Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “But this is the best bit,” Annie said, flicking a switch in the hall. “Air-conditioning! It’ll make such a difference. It’s pleasant now, but the summers are . . . well, they don’t call this ‘hellish Muscat’ for nothing.”

  “How do you cope?”

  “By leaving. I’ll get away again this year, for the hottest months. Go to Switzerland and then home. Poor Rolf has to stick it out, though. It’s like a furnace.” She led him down a corridor to one of the bedrooms, where easels were stacked against the walls, and canvases, used and unused, stood in clumps. “And, look, Rolf can have his own studio now. Honestly, I cannot wait to get out of Muttrah.”

  “But it’s lovely there. Authentic.”

  “Maybe, but that house never felt right to me.”

  When they got back home, Annie went to the kitchen to make lunch, while Gabriel stood in the front room facing the wide, narrow window, hands in his pockets. Annie was right. There was something odd about this place. He had come indoors, yet felt as though he was still outside. Warmth permeated his bones, like the heat of direct sunlight, even though he was in the cool indoor umbra. Someone passed through the room behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Whoever it was had gone to the kitchen, but all he could hear was Annie banging about.

  Gabriel shivered.

  There was something odd about this house.

  They were invited out again that night, to a party in the home of soon-to-be-neighbors. Gabriel played it Annie’s way—he chatted and flattered, laughed at jokes he didn’t altogether understand, and frowned in concentration when the conversation turned to the atrocities just north of them, across the Strait of Hormuz.

  “Saddam Hussein is as much of a tyrant as the Ayatollah,” said Thomas, a Dutchman, standing with a small group by the outdoor buffet. “They should both be wiped out.”

  “I thought he was the good guy,” said Gabriel. It hadn’t impinged much on his existence, the Iran‒Iraq war, but now he was a lot closer to it—uncomfortably so—and he realized the only thing he knew about it was that the Ayatollah was a raving madman.

  “Hussein—a good guy?” Thomas exclaimed.

  Embarrassment drenched Gabriel; he had said “baksheesh” again.

  “He took power in a coup, wiped out his own cohorts, and now the West is throwing him garlands!”

  “No, no,” said Jasper, all earnest, “America is neutral! Just like the Soviets.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Hussein’s tanks are Soviet,” Thomas explained to Gabriel, “but his intelligence is American.”

  “The West has no choice,” Mark said flatly. “If Saddam doesn’t win this war, the Ayatollah’s fundamentalism will flow out of Iran, and God knows where that will lead.”

  Gabriel glanced around the walled-in, paved yard, with a solitary tree in the corner, and noticed how the men were all standing together, while the women were chatting indoors, draped across the living room. Voluntary segregation.

  “This is propaganda,” said Thomas. “America should not be assisting this dictator. If he’s still in power when this war is done, his own people will pay.”

  “They are already paying,” said Jasper, “with their young men.”

  “And he’s building a nuclear reactor,” said Thomas. “And using chemical weapons, according to the Iranians.”

  Gabriel was aghast. “Chemical weapons?”

  “Yes,” said Thomas. “We seem to be going backward, not forward.”

  “World War One rolled up with a nuclear threat,” Jasper said grimly. “Something for everyone.”

  That night, as the night before, Gabriel remained trapped in restless sleep, his dreams intrusive, his consciousness too close to the surface. This was the very state he feared—the wretched half-sleep that suspended and exposed him. That was when blackness came. . . . Live burial, coffin closed, closed on the living, sinking into quicksand, drowning in sand, in water, mud, like Flanders, Flanders-like mud. . . . Every type of burial. Always burial, always alive. It rushed at him from the depths whenever he was off his guard and had lost grasp of his own thoughts. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t contain his thinking.

  He opened his eyes. Turned. Threw off the sheet. Silence hummed in the background, in this quiet, quiet town. He wanted to switch it off. Silent Night Effect: Off.

