The Ruins of Us (40 page)

Squatting down, he took Majid’s hand and examined the nails, which were ragged and dirty. Once, those hands were folded in prayer. Now, the nails would blacken, the skin would melt away, and the bones turn to dust. And for what?

Dan crossed Majid’s arms over his chest, then covered the boy’s face with a T-shirt. Faisal didn’t watch him as he did this, instead looking out at the water.

When they left, they did not look at one another, and they did not look back. They left the body. They left the propane stove and the shovel, the empty gallon containers and the crumpled rice sacks. They left the rotting dhow and the crumbling walls of the Ottoman fortress. They left the customs building with its lighted archways and dank walls. They left the ghosts of traders and tribesmen, soldiers and emirs. They left the fine dust of a century of insects. And they left other things along the bay of Wisoum, things too delicate to name—subtler than the movement of the waves along the shoreline, invisible as the spirit of a boy rising over the Gulf.

Chapter Thirteen

ABDULLAH WATCHED GHASSAN
as they barreled down the highway. The man was a marvel of concentration, his hands pale where he gripped the steering wheel, his eyes focused on the road as he wove in and out of traffic. Abdullah’s heart beat more rapidly as he thought about the possibility of finding them. Dan’s car at Biltagi Brothers’, Faisal’s accusations—none of it mattered now. In his days with Ghassan, Abdullah had felt jealousy and anger slipping away from him, felt his very self disintegrate in the homes of Ghassan’s people, where he was only another Abdullah. To them, Baylani was just a word they saw on buildings, on ships. Here, it was no longer about possession or power. It was about survival, his family’s and his. Did he want to see Rosalie again? The answer was yes. The answer was always yes.

“We’ve wasted our time in those Hofuf alleyways,” Ghassan said. “All this time, they’ve been at Wisoum.” He shook his head. “How did you say your daughter discovered their location?”

“Her blog. Someone wrote on her blog.”

“Eighteen years as a police detective and now a computer can do my job. Unbelievable. Beautiful. Your daughter should join the force.”

“She’s not very good at following orders,” Abdullah said. He laughed weakly.

They drove the last hour in nervous silence.

“I see Wisoum,” Ghassan said. “Do you see it, sir? Just off to the left.” He pointed toward the Gulf.

Abdullah’s breath was coming in shorter now, his heart hammering in his ears.

“It’s another ten kilometers to Wisoum from here,” Ghassan said. “We’re going to park out of firing range and use the megaphone. You must stay inside the car, no matter what happens.”

“I understand,” Abdullah said.

Abdullah shut his eyes and prayed. The car slowed, the tires catching on the road’s loose gravel. He opened his eyes. He saw them before Ghassan could point them out. They were a kilometer or so away. They did not show any sign of having seen the car. Ghassan rummaged under the seat and pulled out binoculars.

“Here, you look and tell me if that’s them.”

Abdullah got out of the car. He ran to the driver’s side and yanked the binoculars from Ghassan’s hands. It was Dan, Faisal, and Rosalie.

“Yes, yes, it’s them,” he said. “Please, drive me there.”

“I apologize sir, but we have to proceed according to the plan. They might have weapons.”

“No, it’s just them. You don’t understand. It’s only them.”

Abdullah dropped the binoculars and took off down the slope that led from the road into the basin of the desert. As he ran, his sandals slid off his feet.
Sir! Sir!
Ghassan called. The sand was hot on Abdullah’s feet. He hiked his thobe up in one hand. He felt his ghutra and aghal slide off his head. Bare-headed and thudding across the desert, Abdullah kicked up sand in great brown splashes.

“Hey!” Abdullah called. “Hey!”

As he ran, he waved his hands back and forth over his head. The car started up behind him; Ghassan honked, but Abdullah continued his tear toward them, closing the distance until he could see their dirty faces. They had stopped moving.

Abdullah yelled out, though there was no longer any need. They did not answer back, just stood there mutely. He stopped. The car stopped behind him, the door opening and shutting, sharp sounds in the absorbent desert. There was shouting. Faisal moved into Abdullah’s arms. Baba Baba Baba, he said. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry. You told me they would kill Ibrahim. You told me.

Only Faisal’s head on Abdullah’s neck told him that it was not a waking dream. The boy sobbed but no tears fell. “It’s OK,” he said. “Everything’s OK.”

