The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

  With a rustle of rayon, the women stretched their legs. Tazkia shot out of the room first, followed by Aaqilah and Nadia holding hands. Mariam lingered, looking anxious. “What is it, Mariam?”

  “I drew a teakettle…”

  “You can go take our kettle, it’s all right.” Relieved, Mariam smiled and slipped downstairs.

  Miranda followed them, turning off at the bedroom she shared with Vícenta. She looked at their mattress on the floor and then back at her sketch pad, smiling. It wasn’t anything like what she had drawn. The blue felt blanket wasn’t pulled up neatly but tossed in a heap at the foot of the bed. White sheets had been ripped from where they were tucked underneath the mattress and lay twisted, damp, and mangled. Vícenta’s pillow was halfway across the room, where she had flung it that morning when it became lodged between their two bodies. In the corner, Miranda’s squashed pillow held on to the vague outline of Vícenta’s profile. Her head had been turned to the left, her cheek pressed on the embroidered roses of the pillowcase, her teeth gripping a fold of the cotton as Miranda took her hips between her hands. Even standing here, Miranda could still smell her, the dark, wintry forest pine of her.

  The bed she had drawn was the kind of bed you might see in a children’s first words book, an illustration of a generic bed. But it wasn’t this bed. Quickly, she sketched their sex-tossed sheets, feeling a tug of longing in her gut, before returning to the diwan and her women.

  As they continued scratching at their pages, she wandered the room, looking over their shoulders. Aaqilah drew her pencil along the stem of a potted plant, the basil Miranda grew in the courtyard, perhaps disappointed that she hadn’t been assigned to draw Princess Barbie. Mariam huddled over her sketch of their ancient tin teakettle, erasing and redrawing its spout. A spiderweb spun from Nadia’s now-steady pencil—it hadn’t been difficult for her to find one in their several unused rooms. Tazkia was the last to return to the diwan, having drawn the bicycle that rusted against the walls of their house.

  “Time’s up,” Miranda announced. The women looked at her, slightly dazed, coming back into their bodies. “Tear out the first drawing so that you can lay it alongside the second, and tell me what you see.”

  The air stood still as the women examined their work. It was unusual for the city to fall this silent, as if it were holding its breath. It was long after the clamor of lunchtime but before the muezzins’ calls for evening prayers.

  “Wow,” said Tazkia first. “Very completely different.”

  “Different how?”

  Tazkia squinched up her face, wrinkling her stubby nose. “More detailed?”

  “Not so boring?” This from Aaqilah.

  “And why is that?” The girls simply stared down at their two pieces, as if waiting for them to speak. “Because when you draw things from memory, you tend to set things down as symbols. Like the cocktail glass signs in airports.” Whoops, bad example. “Or like the airplane symbols you pass on signs on the way to the airport. They are recognizably planes, but not specific planes. Only when you observe an actual plane, and put down its specific lines on paper, can you see.” None of them had ever been on a plane, but they saw them overhead with alarming regularity, government planes on their way to the North.

  Miranda leaned forward on her hands, pulling Tazkia’s drawings across the carpet and holding them up. “Look at the first bicycle. It’s a generic bicycle, a two-dimensional illustration of the word. We know what it is, but there is no personality there. But here—” She put the first one down and held up just the second. “Suddenly her bicycle has three dimensions. The handlebars are turned sideways. They have thick rubber grips on them, and tassels on the ends. The tires are slightly flat. The seat is banana-shaped rather than triangular. There is a screw coming loose behind the seat, hanging off of it. The basket on the front has a hole. You couldn’t make this bicycle up; you couldn’t imagine it.”

  Miranda set down the drawings and turned Nadia’s spiderweb sketches so that they were facing the women. The first was neat and geometric, a perfect hexagon. The observed spiderweb was larger, sprawling, an octagon with a small tear on one side, a thread hanging from the top. “Do you see? When you actually look at things, weird things happen that you would never know about were you not observing.”

  Tazkia was kneeling, pulling drawings closer to her, inspecting them all. “Magic,” she said. “Like magic.”

