Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “How is your family?” murmured the bishop after three gracious maids had passed before them with trays large as sundials piled with chocolates, dates, chocolate-covered dates, date-filled chocolates. Dave felt full by the second round, but watched his host as to when he could gracefully decline, grateful for all those socially trying years in the Gulf. He was not an innocent. “Thank you,” he said on round three, hand on heart, head bowed, after Maktoum waved off the women. The sheikh was older than he’d expected, a trim man in his early fifties with an impeccable, greying goatee, amused, inquiring eyes and an ease in his body that slowed one’s own breathing. Dave felt himself exhale for the first time in months.

  “My mother is doing as well as can be expected. You are kind to inquire, Your Grace,” he said.

  “Alzheimer’s,” he said, turning to Dave. “Such a terrible way to go. And what makes it even more painful is that there’s such an effort to pretend it’s something else. We need to know about Alzheimer’s, not shut our eyes to it.” Maktoum sighed and adjusted his ghutra slightly. “My country…” and he was speaking now just to Dave…“needs to take the blinkers off, put pride aside and get on with the twenty-first century. Read, study; open ourselves to other ways of thinking and being.”

  Bishop Mueller cleared his throat. “Your Highness, I do hope you will excuse me. There is a family coming to baptize their new baby…”

  “Of course! So many people depend on you, Your Grace. Duty calls. Of course,” and Maktoum stood. Lifting himself from the low couch, the bishop shot Dave a look, which made him also get to his feet.

  “But you’re not going too, Father?” The sheikh sounded crushed. “There is much to talk about.”

  The bishop left, looking a bit miffed, but it didn’t seem to have an effect on Maktoum, who ordered in more food. The afternoon opened around them. He wanted to know about Dave’s religious training (“your blessed calling”), his family (“one son, two daughters…lucky man!”), listened intently to Dave’s experiences as an Anglican pastor in Bahrain. “What a bloody mess. Just give the Shia some rights and be done with it,” said the sheikh, tapping a cigarette on the gilt side table before lighting up. “But tell me what you think of our funny little country. Don’t worry, I won’t deport you if you start quoting the last Human Rights Watch report.”

  Dave told Maktoum about the warmth of people — “especially my parishioners from Kerala” — about discovering the beauty of the Liwa desert, about the sense of being “part of the build,” a line he’d used in other postings. “And when I hear the muezzin from the mosque next door it really does feel as if the call to prayer is for all of us.” This wasn’t a stretch. In Kuwait and Oman, it had sometimes bothered him when the call to prayer drowned out the Anglican hymns. Here the call felt almost paternal.

  “Come now, Father,” said Maktoum. “What do you really think?” And Dave, feeling both nervous and relieved, told him about visiting the labour camps where he’d entered squalid, humid rooms, twelve men to a bunk, about the Ethiopian nannies fleeing employers who starved, beat and refused to pay them (he didn’t say most of their bosses were Emirati). Some of these women now slept on the grounds of St. Edmund’s, their slender legs curled inside the holy-white of their shawls.

  There was no Ethiopian embassy in Abu Dhabi, Dave explained, and the consulate in Dubai had no money to help in any way. “I’ve tried.” It had been his first mission at St. Edmund’s, one he literally tripped over some mornings. But no one on the church council had wanted to commit the 18,000 dirhams a month to rent the empty villa across the street for the women. And even if they had consented, there would be no embassy on site to protect the runaways physically or legally. Any of their employers could come and drag them away in the night.

  “I am ashamed,” said Maktoum. He said nothing more for a long moment, eyes closed, before opening them and smiling. “We will do something. I promise you we will do something.” And then just as Dave was beginning to feel the discomfort he’d often felt when speaking to Gulf Arabs about the places they called home, Maktoum wanted to know Dave’s thoughts about the ideological tug of war within the Church of England, what he really thought of Rowan Williams. “I’m just fascinated,” said Maktoum, settling back among the majlis pillows. “Your archbishop is quite the maverick.”

