City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  She stood up and went to the pantry. It was nearly empty, but stacking the few condiments would help her relax. She tried not to think about the story Sabria’s sister had told her. A Canadian man who was in Jeddah with his wife had fallen in love with a young Bedouin girl. They’d had a fling. Soon after, the girl had turned herself in to the police, begging for protection. She believed that her brothers had discovered that she’d had sex before marriage and they intended to kill her. The police, believing it possible, had offered her protection and also took the Canadian man to the station. Sure enough, that afternoon three of the girl’s brothers had shown up at the station door, threatening to kill her. The police had had to spirit the illicit lovers out of the country.

  Miriam couldn’t be sure how much of the story was hyperbole, but Sabria’s sister had been firm on one point: it wasn’t that strange for Bedouin families to react with outrage upon discovering such a tryst. Young girls had been killed before, and sometimes their lovers with them…

  Stop, Miriam told herself. There was no reason to jump to worst-case scenarios. She remembered a story Patty had told her about an American guy who lived on the compound. His wife, who was still in the United States, had mailed him a care package with three DVDs of porn. The censors who opened mail in Saudi had discovered the porn and had the poor American guy arrested. He’d had to explain that his wife didn’t understand Saudi culture. The police had accepted the explanation but forced the American to break the DVDs right there at the station. Apparently, they didn’t want to get sued for destroying personal property. Of course, that hadn’t happened to Eric, but she needed a reminder that in Jeddah, people could be arrested for the strangest reasons.

  Besides, Eric had “disappeared” before. One of his associates at work had decided to take a spontaneous trip to the desert. Eric had gone along, thinking it would be only for the day, and then had discovered that his host meant to stay for the weekend. He’d been too far out of cell phone range to call her and let her know where he was.

  Another evening, the religious police had hauled him into one of their makeshift prisons—in this case, the back room of a local mosque—to give the dumb foreigner a lesson in proper conduct. Apparently, he hadn’t been wearing long sleeves, and his impatience had won him a few bruises from a bamboo cane. But that time, he had been held only for a few hours. He’d come home late that night.

  Miriam took another calming breath and shut the pantry door. It was possible that the God Squad had arrested him for something. Perhaps his walk was too jaunty to qualify as pious. He would come home tomorrow, maybe bruised but unforthcoming as ever. She’d have to pry the story out of him, and he’d only reassure her that everything was fine and that, yes, the religious police could be overzealous but they were just doing their jobs. The police in America pulled foreigners over all the time, didn’t they? It was just something they had to put up with here, respecting other cultures, blah blah blah. The scenario was so real that it almost had to be true. At least it was the sort of explanation that Eric would devise if she had disappeared.

  Then again, if she disappeared, Eric could probably do something about it.

  She glanced at the cell phone sitting on the table. The truth was, she had thought of calling the consulate all morning, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself.

  She began walking through the house, pacing really, wondering if she was ready to face the world and go to the corner store. She got distracted by the bathroom sink, which was filthy. While she cleaned it, darker possibilities began to loom in her mind. The secret police also hauled people into jails, except that the locations of these bunkers were known only to insiders and a handful of Saudi bigwigs. The foreigners who vanished didn’t reappear for months, sometimes years. They languished like women, waiting for lawyers, for trials that never came. If she went to the consulate, they’d probably zip her out of the country faster than anyone could say “indecent.” Then Eric would be stuck in an underground bunker, waiting for a court date that would never be set…

  Stop, she told herself. Jesus! Think of something else.

