The Ruins of Us (15 page)

If Abdullah didn’t leave soon, he’d be late for prayer and have to suffer the condemning glances of the Imam. Abdullah checked his e-mail one last time. There was a new message from Faisal, some sort of video. Squinting at the badly pixelated images, he thought it was the same terrorist video he’d seen on the news. As he focused on the video, he realized that the fuzzy-featured terrorist was actually a white man, and he held up a book before repeatedly plunging it into the toilet. When the camera zoomed in on the text, Abdullah saw that it was the Koran. It was overacting at its worst, the man’s stupid grin incapable of expressing the paler shades of malice fundamental to desecration. Abdullah was not sure what feelings the video was meant to provoke. Clearly, Faisal wanted him to get angry and would probably bring it up at dinner that night, indignant. Kuffar! Faisal would growl, the poor boy’s idea of cocktail conversation.

But anger eluded Abdullah. He just felt sorry. Sorry for the fools responsible for the video and the imbeciles who perpetuated its message by forwarding it on to others. Perhaps it was his old age and the comfort of his wealth that allowed him to be so calm. To him, the video was farcical, one goofball committing a single, outrageous act. The man couldn’t touch the verses that Muslims all over the world had known by heart since they’d learned to read. A book was just paper and ink, a bit of leather.

In Texas, he’d made the few requisite political overtures that the time period and his age demanded. He’d been halfheartedly involved with the Arab Student Union, but gradually he found himself choosing Rosalie’s quilted double bed over the hot concrete of Congress Avenue and the poster-board signs of the union. They’d been dating for several months and after a while, she’d told Wayne and Maxine about him. Her parents had spent thirteen years in the Kingdom, but their time overseas did not mean they would accept him as a suitor for their daughter. They’d feigned tolerance until Thanksgiving, when she asked them if she could bring her new love home with her to Sugar Land. Why sure, honey, they’d said. But just know that we will try to convince Ab-Dallah to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.

Instead, he and Rosalie stayed in Austin, eating enchiladas verdes, drinking shakers of Mexican martinis, and making love. They’d lived cocooned away from his world and hers. When they finally emerged a year later they were engaged, their love resplendent as a butterfly wing; he’d told his family that he’d found a bride and began the preparations for Rosalie’s introduction and the wedding. He finally met Wayne and Maxine March and faced their uninspired proselytizing. When Rosalie converted to Islam, her parents stopped speaking to her, breaking their silence only when she gave birth to their first grandchild. Interestingly, that was also when
his
family became more accepting of her. Abdul Latif had never made it hard for her, exactly, but neither he nor Abdullah’s sisters and brothers had gone out of their way to help Rosalie find her way in the beginning. He still recalled Rose coming home from the Biltagi Brothers’ market in tears. It was back before she’d become fluent in Arabic. She’d been looking for dried oregano for a pasta sauce she wanted to make, and when she couldn’t find it on her own, she asked her sister-in-law, Nadia, to help her ask the store clerk in Arabic. But Nadia had pretended she didn’t understand what Rose was asking, though Nadia’s English was flawless. “That bitch,” Rose had said to Abdullah when she got home. Instead of sympathizing with her, he’d yelled at her for insulting his family. “I’m your family now too!” she’d shouted back. Later, after they’d calmed down, she’d looked at him and said, “You better be on my side, because you’re all I’ve got.” With the help of a private tutor that she hired using her savings left over from the Lion, she’d learned Arabic in less than two years—an astonishing rapidity for the tricky language. But Rosalie didn’t waste her Arabic or her English on prayers. After witnessing, with great annoyance, both sides of the family try to ruin love with their versions of faith, she told him she had decided to forego bossy religions of all kinds. Instead, she did her yoga, and each morning, when she was done, she looked so serene that he accepted her form of spirituality as unusual but good.

AT THE MOSQUE,
Abdullah hurried to his spot, prayed, and raced out before he could be waylaid by any of his friends. He wanted to try to talk to Rosalie before the guests arrived for the feast. In the car, he hummed nervously, tapping his fingers against the mahogany console as the car bumped over potholes. Ayoub, Abdullah’s driver, wasn’t known for finesse, but for a few extra riyals a month, he kept his boss’s whereabouts quiet. It was a bargain well worth the few clips and dents they’d ratcheted up on Al Dawoun’s crowded roads. Unlike Ayoub, the German hardware could be trusted to keep secrets regardless of its treatment.

