The Ambassador's Wife (15 page)

The women were silent. Tazkia stared at her anxiously while the others glanced at each other or the carpet. “It's not a test. You're just drawing.” When no one spoke up, she passed the hat to her left, to
Aaqilah. Tazkia pulled out a piece of paper, frowned at it, crumpled it in her hands, smoothed it against her sketchbook, and crumpled it again. There was a clatter as the women reached for their pencils, the creak of their stiff new books, and then nothing but the scratching of pencils on paper.

Miranda turned to look out the windows, forgetting she had covered them. All of her portholes were obscured by scarves and sheets, to conceal her women from view. It was unlikely that anyone would be able to see in here, on the third floor of the house, but her students' paranoia was contagious. The only uncovered source of light was that small square in the ceiling. It was still bright outside, still enough light burned through her makeshift curtains to illuminate their work. But it wasn't ideal. Sighing, she flipped open her own sketchbook. What could she do? Not Vícenta, not any woman. Their bed. It was the first thing that came to her.

The alarm on her cell phone startled her back into the room. “Okay, stop,” she said to the women. “Turn the page.”

“But I'm not done.” Mariam's chubby, round face gleamed with a sheen of sweat. She was the slowest of Miranda's students, an artist constantly losing sight of the forest because she couldn't take her eyes off the pine needles.

“You are for now. Forget what you have just done and find a new page. Everyone there?” The women nodded. Tazkia and Aaqilah stroked their clean pages with eager fingers.

“Now, go find the object you just drew, and bring it back here if you can. Or draw it where it is. I want you to draw it from observation. Look at it closely as you draw; notice everything about it, every little detail. Don't make any assumptions, just draw exactly what you see in front of you.”

With a rustle of rayon, the women stretched their legs. Tazkia shot out of the room first, followed by Aaqilah and Nadia holding hands. Mariam lingered, looking anxious. “What is it, Mariam?”

“I drew a teakettle…”

“You can go take our kettle, it's all right.” Relieved, Mariam smiled and slipped downstairs.

Miranda followed them, turning off at the bedroom she shared
with Vícenta. She looked at their mattress on the floor and then back at her sketch pad, smiling. It wasn't anything like what she had drawn. The blue felt blanket wasn't pulled up neatly but tossed in a heap at the foot of the bed. White sheets had been ripped from where they were tucked underneath the mattress and lay twisted, damp, and mangled. Vícenta's pillow was halfway across the room, where she had flung it that morning when it became lodged between their two bodies. In the corner, Miranda's squashed pillow held on to the vague outline of Vícenta's profile. Her head had been turned to the left, her cheek pressed on the embroidered roses of the pillowcase, her teeth gripping a fold of the cotton as Miranda took her hips between her hands. Even standing here, Miranda could still smell her, the dark, wintry forest pine of her.

The bed she had drawn was the kind of bed you might see in a children's first words book, an illustration of a generic bed. But it wasn't this bed. Quickly, she sketched their sex-tossed sheets, feeling a tug of longing in her gut, before returning to the
diwan
and her women.

As they continued scratching at their pages, she wandered the room, looking over their shoulders. Aaqilah drew her pencil along the stem of a potted plant, the basil Miranda grew in the courtyard, perhaps disappointed that she hadn't been assigned to draw Princess Barbie. Mariam huddled over her sketch of their ancient tin teakettle, erasing and redrawing its spout. A spiderweb spun from Nadia's now-steady pencil—it hadn't been difficult for her to find one in their several unused rooms. Tazkia was the last to return to the
diwan
, having drawn the bicycle that rusted against the walls of their house.

“Time's up,” Miranda announced. The women looked at her, slightly dazed, coming back into their bodies. “Tear out the first drawing so that you can lay it alongside the second, and tell me what you see.”

The air stood still as the women examined their work. It was unusual for the city to fall this silent, as if it were holding its breath. It was long after the clamor of lunchtime but before the muezzins' calls for evening prayers.

“Wow,” said Tazkia first. “Very completely different.”

“Different how?”

Tazkia squinched up her face, wrinkling her stubby nose. “More detailed?”

“Not so boring?” This from Aaqilah.

