Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “I, umm . . .” If his landlady suspected that he was entertaining loose women, she could have him arrested, but this fragile opportunity could not be wasted. “Things happen,” he mumbled.

  “Like what?”

  “Glasses of water emptied. Fruit disappearing. A sense, a strong sense, of someone else in the house. Noises.”

  Farida’s eyes stopped on him.

  “Noises like what?” Juma asked.

  “The sea.”

  “But the sea—” Juma raised his chin toward the coast.

  “No, no—big seas. An ocean. I can hear waves crashing, and voices.”

  “Your neighbors,” he suggested.

  “It isn’t Arabic I’m hearing. I can’t say for sure what language it is, except that it isn’t Arabic.”

  Juma looked skeptical. How could Gabriel explain that he too was entirely skeptical? He stood like a man at an interview while Juma talked to Farida.

  “Why are you asking about jinn?”

  “I’ve heard that, sometimes, certain houses can have a presence. In Ireland also we have houses that have spirits and others . . . others with a history of strange happenings. I thought maybe this house had some such history.”

  The landlady rattled away at her nephew. Good, thought Gabriel. Finally he was getting somewhere. She was agitated. Her brother had perhaps married a jinniya and the jinniya had stayed on. In fact, might that not be why the landlord had gone away—to escape her?

  Why was he thinking like this?

  They were gabbling. Standing up, Farida announced that she would look around the house and made for the stairwell. Gabriel died a death—the house was a complete tip. She would throw him out for untidiness if nothing else.

  “Maybe,” Juma said to him, “it will be necessary to bring someone here to . . . make go away the jinn.”

  “You think there is one?”

  “We will see.”

  “Look, Juma, I don’t really need anything to be done or anyone . . .” interfering, he thought, “. . . getting involved. I’m simply curious about this place.”

  “My aunt says there were no jinn in this house before.”

  “What about new ones? Can that happen?”

  Juma sighed. Probably not much of a believer, Gabriel reckoned. “Yes, they say jinn can come in a house or yard.”

  “Why? Why would they come?”

  “Sometimes they will come where there is something empty.”

  “Empty.”

  “Yes.”

  Juma’s eyes were cloudy, so it was impossible to tell whether he was very intelligent, but embarrassed by it, or dim, like his eyes. Either way, he was an English speaker and Gabriel would have liked to talk to him more, but Farida came back then, her face wrinkled with . . . something. She spoke to Juma, but her eyes never left Gabriel’s face.

  “Your aunt looks concerned,” he said.

  “She is worried for your safety.”

  Gabriel glanced at his arm. There was no mark where Prudence had bitten him. “She thinks I might come to harm?”

  Juma responded with a sort of a sweep of his dishdasha, his body twisting, his hands deep in his pockets.

  “Please reassure her that I’ll be fine. I’m interested, that’s all, in the way things work here. I have so much to learn.”

  Farida smiled suddenly, a coy, teasing smile, and addressed Gabriel, the language slipping off her tongue like a spell.

  “She says, Aisha Qandisha has you by the forelock!”

  “Excuse me? Aisha . . . ?”

  “Qandisha.” Juma also smiled. “This is a Moroccan jinniya. She makes men go mad.”

  “Oh. . . . Great.”

  “The men, they go, you know, wandering, always searching for her and hoping she’ll return. Whenever they catch sight of her, they have to have relations with her.”

  Farida rattled on some more. “Um, um,” Juma said, nodding. “My aunt says love is possession.”

  But I didn’t mention love, Gabriel thought. Or speak of any woman.

  “You see,” Juma was warming to the subject, “when men fall in love with a jinniya—if he is struck, mdrub, by a beautiful jinniya, he will lose interest in human women.”

  “I see. And what then?”

  Juma was matter-of-fact. “These men, they may suffer psychological effects, or even physical.”

  Farida pulled her veil closer to her face and moved toward the door, saying with a chuckle, “Aisha Qandisha!”

  Closing the door behind them, Gabriel turned. The room was tidy, which it had not been when they had arrived. He went upstairs to see what his landlady would have seen: order, everywhere. His dirty clothes were no longer on the floor of his bedroom, the junk he had dropped around the place had been tidied away; in the kitchen, mugs were upturned on the draining board.

