excoriating pain that Fawad was suffering, but no amount of medication was going to fuse his shattered bones back together again. She, along with his relatives, watched helplessly as the man died on the floor of his tent.

Sarah and Akbar drove back to the camp in silence. When they arrived, he stopped the Jeep just before the tents. He lifted a corner of her veil and kissed her cheek. It was damp with tears.

“It wasn’t your fault that Fawad died,” he said. He tried to wipe away her tears with his sleeve, but they continued to flow from the bottomless well of her frustration.

“If only they hadn’t moved him. If only we’d arrived earlier, I might’ve been able to do something.”

“You did everything you could. Get some rest. You look exhausted.” He took her to her tent and then left her to sleep.

However, Sarah couldn’t relax. She couldn’t remove the image of Fawad’s eyes rolling about in pain like marbles in a jam jar and the horrified faces of his relatives as they realised that Sarah wasn’t going to save him.

Finally, after many hours of tossing and turning about in her bed, she must have dozed off into some kind of slumber, because she woke up only to find that it was dark and the camp was silent. She rolled over. Akbar wasn’t there. After their initial falling out when they were first married, he came to her tent and slept with her every single night without fail. Indeed, their extremely active sex life was one of the reasons that Sarah was concerned about the fact that she wasn’t pregnant yet; it certainly wasn’t from a lack of trying.

Perhaps after the traumas of the day, Akbar thought that she would prefer to be on her own. She was certainly in no mood for sex, but she wanted the comfort and reassurance of having his arms around her. She wanted to hear him whisper in her ear that everything was going to be okay. Without him next to her, there was just a gaping emptiness of crumpled bed sheets, filled only with her visions of a dying man.

Sarah looked at her watch. It was late, very late. If Akbar was going to come, he would have by now. She decided to get up and find him. She threw on her abaya over her naked body, using it as an improvised dressing gown, and slipped out.

The entire camp was in darkness, but a nearly-full moon shone and Sarah knew the way between hers and Akbar’s tent so well that she could have done it in her sleep.

She was almost there when she saw someone slip out of his tent and creep away. Although the person kept herself hidden in the shadows, she knew exactly who it was. The tight-fitting abaya and the way the woman wiggled her hips were unmistakable.

“Rasha!” Sarah called out. She didn’t care who heard her, or how many people she woke up.

The black-covered figure in front stopped and turned around.

“Rasha, what were you doing in there?” Sarah asked, pointing at Akbar’s tent.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because it’s the middle of the night and you’ve just come out of my husband’s tent!”

“Your husband?” Rasha spat. “Akbar’s mine, not yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re nothing. You have no right to him. Akbar’s mine,” she repeated and ran off.

Sarah stood in the dark, too stunned to move until a cold wind blew through her abaya and she suddenly remembered that she was utterly naked under it. Feeling grossly exposed, she returned to her tent where she collapsed with exhaustion.

When she woke up in the morning, she wondered whether the events of the night before were just a dream, or rather a nightmare. She threw on her clothes and went to Akbar’s tent to find out. However, when she got there, it was empty. His men said that he was out hunting for the morning and wouldn’t be back for a while.

Sarah went in search of Rasha. If Akbar wasn’t there to tell her what was going on, she would get Rasha to explain it. However, when she walked into Rasha’s tent, she was leaning over a bowl, throwing up. Next to her was her cousin, Minna.

“What do you want?” Minna asked.

“What’s the matter with her? Can I help?” Sarah asked, automatically slipping into doctor mode.

“You can help by leaving, not just this tent, but this camp, and never coming back,” Rasha said, wiping her mouth on a cloth that her cousin held out to her.

“If you’re ill, you need a doctor and if you don’t want me to help you, someone should drive you to the Women’s Hospital where you can see someone else.”

“She’s not ill,” Minna interjected. “She’s pregnant.”

Sarah felt all the air leave her lungs as if she had been punched in the stomach. “Is it Akbar’s?” she asked.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Rasha said.

