The Ambassador's Wife (6 page)

The room had been silent save for the creak of the sofa under the rocking woman. The crying man had finally looked up from his sodden fingers. “She should have let them die.”

His words had hung in the air for several minutes. The angry couple had wilted, sinking together into a sofa across from the others, their hands falling limply into their laps. The rocking woman had stopped and looked up at her husband. Finn had pulled himself clumsily to his feet. “I am so, so very sorry about your daughters.”

The four parents had sat silently staring at the floor. Apologizing several more times for the tragedy he had been powerless to prevent, Finn had left.

He's going to have to hurry to get home in time for dinner. Miranda is remarkably talented at entertaining diplomats over cocktails when he's running late, but it's very poor form to show up after one's guests. He has no time to switch gears. The tentacles of the families' grief still cling to his rib cage. The whole afternoon has hollowed him out, left him enervated and despairing. And now he must get home to discuss how the EU countries can collaborate more effectively on various development projects. Over the years he has had to
learn how to seal off parts of his psyche, but it's never easy. Compartmentalization does not come naturally to him. When he cries during a movie he doesn't just cry about the movie, he cries about everything.

As he stuffs a stack of papers into his briefcase, he notices the light flashing on his phone and picks up the receiver. Seven messages. The first three are from various government officials wanting him to personally fast-track UK visas for their children. A downside of working in this tinderbox of a country is the incessant demands for visas. The Mazrooqis simply refuse to understand that there is truly nothing Finn can do to ease their way into his country. Several have offered him money. “Look,” Finn often repeats, patience ebbing. “If you really want a visa then I would start by filling out the forms properly.” The elite seem to think they can bypass the paperwork, leaving most of it blank or incorrectly marked. This disregard for process drives him mad. He hangs up the phone before the fourth message begins and takes one last look at his computer. Four hundred and one e-mails. He'll have to get back to work after dinner. Again. He'd work from home if he could, but he can access classified work e-mails only from the embassy.

He's locking the door of his office when the phone rings. Cursing under his breath, he turns the key back and lunges toward his desk. It's Miranda, breathless and panicked, not sounding very much like Miranda.

“Sweetheart,” she says. “We're in trouble.”

AUGUST 9, 2010

Miranda

An hour after leaving the crenellated towers of the Residence behind, Miranda is in the mountains. It's a forty-five-minute drive to a village just outside the city where they turn off the road and rattle over a series of long dirt tracks before leaving their cars in a dusty patch of earth. The others rode together, but Miranda had to come separately with her driver and guard. There are just three of them today—Doortje; Kaia, the Norwegian wife of a French banker; and
Miranda. And of course Mukhtar, who is Miranda's guard for the day. None of the other women have guards. Usually it's just the diplomats who have close protection.
Close protection
. She had never heard the phrase before she became an ambassador's wife. It sounded like a euphemism for birth control. No, Finn had joked. More like death control.

Few of the other ambassadors' wives are keen on hiking. The athletic American ambassador's wife had wanted to get to the mountains but was evacuated after the most recent attack on the embassy. Not that she would have been allowed out anyway. Only the American embassy has stricter security regulations and more bodyguards than the British. The few Americans Miranda meets complain that they hardly ever get to leave the compound. None of them have trekked across the western mountains, swum in the sea off the southern coast, or traveled over the desert heartland to mud-brick cities resembling children's crude sand castles baked in the sun. Presuming that one becomes a diplomat in order to experience other cultures, this posting must be a disappointment to them.

Other diplomats—the Omanis, Egyptians, Qataris, Turks, and Saudis—have no need for such restrictions, having made fewer enemies in the Arab world. Yet the Arab wives, in Miranda's experience, do not hike. A few times Miranda has convinced Marguerite, the French ambassador's wife, to come along, but none of the others.

