Brilliant (12 page)

The Pakistani man had not been there this time, and Dave had roamed around the large room, then two smaller ones, looking for someone to talk with. Some of the men looked up, some nodded, some smiled. But none gave a signal that they wanted more than this. Eventually he'd walked to the end of the road and then back, drenched by the time he climbed into the van. He'd had to wait nearly fifteen minutes for Tina. When she appeared, her hands were empty, her face full.

The women were “incredible, absolutely incredible.” They were “the bravest people I've ever met.” They put her “to shame.” What did she have to complain about? “They enjoy life so much, even in that horrible place.” She wondered, though, about Lola, their matron, who'd taken all the games Tina had brought as soon as she arrived and locked them in her own room. She worried too about the kitchen with its dozen open gas burners and no real walls to keep out the wind and heat. The week before, a woman's blouse had caught fire. And she worried about Shirin, a Bangladeshi girl, who'd been laid off by a cleaning company and was now being paid $50 a month for living expenses. “She can't afford to transfer her visa to another employer and she isn't making money to buy a ticket home. She's completely stuck. Did you ever hear anything more insane?”

“It's insane,” he agreed, but she was already talking about another girl who'd been raped by her foreman.

“Forgive me for going on and on, Father,” she'd said when he dropped her off in St. Edmund's parking lot. “I'm just so moved by what I witnessed.”

 

Tina set down her teacup now and looked at him. She hadn't required any solutions the week before. Now she did. What were they going to do? This country supported modern forms of slavery. This country condoned institutionalized cruelty. “If we just sit here and beat our breasts, we're complicit,” she said.

“We need to get more people involved,” he said, the first thing he could think of. She'd thrown him with the sudden pressure.

“From the church, you mean? I don't think so, Dave,” she said, and he realized it was the first time she'd used his name without prompting and that it was in a kind of rebuke. “You see the response you've gotten so far.” And she pulled a blank face and shrugged, in an imitation, he guessed, of his sorry parishioners who called themselves good Anglicans.

“Perhaps we could form an ad hoc committee with the other churches,” he offered. “Ed Woods is a good man.”

Tina looked at him over her reading glasses. She hadn't smiled once. When she'd turned it off outside, it had stayed off. “I think we're going to have to rely on just ourselves here.”

His body was already refusing, muscles tightening. It wasn't just the fact of being paired up with Tina, who was beginning to worry him. Their conversation was taking him back to things he didn't care to remember. In his early Kuwait days, he'd written an editorial about the plight of migrant workers. The piece had made it through the lines of amateurish command at
Al Watan,
an oversight, not a vote of confidence, as he'd first foolishly assumed. He'd been talked to by the bishop at Middle East headquarters in Cyprus, a knuckle-rapping, really, and a dozen families left his Kuwait City parish, afraid for their jobs and what came with them. Some he'd thought were friends.

“We do need to be careful,” he said.

“Oh, I know,” said Tina. But the way she said it made him think that even if she did know, she didn't care. What was a job, a livelihood, a future compared to the suffering of others?

“Let's talk midweek, shall we?” he finally offered. “See who else I can get on board.” She'd continued to look skeptical as he stood and put out his hand, her expression not even softening when he helped her to her feet. And then Arjun was there, making everything polite again as he swept up cups and cutlery. Dave thanked him as he always did, but he saw the way Tina narrowed her eyes as she watched.

“Where in India is he from?” she asked as Dave showed her out. He could hear Erik playing upstairs on the Wii — what else was there to do in this heat? — and felt a twinge of regret. Most of Friday was gone now.

“From the south,” he said, explaining how long Arjun had been at St. Edmund's, how valued he was. He felt he had to reassure her somehow and this irritated him.

“Poor man,” said Tina.

 

It was later, after he'd had a nap and supper with the family, then gone out for a bit of air and to look for Erik's missing football, that he found the woman. He wasn't sure what it was at first. The white mound against the wall near the mosque looked like one of the Ethiopian women had left her shawl behind. Perhaps the wind had kicked up and blown it off her shoulders and she hadn't noticed. But when he got closer, he realized that inside the shawl was a woman, asleep — he prayed it was sleep — her bare feet sticking out one end.

