The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

Miranda waited for a moment, but he didn’t say anything more. “Come on, you’re really not going to tell me?”

  “And lose my air of mystery? Never.”

  “Do you want to actually get to the silver souq, or be left to wander a maze of twisty little passages until the end of time?”

  He paused to consider this. “I’m just trying to avoid being written off as boring and stuffy before we’ve had a chance to talk.”

  “You have your chance to talk right now. I’ll give you until we find your gift, but I’m not leading you home until you tell me who you are.”

  “Done. That is, if you’ll do the same.”

  “The same?”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  She smiled. “I don’t want to be written off as Bohemian and flaky before we’ve had a chance to talk.”

  “Fair enough. So. Talk.”

  She took him the long way. The streets of the Old City were such a maze that he’d never know. She just didn’t want the conversation to be over. Her bags were no longer heavy and her exhaustion had lifted, leaving her buoyant and breezy.

  “Did you know that the entire Old City is carved out of the same chunk of rock? If you were a giant you could just pick the whole thing up and use it as a centerpiece for your dining room table.”

  “Or a playhouse for the kids.”

  “More like a play city.”

  “I wonder how long it took them. To chisel every one of these.” Finn reached out to touch the cold wall next to him. On every side rose similar buildings, tall and immovable.

  “Generations. Generations of people who didn’t feel the need to see it finished in their lifetime.”

  “How did we lose that kind of patience, I wonder.”

  Miranda shrugged. “That’s one reason I loathe modern architecture. So rushed. It’s all gone downhill since the Romans, in my opinion. I look at this, this million-year-old sculpture of a city, and then look at the new condominiums and McMansions outside of town and I think, This is progress?”

  “I take it you like it here.”

  “This city has ensorcelled me. So much that I don’t seem to be able to leave.” What could possibly lure her from a home in a living work of art? She was in awe of a culture that could create this. Mazrooq had its flaws, but it had created this—and preserved it.

  “You have rather old-fashioned tastes.”

  “Medieval,” she agreed. “Though not when it comes to politics.”

  “What politics would those be?”

  “Surely you don’t want to ruin the afternoon?”

  As they walked, Miranda greeted several people she knew: neighbors, grocers, professors from the local university.

  “You’ve obviously lived here awhile.”

  “Nearly three years.”

  “On your own?”

  “Not even a single bodyguard.”

  “Very brave.”

  “I’m very unimportant.”

  “You must be important to someone.”

  “Not anymore.” Not since Vícenta left, not really.

  So engrossed was she in talking with Finn that it took her half a dozen turns before she realized that she kept seeing the same men at intersections. They wore no uniform but were all in pants and long-sleeved shirts and jackets, not the traditional thobe, and they carried suspiciously bulky backpacks. A few stayed ahead of them, sometimes just a few steps ahead, and sometimes they would vanish into the crowd only to reappear at the next turning. Since she was leading Finn, she wondered how they knew where she was going. Mukhtar stayed by Finn’s side the entire time. Several others seemed to be following them. She admired the grace of their choreography.

  When they ducked into Miranda’s favorite stall in the silver souq, Finn took over, chatting easily and fluently in Arabic with the diminutive shopkeeper, asking questions about the jewelry, the city, the weather. He looked oversized in the tiny, dark stall, having to fold himself nearly in half to avoid knocking his head on the ceiling. Miranda marveled at his ability to charm, even from this awkward posture; after a few minutes the shopkeeper dove through a curtain of jangling plastic beads into the back room and emerged with two small glasses of tea and a plate of cookies. “You seem at home here,” she said, sipping her tea.

  Finn smiled, fingering a string of beads. “I’m at home everywhere.”

  After she had helped him pick out a silver-and-coral necklace and matching earrings for his aunt, he asked where she lived. She gestured through a stone arch, down a narrow alley in the general direction of her house. “You take a left there, then veer right at the bakery, take two more lefts, a right, and then at the square with the best fasooleah in town, you turn left again and go straight until you see the blue gate with the bougainvillea climbing over it. You’re welcome to come along for tea.”

