by Denise Roig
“I’m so glad you’re there!” she cries. “No one else is home. No one is ever home in this awful place.”
Her husband on that killer stretch of the E11? Bad news from her son in Dallas? A scary mammogram? What?
“They’ve gone. They’ve fucking gone.”
Steve just called her from the airport. “‘It’s the only way out, my love. Got in too deep,’ that’s what he told me. They pulled a runner. They pulled a fucking runner,” and Cherry begins to wail. I’m thinking: my love? My love?
“But we’d heard they might be leaving.” I could say many things right now; this seems the safest.
“Not like this. This isn’t a proper goodbye. We were going away this weekend. To that new resort out near Liwa, facing the Empty Quarter. Just the two of us.”
“You and Steve. And he was going to pay? With what? Qasr Al Sarab rooms go for $1,000 a night.” It’s the nastiest thing I can think to say.
“Don’t get all moral on me,” says Cherry. She isn’t crying any more. “Steve told me about you. And you were so chummy with Ronni.”
“Come over,” I say.
“I’ll never, ever see him again,” Cherry sobs.
“Just get a cab, okay?”
> <
Ellen is still on the first slide of her PowerPoint when Sami arrives with the boxes of maamoul. Mother waves him toward the kitchen storage room and turns her eyes back to the laptop, but I can see Ellen is bothered. She keeps looking at me. Maybe she thinks I am in the way, that I am intruding on her lesson. But I have nothing else to do this morning and this is not as boring as most things.
“Plato had a great influence on the field of aesthetics,” Ellen is saying, when there is a scuffle behind the swinging door to the kitchen. She stops and waits but when there is nothing else, Ellen clicks to her next slide. “The four elements, Madame Qubaisi, these are the cornerstones of modern aesthetics.”
Sami hurries in. “Madame, it is Fatima.” Mother looks more annoyed than concerned, but follows him. There’s loud conversation behind the door, during which Ellen goes onto the next slide, checks her watch again.
“What happened?” I ask Mother when she comes back, but she ignores me.
“Please excuse the interruption,” she says to Ellen. “You know housemaids: always a drama! They should be paying us!”
Ellen murmurs something, but I can see she’s a bit put off. She skips to the next slide. And then comes the sound I’ve heard all my life, familiar as the muezzin calling everyone to prayer: the sound of two hands clapping.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Mother says, standing. “My husband.” And she’s gone.
“She won’t be back,” I tell Ellen, who looks like she’s just seen a camel trot through the breakfast room.
“Why didn’t he just come in?” She’s so stunned, she’s not watching what she’s saying, is forgetting the delicate footwork around our cultural differences. “If he needed her, why didn’t he just…?” But now she’s heard herself. Her whole body shrinks. She closes her laptop without turning it off.
“The measure of a man is what he does with power,” I recite. It’s the only quote I know from Plato. I like it. It feels subversive.
Ellen sits back against the pillows, though she doesn’t reopen her laptop. “How do you live here?” she asks and I see that she really, really wants to know.
If she really, really listens I will tell her about my friends and the things we do, how sometimes we dress up in our brothers’ khandouras and ghutras and sneak out, pretending to be boys. How sometimes we even kiss each other. How we will do almost anything to feel alive.
> <
Back home they do not know. They keep coming. Why? Money. Say goodbye kids and husband. Mother, father, everyone.
I go Hong Kong first. Crazy Americans who got four boys. Go UAE, cousin tell me. Big money. I pray Blessed Virgin Mary and get message: Go!
First, think: Bad, but not so bad. Then Madame begin breaking me. Hands shake, can’t sleep. So tired cannot carry baby without feel very scared. If I drop her — she big baby, so heavy — I be dead. Madame make me write every thing I do: iron shirt, stove on, baby nap. Every thing in book: start time, stop time. I say, Madame, instead of write, let me do. Take too much time! She hit me. Only bad nannies say no, she say.
Every day more tired. Cars, kids, but keep go. Then the Baba touch me in my private place. No, I say. No money, he say. We go like that. Three month. One morning cannot get out of my bed. “I am breaking,” I say to Mother Mary. I pray and pray. Go! she say.
