by Zoë Ferraris
Nayir had said yes, it was probably a sign. At the time he thought only of the obvious meaning, as it says in the Quran: that Allah's existence can be known by His signs, the mysterious structures of the universe. Yet here in the sitting room was another sign of sorts: the decrepitude of age, as dark and predictable as night.
Othman glanced at Nayir, his gaze inscrutable, and he whispered in passing, "The doctor says he has to walk around the house three times a day. It keeps the blood from clotting."
Nayir nodded sadly. The man's spirit was gone.
Tahsin motioned for Fahad to let go of Abu Tahsin, and he took his father's arm. The two brothers led him through the terrace door.
A moment later Othman came back. Everyone turned, expecting perhaps that Abu Tahsin was coming behind him. Othman regarded them awkwardly and to distract from their obvious discomfort begged them to sit. Othman's gesture of hospitality felt too formal. It made Nayir nervous, and he realized that—for himself at least—their friendship was vanishing, replaced by the cold, frightening propriety of the sitting room. Othman seemed to sense it too. He avoided Nayir's gaze, and everyone sat.
Nayir tried not to stare but couldn't help it. Othman hadn't shaved; his clothing was rumpled, his skin dull from lack of sleep. Fahad asked Qazi about his father's business, and Qazi began to talk about shoes, account books, employees, and foreign trade. Nayir waited, growing more anxious as the minutes went by. He felt ridiculously inferior, unable to participate in the conversation or even to understand it. He had to keep reminding himself that Othman was the fraud, the one who had lied, the one who should be ashamed of himself.
Abruptly Othman reached forward, picked up a box of dates, and extended it to Nayir. "Please have a date."
"No, thank you." Nayir touched his stomach.
"No, please. Just one."
Nayir raised his hand. "Really, I'd better not." Beside him, Qazi and Fahad were absorbed in their conversation.
"You're looking pale," Othman said.
Nayir plucked the front of his shirt from his chest. "It must be the heat."
"Would you believe, in heat like this, I found my coat?"
"Where was it?"
"At the back of the closet."
"Had you checked there before?" Nayir asked.
"I thought I did." Othman seemed to lose interest. He took a handful of dates and stood up with a grunt. "Anyway, you're hot. Shall we walk?"
Appalled by the indiscretion of having admitted that he, Nayir ash-Sharqi, desert tour guide extraordinaire, was actually hot, he mumbled a vague protest as he followed Othman into the hallway. Silently they traversed dark passageways and cut across vast, empty rooms until they reached a terrace door. Othman led him out onto a narrow loggia that overlooked the sea. Disorientation hit Nayir. He'd never been to this part of the house before. The ground sloped dangerously toward the cliff. Only a stone wall at the patio's edge protected them from a hundred-meter drop to the rocky beach below.
Othman motioned him along the loggia and through a narrow doorway. "Watch the stairs."
They descended a dank metal staircase barely wide enough for Nayir's shoulders. The air had a tacky, industrial stench. Eventually the stairs became shiny glass steps, and a blue light filtered up from below. Nayir walked carefully, fighting dread. Suddenly he spotted movement beneath his feet, the undulating rhythms of kelp and sea anemones, the sudden flicker of a brightly colored fish. At the bottom of the stairs, they stepped into an aquarium.
They were standing in the center of an enormous glass cavern, easily as large as the house itself and glowing in a phosphorescent halo of light. On all sides the ocean stirred with luminous creatures sunk in sad isolation. It was cooler here, but Nayir still felt clammy, and the undersea pressure seemed to weigh on his chest. He felt as if he'd entered a dungeon.
"It's impressive," he murmured. "Did your family build this?"
Othman shook his head and began to walk. They wandered in silence, studying the vast assortment of fish. Nayir recognized a masked butterfly fish. Othman called his attention to a blue-spotted stingray. He watched politely as it glided away, but his mind returned to an image of Othman from Nouf's journal, rescuing her at sea. Then it switched to the opposite images: Othman grabbing her by the wrists, smashing her over the head, dumping her body at the bottom of a wadi. It was horrifying, and selfishly, Nayir felt betrayed. A man doesn't know a friend until he knows his friend's anger.
