The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

  “Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”

  NOVEMBER 5, 2010

  Miranda

  Aisha looks at her quizzically when she straps Luloah onto her front instead of her back. “So I can nurse her more easily,” Miranda explains. It’s astonishing how quickly her Arabic improves when she hears nothing else. Aisha gives a faint shrug. “As long as you can still carry water,” she says.

  Miranda’s fingers tremble as she winds the cloth around her ribs and the tiny child. She pulls the cloth as tightly as she possibly can without suffocating Luloah and ties a few additional knots. She cannot risk losing her. It is a clear, sunny day. It is always a clear, sunny day. Even once the rains start, the mornings will continue like this, relentlessly bright. The air is sharp and clear, with a metallic smell Miranda normally associates with the onset of autumn. But there is no autumn here.

  There is no point in waiting any longer. She is not sure how many months she will be kept here, whether she will be moved, or even whether they will keep her alive. Any day now, her captors will find out who she is, if they haven’t found out already. And that will only put her in graver danger. She has been unable to find out anything from Aisha, who simply repeats that she does not know. There is nothing that she knows. Miranda has no idea if a ransom request has been made. She wouldn’t even bother asking if a ransom had been paid; she knows it would not have been.

  But she cannot simply wait for them to decide to release her. She could keep waiting forever, and it is entirely possible that once Luloah is old enough to eat beans and bread, Miranda will no longer be of use. Though she wonders how much the men holding her really care about the fate of this child. Life is cheap here. Most parents have lost children. And this one has no one to claim her. This is a highly unusual circumstance. In a country where every woman has an average of 6.5 children, there are always cousins, aunts, and uncles galore. Perhaps there are relatives who have escaped the bombings and have sought refuge elsewhere, who have no idea where to even look for the little girl. Or perhaps they are all dead. The bombings had leveled Luloah’s home, after all, and many generations often live together under one roof. If Luloah’s mother were alive, thinks Miranda, she would have found her by now. A mother would never stop looking.

  Miranda has been watching. Every morning when they make their journey along the worn dirt trail to the well to fill their water jugs, she examines the terrain. Most of it is too exposed, there is nowhere to run. Just cracked, flat earth interrupted only occasionally by scrubby olive-green bushes and a few dilapidated wooden shacks that appear uninhabited. But there is a road. She and Aisha cross it every morning, Aisha slowing as they approach, looking anxiously left and right to ensure that they are not seen. Miranda has never seen a vehicle here, though that is hardly surprising. It is more of a track than a road, suitable only for four-wheel drive or a donkey. To the left, the track curves upward into the mountains. To the right, it slopes down, disappearing around a curve obscured by a stand of scruffy trees. Down is her best bet, thinks Miranda. Down might lead eventually to another road, a village. The only question is whether she can make it there fast enough. She knows she has lost muscle mass and endurance but suspects she could still outrun Aisha, who despite their abstemious diet remains stout and slow. For the first time, Miranda wonders if Aisha secretly has access to more food. She still isn’t sure that Aisha is unarmed. But if she has a gun, she keeps it well hidden. To Miranda’s knowledge, no one ever follows them on their morning walks. Armed men dot the perimeter of their encampment, keeping watch, but none has ventured as far as the well.

  For the past several weeks, she has been preparing. When Aisha and Luloah sleep in the afternoons, Miranda does furtive push-ups, squats, and sun salutations. Under her thin rug is a cache of dates. Every time they have appeared on her plate, she has squirreled away one more. She hopes it isn’t far to the next village. She hopes someone with a car will give her a lift toward the capital. She needs to get as far as she can as fast as she can. Because she has no idea where she is, she doesn’t know if she is among the Shias of the North or the Sunnis of the West. It doesn’t matter to her; most people in this country are friendly and intend no harm. Most people.

  Aisha waits impatiently for Miranda to finish fiddling with Luloah’s sling and hands her two large yellow plastic jugs. She will struggle with them on the return journey. Only today she will not be returning. Her heart speeds until she can feel her blood throbbing through her neck, temples, and inner thighs. Luloah stirs on her chest, looks up at her with wide black eyes. “Kull shee tamaam, habibti,” she says, stroking a finger down the little girl’s cheek. “N’aie pas peur.” But the child continues to stare, the sparse hairs of her eyebrows rising up her forehead. She’s right to be worried, Miranda thinks. I’m taking her into danger.

