by Denyse Woods
From her, his jinniya. No way. For one thing, she had an Irish accent. She wasn’t Eastern in any respect. Irish jinn—now there’s a concept.
The water, thick as mud and full of debris, pushed past, with sporadic rushes, as if upstream someone was sweeping out a lake.
Unprompted, Abid began to talk again. His uncle, he said, had married a jinn and had a jinn family—female jinniya, he explained, always gave birth to jinn children—and they lived alongside his human family in another house beyond the orchard, but no one knew about them until his uncle died. He had divided his estate between his jinn family and his human family, since the Quran insists that all wives and children should be equally cared for, but his mortal children could not accept this. His eldest son even moved his own family into the house where the jinn lived. Abid shrugged. “For the jinn wife, it’s punishment time. After the funeral—fourteen days—any time the family has a meal, huge dust comes and spoils it. And then the house, the windows are rattling, shaking, showing her anger. Still they won’t recognize her, so she sends her boys to cry outside the door and the human family couldn’t do anything to stop this, so his sons went to find out what was the problem and she came to meet them. ‘I came only for one reason,’ she told them. ‘My children they have human brothers and if you don’t recognize them, I will make sure you will disappear from this world. One by one.’ The dead man’s sons laughed and told her that jinn are not strong enough to do that, but she said, ‘I have the power. My husband made me that promise, that my family would be recognized, and if a human promises something, he should do it.’”
Abid looked up and down the watercourse a little uneasily. “Jinn live sometimes near riverbeds. Places where not many people come. Like this. They come at the end of the day.”
He seemed a little spooked; Gabriel was fairly spooked himself.
“Very soon after that,” Abid went on, “one of the sons, his little baby disappeared. Two months old. The whole village went searching, looking, until finally, when it was almost dark, a young girl heard a baby crying deep in the oasis and found him on the ground beside a tree. The son’s wife, she took her children and moved back to her mother, saying she would never again go near that place, but the husband, he stayed, until one night he woke and there was a fire burning in his room. It happened many nights—fire burning, like that. So he left also, and the jinn family stayed, undisturbed until today. Still now, nobody goes there. It is full of jinn.’
“So humans can marry jinn?”
“Yes.”
And have children, Gabriel thought, and therefore have sex.
Back in Muscat, late that night, Gabriel checked every room in the house, and the first-floor windows, before locking the front door and the door to the roof. Then he waited, more apprehensive than usual, his chest tight, his bedsheets cold and crinkling. He thought about Annie, her longing to conceive, and shivered.
He didn’t want a jinn-child roaming the earth, the issue of this beautiful creature and his mangled conscience, and he fell asleep wondering what kind of a jinn he might create—evil or good?
When he woke, Prudence was lying with him. He went downstairs—the door was still bolted from the inside. Doubts pricked at him, but not enough to stop him going back upstairs to do what they did best.
“Come out with me,” he said to her afterward. “You always speak of the sea. Let’s get a blast of sea air.”
There was no moving her. She couldn’t go from where she was, she said, and it made sense that she didn’t want to be seen around town with him. It would be all over the expat community within hours.
She had to stay, she insisted, where she could hear the sea.
“You’d hear the sea a whole lot better if you were walking beside it,” Gabriel insisted, and with a faint sense of irritation he got up and left the house before she did.
On Yiti Beach, Annie stood by the water, loose waves fussing over her feet. Marie and Jasper’s pretty daughter was playing in the sea with Thomas and Margarethe’s trio of blond babes and Rashid’s moon-eyed sons.
“Gabriel was almost washed away in a flash flood last week,” Rolf said behind her, to their gathered friends.
“Oh, you have to be so careful!” Marie was sitting in the deckchair next to Gabriel’s. “It can be dangerous. You shouldn’t go driving around the country, especially when the weather isn’t good.”
“It was fine. I was with Abid. We sat it out.”