Could Othman, with his strict sense of tradition and family honor, really have done it? Fornicating, kidnapping, possibly killing? The man standing in the aquarium looked as if he'd been kidnapped himself.
"Have a seat." Othman motioned to a metal bench that faced the widest glass panel. They both sat down. A school of black-spotted sweetlips shifted nervously in the glittering light. Othman watched them but seemed to retreat into himself, brooding.
Nayir crossed his arms to hide his unsteady hands. "I thought only the king had an underground aquarium."
"This used to be a royal house."
"Ah, yes." He smoothed down his shirt. He could feel a confession coming on.
"Brother, I'm sorry to have involved you in any of this," Othman said. He sounded sincere, but something in his tone made Nayir turn his head. "I talked to Katya this morning. She told me..."
Nayir hesitated. "I'm sorry. I meant to tell you that I'd seen her." Othman eyed him strangely. "We had lunch," Nayir said, which wasn't as difficult as his next admission: "And we went to the zoo."
"Ah. The zoo."
"I realize I should have told you earlier."
Othman gave a sad laugh. "You don't owe me any apologies. My sins are so much greater than yours."
Nayir agreed but felt the urge to console him anyway. "A sin is a sin."
"I appreciate everything you've done, Nayir." The words sounded remote, empty, as if he were profoundly tired of formality. Nayir sensed that something was about to break, that it would take only a nudge to shatter the wall of restraint.
Othman kept his eyes on the sea creatures. "I used to come here with Nouf." He laid a hand on his mouth, and for a moment he looked regretful, but when he dropped his hand, his face was bitter and closed. "Before she got engaged."
Nayir's eye twitched. "That must have been hard on you."
He didn't reply; perhaps he felt it was an obvious remark. Eventually Othman raised his chin. "She loved it when I told her about the different fish. There was one fish here, we used to see it all the time. It's a grouper of some sort, and the thing about groupers is that they're all born female, and when they get older, some of them turn into males." He gave a dry chuckle. "She loved that. She said she wanted to be just like the grouper, so when she grew up she could act like a man."
Nayir felt the same pervasive sadness he'd felt in the cabana. He sat still, waiting.
"I actually told my father about it," Othman said, giving a dry laugh. "What a mistake. I told him I wanted to marry Nouf. At first he thought I was joking, so I played along, but I think he began to suspect that it was the truth, and he was disgusted by it. So disgusted that when Katya came along, my father didn't care that her family wasn't like us, he didn't care that she was older. He just wanted me to get married. So we made the arrangements. But with Katya I made the biggest mistake of all." He paused, struggling with his next words. "She was a friend to me, and I didn't tell her what was really in my heart."
"That you didn't love her?"
Othman shook his head. "Not like I loved Nouf."
Nayir experienced a poisonous admixture of relief, guilt, and crippling anger. The idea of Othman being in love with his sister was not so disgusting anymore; it paled in comparison to Othman's behavior with Katya. He had used her—first, to keep up appearances with his family, and second, as a comforting presence, someone to soothe his broken heart, never mind that he was going to break her heart. Perhaps he had even used her to punish Nouf, who had dared to get engaged to somebody else. Nayir flashed on the jacket bazaa
r and a heap of sad, empty wedding coats destined for a forgotten closet somewhere.
"So your father knew about your feelings for her," Nayir said.
"Sort of. I didn't tell him everything."
"He knew you were the father of her child?"
"I think he suspected it."
Nayir knew Othman's next words would answer the deeper question that disturbed him—whether Othman had actually kidnapped her. He was afraid to ask, but he had to know.
"Is that why you paid for a private investigator—to prove to them that you didn't kidnap her?"
Beside him, Othman sat immobile, as if catatonic. Nayir knew he had to say it.
"You did kidnap her."
Othman shut his eyes. The tears fell then, down his cheeks in a line on either side. Nayir looked away.
"I'm sorry," Othman said. "I know what you think." After a painful moment when even the fish seemed to slow in their world, he raised his head. "It's true that I loved her, but brother, believe me, I don't know what happened. I've been crazy, crazy trying to figure it out. It leads nowhere. I've found nothing..." His voice cracked, and he stopped. "I paid for the investigator because I didn't know what happened, and that's the truth."