Normally, evening was a slow time of easement and reflection when Abdullah could say his most honest prayers. At dusk, his mind became loamy again, ready for new seeds, and so he read his favorite suras over and over, working toward memorization. But now, instead of smoothing over the prayers in his mind, he found himself fixating on the video Faisal had sent him. His son was restless, anyone could see that. There were tides moving in the boy. Abdullah rattled his prayer beads, imagining Faisal’s hands growing redder and redder from anger at his father’s tardiness and the scalding water he used when performing wudhu. He was at the traveling age; the age when every young man wants to go out into the world. Most of his schoolmates had graduated and gone on to study in America or in one of Saudi Arabia’s improved universities. Yet Faisal wanted to stay right there in Al Dawoun, rooted to this old familiar ground. Odd boy, Abdullah thought. Odd, serious boy. My boy.

Colors hung in the evening sky. Abdullah remembered his father telling him the story of the sunset once, when he’d asked why the sky always caught on fire. Abdul Latif had replied,
It’s the color of a million hearts exploding from God’s beauty.
Stay, light, Abdullah willed. He didn’t want dark to fall just yet. Dark meant another night of choosing which of his wives’ beds to sleep in. He hadn’t thought of that when he married Isra. He’d been too fixated on her lemon breasts, the shape of her eyes, her words spoken like poetry.

One last peaceful year, he’d think with each anniversary of the marriage to Isra. He’d counted two before the afternoon when Rosalie had confronted him after her weekly trip to the al-Qasr souq. With time, he came to justify his marriage to Isra as zakat, charity—one of the five pillars of Islam. After all, she had been lonely, widowed. A woman needed a man’s care. So what if he was susceptible to women’s beauty. Who wasn’t? What was the difference between a heart exploding at sunset or at the sight of a beautiful face? Both were signs of God’s presence in the world. Still, he missed Rosalie, her ritual disrobing, the way she shaped her body to his. He missed examining the deep blue vein visible just under the skin of her left breast. Abdullah had always imagined it pumping blood directly to her heart, animating her as they made love. Isra’s body was new to him; he was still learning its geography. It’s what drove him wild about her: the opacity, the quality of the unknown that Rosalie had lost after their many years together.

AYOUB SLOWED THE
car just enough to prevent it from careening into the ditch in front of the wall which surrounded the Baylani compound. They hadn’t beaten the other guests, after all. Mercedes and BMWs crowded the driveway. A single champagne-tinged Rolls shone out from the dark mess of steel. Ayoub parked and then opened Abdullah’s door for him.

“Enjoy the feast, sir.”

“Shukran, Ayoub. Tomorrow at eight a.m.?”

“Certainly sir.”

When Abdullah reached the house, he took a breath and collected himself. Tonight had to go well. The family must see that everything was all right.

He opened the door to the familiar chaos of a feast night. Children darted about and the strong smell of cooking onions hung in the air. He felt his shoulders loosen and his stomach tighten in anticipation. In the great room to his right, the men were gathered, waiting patiently to eat.

“Abu Faisal! Salaam waleikum. Keyf al saha?”

“Alhamdulillah, ya Dan.”

Abdullah allowed himself to be borne around the room on the tide of familiar greetings and faces. Usually, when it was just the family, everyone ate together, but tonight Dan joined them, so the women ate in the next room. Abdullah made the rounds and kissed his brothers in greeting before taking a seat on the low-lying burgundy sofa that ran the perimeter of the room. The mood was good, boisterous and easy, and a steady stream of grand-nieces and grand-nephews came in to say marhaba and kiss Abdullah’s forehead. He felt the dull throb of his stump, a natural metronome keeping time to the conversation’s movement. Faisal approached him, walking erectly but with an awkwardness that showed his youth. Eyeing Dan, Faisal took his seat on Abdullah’s right. Laughter sounded in the next room.

Taking their seats around the elaborate meal, the men mumbled bismallah. Quiet fell over the room as they began to eat the first course. Abdullah slowly chewed a cube of meat, letting the spices open up his nostrils. Cinnamon and cardamom clouded his palate, and he tasted the faint flavor of wormwood leaves, each spice distinct and alive on his tongue. As the men ate, Abdullah felt a low ecstasy burning in his stomach. He was grateful for the food, for the family around him. Thanks be to God, he thought. Prayers said from the stomach were always the truest.

