City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  ALSO BY ZOË FERRARIS

  Finding Nouf

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2010 by Zoë Ferraris

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.hachettebookgroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown.

  First eBook Edition: August 2010

  The characters and events in this book are fi ctitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08928-9

  Contents

  Copyright

  ALSO BY ZOË FERRARIS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  GLOSSARY

  1

  The woman’s body was lying on the beach. “Eve’s tomb,” he would later come to think of it, not the actual tomb in Jeddah that was flattened in 1928, to squash out any cults attached to her name, nor the same one that was bulldozed again in 1975, to confirm the point. This more fanciful tomb was a plain, narrow strip of beach north of Jeddah.

  That afternoon, Abu-Yussuf carried his fishing gear down the gentle slope to the sand. He was a seasoned fisherman who preferred the activity for its sport rather than its practical value, but a series of layoffs at the desalination plant had forced him to take up fishing to feed his family. Sixty-two and blessed with his mother’s skin, he had withstood a lifetime of exposure to the sun and looked as radiant as a man in his forties. He hit the edge of the shore, the hard-packed sand, with an expansive feeling of pleasure; there were certainly worse ways to feed a family. He looked up the beach and there she was. The woman he would later think of as Eve.

  He set his tackle box on the sand and approached carefully in case she was sleeping, in case she sat up and wiped her eyes and mistook him for a djinn. She was lying on her side, her dark hair splayed around her head like the tentacles of a dangerous anemone. The seaweed on her cloak looked at first like some sort of horrible growth. One arm was tucked beneath the body; the other one was bare, and it rested on the sand in a pleading way, as a sleeper might clutch a pillow during a bad dream. The hand was mutilated; it looked to be burned. There were numerous cuts on the forearm. Her bottom half was naked, the black cloak pushed up above her waist, the jeans she was wearing tangled around her feet like chains. His attention turned to the half of her face that wasn’t buried in sand. Whole sections of her cheeks and lips were missing. What remained of the skin was swollen and red, and there were horrible cuts across her forehead. One eye was open, vacant, dead.

  “Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim,” he began to whisper. The prayer spooled from his mouth as he stared dumbfounded and horrified. He knew he shouldn’t look, he shouldn’t want that sort of image knocking around in his memory, but it took an effort to turn away. Her left leg was half buried in the sand, but now that he was closer, he saw that the right one was cut around the thigh, the slashes bulbous and curved like tamarinds. The rest of the skin was unnaturally pale and bloated. He knew better than to touch the body, but he had the impulse to lay something over the exposed half of her, to give her a last bit of dignity.

  He had to go back up to the street to get a good cellular signal. The police came, then a coroner and a forensics team. Abu-Yussuf waited, still clutching his fishing rod, the tackle box planted firmly by his feet. The young officer who first arrived on the scene treated him with affection and called him “uncle.” Would you like a drink, uncle? A chair? I can bring a chair. They interviewed him politely. Yes, uncle, that’s important. Thank you. The whole time, he kept the woman in his line of sight. Out of politeness, he didn’t stare.

  While the forensics team worked, Abu-Yussuf began to feel crushingly tired. He sensed that shutting his eyes would lead to a dangerous sleep, so he let his eyes drift out to sea, let his thoughts drift further. Eve. Her real tomb was in the city. It had always seemed strange that she was buried in Jeddah, and that Adam was buried in Mecca. Had they had a falling-out after they were exiled from the Garden of Eden? Or had Adam, like so many men today, simply died first, giving Eve time to wander? His grandmother, rest her soul, once told him that Eve had been 180 meters tall. His grandmother had seen Eve’s grave as a girl, before the king’s viceroy had demolished the site. It had been longer than her father’s entire camel caravan.

  One of the forensics men bent over the body. Abu-Yussuf snapped out of his reverie and caught a last glimpse of the girl’s bare arm. Allah receive her. He leaned over and picked up his tackle box, felt a rush of nausea. Swallowing hard, he looked up to the street and began to walk with an energy he didn’t really have. Uncle, can I assist? This was another officer, taller than the first, with a face like a marble sculpture, all smooth angles and stone. The officer didn’t give him time to protest. He took Abu-Yussuf’s arm and they walked up together, taking one slow step at a time. The going became easier when he imagined Eve, a gargantuan woman stomping across cities as if they were doormats. She could have taken this beach with one leap. Pity it was only the modern woman who had been rendered so small and frail.

  2

  24 hours earlier

  In the loading garage of Al-Amir Imports, the great bustle of activity drowned out the sound of Nayir’s cell phone, which went unnoticed in his pocket. There were tents to be folded, rations to be stored, and water to be measured, not to mention that the GPS navigation network still hadn’t been brought online. While the younger Amir brothers were raising a fuss about the static on the screens of their handhelds, an assistant came rushing up to warn Nayir that the servants had forgotten to stock salt tablets.

