The Ruins of Us (20 page)

If you left the khat unchewed more than a couple of days, it spoiled, so Maxine spent those first days of every month circling the sitting room chewing, spitting her green spit, and lighting cigarettes between the long chews. Now she had the radio going, tuned to an American military station that played Benny Goodman, Tony Bennett, and others whose voices seemed radically misplaced on their flat, fenced stretch of desert.

What fool closes the pool because it’s too hot? Maxine wondered aloud. Rosalie knew that she didn’t want an answer; she just wanted her daughter out of the room so she could wear out the carpet and talk to shadows in privacy.

Rosalie had her watercolors out because it seemed like the sensible thing to do on a hot day when the pool was forbidden. Worse came to worst, if the sun did burn down the house, she could always dive straight into her brush cup like in the cartoons, her eyes wide and blinking from between her crunched-up legs. But she never had a chance to try because before she could make her first stroke, Zainab came slamming through the front door.

“Rosie, my father’s going to deliver a baby from a Bedouin woman outside camp. Come on!”

On most days, Maxine didn’t like Rosalie playing with Zainab. Maxine didn’t think that Americans should mix with the locals, even if Zainab’s father was a trained professional—a doctor who had saved Wayne March’s life, in fact, when he’d gotten potted on siddiqi out at the Tapline and fallen face first on a small hill of fertilizer that the gardeners hadn’t yet spread over the traffic medians. The chemicals, ingested through his gasping mouth, should have killed him, but Dr. Salawi gave him an elixir that made him vomit up every last bit of wet in his stomach, including the sid.

“Mama?” Rosalie asked.

“Go. Give these leaves to that desert mother.” Maxine handed her a bunch of khat. “Lord knows it can’t feel good to deliver a baby on a day like today, in a country like this one.”

By the time they arrived at the tents, Rosalie had snuck at least three leaves into her mouth. When she slid out of the car, she spit the remnants into her palm and dropped them into the sand by the jeep’s tire. Her heart was beating rapidly in her chest and, despite the heat, she felt the urge to bound from dune to dune, popping all the tiny polyps of the succulents that grew there. The world seemed rinsed, as if plunged in water and rid of its dull tea colors. She could see the heat shimmering in waves across the air. Palm fronds crackled as the leaning trees reached out to touch one another. Somewhere a woman screamed, the sound high-pitched, cutting through the shimmering air like a blade. Rosalie was twelve years old plus a few weeks, but in the last minutes, she sensed the earth had galloped past the sun at least twice, and she felt her skull pulse with new wisdom. She could feel the desert shifting beneath her feet—not a groaning, as she’d expected, but a quick movement so that she had to dance to stay upright.

“Come on,” Zainab said. “This way.” Her father had already gone ahead.

Inside the black goat-hair tent, a girl lay on her back in blood. Rosalie staggered at the smell. Dr. Salawi was on his knees near her hips, inspecting between her legs like she was a broken-down automobile. The women surrounding the girl spoke gruffly in Arabic, and Zainab looked eagerly from face to face. Rosalie gave the rest of the bundled leaves to one of the grannies, who sniffed at them before kneeling at the girl’s head. When the granny tried to feed her a leaf, the girl spat and went back to screaming, but soon, she was chewing leaf after leaf until they were gone. Her screams did not stop, but they became more rhythmic, as if she were trying to make a song from her pain. If she had known any prayers, Rosalie would have said them, but Wayne and Maxine were Southern Baptists in name and prejudice only; it meant they used whatever prayer-speak they knew to protest Abdullah’s presence in her life, years later. Their prayers were not for the grace of babies in a heathen land.

Finally, Dr. Salawi pulled the baby out. It was wet and silent, its tiny limbs pressed tightly to its chest. Even though it did not breathe or squall, the girl took it in her arms and rocked it. She kissed its small head and called out a prayer. She smiled at Rosalie.

“Why’s she smiling?” Rosalie asked. “That baby’s dead.”

Zainab asked the girl, who answered in a few words, still grinning.

“Because she is alive,” Zainab translated.

Her baby had not killed her, though it had tried.

