The Ambassador's Wife (14 page)

At the souq he found a cheap new phone. Only the necessary people had the number. Well, most of the necessary people. All except one.

He had moved to the Old City with the help of Tucker and his team in the middle of a cold, moonless night. The press hasn't found him yet. Soon, they will lose interest and go back to stalking celebrities, spying on the royal family, and occasionally libeling an ordinary person, just for sport. Finn's Mazrooqi neighbors watch his door, noting his comings and goings with Cressie and sometimes with Bashir or Negasi. His devoted bodyguard Bashir had quit the police force and the CP team in order to come sleep in the small shed in the courtyard. Finn had discouraged him, saying that he couldn't pay enough, that the embassy offered better benefits, but Bashir would not be dissuaded. He had sworn to protect Finn for as long as he was in the country and that was that. “If you don't care for yourself, care for your daughter,” Bashir had finally said, silencing him. Tucker stopped in at least twice a day, out of guilt and fear that Finn would be next. He had even broached the subject of sending Cressida out of the country. “To whom?” Finn had asked. He had no one left but an elderly aunt; Miranda's mother had wandered off to Mexico or South America, and her father was hardly capable of caring for an active toddler. But even had Finn had a younger brother or sister
with the emotional and financial resources to care for his daughter, he isn't sure he could let her go. The house is empty enough without Miranda. If Cressida were not there to distract him with demands to “play bears” or read her Corduroy books, how would he keep his mind from the sharp blade of loss?

Negasi and Teru take turns visiting, always with tubs of Tupperware packed with muffins, quiche, or salads. “I don't think you're allowed to be giving me food,” Finn tells them. “I can't take it.” But in the end he does, to avoid breaking their hearts. They need to care for him as much as he needs to care for Cressie.

Ordinary things feel like luxuries. He can walk to the grocery store, buy his own milk and cereal. Karim is his ever-ready guide, helping him to navigate the warren of streets and to find the freshest produce at the best prices. He can decide to go out to dinner at the very last minute and walk to a restaurant. He can sit in the garden of the Ahlan Hotel and watch Cressie tear mint leaves into tiny pieces. And then there is the house. Like Miranda's former home, it has four stony stories, tiny windows, and nearly a dozen rooms. He's hired a Somali woman to come clean once a week and kept Gabra to watch Cressie when he is working. But mostly, he and his daughter are alone.

One perk of being out of a job is that he's free to devote all his energies to the search for Miranda without the distractions of diplomacy. Ignoring the FCO's warnings, he recruited enough people to create his own little network of spies and investigators. It is useless for him personally to set out on a quest for her. He knows that. He isn't a fool. He would need permissions to travel through each checkpoint, he would set himself up as an easy target, and people would know he was coming. He is not anonymous here. And there is Cressie. How can he walk into known danger when she is already missing a mother?

Yet this inability to travel drives him mad. He wants nothing more than to walk the mountains and valleys searching every single house for her. Nothing could be worse than this waiting, this endless nothingness. And he knows from long experience that these situations always involve interminable stretches of inaction and patient waiting. There have been a few false leads, spottings of Western women in remote locales, but no real progress. Every trace of Miranda and the
other women seems to have been swept from the desert, as if by a broom.

M
ADINA AND
M
OSI
help him lug the paintings from Miranda's former home—where she had continued to teach her class until they married—down the street to his gates. Before removing them from the rooftop room where Miranda kept them, he seals them into their cardboard boxes with borrowed tape. Mosi and Madina knew what they were, though only Miranda had had the key to that room. Finn had found it in the purse she had left behind in her studio. “If you see the women,” he says, “please reassure them that their work is safe. And unseen.” Having failed to protect Miranda, the least he can do is try to protect the women she loves.

JUNE 7, 2007

Miranda

When Finn and Miranda arrived at her house, she ran up the stairs calling, “Allah Allah Allah!” in imitation of the local men broadcasting their presence to women in time for them to hide themselves. No one responded. Given the number of housemates she had, it was astonishing that so few were ever home. She extracted a set of keys from the patchwork bag that served as her purse and contained a book, a sketchbook, three pencils, a pack of sugarless Orbit, a camera, and a bag of raisins, and continued up to the top floor. Finn followed her, his long legs taking the stairs two at a time.