  This was the kind of poltergeist he could live with.

  Pity, he thought, about the other stuff.

  What you say about your parents isn’t quite true, is it?

  Gabriel started. He had been asleep, alone, and he woke to hear her say this, or something like it. He was wary of Prudence now. It was no longer a question of who she was but of what she was. Jinn were often capricious. But, then, so was he.

  You are angry with them, but you long for their forgiveness.

  Perhaps it was his own voice that had woken him. He no longer knew whose thoughts were in his head.

  The weather turned up its thermostat. March had given way to April and April was behaving like May. Gabriel swam at work, when he wasn’t meant to, wiped down lavatories, collected empty glasses, and got his fingers sticky with discarded ice-cream wrappers. He meandered between loungers, looking at people snoozing, their skin burning, and didn’t warn them. Later, scorched, they handed in their towels. I could’ve told you, he almost said. He ate as much as he could at the bar, but wasn’t fired. They offered him more hours. He needed the money. He said thanks, declined, and cabled his father for more cash.

  Annie came and sometimes didn’t, like Prudence. She turned up more often at the pool than the house. Checking up on him. One afternoon, she shaded her eyes and said, “Gabe, I want you to come to an exorcism with me.”

  He gave her a look. “You think I need to be exorcized?”

  “No. I mean—yes, you probably do, but this is, well, about the baby thing. It’s some kind of ceremony. It won’t be much different from going to a Catholic shrine that promises babies to barren women.”

  “Of course it’s different!”

  “How do you know? Have you been to one?”

  “There’s a lot more to that business than throwing pennies in the shrine, Annie.”

  A dip of frown indented her brow. “You’ve been informing yourself, I see.”

  “Talking to people, yeah. People go into trances at these things.”

  “So it’ll be interesting. I’ve always been fascinated by this stuff.”

  He gave her another wry look. “You don’t need me. You have Rolf.”

  “He won’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he . . .”

  “You haven’t told him.”

  “No.”

  “They call it ‘sihr,’ Annie. Witchcraft. Are you really so desperate?”

  “And some call it ‘ruqya’—healing.”

  “Only when it’s done in the proper Quranic way by the right person. Like priests doing exorcisms.”

  “We need some joy in our lives, Gabriel. All of us.”

  “That’s not your responsibility. You don’t have to get pregnant to save the rest of us.”

  “I’m trying to save myself.”

  “It could unhinge you, something like this.”

  “Remaining barren is unhinging me. Will you take me?”

  “I’d really rather not.”

  “You’d really rather not, would you? You’d really rather not.”

  The nights continued into darkness. Howling Atlantic winds raged across the tranquil Gulf
of Oman and bits of sentences tiptoed across Gabriel’s hearing, like actors muttering their lines backstage: “. . . maybe later?” and “. . . so much the better,” and intriguing snippets like “. . . say that because it’s time to look the other way.” He even heard a woman say, “What the mind can . . .”

  “Am I tuning into the jinn world?” he asked Ali. “And if I am, how come they’re speaking English?”

  Ali discussed it with the other men, who leaned over their camel sticks, stroked their white beards, and concluded, as they had before, that he had been put under a spell. Someone was angry with him and had brought the evil eye upon him. They waited while he considered this, more seriously now than he had before. For sure, people were angry with him, but Max was not a vengeful man; he would scarcely know the meaning of the word. Geraldine, on the other hand. . . . She would never forgive him, she had told him so, and no doubt she wanted him to suffer as she now suffered. Perhaps this was the spell she had cast: an evil fairy sent to torment him.

  No. No. He was losing grip. Geraldine—casting spells? That meek woman sending purring cats and radio shows? Hearing voices, in any creed, was a common infliction.

  And yet revenge was being sought, and found, and Gabriel was shrinking. “But she’s very beautiful, my jinn,” he said, feeling forlorn, “and kind to me.”

  “That is all part of the trick.” Behind the beauty, they agreed, there could be a foul-looking jinn—an old hag who meant him harm—and they shunted about so uneasily in their plastic seats that he didn’t like to query them further.

