Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Until today he does not know how he spoke Arabic, except that it was the jinniya made him do it so that he would like her. And he stayed here. He’s still alive, got kids, good job. Sometimes he used to dream and call the jinniya to come to him.”

  “The Zanzibar jinn?”

  “Yes. After she helped him know Arabic, he wanted her to come back in his life. He wanted to feel safe. So he called her.”

  “Did she come?”

  “Sometimes,” Ali said, with a deep nod, looking at the ground. “Sometimes.”

  Sometimes, Gabriel thought. A powerful word.

  Prudence didn’t show up for several days. Perhaps his insistence that they should go out had bothered her. More likely, she was enjoying a normal existence of proper clothes, plentiful food and regular showers—none of this lying about, being mysterious. But in her absence, the fables that skirted around his reason kept trying to stake a claim. The parallels between Eastern and Western mysticism were comforting—the sudden command of an unknown language equated to the Christian belief of speaking in tongues. Comfort and evil, ghosts and ghouls, devils and spells, the effects were much the same; only the explanations were different. By day, he liked to toy and think about it; tease himself with the paranormal. Only in fear’s natural habitat—the deep hours of night—did true apprehension shake him. He, Gabriel Sherlock, was having an affair with a woman no one else had seen, and he wished to God they could.

  Rolf and Annie, he increasingly believed, had genuinely not seen Prudence. Before they moved out, she had been quick to pass through a room, usually behind them. She almost always moved behind their backs. Why? Annie appeared to be truly perplexed by his affair, which only perplexed him further, because if she did not know this woman, who the hell did? Who had planted her there, on his life?

  Annie was also more unsettled, less in control, than she had been when he had arrived, as if she were seeking the ghost within him for her own reasons.

  “You know,” she said one afternoon, when they were taking a walk along the beach west of Muttrah, “they can cure things.”

  “Who?” The hot wind was beating through his shirt.

  “Jinn.”

  A fleshy body lay farther along the shore by the waterline. As the waves came in, it shifted lazily, like someone turning in their sleep. Annie curved away from the shiny gray heap, but Gabriel stopped to look down at the dead dolphin. “So you reckon I should prevail upon the jinn to cure me of my jinniya?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about me.”

  He looked up. “You? How so?”

  “There are jinn, Sabah says—special ones for different things, like . . . infertility.”

  “But you aren’t infertile!”

  “Who says?”

  “It’s far too soon to reach that conclusion.”

  “I’ve been trying to conceive for over a year.”

  “A very tough year.”

  “I was thinking,” she said, moving on, her feet in the water, her thoughts farther out, “I could go to one of these ceremonies.”

  “Ceremonies?”

  “You know, like . . . not quite séances, but you can go to see people who invoke certain jinn who have particular powers. Like when there’s a bad jinni, it’s because somebody has given the evil eye to whoever they’re peeved with, so that the jinn will create problems or illness for them, but then there are good jinn too, who can also intervene through a kind of holy person, or sorcerer.”

  “Oh, Annie, don’t buy into all that! Far better you see some specialist in Berne. Don’t mess with that ritualistic stuff. From what I understand, a lot of it comes from Zanzibar and it’s . . .”

  “What?”

  “A bit too close to black magic for comfort.”

  “This, from a man who sees an invisible woman?”

  “She is not invisible. She is simply shy, careful about who sees her.”

  “Prove it then. Introduce us.”

  “But that’s the thing—she won’t meet anyone or go anywhere. It’s not what she wants.”

  Annie shook her head. “What a choice—either I believe that you’re going slightly mad or that you’re being visited by jinn. Frankly, the latter option is less scary. I need you sane, Gabriel.”

  “I am sane and she is real, Annie.”

  “How can you be so sure when I look at the same place as you do and see nothing?”

  “Because I’m sleeping with her, that’s how.”

  Annie stopped, her arms hanging by her sides, the corpse of the dead dolphin twisting about behind her.

