Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Who?”

  “Can’t you—can you hear them?”

  He listened, shook his head.

  “It’s like a kind of muttering.”

  As she spoke, a column of dust swirled up before them in a sudden twist. They shielded their faces and kept their eyes tight shut until it dropped to the ground.

  “Ha,” said Reggie. “You summoned a jinn!”

  She wiped dust from her face. “I did what?”

  “Dust devils the world over,” he coughed, “are seen as spir-itual manifestations of one sort or another. Here, they say they’re jinn. You know, earthbound beings made from fire that we can’t see. You heard voices and then, whoop, a dust devil whirls.”

  “I really don’t want to hear this right now. I’d like to be able to sleep tonight, if that’s not too much to ask. Ugh, my hair is full of sand!”

  “So this is Babylon,” Geoffrey declared, in his trombone voice. His hair was greasy, his eyebrows bushy. “A little underwhelming, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What did you expect?” Kim asked, bringing up the rear. “Fresh vines hanging down from the ziggurat three millennia on?”

  “Apparently there’s a considerable body of evidence that suggests the Hanging Gardens were in Nineveh,” said Reggie. “Not here.” He enjoyed being a fount of information, but in a gentle, unprepossessing way; he wasn’t showing off, and what he knew, Kim and Thea wanted to learn. Potted history, as they took their Friday outings, was as much as they could absorb, in view of the extraordinary heritage of this country. As Reggie rattled on about Nebuchadnezzar, who had built the gardens for his queen, Amytis, because she was homesick for Iran’s green slopes, Thea felt embarrassed. She had been ridiculous during the night—she had probably imagined the whole key-in-the-door scenario, and in the blue light of day, here at Babylon, it all struck her as very silly. Bored staff, playing up.

  The Ishtar Gate was newly built, its blue tiles studded with frescos of golden lions, but the Lion of Babylon had survived in crumbling basalt. Kim and Thea stood quietly. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Thea looked over Kim’s shoulder. “You mean that the man under the lion is the Iraqi people, and the lion,” she dropped her voice, “is . . . ho-hum?”

  Kim threw a squinting glance toward the hovering guides.

  “Don’t be mean to lions,” Thea went on. “They kill only to survive. And look—the man is fighting back.”

  “Yeah. Resistance, in spite of overwhelming odds. We never see it, but it must be going on all around us. We don’t know who’s who or what’s what, but . . .” Kim looked at the lion again and at the disintegrating figure trapped beneath it, “. . . this is a reminder. They will prevail and then,” she turned, “hordes of tourists will come here, not one of whom will say, ‘A little underwhelming, isn’t it?’”

  “I want to make sex with you.”

  Same voice, same words. The next night.

  Another state of alert gripped Thea, stayed with her, as she waited out the hours, listening fretfully to every sound in the corridor, but once again, in the light of day, when nighttime felt a long time ago and a long way ahead, her anxiety seemed overblown. “It’s ironic,” she said to Kim. “A few hundred miles from the front, I’m fretting about a randy waiter.”

  There were no calls that night or the next. The test had run its course. Thea slept again and, as she walked through the lobby, she was able to smile at the fine man standing at his desk, but when the calls resumed the following week, Kim concluded that the caller had simply come back on night duty. They were both wary, now, of the waiters who brought room service, but only one made Thea uneasy. Younger than the others, and shifty, he had a flicker in his eyes that she didn’t much like, yet she could not risk his livelihood—and that of his family, wherever he came from—unless she was sure.

  Still, enough was enough.

  Reggie’s reaction, when she told him, was muted, but fierce. The hotel management, in turn, were alarmed, apologetic, and insisted that Thea should immediately be moved to another room. No one could know—only Sachiv, Reggie, Kim, and the general manager. That evening, two years’ worth of clothes and six weeks of living in one room had to be squashed into suitcases, and when it was done, Sachiv and Reggie came to move her. No porters were called. Laden, the four of them hurried along the corridor and scrambled into the lift with suitcases, bags, sunhat, tape recorder, a heavy portable typewriter in its ungainly box and a pile of books. Thea could feel Sachiv’s breath on the side of her neck.