"Nouf had bruises on her wrists."
Othman shook his head. "I didn't kidnap her."
"We found your skin cells around the bruises."
He seemed confused. Perhaps it was the word "we." But if it caused him any pain, he didn't show it. "Nouf and I fought just before she got kidnapped." He swallowed hard. "She told me she was going to run away to New York. I couldn't believe it."
"So you grabbed her?"
"No, I was thrilled. I told her I wanted to plan a life with her. I told her we could move to New York together. I'd give her anything, let her do anything, but..." He paused. "She didn't want to. She wanted to start over."
"How did you end up grabbing her wrists?"
"I begged her, Please, please don't go!' She'd be ripping out my soul. She was crying too. She started to hit me. I grabbed her to make her stop, but it was hard." He unbuttoned his sleeve and rolled it up, exposing a series of faint discolorations from his wrist to his elbow. They might have been from scratches that had happened two weeks before. "She got me too. I had to stop her. She was frantic. I didn't realize I'd hurt her."
"Why was she so angry?"
Othman rolled down his sleeve with a steady hand. "When I realized that she was telling the truth, that she didn't want me to go with her, I said something I shouldn't have. I told her I would stop her. I didn't mean I was going to kidnap her—I only meant that I would tell my father about her plans." He covered his face with his hands and shook his head. "I apologized. I told her I didn't mean it—and I didn't mean it. I just didn't want her to leave."
Nayir nodded, not certain what to believe but stirred by the sincerity of Othman's words. "So you were meeting her at the zoo."
"We met there, yes. It was private. She liked it."
"How often did you meet there?"
He hesitated. "Once a week."
"She went to the zoo on the day she disappeared," Nayir said.
Othman looked at him. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. We found her shoe—and her footprints—on a service road behind the zoo. We also found evidence on her body. The dirt in her head wound matched the dirt from the service road. There was also some manure on her wrist. But there's something I don't understand. She fought with you that morning, and she went to the zoo after that. Why would she concoct a lie about needing to exchange her wedding shoes and then go to the zoo instead, when you weren't going to be there?"
Nayir waited, but Othman sat rigidly staring at the fish. "I don't know," he whispered.
"Is it possible she went there to meet somebody else?" Nayir asked.
"No, that's ridiculous. She probably went to ... I don't know, maybe it reminded her of us." He moved his hand to his eyes and pressed them hard. "Maybe she went there to say goodbye."
"But who else would have known about the zoo?"
Othman sighed. "I don't know. Maybe she told Muhammad. She told him everything."
"What about someone in the family?"
"She didn't tell anyone in the house—it was too risky."
"Did she have any friends?"
He shook his head. "She did have friends, but she wasn't the kind of person who would confide something like this to anyone. She was more comfortable with the dogs."
"As far as we can tell, you're the only person who knew where she might have been going that day." Nayir tried to keep the judgment out of his voice, but his thoughts were spiraling in on themselves. It seemed obvious now. Not only was Othman the only one who knew about the zoo, he was the only one with a motive to follow her that day. They'd just had a fight; she'd stormed out of the house. He had probably gone after her to rectify things—or to stop her from going to New York.
"Where did you go after the fight?" Nayir asked.
Othman crossed his arms tightly over his chest. "I was too upset to stay here," he said. "I went for a drive. When I came back later that afternoon, she was gone."
"You were alone in the car?"
"Yes."
"I see."
"I know," Othman said. "I wish I could offer you some proof, but I can't. And your surprise about this mess—I have felt it myself, I still feel it. But I never actually looked at the thing itself." He pinched his fingers together and poked the air with each word. Nayir saw the shame and anger in the gesture. "I never had the guts. She never let me in. I spent months trying to open her up, trying to make her happy, to make her trust me." He pressed his lips together. "After it happened, after I told her I loved her, she pushed me even further away. And dammit—" His voice cracked. "I still loved her." He turned away, angrily wiping tears from his cheeks.
Nayir looked back at the glass. A clown fish swam by, urgent and paranoid. Somewhere above them a generator switched off, and silence descended. Nayir, feeling uniquely inept at discussing matters of the heart, became absorbed in his thoughts. He waited for Othman to speak.