  She hadn’t meant to invite him home, but the words slipped out. Could you even invite a man with ten bodyguards home for tea? She wasn’t sure. Would they all come too? She would need a bigger teapot.

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve got a national day of some sort tonight that I am afraid I can’t get out of. Perhaps another time? Look.” He searched his coat pockets. “Here’s my card. I’ve only been here a week, so I’m sure there’s plenty more you could tell me. You are, after all, the only person who has managed to infiltrate my security team to get close enough to wound me.”

  “I didn’t wound you; the pomegranate did. You know weapons aren’t properly regulated here. Besides, you aren’t limping.”

  “I’m limping on the inside. I’d better be off; the guys are starting to get twitchy.” He gave her his hand, warm, thin-fingered, and dry, and vanished into the crowd.

  Miranda looked down at the card in her hand. FINN FENWICK, BRITISH AMBASSADOR.

  —

  NO ONE WAS home when she got there. “Madina?” she called. “Mosi?” Nothing. No one. Good. She put on the teakettle and tipped her bags of produce out onto the counter. The pomegranates were fat and yellow, a shiny blush of pink staining their sides. She rolled one under her palm, feeling the nubs of seeds pushing through the skin. If Madina were home, she would be tempted to tell her about Finn, and Miranda wanted to keep him all to herself for a little while longer.

  Ever since Vícenta left, her home had become a kind of hostel for lost and wandering souls. She didn’t plan it that way. She had always loved living alone; she wasn’t looking for housemates. They just kind of showed up, like stray kittens. Now she can’t imagine life without friends wandering in and out of her house all day and night.

  She had met Madina at the gym. It was a women’s gym up in the ritzier part of town, and it was Miranda’s first (and last) visit. Gyms hadn’t exactly caught on in this country, and the few that existed outside of the luxury hotels were minimally equipped. She had tried the bicycle and the rowing machines, both of which were broken, before ending up on one of the two treadmills. They were the only things in the gym that worked, aside from a vibrating platform that one of the staff members told her would jiggle off fat.

  She was mid-run, watching with great interest a heavy woman standing on the platform, the folds of her thighs flapping up and down as it vibrated, when Madina climbed onto the treadmill opposite. Even had she not been directly in Miranda’s line of vision, she would have been hard to miss. Her thick black hair wasn’t covered but pulled back in a ponytail. She was very dark, espresso rather than cappuccino, with dramatic cheekbones and enormous eyes. She was beautiful. But that wasn’t the first thing Miranda noticed. No, the first thing she noticed was that the girl was wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt emblazoned with the words I AM A VIRGIN (this is an old T-shirt) in white. Which isn’t something you see every day on the streets of this or any other Muslim city.

  She spoke to Miranda first. “How do you work this thing?” she said in flawless English. “I don’t really do exercise.”

  “You’re at a gym,” Miranda pointed out. “Exercise is kind of what it’s about. That platform a
side,” she said, waving at the vibrating woman.

  The girl laughed. “I thought maybe it would be a good place to meet some girls. I don’t know anyone.” Miranda briefly recalled a time when she too visited gyms in the hopes of meeting girls but suspected this girl’s intentions were less salacious. Still, you never knew.

  Panting slightly (the city was eight thousand feet above sea level, so even minimal exertion resulted in panting), Miranda told her how to set the controls on her machine and introduced herself.

  “Madina,” the girl said. “As in the Arabic word for city.”

  She was nineteen and had arrived just nine days ago from her home in Kenya, where she lived with her Somali mother and Italian father. At the moment she was renting a room from a family in the Old City, but living with Mazrooqis was cramping her style. “I just want to have some fun,” she said. Which wasn’t the usual reason people come to Mazrooq. But, she quickly added, “I also came to learn a little more about Islam. Or at least that’s how I convinced my parents.” She had started attending classes at a local university, which already bored her. “The teachers are kind of a pain. So serious! And what’s with all the black? At least we African Muslims have a bit of style. As long as we cover our hair it doesn’t matter what color we wear.”