  “And now you’re going to call me depraved, I suppose, as well as delusional?”

  “Humans can sleep with jinn,” she said. “They even marry them. Every village in the country has that story: the man who married a jinniya.”

  “Listen to you. You’re talking about them as if they’re real.”

  “Maybe they are. What do we know?”

  Gabriel put out his arm. She hesitated, then moved into him and he held her against him. “We’ll laugh about this one day,” he said. “When we’re sitting around with our kids, yours and mine, Prudence’ll tease us about how we thought she was a jinniya.”

  “That’s her name? Prudence?”

  “That’s what I call her, yeah.”

  “From your favorite song.” Annie looked up at him with what might have been a flicker of forgiveness in her eyes.

  Prudence asked him, one day, as they lay spent on the bench in the front room, why he was there.

  There—where? Muscat? Oman? That particular house? There were so few specifics in her conversation.

  Gabriel ran his finger along her breastbone, skiing through the sweat that lingered between her breasts. “I’ve run away,” he said, coasting toward her navel.

  A woman, she immediately presumed.

  He had yet to speak of it to anyone. There had been deluges of earnest, but rhetorical, questions: “Why would you do something like that?”; “Did you not think?” But he had been given no right of reply, ever, since no one really wanted any answers or excuses. Here was his chance to speak, with this woman, who would not judge him. He could release it into the air, into sound and words, and see where it went.

  “I’m running from what the French would call ‘honte,’” he began. “A more haunting word than ‘shame,’ wouldn’t you say? Being ashamed, that’s what a child feels, that’s . . . standing with your feet turned in, your hands behind your back, and your eyelids lowered. But ‘avoir honte’ is something else, something that has to be carried, much heavier than shame. It sounds like an unpleasant disease, doesn’t it? And in most respects, it is.”

  She turned her gray eyes on him.

  Did she see him at all? Did she see anything?

  “Are you a jinniya?” he asked, without expecting her to respond.

  Nor did she.

  Back in her fresh new house in Muscat, Annie was sitting with Stéphanie outside the French windows, staring across her soulless unplanted yard. Their voices were heavy, the conversation low. Annie was smoking—which was stupid, since she wanted to conceive—but when Stéphanie had expressed concern for her, she’d reached for the fags.

  “. . . and I wondered,” Stéphanie was saying, “if you and Rolf maybe—”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “So is it Gabriel?”

  Annie released a long stream of smoke. Then she leaned forward to place the packet of cigarettes and a lighter on the table, and sat back. “I thought I could be the peacemaker, you know? That I would heal everyone. Instead, I can’t heal myself and I don’t even want to heal Gabriel. He’s like . . . ants in the cupboard.”

  Stéphanie chortled. “Like what?”

  “No, really—when I see him, it’s like opening a kitchen cupboard and finding thousands of ants crawling all over my food, so I just slam the door shut, rather than deal with it. If I don’t look, I’ll forget I’ve been infested.”

  “Infeste
d? Why such language? He is a nice man, and a good brother, and you love him very much, I think.”

  “More than myself. More sometimes than Rolf. I also dislike him now and that’s what’s so difficult. Every day when I get up . . . this new feeling. This dislike.”

  “But what has he done to deserve it?”

  Holding it in was doing Annie no good. That much was clear. She was constipated with anger. And Stéphanie could be trusted not to spread it across the colony, so she picked up her cup to drink, saying very quickly and matter-of-factly, “He nearly killed our brother Max and in all other respects has destroyed him.”

  Stéphanie’s head swung around, her jaw falling.

  Leaning forward to flick ash off her cigarette, Annie felt like a schoolgirl divulging her brother’s misdemeanors, but she had earned the right to unburden herself.