  It was wonderful, rare and wonderful, Dave thought later, as he followed a palace driver to a waiting Mercedes, to talk ideas with a deeply intelligent person. It was rare enough back home, but here in the oil lands, where consumption and piety had replaced ideas, where intellectual life was as hard to come by as a temperate day, it almost never happened. It was even rarer, if that was possible, to be listened to with such unwavering attention, as if every word, every inflection, was being taken in. It was only later still, going over their conversation as he tried to gather points for the coming week’s sermon, that he heard that word: some. Give them some rights and be done with it.

  Tina Souaidy hadn’t touched her tea. She talked, referring to typed notes, looking up over her reading glasses to hammer in a point. She’d written a thesis. He should have seen this coming after last week.

  It had been sweltering when they’d driven out to the Musaffah camps. Tina, who always looked like she’d just stepped from an air-conditioned shop, had even fashioned a fan out of the church bulletin. “Lord,” she said, when they got out of the van. She’d brought two LuLu bags packed with board games, Bingo chips, playing cards. “The girls need some amusement, don’t they, poor things?” After several visits to the camps, wandering through the neglected buildings of bunk beds, communal kitchens and too many bodies, Dave wasn’t sure what was needed. Tickets home? Then what?

  As a man, he’d been able to go only as far as the front courtyard of the women’s compound. Most people didn’t even know there was a camp for women out here. Surrounded on all sides by the crumbling sprawl of the men’s buildings, it housed up to 100 women, Filipinas and Bangladeshis employed by the city’s large industrial cleaning companies, women who mopped floors and scrubbed toilets at Adnoc or HSBC headquarters at 3:00 a.m. You worked like a slave and then you came home to this. Dave had to steel himself to come here every week, to enter the shantytown that most expats sped by on their way somewhere else, to Tarif or Liwa. The camps were so here, but so invisible.

  While Tina visited with the female residents, he planned to drop into some of the men’s rooms in the camp down the road. The week before he’d played chess with a red-bearded Pakistani fellow, a labourer on the ten-year engineering joke known as the Sheikh Zayed Bridge. The man had beaten him soundly at the game, grinning all the while. When Dave pressed him as to what he needed (sheets, food, pen and paper?), the man shook his head. “Good,” he said.

  Dave had dropped Tina quickly at the entrance, trying not to look at her face, which had frozen into a mask of anxious good will. “Just be yourself,” he said, patting her arm before getting back into the van, knowing this advice sounded as lame as the buck-up he’d given Rachel, his oldest daughter, on the first day in her new high school. She’d looked at him with adolescent pity.

  The Pakistani man had not been there this time, and Dave had roamed around the large room, then two smaller ones, looking for someone to talk with. Some of the men looked up, some nodded, some smiled. But none gave a signal that they wanted more than this. Eventually he’d walked to the end of the road and then back, drenched by the time he climbed into the van. He’d had to wait nearly fifteen minutes for Tina. When she appeared, her hands were empty, her face full.

  The women were “incredible, absolutely incredible.” They were “the bravest people I’ve ever met.” They put her “to shame.” What did she have to complain about? “They enjoy life so much, even in that horrible place.” She wondered, though, about Lola, their matron, who’d taken all the games Tina had brought as soon as she arrived and locked them in her own room. She worried too about the kitchen with its dozen o
pen gas burners and no real walls to keep out the wind and heat. The week before, a woman’s blouse had caught fire. And she worried about Shirin, a Bangladeshi girl, who’d been laid off by a cleaning company and was now being paid $50 a month for living expenses. “She can’t afford to transfer her visa to another employer and she isn’t making money to buy a ticket home. She’s completely stuck. Did you ever hear anything more insane?”

  “It’s insane,” he agreed, but she was already talking about another girl who’d been raped by her foreman.

  “Forgive me for going on and on, Father,” she’d said when he dropped her off in St. Edmund’s parking lot. “I’m just so moved by what I witnessed.”