  Several times he shook himself, like a dog, head to tail, to throw off the sleeplessness. It will wear itself out, he thought. All I can do is wait. Time, Time, the Medicine Man. . . . He trusted in it, waited for it to do its thing. He would let time bleed him, imagine the blood flowing into the tin dish, like in the Elizabethan era, believing it would make him better, while in truth every hour was making him worse. Still, he would go on hoping for a lighter day. An easier day. He was, had always been, an optimist.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Sandra, of making love to her . . . and of never making love to her again.

  When the first shades of daylight pushed slowly across his walls, opening out the night, it brought some relief. Gabriel slept for an hour and woke again in a sunlit, breathless house. He got up and went downstairs, glancing into the diwan, where beams of sunlight slid in from high windows, slanted across the air, and landed, like children’s slides, on the red rugs.

  The kettle was burbling in the kitchen, so he walked in, saying, “Sleep any better?” And as quickly realized that he was talking to a stranger.

  “I didn’t know there was someone else staying here,” he said to Annie, when she came down some hours later, poorly slept and cranky.

  “Huh?”

  “Your friend. She was in the kitchen earlier.” She had been leaning against the sink, wearing a long blue kaftan.

  Annie blinked at him. “What?”

  “You could’ve told me you had another guest.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Well, she sure as hell wasn’t the maid. Not in a kaftan that was slit up to here.”

  “You been dreaming, Gabe?”

  “No. Tawny hair. Long legs, knobbly toes. Went upstairs. At least, I think she went upstairs.”

  Annie picked up the coffee pot, took off the lid and inhaled, as if the aroma alone would keep her going until fresh coffee brewed. “You need to wake up, Gabriel. Red hair, long legs? Dream on.”

  Perhaps she was right, he thought. Bad night, early sun, dazzling. . . . Maybe he had dreamed her. If so, he must do so again.

  He helped Annie set up breakfast on the glass table in the front room. “I don’t know how you two can leave this house, I really don’t.”

  “I told you. I don’t like it.”

  “But why not?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno. It has a kind of atmosphere, I suppose.”

  Rolf joined them in ebullient mood. As he sliced a mushy peach with meticulous care, he told Gabriel about a particular spot near Nakhal where he liked to paint.

  Gabriel watched him fuss over the fruit, then suck its gooey slices into his mouth, disintegrating on his lips. She—the woman in the kitchen—had been holding an apple and, with her eyes fast on him, had bitten into it. Silently. No crunching. It confused him that he could not hear her munch in the dead quiet, but then she had dipped her head, walked past him and out of the room.

  Annie was right. Must have been a dream, since dreams have no sound.

  “Over and over,” Rolf was saying, with his forceful enthusiasm, “I’ll paint the Ghubrah Bowl until I catch its light and pin it down. You will see, this weekend, how it changes.”

  After he had hurried off to work, Annie and Gabriel sat in silence. Annie turned her engagement ring around her finger with her thumb. Voices and screeches filtered in from the street.

  “Well,” she said eventually, “I’ve a lot to do, packing and so on.”

  “I can help.”

  “It’s fine. You should go out, explore the town. You’ll only get under my feet otherwise.”

  So Gabriel took himself through the suq where, for the first time, he properly opened h
is eyes to the Middle East. The narrow alleys, mostly shaded by corrugated-iron sheeting hanging over the shops, were busy enough, though nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. There were scarcely any women about, and those he glimpsed were shrouded in black, so it was mostly the men who were buying the groceries, and sitting on the steps of their own shops—Indians, Arabs, Africans—calling out to Gabriel, some of them, in unintelligible Arabic. When he came to the seafront, the Corniche, he set off toward the old town, expecting to find it around the bend. The hills, which hugged Muttrah like a protective ring of friends, glowed in the morning sun, and below them white buildings—old merchants’ houses mostly, with roofed balconies and intricately latticed railings—curved along the sea in a graceful arc. Dhows bobbed about in the port, their prows raised and their back-ends boxy, like grand old dames wearing bustles. Gabriel stopped by the railing and, for a moment, could almost feel Max beside him, leaning on the railing also, his spectacles on the end of his long sweaty nose. He would have loved these beautiful boats. As kids, they had messed around in dinghies and talked of sailing the world together when they grew up.