“Maybe Rasha will provide him with the son that you can’t,” Minna added.

“You bitch!” Sarah yelled and slapped Minna across the face.

Minna grabbed Sarah’s arm and dragged her to the opening of the tent. Minna was a lot stronger than she looked and it was only with a huge effort that Sarah prevented herself from being physically thrown out.

Once outside, Sarah tried to catch her breath and take in what had just happened. Her head reeled with what the two women had told her and now Sarah felt sick herself. How long had Akbar been sleeping with Rasha? How many months pregnant was she? Why hadn’t Sarah seen the signs before? She thought about what the Al-Mashid women said to her on her first visit to their camp about Rasha being a slut. Had they been trying to warn her?

She knew that Rasha wouldn’t provide her with any answers, so she went back to Akbar’s tent and waited for him to return.

“Have you been sleeping with Rasha?” she demanded as soon as he walked in.

Akbar didn’t reply. Instead, he put down his hunting rifle, poured himself a large glass of water and gulped it back.

“You have, Akbar, haven’t you? You’ve been sleeping with Rasha!” Sarah repeated.

“If you keep on telling me that I am, then maybe I will. Why do you keep going on about Rasha?”

“She was in your tent last night. I saw her come out.”

“Yes, she wanted to talk to me.”

“What about? What was so special that she had to sneak into your tent in the middle of the night to talk to do it?”

“That’s between her and me.” Akbar pulled out the dagger that he kept tucked in his waistband and began polishing it.

“Was it about the fact that she’s pregnant?” Sarah asked.

Akbar stopped wiping the dagger with his sleeve. “So you know? I guess everyone will know soon. It’s difficult for women to keep these things secret forever.”

“Is it yours?”

Akbar held up the knife to the light and examined it for any imperfections. “It will be,” he muttered as he resumed polishing the dagger.

“What do you mean, ‘It will be’? Either the baby is yours, or it isn’t. Which one is it?” Sarah knew that she was shrieking, but she didn’t care.

“I will claim it as mine.” Akbar put the dagger back into his waistband and poured himself another glass of water. “I’ve offered to marry her this weekend.” He threw back the water and then let the glass fall to the floor. A trickle of water came out and spread around Akbar’s feet turning the carpet a deep red colour like a blooming rose.

Sarah couldn’t believe that Akbar was planning to take another wife. “Why would you do that to me?” she asked. “I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you. I love you more than anything. You’re my desert rose.” Akbar tried to put his arms around her, but Sarah pushed him away.

“So why have you been sleeping with Rasha?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I haven’t slept with Rasha since we got married.”

Sarah looked at her husband. He’d effectively admitted to the fact that Rasha was some kind of ex-girlfriend. “So you’ve had sex with her, haven’t you? But she’s your cousin!”

“Not exactly my cousin.”

“I don’t care if she’s your second cousin, third cousin, or cousin once-removed; it’s still incest.”

 “Her grandmother wasn’t my mother.”

“What?” For a minute Sarah wondered if they were still talking about the same person. “Your mother said that Rasha was her granddaughter.”

“In a sense she is, yes, but she’s actually the granddaughter of my father and his fourth wife. My mother was his first wife.”

“And are you planning to have four wives?”

“If I have to.”

“Have to? You make it sound like you are being forced into this!”

“Do you think I want to be with anyone but you? I love you, Sarah, but this is something I have to do.”

“Why?” Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted to hear some ridiculous excuse from him about how he had to marry Rasha, which would basically be nothing more than an open, public affair with another woman.

“Rasha’s pregnant and the father was Fawad, the man who died yesterday. Fawad knew that she was having his baby and offered to marry her. Rasha says he was on his way to see me to ask me for my consent when his horse threw him.”

Sarah wasn’t sure whether she would believe anything that Rasha said. “It seems a bit strange that a woman who’s just lost her fiancé, the father of her child, would suddenly throw herself at another man the very same day.”