On the roof, she unlocked the small padlock on the door of a tiny stand-alone room and pushed open the door. It didn't open very far—the room was nearly full. The stench of linseed oil and turpentine was overwhelming in the windowless space. She turned to the first box of canvases and pulled the light cord.

“This is one of Mariam's,” she said, tilting it forward to show Finn. “She's really coming along. Look at her use of texture.” The first painting was a still life of
foll
, the chains of jasmine flowers worn to
celebrate weddings, Fridays, or funerals. Three chains lay abandoned and entwined in a
diwan
, their petals browning around the edges. The red cushions of the
diwan
, created by rolling paint-soaked rags across the surface of the canvas, were so invitingly velvety Miranda could hardly restrain herself from stroking a finger along their seams. Yet the jasmine petals were silk-smooth. Mariam was in love with the static, but she did it so richly Miranda was loathe to steer her in another direction.

They looked through dozens more paintings, of horses, houses, camels, gardens, and landscapes, before they came to Nadia's wedding series. Weddings were seriously single-sex affairs here. Guests were patted down before entering a women's celebration to make sure they were not carrying a camera or cell phone. Only an official (female) photographer could capture the bride and her guests. Even this was too terrifying for many women, who pulled their
hijabs
back over their heads as the bride and her photographer approached. Nadia worked from her cousin Imaan's wedding album, painting vibrant scenes of revelry certainly unwitnessed by at least half of the population. Her faces were blurred, like those of Degas's dancers, and her style impressionistic. But she painted the bare shoulders and knees, the tilted hips, the long locks of hair tumbling down around waists. Miranda was impressed with how accurately she captured movement, in the reach of an arm and the toss of a head.

“She's an accidental Degas apprentice.”

“Wow,” said Finn, properly awed.

“I know. I just wish I could
show
them somewhere,” she said. They stood together looking at the last painting for several minutes.

“What about in another country? Oman or Egypt?”

“Maybe. I don't know. We haven't really talked about where things will end up, we're still wallowing in the process.”

Finn looked up suddenly, cocked his head to one side. “What about Tazkia? I don't see anything of hers?”

“Ah,” said Miranda. “Tazkia. Tazkia gets a bit of extra security. Hang on…” She stepped deeper into the closet, fumbling in the dim light of the farthest corner until her fingers found a sharp edge of the metal trunk. Pulling her key chain from her purse, she unlocked the
clasp with a miniature key. “Stay there, I'll take one out,” she called back to Finn, who lingered underneath the bare bulb, watching her with starkly shadowed eyes. Carefully, Miranda freed a recent painting; Tazkia had created it from an old sketch of Vícenta. Cradling it in her arms, Miranda spun on her heel and held it up to Finn without speaking.

For a moment he simply stared. “Mira,” he finally said. “Are you sure you know what you're doing?”

“No,” she said. “But she does.”

By the time Miranda met Finn she had already been working with the women for more than two years. While she had slowly grown closer to all four, her relationship with Tazkia had evolved into a thing apart. Nadia was still so nervous every time she arrived that it took several minutes for her hands to stop trembling. Mariam was a plodding perfectionist—not without talent but without a flicker of fervor in her heart. Aaqilah was their fairy-tale artist, dreamily daubing her saccharine fantasies of romantic love: men on horseback wooing shadowy maidens, poets swooning over their quills, long-haired princesses stroking kittens and looking glazed with lust. The kinds of things one paints when one has no experience of men. Miranda's teeth ached every time she glanced at Aaqilah's easel.

But Tazkia. Her cartwheeling firework of an artist. Tazkia was made of passion; she blazed her way through sketchbooks and across canvases, leaving dazzling color and contorted human shapes behind. She was Miranda's Mazrooqi soul mate. Miranda enjoyed teaching the other women but had no personal stake in their creations. Tazkia she wanted to show to everyone. She wanted to set ablaze her booster rockets and launch her into the art world. And yet, it was her work that was most likely to doom them all.

