When Katya had turned the dresses down, Nusra had been apologetic. "I'm certainly not one to recommend a dressmaker," she'd quipped, motioning to her blind eyes. Katya apologized, saying that she needed some time to decide what she really wanted.
"I still haven't decided," she told Fadilah. "I was hoping to find something simple and elegant."
Fadilah shifted uneasily, the nonverbal equivalent of a harrumph. "My sister is a dressmaker," she said. "Tell me what color you like, and I'll have her make you a dress."
Katya couldn't imagine anything worse than being obliged to wear a dress made by Fadilah's sister, a woman she'd never met. But something in the way the other women looked at her indicated that the offer was not the sort Fadilah made every day and was certainly not to be refused.
"Thank you," Katya said. "I've actually got a dressmaker coming over this weekend. She's an old friend of my mother's. But I'll keep your offer in mind."
Fadilah looked uncertain—perhaps she sensed it was a lie—but she nodded graciously and the conversation died.
As the tension lulled into one of the room's long silences, Katya felt more and more like a failure. She was not interesting enough to rouse any enthusiasm from these women. She sought desperately for a way to break the ice, to raise the subject of Nouf without being awkward, but her mind had stalled. Things were only made worse when the door opened again and young Huda came in. She was a Shrawi cousin who had come from Dhahran to perform the hajj. In the two years since she'd arrived, she had done hajj a dozen times. Far from growing sick of her perpetual visit, the Shrawi women spoke of her with superlatives, calling her the greatest pilgrim on earth and the right hand of Allah, while Huda, modest ever, never stopped thanking them for putting Mecca within her reach.
Huda's arrival caused a stir as Muruj leaped up to welcome her. Huda smiled faintly and announced that it was prayer time just as the call to prayer filled the room. It blared in the far window, which looked out over a steep rock wall that loomed over the family's mosque. Its loudspeakers were situated all over the island, but two of the largest ones pointed straight up at the women's sitting room, so that five times a day the room was filled with such beatific chanting that it was impossible to speak. Both Huda and Muruj went into an adjoining bathroom to perform their ablutions, while the others sat quietly, not looking at one another, slightly embarrassed to be left out and yet making no effort to join the prayer.
Katya waited too. She had been in this position before. If Nusra had been there, or if there had been nonfamily visitors in the room, then everyone would have prayed, but when it was just the younger women, they did what they liked.
Katya studied the women silently. So much of her discomfort around them came from the stiffness she was seeing right now. Thus far, her whole relationship with them had been an elegant dance of pretend, of formal thank-yous and my-pleasures and
al-hamdulillahs.
But she was going to be spending a lot of time with these women, without Othman around. She had never believed in marrying a man because of his mother or sisters, although her friends did it all the time. The husband didn't matter so much. He was never home anyway, and if the household was big enough, they wouldn't see him even if he was home. No, when you married, you were marrying a mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces. And Katya kept telling herself that they'd come to appreciate one another, that the relationships would grow warmer, or at least more tolerable. Yet she had so little in common with these women. This was nothing like her own family, where Abu spent all day in the kitchen, cooking, smoking, reading newspapers, and watching TV. This family never cooked or read papers; servants did it for them. Othman had promised her an apartment in the city, but he would still want her to visit the family frequently. She would spend her holidays here, bring her father here, even her children someday. She would see more of this room than she could ever imagine.
Now she wondered what Nouf had thought of them. Nouf, who'd wanted to live among dogs, to move to America, to go to college and have sex before marriage—how had she coexisted with women like Huda and Muruj? It must have been difficult having Huda move in—she was a year younger than Nouf but ten times more devout, the child any pious mother might have wished for. Or had Huda's presence been a blessing—a distraction that enabled Nouf to get on with her plans?
On the floor across from Katya, Abir was sitting cross-legged with a cold look on her face. She looked so much like Nouf that they might have been twins. Her house robe was a simple black; her hands were clasped on her lap in an unconscious attitude of modesty. There was an air of disgruntlement about her that Nouf hadn't had, or perhaps had done a better job of concealing. Abir was most like Nouf, not in temperament exactly, but in position. Young. Eligible. The family looked to these girls with a certain degree of suspense: How would they act? Who would they marry?
