The Ambassador's Wife (37 page)

It was a lively evening, livelier than he had expected. Al-Attas was loquacious and expansive, which wasn't always the case, and the Minister of Commerce, Tawfeek al-Kibsi, and political science professor Adil al-Ahmar spoke passionately about their country and its promise. So far Miranda was holding up admirably. After drinks on the veranda she had led the group to the front hall to sign the guest book before escorting them into the dining room.

While Miranda and the others were still in the front hall, al-Attas had followed Finn into the dining room, circling the table reading the name cards like a buzzard seeking out prey. He stopped at Miranda's seat. “Miranda Taluma?” he read, a question in his voice.

“My partner.” There was no need to use the word
wife
with a man who was educated in the UK and kept a second home in Surrey. Still, Finn's hands were sweating, and he wiped them surreptitiously on his handkerchief.

Al-Attas looked at him, one graying eyebrow cocked. “Long-term?”

Finn smiled. “Absolutely. Presuming she'll have me.”

Al-Attas nodded slowly and patted the sleeve of Finn's suit.
“Mabrouk,”
he said. In his pockets, Finn's hands unclenched.

J
UST WHEN
F
INN
had completely relaxed his guard, the Foreign Minister had to go and mention freedom of expression. He complained about the way the press was handling the conflict with the North, prompting Finn to point out, with just a touch of frustration, that al-Attas couldn't expect the media to report accurately when the government didn't allow any journalists into the region. “When the government decides to completely block the media from somewhere, it instantly arouses suspicion,” he added. “I don't understand why the government has failed to grasp this.”

“We
have
let journalists in,” protested al-Attas. “Just last week we took a bus full of them—”

“That's just it,” said Finn, smiling to soften his words. “You put them all on a bus and told them what they could see. Why don't you let them roam freely?”

Al-Attas frowned. “It isn't safe,” he said. “And you must know that our journalists are not professionally trained. We cannot trust them to report the truth.”

“Can't you get them training?” said Miranda. “Surely there is no shortage of journalism trainers in the world who could come and teach them?”

Al-Attas bowed his head respectfully toward Miranda. “Perhaps,” he said. Then, perking up slightly, he added, “But even without training we have freedom of expression here. Our journalists are free to write what they want even when they are wrong.”

“Are they?” Finn raised an eyebrow. “So they're free to criticize
the president by name, are they?” Aubrey stayed bizarrely silent throughout this exchange, simply observing. Finn had the feeling he was simply too exhausted to ask the questions himself. But Finn hadn't expected a newspaperman to be so passive.

The Minister of Commerce wiped his mouth and replaced his napkin in his lap with a cough. “They are free enough to commit libel,” he said. “I am suing someone for libel, a journalist who wrote that I hired some members of my family and put them on the government payroll.”

“Did you?” Miranda leaned forward with interest.

“Miranda!” But Finn couldn't help laughing. Fortunately, the Minister smiled as well.

“I'm just asking!” said Miranda.

“No,” said the Minister. “This is why it is libel.”

I
NEVITABLY, THE TALK
turned to terrorism and the issue of increasing radicalization. “So what's the main cause
here
, do you think?” asked Aubrey, abruptly setting down his wineglass and coming to life. “Is it poverty? Unemployment?”

“I don't think you could say there is one main cause,” replied al-Attas, dabbing at the curried shrimp soup on his chin. “It's certainly much more than poverty.”

Finn turned to Aubrey, who was seated next to him. “I'd say—correct me if I am wrong, Minister—I'd say that a sense of injustice and unfairness contributes hugely.”

“That's right,” said political science professor Adil al-Ahmar. “Unequal distribution of wealth as a result of government corruption. It's the same thing that drove Europeans to socialism in the nineteenth century. We see our world exploited by rich—often foreign—companies and governments. We see our country being run by another country. Or oppressed by it.”

“But isn't it also an education issue?” Miranda looked at al-Attas. “I mean, you have a system focused on rote learning. People aren't encouraged to think for themselves. If you had an educational system
that actually taught people critical thinking, taught them to challenge what they are told—wouldn't that change things?”

