In the Kingdom of Men

by Kim Barnes

  He wouldn’t serve me this way, I reasoned, if he meant to hurt Mason. The idea that he might do so seemed suddenly absurd, a drama only a pirate would pretend.

  I looked to where Badra grazed a small clutch of brown grass, her back still marked with the dark sweat of her ride. I pressed my fingers against the horsehair fob in my pocket like a charm and took my place, tucked my feet, and waited until Abdullah lowered himself to the sand before looking up. It seemed impossible that we had ever spoken, that there was a language that we shared, that we had told each other stories and teased. I watched as he tended the small fire, each movement precise, efficient, and remembered my grandfather—each morning, the four sticks of kindling split and feathered, laid atop a twist of paper, the single match struck, the wait to add another piece of wood to the stove, and then another, never rushing no matter how icy the room. “Do it right once,” he would say, “or do it twice wrong.” It was a lesson I seemed never to learn.

  Abdullah poured our coffee—another three servings before I shook my cup in the mute gesture that meant enough. He stirred the fire, then elbowed back into a bolster and crossed his fingers at his chest. I saw him glance at me quickly, then away.

  “You never brought our lunch,” he said.

  It took me a moment to remember: Texas chili, no beans, Abdullah just pulling away as I came back from the movie theater. That moment seemed years ago, and I gave a strange laugh that set my teeth to chattering.

  “I wish I had a cigarette,” I said.

  When Abdullah reached inside the placket of his robe and pulled out a pack, I realized that I had never seen him smoke before. I steadied my own shaking hand as he held the lighter to my cigarette, then his own. He reclined again, let out a slow breath, the smoke rising to the soft wind that raised the folds of his scarf, revealing the round of his ear, the nape of his neck. I watched, oddly mesmerized by the tensing of his jaw, the configuration of his hands. His calm was nothing new to me—he was every man I had ever known, resolute against any show of emotion. I believed that my only hope was to match my stoicism to his, to earn my place at the fire, to not be exiled to the weaker world of women.

  “Yash is gone,” I said, “but you probably already know that.” When he didn’t respond I looked down at my hands. “Ross took the ledger,” I said. “It’s all the proof we had.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Abdullah said. “None of it matters anymore.”

  “But it does,” I said. “Mason is your friend. You know he has always been on your side.” I fought to keep my voice from rising. “You know what those four men are saying isn’t true. Someone paid them to lie.” I let a moment skip by. “And you know who it was who paid them.”

  He blinked his eyes away, then glanced to where Fatima sat in the shadows, weaving with the unhurried efficiency of someone who has learned to bide her time.

  “It was during the shamal,” he said quietly. “I had gone into camp, hoping only to see you. When you brought me the tea, I thought it was fate, and I left the compound happy.” He balanced the cup in the center of his hand. “When I returned to the tent, I found my mother weeping. She told me that Nadia had gone to the shore. I tried to follow, but the storm filled my eyes with sand.” The lines around his mouth tightened. “There was nothing I could do to save her,” he said. “It is better that she gave herself to the sea.”

  He paused, and in the silence, I heard the sound of Abqaiq’s schoolchildren float in on a torpid current of air, mixing with the muezzin’s call.

  “She drowned herself,” I said—a possibility I hadn’t imagined but now seemed so clear. “Because of Alireza,” I said. “The baby.”

  Abdullah rolled his cigarette against a stone. “They have found the Arabesque run aground,” he said, “just north of Jubail.”

  “Then they made it,” I said. “They survived the storm.” When he didn’t answer, I felt a claw of new fear scrabbling to take hold. “You would tell me …” I trailed off, blinking against the dark edges of my vision. “Please,” I said, “just tell me the truth.”

  He lifted his face, looked to the east. “There is something happening here,” he said, as though in a dream. “It is something that nothing, no one can stop.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Why won’t you just tell me? Why won’t you say if he’s dead?”

  “Because I can’t say,” he said.

  “Why? Why can’t you say?”

  “Because I don’t know.” He considered his empty cup. “All around the boat, the wind had swept the sand clean. The trackers had no trail to follow.” He looked toward the compound, the smutty flares warbling the air, then lowered his gaze. “I have brought you Badra,” he said.