  “No.” Miranda shook her head, smiling. “It is only that there are more interesting things in this world than you can imagine. You must go out. You must explore. And you must keep your eyes wide, wide open.”

  AUGUST 18, 2010

  Miranda

  Several uneventful days pass before Aisha notices the state of Miranda’s shirt. No one else has come near her. The men keep their distance from the hut; Aisha is the only person who speaks to Miranda, usually in monosyllables. Each day they walk through the slanting mountain sun to fetch water, eat their meager meals squatting in the dust, and crouch silently in the dark of their hut. Miranda tries to question the old woman about why she is being held, what plans the men might have for her, but Aisha only shakes her head and looks fearful.

  “And Mukhtar?” she is finally desperate enough to ask one morning as they huddle over their tin plates of beans. Her need to know his fate has overpowered her terror of the answer. “My…my friend?” She almost says the word guard. But if they don’t know who she is, she doesn’t want to give it away, that she is a person deemed worthy of a guard.

  Aisha’s face shifts nearly imperceptibly. But there is something, a shadow crossing. Bile rises to Miranda’s throat; please, let him not have died for her, because of her.

  “Is he alive?” she persists. “Is he here?” When Aisha remains silent, she leans forward and touches the woman’s rayon-sheathed arm. “Please, Aisha, is he alive?”

  “You are asking too many questions. I do not know. I know nothing of this man.”

  For a few minutes, Miranda falls silent. Either Mukhtar has been left in the mountains for dead or imprisoned somewhere else. He cannot have gotten away, not with blood streaming from the side of his head. She misses Mukhtar. In the last few years she has come to think of him almost as an overprotective brother, the brother she had longed for and her parents had not been inspired to produce. Out on the team’s practice range in the desert, he had taught her how to fire a Sig Sauer and an AK-47, never losing patience with her no matter how many times she missed the target entirely. Miranda was not a gun enthusiast, nor did she get any kind of macho kick from wielding deadly machinery, but she loved Tucker and his team and thought it wise to understand their weaponry. When she had fallen ill with typhoid (despite having been vaccinated), it was Mukhtar who took her to Dr. Jay, the embassy’s doctor. When she had walked to Baskin-Robbins, Mukhtar carried home the pints of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream and lime-pomegranate sherbet. She had become accustomed to having a shadow.

  “Are we in the North?” she asks, changing tack. She wants desperately to know where she is. “Is this Zajnoon’s land?” She is only guessing, but Aisha looks up sharply at the mention of the sheikh’s name.

  “I’m right? Is he here? Is this one of his camps?” Her pulse speeds into hyperalertness.

  Aisha stares at her as if she isn’t sure what to say. Then, “Zajnoon is dead.”

  “Dead?” Miranda’s mind somersaults. Surely this is good news? Will the violence end without the vicious, fanatical leader? She feels a surge of hope, though she knows Zajnoon’s people are not the only rebel tribe in the North. Her thoughts fly to Finn; is he still working with the sheikhs? No, no, impossible. He would probably have been removed from post, if not by now then soon. Removed from the work he loves, from the project he initiated. And it is her fault. Is he even still in Mazrooq?

  “The last government bomb. It destroyed his house, his wives, his sons.” Aisha’s voice catches, as if she is holding back tears. This is the most information she has imparted thus far.
Miranda wonders how many of Zajnoon’s followers are still alive.

  “But our struggle will not die,” says Aisha, with renewed vigor. “In his name, we will fight to our deaths.”

  Miranda’s hope fades quickly in the wake of this pronouncement. So it is Zajnoon’s people who have her. What could they possibly want, other than a ransom? And how organized are they, suddenly left leaderless? She is still puzzling over this when Aisha demands her shirt. “I will wash,” she says. “Here is a new one, a clean one.” She holds out a long-sleeved jersey emblazoned with the name of a British football team. Has it come from a former prisoner? Miranda hesitates before handing over her shirt, all she has of Finn’s. “Yalla,” says Aisha impatiently. Slowly, Miranda unbuttons the shirt and slips it from her shoulders. The front is wringing wet. Desperate to maintain her milk supply in the wild hope Cressida could still profit from it, Miranda empties her breasts as often as possible. But still when she wakes, her shirt is drenched.