“But Majid . . .” Faisal said, the sounds muffled by Abdullah’s collar.

Abdullah pushed his son to arm’s length so he could see his face.

“What? What’s happened to him?”

“He’s dead.” A pause. “I killed him.”

Abdullah stared at his son, then looked left over his shoulder as if to make sure the desert was still behind him. Finally, he looked back at Faisal, who was only a dark outline against the pale sand behind the blur of tears that had gathered in Abdullah’s eyes. He put his hands on his knees and hung his head.

“It shouldn’t have come to this,” he said.

Faisal, unaccustomed to seeing his father in any sort of yielding posture, rushed at Abdullah and gave him a hard shove. Abdullah fell to his knees. He was so tired.

“You told me they would kill Ibrahim.” Faisal moved both hands through his hair and glanced around in desperation. Then he sat down in the sand and folded himself down over his knees. “Beat me!” he shouted. “Tell me I’ve done wrong.”

Over Faisal’s bent head, Abdullah met Rosalie’s eyes. She was alive. They would have their apologies, their explanations. They would go on. They would all go on, together.

GHASSAN DROVE THEM
to the customs building, where Faisal had said that they would find Majid’s body. Faisal and Rosalie rode up front, Abdullah and Dan in the bed of the truck. When they arrived, when he saw the body lying still in the dark of the building, Abdullah’s stump throbbed, and for a moment, he felt that it was
1967
. It was one memory of pain, and to that stockpile, a lifetime’s accumulation, he would now add this: the salt from the sea stinging his nose as he watched his son crouch over his friend’s lifeless body, lay his head on the boy’s bare chest and sob.

He watched Rosalie, her hand pulling at her collar. He would be more careful with his threats; he would be more careful with his promises. He would not want as much. Rosalie. His wife. A shadow of gold at the inner eyelid. The faint heat of another body in the bed. He covered his mouth.

Ghassan looked out to the bay. It embarrassed him to see this powerful man whom he had once only read about in the papers made silent by grief. Gulls dove to peck at cuttlefish dry and bleached as bones. Ghassan crushed his cigarette into the sand next to a large black beetle, lit another one.

AT THE HOSPITAL,
the ragged group received bags of fluid from careful doctors who knew only that the party had spent too long under the desert sun. While he waited for them to finish their treatment, Abdullah decided he would make no mention to Dan of Biltagi Brothers’ or Faisal’s accusations. In the truck, beneath a tarp, Majid lay stiffening. With death still so close, Abdullah understood jealousy to be a concern for people who had the time to be injured, to entwine themselves in all the impossible postures that surrounded love but were not themselves love.

BACK IN THE
truck, Faisal asked: “And the sheikh? What about Ibrahim?”

“I’m sure he is safely at home,” Ghassan said, though he was not sure of anything. A man arrested for crimes of dissent could go missing for years, until his family forgot the features of his face. Then, when the interrogators grew tired of bouncing him from prison to prison, they would turn him out into the street, stunned and blinking. With all of the years of freedom they had stolen from the wrongfully imprisoned, the al-Saud could build an army of centenarians.

Night had fallen. Dan and Abdullah rode in the back of the truck on either side of Majid’s corpse. Lights blinked from the tops of the electricity towers, which were staked into the sand from horizon to horizon. Abdullah did not bother to pull his ghutra across his face to protect it. He closed his eyes and let the strong wind push and pull the skin of his face. Dan watched the darkness, content to let his eyes swim over the invisible passing landscape. Occasionally, he looked over at Abdullah. He could be a camel herder coming home after a long day spent manipulating the unruly beasts and drinking camel’s milk with his Sudanese workers. There were simpler ways to live than what Abdullah al-Baylani had chosen for himself. For all of them, there were simpler ways to live.

Feeling Dan’s eyes on him, Abdullah glanced up.

“We will pay the family reparations,” Abdullah said, placing a hand on the tarp. “Even though Faisal was defending his mother, we will pay. The boy is still someone’s son. We won’t go to the authorities with the note. No reason for the families to bear that shame in addition to this tragedy.”

Dan nodded, but he wasn’t thinking of Majid. He was thinking of Rosalie and what was left for her.