  “He was to be married, Max,” she went on. “He’d met a lovely girl. Someone to look after him, you know? He wasn’t really made for this world, my big brother. To him, it was all so confounding. The one thing that made sense to him, the thing he loved most and could do well, was music. He played the piano—really very well, but then Gabriel came along and he was, from day one, a natural. Profusely talented. God, he could play. We were blessed, really, to live in a home resonating with sonatas and fugues, toccatas and concertos. I can still remember those pieces wafting up through the floorboards. A couple of times—I mean, I was young, I didn’t know what I was saying, but sometimes I shushed Max, when he was speaking, so I could listen to Gabriel.” She paused, smoked. “Max didn’t mind. He was very proud of Gabriel too. Frequently he moved aside to let Gabriel practice. That’s when he became really awkward in himself, in his late teens, like he no longer knew where to sit, but he didn’t give up. He worked harder. He had no other life, you see. He’d sacrificed everything to the piano, so he took his music degree, ended up teaching in the School of Music, and sometimes gave recitals. He played . . . earnestly, I suppose, as if determined to subjugate the piano, because he couldn’t really do it justice.”

  “And Gabriel?”

  “Oh, he flourished. The piano owns him, so he sailed through every exam, got scholarships, won prizes, traveled to Europe to perform in junior competitions, but . . . I dunno, maybe the parents pushed him too much, because when he was sixteen, he ceased to care. He lost all sense of application. Wouldn’t practice enough, refused to enter competitions, and eventually stopped performing. Like Max, he took a degree in music, since there wasn’t much else he was good at, he said, but still, whenever he sat down to play, you’d almost wish that Max wouldn’t . . . bother.” She let out the word in a whisper. “Yet on he went, slamming those keys as if Gabriel’s slump was his second chance. It was painful, hearing him practice. Striving. Never quite . . .

  “Anyway, we were relieved when Geraldine came along—she showed him there was more to life than work and music, albeit with limited success.”

  “Aie,” said Stéphanie. “And Gabriel took her?”

  “I suppose that is what happened,” Annie said, after exhaling and inhaling and exhaling again, “but not as you imagine it. He never laid a finger on her.”

  “She fell in love with him?”

  “Oh, no. No, Max was the love of her life.”

  “Go on.”

  “Gabriel got very drunk one night and . . . he got very, very drunk. There was an accident.”

  “Car accident?”

  With another sharp intake of smoke, Annie said, “Yes.”

  “My God.”

  “Actually, that’s a lie,” Annie went on quickly. “I wish it wasn’t. I mean, young men drink and drive and people get hurt. Max could have broken an arm, or some fingers, and never have played again for that reason. That would be endurable, I think.” Her voice slowed, the words losing their hurry. “Because he doesn’t play anymore.”

  A door banged and Gabriel came through the living room toward them.

  Later that evening, after Stéphanie had left, they sat on the terrace, while Rolf barbecued.

  Gabriel stared at the ice in his glass as if looking for his reflection. “So she knows now?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Stéphanie.”

  A flush of red climbed Annie’s face. “You were eavesdropping?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I didn’t tell on you.”

  “I’m only worried about you,” he said. “Once word gets out, it’ll travel, fast, with varying degrees of accuracy and malice. People have little enough to do here. It’ll attach itself to you and I don’t want you paying more than you already are.”

  “We need a story,” Rolf interjected, barbecue fork in his hand. “Me too, I’m asked about you. Are you here on holiday? Drifting? Looking for work? No one gets into Oman unless for a job.”

  “I’d love a job,” Gabriel said, over his shoulder.

  Rolf grimaced. “There isn’t much call for a pianist.”

  “I’m no longer a pianist.”

  “Aren’t you confusing yourself with Max?” Annie said tersely. “You at least can play if you want to.”

  “If you want to work,” said Rolf, “I can ask Rashid. But you would have to take whatever is offered.”

  “Fine.”

  “Driving, that is one thing you might do. You have an international license?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rashid might be able to find something with one of the companies.”

  “Thanks. A job would put an end to awkward questions.”

