This was Ruthie’s talent: to take any dog-day afternoon and turn it into something special.
Over the next several weeks, when Mason was on the platform, I spent hours with Ruthie at the pool and hours more with her in my kitchen, eating the meals that Yash prepared for us, drawing him into our conversation. Ruthie’s houseboy never returned after finding his bride, and the recent immigrant she hired, a shy young man from Sudan, kept to the farthest corners of the house when we were around, as though he feared contamination. The few times we sat at her Formica dinette to smoke and drink cocktails, flanked by the curio cabinet filled with porcelain bells from various nations on one side, the clock in the shape of a peacock on the other, we both knew something was missing, and we knew that something was Yash.
Mornings, I began to lie in bed and listen for the rattle of his bicycle timed to the muezzin’s first call, to regret when the evening song sent him home again. I sometimes felt like a child in his care, and at other times I felt strangely wedded to him, as though I were the husband going off to earn the wages and Yash the keeper of the hearth. When I grimaced at the bitter martini he made me one day when I returned home from the newspaper, he met me at the door each afternoon thereafter with an iced glass of sweet tea and encouraged me to relax, put up my feet while he brought me the mail and finished preparing my meal.
The first time I asked him to sit down to dinner with me, he demurred.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It is not appropriate,” he said.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” I said, and pointed to the blinded windows. “Besides, who will know?” I asked.
“Only those we tell,” he said.
“I won’t if you won’t,” I said.
He considered, his face grave, before reluctantly acquiescing. He sat stiffly in his chair, responding to my attempts at conversation with small tidbits of his life before arriving in Arabia but never anything that I really wanted to hear—nothing more about his wife, about why he had left her behind. As our meals together became more habitual and familiar, we sometimes didn’t talk at all but listened to the BBC until he rose to gather our dishes and clean the kitchen before pedaling his bicycle home. When I showed him the pearl I had gotten on the dhow and wondered what to do with it, he took it as one of his errands to have a jeweler in al-Khobar fashion the pearl into a pendant. I hadn’t expected him to be so pleased by my delight or so embarrassed when I turned my back to him, bent my head forward, pulled up my hair, and asked him to clasp the thin gold chain. I felt the brush of his fingers, heard his murmured apologies for his fumbling. When I turned to face him, the color of his cheeks had deepened to umber, and he quickly excused himself to the kitchen.
By late spring, the flowers that had erupted from the desert floor were nothing but memory, the purples and pinks and cornflower blues devoured by the camels and goats before they could be burned to cinders by the harsh summer sun. As the heat hit triple digits and Mason’s schedule ground into routine, my days became defined by meals, afternoons writing articles for the newspaper, drinks with Ruthie, late nights of reading, sometimes until dawn. After his long absence, Mason’s sudden presence felt like an intrusion, a rupture in the space I had made for myself, and I began to understand why Ruthie and Lucky had to fight. Instead of welcoming Mason with open arms, I sometimes resisted his affection, our first round of intimacy a push-me, pull-you bout. When he left again, it felt like I was being torn open, and I would cry myself to sleep, rise the next day back into my other life, begin once again to mend myself against the pain of his absence.
I gave up learning the difference between tricks and trumps, neglected to call Candy about golf, and concentrated instead on my photographs and articles, covering social events, gathering meeting dates, and posting club minutes. I discovered that although the company’s children might live in the barren desert, there was nothing that they were denied. They were instructed in marksmanship, archery, and field hockey. They were flown to Lebanon to ski the unlikely snow, sail the Mediterranean, spelunk the Jeita cave. The Hobby Farm stabled the finest Arabian ponies; the Little League teams sported customized uniforms. I interviewed the members of the Dive Club, who had just returned from the Farasan Archipelago, where they searched for silky sharks. I reported the names of Boy Scouts receiving their merit badges and youth delegates selected to attend the national convention in Portland, Oregon, for Teens Aid the Retarded. When the children graduated eighth grade, they left the compound to study abroad at the finest boarding schools and universities in the world, tuition subsidized by the company. “Little princes and princesses,” Ruthie said. “They wouldn’t know real life if it bit them in the ass.” But when I interviewed a handsome young American man who was visiting after his graduation from St. Stanislaus in Bathurst, Australia—a place he had chosen because of its excellent surf—he seemed less like a scion than a homesick child. “I didn’t want to leave,” he told me, “but they shipped me out anyway, just like they ship us all out.” He chewed at the rawness of his thumb, where a pinhead of blood welled. “No one gets it, man. You grow up in the desert, nothing else is real.” I listened, took notes, but I knew it wasn’t anything that my readers would want to hear.