“And why is that?” The girls simply stared down at their two pieces, as if waiting for them to speak. “Because when you draw things from memory, you tend to set things down as symbols. Like the cocktail glass signs in airports.” Whoops, bad example. “Or like the airplane symbols you pass on signs on the way to the airport. They are recognizably planes, but not specific planes. Only when you observe an actual plane, and put down its specific lines on paper, can you see.” None of them had ever been on a plane, but they saw them overhead with alarming regularity, government planes on their way to the North.

Miranda leaned forward on her hands, pulling Tazkia's drawings across the carpet and holding them up. “Look at the first bicycle. It's a generic bicycle, a two-dimensional illustration of the word. We know what it is, but there is no personality there. But here—” She put the first one down and held up just the second. “Suddenly her bicycle has three dimensions. The handlebars are turned sideways. They have thick rubber grips on them, and tassels on the ends. The tires are slightly flat. The seat is banana-shaped rather than triangular. There is a screw coming loose behind the seat, hanging off of it. The basket on the front has a hole. You couldn't make this bicycle up; you couldn't imagine it.”

Miranda set down the drawings and turned Nadia's spiderweb sketches so that they were facing the women. The first was neat and geometric, a perfect hexagon. The observed spiderweb was larger, sprawling, an octagon with a small tear on one side, a thread hanging from the top. “Do you see? When you actually look at things, weird things happen that you would never know about were you not observing.”

Tazkia was kneeling, pulling drawings closer to her, inspecting them all. “Magic,” she said. “Like magic.”

“No.” Miranda shook her head, smiling. “It is only that there are more interesting things in this world than you can imagine. You
must go out. You must explore. And you must keep your eyes wide, wide open.”

AUGUST 18, 2010

Miranda

Several uneventful days pass before Aisha notices the state of Miranda's shirt. No one else has come near her. The men keep their distance from the hut; Aisha is the only person who speaks to Miranda, usually in monosyllables. Each day they walk through the slanting mountain sun to fetch water, eat their meager meals squatting in the dust, and crouch silently in the dark of their hut. Miranda tries to question the old woman about why she is being held, what plans the men might have for her, but Aisha only shakes her head and looks fearful.

“And Mukhtar?” she is finally desperate enough to ask one morning as they huddle over their tin plates of beans. Her need to know his fate has overpowered her terror of the answer. “My…my friend?” She almost says the word
guard
. But if they don't know who she is, she doesn't want to give it away, that she is a person deemed worthy of a guard.

Aisha's face shifts nearly imperceptibly. But there is something, a shadow crossing. Bile rises to Miranda's throat; please, let him not have died for her, because of her.

“Is he alive?” she persists. “Is he here?” When Aisha remains silent, she leans forward and touches the woman's rayon-sheathed arm. “Please, Aisha, is he alive?”

“You are asking too many questions. I do not know. I know nothing of this man.”

For a few minutes, Miranda falls silent. Either Mukhtar has been left in the mountains for dead or imprisoned somewhere else. He cannot have gotten away, not with blood streaming from the side of his head. She misses Mukhtar. In the last few years she has come to think of him almost as an overprotective brother, the brother she had longed for and her parents had not been inspired to produce.
Out on the team's practice range in the desert, he had taught her how to fire a Sig Sauer and an AK-47, never losing patience with her no matter how many times she missed the target entirely. Miranda was not a gun enthusiast, nor did she get any kind of macho kick from wielding deadly machinery, but she loved Tucker and his team and thought it wise to understand their weaponry. When she had fallen ill with typhoid (despite having been vaccinated), it was Mukhtar who took her to Dr. Jay, the embassy's doctor. When she had walked to Baskin-Robbins, Mukhtar carried home the pints of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream and lime-pomegranate sherbet. She had become accustomed to having a shadow.

“Are we in the North?” she asks, changing tack. She wants desperately to know where she is. “Is this Zajnoon's land?” She is only guessing, but Aisha looks up sharply at the mention of the sheikh's name.

“I'm right? Is he here? Is this one of his camps?” Her pulse speeds into hyperalertness.

Aisha stares at her as if she isn't sure what to say. Then, “Zajnoon is dead.”