The children’s high-pitched screeches, their simple joy, held Annie there, adrift from the reclining adults who, apart from Rashid and his wife, Sabah, were oiling themselves against the blistering sun. Annie tried not to mind. She and Rolf were the only couple she knew in Oman who had no children, but she tried not to mind.
Yiti Beach, east of Muscat, was accessible only by 4x4, but worth every jolt of the physical shake-up that had to be endured before getting there. At one end, two huge rocks lifted out of the shallow waters and Annie stood gazing at them, her hands on her haunches, her toes sinking into the sand.
“Walk?” Gabriel asked, coming alongside her.
They paddled toward the jagged humps of rock.
“It’s nice to meet Rashid at last,” he said. “I owe him.”
“He’s a lovely man, and Sabah is a good friend of mine. She’s teaching me Arabic. Or trying to.” Annie raised her chin. “They’re called the Sama’un Rocks. Sabah told me they were inhabited by a jinni called Sama’un and that people used to leave gifts at the base at low tide.”
“Like an Irish shrine. A few pennies for a miracle.”
“I suppose.”
“So what does Sama’un have to offer? Sight for the blind? Cash for the strapped?”
“Fertility for the barren.”
Even through sunglasses, she could feel Gabriel’s eyes shoot over to hers. “So that’s why you organized this little expedition.”
“Don’t tell Rolf.”
The rocks were turning to a shade of burnt orange in the late-afternoon sun. “Do you know what gifts he likes, your Sama’un?”
“Dead goat, probably. Anyway, he’s gone now. Legend has it he took off after the British tried to bomb his rocks in the fifties.”
They paddled all the way to the rocks, where some fishermen were sitting on the sand mending their nets, then returned to the party. Rolf pointed toward the muddy lagoon farther along the strand and told Gabriel it was good for waders. “Fantastic bird-watching.”
“Fantastic everything,” said Gabriel. “Is Sultan Qaboos ever going to let tourists in?”
“I hope not,” said Marie.
“Give him time,” said Jasper. “There’s no infrastructure yet for tourism.”
“I do love your name,” Stéphanie said, out of the blue, looking at Gabriel with her fox-like eyes. “Were you named after the angel?”
Gabriel threw Annie a weary look. The question of his life. “Remember to put that on my tombstone, won’t you?” he said to her. “‘P.S. He was not named after the angel.’” He turned back to Stéphanie. “An uncle,” he said. “Sort of.” He sat on a towel and perched a sunhat on his head.
“Sort of?” said Marie, as Jasper handed her flatbread, stuffed with lamb and salad. “Thanks, darling. How do you mean ‘sort of”?”
“In that he wasn’t actually called Gabriel himself. My uncle. Our uncle.”
“How then can you be named after him?” Stéphanie asked in her tetchy French accent.
Rashid wandered back from where he had been playing with his younger son and sat on the sand near Sabah who, in spite of the heat, remained cloaked in her abaya.
“Go on, Gabriel,” said Annie. “It’s a nice story.”
“Oh, do,” said Marie.
Clearly unsettled at finding himself the center of attention, Gabriel hesitated.
Annie felt a pull of compassion. He had probably grown accustomed to averted eyes in recent months, but now these people were staring, waiting, as if asking him to account for himself, not s
imply for his name.
“Our mother’s brother, Jack, died with the name ‘Gabriel’ on his lips.”
“He said it over and over, during his last days,” Annie put in.
“But no one knew who Gabriel was,” Gabriel went on. “Jack’s wife was called Helen, their sons were Declan and Paul, and nobody in the family knew anything about a Gabriel, so they had no idea how to fetch him. Still, he kept asking for this Gabriel. Even years later, my mother couldn’t speak of it without welling up, because she couldn’t forget the way he had looked at her, pleading. She asked him where he was, this person, but Jack could barely speak.
“So, determined to find this man, she went through all Jack’s papers, his address books, his desk, and one day she even pulled every single book he owned off the shelves and looked through them for a note or a name on the flyleaf, anything.”
“That’s one of my earliest memories,” said Annie. “I must have been about four, and I remember all these books falling off the shelves at Jack’s house, raining down on us, with Mam leafing through them, like a madwoman.”