Miranda feels self-conscious about Mukhtar, as if his presence suggests her life is somehow more important, more valuable than the others'. Still, she has no choice, and the other women know that. She had felt much safer living with Vícenta in the Old City than she does living with Finn, surrounded by gates, guards, and security procedures. For nearly three years she walked the streets alone every day, shopped the markets, met friends at tea stalls, explored the mountains, and chatted with strangers, unmolested. She and Vícenta even freely held hands on the street, as it was not uncommon for people of the same sex to do here. Then she fell in love with Finn and the cage descended around her.

The day has grown uncommonly hot, the sun blazing drily down. Miranda pulls her Mariners baseball cap low on her forehead. As they
set off across the parched ground, Mukhtar stays just ahead. Miranda hurries after him, her limbs rejoicing in the freedom. It is wonderful to be outside; the new security restrictions mean that too many days are spent cloistered at home. In the wake of the attack on the US embassy, a series of attacks on oil companies, and the kidnappings up north, embassy employees (and their spouses) are banned from anywhere Westerners might gather: the souqs, coffee shops, hotels, certain restaurants. The British Club, one of the only bars in town, has been closed. And recently even the weekly hiking trips have been canceled. Despite the tragedies, the restrictions feel slightly absurd to Miranda. She has been hiking in this country for three years without incident, and no one she has encountered on her journeys has ever been less than hospitable. In fact, she is treated more royally in this country than she has been anywhere else in the world. The kidnappings up north were unusual; they happened in a rebel-controlled area beset by periodic violence and regularly bombed by the government. It was also an area ruled by Sheikh Zajnoon, perhaps the most formidable sheikh in the country. He terrorized his people, confiscated land and money, and claimed it was all in the interest of the antigovernment cause. More than one of his tribesmen has accused him of beatings and sodomy, after having reached the relative safety of the capital. But none of those complaints ever came to trial. No prosecutor would dare take the case.

Foreigners rarely venture into Zajnoon's lands. It would certainly never have occurred to Miranda to go there. She is perfectly happy to hike within recommended areas. These were the arguments she presented to Finn when she asked if she could resume her hikes after Cressie turned one and she could leave her for a bit longer. “If I don't get out of this house and stretch my legs, I'm going to have to be taken out in a straitjacket.”

“There are worse places to be kept prisoner,” he'd said wryly.

“I know, I know. But do you honestly, really, truly think I would be in danger?” If he had said yes, she would not have gone. But he did not say yes. Finn hadn't seemed worried last night, though he never does. Finn is constitutionally calm (a helpful quality in his line of work). “If I thought you were going to be attacked I'd lock you in the
safe room and never let you out,” he'd reassured her. Adjoining their bedroom and the bath was a tiny room with double-reinforced doors, a radio, and a week's supply of water. This was where they were to hide if the house came under attack. And this was where, in the tall, locked mahogany cupboard, the secret paintings lived. Not even Finn had a key.

T
HE WOMEN TAKE
turns in the lead, chatting with each other in French, their one common language. Kaia, in her sixties, is a strong walker. Her close-cropped hair is still blond and her face bears only faint lines. Her slender form is all the more remarkable given that she has four grown daughters. When she married Stéphane, she didn't speak a word of French, she says. But when they moved to France just after the birth of her first daughter, a desperate loneliness made her quickly fluent.

“It was Siri who saved me. When she was born she gave me the excuse to talk to people. I needed other mothers. My best friend was a woman I met at my local crèche, and unsurprisingly she didn't speak any Norwegian. So I learned fast.”

Many of the women Miranda meets have more than three children. She wonders if it's because their line of work has allowed them to live in places where child care is cheap. She hadn't thought she would want more than one child, but she and Finn have already started talking about a second. Watching Cressida evolve has been more thrilling than Miranda had ever imagined. From a purely scientific point of view, observing the process by which Cressie discovered her hands, learned how to clap, and put simple words together was riveting. It was like living with the greatest science experiment ever. However, at thirty-nine, Miranda isn't sure she could get pregnant again. Conceiving Cressie had taken sustained and concentrated effort. Pleasurable effort, to be sure, but effort nonetheless. “Could we adopt a Chinese baby?” she'd asked Finn once. “A baby girl?” She'd become obsessed with news reports from China about baby girls murdered at birth, dismissed as less than human because of their sex. It made Miranda
want to adopt every girl in the entire country. She cannot imagine anything more wonderful than a baby girl.