“Dead?”
Miranda's mind somersaults. Surely this is good news? Will the violence end without the vicious, fanatical leader? She feels a surge of hope, though she knows Zajnoon's people are not the only rebel tribe in the North. Her thoughts fly to Finn; is he still working with the sheikhs? No, no, impossible. He would probably have been removed from post, if not by now then soon. Removed from the work he loves, from the project he initiated. And it is her fault. Is he even still in Mazrooq?

“The last government bomb. It destroyed his house, his wives, his sons.” Aisha's voice catches, as if she is holding back tears. This is the most information she has imparted thus far. Miranda wonders how many of Zajnoon's followers are still alive.

“But our struggle will not die,” says Aisha, with renewed vigor. “In his name, we will fight to our deaths.”

Miranda's hope fades quickly in the wake of this pronouncement. So it is Zajnoon's people who have her. What could they possibly want, other than a ransom? And how organized are they, suddenly
left leaderless? She is still puzzling over this when Aisha demands her shirt. “I will wash,” she says. “Here is a new one, a clean one.” She holds out a long-sleeved jersey emblazoned with the name of a British football team. Has it come from a former prisoner? Miranda hesitates before handing over her shirt, all she has of Finn's.
“Yalla,”
says Aisha impatiently. Slowly, Miranda unbuttons the shirt and slips it from her shoulders. The front is wringing wet. Desperate to maintain her milk supply in the wild hope Cressida could still profit from it, Miranda empties her breasts as often as possible. But still when she wakes, her shirt is drenched.

She holds out the soggy shirt to Aisha. “Milk,” she says. “I have a baby at home.” Perhaps this information will encourage leniency. Surely a woman would understand what it means to be separated from a child?

Aisha stares for a moment and then reaches her left hand toward the shirt. She pinches it and lets it drop. “Milk?” she says. “Son or daughter?”

“A daughter.” Miranda isn't sure she should be giving this information away, but she cannot think of anything else to say. She pulls the jersey over her head.

The woman clucks again in disapproval. “Maybe next time you will have a son,” she says.

Miranda bites back an instinctual defense of her daughter. When she was pregnant, the guards had constantly blessed her belly, wishing her a boy. But Miranda had wanted a girl for as long as she wanted a child at all. After the amniocentesis in London, when she and Finn told the guards they were definitely having a girl, the men still resisted the idea. This is not a country that rejoices at the birth of girls. “
Insha'allah
it will be a boy,” they repeated. Miranda and Finn tried to explain that they already knew the child's sex, but this just confused the men. Finally, Miranda gave up, though she could never resist saying, “But I don't
want
a boy. I
want
a girl.” It was important to her that they know that somewhere, by someone, girls were
wanted
.

Aisha adjusts her
niqab
one more time and disappears. Miranda assumes she has gone to fetch her something else to wear, but when the woman returns a few hours later, she is carrying a tiny parcel
wrapped in a dirty pink blanket. “You feed,” she says. “Feed her.” She thrusts the blanket toward Miranda, who gingerly takes it in her hands. It weighs almost nothing. In the dim light it takes her a second to discern the top of a tiny head covered with fine black hair. Kneeling, Miranda lays the baby on the floor in front of her and slowly peels back the blanket. Nausea wrings her stomach when she sees the tiny infant. Its ribs are clearly visible, propping up the skin like tent poles, its arms and legs wasted almost to bone. Its stomach is bloated and round. Miranda slips a finger around the edge of the filthy piece of cloth pinned at the tiny hips. A girl. The child watches her with large dark eyes, quiet. She doesn't have the energy to cry, Miranda thinks. It may be too late.

Aisha is watching her impatiently. She flips the blanket closed again, covering the child's shriveled form. “Feed,” she says again.

“Where is her mother?”

“
Mayyitah
. Dead.”

“And her father?”

“They were both killed. Government bombs.”

“She has no one?”

“No one is left.”

Miranda lifts the featherlight child, shifting her into her left arm as she lifts her shirt with her right hand. Queasiness at her disloyalty almost overwhelms her. But chubby little Cressida doesn't need this anymore, even if she could get to her. She presses the child's face to her nipple, but the tiny girl doesn't drink. She simply continues to stare up at Miranda, her cracked lips slightly open.