“Excuse me,” he said, bending as close as he dared. He knew not to touch her, not even her feet or the shawl that covered them.

She sat up instantly, drawing the shawl across her shoulders. “No!” she said. Then more forcefully, “No!” She was not more than twenty, he guessed, a girl with a dusky, troubled beauty. Her eyes were golden brown, suspicious. He hastily made the sign of the cross, and her face relaxed a little.

“Come inside,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

This, he realized, after settling her on the loveseat with tea — Arjun showing nothing on his face as he glided in and out — was the extent of her English. No. Yes. And her name: Eden. Even the Arabic he tried on her was a miss.

“She can't have been here very long then,” said Suzette, who'd acted only mildly surprised to see a beautiful young woman having tea with her husband. His wife, practical and plain-speaking to a fault — and sometimes it did feel like a fault — had seen just about everything there was to see in twenty-two years as a pastor's wife. He sometimes wished he could shock her, rock her steady little boat. He also needed that boat.

“Look at her legs, Dave,” and he was embarrassed he hadn't noticed something so obvious. Fuchsia bruises and black scabs covered her thin shins. “She can stay, you know. Tonight, a few nights. Until you figure out where she's from, what to do. I'll have Lauren bunk in with Rachel.” And before he could say, wait, I'm not sure about this, Suzette had gone to get the room ready.

Eden drank her tea dutifully, but declined the cookies when Arjun held out the plate to her. “No,” she said.

“You can stay,” Dave told her. “Okay?” But she looked confused now and after a few more stabs at communicating, Dave called one of the elders in the Ethiopian congregation. The man was reluctant to come at first, even with Dave offering to pay for his cab. When he finally arrived an hour later, he wouldn't sit down, but stood close to the door and when he spoke to the woman in their language, he kept his eyes on Dave's face. The girl seemed to have a lot to say, growing animated, then tearful, then angry, the man stopping only once every few minutes to turn to Dave and explain in short, vague sentences what she was saying.

The gist of it was that Eden, the girl, had been made to work twenty hours a day. Her employers wouldn't let her go to church on Fridays, locked her in her room, which had no window and no air conditioning, when they went out. Sometimes they visited family in Fujairah and she was locked in for two, three, four days with no food. She never knew when they were coming back. They had not paid her in months. Her family in Ethiopia was upset, hungry and uncomprehending.

“Who are her employers?” asked Dave. “Are they local?” And the man shook his head so absolutely that Dave had to assume they were. And then he was gone, refusing tea, cookies and further entanglement.

After the man left, the woman sat without moving, her head in its white wrap dropped slightly. Of course, she could stay; she could stay as long as she needed to. But it always came back to: then what? The woman was so still he began to think she was sleeping again. Arjun paused at the doorway and Dave put a finger to his lips. Let her sleep. These women were so tired they would sleep for days when they finally found shelter. Then he realized she was praying, whispers of words lifting the gauze slightly with her breath.

“Eden.” He went to sit next to her, but didn't put out a reassuring hand. A strange man's touch in these countries, even if you weren't Muslim, was always a mistake and nearly always misinterpreted. It had taken him years to unlearn the impulse. When someone was in pain, you sat, you listened. You did not do the most human thing of all.

She was an easy guest, a “silent little thing,” Suzette reported, and the kids took it in their stride. There had often been strange faces at the family table. “Doing God's work, right, Dad?” said Erik, when Dave tucked him into bed that night, and he wondered again about the new, intense devotion of his youngest child. A crazy thing for a pastor to be worrying about, but he'd known zealots and they scared him more than non-believers. Those folks, at least, knew to be quiet.

He put in a call to Sheikh Maktoum's office first thing the next morning. But it wasn't until late in the afternoon that he learned Maktoum was on a falconry hunt in Kazakhstan and wouldn't be returning for another week. Was this “an urgent,” as the assistant called it, or could he wait for His Highness's return?

“It's urgent, yes, but I'll wait,” he said, knowing it was likely only Maktoum had the pull to do something: Repatriate the girl, talk with the abusing family, perhaps even employ her in his palace. Being sent home was rarely the outcome the girls' families had in mind. Dave had often imagined these homecomings, the women half-broken, while parents, husbands, siblings demanded to know just how bad
bad
was. Things were bad at home. Now what?