  He had found her a room on the same floor as Reggie. When the doors of the lift opened, he poked his head out, looked left and right, causing splutters of giggling behind him, and gave the nod. They scurried once more along a hushed corridor, sniggering, stumbling over their loads and peeking around corners. In his hurry, Sachiv had trouble with the key, but when the door opened, they crashed into the room, laughing.

  Sachiv now had a legitimate reason to single out Thea. Special care was due to her, in view of the inconvenience she had suffered at the hands of hotel staff, and he addressed himself to the task with alacrity. He was not on duty the morning after she moved, but he phoned her room that afternoon.

  “Have you had any more trouble, Miss Thea?”

  “No, it’s been fine, thank you.”

  “I’m very glad. . . . So everything is okay now?”

  “Yes. Thanks so much for sorting it out. And this room is lovely.” It was much larger than the last, with a seated area and a double bed.

  “No, no,” he said. “We are very sorry about this. Please call me if you are disturbed again.”

  But it was he who called again the next day, and the day after that—to check that she had passed an undisturbed night. She liked the sound of his voice, hesitant, coming from his office, not Reception, and soon they no longer referred to the nocturnal incidents. They chatted. He asked what had brought her to Iraq and if she was missing her family; she asked about his work, the career that had taken him from Bombay to Baghdad, but neither ever mentioned his children or his wife. It was supportive and companionable, but when, a few weeks later, a shrill ring shook her from oblivion in the dead end of night and that loathsome voice breathed, “I want to make sex with you,” she was still alone.

  Whoever he was, he had found her.

  The circus repeated itself: Sachiv insisting again on subterfuge, to narrow down the suspects, since the only way the caller could know her room number was by bringing her room service. They didn’t laugh so much this time, as they squashed into lifts, reached yet another room, and dumped her stuff; dumped her, she felt. She hated sleeping in the hotel now, but even though Reggie and Geoffrey were soon moving to a bungalow in the suburbs, Reggie’s endless remonstrating with the company had yet to yield accommodation for the girls.

  They were therefore relieved when, later that week, they were told an apartment had been found for them and set off to have a look with Reggie. It was after dark when they drove up to what looked like a vast shopping mall, a great hulk of cement looming out of a parking lot. There would soon be shops, Reggie had been told, businesses and tenants. Kim and Thea glanced at one another as he led them up a back staircase to the second floor, then followed him along an outdoor corridor and across a vast open concrete space. He unlocked a door and they all stepped in. Their apartment had a spacious kitchen, large rooms and a balcony, but it was all tiled, like a bathroom.

  Kim said, “The only things missing here are a pathologist and a corpse.”

  Reggie looked about. “It’ll be done up.”

  “Yeah? Are they gonna relocate that shopping mall downstairs?”

  “It isn’t safe,” said Thea. “It’s dark and deserted, and we’ll have no transport.”

  “Hmm,” said Reggie. “It isn’t appropriate at all. I had no idea.”

  “You guys get a lovely house in the suburbs,” said Thea, “and we get a changing room.”

  “Hey,” Kim nudged her, “we’re just
secretaries.”

  Back at the hotel, Sachiv came into the restaurant while they were eating and stopped by their table. Thea, who had launched into her usual starter, tried to munch demurely.

  Sachiv lifted his chin. “So—it is a nice place, your new apartment?”

  “Disaster,” said Kim.

  Reggie shook his head. “A few rooms over a car park. It won’t do.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.” He sat on the bench next to Thea. “Tell me, the boy you were not sure about, have you seen him recently?”

  She swallowed her mouthful. “Yes, but I’ve also seen three or four others.”

  “You didn’t note his name? You know, on the. . . .” He gestured toward his own name tag.

  “I’ve been trying not to look at them.”

  “Next time you see this one, the one you suspect, try to read his name.”

  “All right, but—”

  “We won’t do anything until we are sure. In the meantime, if he phones, call Reception immediately.” He stood up. “Have a good evening.”

  “Night, Sachiv, thanks,” said Reggie.

  “Call Reception?” Thea hissed. “What are they going to do? Rush up to my room, grab the phone and tell him he’s a very naughty boy?”