  She spoke like an American teenager, though she had never lived outside of Africa. She spoke Swahili, Somali, Italian, Arabic, and English, all fluently. Which made Miranda feel rather half-witted for knowing only English, French, and basic Arabic. Americans were so pathetic about languages.

  They left the gym together, Madina’s scandalous T-shirt now hidden under the voluminous folds of an abaya, and Miranda scribbled down her phone number and rough directions to her house. Without street names in the Old City, you had to use the ubiquitous mosques as guideposts.

  Two days later she came home from the swimming pool at the InterContinental to find a note from Mosi, a Kenyan friend who worked for the Ministry of Education and who had moved in soon after Vícenta left. “Just to let you know, we seem to have acquired a cat,” he wrote, “and a teenage daughter.”

  Madina had discovered the white fluff ball of a kitten limping on the streets outside of their house. “She’s little,” she pleaded to Miranda. “She won’t take up too much space.” The kitten was small enough to fit in the center of Madina’s dusky palm.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about.” The Old City was crawling with stray cats, almost all of whom were mangy and riddled with disease. This innocent-looking kitten could be carrying enough bacteria and viruses to kill them all.

  “Could I at least fix her paw? I’ll give her a bath first!”

  Miranda thought about what would happen to the kitten back on the streets. Muslims do not keep household pets, which was one reason the country overflowed with stray animals. But it wasn’t just that the local children didn’t keep animals at home; they seemed to openly loathe them. How many times had she stopped to yell “Ayb!” (shame) at a boy throwing rocks at a cat or whipping a dog with a stick? Torturing animals was a popular local hobby. She often wondered what this suggested about how the children themselves were treated at home.

  Relenting, she watched as Madina tenderly lathered the mewling kitten in the kitchen sink with one of Miranda’s self-imported organic, nontoxic soaps. With its fur slicked down, it was hardly bigger than a mouse. After fluffing it dry with a spare washcloth, Madina held the kitten still while Miranda examined its back left paw. A shard of glass was wedged into it. Using her tweezers, she carefully extracted it and then rinsed the wound.

  “That kitten still needs a vet,” she said. These were not easy to find. Once a year a man at the British embassy brought a vet in from Dubai to treat expat animals, as there were so few qualified locals. But she let the kitten—and the girl—stay.

  Madina, Mosi, and Qishr the cat (named after the Mazrooqi drink made from cardamom and the husks of coffee beans) were often joined by students, poets, and diplomatic interns passing through for a month or three. Yet the house never felt crowded. Not only was it plenty big enough to accommodate them all but they were all so busy they were rarely home. Miranda was there most often, because she worked at home, in the airy diwan that made up her top floor. Boy-crazy Madina was out nearly every night with a series of Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Mazrooqi, and Syrian men. They went to the city’s sole nightclub in the basement of the InterContinental, took all-night drives to the beaches of the South, and threw impromptu parties at their homes. Rare was the night she did not come home in love. “I didn’t even know there was a nightlife here until you moved in,” Miranda told her. She worried over Madina’s safety, but Madina assured her they were all gentlemen; she remained a virgin. And then Madina adopted Mosi as her protector. Every evening she would model her spangled skirts and tight jeans for him, soliciting his advice, before dragging him out of the house with her. That she actually got him to leave was impressive; Mosi loathed nightclubs and preferred to keep his own company. But he loved Madina, taking a fatherly interest in her well-being. At first, they had invited Miranda along as well, but she always begged off so that she could work while the house was empty. It was also the only time she could pay serious attention to her students’ artwork.

  The house was peaceful now. The kettle had boiled, and Miranda poured the water over a cup of green tea leaves and sat down at the kitchen table. They had only two hard plastic chairs, but on the rare occasions that there were more than two people in the kitchen, they sat on the counter or the floor.