  “We need a story,” Rolf said again, “even so. People are curious, and I don’t want to expose Rashid to gossip.”

  “You’re getting over a broken heart,” Annie said to Gabriel. “You were about to propose to her when she told you she’d fallen in love with someone else. You couldn’t stay in Cork any longer, because . . . because—”

  “You worked with her lover,” Rolf interjected. “He was your boss.”

  “Or your friend.”

  “Your boss and your friend,” Rolf went on, shaking his head. “Everyone knew.” He turned a steak. “Everyone in the office. Except you.”

  Gabriel looked over his shoulder. “Did you?”

  Rolf glanced at Annie, who nodded and said, “We didn’t know how to tell you.”

  Morning. The inside of his eyelids glowing with early light. Before he could stir, Prudence put her mouth to his ear and asked him to find her.

  There was little to go on, since she had no name that she knew of. Neither did it help that she had no memory, no sense of her past, nothing to tap into that could point him in any direction. No memory either of recent events, not even of Annie and Rolf. She knew only Gabriel. She remembered so little, in fact, that she sometimes came looking for love five minutes after she had worn him out.

  He stood her in front of the mirror, gently bit into the flesh on her wrist, tasteless but chunky, and said, “There you are. I’ve found you.”

  That’s not me, she said.

  “Then we must go out. Someone might recognize you, or you might see something that has meaning for you. If you honestly don’t know where you go to when you leave this house, then the only possible explanation is that you’ve been hypnotized.”

  Hypnotized, she repeated.

  “Yes—you do what you’re told to do and remember none of it afterwards. It isn’t impossible, but it would mean that I’ve been set up and I’ve drawn a blank with that. Most of the people I know have no clue where I am.”

  I do, she said.

  The Intercontinental Hotel needed pool attendants who could swim well enough to assist any patrons who might get into trouble in the water. Gabriel had laughed when Rolf put it to him: “I’m no lifeguard!”

  “You can swim, you need a job and they need you. Thursdays and Fridays.”

  And so, on those days, Gabriel spent his time poolside, tidying and handing out towels while club members and businessmen lay around gossiping and making deals. Embarrassed by his w
eedy legs and shapeless arms, he was tempted to say to the sunbathing women who flirted with him, “I’m a pianist. The muscles are all in my fingers.” Friends of Annie tried to poach from him the story of his broken heart, but he wasn’t as good at invention as his sister, which appeared to leave them all the more intrigued.

  One afternoon Annie turned up at the pool, when Rolf was off painting mountains, and stayed until the evening, lying in the dimming sun. “I can’t bear to see you do this,” she said, watching him stack lounger mattresses. “There’s a grand piano in the bar, you know. Maybe you could play in the evenings?”

  “Cabaret?”

  “You mustn’t forget how to play.”

  “I’ll never forget.”

  “You don’t come over anymore,” she said.

  “Well, I have work and—”

  “The woman? So bring her with you. God knows we’d all like to meet her.”

  Gabriel folded a damp towel instead of dropping it into the basket. The sun beat down on the back of his neck. “I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve tried to get her to come out with me, but it’s like she’s been brainwashed. She won’t budge.”

  “That fits. They don’t move about much,” Annie said vaguely. “They tend to stay in one place.”

  “They?” he asked sharply. “Who’s behind this? Because if you know, Annie, own up. I want it wound up, finished. Let’s call a halt to the whole charade so Prudence and I can be together properly.”

  “I meant jinn. They tend to be shy. They’re usually found in isolated spots, and they certainly don’t go around socializing and bumping shoulders with expats at swimming parties.”

  “Christ, not this again. In all the stories I’ve heard—and I’ve heard a few—I’ve never come across an Irish jinni.”

  Annie looked at her freshly manicured nails and said quietly, “Have you been told that they can make themselves look like anything and anyone? That they can make mortals see exactly what they want to see?”