  “You should go home to Ireland,” one of the old men said.

  Ali translated, retorted, then translated his retort. “Don’t go home. Jinn travel. She can go with you, and in your country there is no one to subdue her. You must go to the holy man and he will send her out.”

  They all nodded sagely.

  Gabriel walked back to the house, sticking to the shade where possible, and found Prudence waiting, ready to shoo all the riddles away. They had a shower, giggling when shampoo froth slid down her face and she blew through the bubbles. The very idea that she was anything other than a delectable woman standing in a shower made him smile all the more and come like a bull elephant.

  There would be no exorcisms.

  Afterward, wrapped in a towel, she sat on his bed, leaning against the wall, her hands clasped around her raised knee, and said, Your parents will forgive you. Your sister already has.

  “Forgive me? For what?”

  The night in the music school.

  He stroked her ankle. “Who told you?”

  Prudence talked, that day, as she never had before.

  The self-loathing, she told him, would never dissipate. In years to come, he would still stink of it and parts of him would grow rotten and wither, but he should expect that. Such were the consequences. And although he would spend a lifetime trying to understand his motivation, that lost moment would never make sense. Such were capricious mortals. His bitterness toward his parents was a dead end; he went there only because he had nowhere else to go. In truth, he blamed only himself, which was as it should be, she said, since he was to blame. There would be no relief. Time intermingles. The past cannot be revisited, she said, because it continues with us, embedded in a network of capillaries in our hearts and minds. That night in the music school happened every day, over and over; it had been rooted in all their lives forever, and so he confused things, couldn’t see through it. His mind could never be quite clear, because what he did was not behind him. It walked alongside him.

  Gabriel rolled from his stomach onto his back. “Might as well just slice my wrists, so.”

  Enough with cowardice and self-regard, she said, and he looked up because, for a moment, her voice was much lower than usual.

  “And I thought you’d come to save me.”

  Later, she said.

  “But I need saving right now.”

  Again soft-spoken, she went on, What’s left of you is for others. Your sister needs you.

  “And you need to stop talking. You know nothing about anything.”

  You buried him. That’s what I know.

  As they came around a bend in the road from Nizwa, the huge fort at Bahla came fully into view, standing proud of its oasis against a backdrop of copper mountains. Annie was quiet, and when Bahla’s ancient wall came out to meet them, curving around the plantations, Gabriel could feel her anxiety. He squeezed her forearm. She stared ahead. Sabah and Marie were chattering in the back. They had told Rolf they were taking a picnic and had left for Nizwa, on the other side of the Hajar, then headed out toward Bahla, known for sorcery, magic, and jinn.

  “In Bahla,” Sabah said, “you should keep your head lowered and not look at anyone. They might give you the evil eye.”

  “What will happen, exactly?” Annie asked. “At this thing. I won’t be the main act, will I?”

  Sabah patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry. There will be others. She will recite verses over you, from the Holy Quran, and give you a little stone or something.”

  “A stone? Like a talisman?”

  “Or an amulet,” said Marie, fanning herself. “Golly, it’s warm for April. Turn up the air-con, Gabriel.”

  In the village, Sabah asked for directions, first from a man on a donkey, then from two Bedouin, in crinkly calf-length dishdashas wearing belts and turbans and carrying rifles, who were themselves looking for a bus stop.

  “Getting to these places is the easy bit,” said Marie. “Actually finding the right spot takes much longer.”

  Gabriel did his best to follow Sabah’s directions: “We have to go down that road.”

  “Which road?”

  “Back that way.”

  They were looking for the home of a woman who performed exorcisms and would be holding court for three days. She had a good hit rate with infertility. There were two types of exorcism, Gabriel had learned: legitimate, carried out according to correct Islamic practice by holy men, and the rest, performed by anyone who had a reputation for cures and magic. This was a magic woman; a witch, in his view.

  He had to get out of the jeep several times to knock on doors so that Sabah could ask for directions from the back seat, only to be sent off in another direction, but Sabah seemed confident that they were homing in on their target.