“What about his wife?” asked Stéphanie. “Did she not know?”
“She’d left him years before,” Annie explained, “so it was just Mam nursing him through his illness. He was only forty-nine.”
“And all the time she was looking for Gabriel,” said Gabriel, “it turned out she was expecting me.”
“Did she ever find him?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. My namesake has never been tracked down or been found lurking in old papers. Not one clue. The family concluded that there must have been a son. Our cousins, Declan and Paul, still wonder if some bloke will one day roll up on their doorstep claiming to be their brother, but Mam has her own theory.”
Marie swallowed a large mouthful of food. “Which is?”
“A love affair,” said Annie.
“Ah,” said Stéphanie, “of course.”
Annie nodded. “It wasn’t spoken about, but it was fairly obvious why his marriage had failed.”
“When I was born,” Gabriel went on, “she wanted to pay homage to the love she had witnessed for the unknown Gabriel.”
“So you were named after a stranger,” said Stéphanie.
“Yes, and the only thing Mam knew about him was that somebody loved him, a lot, and that’s good enough for me. Better than being the namesake of some twerp with wings.”
“In the Quran,” Rashid said, vaguely, gazing down the strand, “the angel Gabriel is called Jibril.”
By day, Prudence stayed around more often, wandering about the house, eating the apples or lying on the cushioned bench, sleeping, staring, smiling if he passed. She even read, or at any rate flicked the pages of his few magazines, leafing through them again and again. He suspected she didn’t see what she was looking at; it was a movement, something for her hands to do.
“How does it work for you?” he asked one afternoon. “Do you decide, ‘I’ve had enough now, I’m going home?’ Do you call it home, wherever it is that you go?”
When she was with him, she said, she knew of nowhere else, and she came because she wanted to be in that quiet place, where she could listen to the sea and lie with him.
Dutifully, Gabriel phoned his parents every few weeks, the calls coming toward him, days out, like a slow-moving storm that could not be avoided. His parents’ voices would echo and bounce along the line and only the expense of the call saved him from anything more than fleeting inquiries. His father’s anger had not subsided. He said each time, “I’ll get your mother,” and she would say each time, “Is it very hot?”
Dutifully, he visited Annie as often as he could bear to leave the house, because he wanted to see her and to work on her. One weekend she intimated that, come the end of their lease in Muttrah, he would be moving in with them.
“Actually,” he said carefully, “I’d like to take on the lease myself. It’s working out so well.”
“In what way is it working out well? You have no friends, no music. No work. What do you do all day?”
“The solitude is good for me. It’s helping.”
“Helping with what? You’re not ill.”
“Christ, Annie, I’m ill as a dog!”
Her dead eyes turned back to the dishcloth she was running across the table. “Then you should be here, where I can look after you.”
“No.”
She looked up.
“I mean—no, thanks. I’m better alone. Really.”
“Your jinn lady keeping you busy, is she?”
He was not so dutiful, however, toward Max, whom he betrayed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Irrational though it was to be in love with a woman he knew nothing about—who claimed, indeed, to know very little about herself—Gabriel was nonetheless gliding through the days in happiness. Prudence soaked through his pores and flowed through his limbs. Every time they made love, he betrayed his brother with exultation and oblivion. He delighted in her presence, quiet though it was, and relished her ignorance. She knew him not at all. There was scarcely a person in Ireland who didn’t know what he’d done. Even the nation’s favorite broadcaster had churned it over with his listeners, many of whom rang in to the show to express their heartfelt outrage that he escaped with only a warning. It must truly have been a living nightmare for his parents. He had crippled them. The depravity had been momentary, perhaps, but its gruesome consequences would be lifelong. His every relationship had been compromised, damaged or destroyed, and any future relationship would feel it also. But Prudence knew nothing. He asked her. He said, “If I told you I’d done something despicable, would you still come?”
It was nothing to her, she said.
“I could be dangerous.”