Night I jump from window. Not far, but ankle crack, so I crawl to street. Cab come. No money, so he want sex. I wait another cab. He bring me to embassy. Some good people.
Carmela know my story.
“Hey,” she say, when she think I am sad.
“Hey,” I say back.
“Crochet,” she say and bring out yarn Ronni give. “I make you hat,” she say.
“Hat?” I laugh. “Maybe snow here!”
“Yeah.” She laugh. “Maybe snow.”
> <
We don’t end up talking about Steve at all.
“Remember that crazy couple from, I can’t remember where, Manchester? No, Liverpool. They used to throw these huge bashes on their yacht, hire half the waiters in Abu Dhabi,” says Cherry. “I saw Elton John there once.”
“I think it was Tom Jones,” I say.
“Were you there too?” Cherry’s eyes are swollen, but she’s got her legs tucked under her on my loveseat and her hand wrapped around a glass of wine. I’ve refilled it twice, will need to put on a pot of coffee to sober her up. “I can’t remember. We go back and back, don’t we?”
That was the party where Russ drank too much too fast and had to take a cab home. I’ll be fine, I told him. Never mind about me. It was one of those half and half parties, half Brits and half the rest of us, a stir-fry of Germans and Aussies, South Africans and Yanks. Expat nation. With enough booze and enough time, national rivalries always broke down. “We are the world, we are the people…” At some blurry point a bunch of us ended up on the sand, ankle deep in it, the Gulf glittering just beyond, arms around strangers’ shoulders, singing and swaying.
“God, I love this place,” Steve said. He’d taken me to a hidden spot on the beach. The others had gone back inside. We made love crouching against the outside wall of the neighbouring villa. It was so good, I cried.
Oasis, 1972
And so we’ve become a country. The United Arab Emirates, a long name for a small place. With the British pulling out of the Trucial States at the end of ’71, Sheikh Zayed rallied the tribes of the seven regions, a monumental task considering the old grudges, blood lines, feuds over land and resources. What a strain on Baba Zayed as he brokered a deal that would have broken any other man. He has been less among us this year, as he travelled from emirate to emirate, negotiating, listening, compromising.
With his mother, Sheikha Salama, gone since a year, he also comes less frequently to Oasis Hospital. He used to visit her nearly every day; his brother, Sheikh Shakhbut, less often. But one evening they were here together. The Sheikha was failing, but she was so happy to have her sons with her that she sat up straight as a young girl against the pillows of the low sofa. The majlis was flickering with candlelight, the incense especially pungent. It was from the Sheikha that I learned about Arabian perfumes — oud, ambar, zafran, musk, sandalwood. I absorbed so much sitting with her during her stays in the hospital. She would sometimes laugh at my Arabic and correct my mistakes, though after ten years, I’ve become fluent enough to teach newcomers at the hospital. When I use some of her phrases now, Arab companions will ask, “Where did you learn to say that?”
Sheikha Salama would be so proud to see what her country has become. If she had lived just a year and a bit longer she might have stood by her son’s
side as he raised the new flag — stripes of red, green, white and black — on December 2, 1971. But even more, I think she would have been overjoyed that her sons were able to negotiate the change in leadership without bloodshed, so unlike the violence when her husband took the throne from his brother. The Sheikha even made her sons take an oath of fidelity that they would never resort to fratricide. If Zayed is now seen as the father of the country, it is in no small part due to their mother.
Shakhbut is a good man, but so tied to the old ways that he was nearly paralyzed when oil and fortune gushed from the sea beds. I’ve been told he even blocked the first attempts to build a hospital in Abu Dhabi back in ’56. The year I arrived, crates and crates of medical equipment and construction material sent by the British were left unpacked on the beaches of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, Shakhbut and his family were treated abroad, doctors even flown in from Britain when Sheikha Salama fell ill. God love her, but God bless her people too. They also deserve the best care.