  I looked to where the mare had dropped her head and dozed, her ears tenting forward to catch the tenor of our voices, her breath sculpting a small bowl in the sand.

  “A horse?” I asked. “Do you think that a horse is what I want from you?”

  “It was your husband who asked to buy her, but the emir is a generous man. Because you admired her, he has sent her as a gift.” His eyes came up to meet mine. “Mason is gone, Gin. He isn’t coming back.”

  It wasn’t only what he was saying to me that shocked me into stillness but the sound of my name in his mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t know what you are telling me.”

  He offered his words like a heaping of small stones. “I am telling you that even if Mason survived the shamal, there are men who will not let him live, and there is nothing I can do to stop them.” He lifted one hand tentatively, as though in offering. “I am telling you that you can stay,” he said, “here with me.”

  Stay here. I met his gaze because I couldn’t look away, and I wonder now: What did he see in my face?

  I staggered up, trying to stand, but the sand caught my heels, and I fell to the edge of the fire. The stink of burned animals took to the air, the skin of my right arm singed before Abdullah could grab my wrists and snatch me up. I tried to wrench myself free, saw the look in his eyes, a mix of excitement and fear, and I thought he might pull me close, hold me against him, and what then, I ask myself now. What then?

  “Abdullah.”

  It was Fatima’s strong voice that broke the spell. She stood unveiled in the open door of the tent, her chin lifted.

  “Abdullah,” she said louder, the word like a command, and I felt him let go. He looked at me, then dared to rest his palm against my cheek before turning to where the mare waited, tied to nothing but sand. He grabbed a hank of her mane, pulled himself up. No word, no kick of his heels or snap of the reins, just his body leaned forward, and they were moving away so fast it did me no good to call, though I did, again and again, for Badra to come back, to wait, to please wait for me.

  Epilogue

  Where does it end, that arc that traces the path of our days, ascends, ascends, then begins its sure decline? A heroine’s journey, a cautionary tale—only later can we look back, try to make sense of what story we are living, give it some meaning that might redeem the choices we have made.

  I can tell you that Fatima came to where I lay, curled and howling by the fire, that she knelt beside me like a mother might. I looked up, saw her eyes heavy with an acceptance I could not bear.

  “Will you tell me?” I whispered. I clung to her hands. “Won’t you please tell me where he is?”

  She rose silently, urging me up with her. I wanted her to soothe me, salve my burns, tell me that Abdullah would return, but I pulled away and left her there, left all that was left for me to leave. I stumbled across the sand, down the road, and back through the gate, Habib silently watching.

  Just inside the door of my home, a grim American man I had never seen before was waiting. He handed me my passport, along with a one-way ticket, an envelope of strange money, and told me to take what I wanted, that I wouldn’t be back. I packed no bags, took nothing but what I wore—Mason’s shirt and jeans, my mother’s boots, my scarf—a
nd he drove me to the airport without another word, put me on the next plane to Rome.

  I remember nothing of that flight except the stewardess touching my shoulder, handing me a sandwich that I held until she came and took it away. A car was waiting for me, another silent man, who took my passport before he dropped me in front of an ancient stone building and handed me the single heavy key. I stood alone, looking up and up, and began to climb the stairs, one floor, and then another, and another, ascending to the rooms that have held the past three years of my life.

  I remember how I lay on the thin mattress as the hours turned into days, rising only to fill my mouth with water, use the toilet. I believed that I wanted to die, but it was my hunger that goaded me to take some of the lira and go back down to the street, where I found a little market, bought a round of bread and a wedge of hard cheese, then sat on a bench overlooking the Tiber and cried as I ate it all. I began walking the city like I had first learned to drive—around one block, and then another—never caring that I might be lost, until the street opened out into a kind of courtyard, and I stopped, amazed.

  Have you seen the Trevi Fountain? The waters spill out, the great marble seahorses riding the foam. At the edge of the pool, a large sculpted vase is said to once have hidden a stubborn barber’s lowly sign. They call it the Asso di Coppe—the Ace of Cups—and I leaned against its base, numbly counting the coins, all those wishes for return, and wondered, Why here? Soon, I would know: the tall buildings, the labyrinthine avenues—in the Great Fire, there was no escape, and people died by the thousands in these very streets because they had nowhere to run.