When Nestor put me to work drawing the crossword puzzles, I holed up in Mason’s study, scouring old editions of Aramco World, expurgated dictionaries, and censored encyclopedias. I loved the ephemeral feel of immersing myself in strange knowledge, my awareness of the world enlarging with each down and across, but when I quizzed Yash with my clues, he already knew the answers. “What do you think I do with my evenings?” he asked. “I could fill them out in my dreams.”
I carried my camera everywhere, found that things looked different through the lens, and began to understand how Carlo Leoni might come to fancy himself invisible, move more easily through this world. I rode the bus for no other reason than to capture what images I could through the windows: a silver Cadillac sleek as a shark, beside it a donkey carrying three young boys bundled between rickets of wood, their mouths caked with dust; our Muslim driver bowing in prayer alongside the road, each window behind him framing the face of an Aramco wife. I had watched him, remembering my grandfather on his knees beside his bed, in the door of the kitchen, in the field in the middle of pitching hay—wherever the spirit moved him, that was where he fell—and stepped out quietly to take the picture, the women inside scowling their disapproval. I dropped my film off at the newspaper office, waited impatiently for the days it took to be developed, eagerly sorted through the prints. Framed, contained, the desert became more knowable, its variegations and movement captured in split-second shots that I studied like the pages of a primer.
I stopped by the newspaper office one day and found Nestor at his desk, my photographs spread out before him. I was pleased, expecting praise, but he pushed them aside and rested his weary eyes on me.
“Maybe you don’t know any better than this,” he said. “You can’t just take photos of whoever or whatever you want unless what you want is to be deported.” He shuffled the pile into an envelope, thumbed down the clasp, and handed it to me. “I don’t want to see these kinds of prints anywhere near here,” Nestor said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” I tucked the envelope against my chest, wishing I had my own darkroom, a private place to do my work without anyone looking over my shoulder.
He took a deep breath, tapped his pencil. “Maybe it’s better if you stay with ‘Memory Lane.’ ”
“But I want to write about what’s happening right now,” I said. “Something that matters.”
Nestor settled back. “Just where do you think you are, Mrs. McPhee?” He took off his glasses, rubbed the sore spots on either side of his nose, then pushed forward a photo of a royal-looking Arab man, maybe a sheikh, his son sitting at his knee. “See anything wrong with it?”
I studied the portrait. “It looks fine,” I said.
“Except for one very important detail the photographer overlooked.” He pointed to the man’s bare feet. “We can’t use it because the censors say it’s degrading. What are we supposed to do, buy him a pair of wing tips?”
I stood there, stubborn, my packet of photos clutched tight.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m not saying you don’t have an eye for this. I’m just saying you’ve got to tighten your blinders. Hunt down Carlo Leoni. See if he can teach you a thing or two.”
I left in tears, not just because I was angry but because I knew that I didn’t have any way to hunt down anybody, and especially not a pirate who had the run of the country. I rode the bus back to Abqaiq, found Yash in the kitchen, and sat glum while he made me dinner. He seemed quieter than he had only hours before, and I wondered whether it was because Mason was due home that night, if, like me, he found the transitions the hardest.
“I need an adventure.” I sighed.
“Mrs. Gin,” Yash said, “you are in Arabia. Do not wish for adventure.”
“At least you can drive out of here,” I said.
“I cannot drive,” he said. “I have never learned.”
“I could teach you,” I said. “Ruthie would let us use her car. Just around the compound.”
He pinched a smile. “Let us not forget our experience with the polka.”
I rested my arms on the counter. “I wish I could explore the desert like Lawrence of Arabia.”
“Ah, you want to go native,” Yash said, taking care as he salted a pot of water. “It’s like an illness among white men of some privilege. T. E. Lawrence, Sir Wilfred Thesiger. They see themselves as golden-haired gods, I suppose.”
“Thesiger? The explorer?” I asked, remembering the rain. “Abdullah told me about him.”
Yash lifted his eyes, blinked slowly. “An interesting conversation for you to have with the Bedouin,” he said. He took out a knife, began slicing a carrot. “Did he tell you about the women who have mapped this land?”