  On the horizon, oil tankers were waiting offshore. Muttrah formed a perfect natural harbor, a horseshoe of sea pressing into the coast. As Gabriel walked on, Muttrah Tower looked down on him from its perch on one of the hills.

  Old Muscat was not where he’d thought it would be. He went around another bend, and another, until finally he skirted a hill and saw a gathering of houses tucked into the mouth of a ravine. A fort perched over it—al-Jalali Fort, perhaps, which had once looked out for the little town and its inhabitants. Gabriel’s legs were beginning to feel the walk, but he wandered between the low houses, climbing back streets, lifted by every minute of solitude and by every face that passed him wearing no expression of condemnation.

  That evening, when they were all in the diwan—Rolf reading, Annie and Gabriel playing cards at a low table—Gabriel nudged Annie’s knee with his foot and nodded toward the door.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “What?”

  “Your mysterious guest.”

  Annie looked around again, and back at him.

  Gabriel spread out his hand. “Don’t you think we should be introduced?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “I just saw her go into the kitchen.”

  “Gabriel,” she said wearily.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Dreaming again, am I?”

  His sister’s shoulders seemed to retract, come closer to her body. “There’s nobody here except us.”

  “In this room, maybe, but there is somebody in the kitchen.”

  Annie put down her cards, pushed herself up from the floor and went through to the kitchen. Gabriel followed. “Nobody in here either.”

  Perplexed, he leaned over her shoulder.

  Annie gave him a sharp, steady look. “Don’t start having visions, Gabriel. We have quite enough on our plates at the moment without you going doolally.” She went back to the diwan and, as she sat down, Gabriel caught her rolling her eyes at her husband, which forced him to acknowledge the other dialog that was going on—the one between the two of them to which he was not party, the one about him. That look of impatience and irritation accentuated his exclusion.

  Isolation shook him. There was little difference between this and home. He might as well have stayed in Cork, enduring ignominy until people lost interest, because to come this far and still find himself alone was proving equally hard.

  He wondered what his mates were doing right now. Having a pint, perhaps, while at the School of Music the evening students would be coming in, scales up, scales down; the sonorous moan of a cello would be escaping the old walls; the river outside would be black and cheerless, but the city would be humming with traffic and the pubs filling with customers, as pints were poured and lined along the counters. All this he had denied himself.

  Welcome to exile.

  “Are you playing or not?” his snappy sister asked. The one he didn’t recognize.

  He ambled back to the table and picked up his cards. It might have been a shadow, he supposed; shadows, after all, tended toward blue, and she wore blue. Loneliness could make you mad. His own self-respect and the respect of others had gone forever. Perhaps he should go help starving kids in Africa. Or work in a Romanian orphanage. Live a life of contrition. Contrition—that strange Catholic concept. It was all coming back to him, the Catholic stuff. Had the schools, against the odds, managed to instill such a belief in sin that now, now he had really committed one, he grappled and clung to that discarded morality?

  It wasn’t a sin, a voice said, it was a mistake. A voice. Her voice—the woman who had not yet spoken.

  Rolf was standing over them. “You two,” he was saying, “this is enough now. You must stop this tiptoeing. It’s like living with paper shapes.”

  Annie threw down her hand.

  “So talk now,” Rolf went on. “Courtesy serves no purpose here.”

  Gabriel glanced at his hand, and also put down his cards. It was a good hand. A pianist’s hand. His thin sister, her eyes bigger than they used to be—the rest of her had shrunk—was staring past his shoulder. He swung around, expecting to see the other woman, but Annie was looking at the wall.

  “I don’t know how you can imagine I have anything to say,” he said to Rolf. “I’m deeply sorry, but I’ve already told you that, told everyone that, and it isn’t good enough, so what’s the point of repeating it?”