  She went back into the kitchen. A sickly sweet smell was emanating from the broken sink disposal, so she went to work, clearing out the cabinet beneath the sink, unscrewing the trap with the flashlight dangling from her mouth, feeling frustrated and competent all at once. When the trap finally came down, a few weeks’ worth of gunk spilled onto her hands. Tea leaves. As far as she knew, Eric had never so much as touched a cup of tea in his life before coming here, but now he spent all his free time in the sitting room drinking tea with his friends. Not with Jacob or the other Americans he worked with. Eric hung out with Arab men who were friendly enough but who would have considered it rude to strike up a conversation with a woman. They thought it was strange that she didn’t know how to make tea, that Eric boiled it himself because he wanted to master the art of making tea Saudi-style. She even took a picture one night of Eric with a teacup in his hand. When she’d teased him about it, he’d shrugged sheepishly and said, “It’s what the guys prefer to drink.”

  She watched the ease with which he adopted these new rules of manliness. Kissing other men on the cheek. Hugging. Sitting around gossiping and laughing for hours like teenage girls who shut down the moment a parent walks into the room. At first she reacted to these changes with tenderness and gratitude, even if she did think they were a little weird. It seemed that the girlish transformation applied some balm to the broken man who had come home from Iraq caged in a crushing hypermasculinity. And for him there seemed to be something deeper still—was it good old-fashioned Protestant guilt? I killed Muslims, now I’m redeeming myself. Whatever the reason, despite his occasional agreement that it wasn’t quite the ideal place for a woman to live, Eric had fallen hard for Saudi Arabia.

  She remembered the conversation they’d had on the porch at their house in Fayetteville when he’d signed the contract for his job here. He’d popped a bottle of champagne, spilling it all over the love-seat swing, and she’d teased him about his excitement. “Are you sure there’s not another reason you’re wanting to go there so badly? Maybe a female reason?”

  He’d grinned devilishly and kissed her neck. “I love you, Miriam,” he whispered in her ear. “And you have to know that no matter what happens, you’ll always be wife number one.”

  She’d smacked his arm, and he’d burst out laughing. She couldn’t help laughing herself. Then he’d wrapped her in his arms. “That won’t ever happen,” he whispered, serious now.

  Yeah, yeah. She washed the tea leaves from her hands and realized belatedly that it wasn’t a joke. She’d feared that some exotic beauty would snatch him away, but the real secret lover was the city itself, the countryside, the desert, and the sense of companionship he’d found among the men here. Finding another woman in Jeddah might be a natural extension of…

  She shut down the thought immediately. It was good to see Eric so excited about a place. And his newfound companionship wasn’t so different from the kind of closeness he’d always felt with his army buddies back home. Sure, their marriage wasn’t doing so well, but were they doing so poorly that he would run away?

  Maybe she shouldn’t have been gone for so long. For weeks she had vacillated between thinking it was a good idea to give Eric a break and thinking that her leaving would give him a convenient opportunity to forget about her. She had decided to trust him. And she had needed the time away.

  But what if, in the month she’d been gone, Eric had grown even more addicted to this place? Perhaps even come to visualize a future here without her? They both knew she would never fit in here. She had tried very hard, for the first few months, not to complain too much. Then abruptly it had all come spilling out.

  The disposal gave a pathetic whir. She heard a crack, something shot out of the trap, and she knew without bending over that it was really broken. Picking up a wrench, she knelt down to see what she could do.

  10

  Katya tried to
avoid looking at the bloated red and blistered skin of the woman’s hands and face. She kept her eyes on the clean white walls of the new autopsy room, on the metal sinks and the locked gray cabinets where the examiners stored their textbooks.

  They still hadn’t identified the woman, but the police who’d brought her in had dubbed her “Eve.” Katya alternately wondered if she would have to sit through the entire autopsy and—if she did survive it—whether she’d ever be able to eat meat again.

  It was the second time Adara had invited her into the autopsy room. The first time Katya had become sick almost immediately. She wasn’t used to the sight of corpses; she dealt with samples on slide trays, hairs and fibers, and occasionally pictures of death. Now she was being given a second chance. She didn’t have to watch the full autopsy. Adara had already done it. But there were things she wanted Katya to see for herself. And the circumstances were convenient: her boss and the other men in the examiner’s office had gone out for their lunches. Zainab, unofficial boss of the women’s laboratory, was home tending to a sick child. The body was on the table —

  Ocean fish had eaten away one of the woman’s eyes and most of her cheeks and lips, exposing the tissue and bone beneath. Now only the forehead and the hairline edges of the face showed where she’d been burned. Where the skin remained, there were traces of blood.