  She holds out the soggy shirt to Aisha. “Milk,” she says. “I have a baby at home.” Perhaps this information will encourage leniency. Surely a woman would understand what it means to be separated from a child?

  Aisha stares for a moment and then reaches her left hand toward the shirt. She pinches it and lets it drop. “Milk?” she says. “Son or daughter?”

  “A daughter.” Miranda isn’t sure she should be giving this information away, but she cannot think of anything else to say. She pulls the jersey over her head.

  The woman clucks again in disapproval. “Maybe next time you will have a son,” she says.

  Miranda bites back an instinctual defense of her daughter. When she was pregnant, the guards had constantly blessed her belly, wishing her a boy. But Miranda had wanted a girl for as long as she wanted a child at all. After the amniocentesis in London, when she and Finn told the guards they were definitely having a girl, the men still resisted the idea. This is not a country that rejoices at the birth of girls. “Insha’allah it will be a boy,” they repeated. Miranda and Finn tried to explain that they already knew the child’s sex, but this just confused the men. Finally, Miranda gave up, though she could never resist saying, “But I don’t want a boy. I want a girl.” It was important to her that they know that somewhere, by someone, girls were wanted.

  Aisha adjusts her niqab one more time and disappears. Miranda assumes she has gone to fetch her something else to wear, but when the woman returns a few hours later, she is carrying a tiny parcel wrapped in a dirty pink blanket. “You feed,” she says. “Feed her.” She thrusts the blanket toward Miranda, who gingerly takes it in her hands. It weighs almost nothing. In the dim light it takes her a second to discern the top of a tiny head covered with fine black hair. Kneeling, Miranda lays the baby on the floor in front of her and slowly peels back the blanket. Nausea wrings her stomach when she sees the tiny infant. Its ribs are clearly visible, propping up the skin like tent poles, its arms and legs wasted almost to bone. Its stomach is bloated and round. Miranda slips a finger around the edge of the filthy piece of cloth pinned at the tiny hips. A girl. The child watches her with large dark eyes, quiet. She doesn’t have the energy to cry, Miranda thinks. It may be too late.

  Aisha is watching her impatiently. She flips the blanket closed again, covering the child’s shriveled form. “Feed,” she says again.

  “Where is her mother?”

  “Mayyitah. Dead.”

  “And her father?”

  “They were both killed. Government bombs.”

  “She has no one?”

  “No one is left.”

  Miranda lifts the featherlight child, shifting her into her left arm as she lifts her shirt with her right hand. Queasiness at her disloyalty almost overwhelms her. But chubby little Cressida doesn’t need this anymore, even if she could get to her. She presses the child’s face to her nipple, but the tiny girl doesn’t drink. She simply continues to stare up at Miranda, her cracked lips slightly open.

  “What has she been eating?” asks Miranda, stroking the girl’s cheek.

  “Tea.”

  “Tea?”

  “That is all we have to give her.”

  Carefully Miranda takes her nipple between her fingers, holds it over the child’s lips, and squeezes gently. A few drops of watery milk spatter onto the girl’s lips. A tiny tongue darts out, searchingly. The taste is sweet. She opens her mouth wider. Miranda squeezes more milk into her mouth. For nearly an hour she repeats this, alternating breasts and continuing to try to get the child to suck. She licks her own finger to clean it and gives it to the girl to suck, then transfers her to the nipple. The child doesn’t have the strength to suck for more than a few seconds, but Miranda is patient. Her body relaxes as her breasts are slowly relieved of their stores. She does all of this mechanically, trying to calculate its significance. If her captors need her to feed this child, surely they won’t kill her now? Is this girl her salvation? But before this morning, they hadn’t known she was breast-feeding, hadn’t known about Cressida. So why have they spared her?

  Aisha watches for a while before beginning her morning prayers, prostrating herself on the dirt floor. Miranda wonders how old the child is. She doesn’t even know her name. She waits for Aisha to finish her prayers before she asks.