  Tina set down her teacup now and looked at him. She hadn’t required any solutions the week before. Now she did. What were they going to do? This country supported modern forms of slavery. This country condoned institutionalized cruelty. “If we just sit here and beat our breasts, we’re complicit,” she said.

  “We need to get more people involved,” he said, the first thing he could think of. She’d thrown him with the sudden pressure.

  “From the church, you mean? I don’t think so, Dave,” she said, and he realized it was the first time she’d used his name without prompting and that it was in a kind of rebuke. “You see the response you’ve gotten so far.” And she pulled a blank face and shrugged, in an imitation, he guessed, of his sorry parishioners who called themselves good Anglicans.

  “Perhaps we could form an ad hoc committee with the other churches,” he offered. “Ed Woods is a good man.”

  Tina looked at him over her reading glasses. She hadn’t smiled once. When she’d turned it off outside, it had stayed off. “I think we’re going to have to rely on just ourselves here.”

  His body was already refusing, muscles tightening. It wasn’t just the fact of being paired up with Tina, who was beginning to worry him. Their conversation was taking him back to things he didn’t care to remember. In his early Kuwait days, he’d written an editorial about the plight of migrant workers. The piece had made it through the lines of amateurish command at Al Watan, an oversight, not a vote of confidence, as he’d first foolishly assumed. He’d been talked to by the bishop at Middle East headquarters in Cyprus, a knuckle-rapping, really, and a dozen families left his Kuwait City parish, afraid for their jobs and what came with them. Some he’d thought were friends.

  “We do need to be careful,” he said.

  “Oh, I know,” said Tina. But the way she said it made him think that even if she did know, she didn’t care. What was a job, a livelihood, a future compared to the suffering of others?

  “Let’s talk midweek, shall we?” he finally offered. “See who else I can get on board.” She’d continued to look skeptical as he stood and put out his hand, her expression not even softening when he helped her to her feet. And then Arjun was there, making everything polite again as he swept up cups and cutlery. Dave thanked him as he always did, but he saw the way Tina narrowed her eyes as she watched.

  “Where in India is he from?” she asked as Dave showed her out. He could hear Erik playing upstairs on the Wii — what else was there to do in this heat? — and felt a twinge of regret. Most of Friday was gone now.

  “From the south,” he said, explaining how long Arjun had been at St. Edmund’s, how valued he was. He felt he had to reassure her somehow and this irritated him.

  “Poor man,” said Tina.

  It was later, after he’d had a nap and supper with the family, then gone out for a bit of air and to look for Erik’s missing football, that he found the woman. He wasn’t sure what it was at first. The white mound against the wall near the mosque looked like one of the Ethiopian women had left her shawl behind. Perhaps the wind had kicked up and blown it off her shoulders and she hadn’t noticed. But when he got closer, he realized that inside the shawl was a woman, asleep — he prayed it was sleep — her bare feet sticking out one end.

  “Excuse me,” he said, bending as close as he dared. He knew not to touch her, not even her feet or the shawl that covered them.

  She sat up instantly, drawing the shawl across her shoulders. “No!” she said. Then more forcefully, “No!” She was not more than twenty, he guessed, a girl with a dusky, troubled beauty. Her eyes were golden brown, suspicious. He hastily made the sign of the cross, and her face relaxed a little.

  “Come inside,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  This, he realized, after settling her on the loveseat with tea — Arjun showing nothing on his face as he glided in and out — was the extent of her English. No. Yes. And her name: Eden. Even the Arabic he tried on her was a miss.

  “She can’t have been here very long then,” said Suzette, who’d acted only mildly surprised to see a beautiful young woman having tea with her husband. His wife, practical and plain-speaking to a fault — and sometimes it did feel like a fault — had seen just about everything there was to see in twenty-two years as a pastor’s wife. He sometimes wished he could shock her, rock her steady little boat. He also needed that boat.