“What women?” I asked.
“Gertrude Bell was one of the greatest Arabist explorers of all time and single-handedly drew the boundaries of Iraq.” He raised his knife like a pointer. “Did he tell you that Dame Freya Stark trekked the terra incognita of Iran and was the first to locate the fabled Valley of the Assassins?” He flicked the knife. “Of course not. Women have no place in his history.”
“It hardly matters,” I said, “if I can’t even leave the compound.” I snorted and dropped my chin. “I just love learning new things,” I said, then tipped my head. “Tell me about India. All I really know is that is where Gandhi is from.”
“That may be all that you need to know,” Yash said, then lifted his head and scowled at the sound of someone at the door—maybe the shrimp peddler again, thinking me a soft touch. I hopped up to answer it, found Faris clutching a sheaf of dry weeds that he held between us and rattled meaningfully, his wizened face half-hidden in the folds of his ghutra. Yash listened and translated as best he could.
“He has dreamed that a swarm of locusts will come from the west and descend this evening.” Faris swept his hand across the yard, uttered a few hoarse words, and Yash nodded. “He says they will take everything.”
Seeming satisfied, Faris returned to his weeding. I hesitated a moment, then followed Yash out to the back patio, where he had taken the chicken he had gotten at market. I saw that Faris had covered the vegetables with buckets and boxes—anything that he could find.
“You really think the locusts will come?” I asked, wondering whether Faris was only trying to scare me off my garden.
“They always come. If not today, then tomorrow.” Yash motioned at the chicken. “You can help me. It will occupy your time.”
I sat down and began plucking. “My grandfather said the locusts in Oklahoma ate the feathers right off the chickens.”
Yash smiled, making quick pinches with his thumb and finger. “My father said the same of Punjab.”
When the feathers stuck and matted, I wiped my hands on my pants, but Yash remained pristine, his white shirt crisp and unblemished. I thought of my mother sitting on the porch, doing just this thing, how it was in the concentration of chores that she told the stories I remembered.
“What about your wife?” I asked. “What happened after the fountain?”
“I asked that I might marry her.” He dipped his fingers into the bowl of warm water at our feet and went at the pinfeathers. “We lived with my family in a top-floor room. My mother would stand on her bed to slap the ceiling with her slipper. ‘Enough!’ she’d cry. ‘Enough!’ ” Yash’s face broke into a grin with the memory. “We found an apartment, very small, but one window looked out over the gardens of an old woman from Goa. She gave us guavas from her trees and bottles of fenny made from the cashew apples she distilled on the slope of the courtyard. We would wake in the morning and know she was brewing by the sweet juice smell. It made us happy and want to make love.”
I blushed in spite of myself, but Yash kept plucking. “I was not a temperate man,” he said.
“You were young,” I said, “in love.”
“Young, yes, and in love.” He rinsed his hands, dabbed them against the towel on his knee.
“And then what?” I asked.
Yash looked up, his eyes dark, then stood, taking the chicken with him. “I will start the stewing.”
I followed him into the kitchen, trailing downy tufts that floated aloft in the slightest movement of air. I stood for a moment, hoping for more talk, but Yash busied himself with sharpening the knife to a fine edge. I sighed, then moved into the living room that felt like a cavern, dark and cool. The house that had once seemed enormous to me now felt small, each room too familiar. I lay on the couch with my book, trying to forget that it was my second time through, that I already knew what came next, and felt the drowsiness of an empty afternoon coming on.
If I dreamed, I don’t remember, except when I woke from my nap, it was to what I thought was the static of the television or maybe the radio. I lifted my head and realized it was the sound of the wind rising, sand pelting the house. I moved into the living room and pulled the blinds. The sky was a blur, the light filtered to gray. And then I understood what I was seeing: not the common swirl of dust but the bodies of insects, thousands and thousands of them, a storm of locusts brewing the air.