  Katya was already feeling light-headed. “Why is there blood on her face?” she asked, desperate to stay focused. “Shouldn’t it have washed away in the water?”

  “Perhaps,” Adara said. “Corpses usually float facedown in the water, which causes some blood congestion in the head. It’s seepage. It had to have happened postmortem.”

  It was Adara who had first drawn back the sheet and touched the naked body, taking hold of the woman’s forearm and turning it gently. Eve’s hands were also burned so badly that it looked as if there was no chance of fingerprints. The wounds extended up her arms in splotches.

  “Let’s take a few fiber samples from this,” Adara said, pointing to a spot on the lower left arm.

  Katya pulled a few fibers from the skin and slipped them into a jar. She was having trouble controlling her shaking hands. She tried desperately not to look at the burns, but when she shifted her gaze her eyes fell on the large black autopsy scars on Eve’s chest, and she felt a wave of nausea.

  “There are a couple of things I’d like you to notice. First, the slight bruising on the upper right arm. It’s circular. Premortem.” Adara moved around to the left arm, pointing out more bruises of a similar type.

  Katya had to look away to collect herself.

  “Katya.” Adara locked her gaze. “Why did you agree to come here?”

  “Well, you asked me and I —” She stopped short, aware suddenly that Adara wanted—or perhaps needed—the truth. “I wanted to come.” Seeing that Adara wasn’t going to interrupt, she forced herself on. “I want to do more. I’m sick of just sitting in the lab and trying to imagine what happened to all the dead. We only get little bits of information, you know.”

  “I know, I used to be a lab technician, too.”

  This surprised Katya; she had somehow imagined that Adara had emerged fully formed from the womb of medical school. “How did you come to be an examiner?”

  “They needed a woman to handle some of the more sensitive matters for certain female victims.” She motioned gracefully down to the body but didn’t let her eyes follow the gesture. “They told me it was for the victims whose families requested it. The people who didn’t want a strange man touching their beloved daughters or wives. But the truth is that I get to handle the cases that the male examiners don’t want to bother with. Housemaids, mostly.” She looked down at the corpse now. “I’m not saying she’s a housemaid. But on the important cases there’s always a male examiner standing by. They don’t trust us to do our jobs, and that’s the problem. One little mistake on my part justifies all their biases against me. The good news is that the pressure has turned me into the best examiner in the building.” She said this proudly, without a trace of shame, and Katya admired her fiercely for it.

  “I’m not sure I’d want to trade jobs with you,” Katya said, looking down at the victim’s bruised arm and thinking about the pressure Adara was under.

  “I like my job,” Adara said. “I was placed here by Allah, but staying here has been a constant jihad. You know what the Prophet, peace be upon him, said: The rights of women are sacred. See that women maintain the rights granted to them.”

  Katya nodded respectfully. Adara’s face was firm and determined, clean of all makeup and never hidden behind a burqa. She wore no jewelry. She was pregnant more often than not, but she had never grumbled about her long hours at work, not at three months when she couldn’t eat, nor at seven when her ankles looked like pears. Even in her gestures, nothing spoke of complaint. Her practical walk, her efficient movements from one part of a room to another, revealed the solid determination of a lone shrub in the desert. Katya felt like an untested schoolgirl.

  “I can’t sit still anymore,” Katya said with a sudden impatience. “I can’t look at these people’s lives through tissue samples and biopsies. I want to be out. I want to know who they knew. Where they lived. Where they died. I want to be an investigator.”

  Adara regarded Katya in the same way her mother used to when she was forced to admit that the reason for Katya’s refusal to marry was that the prospective groom was in fact a donkey.