  Miranda wondered how long she should wait before e-mailing Finn. Three days? The same number of days she used to wait in Seattle before calling someone she’d met at a party? A ridiculous waste of three days, really. She would have Googled “how to invite an ambassador for tea” or something like that if she’d had Internet access. But she did not have Internet access. Wireless did not exist yet in the Old City, and what little wiring could be strung up in these impenetrable houses could not be trusted even to keep the lights on for an entire evening.

  To check e-mail Miranda had to walk out of the Old City to a grimy little Internet café in Shuhadā’ Square. She didn’t do this very often. Squeezing in between two adolescent boys both covertly downloading porn was not her idea of a good time. Every Internet shop in the country was like this, with the young men doing their best to hide their illicit searches from each other, shrinking the images of copulating couples until they were tiny figures in the corners of their screens. Still, Miranda didn’t have to look hard to figure out what they were. All of the fevered and covert behavior around her made it kind of hard to focus on writing to family. Mostly she wrote letters at home and then uploaded them at the café from a flash drive, as quickly as possible.

  Why was she so interested in this man anyway? She had no ambassador fetish—the few she had met were terribly worthy and dull—and, well, he was a man. Not that she hadn’t fallen in love with men before, but not often, and it had been a while. Six years at least. Not since she met Vícenta.

  It was, in fact, three days before she managed to get herself to the Internet café to write to Finn. Whether that was due to ambivalence about jumping off this particular cliff or a simple lack of time was anybody’s guess. Miranda must have done a passable job with her note, as he wrote her back about seven minutes later to see if she might be free for tea the next day. She replied to say she was, pretty much any day, and would he like to have tea at her place? After all, Finn was new to the country, and had the misfortune of living outside of the Old City.

  The next morning, before Miranda had even managed her first cup of coffee, “the guys” or “the team,” which was how Finn referred to his bodyguards, arrived at her gates to do a “recce.” Miranda’s fogged brain puzzled over what recce was short for. Reconnaissance? Was that it? Somehow that seemed an odd word to have applied to her beloved home. She panicked when she saw them at her door, worried they would search her rooms and find the paintings. But they merely
knocked politely at the gate, made sure the address was correct, glanced around her courtyard, and vanished. Finn arrived several hours later.

  Turned out she needn’t have worried about the teapot. The guys stayed outside in the courtyard (and at the top of her street, the bottom of her street, and across her street. There may even have been some at a neighbor’s window).

  “Do you have a curfew?” Miranda asked nervously, peering out one of her tiny slot windows.

  “Yes. I absolutely must be at the embassy by seven thirty in the morning.”

  “Hmm,” she said, noting with a glance at her phone that it was only 5:00 p.m.

  “I know,” he said sadly. “It doesn’t give us much time. But I’m free Thursday too.”

  Miranda laughed. “We haven’t even sat down yet! How do you know you’ll want to see me again Thursday?”

  “I know,” he said simply, smiling. “I just know.”

  —

  SO DID SHE. She’d known since the second the pomegranate rebounded and she looked up to meet his eyes. She didn’t believe in love at first sight, but apparently you don’t have to believe in it for it to happen. The funny thing was, it wasn’t merely that kind of physical chemistry buzzy thing that had happened with so many of her previous loves, including Vícenta. It was a calmer, quieter thing, saying not (or rather, not only) “I want to throw this man down on the pavement and have my way with him” but rather “I want to be doing crossword puzzles with this man on Sunday mornings thirty years from now.” That kind of thing. On top of the buzziness.

  There was something else that set Finn apart from her previous lovers. She had chosen him. For so long she had simply allowed herself to be chosen. There had been hardly any space in between her romantic entanglements. As soon as one ended, she had always told herself that she needed time alone, needed time to be free. But it never happened. She’d be at a St. Patrick’s Day parade and suddenly find herself dancing with a firefighter in an Irish bar. Or she’d be doing volunteer work painting schools and a skinny girl with a shy smile would invite her to her art studio. People kept happening to her.