I knelt on the couch, fascinated. I’d seen the hordes of grasshoppers descend on our neighbor’s corn and mow it clean, had swept them into piles on the porch, but I had never seen anything like this. The lawns, the sidewalk, the asphalt—all boiling like lava pouring down the streets. No sun, the streetlights muted, not even the houses next door were visible. The locusts popped against the windows, held for a moment, then fell away to be replaced by a dozen more, their sound a frenzied murmur, like the june bugs I used to catch, tie to a string, and let fly around me, their wings beating up, dipping, beating up, a rhythmic rise and fall, an openmouthed zip of sound. But it was larger than that, a noise that swelled to fill the sky, more like the tornado that had touched down outside Shawnee, when my grandfather had taken me to the dank root cellar. Where the corona of the candle’s flame fell away, I could see things moving, spiders, scorpions, snakes. “Just sit still,” he had said, “and let me listen.” He was waiting for that sudden quiet that was the heart of the tempest, the train leaving its tracks. I fell asleep against his shoulder and woke up in my bed, the morning sky clear as rainwater.
I slid to sit on the sofa, wondering whether Mason would make it home. I went to the telephone to dial Ruthie, but the lines were already eaten through, and I began to feel a creeping terror, as though the locusts might gnaw their way right through the walls.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Yash. He was tearing up over the onions, wiping his eyes with a sleeve.
“I will bring your tea,” he said.
I hesitated before moving back into the living room, working hard to stifle the sense I had of the air closing in. When a pair of headlights broke the false dusk, I stood at the door, afraid to open it too soon, afraid to wait a second longer. Mason hit the porch at a dead run, Abdullah close behind. We laughed together as they pinched the insects from their clothes.
“It’s like a plague,” I said, “a biblical curse.”
“Locusts are common enough,” Abdullah said. “If Allah were truly angry, there would be no mistaking it. As-sahara,” he said, plucking a locust from his neck. “That is the desert.” He seemed happy, more like I’d first seen him, as though the hardship of the locusts whetted his good humor.
I gathered the bugs in a paper bag, where they rattled like a sack of snakes, and pitched it out the back door. Yash brought coffee while I stood awkwardly until Mason indicated that I should join him on the couch. Whatever had been their business before they came home, Mason and Abdullah’s conversation now moved from the locusts to the prospect of the Dhahran Little League team going to the World Series in Pennsylvania. There was something about keeping quiet, feeling invisible, that caused me to think I might really be, and I half listened, less interested in the details of the discussion than Abdullah’s gestures, the way his long fingers articulated the air. Ever since our talk after the emir’s banquet, he had seemed different to me, someone I might like to know.
I kept my eyes low, examining his leather sandals, the strong tendons of his feet, then raised my gaze to his shoulders, the place where his collarbone ridged the yoke of his thobe, where his ghutra hid his plaited hair. I’d seen enough Arabs to know that the drillers’ locks were shorn so as not to become tangled in the machinery, but still they wore their ghutras tucked or kept their heads modestly capped. Abdullah’s long hair set him apart, as though he weren’t quite willing to give up that Bedouin part of himself.
I raised my eyes to see Mason watching me, heard my grandfather’s voice: It’s not what you’re looking at but what you are wanting to see. I straightened, brought my eyes to Abdullah’s face. “When will it stop?” I asked.
“As Allah wills,” he said, and canted his head to acknowledge my distress. “It is said that when men were given the gift of song, they forgot to eat and drink and sang themselves to death, so were changed into locusts so that they might sing from birth to the grave.”
“Maybe we should all tell stories,” I said, “like in The Decameron.”
Mason kicked back and crossed his fingers at his chest. “You two go ahead.” He yawned and closed his eyes. “I’ll just listen.”
Abdullah’s face opened with pleasure. “Who will go first?”
“I will,” I said.
“Will this be a story of love or morality?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “Love.”
“A cautionary tale or an adventure story?”
“A cautionary tale,” I said, then changed my mind. “No, an adventure story.”
Abdullah nodded and sat back with his coffee.
“I once had a horse,” I began. Abdullah looked up, surprised.
“You?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Where I’m from, women ride horses like men.”
Mason opened one eye. “Ride them right into the ground.”
I shot him a warning look. “I mean we sit them like men sit their horses.”
Abdullah furrowed his brow. “But you said ‘I.’ Is this a true story?”
I considered for a moment. “It’s a tale,” I said. “It’s not me but a girl.” Abdullah seemed satisfied, so I went on. “There once was a girl whose mother had died and who lived alone with her father. They were very poor.” I glanced at Mason, but his eyelids didn’t flutter. “Every night before she fell asleep, she would ask God for one thing.”
“She wants a friend,” Abdullah said, “because she is lonely.”