But whereas the women had treated Nouf as an adult, Abir was still the girl whose mother chastised her for playing with the food tray. Right now she was eyeing the bathroom strangely, perhaps feeling pressure to join her sister and cousin, or perhaps silently scorning them for more cryptic reasons.
When Muruj and Huda emerged, they went to the corner window, unrolled two of the prayer rugs that were stacked there, and began their prayers. Katya watched them from behind, thinking how funny it was that Huda had come for a visit and never left. The family had practically adopted her, just as they'd adopted Othman years before, although his story was far more dramatic than Huda's. It was, Katya recalled, one of the first things he'd ever told her about himself.
The Shrawis had not really known Othman's father, but they knew that his name was Hussein and that he was a guest worker from southern Iraq. He'd been in Jeddah for only six months when the construction company that hired him had stopped paying his wages. Without the company's support, he couldn't renew his work permit, yet he didn't have the money to return to Iraq. Within a month he'd taken to begging on the streets of Jeddah with his six-year-old son.
On his way to work one day, Abu Tahsin saw them from the window of his limousine and called for the driver to stop the car. He led Hussein and his son to one of the family's charity homes, where he made sure they were fed and outfitted with new clothes. He sent Othman to the local elementary school and even arranged to renew Hussein's work permit. He gave them enough cash to get by for a few days and left them to their luck.
But two days later, while Hussein was walking around the city looking for work, he suffered a fatal case of heat stroke. He died that night.
Abu Tahsin took such pity on the boy that he arranged the adoption papers at once. Katya often wondered what had prompted the decision. It wasn't rash, exactly—the adoption itself had taken a year and a half—but it wasn't the sort of action that could later be revoked; it bound Othman to the family for a lifetime. What did Abu Tahsin see in the boy that turned his heart? Why was Othman different from any other homeless child? In any event, Katya mused, it was actually a story about Abu Tahsin and how rare it was to find such spontaneous passion coupled with such long-lasting generosity of spirit.
After the prayers were finished and the women had returned to their seats, Muruj suggested that they eat some fruit, and the women busied themselves. Zahra picked up the telephone and called the servants. Huda stacked the empty coffeepot and cups on the tray. Abir was idly picking lint from the couch. Katya wondered how Nouf's death had affected them really. They seemed as composed as ever.
Zahra finished her call and turned to Katya. "You seem tired," she said. The other women were chatting, and Katya felt comfortable giving an honest reply.
"I am tired," she said. "It's sad being here without Nouf."
The mention of Nouf brought the other conversations to a halt. Even Abir snapped out of her daydream.
"It is sad," Zahra said in a soft voice. The conversations picked up again, but without enthusiasm now. "I've been wondering," she went on, "will you quit your job after the wedding?"
There was another lull and people to turned to Katya, curious to hear her reply. She shrugged. "I haven't discussed it with Othman," she said.
"But certainly you'll want to have children."
"Yes. We do." She couldn't help blushing. She knew what came next, what Zahra would say if this were not such a formal sitting room:
You'd better start having children before you get too old. You may be too old already! What is a job compared to the value of children?
But instead Zahra smiled and nodded. "May you have as many children as Um Tahsin."
"Thank you," Katya said, weighing whether her next segue would be in bad taste or not. "How is Nusra? I imagine it's terrible to lose a child."
"The worst thing in the world," Zahra agreed.
There was a moment of respectful silence. Katya was dying to blurt out,
Do you think she ran away?
But it was Huda's soft voice that split the silence.
"Allah forgive her. She should have known better."
No one knew quite how to argue with that. Katya glanced at the women, all looking at their hands. "It's so strange," she said. "I thought for the longest time that she'd been kidnapped."