“That's one of our working premises. Which is why education reform is a development priority, alongside political reform,” said Finn.

“Ah, but development assistance as a cure for radicalization is a delicate thing,” said al-Attas. “Yes, ultimately you need an enlightened education system, young people need access to a dignified livelihood, and the West can help with vocational training and curriculum reform, but—”

“But as soon as a Western presence is involved, the whole project becomes imperialist or colonialist—or at least that's the perception,” finished Finn.

Al-Attas nodded in agreement.

“So what should we do? Shut down our development programs? Do we try to deal with these root causes at all, or do we just keep trying to kill off the terrorist leadership?” Aubrey slid a notebook onto the table.

“Killing off the leadership clearly isn't working,” Miranda said, abandoning her attempts to saw a leathery aubergine in half. “Every time a US drone attacks, it kills one terrorist and creates five hundred more. Isn't that right?”

Al-Attas nodded slowly. “In a way. It depends whether the radicalization results from a grassroots movement fed by the people's common frustrations, or whether a few charismatic leaders are manipulating the people.”

“Could be a bit of both,” added Minister of the Interior Mohammed al-Bayaa, who had thus far remained silent.

“So if it's more a leadership thing than a grassroots thing,” said Miranda, “by cutting off the head of the movement, do you kill the movement?”

“Yes—but you have to kill the right people,” said al-Bayaa. “It doesn't stop it from being a terrorist movement, but it stops it from being a threat to the West. Which is why we allow the American drones to attack known leaders.”

“But the drone attacks make people hate the West more than ever,” said Miranda, her face flushed and voice moving up an octave. “Even some of my friends here, they have grown to hate the US because of the attacks in the North. I just don't understand why you support them, especially when they always manage to kill off a bunch of civilians in addition to their alleged target. How can you let them slaughter your own people?” Finn found her foot under the table and gave it a firm nudge. She glanced at him distractedly but continued. “Don't drones just anger tribal leaders and exacerbate the whole situation?”

“Well, maybe,” answered al-Bayaa cautiously. “But what are five hundred people without direction? A nuisance to their own country, perhaps, but not organized enough to attack abroad.”

“But isn't it possible one of those five hundred people would then rise to be the new leader? And what if it wasn't the leadership that had radicalized them after all, what if it had been a sense of common frustrations? And it just keeps spreading, this need for justice?”

“If there's enough of them,” said Finn grimly, “you get civil war.”

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Miranda

From darkness to darkerness, thinks Miranda. You don't think you could survive anything blacker than your current reality, and then you must. She lies on a cement floor in another stone house, some hours from her last confinement. Alone. Already, her painfully engorged and leaking breasts protest Luloah's absence. Or Cressida's. This undrunk milk mourning two unbearable losses. Cressie is her first love, always and forever, but tiny, fluffy-haired Luloah has made herself some space in whichever atrium or ventricle is responsible for the agonies of maternal attachment.

An image floats into her field of vision, illuminates her despair. An exhausted-eyed woman sits in a small, windowless room, grinding a steady stream of stars into a mush that she spoon-feeds to a caged
crescent moon. Varo had probably meant the painting
Celestial Pablum
to say something about the way that women crush their stellar selves, sacrificing their unique light to the hungry demands of their children. Something about the soul-crushing, blue-collar slog of motherhood.

But now, that image for Miranda is an unattainable paradise. For now she would give anything, pulverize any star quality she has left, for the privilege of feeding her two moon children again.