A
SINGLE RAY
of sunlight streaming in through a tiny square cut into the roof of Miranda's
diwan
caught the dusty air, exposing the glittering powder with which the women filled their lungs. Atoms of stone exhaled centuries ago that had drifted out windows and down narrow passageways, in and out of mosques, in and out of Mazrooqi
mouths. Male and female, adult and child, believer and heretic, sharing breath. Miranda contemplated the light, the tumbling grit, tempted to draw out her own sketchbook. Pieces of the universe, as old as God, rained down on them.

She sat on the floor at the end of the rectangular room, charcoal pencils and pastels fanned out in front of her. The women were still floating onto the cushions,
abayas
sinking down around them like parachutes, two on either side. Aaqilah and Nadia on her left, Tazkia and Mariam on her right. Their faces were bare,
niqabs
flipped back over their heads. As Miranda shuffled through a stack of sketchbooks on her lap, they unzipped bags, curled their bare feet underneath them, and lifted their eyes to her, hopeful, wary, eager, anxious.

They had been meeting for several weeks. Each time, the women were incrementally more relaxed, more confident. But it was slow. Their fears were too well founded to be vanquished entirely. In her first class, as if to make sure Miranda understood what they risked, they had told her—in turns, interrupting each other in their imperfect English—the tale of Aila. Instinctively the girls who doodled in the margins of their school notebooks were drawn to each other and formed a kind of protective secret society. Tazkia, Aaqilah, and Mariam had met as children, scribbling with their fingers in the dust of the alleys near their homes until adult arms finally descended to restrain them. Nadia and Aila, who came from villages in the North, had moved to the city later, as teenagers. Rarely did they meet all together, afraid of discovery. But in pairs they encouraged each other, rationalized away their sins, offered the comfort of shared guilt.

Aila had been among the boldest, sketching caricatures of their teachers and friends, which she shared only with her fellow artists before tearing them into confetti or setting fire to them in an unpopulated alley. When her father discovered one such drawing on the back page of a textbook, he had taken Aila by the hand without speaking and led her to the room where her mother was ironing their sheets. “Go,” he'd said to his wife. “I have a lesson to teach to your daughter.” As soon as the woman was out of sight Aila's father had turned the iron on its side and stood behind the girl, holding her wrists. With slow deliberation, he had pressed her palms against
the scorching metal. Her mother had responded immediately to her daughter's screams but had been unable to pull her husband's arms away. Aila had been hospitalized with third-degree burns for thirteen days before she died of septicemia.

The story had a dampening effect on Miranda's professorial passion. While she hadn't been cavalier in inviting the women to study with her, she had insufficiently grasped the peril in which she placed them. Never had such responsibility been laid on her shoulders. Yet, here they were. Four hungry souls, gathered before her, their passion overwhelming their terror. Did this not have to be honored? Knowing what they dared, how could she
not
teach them?

“I have some extra sketchbooks and pencils,” she said carefully, passing them around. “In case you would like them.” Sketchbooks and pencils were never extra, never in danger of going unused. But none of the women—whose parents were shopkeepers, taxi drivers, or unemployed—could afford to buy them for themselves. They had been drawing and painting on pages torn from school notebooks and magazines, in the margins of textbooks. She had to find a way to give them what they needed without it looking like a gift, like charity. They touched the thick new paper with wonder. Tazkia bent to inhale its woody scent.

“I have a new exercise for you to try today,” Miranda said. “So I'm not going to waste time talking. First, I want you to draw an object from memory, from your imagination. It will be something you can find in this house or in the courtyard, but not in this room. It could be a plant, a teakettle, a chair. Think about this object. Summon it. You will have thirty minutes to work. This is the first half of the exercise.”

“We can pick anything?” asked Tazkia.

“No. Here…” Miranda picked up the cloche hat lying upside down beside her. Vícenta's hat. “I've written the names of four objects on scraps of paper and put them in this hat. You will each pick one piece of paper, and draw what is written on it. Okay? Any questions?”