  “Still.” Reggie put down his napkin. “You have to be careful. He might take the next step and come up to the room.”

  “He already has.”

  Iraq, like the night caller, remained aloof. They worked in the midst of a silent population, among fearful colleagues. A friendly people, gagged. Though they smiled at one another, the foreign cadre and the local employees, though they leaned over the same desks and documents, consulted and considered, said “Good morning,” and “Bye, now,” they never really talked; they simply operated in the same space. To live in a war zone was one thing; to live in a zone where no one could speak, quite another. The only Iraqi who spoke to them fluidly, fearlessly, was Saddam Hussein—on their television screens every night, relentless, ranting and raging to his soldiers at the front or opening public lavatories in bleak villages, surrounded like a rock star by an exhibition of ululating women.

  But, for one day in March, the barriers came down. Arriving at the office that morning, Kim and Thea made their way past the security man, who sat on a kitchen chair in the entrance, and the cleaning woman in the hallway who, every day, was hunkered to the ground with a bunch of twigs, sweeping the dust from one place to another. As soon as they got upstairs, they noticed a change. The women were not only made up, but dressed up. They looked at Thea’s office clothes—skirt, panty hose, V-neck jumper—perplexed, yet with a degree of sympathy.

  “You are not celebrating?” Najma, the chief engineer, asked her.

  “Celebrating?”

  “Yes. International Women’s Day. We will have a small party later.”

  And party they did. At lunchtime, in the large office where Thea worked, desks were pushed aside, trays of canned drinks and snacks were set on a table, the men were kicked out, and the women gathered. There was chatter, laughter—lots of laughter—and talk of family, as the women opened up about their mothers and grandmothers, in turn asking Kim and Thea, who were feeling more than usually dowdy in the midst of glamor, about their homes in Dublin and Philadelphia. This soon gave way to singing and dancing until, as the party wound down, they all formed a circle, holding hands, and turned around the room, then broke off, kissed one another three times and repeated a blessing.

  “What does it mean?” Thea asked Alia.

  “We are wishing for one another healthy children, nice homes, and husbands.”

  “I love the husband bit,” Kim said, sotto voce, to Thea. “Like an afterthought. A necessary accoutrement, like a good vacuum cleaner.”

  “Alia couldn’t understand why we hadn’t dressed up.” Thea shook her head. “I was too ashamed to admit I’d never heard of International Women’s Day before.”

  “Me neither.”

  “We should know these things.”

  “We do now.”

  For that one afternoon, the invisible film that surrounded their colleagues dissolved. For a few hours they were neither Irish nor American nor Iraqi; neither spies nor spied upon. They were women all. But when the party ended, their colleagues went back to their desks, the men were granted access, and the shutters came down.

  “We caught a glimpse,” Thea said, on the way back to the hotel, glancing at two women on a street corner gripping their abayas at the chest. “A glimpse of who they might be. The repression is paralyzing.”

  “After the war,” Reggie said, “things will relax.”

  “And if he loses the war?”

  “Iraq won’t lose. The West can’t let that happen. Why do you think we’re all here, building up the place? Not to hand it over to the mullahs, that’s for sure.”