  When, finally, she instructed Gabriel to stop, they parked in a back street and followed Sabah, her narrow ankles and dusty sandals hurrying along under her abaya, down a dusty track to a mud-brick house. The door opened onto a courtyard where a woman, swathed in blue and black and wearing the most intimidating, and alluring, burqa—beak-like leather strips masking her face—immediately screeched at Gabriel and shooed him away. This was women’s business. His gut tightened when Annie stepped into the courtyard where, beyond the heavy wooden door, he glimpsed clay pots and baskets stacked against a wall. The door closed behind his sister and her friends.

  He was adrift, alone in this place. He grabbed a bottle of water from the jeep and set off along a path with a high mud wall on one side, which took him into the palm grove, where he followed the falaj. It whispered with a thin stream of water. The shade was calming. There was something soft about this country, he thought. The landscape was harsh, by and large, but these oases, the cover of palms and the trickle of water, and the kindness of the people, in town and out of it, made him increasingly reluctant to leave. So much was happening in Oman: Qaboos was educating and modernizing, and while there were slim pickings for a piano teacher, Gabriel was sure he could find work. Proper work. The life Annie and Rolf led—beach parties, barbecues, and lunches—held little appeal, but his own lifestyle did: sitting in the suq with Ali, waking to the call to prayer, watching dhows bob in the harbor. Oman, he realized, as he wandered among the trees, had brought him a kind of contentment, which he had believed he would never experience again.

  And he had yet to see the desert, learn the language, know the people.

  The high ramparts of
the fort loomed above the gaps in the palmtops, so he headed in that direction and emerged at the foot of the promontory on which it stood. It looked like a Crusader stronghold, perched on its hill, but it was being watered down, year by year, during the rainy season, and its walls were melting into one another, so that the whole edifice was doomed to collapse. Gabriel found the best approach and scrambled up to the base, climbing over rocks and sliding on scree, followed for a time by a set of children, who slithered away before he reached the point where lumpy stone became a smooth mud-brick wall rising to battlements. High above, windows that had lost the rooms from which to appraise their view stood bravely in an unsupported wall, like a mask held away from a face. Gabriel’s ankles strained at an angle. Steadying himself, with one hand on the hot brick, he reached the tower on the corner. What a lovely old wreck, he thought, falling apart like a rotting galleon on a bay.

  Sweat soaked into his shirt, cooling him. Below, the palm groves concealed houses and alleys, and as he slid and stepped down, he wondered how the hell he would find Annie again.

  Back in the shade, the trees were at first like a crowd gathering around to protect him from the sun’s hitman-aim, but then he began to feel increasingly small, shrunken, and the palms no longer appeared kindly. They didn’t seem to acknowledge his vulnerability, and if they rushed at him, as he felt they might, he would be trampled. His imagination moved. It dawdled behind him, like a shadow stretching out from his footfall, a part of him, but with a will of its own. He looked back along the rows of palms that seemed to be closing in. Ifrit and jinn, he imagined, were dancing around him like fairies, probably darting between tree trunks whenever he turned. He thought he heard their sing-song voices calling to one another, mocking him. Jinn often mocked mortals, and ifrit were horrible beings, a tribe of jinn who liked to torment. Bahla’s reputation had caught him; the evil eye was on his back. His thoughts, watchful and wary, scurried after him, rattled.

  It was stuffy under the canopy but, more by accident than intent, he reached the track by the mud wall, breathless, and came across an old man sitting outside a small home, the ubiquitous camel stick between his knees. He called Gabriel over. It was good to hunker down beside a solid person, a tangible presence, who talked away at him, with one very long tooth protruding. Gabriel had no means to respond, but he crouched and listened, trying to pick out some of the words he’d learned in the suq. The man called out to a small boy and in time coffee was brought, with a plate of plump dates on an old tin tray. Relieved not to be alone, Gabriel sat cross-legged on the ground, slurped his coffee—not too loud, as was polite—and made appreciative sounds about the dates. The man smiled and pointed at the palms, nodding with obvious satisfaction at the greenery that flourished all about them, thanks to the falaj.