by Ragen, Naomi
Colonel Amos looked at him knowingly. Ismael fell silent.
“Why didn’t you call us?”
“Bahama is involved,” Ismael blurted out. “I have children . . . I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk my children.” He raised his head, looking the colonel in the eyes: “Ever since you signed those fucking Oslo agreements, Arafat and Hamas and every other group have been killing us informers—and plenty they just imagine are informers—by firing squad, raping their wives and daughters. No trial, nothing. And you Israelis with your foolish peace fantasies—you let them! You’ve made it much too dangerous for people like me to help you.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t we get you and your family out of here? Then I’ll buy you lunch and we’ll talk. I’ll make you an offer, Ismael. A good offer. One you’ll find hard to turn down,” the colonel said almost gently. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Ismael said slowly, wearily, wondering what choice he had. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Thursday, May 9, 2002
11:00 A.M.
IN THE ROYAL neighborhood of Nasariya, where one palatial estate after another crowded the streets beyond the extravagant fountains of its traffic island, the home of Whalid and Amina Ibn Saud was considered almost embarrassingly modest. Finished in natural white stone and gray slate, its clean lines drew shrugs from the neighbors, whose white gingerbread moldings and pink-and-green brickwork seemed to go on forever The odd taste of the couple was usually dismissed with the reminder that Amina was a foreigner—an American—who, while embracing Islam, had embraced little else that a Saudi wife should.
Rumors about the tall, blond wife of Whalid Ibn Saud were a hobby, almost an avocation, among their neighbors. It was said that she never left the house except to drive to King Faisal Hospital to have a baby, or to the airport to leave the country. And although she had been doing this ever since she became Whalid’s bride six years before, each time she left, rumor had it that he had thankfully divorced her or that she was leaving for good and would not return. And each time she came back, rumor had it that one or the other of the couple must be dying. Or that she’d repented, and would never leave the country again. And when, six months later, like clockwork, much to the consternation of the pundits who had predicted otherwise, she picked herself and her three children up and found her way out of the country once more, the rumors began all over again, with greater fury.
And thus, although hardly any of her neighbors had actually met her, everyone had an opinion about Amina Ibn Saud and at least one story they were delighted to share, embellish and trade for others.
These were the most popular: it was said that unlike other Saudi wives, Amina refused to wear the abaya—the traditional black cloak that covers Saudi women from head to ankle with only two holes for their eyes to peer out at the world—and that as a result she was forbidden by her husband to leave the house to visit shopping malls or supermarkets, and had everything delivered. It was said that inside her seemingly plain and drab home was an Olympic-sized pool, a gym, and a running track, which only she apparently used, dressed in tight outfits with the names “Nike” or “Adidas” printed on them. It was purported that the family held private screenings of forbidden films, and arranged private concerts with world-class musicians flown in for evening soirees attended by the elite of American and British inhabitants of Riyadh: its doctors, company directors and British Council cultural employees. And at these parties, it was said that Amina Ibn Saud did not cover her hair, and thus her husband refused to allow his relatives to be invited. It was also said that she held classes for women in which she and they would encourage each other to read foreign books and shamelessly discuss un-Islamic topics, including sexual practices.
As can be imagined, these rumors caused a great deal of chagrin to the local Committee Against Vice and for the Promulgation of Virtue, or as the locals called it in fearful private whispers, CAVES, who never stopped searching for an opportunity to exert their influence against such a destructive and free-wheeling wild card among the women of Saudi royalty, who were, after all, supposed to set an example. So far, however, their efforts to ascertain the guilt or innocence of Mrs. Amina Ibn Saud had been met with an unusual degree of resistance from the royal family, to the extent that a certain particularly aggressive CAVES member had been found drunk with a prostitute at the Riyadh Intercontinental. Even when faced with long imprisonment for his twin crimes, the man had maintained that he had been drugged and framed.
Many in Riyadh believed him. But ever since, CAVES had left Amina Ibn Saud alone. This in itself had contributed to the rumors becoming fullblown myths that were turning into legends. Elizabeth knew what was being said about her. And, as she often told Whally: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
From the beginning, she never made a pretense of enjoying life in Riyadh or wanting to fit in. The twenty-room mansion with its tropical gardens, she’d labeled “Sing-Sing.” In her office, she hung a calendar on which she carefully crossed off each day that passed in between trips to the States.
With the years, she had come to terms with certain things: like cutting off Marks and Spencer labels from her underwear before going through Saudi customs, because it was a Jewish store. Or like tearing out the Rubens nudes in her art books so they’d be allowed into the country. She came to terms with being unable to bring in novels and biographies because the punishment for smuggling in a book was worse than for hashish or cocaine. (People got five years in prison for arriving with copies of the Old or New Testament, for Pete’s sake! And a seventeen-year-old, Abeel Karim Nima, was tortured to death for owning a Shi’a religious text.) She got used to the fact that forty percent of Saudi television programming was sermonizing Imams with bad tempers, and movies that had no sexual content, no violence, no nuns, no priests and no mention of or reference to Israel, unfriendly countries, Communism, or venereal diseases. Having a satellite dish put one in danger of having one’s television confiscated. Still, Whally had managed to smuggle in some decent movies on CD and video, and others they secretly downloaded from the Internet.