  “Then you will be,” Adara said. “If you keep at it.” She returned her gaze to the corpse.

  “What do you think about the bruises?” Katya asked. “Abuse?”

  “I’ve seen housemaids with similar bruises on the upper arms. That’s where people grab them and jerk them around. However, these don’t look like grab marks, they’re more like wounds. I would guess that these came from fighting her attacker. They’re still very light colored. They must have been made right around the time she died.

  “Back to the face and hands,” Adara said. “These are the kinds of burns you see with hot oils. Maybe acids. It wasn’t from fire.”

  “Kitchen oils maybe?” Katya was surprised by the calm in her voice. She glanced at Adara, who was looking bleak. “Can I get a skin sample?”

  “Yes, I’ll do it.” While Adara removed a portion of the burned skin, Katya studied Eve’s legs. There were a series of cuts on the thighs. There was no pattern in the placement of the wounds. It didn’t look as if they’d been made by a fish; the cuts were too clean.

  “Do you think a knife made these wounds?” Katya asked.

  “Yes,” Adara replied. “I’ve already checked the back of the legs, and there are no marks there, only on the front and just on the side here. I did look at her clothing and saw that they had cut through her jeans.” She pointed to a particularly large wound on Eve’s left thigh. “Anyway, whoever did this was standing in front of her. She didn’t turn her back to him.”

  Going to the wall, Adara switched on the display lights, revealing X-rays of Eve’s legs. Adara pointed to her right leg. “This is an older wound. A fractured tibia, probably half a year old.”

  “They may be able to search hospital records to identify her then?” Katya suggested.

  “Yes, and good luck with that!” Adara gave an empty smile. “You can try, but I don’t think you’ll find anything. This injury didn’t heal properly, so I’m guessing she never made it to a decent doctor.”

  “What about this large bruise on her hip?” Katya asked. The bruise was pale, large and splotchy, beginning at the waistline and extending down to the top of the thigh.

  Adara returned to the table. “I would say she fell right before she died. Another injury from the attack. I think you should focus on the tibia. They’ll want to know what made that fracture.”

  They. The real investigators.

  “Was she raped?” Katya asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “No,” Adara said with kindness in her voice. Grimly exposed in the fluore
scent light, the body looked like a wax doll with bright red mittens. Katya experienced none of the weird sense of imminent awakening-of-the-dead she’d felt when gazing down at Nouf’s body. Now she was afraid that the person who did this would walk into the room and do it again.

  “How did she die?”

  “Well, this is where it gets tricky. First of all, her neck was broken.” Adara motioned to the X-rays. “Actually, she was burned first, stabbed, and beaten. Then she was thrown in the water. But it’s going to be difficult to determine when her neck was broken. It’s a very clean break. If it happened while she was still alive, she would have stopped breathing and died almost immediately. It could also have happened as a passive, postmortem injury while she was in the water. She could have knocked into a piece of debris. Also, her headscarf was wrapped around her neck when they found her, but it wasn’t tight enough to choke her and there were no loose ends that could have become caught on something and broken her neck that way.”

  “Can’t you tell if she was dead when she entered the water?”

  Adara gave a wry smile. “I’m sure you know from your own work that things are never as easy as they might seem on TV shows. Here’s the problem: I found traces of foam in her lungs, which is characteristic of drowning. If she was alive when she entered the water, she would have inhaled and swallowed a good quantity of water. This produces a white froth in the airways. I did find that, but not a lot. If she had a lot of seawater in her stomach, I would feel more convinced that she drowned, but again there was only a little. The truth is, this foam in the lungs, or what we call pulmonary edema, can just as easily indicate other causes of death: a drug overdose, heart failure, or head injury. I’ve ruled out heart failure, but we’re still waiting on blood tests for drug overdose. Given the contusions on the back of her head and the fact that her neck was broken, head injury is a distinct possibility.”