  “But Annie has plenty to say, haven’t you, Annie?”

  She held her fist against her mouth. Take away the enforced normality and there it was, right there, dead close. Behind a very thin veil.

  “She wants to say,” Rolf began, “or perhaps it is me who wants to say, that she doesn’t eat or sleep enough, and we have to resolve that.”

  “How?” Gabriel looked up at him again. “I can’t undo it.”

  “No, but we have to get better. We must somehow get better, and Annie needs to tell you something.”

  It was her turn to look up at Rolf. “Go on,” he said.

  “Which bit?” she asked quietly.

  “Any bit will do. Tell him about your dreams maybe.”

  Gabriel could hear the wind outside, but nothing rattled in this stone house. There was no sound at all inside while Annie sat, her arachnid fingers playing with the hem of her skirt. Then, suddenly, she reached across and, with a swift swipe, struck Gabriel.

  His jaw jerked. He had expected it, yet could never have expected it.

  She sat back. “Feels slightly better than it does in my sleep.”

  His hand went to his cheekbone.

  “What Rolf means,” said Annie, “is that I’m so angry that sometimes I can barely speak. I love you, and hate you, and I hate myself. Mam and Dad blame themselves—did you know that? Do you know they feel such shame they won’t walk down the street?”

  I’ll just sit here, Gabriel thought, and wait until it’s over. Let her have her release.

  So Annie talked. He’d heard it all before—that is, he’d seen it in her eyes and heard it in his head—but if it would help her, he’d sit it out. His mind wandered—not to pianos or pubs, but to the woman, gone upstairs. Was she listening to this, learning things he would prefer she didn’t know?

  “And now I’ve spluttered and ranted and I feel no better,” Annie was saying, with a depleted sob. “No matter how much I rage at you, awake or asleep, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, Rolf.”

  From the start, Annie’s friends were determined to show her brother a good time, so Gabriel was invited everywhere: barbecues, garden parties, swimming parties at a beach club. These people seemed to have no cares and were enjoying themselves mightily. The women, unable to work, had little to do beyond child-minding and entertaining, so Gabriel quickly became the focus of their attention. Handsome, tall, and sad, he was a glorious distraction from the usual run of social events. They cooed at Annie. She was well used to it. H
er good-looking brother had always drawn appreciation from her own sex and now, in his midtwenties, he looked better than ever. His expression, at once distracted and concentrated, and the ill-concealed distress behind his eyes, only added to his appeal.

  Keeping pace with the hospitality offered by others, Annie also entertained him, taking him out and about in a company car. It was a question of keeping up. When asked, socially, where they had been and what they had done, she had to have answers. She couldn’t say, “No, I haven’t taken him to Bimmah yet,” and “No, we haven’t done the wadis,” because then they would ask why and she was all out of lies. Creating a convincing wedding scenario had left her exposed. Sooner or later she would let something slip or contradict herself, and someone would say, “But you said . . .” She longed to be honest, to say, “I’m not taking him anywhere because I can’t bear to be with him, because he has let me down more thoroughly than anyone could imagine.”

  Yes, that was the weight on her shoulders: disappointment. The one person who should never have disappointed her had rocked their shared foundations to the point where she could no longer look down. So she took Gabriel first to the Bimmah Sinkhole, some way along the coast, where a comma-shaped pool of sparkling green-blue water reflected the layered limestone walls of its deep crater. Wiry Bedouin boys jumped off a protruding rock on the edge and dropped like stones into the water below, throwing out a great splash, while their friends cheered.

  “Tempting,” said Gabriel. “What a way to cool down.”

  Annie peered over the rocky ledge. “Don’t be stupid. Those kids know what they’re doing.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “No one knows for sure. Divers haven’t even got to the bottom yet.”

  “Maybe there is no bottom.” Gabriel couldn’t take his eyes off the pool, still and mysterious, a dazzling eye on the orange landscape. “It’s like liquid emerald.”