Muruj sniffed loudly and sat up in her seat. "No." She looked directly at Katya with eyes full of scorn. "I'll tell you what happened. My sister had a head full of fantasy. Ever since she was a child!" Her voice reached an awkward pitch. The other women were in agreement. Fadilah gave the subtlest of nods, and Abir exhaled sharply, as if to say,
Well, of course we knew that!
"She ran off for the most shameful reason," Muruj said. "For a man! Probably a boy she met at the mall or, Allah help us all, through her driver. She fell in love, or
thought
she was in love, and when she ran off to meet him, he didn't show up. He left her out there in the desert to die."
Fadilah shot Katya a look that said,
Why did you bring this up?
"That driver ought to be fired!" Muruj snapped.
"If you have proof of this," Katya said softly, "then shouldn't the family try to find out who this boy was?"
"Any way you look at it," Muruj plowed on, "it's the same old story. He damaged her and then he abandoned her. That's what you get when you don't have a marriage contract. Nouf wouldn't be the first poor girl to learn that!"
"Yes," Zahra murmured. "We are trying to find out who it was. Isn't Tahsin—?" She looked to Fadilah, who raised a hand to indicate that she didn't want to talk about that either and was disgusted with the way the whole conversation was going.
In the face of scorn from both Fadilah and Muruj, Katya had to summon her deepest reserves of nerve to ask the next question. "Nobody has any idea who it was?"
No one answered right away, but Huda and Muruj exchanged a meaningful look, which caused Huda to shut her eyes and plunge into a series of whispered prayers.
"Whoever did this to my sister will find his judgment in heaven," Muruj stated flatly. And with that, all the scorn fell from her face and she sat back on the sofa with a sad, crippled, defeated air that somehow seemed more honest than all the bluster that had come before it.
Only Abir kept her eyes fixed on Katya, but when Katya met her gaze, there was a knock at the door and Abir leapt up to answer it. Three strange women came into the room.
Katya felt a sinking frustration; there was no hope of continuing a private conversation. The new arrivals were obviously guests. When they shed their
burqas,
no one recognized them, and they greeted the company awkwardly. One of the women introduced herself, explaining that her husband had come to make a donation. The other women remained happily anonymous, but Katya guessed that their husbands were visiting the house too. They were a well-dressed group; clearly their husbands were wealthy. The women's purses were Gucci, their high-heeled shoes revealed a daring portion of ankle, and, most telling of all, their cloaks were silk and tailored to suggest the elegance of form beneath them. One woman even wore false fingernails with a bright red gloss. Compared to these paragons of fashion, the Shrawi women looked as if they'd
just wandered in from the desert. They didn't wear makeup or silk cloaks or high heels, and they certainly never painted their nails. Abir was staring at the women's hands, but her expression was inscrutable. Was she offended? Disgusted? Envious? Before the door shut again, Abir slipped out of the room.
Muruj invited the women to sit, and Katya got up, offering her seat and politely rebuffing the protests. She seized the opportunity to excuse herself, saying that she had to get back to work. Fadilah looked at her oddly, and it was only when Katya was out the door and halfway down the hall that she realized why: she'd already said she'd taken the afternoon off. She blushed just thinking how blatantly she'd lied.
At the end of the hallway she came to a corridor. To the left was the exit, used exclusively by women, and to the right lay the entire unexplored realm of the women's side of the house—their bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and sewing rooms. Katya had been there once, on a brief tour with Nusra, but she had not seen it since her first visit to the house. Abir had probably come this way.
No one was there now. Katya turned to the right and tiptoed down the hallway, listening for sounds of teenage activity. Would it be the scratching of a homework pencil? The faint strains of rock music emanating from headphones? Did she even have music? It was all Katya could think of—her own life as a teenager, minus the technology.
She passed an open doorway and saw an empty bathroom. A few meters down the hallway was a complex of doorways. She took the first one and went into a foyer, a quaint box of a room with a tiny square table standing in the corner. On the table was a copy of the holy Quran.
Gently she tapped on the door. There was no answer, so she pushed it open and peeked inside. The first thing she saw was blue wooden letters spelling
NOUF
on the wall. Looking back into the hallway to make sure no one had seen her, she stole inside.