AFTER HE LEFT
the family in the driveway of their home, where Abdullah leaned in and made his request for Majid, Ghassan drove Majid’s body to the al-Urbutiin home. At the door, he rang the bell. While he waited, he looked over the note that had been dropped at the
Saudi Times
. Was there anything more futile than a demand, with its sad showmanship, its desperate arrogance? Countries demanding; people demanding; kings demanding; armies demanding; terrorists demanding; and guns demanding. And always met by silence or aggression, never solutions.

A fat young man answered the door. He had a softer face than Majid, but it was clear they were brothers. Ghassan unfolded the note, held it where the brother could read it.

“Your brother has died for his cause,” Ghassan said. He heard a woman cry out—the mother, hidden in shadows. He swallowed, then continued. “He kidnapped innocents. It’s what the authorities would call hiraba, an action against the state. Sometimes, in the courts, this gets the sword. In a way, your brother is lucky; he will not bring you shame. You can bury him in privacy.”

“Will there be blood money to pay for my brother’s life?”

The mother shouting bitterly, no, no, la, la. A rhythmic pounding on the walls.

“He was killed by an act of self-defense. There are witnesses. There is no diyya owed, but the Baylanis will pay your family for the loss. A gesture of good faith. Let us keep this between families.”

The brother looked down at the floor, his mouth slightly open. From within, the long whine of an exhaled sob. Ghassan wondered if he had understood him. At last, the boy looked up and nodded.

“I will help you with the body,” Ghassan said.

Jalal walked with him out to the truck. A few cats had found their way into the truck bed. The boy hissed and pounded the side of the truck to disperse them. He pulled the edge of the tarp down to reveal his brother’s face, now sunken and dull-skinned.

“Ya Majid,” Jalal said in greeting, the second syllable of the name swallowed by his cracking voice. My brother, he thought. You rode your passions down the wrong street. And now. Now.

WHEN HE CLOSED
his eyes at night, Faisal dreamed in the white of mourning clothes, in the silver of the blade, in the red of his own blood. When he awoke, he felt the chill of his deeds settle around him. He prayed five times a day, and in between those prayers, he prayed more. He prayed for forgiveness from God and from the families, including his own. When he felt particularly lonely, he prayed for Majid—prayed that he appear to him in his room so that Faisal might hear his bossy, teasing voice again—so that he might be made to feel important, like his destiny would somehow take him further than Al Dawoun and the big house and the small pleasures of his car and his video games. With Majid, Faisal had gone further than his own thoughts. He supposed that was what friendship was, in the end.

Didn’t you wonder how they found you? Mariam asked one day.

No, he answered. It was God’s will.

It was Hassan, she said.

It was God’s will, he repeated.

I missed you, you foolish boy, she said.

I missed you, too, he said. He clutched her close to him.

FOR A WEEK,
Rosalie did not leave the living room of the big house except to relieve herself and shower. On the embroidered couch, she slept, took her meals, watched television with Mariam and, occasionally, Abdullah. At first, she had considered going to her bedroom; she was so tired she wanted to sleep for days. But then she had been jolted by fear. If she went to her room, all the living would take place around her. Abdullah and Faisal would use her absence as permission to go on as they had before. So she stayed in the living room, in the heart of the house.

On the couch at night, she pulled the blanket up under her chin, watched the moonlight filter in through the linen curtains. For a brief moment at Wisoum, she had wanted to die, so she would not be forced to return to the indignities of her life. But now, here she was, and what would change? She could not float on as if nothing had happened. Her son had thought he hated her enough to take her by force into the desert, and he had killed another boy, his best friend, when he realized he did not. In the aftermath, their family was living under the same roof like warped puzzle pieces that once fit together. What to do? What on earth was she to do?

ABDULLAH GATHERED HIS
sisters together at the big house. Dina, Nimmah, and Nadia were to tell their sister-in-law about Isra’s pregnancy. Abdullah thought that, if the words were spoken among women, Rosalie would see that a baby meant only love and happiness for a family, no matter how it found its way into the world. When they first met Rosalie, the sisters had not liked her, but over time they came to love her after seeing the galloping way she adored their brother and her children. Secretly, they had sympathized with her after hearing about Isra, but their husbands had told them to mind their own business, so they had not taken sweets to her, as they had wanted to do, nor had they invited her over to take tea or coffee, for fear that this would be seen as interfering. Instead, they had kept close watch over their own husbands until they regained the certainty that their men would not make the same reckless choice as Abdullah. Their pity and sympathy for Rosalie was like a flower that the women of the family had tended.