“Yes,” I said, “she wanted a friend, but not like the girls she met at school, who teased her about her tattered clothes and laughed when she cried. She wanted a special friend, the kind who would love her no matter how different she was. So she asked God for a horse. She would sleep in the hay at his feet, and he would watch over her and keep her safe.”
“What about her father?” Abdullah asked.
“Her father … her father was very sad. He didn’t know how to raise a daughter and wouldn’t let her go into town where the other girls were. And so she prayed for a horse. Every night she would pray, and every morning she would wake up and look out the window. She believed that if she prayed hard enough and had enough faith, the horse would appear in the old pasture where her father’s mule grazed. But when spring came and the horse had not appeared, she began to believe that God needed a better pasture to put the horse in, and so, as soon as she had finished her other chores, she would go to work mending the fence as best she could with pieces of old wire and rocks around the rotted posts. She pulled the pokeweed and nettles that the mule had left uneaten. She worked each afternoon until her father called her to prepare his supper, and as the days got longer, she went back out after washing the dishes to work until dark. Her fingers were festered with thistles, but still she worked.”
“She will conjure the horse of her very will,” Abdullah said, admiration in his voice.
“She worked and she prayed and she tried to be as good as she could so that God would answer her prayers. She cross-fenced the pasture to keep out the mule, brought water, and sowed the soil with the ryegrass seeds she had stripped from the stalks of nearby fields. Soon, the dirt sprouted green, and she was happy. She sat in her half of the pasture and read her books and dreamed of the horse she would have.”
Abdullah lifted his fingers. “Has this girl had her first blood?”
I hesitated a moment, unsure of what he meant.
“Yes,” Mason said, never opening his eyes.
“Then it is a husband that she truly wants,” Abdullah said, and winked. “She only imagines him as a horse.”
Mason’s mouth twitched at the corners.
“One morning,” I pushed on, “she woke as she always did and looked out her window. She blinked because she couldn’t believe her eyes. The mule was gone from the pasture, but there was the horse she had prayed for.”
Abdullah sat forward, intent. “It may be a djinn,” he said. “She must be wary.”
“It was a horse,” I said, unsure as to whether Abdullah’s concern was genuine or if he was teasing me, “a tobiano paint with a black mane and tail.”
“A stallion?” he asked.
“A gelding,” I said.
Abdullah sat back, smug. “Then it cannot be her husband,” he said, and I heard Mason snort. I looked from him to Abdullah, feeling as though I were on the outside of some kind of joke.
“He was an old horse,” I went on, “she could see that right away, and a bit bandy-legged, but when she ran to the pasture, he came to her and laid his head on her shoulder, and she knew right then that God made this horse just for her. His mouth was broken, and his hooves were split, and she worried he’d been hurt, but she washed him and brushed him and told him his name was Sonny and then she fed him the rind of a watermelon.”
“And now he loves her,” Abdullah said, real kindness in his voice, and I smiled.
“Yes,” I said. “She had forgotten to pray for a bridle and reins and a saddle, but she found an old rope that he didn’t mind, and when she jumped one leg over and hitched upright, he held like he’d been a good horse all his life.”
“This is why he was chosen,” Abdullah said. “Allah is merciful.”
“And so the girl and her horse rode the small pasture, and when she asked her father whether she could ride to school, he said yes, but no farther. She picketed the horse at the edge of the playing field, and he was happy to eat the grass and doze in the sun. The girl knew that she, too, should be happy, but the road to and from school was never long enough, and even with the horse, she was still lonely.”
“She desires a husband,” Abdullah said, and I was sure, now, that he was feigning earnestness. “Her aunties must find her one.”
“She wants an adventure,” I insisted. “At first, it was enough for her to explore the nearby fields and farm roads, but in the opposite direction lay the town, where she knew the girls and boys were gathering to drink sodas and listen to music. One afternoon, because the air was warm and all the birds were singing, she let her horse continue past the crossroad. She thought she could deceive her father and tell him she’d stopped to help a neighbor pick plums. She even knew the tree, where she would be high enough on her horse’s back to reach the highest limbs, and she would stain her fingers and her mouth with the fruit to convince her father of her lie.”
Abdullah’s face took on a truly troubled cast. “The daughter who disobeys her father in this way, she will be in trouble.”
“This is in America,” I said, even as I realized that what he said was true.