The grannies buried the baby under a weeping carob tree even though they knew that some creature would come for it in the night. They were not angry in this knowledge. It was only the desert replenishing itself. In their careful movements, Rosalie saw love but no sadness. When you are born to a mother who talks to shadows, you see beauty in simplicity: a land that greets death with solemn silence; a mother who smiles simply because she is alive.

Look: a short jeep ride between me and this existence, she thought with wonder, sensing the enervating desert close at hand. There was no chain-link fence or glittering pool standing like a moat between her and this life. She felt suddenly dizzy, shaken by the enormous quiet of the grove. She could hardly believe that life existed there. Nobody had told her that whole families created worlds for themselves in the nothing sweep of the desert outside of the compound. She felt excluded and fascinated. She felt a pinching at her breast, like discovering a secret room in a house you thought was your home. There was so much more to know.

Yes, Rosalie thought. In that moment, Arabia was irrevocably part of her.

But there is a trouble peculiar to expatriate children who fall in love with Saudi Arabia. Their visas expire when they leave, and they quickly discover that the place they have loved so long does not want them back. There is no room in a closed Muslim society for nostalgic American children. With no possibility of return, these boys and girls, at first melancholy with their loss, soon create in memory the perfect homeland, a suitable object for all the yearning sadness in their quiet American lives.

Rosalie was thirteen when she and Wayne and Maxine and Randy left for good. And so in Texas, Rosalie began her slow fixation on the peninsula, singling it out on the maps in her high school textbooks, touching its outline tentatively, wondering how it was doing, that faraway country where she was born which did not want her back, though she would never stop loving it. Let this be a lesson to you, someone should have warned her yearning heart. Let this be a lesson in love—that you do not always get what you want. That sometimes, you must watch your love across a murmuring sea, nevermore to be close.

THREE SHARP KNOCKS
came at the door. Rosalie buried her face in the pillow, annoyed at the intrusion.

“Rosalie?”

It was Abdullah’s voice.

“What?” she said.

A pause.

“I . . . Would you like to go shopping in Bahrain? We can go this afternoon. I’ll take off work.”

It was his peace offering for the missed dinner, and perhaps more. He would buy her finery. A new bracelet, or a sapphire set in a tree of gold. Perhaps even an Italian silk dress. Undergarments made from French lace so elaborate and dense that they would hang off of her naked body like chain mail. She would accept the presents, but only to add to her war chest. According to the Koran, all gifts given in a marriage were the rightful property of the recipient. When she left the Kingdom, she would take her jewels and designer clothes. Then she would pawn them, hire the best international lawyer, and try to gain custody of Mariam. Though it broke her heart to admit it, she knew that Faisal would never leave his country or his father. In fact, she was probably ambitious in her hope that he would want anything to do with her at all if she divorced Abdullah. Perhaps she should start training her heart to function without the love of her first child, the miracle child who had insisted on being born a full six weeks early, pink and wrinkled as a skinned possum, so ugly that the nurses laughed every time they saw him.

“Give me one hour to get ready,” she said.

“OK. Dan’s on his way. He wants to go in for a beer.”

She held her breath and counted the beats of her pulse. She exhaled. Would Dan feel a twinge when he saw her with Abdullah? What had happened between them on the dune—she had been acting out. She hoped he realized that. Today, Rosalie would practice indifference. It would be the first step toward detachment from her current life. She would lay her fear and her love on a bed of ice until they were both gray as the dead-eyed hamour in the souq. She rolled off the mattress and dropped her nightgown to the floor. She pinched the soft flesh of her belly hard. Pain was one way to quell desire.

ON HER WAY
out of the bedroom, Rosalie glimpsed Faisal in the courtyard. She looked down at her son’s face through the window, his cheekbones spreading wide and high, creating an openness that made him look like a Pashtun. His was a mountain visage, defying gravity. How handsome he was. Like his father, but more unusual—the result of the two continents mixing in his blood. She waved, and he nodded solemnly. Whenever she passed him in the house, she wanted to squeeze his cheeks in her hands, squash them around to see if the blood still flowed there.

She heard the swish of the sliding-glass door, the click of the lock as he moved it back into place. Leaning over the banister, she looked for him in the sitting room below. Their eyes met.