"I would never have hurt her," Othman finally said. "Disgusting though it may seem to you, I loved her, and she was carrying my child."
Nayir returned to his Jeep. He could feel helplessness sinking into him like sand in an hourglass, filling him, weighting him, and he wanted nothing more than to return to his boat and set out to sea, perhaps to a quiet spot down the coast. Drop anchor. Fish. Yes, he would fish, and lie in the sun, and watch the windsurfers and the gulls and the boats passing by. That was all he needed. Just a few fish and a quiet place to forget the one thing that was bothering him: Othman hadn't asked what else he'd discovered about the case. There were too many lingering questions. Why had they found her body so close to the old campsite? Why were the camel and the motorcycle together in the back of the truck? Could Nouf have done that by herself? Where was the truck? If Othman was genuinely perplexed by her kidnapping, wouldn't he want answers to these things as well?
Just as Nayir was climbing into his car, he caught a glimpse of black and saw a woman emerge from a nearby Toyota. It was Katya. He was struck by her courage, coming to face Othman so soon. When she saw him, she flushed and averted her gaze.
"Hello," she said.
He greeted her, but she seemed at a loss for words, and an awkward silence deadened the space between them.
"Thank you," she said, "for everything last night."
"You're welcome." He felt the urge to say something—anything—but nothing seemed right. He felt unbearably self-conscious. Not knowing what else to do, he said goodbye and turned back to his car. She turned just as quickly and walked toward the house.
27
THE BOAT BOBBED QUIETLY on the waves. Nayir sat on deck, fishing pole in hand, staring at the expanse of sea. From the left he heard a buzzing, a jet-ski no doubt, and sure enough, a moment later a woman came zipping over the water. She was wearing a bikini that looked like scraps from a tailor's floo
r, something that would rip if she sneezed. She was also pressing buttons on a cell phone, the other hand on the ski, steering recklessly. Defiantly, he didn't avert his gaze. He waited, watching. How long would it take her to realize he was staring? But she didn't notice. She was absorbed in her phone call. Her sleek brown thighs failed to arouse him. All he could think of was the fish she was scaring off.
Two days on the water had managed to put some distance between him and the events of the past few weeks. This morning he had finally been able to think about his conversation with Othman. It seemed absurdly false from a distance. Othman had hit Nouf on the head and dragged her out to the desert and left her there. So what if they hadn't found his prints on the service road at the zoo? They could have been obscured in the struggle. Even Mutlaq would admit to that.
But why had Othman done it? Had he needed to release his rage? Why not some other kind of release—a forgetting, moving on? Those who believe, and suffer exile and strive with might and main in Allah's cause, with their goods and their persons, have the highest rank in the sight of Allah. That was true jihad, the giving up of goods, hopes, desires, when life demands it, when not to give up would lead to wrong. But Othman hadn't given up, and he'd become a liar. His love for Nouf—was that a lie too?
The only question now was what to do about it. In theory, Nayir should take the whole thing to the police, to the judges or the mosque and the men in charge of law, but since the examiner's office had already closed the case—decided, in fact, that there was no case to close—then what hope did he have of stirring up justice from a system so easily corrupted by the rich? Even with the evidence that he and Katya had collected, there was not enough proof that Othman had actually kidnapped his sister or delivered that last blow, the one that had knocked her unconscious and allowed her to drown in the wadi. Nayir acknowledged that he could be wrong about Othman, and his mind circled relentlessly back to this hope.
It was possible, of course, to try Othman for zina—specifically, for sex out of wedlock. But the family would issue a punishment for that, which would probably be the same as no punishment at all—or perhaps a punishment for everyone. Nayir could imagine the look on Nusra's face if she ever found out that Othman had been intimate with Nouf. Personally, he hoped to spare her the knowledge. Othman could be tried for incest, but that didn't seem fair either. It wasn't really incest in a technical sense—he wasn't her blood—and even if a court established that he was her brother under law and mehram to her, Nayir didn't think it was humane to punish a man for being in love, or for thinking he was in love, if that's what it was.