 

Eden would not be staying a second night in the Vicarage. “No,” she'd told Suzette. “No, no, no.”

“Maybe it was the doctor,” Suzette said at dinner. She'd asked their family physician, a stately, serene Indian woman who'd been practising in Abu Dhabi for years, to come have a look at Eden's legs. Dr. Nadira didn't often make house calls, but when Suzanne explained the circumstances, she'd agreed. “I thought it would be okay, you know, because Dr. Nadira's so gentle, plus she's a woman. And it was private. I knew she'd never go to a clinic. But I could see Eden wasn't happy. She wouldn't let Dr. Nadira touch her. Next thing I know, she's saying no and she's gone.”

Lauren and Rachel reworked their sleeping arrangements, barely registering the change. “The girl?” asked Arjun when serving late-evening tea. “No,” Dave told him. And Arjun had simply nodded, all things being equal.

Dave found her the next morning, asleep by the wall facing the Orthodox cathedral. Her shawl was spread under her so that her long legs were exposed. She must have kicked the shawl off in the heat of the night, exposing more skin than she would have wanted. Dave looked around; then carefully, slowly, tried to rearrange the fabric before calling her name.

The girl didn't wake easily this time, curled away from him, leaving one lean thigh exposed again, allowing him to see what he couldn't have seen before: a wound on her inner thigh that made the bruises on her shins look like cat scratches. It was huge, gaping, like someone had tried to carve a piece out of her, and crusted with pus. He ran back to the vicarage, hoping to find Suzette, but she'd already left for Dubai. Some of the thrift shop ladies had invited her on a shopping trip to Dragon Mart. “Not exactly my cup of tea, sifting through a bunch of junk from China,” Suzette had sighed the night before. “But what else are you going to do in this place?”

He tried calling the Ethiopian elder again, but his mobile was switched off. Maktoum's office was going to be no help with him still away. Ed Woods? He was in a prayer meeting but would call back later. Dave walked back to find the girl. He would need to be more persuasive. He made the full tour of the compound twice, but she was gone.

When Ed Woods called back an hour later he was jovial, full of the spirit, until Dave told him what he was calling about. “Ethiopian nannies? We've got them here too, Dave. Terrible situation, but what can you do? Their government's hopeless.” He wanted to know the young woman's name. “Eden? Kind of ironic. But sure, I'll send up a prayer for little Eden. I'll ask my afternoon prayer group to pray for her too, how's that? And speaking of prayer, my friend, when are you and I getting together?”

 

That week Dave began getting up early, pre-dawn some mornings, to walk around the compound, sometimes rising even before Arjun, always the first up.

On Wednesday morning he found two young women huddled inside the thrift shop entrance, but they took off, startled birds, into the street. Back at the vicarage, Tina was waiting on the front steps. “Couldn't sleep,” she said. “I figured you'd be up.” She looked — for Tina — terrible. Even in the forgiving dawn light, he saw now that she was closer to sixty than fifty, that the roots of her hair were grey, not brown. She wore a pink track suit and matching sweat band. “Even running at 4:00 a.m. didn't help. I can't stop thinking about those women,” she told him as he let her in. Arjun, there already, nodded and disappeared into the kitchen when he saw her.

Dave braced himself to hear another litany of labour camp abuses as he settled her — without resistance this time — on the loveseat. But Tina didn't say anything right away, sat looking at her hands while Arjun brought in the tea things. “I went back to the camps this week,” she said when he left them. “I know, I know. I should have told you first.” On the way back from their first visit to the camps, hearing the intensity of her reaction, he'd told her about the couple who'd been deported recently for operating their own outreach ministry. As a registered charity — whatever that meant in this country — St. Edmund's was their sponsor and protector. “The church has been in the
UAE
forever. The royal family trusts us,” he told her. Probably because the church had done so little to change anything, he wanted to add, but didn't, realizing in the omission how little he must trust her. At any rate, he'd hoped the story about the couple would be warning enough, a gentle, but clear message to tread lightly.