Shafiq had a foreboding sense that Kathmiya was far gone, but he still hoped she might come back—until he read her note.
It was penned in the margins of a news article about the growing threat of Communism. Kathmiya never could have understood how this choice of paper would cut Shafiq even deeper, but he felt doubly wounded all the same, abandoned again by someone he loved.
“I am so sorry to my God,” she wrote in her precise hand. “Please do not follow me or ever try to find me.” Then, below, as though she realized he would, she added, “Shafiq, they will kill me if you do.”
And now, the expression he had remembered on first meeting her was again ringing in his ears: You applied mascara to make her more beautiful but ended up blinding her.
Only it was so much worse than that. He had nearly gotten her murdered, and she might die yet.
The self-disgust was overwhelming. Shafiq was repulsed by his own actions, all the attraction and love he’d ever felt for Kathmiya transformed now into hate for himself.
Like Kathmiya, Shafiq had an overwhelming urge to connect to the person he felt closest to, but it was not his mother. He desperately wanted to confide in Omar, but when they met in the morning to walk to school together, Shafiq felt no more able to break through the silence with his adopted brother than his real family. Eerily, daily life resumed. Shafiq was crushed within but still whole on the surface, while Kathmiya, he knew, was running for her life.
In class the next day, while the teacher wrote algebraic equations on the chalkboard, Shafiq could not help but think about their brief time together, sweeter than all the dates in Basra. He missed the fleeting but endless possibility of the life they had almost embarked on, but more than that, he was terrified for her.
Strong as she was, and capable beyond what anyone had ever given her credit for, and extraordinarily beautiful, she was still in serious danger.
Shafiq tried to shut out the memory but all he could hear in his mind was Ezra scolding Naji when he asked about the beautiful maid: “They would murder her in a heartbeat.”
Staying up all through the first night after she left, Shafiq was consumed by a droning anxiety that released him from its grip only after he’d given in to the inevitable: he had to search for her. He needed to know she was safe, to try to convince her to come back, to somehow erase this stain.
Even in his recklessness, Shafiq knew to postpone telling his family at least until he found her, so he made excuses about a school science trip to the marshes and then headed there, clinging to the maudlin thought that if he didn’t make it out alive, they would know where to look for his body.
He missed the ferry but hired a fisherman to take him upriver in a small boat. Kathmiya had described her journey home to him in poetic terms, but these were of little use after he arrived at the edge of the wetlands and began making his way through the mud and reeds. Unbelievably, he had never learned her last name, and he trembled as he moved through the area, so obviously out of place, despite having thrown on one of his father’s old abaya by way of flimsy disguise.
America was an abandoned dream.
He had lived near the marshes his whole life, but had never actually seen this other world. He stared at the brown reed huts clustered on small islands that nearly sank in the ubiquitous waters, watching the long, bent canoes used to travel among them.
Where do I begin? he wondered. Shafiq reviewed the few bits of information he had: there was a sister with three children—or was it two? Kathmiya’s mother worked in Basra and would not be around. And she rarely mentioned the father, except to complain that he drank too much.
These scattered facts were useless. It was like arriving in Basra and asking for a man named Muhammad with a beard.
Only he wasn’t in Basra. Shafiq could barely tell the land from the water in this strange place. Houses seemed to stand in the middle of rivers, while canoes navigated through passageways that looked like solid ground.
All he could think about was the next step forward. He tried to pay attention to the route he took but the landmarks kept shifting—a pelican that took off; a black water buffalo, slick and wet, that swam away; a patch of light on the sparkling grass cast by a shifting sun.
Making his way through the wetlands he tried not to think of what might have happened to Kathmiya, imagining instead carrying her away. The more his feet sank into the soft ground, the more despondent he felt, but who could he ask for help? Even if he could find a willing guide, he would only be courting death if he mentioned the girl.
Pangs of hunger were tearing at the walls of his stomach. Shafiq had a few dinars in his pocket, but there was no store to spend them in.
Still wrapped in his father’s black abaya, he climbed on a small rock, trying to get a better overview of the lowlands. Scanning the horizon, his eyes fell on the majestic mudhif. Clearly, this was the center of town, the locus of power and the heart of the society. For a fleeting, breathtaking moment, he forgot Kathmiya and her lost virtue while he relished the symmetry and beauty of the massive reed building.
It drew Shafiq like it must have drawn countless people who were awed into thinking that magnificence could offer beneficence. Without a single brick or drop of mortar, the mudhif had more grandeur than Basra’s most stately homes.
“Are you a visitor?” asked a man outside.
Shafiq wanted to duck away but knew this would only imply guilt, so he greeted the sentry in his best imitation of Kathmiya’s backwoods accent. “Yes, Allah be with you.”
“Come,” instructed the man. “You must pay your respects to the sheikh.”
Four great bundles of reeds as tall as trees flanked the front of the structure, which was curved on top. There were no windows, but slats in the weaving let the beams of yellow light through.
Entering through a beveled wooden door, Shafiq was even more awestruck by the interior of the large dome. It was like walking under the ribs of a lion, he thought, staring at the even golden-colored beams that curved from floor to ceiling on each side.
The servant led him to a mat on the floor, woven as perfectly as the walls.