  Back in her room, Thea took up her spot beside the window for her daily feed of muddy Tigris. Although those waters had come a long way, it was hard to see any flow or movement. The Tigris and the Euphrates had their sources in the same mountain range—the Taurus Mountains in Turkey—and, like siblings born of the same womb who kept their distance, they ran from north to south, sometimes quite close, sometimes far apart, before finally joining up to create the great delta of the Shatt al-Arab. The Euphrates was mentioned in the Bible and so too was the Tigris, although it was referred to by its ancient name, Hiddekel, because these, it was generally believed, were two of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. This was Thea’s day-to-day now: gazing down at the waters of Eden, no less. Whenever she stared at her map, her eyes always followed the rivers south and settled on the Marshes, highlighted by the blue dashes that symbolized wetlands, and she knew she would have to be patient, since such a trip would need planning and time off. Just as she could not wait to see more desert, so she longed to see this rare habitat, where people lived in reed houses and whole villages floated on water. These would be sights to tuck away in her little book of notes and memoranda. It didn’t exist, yet, her wallet-diary. She had still to find the right-sized notebook, which must have a solid spine and lots of pages to accommodate her scribblings. There had been no time, before leaving Dublin, to go browsing in Easons, and at Heathrow airport every conceivable format of diary had been on display, except the one she sought. She could visualize it, see it tucked into her bag or sitting on the desk in this very room: it had a leather jacket, mottled brown, and wasn’t much bigger than her hand, or wouldn’t be when she eventually found it. She could even hear the snap of the rubber band that she would loop around it to hold in her bits and pieces. At home she had shoeboxes crammed with memos going back as far as primary school, and here, already, on the bedside table under a novel, a small stack of random papers was accumulating: hand-scribbled notes to herself capturing a scene, a smell, the sounds of this city; receipts; a scrap of paper on which one of her colleagues had written her name in Arabic; a map drawn by Sachiv on hotel letterhead showing the quickest route to the park.

  Her Iraqi experience would be recorded in jottings and tangibles—she would flatten its petals, note its peculiarities, allow its dust to get between her pages. There would be no considered essays, well-crafted letters or articles, such as her father had suggested. No. She would be no good at that. But memory, keeping it and controlling it, that was a job worth doing. Thea liked to be reminded, and she intended to capture this country, and hold it, in its minutiae.

  The morning’s celebrations had set her on edge. She wondered, possibly for the first time, why she had not attended university. At eighteen it had been a straightforward choice, to her, even though it didn’t quite make sense. She was a reader, inquisitive, open-minded. Her parents’ expectations had been disguised as suggestions: a degree in history or literature? French, perhaps? Their thoughtful, considered child—her occasional outbursts of inanity notwithstanding—was surely bound for study? And they held this opinion even though her father had told her frequently that she spent too much t
ime thinking. “Tell me how to stop,” she had teased him one day, “and I’ll tell you how to stop dreaming.”

  There was, though, some truth in what he said—back then she spent a good deal of time inside her own head—but she wasn’t pondering Jungian psychology or planning a rewrite of The Great Gatsby. She was scheming, dreaming, fashioning plans to give her restless, reckless thoughts something to do. So when a summer job in an office had yielded cash into her hand, she was immediately persuaded that there were more exciting places to be than the dreary corridors in UCD’s campus at Belfield or the cobblestoned quads at Trinity College. A resistance to containment had always pulled on her—an impatient yank on her arm—and while working in an office was a containment of sorts, she did not feel constrained therein, because her bank balance had an air of conceit about it, and come the holidays, her spirit, her impulses, were her own to spill, be it on the shores of Lake Titicaca or sleeping with some pigs in a hut in the Pyrenees. Now, instead of a degree, instead of looking for a secure teaching job and a house on a cul-de-sac, she was living in Iraq.

  No regrets. None.

  And yet something niggled. Her laundry had been left on the end of the bed in a plastic bag. As she put away her pressed and folded clothes, she pinpointed what was bugging her: the women with whom she had celebrated International Women’s Day were architects and engineers and project managers. They had skills, real skills (though some weren’t much older than Thea), while her professional abilities amounted to typing. And Pitman’s Shorthand. A little bookkeeping. According to her last boss, her attention to detail was her real forte.

  Attention to detail. Thea shook her head, folded the laundry bag, and went back to the window. How far, in truth, could secretarial work take her? Alia and Najma could design bus shelters that would survive a nuclear attack, but Thea had swapped education for a typewriter: 90 w.p.m. Her great skill: ninety words per minute.

  A pink gloom was curling across the town. Perhaps it was in this part of the world, where the evening light was filled with desert dust, that the expression “dusty pink” had been born. The traffic was building now, the bridge lined with buses and pickup trucks, but scattered among the houses, palm trees lifted the city from the touch of time. From this perspective Thea could see, more clearly than had ever been possible from her breakfast café in Dublin, that horizons meant only that you had still farther to go. Her unease about her lack of professional qualifications began to fall away. She must, simply, make good her choices. If she was to live like a cricket, she should learn to fly.