  Those first weeks in Rome, returning to Arabia was my obsession, as though I might yet find my way through the maze of fear and confusion my life had become, rescue Mason, save myself. I petitioned the embassy for a new passport, told them that my husband was missing, that I needed to find him, but they shook their heads as though deaf until, finally, I stood mute, the other people in line staring at me as though I might be crazy. And wasn’t I? Even if I were allowed to return to Arabia or even Shawnee, whom did I think I might find there? Better that I remain where they have sent me, surrounded by a sea of people who have taken me in like the orphan that I am, who urge me to eat, eat, who light their candles and remember me in their passionate prayers.

  I believe it would please Carlo to know that, like him, I have learned to make my way through this world by taking the portraits of those who consider themselves important. They seek me out, hang their likenesses on the walls of their villas, but most days, I carry a simple Rolleiflex hung beneath my scarf. I can walk any avenue, see ruins in every direction, the ancient domes and fractured pillars thrusting up from the marble floors and ruptured canals, the ancient cathedrals marshaling the town. I turn a corner and there is another piazza with a bench or two, a belled wall, where I sit with the elders, their ineffable patience stretching through the sultry afternoons. They have nothing but time, it seems, to watch, to listen, to study the sky, to gossip meanly about their neighbors as though I were just the one to hear, and I snap the shutter, catch their faces unguarded as they contemplate the gush of water from the mouths of stone fishes. Young mothers push by with their prams, and I wonder how my life might be different if I could find my way back to that first night with Mason, start over again.

  I say this aloud to Apollonia, the old woman who sits on the bench next to me, whom I have come to know like the seasons here—slowly and with anticipation. “Never regret,” she tells me, “or your life will end before it’s begun.” I don’t tell her that there are times when I wish it were so but breathe in the comfort of her smell—hot wool and ripe lemons—as she talks to me of her dead husband, her seven children and nineteen grandchildren. She thinks that I, too, am vedova de guerra—a widow of war, and maybe I am. She points out the handsome young men who walk by, wearing their lust like a golden skin, and makes bawdy gestures that only we can see. She loves to hear my Arabian tales. I have imagined for her every possible outcome to this story, and the impossible, too—that my heroine looks up one day and sees her lost love, that faint scar, those blue, blue eyes. He was only wounded, had gone into hiding—“He didn’t want to endanger her, so he stayed away as long as he could bear,” I say, and Apollonia nods.

  “A good man,” she says, “who made a bad mistake.”

  I want to tell her that maybe I am the one to blame, that if I hadn’t told Lucky, he and Mason and Nadia might still be alive, but it is a story that no one would want to believe of me, not Virginia Mae McPhee.

  When Apollonia takes my arm and we walk past the young sweethearts strolling the bridges, the businessmen covering their mistresses in the backseats of cars, the old lovers hand in hand, taking their passéggiata, I think of Carlo, imagine that he and Linda have married, that they live in a white stucco house just north of al-Khobar, large windows to catch the sweet salt breeze, three dark-eyed daughters who someday will grow taller than their father. Perhaps he has given up his pirate’s guise, thrown off his silk and heavy boots, taken on the cotton undershirts and soft shoes of an old man. Maybe one day, I think, he will find me, teach me how to eat tripe, introduce me to his cousin’s cousin, show me how to grow big again. But it is Apollonia who presses her warm hand to my heart, tells me that the boat of my soul has known many waters, that I am still worthy and true, and an unexpected hope stabs into me.

  Most evenings, in the little ristorante near the river, I take my wine in short glasses, take whatever Fausto, the surly owner, brings from his kitchen, and it is always good. I love the forest mushrooms most of all—morels in the springtime, porcini in the fall—and Fausto loves me, although he has his consorta upstairs who bangs her heel against the floor when he lingers too long at my table, and I think of Yash and his young wife making love to the brewing juice of cashew fruit, lewd and promising on the morning air. There are times when I wish I could travel to India, find Yash if he is there or find what remains of his family, trace his blood and know it again, but what would I tell his son? We danced, I might say. He taught me so many things. Orphaned himself, abandoned, set aside, what would he care? Perhaps he would hate me as I sometimes hate myself.