In the end, Zayed, the family agreed, would be the stronger, more fearless leader. The Brits, too, were happy to leave their once-protectorate in such capable hands.
But that last evening, all that history was like water flowing through a falaj. It was just a mother and her sons, laughing, talking, drinking coffee. The men began to sing qaseedas, old Bedu ballads. I’d heard Sheikh Zayed sing before — he sings even when driving — but that night his voice was especially rich, deep as a well at day’s end. No one enjoyed it more than their mother. Her sons were singing for her.
It’s almost impossible to recognize the hospital now. The original palm branch and mud-brick buildings, plus the twenty cement-block rooms built in my second year, are still used, but we’ve added a labour and delivery suite, an X-ray building, and a cold-storage basement for medicines. Later this year, another ten patient rooms — with private baths and air conditioning, such luxury — will be built. And, despite my preference for sleeping outside, we will soon be getting new staff housing.
The town of Al Ain is growing too, with super-markets, banks and travel agents springing up. Still, the centre of social life is here in the hospital, with some folks coming in every day just to chat. They actively seek our help now. There is less TB, less malnutrition, less ignorance. And healthier babies. We’re also seeing the kinds of emergencies one finds at home: car accidents, injuries from machinery. One night last week, a Volvo roared down a sand dune, injuring two members of a Bedu family sleeping below, the dune their shelter from blowing sand. When I arrived in Al Ain, you could count the number of cars on one hand. Now there are 8,000 cars in Abu Dhabi emirate alone.
The country is being swept into the modern world at last. But who could have dreamed it would happen so fast? No man sauntering along on camel from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi in 1960 could have imagined that in a decade he’d be driving a Mercedes on a highway and arriving in less than two hours. Or that he would no longer be living with extended family in a little areesh hut, but in a spacious villa with every convenience.
When I worry about what might get lost in the name of progress, I look at my friends, my patients, even at Sheikh Zayed himself. I look around me — at the palms and the dunes, at the Bedu men who greet each other by touching noses. I feel the biblical rhythm of life. The desert is still home, will always be home, despite asphalt and airplanes, oil rigs and steel girders. No amount of money will erase who these people are. The sky, the heat, the emptiness will keep us rooted.
19th & Khaleej al Arabi
They’d been heading out that Friday morning, the humidity a damp haze at 5:00 a.m., Victor in front of him, pedalling in his frenzied, unorthodox form, Talbot yelling back to them both, into the dimness: Switch! Mathieu surging forward, Victor slowing enough to be passed.
Mathieu had seen it so many times, though once had been enough: their shifting line as they drafted into Talbot’s slipstream, their controlled zig-zag down Khaleej al Arabi, the July sky lightening over mosques and tall cranes. It was a drill he’d known since the lycée in Lyon, since crazy coach Gervais took a riding switch to their sweaty legs. He’d been amazed that his calves could sweat like that, amazed that pumping his legs up and down a million trillion times could carry him so far. And not just down the road, Gervais would tell the panting, doubled-over boys. He’d been a philosopher, that Gervais.
Sandrine and the girls were in France when it happened. These were their summers now: his wife and twin daughters walking into the Languedoc village for croissants each morning, Mathieu grabbing a black coffee at Starbucks on his way into the Khalifa Street office. They talked every night by webcam, Mathieu leaning back in the office chair, watching the fuchsia faces of his family. The technology still hadn’t been perfected. Sometimes the girls were just voices out of the darkness. “Qu’avez-vous fait aujourd’hui?” he asked every night. There were markets in Pézenas and Sète and old friends and day trips to la plage. It was hard not to be envious. He had his all-consuming job, Victor and the bikers, sometimes a flirtation in a bar on a Thursday night that slid into Friday morning. C’est tout.
He hadn’t wanted to go out that morning. A big meeting with the Al Nafs people was scheduled for Sunday morning and he didn’t have all the numbers he needed. Even if he worked all weekend, there still might not be enough time to fill in the holes. Two years of dealing with Abu Dhabi’s investment body had shown him how fatal this could prove. Weeks of work down the toilet. He didn’t like riding when he was this edgy, although Talbot was always saying this was the best time to get out there and pump your ass off. “Who isn’t on edge in this place?” he asked. “Name me one person you know who isn’t totally stressed out, especially in our world.”