“Faisal? Would you mind coming upstairs for a minute?” She wanted to have a moment alone with him. It was hard to be angry with people when you were alone with them, hearing them breathe, watching the clumsy movements of their fragile bodies. That was one reason why Rosalie couldn’t handle being alone with Abdullah. When he’d found her in the bathroom last night, she’d felt a softening toward him, a feeling that ran so contrary to what was in her heart that she hadn’t known quite how to react. But she had listened to her husband because she was concerned for her son. Faisal’s religious outburst revealed to her the stark truth that her boy, the one she had spent sixteen years raising, controlling almost everything down to the hue of the oranges that he consumed, had found his path away from the family and was now in the world, where either he would be in control of himself or others would be. She studied Faisal’s face as he mounted the stairs.

Before he made it halfway up, the doorbell rang and Abdullah charged out of the guest bathroom. He swung the door wide to reveal Dan Coleman. Rosalie watched Faisal’s face turn cold.

“Coleman! What, did you fly here? I guess I should never underestimate your need for a beer.” Abdullah looked up at her. “Habibti, hurry up. We want to make it before noon prayer.”

Faisal gave Dan a withering look, then turned and went back toward the courtyard. Rosalie considered following him outside but decided against it. She wasn’t sure she could control her tone in talking to Faisal. She suspected he’d known of Isra for some time now, and she worried that her bitterness over his knowledge would transform her concern for him into a retributive bark.

“Shut the door, you’re letting the AC out,” she said. The relief of the previous days’ north wind had disappeared, replaced by a damp stillness that made breathing difficult.

“You’ll be needing your gills today,” Dan said. “Got to practically swim through this air.”

IT WAS MIDDAY
as they made their way across the causeway. Whenever they went anywhere together, Abdullah had Dan drive. The Gulf, milky with salt, stretched out on either side of them. There was no wind, the water glassy as a lake, so that a single windsurfer kept capsizing, his red sail slowly tipping into the water. Inside the car, the air-conditioning blew loudly. Rosalie wanted to close her eyes and sleep. When she’d climbed into the backseat, she was so jittery that she almost leaned forward to tell Abdullah that she’d been alone with his friend. She had even kissed him. Did she still have the power to make her husband jealous? She wanted to see Abdullah’s features blanking in confusion, then the contorting effects of his anger.

“We’ll stop at a barber first. I should get cleaned up before we go to the shops,” Abdullah said.

Rosalie assessed the backs of their heads. Abdullah’s was bare, his graying hair cropped close to the neck. He was meticulous about upkeep. Dan, on the other hand—his hair was thick, a deep brown. A few white hairs had sprouted around his temples, and on top the hair was mussed, as if he’d forgotten to comb it that morning. It had grown shaggy, falling over his collar in tufts. Bachelor hair. He looked as unkempt as in his grad school days, except the lank hair was charmless now that it sat on a middle-aged head.

At the inspection station for vehicles reentering the Kingdom, blue-uniformed policemen and National Guardsmen moved between cars, checking in backseats and trunks. There were more of them than usual. Dan eased the car through the VIP lane and paused momentarily at the booth. A policeman with a patchy goatee and crooked teeth that gave him an underbite greeted them. Instinctively, Rosalie’s hands moved to her headscarf to make sure it was in place. In Arabic, Abdullah asked him what the commotion was about.

“The jihadis are acting up again,” the guardsman said. His eyes twinkled.

She supposed it was a good sign if a National Guardsman could joke about extremism. To him, the thugs were children, naughty children. Nothing to see here, just a bunch of amateurs with firecracker bombs. It was a risky comment to make, but she could tell that the man was not risk-averse. His eyes were small and hard, and he had fading bruises on his neck. Here was a person who had seen violence in some form, and their effete party—men with soft hands and shaggy hair and she with the carefully embroidered abaya that exposed her vanity—were another species altogether. Abdullah gestured to let the man see into the car but the guard put up both hands and shook his head as if they were old friends and inspecting the car would be insulting.

Abdullah nodded his thanks and climbed back inside. She noticed, not without pleasure, that he had grown rounder in recent days. She pursed her lips tightly, saw Isra prone beneath him, head thrust back, breasts protruding, heard her half-cries of pleasure, and as suddenly as it had flared, Rosalie’s affection vanished.