She had gotten used to the fact that there was absolutely no place to go and nothing to do: no movies, concerts, theatres, discos, nightclubs. But what she would never get used to were the public beheadings between the tall clock tower and dun-colored mosque in Dira Square after Friday morning prayers; or the way the executioners put down six inches of sand to keep the blood from staining the white floor tiles.
She would never get used to the fact that Riyadh was a hideous and claustrophobic place, from the sprawling beige Riyadh Intercontinental Hotel of sandstone and marble, with its lush gardens facing Maazar Street, to the boxy and tasteless palace of Prince Mohammed (nicknamed “Twin Evil”) abu Shirieyn, who had had his own granddaughter publicly executed for falling in love with someone other than the man chosen for her.
In the first six months of her stay, Elizabeth would often wake in the middle of the night and listen to the sounds of planes taking off and feel an almost unbearable urge to flee. What stopped her was the fact that she loved her husband, and that his mother and sisters had treated her so kindly. Showering her with gold, holding parties in her honor in which the women of the family brought her endless, expensive gifts, they truly did their best to make her feel like a member of the family. Whalid’s mother tried so hard to be considerate. All Elizabeth had to do was mention she liked something and the next day it arrived. They hired a foreign chef to cook for her. They spent afternoons together, and Elizabeth tried hard to return the honest affection of these very different women, women who had accepted the limitations of their lives as a given. They never asked questions that couldn’t be answered.
Whalid had warned her not to raise their consciousness. “You will just be making them unhappy. Why?”
At first, she had bristled at the restriction, but thought it best to be respectful of her husband’s request, and
of his culture. She had married an enigma, which was part of the reason she loved him. His whole world was strange and indecipherable. With her Berkeley respect for multiculturalism and her natural curiosity, she’d prepared herself for an adventure. What she had not been prepared for was the cruel reality: it had taken her about six months to figure out that the lives of Saudi women were enough to make any normal female need antidepressant drugs just to wake up in the morning and get through the day.
Aside from beheadings, and what Elizabeth liked to call “harem” parties—fashion shows and eating fests for women friends and relatives—women did the following: they made crank calls to strangers by randomly dialing numbers, hoping to happen upon a foreign male or another girl. They got all dressed up, piling on their gold jewelry—which they owned by the kilo—then covered themselves with an abaya, letting only their expensive designer shoes show, and then went shopping at the mall to buy more designer shoes and jewelry. Even the little girls—in their ludicrous sequined dresses with the puffy skirts—wore gold bracelets and earrings. The supermarkets were obscenely large and sold everything from Lebanese pastries to plane tickets to the Cayman Islands.
At all times, they had to be accompanied by a man. Sometimes, in the mall, the CAVES held adultery drills, checking the papers of couples to make sure the men and women who had arrived together were married or blood relatives. Anyone they caught out faced beheading.
You couldn’t get any shopping done anyway, Elizabeth once complained to Whally, since the stores seemed to close down every two minutes so salespeople and shoppers could run off to pray every time the alarm sounded at the local mosque. Actually, it only happened five times a day.
Coming to terms with six months out of every year in this place had been an enormous leap. The fact that she got pregnant right away helped. She began to realize that the only way to survive was to build her own little world within her home until the six months were up and she could once again breathe the air of freedom back home.
She began working on a doctorate, which kept her busy. She built a greenhouse and grew orchids. She spent time learning to play the oud with a local teacher. She swam, ran, ate lovely meals cooked and served by attentive servants. She took off on weekend shopping jaunts to Paris and Milan on royal family jets for the fashion showings. She cultivated a few friendships with expats who hated Saudi Arabia as much as she did, but loved the wealth that made possible a lifestyle most women could only dream about. And of course, there was always Whally. She loved him. More than ever.
And so, like all human beings who have talked themselves into making difficult and painful compromises with their lives, Elizabeth tried to work out some kind of an arrangement that would keep her sane.
She managed. Most of the time.
What she found most difficult of all was to accept the cultural differences of the women around her without proselytizing. They were truly convinced not only that there was no other way of life possible for themselves, but that their way was actually the best way. They felt virtuous in their imprisonment, even as their husbands secretly drank, read pornography on the Internet, hired call girls, and replaced their wives with newer, younger versions every few years without bothering to divorce them. Men were allowed up to four wives at a time.
To convince these women that life could—should—be otherwise, that there was a screaming inequality and injustice in all these things, would have been difficult, if not impossible. And, given their limitations in making any change in the situation, perhaps it would also have been simply cruel. They did not know they were in jail with a life sentence. Why point it out to them? Within their jail, they were for the most part treated well, and in return were warm, kind, funny and generous, and they truly loved Whally, and her and the children. They were family.