She wrenches her mind from the girls before the fear and grief engulf her. Nothing is more soul-strangling than contemplating her child and little Luloah, when she is helpless to go to them. Her lips are dry and cracked; no one has yet brought her water. It occurs to her that she could drink her own milk if she had a cup. She sits up, presses a little into her right palm, and laps it up. Her hands are filthy. That was probably a bad idea. No one has yet thought to bring her a pot, so she has urinated into a drain in the corner of the floor. Her room has one tiny window, set so high in the wall she cannot reach it. Not that she could squeeze out of it if she did reach it; it's the size of a lunch box. Why do we measure everything with food? she idly wonders. When she was pregnant, the baby websites had informed her that Cressie was the size of a blueberry, then a walnut, a plum, an orange, a melon. Bigger than a bread box. Better than sliced bread. The game of free association has become a way of life. Her mind leaps about in the emptiness, seeking order. The images of food keep coming, garish, taunting. Still life after still life of gleaming apples, dusty plums. A faint burning in her abdomen suggests she is hungry, but she cannot imagine swallowing. She cannot swallow this.

The three tiny stars and crescent moon she can see through her window are fading. Again she thinks of Remedios Varo, her crescent moons in the windows of the tiny rooms where isolated women work—or step from the walls. Her crescent moons brought inside, where they glow like lamps, like sculpture. She thinks of her father and wonders if Finn has told him. Her poor father. For the trillionth time, Miranda wishes she had a sibling, someone left for him. Her mother apparently didn't need anyone. (Or that was the impression she gave.) Her father had tried to hide his fear when she told him
where she and Vícenta were moving. “Oh,” he had said, turning his glasses over in his hands. “I thought something like this might happen.” She and Vícenta had already taken several long trips together, accepting grants and residencies in far-flung locales they hoped would take their work in new directions. They'd begun in Italy, working in separate studios in a stone farmhouse in the foothills of Mount Subasio outside of Assisi, and spent subsequent summers in Senegal and Peru. It was one of Vícenta's German cousins in Buenos Aires (“the Nazi side of my family,” Vícenta called these descendants of refugees from postwar Germany) who had told them about the German Haus grants in Mazrooq. “It's one of the last untouched cultures of the Middle East,” she'd said. “One of the few places that hasn't yet caved to materialism and malls.” Neither Miranda nor Vícenta had traveled to the Middle East, and they shared a craving for novelty. No one they knew had ever been to Mazrooq. “Let's go exploring behind the veil,” Vícenta had joked. “Find out what they're hiding.”

“I've already got a name for my first painting,” Miranda had said.
“The Mazrooq Mystique.”

Vícenta's mother hadn't been quite as resigned as Miranda's father. “Are you fucking NUTS?” she had said over Skype to New York. “You'll fucking die over there, Vícenta. You and Miranda both. You claim you love her and you are taking her back to the fucking dark ages?”

Yet oddly, once they were there, Miranda and Vícenta had stopped worrying that the true nature of their relationship would be discovered. It wasn't in the least bit unusual for Mazrooqi women to share a bed or hold hands on the street. Miranda's students slept in the same bed with their sisters and friends every night; countless times both women had been invited to stay over with Mazrooqi women. It simply didn't occur to anyone that anything sexual could be going on. (Miranda and Vícenta had heard rumors of clandestine lesbian activity in the
hammams
, the local bathhouses, but they hadn't ever witnessed it.) In a way, it had never been easier to live in a lesbian relationship.

Still, the country had been their undoing. While Miranda became more and more absorbed in the culture, in the lives of her students, Vícenta found herself more and more repulsed by its misogyny,
unable to see beyond it. By the time Vícenta's fellowship was up in February 2005, her bags were already half-packed.

“Mira?” she asked, as their departure date loomed.

“Mmmmm?” Miranda was sprawled naked across their bed, a fat king-sized mattress that took up most of the floor of their room, her head resting on Vícenta's warm stomach. Half-asleep, she breathed in Vícenta's sharp scent, damp earth and evergreen. “It's like I'm making love to Christmas,” Miranda used to tell her. She was dreaming up a new painting, a landscape composed entirely of women's bodies. She had never done anything
entirely
composed of women's bodies. An Amazonian rain forest (made of actual Amazons!)? The Cascades? Or what about Jordan's Petra? Petra could be fun…so many different temples and canyons and tombs. She could paint a whole series of Petras…Somewhere she still had the photos she and Vícenta had taken on vacation there. Woman as a tomb. Life springs from women. Could it also end there? Sometimes it does, she thought morbidly.