Talbot was a corporate lawyer for Amaal, the real-estate Godzilla in town. He and his wife had just split, Molly going back to Scotland with the girls. “For the best,” he kept saying, but Mathieu had seen the terror behind the brave drinking and pedalling. Victor, mad Victor, was a cheery Aussie with a gorgeous wife and two boys he couldn’t stop talking about. Even with the market slump he was upbeat. “Yeah, investment banking’s in the sewer,” he’d said to Mathieu the week before, as if he’d said, yeah, it’s hot. The three usually went to Forty Fruity on the Corniche after biking. Victor always ordered the tallest triple-layer drink, noisily slurping the avocado purée at the bottom: “Put back the calories, mates.”
But Victor was a demon on a bike, competitive as hell. Even with his irregular form — pitched slightly more forward than Talbot advised — he was the fastest among them. He’d confided to Mathieu that he wanted to tackle a triathlon next year. “I’d like that just once.” And it was looking good, Victor surpassing his times each week, Talbot, even Talbot, looking impressed.
The week before he was hit, Victor told Mathieu he was thinking of going to Amman in April. “Heard it’s one of the best triathlons in the region. You know…organized!” And they’d laughed, both of them having lived in the UAE long enough to appreciate that.
The place had you by the balls. So much money you could barely believe it. Kids happy as clams, carefree in their private schools, golf and piano lessons, wives relieved to have someone else take over the laundry, the cooking, the toilets, the daily nit and grit. Sandrine had slipped into the life as if she’d been born to it. And if it got too hot or too boring, if the nanny quit and you had to go through the maze of finding another, if the clogged streets and wacko drivers made you scream with helplessness, there were summers in France to set you right.
They’d stopped running, were walking now. Whatever Gillian did, he did. “My friends at the school tell me this is normal, that if I wasn’t crying every second they’d be worried. ‘She is,’ as the papers said, ‘inconsolable.’ She is — thank God! — completely out of her mind.” He thought she might laugh — she had a great, surprising laugh — but her voice caught. “What kills me as much as the stupid tank that cut him down and kept going is that I wasn’t even here. Dad had a
second small stroke and Mum thought it’d be a good idea to come home a week earlier than planned for summer hols. ‘Were you afraid Dad might die, was that what you were thinking?’ I asked her that on the phone last night. She calls every night, more worried about me now than she is about Dad. It was harsh of me, I guess. Like if she hadn’t been her overly concerned self, always dramatizing Dad’s health, I would have been here, instead of shopping with her that afternoon in Brisbane. I would have made it not happen.” Gillian reached for the bottle of water Mathieu had extended to her and let out a shaky breath. “Don’t tell anyone I said that last thing, okay?”
He’d called the day after the accident, left a message with her sister, who’d flown back with her and the boys. “Hello, this is a message for Gillian. It’s Mathieu. I rode with Victor. I cannot tell you how terribly sorry I am. For you and for…” Merde, he couldn’t remember the kids’ names. Aaron? Cedric? He didn’t know them, didn’t know her. She’d been Victor’s backstory, probably the reason he seemed so happy all the time. They’d only met Victor’s family twice, running into the four of them at the Carrefour check-out one Friday evening, chatting longer than they might have because the lines snaked back into the aisles of chips and chocolates. An Emirati woman, hugely, modestly pregnant under her abaya, stood between the two families. Her eyes, bright, curious even, watched them above the shayla that covered the rest of her face. Amazing, the eyes of some of the women here.
Unloading the bags into the back of the Volvo later, Sandrine had commented on how beautiful Victor’s wife was. She wouldn’t say that now. Gillian looked like a woman who hadn’t stood in front of a mirror for a while, had lost track of herself. She was tall, nearly as tall as Mathieu, and as she bent over to retie the laces of her trainer, foot high on the Corniche railing, he could see the outline of her back ribs against the jersey.