The fact that they didn’t know she was Jewish, of course, always rankled. But it was the one thing Whally had insisted upon, the one thing that made their existence together possible. Saudi anti-Semitism was so wide, so deep and so fierce, there was absolutely nothing to be done.
She put that on the top of her list of things to truly hate about the country and the people who lived there.
“Americans are prejudiced against Muslims. And some hate the Saudis,” Whally had tried to convince her, without success.
“There is nothing here that is remotely parallel, Whally. Americans aren’t fanatic people-haters, and we excoriate racists. Saudis feel it’s a virtue. How many mosques are there in America? And how many synagogues and churches in Saudi Arabia?”
He was silent. She knew he agreed with her. She also knew that there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it.
They still had physical love; the attraction between them was never stronger. They had their children, whom they adored, and they had a genuine interest in each other which never waned. Whally never bored her, because she never really understood him, not completely. And she continued to revel in the challenge of her relationship with him.
Over the years, they had found a place for all the things they could never reconcile, or discuss or change. Her Judaism. The way women were treated in Saudi Arabia. His family. His love of Islam, country and tradition. His loyalty to them. They acknowledged the existence of their irreconcilable differences, which like a cancerous growth they needed to cut out of their relationship. They told themselves it was like the old joke of pulling out an aching tooth and placing it in a box, where you could watch it ache. The box kept getting fuller and fuller with the years, the screaming ache louder and louder as they tried to muffle it. She was dreading the day when the sides would no longer hold and the box exploded, shattering debris all over them.
That day, she understood, was rapidly approaching.
The older the children got, the more impossible it was for her to ignore the influences of their Saudi education. The boys were learning that only Muslims were God’s chosen, and every other religion was subordinate, its adherents dhimmis, lesser beings meant to serve Muslims; that men were meant to be lords and masters over all women. And her daughter couldn’t help but see the way women were treated, the sharp contrast between their lives in America and their lives in Saudi Arabia. So far, they were still young. But the time was soon approaching when it would be impossible to fly back and forth between cultures without giving the children some serious answers, answers neither she nor Whally had.
Deep down, she’d always secretly believed that by the time the children grew up, Whally—her intelligent, kind, generous, loving Whally—would realize that the children would be tainted by the evil that surrounded them in Riyadh—the nepotism, the fanaticism, the lack of tolerance. But that wasn’t happening. More and more, he threw himself into his work. He owed his loyalty to his king, who was also a great-uncle. It was an irrational, emotional dedication that she couldn’t begin to fathom. After all, she’d abandoned her own culture, her own heritage, without a backward glance. She believed in the love between them, in a philosophical kind of goodness in which people didn’t need religion to do the right thing, which was to treat each other as they would like to be treated and to live lives in tune with the cosmos, the environment, human values. Her loyalty was first to her personal feelings, and then to the world. She would never do anything to betray either.
The phone call from her grandmother caught her by surprise. She had come to terms with her grandmother’s vociferous and unbending objections to her marriage. Of course, it hurt. But she’d always assumed that her grandmother would eventually come around. When she realized how badly she had misjudged the depth and strength of the old woman’s heartbreak, it was much too late to do anything about it. She had made a few overtures in the past six years, sending pictures of the children, New Year’s cards, birthday greetings. They had all been returned unopened.
“Elizabeth.”
“Granny?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Well . . .” Elizabeth swallowed, speechless.
“I know you weren’t expe
cting it. Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are. I never thought I’d even be able to dial Saudi Arabia . . .”
“Was it so hard?”
“It wasn’t easy, Elizabeth.”
“He’s a good man, Granny. He loves me and the children.”
“What’s not to love, my beautiful Elizabeth? How are the children?”
“They are lovely, smart, funny, healthy.”
“The boys will be Bar Mitzvahed before you know it . . .”
Elizabeth stiffened. “Why did you call?”
“I called because I need your help.”
“Of course. If I can.”
“No. Not ‘if You must.”
“What is it you want, Grandmother?” Elizabeth said coolly, beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“I never spoke to you—to anyone—about what happened in Auschwitz.”
“Auschwitz . . .?” The evasive answers, the averted eyes, the feeling you were opening a box of horrors you had no right to open, that you had no right to ask. Elizabeth had always wondered, always wanted to know . . .
“Well, one of my friends from those days, a woman who saved my life a hundred times, who lives in Brooklyn, has a granddaughter in Israel named Elise. A few days ago, Elise’s husband and child were kidnapped by terrorists . . .”
“Oh my God!” Elizabeth covered her mouth in horror. “Look, don’t say anything. I will call you back.” She hung up the phone and hurried into the house, picking up her cell phone, the one Whally said was safe to use. She went into her “safe room,” the one swept for bugs several times a day. She closed the door. She didn’t want anyone listening in on this conversation.
The religious woman with the wig from Brooklyn in the photographs on her grandmother’s dresser, the one with the pretty little girl in her arms. She called back immediately. “Grandmother, how horrible! Are they all right?”