  Too often, I forget that Ruthie had a son, that she lived every day with his absence, that wherever he is, he must now live with her death and his father’s, too. Because I believe that they are all dead, don’t you? The last open seat, one last tour, one last race to run—I sometimes feel as though I am the last one left to tell the story, and where is the mercy in that?

  You are wondering about Abdullah. I don’t know what to say. I could have loved him, I think, or I did. I keep the short braid of Badra’s mane in a box made of abalone with other precious things: a fistful of small pebbles the color of cinnamon that I emptied from my mother’s boots, the necklace with its single pearl—all that I have to remind me that I once lived there, where the sand meets the sea.

  There are times when I wonder whether it is simple solitude that I seek, whether that is what drew me to the desert, the tent, whether what I wanted from Abdullah was anything more than that. Some part of me has always believed that I need only myself to survive—that part that Mason recognized early on—but what woman has ever known such agency and could move through this world without the aid and protection of men? What choice do we have but to try? Every time a woman sins, my grandfather said, she falls again, and I say that in doing so, she claims sovereignty over her actions. See the two sides of me, then: repentant and refusing to repent. Everything in my life is different, yet nothing has changed.

  Like Dickens in his London, the nights such dark thoughts keep me awake, I walk. The city never chills like the desert at dusk, but last winter, in the throes of insomnia, I stepped out, looked up, and thought that the stars were falling. The snow hit my face like sparks from a fire.

  I had almost forgotten those winter mornings in Shawnee, my bedsheets iced to the wall. How my grandfather would wrap me in a blanket and carry me to the kitchen, w
here the potbellied stove moaned its misery so that I didn’t have to. He would tuck me into my chair, rest his hand on the top of my head. “You are a fine girl,” he would say, as though the cold had melted his heart. And then he would pray and spoon the porridge, test it against his own lips before moving it to mine. “Eat, eat,” he would say, and then he would bundle me in wool, sit me on the mule, and lead me to school through the ghostly fields. When the last bell rang, I would find him waiting, ready to tug my hat over my ears, snug on my mittens, and we would follow our own trail home.

  Who knows where grace resides? That night in Rome, the miraculous snow coming down, I stopped when the Gypsy fortune-teller called to me. She had no table, only the slick flint road to lay her prophecies upon, and I crouched before her. The card came up, an open palm holding a golden chalice, the Asso di Coppe. “Cups are the suit of the heart,” she crooned, “of family, of love. Do you have someone to forgive?” she asked me, her eyes clouded with age. “Do you want to ask forgiveness?” She smelled like the last wilted petals of jasmine, the desert after a rain. She took my fingers, clasped them in hers. “We are all wanderers on this earth,” she said. “It is never too late.”

  I let her peer into my face, then slowly drew my hands away. I pulled off my diamond ring and dropped it to her blanket like payment for my sins. I was blocks away before the regret turned me around, but what did I expect? She was a nomad, after all. She had taken her cards, taken my ring, rolled up her blanket, and was gone.

  How long did I search the vias and nearby piazzas for any sign of her before I found myself on an unknown avenue whose walls were bolted with forged iron? In an upstairs window, its arched panels opened to the cold air, a light shone through, and I could hear the voices of the choir, practicing their songs of communion. A slender osteria anchored the corner, and I hesitated before giving up and walking in, past the old bachelors taking their late meals, to the handsome young barista who followed me with his smoky eyes. “Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore,” I said, and maybe it was the bitterness in my voice that caused him to bring me the bottle already uncorked. When he offered two glasses, I shook my head, said, “Solo una.” He took in my sadness but would not take my lira no matter how much I insisted. I asked whether I was his evening’s charity, but he said no, that if I did not accept the wine, he would have to drink it himself, and that might lead him into temptation. He lifted one eyebrow. “Tu sei la mia salvezza,” and though I felt like no one’s salvation, I raised my chin, said, “Grazie,” and turned for the door before he could see my tears.