  Nayir went straight to the Land Rover in question—cell phone still happily jangling—and foraged in the trunk for the missing tablets. He found table linens and silverware, two boxes of cigars, a portable DVD player, and a satellite dish—none of which he had approved for the trip. Men brought whatever they wanted to the desert, but the satellite dish was going too far.

  “Take this stuff out,” he ordered. “Don’t tell anyone. Just do it.”

  “Where should I put it?” the assistant asked.

  The swe
at ran in rivulets down Nayir’s back. “I don’t care. Just make sure they don’t notice it’s missing until we’re gone.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. The garage, like many belonging to the superrich, was air-conditioned, but it made no difference. The heat bled into everything. “And send a servant to buy salt!” These men were going to have daily doses of salt tablets whether they liked it or not. He didn’t want them coming home on stretchers, dying of dehydration.

  Nayir grabbed a water bottle and headed for the door. Behind him, twelve Land Rovers sat in regal formation, each attended by detailers, fussed over by mechanics, lovingly attended like pashas of old by the eager hands of slave labor (this more modern type of slave imported from Sri Lanka and the Philippines), and all for a five-day jaunt to the desert so that the male half of a large and obnoxiously rich family of textile importers could later brag to their friends and neighbors about shooting wild foxes, eating by a campfire, and generally “roughing it” at the edges of the Empty Quarter. The trip had originally been planned for a fortnight, but because of the great chaos of schedules and commitments—each Amir son with his own boutique to manage, investors to please, workers to boss around—their desert adventure had slowly been whittled down to five days. Five. Nayir counted them in his head: Days one and two, to the desert. Day three, piss in the desert. Days four and five, drive home.

  He remembered the preparations for long-ago trips, taken to far more difficult locales in the company of greater men than these. Packing sandbags and live pigeons for archaeological digs with old Dr. Roeghar and Abu-Tareq. “Why are we bringing sand to the desert?” Nayir had asked, back then a boy of eight. “To give us ballast in case of a storm,” Dr. Roeghar had replied. Nayir had not understood the word ballast, and he had had to refer to his uncle’s English-Arabic dictionary. When he finally understood, the idea conjured such a wild, windswept image of the desert that he could hardly suppress his excitement. Then he reached the real desert, so treacherously hot that he and the other children had to cover their faces for the first time, ingest water at ritual intervals like medicine, and discover the indignity of salt tablets on the gastrointestinal system.

  He’d worn his first pair of sunglasses that year and been teased by Abu-Tareq’s daughter Raja’ for looking American, so he’d taken them off and never worn sunglasses again. Young, beautiful Raja’ with the bright green eyes. She swore that she’d marry him someday, and he believed it, to his later, quiet embarrassment. During the day, they slept side by side in his uncle Samir’s tent on an old mattress of straw that smelled incongruously green and chemical. Machines loomed above them, set on folding wooden tables. He and Raja’ always curled up like twins, face to face, with dust on their cheeks and sand in their hair. They locked legs sometimes, and once he tied pieces of string in her hair while she slept, and then tied the whole bundle with a longer string to his own hair. Occasionally, when they woke, he’d find that her fingers had become entangled in his hair, which was long and often knotted from the wind. The wind would wake them at dusk, and they’d hear the camp stirring, and the coolness of the evening would beckon them outside. Entangled fingers would be forgotten as they raced off to play.

  It was hard now to imagine that he’d once been so close to a girl, close enough to sleep on the same mat and call each other “best friend.” At eleven, Raja’ had become a “woman,” and her mother had draped her in a veil and sent her off to be with her sisters. He never saw her again. The next winter Dr. Roeghar’s dig had gone on without her, and Nayir soon became mature enough to feel ashamed of any lingering thoughts of her face.

  Nayir drank half the bottle of water and resisted the urge to pour the other half over his hair. Their Bedouin guide, Abdullah bin Salim, was standing just outside the garage, unperturbed by the heat. He was staring at the traffic on the boulevard. It was the same look he wore when studying the winter pastures of the Empty Quarter, a look of contemplation and challenge that said What do you have for me this year?

  He frowned as Nayir approached. “Are you sure about this?” Abdullah asked.

  Nayir wanted to remind him that he said that every year, no matter what kind of people they were taking to the desert. “I have to admit,” he said, “they don’t seem ready.”

  Abdullah didn’t reply.

  “Listen,” Nayir said, “I’m sure it will be all right.”

  Abdullah’s eyes remained on the boulevard. “How do you know them?”

  “Through Samir. He’s known the father for twelve years.”