  “Yalla.” Aisha is growing impatient. Miranda runs through the checklist in her mind. Small plastic bottle of water, tucked in the sling with the baby, handful of dates wrapped in a scrap of cloth, and Luloah. The lip balm and the thousand-dinar note were taken from her the first day. She looks up at Aisha, whose face is obscured by the niqab. Only her dark eyes are visible, urging Miranda to hurry.

  Fear catches hold of Miranda’s heels, slowing her steps and making Aisha even more impatient. What will happen if she fails? Aisha will never trust her again. But she cannot consider this. “But screw your courage to the sticking place / And we’ll not fail,” she murmurs, and then chastises herself for quoting the cursed play. The last thing she needs right now is bad luck. The journey is too slow and too fast all at the same time. The sun feels hotter than usual, and trickles of sweat slide from Miranda’s armpits down to the band of her trousers. Luloah’s body relaxes with the rhythm of the walk, and she dozes against Miranda’s chest.

  As usual, Miranda sees no one on the way to the road. Aisha pauses for what feels an eternity, looking around her before crossing the track to the trees on the other side. Miranda allows her to walk ahead, saying she wants to adjust the sling. In the first stand of trees she stops, watching Aisha continue up the path, her water jugs banging against her sides. Miranda presses Luloah closer to her as she glances left and right. The contours of the rocks and trees are sharp against the eggshell-blue sky. Her vision is so keen she feels she could see through walls. One deep, shuddering breath, and she turns back to the road. One foot numbly follows the other, an arm fixes around the child, and suddenly, she is running.

  JULY 2008

  Miranda

  Miranda had been an ambassador’s wife for nearly five months before she made it to her first Heads of Mission Spouses Association meeting. Several embossed invitations had been hand-delivered to their guards, but she had always found an excuse not to go: She’d already planned a hike in the western mountains; a new painting was flowing and could not be interrupted; she had agreed to meet one of her women. But it could not be put off indefinitely. Even Finn was beginning to grow impatient. “What are you afraid of?” he asked one morning over muesli. “They’re women, not sharks. And they do some good things, things you would approve of. Helping local children’s charities and whatnot.”

  “I know…” Miranda felt a little ashamed. What a snob she was. She was reluctant to go to a HOMSA meeting because she didn’t want to spend her morning with a bunch of housewives, something she was embarrassed to admit even to herself. Besides, she was making generalizations. Some of the ambassadors’ wives worked. And these were women from all over the world. Surely she had plenty to learn from them—even from the housewives.

  It was difficult for ambassadors’ wives to maintain careers. (It was equally hard, she supposed, for ambassadors’ husbands. But there were still regrettably few of those. Many of the women who did make it to the lofty heights of the Foreign Office were single and childless—apparently men were less willing to be trailing spouses.) Many of the wives had had careers before they married, working as lawyers, architects, chefs, journalists, teachers, or scientists. But committ
ing to a diplomatic spouse meant committing to a lifetime of impermanence. Few careers were flexible enough to survive transitions from Britain to Romania to Bangladesh to Uganda to Oman and back again. Miranda was fortunate. She didn’t—and wouldn’t—have to sacrifice a moment of her painting (or teaching). And without painting she would go slowly mad. Perhaps not so slowly. Would Finn have been such an easy choice if her career demanded that she live elsewhere? But the question is absurd. If Miranda’s career had not been flexible, she wouldn’t have been here to begin with. She would never have met Finn.

  “And sweetheart, I am sorry, but there are some things that are expected of you as my wife. It’s inconvenient, I know, but these things do matter.”

  “I’m sorry.” Miranda stirred her cereal, avoiding his eyes. “I’m a crap ambassador’s wife.”

  “It really wouldn’t take much—”

  “I know, I know. I’ll go. Okay? I will go to the next meeting, I promise.”