  “Look at her legs, Dave,” and he was embarrassed he hadn’t noticed something so obvious. Fuchsia bruises and black scabs covered her thin shins. “She can stay, you know. Tonight, a few nights. Until you figure out where she’s from, what to do. I’ll have Lauren bunk in with Rachel.” And before he could say, wait, I’m not sure about this, Suzette had gone to get the room ready.

  Eden drank her tea dutifully, but declined the cookies when Arjun held out the plate to her. “No,” she said.

  “You can stay,” Dave told her. “Okay?” But she looked confused now and after a few more stabs at communicating, Dave called one of the elders in the Ethiopian congregation. The man was reluctant to come at first, even with Dave offering to pay for his cab. When he finally arrived an hour later, he wouldn’t sit down, but stood close to the door and when he spoke to the woman in their language, he kept his eyes on Dave’s face. The girl seemed to have a lot to say, growing animated, then tearful, then angry, the man stopping only once every few minutes to turn to Dave and explain in short, vague sentences what she was saying.

  The gist of it was that Eden, the girl, had been made to work twenty hours a day. Her employers wouldn’t let her go to church on Fridays, locked her in her room, which had no window and no air conditioning, when they went out. Sometimes they visited family in Fujairah and she was locked in for two, three, four days with no food. She never knew when they were coming back. They had not paid her in months. Her family in Ethiopia was upset, hungry and uncomprehending.

  “Who are her employers?” asked Dave. “Are they local?” And the man shook his head so absolutely that Dave had to assume they were. And then he was gone, refusing tea, cookies and further entanglement.

  After the man left, the woman sat without moving, her head in its white wrap dropped slightly. Of course, she could stay; she could stay as long as she needed to. But it always came back to: then what? The woman was so still he began to think she was sleeping again. Arjun paused at the doorway and Dave put a finger to his lips. Let her sleep. These women were so tired they would sleep for days when they finally found shelter. Then he realized she was praying, whispers of words lifting the gauze slightly with her breath.

  “Eden.” He went to sit next to her, but didn’t put out a reassuring hand. A strange man’s touch in these countries, even if you weren’t Muslim, was always a mistake and nearly always misinterpreted. It had taken him years to unlearn the impulse. When someone was in pain, you sat, you listened. You did not do the most human thing of all.

  She was an easy guest, a “silent little thing,” Suzette reported, and the kids took it in their stride. There had often been strange faces at the family table. “Doing God’s work, right, Dad?” said Erik, when Dave tucked him into bed that night, and he wondered again about the new, intense devotion of his youngest child. A crazy thing
for a pastor to be worrying about, but he’d known zealots and they scared him more than non-believers. Those folks, at least, knew to be quiet.

  He put in a call to Sheikh Maktoum’s office first thing the next morning. But it wasn’t until late in the afternoon that he learned Maktoum was on a falconry hunt in Kazakhstan and wouldn’t be returning for another week. Was this “an urgent,” as the assistant called it, or could he wait for His Highness’s return?

  “It’s urgent, yes, but I’ll wait,” he said, knowing it was likely only Maktoum had the pull to do something: Repatriate the girl, talk with the abusing family, perhaps even employ her in his palace. Being sent home was rarely the outcome the girls’ families had in mind. Dave had often imagined these homecomings, the women half-broken, while parents, husbands, siblings demanded to know just how bad bad was. Things were bad at home. Now what?

  Eden would not be staying a second night in the Vicarage. “No,” she’d told Suzette. “No, no, no.”

  “Maybe it was the doctor,” Suzette said at dinner. She’d asked their family physician, a stately, serene Indian woman who’d been practising in Abu Dhabi for years, to come have a look at Eden’s legs. Dr. Nadira didn’t often make house calls, but when Suzanne explained the circumstances, she’d agreed. “I thought it would be okay, you know, because Dr. Nadira’s so gentle, plus she’s a woman. And it was private. I knew she’d never go to a clinic. But I could see Eden wasn’t happy. She wouldn’t let Dr. Nadira touch her. Next thing I know, she’s saying no and she’s gone.”