She pointed out that she could leave any time.
“You leave too often.”
When she lay with her back to him, letting his hand curve over the hill of her hip toward the dip of her belly, he felt good, rich, lucky. Luckier than he had any right to be. When he pressed into her, he reached his own hearth, that safe place where no one could touch his conscience. And then the fucking took over. He loved the way she twisted, stretched, coiled herself around him; he liked the power of giving her pleasure, and denying it, enjoyed her soft gutturals when he succeeded and when he desisted. Although she was generous, bringing him off in the kitchen, in the stairwell, in the diwan, he gave more than he took, because he had to hold her attention; he had to keep her coming.
Even so, the walls were moving in. “Come and get some sun on your face,” he said, more than once. “You’re so pale.”
Her reply never varied. She could not go from there.
The mantra repeated itself softly in his mind when she was with him and when she was not. I cannot go from here.
In her soft company, he only loved, he never thought. But when he was alone, he thought a lot—about how long this could go on and, increasingly, about how to get beyond the impasse where she would go nowhere and see no one else. Prudence was . . . wispy. Wispy, yet firm. He could neither understand her, nor influence her, but outside their cozy playhouse reality knocked. He had to make a living, one way or another. His salary would soon be stopped—he would inevitably be fired from the School of Music—but if he went out to work every day, she might wander off, never to return. Somehow he had to tear her from the anchor of the house and anchor her instead in his life, and if she was indeed a jinniya, he would have to consult with those who could tell him how man and jinn could live together.
For that, he needed to talk to the men in the suq, who could tell him everything he needed to know—if only he could speak their language. Without Arabic, their knowledge was locked away. He could learn it, but not quickly enough to be able to grasp subtleties. How to inquire about the insubstantial with an insubstantial grasp of the language? He needed an interpreter, not only of Arabic but also of folklore, and he had to find one without involving his sister.
His best bet was Ali, a trader who spoke
fairly good English and made very good tea. Gabriel had often stopped for a chat on his perambulations, although more recently he had been too eager to be home and passed Ali with a dismissive wave and a long stride. Now, again, he ambled into the suq and stopped at Ali’s stall, where he sold scarves and garments, and accepted a glass of tea and a smoke. They sat for a time, chatting, but it was toward the end of the evening, when night was spreading in and the suq was emptying, that Gabriel asked Ali about jinn.
Ali, it turned out, had many jinn stories, but then so did everyone, and as he told that first tale, with the shops closing around them, others gathered, a few old boys with decayed teeth and sad eyes, who didn’t understand, but nodded and praised God and sometimes added their own wisdom. The stories were convoluted, tangential, but Gabriel got the gist, and in any case enjoyed the throwback to those times, as a child, when he had sat around fireplaces, listening to old folk tell tales of the unsettled dead.
“There was a man, Abdullah,” Ali began, that first time, “from Zanzibar, and he was suffering from illness, but nobody knew what this illness was. He felt sick all the time and he get very thin. His mother, she knew jinn had came into his body and after a few months, she found out who cast that spell—a woman who lived in the town, so they went to see her. When he saw that woman, he said, ‘I know her.’ She used to come to his bed, until he sent her away one day, and this makes her very angry. She cast the spell on him and sent a jinniya to make him suffer. When they got the spirit out of him and Abdullah felt well again, he left to come to Oman to get away from this jinniya. Long journey, but he was okay, until the day the boat is approaching Oman, and there is no one to say he has a job there.” Ali’s watery eyes looked down the alley. “In Muscat, nobody can come out of the boat until he knows someone. Someone who says, ‘I know this man.’”
“Like a sponsor.”
“Yes, but Abdullah, he is left in the fishing boat. . . . He didn’t understand what is happening. He speak Swahili, not Arabic. He didn’t know why they wouldn’t let him get out of the boat and he’s very scared that he has to go back again. But suddenly he is speaking in Arabic. He could not believe it! How he is doing that? So one of the fisherman invited Abdullah to come work with him and stay with his family.