  “And you’ll play nicely with the other wives?”

  “As long as they play nicely with me.” Miranda smiled and reached for his hand. He held her fingers briefly, before picking up his coffee.

  “It’s not forever, you know.”

  “Do you hear me complaining? I’m a reformed woman! I embrace my wifeliness!”

  “Don’t get carried away. I won’t know who you are.”

  Of course, there were plenty of women who saw being an ambassador’s wife as a satisfying career in itself. It was easy to fill entire days managing staff, hosting teas, planning Christmas parties, counseling the younger staff members, organizing outings for other ambassadors’ wives, and planning menus. Many women relished these tasks. But not Miranda. In fact, she felt a reflexive and guilty condescension toward such domestic ambitions. Her conscience wrestled with this prejudice, meanness not sitting comfortably in her psyche. Who was she to judge anyone else’s choices? Just because traditional wifely duties were not for her did not make them less worthy. Surely many of these women frowned on Miranda’s obsession with her own work, her abandoning of most domestic duties to Negasi. Because Finn had been a bachelor ambassador before Miranda came along, Negasi had assumed many of the duties of an official wife. When Miranda moved in, Finn—aware of her lack of passion for managing household staff—had suggested that Negasi continue with these duties.

  Even now, Miranda wore her official duties uneasily. She wanted to be Miranda the Artist, not Miranda the Derivative of Finn. After spending much of her early twenties reading artists’ biographies, Miranda had concluded that there was nothing worse than being the wife of a famous or powerful man, condemned forever to the shadows, forever to a supporting role. She had always thought that if anything, she would like a wife of her own—someone to make the meals, raise the kids, and do the laundry while she focused on her art. “You need a wife more than anyone I’ve ever met,” a friend once told her. It was true. When Miranda had lived alone, she’d subsisted on toast, hummus, carrots, nuts, dried fruit, and apples, daunted by the thought of cooking. And while she had always kept her bathroom and kitchen spotless, the rest of her apartment was generally strewn with discarded clothing; books; tubes of paint; rolls of canvas; sticky cans of turpentine; half-stiffened, paint-spattered rags; and endless mugs of tea. Things hadn’t been that much different when she lived with Vícenta, who was similarly domestically challenged. Turned out Miranda just wasn’t attracted to the kind of woman who wanted to stay home cooking and cleaning. She remembered the jolt of recognition and surprise she felt the first time she read Anna Lea Merritt’s “A Letter to Artists, Especially Women Artists.”

  “The chief obstacle to a woman’s success is that she can never have a wife,” Merritt wrote.

  Just reflect what a wife does for an artist:

  Darns the stockings;

  Keeps his house;

  Writes his letters;

  Visits for his benefit;

  Wards off intruders;

  Is personally suggestive of beautiful pictures;

  Always an encouraging and partial critic.

  It is exceedingly difficult to be an artist without this time-saving help. A husband would be quite useless. He would never do any of these disagreeable things.

  How little things have changed, mused Miranda. Thank god Finn liked to cook and knew how to sew. After all, they wouldn’t have a staff forever. When his posting ended, they’d likely be living in a shoe box in London and doing their own dishes. This didn’t worry Finn.

  “The passion you have for your work is one of the things I love best about you,” he told her. “I’d never let you give it up for me, even if you tried.”

  —

  IN THE END, she had become an ambassador’s wife in the garden of the Residence. She and Finn had briefly considered eloping to an exotic country before thinking, What could be more exotic than here? And when would they ever have a home more appropriate for entertaining? So Teru and Miranda put together a wedding menu, Finn ordered the gardeners to set up a tent in the yard with a dance floor, and the bride and groom hastily compiled a guest list. They didn’t have to worry about inviting their extended families; most of them wouldn’t come. In fact, they could invite ten times the number of friends and relatives they could accommodate and still have a fairly empty house. Most Westerners—particularly those who read the news—found Mazrooq too intimidating a destination. But there was no shortage of local invitees: the entire close protection team, the household staff, Miranda’s students, Mosi, Madina, Morgane and Sebastian, Kaia and Stéphane, Doortje and Alfons, the French, German, Italian, Dutch, and American ambassadors, the Omani, Egyptian, Emirati, Saudi, and Tunisian ambassadors, several of Miranda’s friends from the Old City, the whole expatriate staff of the British embassy, and a smattering of oil workers. So it wasn’t quite the intimate affair they had planned.