  “These people aren’t Bedouin. They never were. Just looking at them, you can see they were sharwaya.” Sheepherders, not the “real” Bedouin, whose lives were tied to camels. It was an insult, but Nayir had heard this remark before as well. The families they took to the desert were seldom good enough for Abdullah. And perhaps it was true that they could never actually survive in the landscape their forefathers had inhabited for six thousand years, but in the greater scheme of things, it was enough that they would try.

  Nayir nodded politely. “You’re probably right. So let’s teach them how to be real Bedouin.” His cell phone rang again, and this time he answered it. He listened patiently to his uncle, made a few replies, and once he was finished, excused himself from the preparations and headed quickly to the parking lot for his Jeep.

  3

  As Miriam Walker made her way to the back of the plane, she could see that the flight to Jeddah was going to be tedious. It was packed with holiday travelers. There were too many overhead items, too many nervous stewards scurrying down the aisles looking for space. She looked back at her seat: 59C, the distance from the bowler to the kingpin. She felt a familiar combination of dread and excitement. She was looking forward to seeing Eric again—she’d been gone for a month—but this simple walk down the aisle marked a return to a world where she would stay indoors for weeks at a time. As the line trudged forward, she pushed ahead, anxious to buckle herself in, as if the seatbelt would prevent her from stepping off the plane and turning her back on it all.

  Miriam’s seat assignment turned out to be next to a man. It seemed that Saudia ought to have restrictions against seating women next to unrelated men, but apparently not. The man stared as she approached, a knowing look in his eye. He had the dark eyes and olive skin of an Arab but a shock of natural blond hair. The contrast made him surprisingly handsome. Miriam’s cheeks brightened. A sidestep put her behind a tall man in a turban. Slowly, casually, she straightened her shoulders and licked her front teeth. Another brief glance told her he was still staring. They were technically in New York, but she could feel Saudi Arabia draping over them with every blast of recycled air. She ran a hand through her hair and thought, Enjoy your last bit of freedom, curly locks.

  She slid into her seat and shot him a casual smile, practiced to hide a crooked incisor. He greeted her with a satisfied look. To stall his talking, she rummaged in her purse, made a show of forcing it beneath the seat in front of her, and spent a few minutes inspecting the contents of the seat pocket. There she found a surprising comfort—a silk drawstring bag that must have been left by the passenger before her. In it was a toothbrush, a bar of soap, a tortoiseshell comb, and a small bottle of Calvin Klein perfume. Escape. She smirked.

  As the plane backed out of the gate, Miriam felt herself tense. No going back now. She never used to be afraid of flying, but traveling to Saudi had done something to her. As they lumbered down the runway, her instincts took over. Palms cold, forehead wet, chest tight. The plane would never go fast enough to rise off the ground. Everyone stared at the windows and walls, which were shuddering violently. An overhead compartment burst open, spilling jackets and a coffee tin on a passenger’s head. She wondered why anyone would take Folgers to Jeddah.

  “Do you know,” the man beside her said, “on the old Saudia flights, they used to say Mohammed’s prayer for journeys over the loudspeaker?” He spoke with a clear American accent, which surprised her somehow. She had thought h
e was Arab.

  “Oh, really?” She gave a nervous laugh.

  “Another tradition lost.” He seemed almost amused.

  They felt the pull of their bodies resisting the rise. A man across the aisle began cursing. Miriam wanted to hush him but she was hinged in a twilight of prayer, hoping they wouldn’t fall out of the sky. With a bounce, the plane leveled. It seemed to stop in midair and float like a walrus on top of a balloon. A mechanical lullaby hummed in her head. It was midnight. That and fear combined to make her feel crushingly tired. The only way to escape the terror of flying was to surrender to the void of unconsciousness, but there was no alcohol on Saudia flights, and the dark nestle of sleep would not come closer until they turned out the lights. She shut her eyes, hoping to deter her neighbor from starting a conversation, but he pressed the call button. Bing. The steward appeared, looking annoyed. Her neighbor leaned past her, almost touching her breast with his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. He asked for two empty cups.

  “One for me,” he told the steward, “and one for my girlfriend.”

  * * *

  From the pocket of his jacket he produced two small bottles of wine. Miriam’s chest tightened.

  “You know that’s —”

  “Forbidden,” he said. “Yes. But what are they going to do, kick us off the plane?” He smiled at her, poured out two cups, and tucked the bottles in the seat pocket. He gave one cup to Miriam. She shook her head but he insisted. “Come on,” he said, “I’m sure the worst they’ll do is make us flush it down the toilet.”

  She felt like a teenager again and found herself doing just what she’d done back then. She picked up the cup. “Thanks,” she said, taking a sip. It was a welcome palliative. Actually, the worst they’ll do is arrest us and throw us in prison when we land.