  Aisha isn’t sure of the girl’s age—no one here is ever sure about anyone’s age—but thinks she is not more than a few weeks old. She has no name. Or rather, no one knows her name. But Aisha had passed by the ruins of her house and heard the crying. The child had been lying under an inverted V of mud bricks, surrounded by splintered plaster and stone. “I could not just leave her there when Allah had spared her,” she says. “Though we have nothing to give her. The women left here are either too old or too young to have milk.” The girl had been staying with one of Aisha’s sisters, who fed her tea.

  I don’t have enough milk for a newborn, Miranda thinks. Perhaps her body will adjust to the child’s needs, but she has no idea. Aisha squats, anxiously watching Miranda.

  The frail child has fallen asleep in her arms. Miranda rewraps her in the dirty blanket and places her on the mat. They had swaddled Cressida until she was three months old and could wrestle her arms and legs out of her blankets. “Like the Incredible Hulk,” Miranda had said. Finn had looked at her questioningly. Another cryptic pop-culture reference.

  Aisha stands. “Haasna. Now we get the water.”

  “But the child,” Miranda starts. The woman nods and disappears into one of the other houses. When she returns, she carries a long bolt of red-and-black striped cloth. Together, they fashion a sling so that Miranda can carry the infant close to her chest. Miranda pays close attention to the way Aisha folds it. To think she had paid nearly fifty dollars for a custom-made sling for Cressida. That amount of money seems ludicrous to her now. The baby smells faintly of fecal matter, though Miranda imagines it has been a long time since she consumed enough calories to trigger a bowel movement. Miranda is surprised to find herself trusted with the infant. Aisha could just as easily have carried her, but she seems to have abdicated responsibility.

  The girl sleeps all the way to the spring and back, exhausted from her efforts to nurse. When the water is stashed by the fire and the women have settled on the ground to eat their beans again, the baby opens her eyes and lets out a feeble howl of hunger.

  “Well, that’s a good sign,” whispers Miranda, setting aside her tin plate and picking up the child. “Let’s try this again, shall we?”

  AUGUST 30, 2007

  Miranda

  Miranda stood in front of the mirror and groaned. “Nothing works!” The silver-and-black sundress, which had always felt so modest back home in Seattle, made her feel exposed and slatternly. Sighing, she slipped the straps from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. “Everything makes me look either Amish or prostitutional,” she said, stepping out of the puddle of polyester at her feet.

  “Prostitutional?” Finn watched her with amusement from across the room, where
he was adjusting his tie. He was wearing khakis and one of his many long-sleeved, stripy shirts.

  “You men have it easy. You can wear pretty much the same thing in any culture. It’s a minefield out there for us.”

  One of the things she loved about living here was that every day she had only to throw on one of her three floor-length skirts with one of her seven cotton Indian blouses. That was it. No agonizing over which pants worked with which shirts, or which dress was most flattering. Further abbreviating her morning routine, she wore minimal makeup and kept her hair tied up in a ponytail or knot at the back of her head. It was so freeing to shed all of the accoutrements of vanity. Yet, oddly, she received more male attention on the streets here than anywhere else she’d ever lived. “I look like Laura Ingalls Wilder in mourning,” she said to Finn, “and they treat me like I’m Dolly Parton.”

  Now everything had changed. When she went out with Finn, they were just as likely to mix with Western diplomats as they were to mix with the locals. And at Western homes, the women did pay attention to fashion. At least, certain women did. The wives of ambassadors, for example. The thing was, Miranda didn’t own anything remotely chic. She traveled light. What on earth would she do when she and Finn had to host dinner parties together?

  Tonight they were stepping out together for the first time, to the InterContinental for a dinner and dance celebrating the launch of a new adventure tourism agency (for very brave tourists, willing to wander into lawless lands to scale monumental walls of rock). Miranda found the agency’s optimism about its prospects refreshing. Few diplomats thought anything could succeed in the grim political and economic climate of Mazrooq. She felt like wearing something cheerful, something red. But while the hotel was certainly quite Western (and as fancy as it got in this city), there were certain to be Mazrooqis there as well. So did she deck herself out in bright Western wear and risk shocking the Muslims, or wrap herself up in modest lengths of cotton and risk being thought dowdy by the international community?