  The Mazrooqis, of course, assumed they were already married. As soon as Miranda had moved in with Finn, he began referring to her as his wife. Given that marriage contracts and wedding celebrations were normally separate events in Mazrooq, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that Miranda and Finn were throwing a party long after they were legally wed.

  —

  “SO HOW MODEST do I have to be?” Miranda asked Finn. They were sitting over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and porridge—they lingered in bed so late on weekends (and not because they were sleeping) that they were ravenous by the time they made it downstairs—at the small round table in a sunny corner of the kitchen, which during the weekdays was monopolized by the staff, working on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. A friend of Miranda’s in Seattle mailed a collection of them each month. Finn had pointed out that they could probably print them off the website, but Miranda had looked at him reproachfully. “It’s not the same.”

  Pouring cold milk over her porridge, she continued, “I mean, there’ll be an awful lot of Muslims in attendance. Wondering, no doubt, why we’re allowing men and women in the same room. Or same yard. Whatever.”

  Finn looked up from the puzzle. “Massenet opera?”

  “Who the hell is Massenet?”

  “It’s your wedding,” said Finn. “This once, I think, you can wear whatever takes your fancy.”

  “Nothing you can buy in this country. I don’t fancy getting wrapped up in polyester. Dear god, Finn, you realize what this means, don’t you? I am going to have to go shopping.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I’m afraid there’s no way around that one. Unless you want to wear one of your sundresses?”

  She gave him a hopeless look. “I just don’t want to be one of those bride people.”

  “Um, have we not gone over the definition of wedding? Big party, bride, groom, sometimes bridesmaids?”

  “Bridesmaids.” She looked horrified. “All in look-alike taffeta. I couldn’t bear it.”

  Finn reached for her hand. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Of course!” She squeezed his fingers. “If taffeta mea
ns that much to you, I will suffer it.”

  “We can skip the taffeta. Do you think you want bridesmaids at all? Or maybe just one attendant? Maid of honor type of person?”

  Miranda thought for a moment. “I want Tazkia,” she said. “Can I have her? Though she’ll have to be all covered up, of course, with all those men around.”

  “Of course. Look, do you want to give Marguerite a call?”

  “Are you going to have any—what are they called? Ushers? Groomspeople?”

  Finn thought for a moment. “I don’t think so.” He had no siblings, his parents were both dead, and he hadn’t been the world’s finest correspondent with his friends. He had always had plenty of great mates wherever he had been posted, but he somehow never managed to maintain those relationships once one or both of them had moved on. Claire remained his closest friend in the UK, doggedly continuing to write him at least once a month even in the face of his long silences. There was little chance, however, that she and Charlie would drag their family over here for the festivities.

  “If I have Tazkia, won’t we be lopsided?”

  “Could we both have Tazkia? She could be our maid of groomsman. Our usher of honor.”

  “I’m sure she’d be flattered.”

  “Look, I’m going to be doing the accounts solidly through next weekend. Why don’t you go to Istanbul or Dubai or somewhere and pick up a dress?”

  Miranda looked at him in surprise. “Seriously?”

  “You’ll want something nice, or at least something you like.”

  “We can afford it?”

  “We have a travel package, love. Among the great perks of hardship postings are all the free airfares.”

  “Maybe I’ll ask Marguerite to come with me.”

  Finn smiled. “I recommend it.” He had been relieved when she and Marguerite began spending time together. While Miranda seemed happy with her merry band of expats and Mazrooqi women, he had fretted about her integration into diplomatic life. Marguerite managed to engage Miranda on an intellectual level—they traded books and argued about postmodernism—while also gently coaching her in the diplomatic arts of managing staff, planning menus, and dressing appropriately. He was careful, however, never to openly express gratitude for this.