Abdullah watched Dan attempt to roll rice into a ball to eat with the meat of his stew, but the ball kept falling apart in his hand. Around him, the other men balled the rice and meat together expertly before popping them into their mouths. It wasn’t sticky rice, and it had taken most of the men a childhood of practice to properly roll up the long, uncooperative grains. Abdullah chuckled to himself as he remembered Dan’s first time in the Kingdom decades ago. Saudi traditions eluded him and he had embarrassed himself at more than one dinner that Abdullah threw in his honor. He sat with the soles of his feet facing people as they tried to eat; he inhaled his food using both hands, probably thinking he was being polite with his zeal. He took his cups of sweet tea with his left hand, not knowing that Saudis didn’t use their left hand to eat or drink because it was unclean.
The left hand is for ass-wiping, or it was, back in the day,
Abdullah had finally told him. Fortunately for Dan, they accepted him as a well meaning, if rough-hewn, person. The Baylanis didn’t have anything against Americans, as long as no one in their family wanted to marry one. They’d loved Dan even more after he married Carolyn, fathered two children, and revealed the devotion to family that Saudis held most dear. Unlike many Western expatriates in the Kingdom, Dan counted Saudis and Arabs among his best friends, and he went to more kabsas than compound barbecues.

Just as Abdullah decided against teasing his friend for his rice-balling deficiencies, Faisal stood and began to speak in his clear, slightly accented English.

“Before we begin the next course, I would like to say a prayer for the man sitting to my father’s left, Daniel Coleman. You all know him well and he has shared my family’s hospitality for a number of years now. But we should never forget that Mr. Coleman has not yet accepted God, nor has he accepted the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him.”

Abdullah felt a piece of meat sticking in his throat. Faisal continued.

“I cannot enjoy this meal knowing that I sit beside a man who will know hellfire when he passes from this world. The Koran says
Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred which their breasts conceal.
I fear for my family, and so I take this opportunity to speak directly to God on this unbeliever’s behalf, in hopes that He might help Mr. Coleman.”

Yusef, Abdullah’s middle brother, cleared his throat and stole a quick look at Dan, who was sitting with his legs crossed, his ruddy face turned politely toward Faisal. Rashid and Ibrahim, Faisal’s cousins, were quietly repeating na’am and wallahi, nodding in agreement. Abdullah had always believed that the two boys’ faith was more the result of boredom and a pushy mother than anything else. He fixed them with a silencing look.

“Allahu Akhbar. Bismallah al-rahman al-rahim. Alhamdulillah wa shukru lillah.”

Abdullah interrupted his son before he could continue.

“Bas, Faisal. Bas. That’s enough. You’ve shown Mr. Coleman a great deal of disrespect. Apologize to him immediately.”

A few of the other men nodded in support of Abdullah.

“Ya Faisal, sit down,” Yusef said. “We just want to eat. We’re all friends here.” He twirled his beard nervously.

“For God’s sake, yes,” Nabil said. “Sit down, boy. Some of us spend all day working. We don’t want fighting when we come home.” Nabil was not known for his patience. His short temper and quick tongue caused issues at home, but were what made him one of the best news editors in the region.

The rest of the men remained still, the absence of their voices amplifying the tension in the room. Faisal’s cheeks, which were almost as fair as Rosalie’s, turned a deep red, whether from fury or embarrassment Abdullah couldn’t tell. Yet Faisal went on, his voice quavering slightly.

“I think it is my right to say a prayer for an unbeliever, should I find myself sitting next to him at a meal.”

“Faisal . . .”

“Especially after watching that awful video I sent you. Father, please.”

“Now is not the time to talk about the video. See how you’ve made everyone silent? No one else is as ungenerous to Dan as you are. It’s your right to refuse your meal, if you’re so offended by his presence, but the Koran states that the Prophet, peace be upon him, took pleasure in the company of all men. You should treat our guest with the same respect.”

Abdullah’s voice was firm and left no room for protest. Faisal left the room quickly, an angry sigh stretching out behind him until he had disappeared beyond the doorway.