Mason sang under his breath, “ ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ ”
“Listen,” I said. “It’s just a story, and I can make it whatever I want. Forget that she’s a girl. I’ll make her a boy. So now the boy has a horse, and he is the one wanting adventure, and so he goes to town.”
Abdullah relaxed back and nodded at Mason, one corner of his mouth lifting. “It is better that she is a boy.”
“Fine,” I said. “It’s a boy. So the boy disobeyed his father, rode the horse into town, and went to the soda fountain, where the other teenagers were. He had a Coke and listened to the music on the jukebox and didn’t talk much, but at least he wasn’t alone. When it started to get dark, he realized how late it was, and he rode the horse to the plum tree and rubbed his mouth and fingers with juice and dropped a few in his pockets. He put the horse away and did his chores before making pancakes for dinner and doing his homework and going to bed early so his father wouldn’t ask any questions.” I spoke quickly, the impending lament I had felt when first telling the story turned to frustration. “When the boy woke the next morning and looked out his window, the horse was gone.” I heard the blood rushing in my ears and remembered it was the locusts’ endless chirping. “And that’s the end,” I said.
“But it is not the end,” Abdullah said, and cast a conspiratorial glance at Mason. “Along with adventure, you promised a love story.”
“He loved the horse,” I said.
Abdullah slanted his mouth. “A man might write a poem of praise for his horse, but he would not write a poem of love.”
“Finish the story, Gin,” Mason said. “I bet the boy meets a girl.”
“Why don’t you finish it?” I said, sharper than I meant to.
“Please,” Abdullah said. “I want to hear what happens to this boy.”
I set my jaw. “Even though he was punished, the loss of the horse only made the boy braver. He began to wait for his father to fall asleep before slipping out and sneaking into town, where he met a girl and fell in love and lived happily ever after. How’s that?”
Before they could answer, Yash appeared in the doorway as though he knew I needed intervention. He bowed slightly.
“Your dinner is ready, sahib.”
“Abdullah will be joining us,” Mason said.
“You are very kind,” Abdullah said, “but I do not wish to impose.”
“No imposition at all,” Mason said, and led us to the table before Abdullah could protest further. “Hey, Yash, check the weather outside. See what’s happening.”
Yash seemed relieved to exit the room. He came back to report that the locusts were lessening and that the pin boys from the bowling alley were sweeping them into garbage cans.
“A feast for the Bedu,” Abdullah said. He waited until Mason and I had begun eating before forking a bite of rice.
“Let me guess,” Mason said. “They taste like chicken.”
Abdullah cocked his head. “Why would they taste like chicken?”
Mason looked at me and grinned. “What do they taste like, then?”
“Besides tasting like locusts, you mean.” Abdullah considered a long moment. “I would say they taste like still-green grain.”
Mason broke into a smile. “I know exactly what that tastes like,” he said. “I used to chew the heads to test the fields for harvest.”
“But bugs,” I protested.
“If you remove the legs and wings,” Abdullah said, “you have a small shrimp.”
I looked quickly at Yash, who raised one eyebrow and turned for the kitchen.
Abdullah rested his wrists against the table’s edge. “To the Bedu, a locust swarm is nothing less than manna from heaven. We eat what we can, then dry and grind them to powder for when food is scarce.”
“You make the most of what you’ve got,” Mason said. “We butchered our hogs right down to the bone. Cracklins, chitlins, trotters, jowls. You name it, we ate it.”
“You must come to the tent,” Abdullah said, “and my mother will fry for you the female locusts full of eggs. They are by far the best.”
“When?” I asked.
Mason cleared his throat. “I think it’s Abdullah’s turn to tell a story.”