“No.”

“No?” Miranda had been surprised. Finn was the pied piper of the local children. When they'd had a children's party around Christmastime, Finn had led every game, tumbling on the ground with the children and swinging them onto his shoulders. If there was ever someone who could love a stranger's child, it was Finn.

“I just don't think I would feel the same as I do about a child who is part of me,” he'd said.

Miranda couldn't get her mind around this. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he'd said. “Couldn't we just try again the fun way?”

U
NDER THEIR FEET
, the ground is dry and cracked, yet large patches of the flat valley are carefully cultivated. Miranda wonders at the source of water until she sees the irrigation pipes emptying into furrowed fields. After an hour or so, they pass a field of tomatoes just coming into ripeness. “Tomatoes are on me!” Doortje declares, waving a five-hundred-dinar note. Two bearded, white-robed farmers lingering by their field happily scamper off between rows to pick them the reddest ones. Crouching beside the irrigation pipe, the women dip the tomatoes in the gush of water and dry them on their trousers before sinking their teeth into the sweet, slightly mealy flesh.

Doortje catches up with Miranda as they finish their last tomatoes, juice running down their forearms and into their shirtsleeves. “I'm thinking of starting a dance class,” she says, tipping her blond head to smile at Miranda (who wonders, not for the first time, if Doortje is flirting with her). She'd been studying salsa and ballroom dancing in Amsterdam before she moved here, she says, and she wants to keep it up. “But we're stuck in this stupid company compound, with a tiny living room.”

“What about somewhere near us?” says Miranda. “Everyone has these enormous houses they hardly use. Want me to ask around? I'd offer our living room, but there are kind of constant meetings and
lunches and pre-dinner drinks and after-dinner coffees going on there. So it's a bit hard to schedule.” And bug men, she adds to herself. She isn't sure whether to mention the bug men. When she isn't sure whether something is confidential, she stays silent. In fact, since meeting Finn she has probably grown quieter than she has ever been. Her head is so full of things she isn't supposed to know that she constantly fears letting something slip.

It's another hour and a half before they stop for tea and snacks on a rocky outcrop. Miranda's feet ache as she stretches them out in front of her, nibbling at her almonds and raisins. She isn't terribly hungry. Near the top of the hill behind them, where he can maintain a good view of their surroundings, Mukhtar has stopped to eat his lunch. Miranda gazes before her at the sea of gentle hills and cultivated valleys. A cool breeze brushes the sweat from her brow. Kaia unscrews a thermos of espresso and pours tiny cups, passing them around the circle. She can always be counted on for the extravagant gesture—the flask of gin and tonics, the box of Swedish black licorice, the tiny, handmade chocolate truffles. Doortje passes around a plastic container of pomegranate seeds.

“That's a lot of time in Hades,” Miranda says, watching Doortje pour a few hundred into her hand.

“If they've got good pomegranates there, then I don't mind,” says Doortje, her eyes crinkling with her smile.

As she lifts the second forkful of pomegranate seeds to her lips, Miranda notices the shouting. Part of her mind had registered it moments earlier but dismissed it as insignificant. Men here were always yelling. They yelled their greetings, they yelled comments on the weather, they yelled in arguments. Miranda sometimes wondered if the entire country was hard of hearing. She had noticed several men approaching Mukhtar, who had wandered up the hill to inspect their surroundings, but again, this was not unusual. Mukhtar and the other guards often befriended the locals where they walked, talking and sharing their food.

But suddenly something sounds wrong. They all notice it at once, a sharpness of tone. As they turn their faces toward the top of the hill, Miranda hears another familiar sound: the slide and click of a
rifle being cocked. A small, elderly man dressed in the standard white robe and twisted turban stands training an AK-47 on them. He waves it back and forth, screaming Arabic words that are lost to the wind, and then holds it steady. Behind him, several disciples fan out, raising their own weapons.