“Kind sir,” he said, trying to shake his fear and doubt. “I am trying to find a man from around here.”
The sheikh, with his stern eyes and sunken cheeks, looked intimidating, but he nodded.
The servant brought rice bread and tea in handmade clay cups.
Shafiq knew he couldn’t mention Kathmiya’s name, and he didn’t know her father’s, but he tried combining theirs.
“Abu Kathmiya,” he guessed. The father of Kathmiya.
The sheikh shook his head. “There are fifty men who fit that description here.”
Worse, Shafiq knew that Kathmiya had an older sister, so surely he would have been known only as the father of…whatever her name was.
Shafiq tried to remember everything he had ever heard about the old man. “We have nothing at my home,” Kathmiya would complain, “except the empty bottles of arak that he tosses in a pile behind the house.”
Shafiq could hardly ask for the town drunk, so he danced around the subject. “Fine craftsman, but had a small problem of thirst. I’m sure there are not a lot around here who drink the way he does.”
Now the man smiled. “Ali Mahmoud? Two daughters, a few grandchildren?”
“That’s him,” Shafiq said, jolted by the fear that he might actually find Kathmiya, and meet his death in the process. “Is he far from here?”
“I will have one of my boys take you,” the sheikh offered matter-of-factly.
That reliable Arab hospitality. Shafiq’s father always protected and helped anyone in his home. And now Shafiq received the same consideration in the heart of the marshes.
“Thank you, thank you, and may Allah protect you,” Shafiq repeated over and over.
On the way there, he decided he would hide until she came out by herself and then convince her to run away with him. That way, even if they were alone together in the world, she would be safe.
He had no idea how the family lived, but it seemed like it would be easy enough to get Kathmiya out of there. She was naturally worldly, so why would she want to stay in this primitive environment?
And then he saw it: the sagging little hut with clear empty bottles piled outside.
Her home.
He thought about their last fight, when he’d challenged her, said he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to find a husband. But staring at this hopelessly impoverished little place, barely big enough for a few people to crowd together inside with no pipes or lights or any of the comforts of a modern home, he started to understand how far she had come. Even if she looked to him like she belonged in a palace, she was mired in poverty.
Shafiq thanked the oarsman, pledging to repay the sheikh’s kindness someday. And then he approached Kathmiya’s little bit of shade under the harsh sky.
Two small children sat outside, the oldest around Aziza’s age, but ragged in used clothing and already working, pounding rice in a crude stone pestle. Now Shafiq remembered that Kathmiya had two nieces.
This was it.
When the boat left, he slipped behind a thick bed of reeds, the fresh smell of damp earth filling his nostrils. Whether it would take a day or a week, Kathmiya would go out alone, and then he would signal her. There would be no need to pack, since these people had no possessions.
Shafiq’s lank limbs grew sore from crouching, and he gave in and sat on the moist ground. Soon his well-founded fear started to fade as impatience took its place. Night fell, but he couldn’t sleep. Every rustle in the wind could have been a dangerous animal or a threatening Midaan. He was stripped of shelter, his hunger was raging, and he would never be able to rest, not until Kathmiya was safe in his arms.
And then?
Too far ahead to think about, too impossible to contemplate. Some kind of underground existence like Naji had, only without an illegal group to back you, just out in the open air like a Bedouin in the desert.
His future deprivations seemed even more pronounced knowing that Kathmiya’s family was safe inside their house, tribe, world. And then he realized: That’s my advantage: to be up and alert while they are all lulled into unconsciousness. Now is the time to get her.
Shafiq crept slowly toward the little home, hearing the sounds of quiet breathing as he approached. There were six people sleeping on little mattresses arranged around the edges of the open space.
Scanning the figures in the light of the moon, he thought for a second that he had found Kathmiya, but the wild, dark hair belonged to a woman twice her age…must be the mother. His eyes moved quickly past the two men, obviously the husband and father of a young woman sleeping near her three children.
But then he realized: it could not be.
It could not be Kathmiya’s home, he knew.
The sister’s stocky body, her eyes beady even when closed, her bulbous nose and weak hair—none of it added up.
Determined to be sure, he shifted his focus from the young woman to her father and saw there a coarse, bloated face that had even less in common with the girl that he loved.
So there are two town drunks, he thought, starting as a child stirred. Or perhaps two different towns. Or ten or ten thousand. The realization that he was in the wrong place fell on Shafiq like a sagging roof, and he skulked out, lost in the midst of the vast, unfamiliar marshes, trying to leave before trouble came crashing down.
Shafiq followed the water, moving away from the dry land until he came to a shore. And then he followed the shore, feet wet and body clammy and head aching, until he found a small dock. Fishermen arrived before dawn. Soon boats began coursing through the river, and Shafiq watched helplessly as the large ferry taking passengers to Basra glided by.
There was no way to catch it, and frustration roused him to action. Approaching an older fisherman, Shafiq faked his accent and asked for a ride to Basra, offering to pay two hundred fils. It was such an exorbitant sum that the man at first refused out of suspicion. But when Shafiq produced the coins, he was welcomed onto the boat. Resting his exhausted head on his arm, he fell asleep under the blanket of the hot sun.