Abdullah took up his coffee. “Locust swarms in the desert are too numerous to count, but I remember one especially.” He paused to listen to the rippling drone as though it might call back his memory. “When spring rains came to Wadi Ab, the caravans stayed for days. The merchants wished to buy our textiles and fine camels and consider our women, but more than that, they wanted to feast their eyes on the beauty of the oasis. I would lie beneath the stars and listen to the men recite poems and tell of their journeys. I planned to join a caravan, travel to distant places, perhaps even Egypt.” He dipped his head. “I had not yet heard of America.” His voice had taken on the tone of a storyteller, soft and rhythmic. “I remember that during this season, the emir’s representative had visited our settlement, bringing with him promises of gold without measure. Behind them came a group of white men, who camped nearby.” He nodded as Yash poured more coffee. “Some of our elders believed the Americans had come by the grace of Allah to bring us a life of good fortune, while others believed they were demons. We were amazed by the loudness of their voices and the pinkness of their skin. We knew nothing of their instruments and were filled with curiosity.” He smiled to himself as though amused, then lifted his face and grew more solemn. “In the days before the locusts, an angry heat had descended, as though the sun meant to burn us to ash. Birds fell like cinders from the sky. There were other omens. The mother of Hammad al-Salib had fallen into the fire, and the skin of her arms fell off like sleeves shorn from a dress. Abu Kareem dreamed that his eldest son, who had gone to work for the Americans, had drowned in the sea and that his body was being beaten against the rocks. The old man had left that morning for Jubail against all persuasion.”
I looked up to see Yash standing in the shadows of the hallway, the coffeepot still in his hands. I caught his eye, glanced at the empty chair, but he shook his head and put a finger to his lips as Abdullah continued.
“That evening, the locusts came with the wind like smoke from Allah’s fire. My young sister, tending sheep, spied the black cloud massing on the horizon and came running to tell our father, who ordered us to rope the mare. We gathered in the tent and draped the doorways. We knew the locusts would strip the date palms and grasses, as they always do, but rather than mourning what was lost, my family chose to spend the time just as we have here, drinking coffee and sharing stories.” Abdullah raised his cup to the blinded windows. “After a time, we opened the tent to find that the locusts had gone except for those that we gathered and roasted over the fire. I led out my mare and fed her a few from my hand.”
“Badra,” I said, and Abdullah nodded. Mason lifted his chin and looked at me. I had forgotten that he didn’t know about my conversation with Abdullah in the Land Cruiser.
“I remember that the evening sky had cleared to nothing but stars,” Abdullah went on, “and the moon rose fat and sated. We slept well that night, as though a purging had taken place, knowing that the locusts come and go like the rains.” He lowered his eyes, touched the rim of his cup. “Nothing could prepare us for what would be visited upon the wadi the next morning.”
Mason raised his eyes, leaned forward with new interest.
Abdullah took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “At dawn, we awakened to a noise we had never heard before, louder than the locusts, louder even than the fiercest shamal. The children held their ears, and the women wept in fear. It drowned out the cries of our infants. I went with my father to where the men gathered, each shouting louder than the other. It was Hammad who came running from the far end of the wadi, and we feared that his mother had died of her wounds, but when he told us that monsters were tearing the earth, we feared he had lost his mind. We took up our weapons and followed him, but all we could do was watch as the giant machines devoured what remained of the date palms and tamarisks, along with the shade that travelers had sought for thousands of years.” Abdullah half lidded his eyes. “By the time the sun had set that day, our home as we knew it was gone, and with it the heart of Wadi Ab.”
We sat in silence, Sinatra’s voice filling the room. Mason looked down at his hands. “That shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I guess this oil company is like any other. Takes what it wants, leaves the people behind.”
“Inshallah,” Abdullah said quietly. “As God wills.” When Yash stepped in with more coffee, Abdullah shook his cup. “You’ve been very kind,” he said, and stood to go. “I hope I may someday return the favor and welcome you to my tent.”
“I would love that,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mason said. “We’ll stop by next time we’re on our way to Cincinnati.” He laughed at the look of confusion on Abdullah’s face, clapped his shoulder, and walked with him out to the Land Cruiser.
I went to the kitchen to find Yash up to his elbows in soapy water. I picked up the dish towel and began drying. “Dinner was delicious,” I said.
He considered for a moment, then spoke quietly. “It is the first time I have served an Arab,” he said. “They look upon me with disdain.” He wrung a cloth and began to wipe the counter. “The Saudis do not wish us here except to do the work they see as beneath them.”
“But Abdullah, he’s different, isn’t he?”
Yash stopped his cleaning to look at me. “Do you think that an educated Bedouin is any less a Bedouin?” He began scrubbing the counter in earnest. “I heard what he was saying. He is a noble savage schooled by enlightened beings who misses the Eden he has lost. How very unique.” He glanced up, saw the look on my face, dropped his shoulders. “Forgive me,” he said. “I speak out of turn, and he is your friend.”
“No more than you are,” I said, and caught the hint of a smile before he turned away.