he’s building a nuclear reactor,” said Thomas. “And using chemical weapons, according to the Iranians.”
Gabriel was aghast. “Chemical weapons?”
“Yes,” said Thomas. “We seem to be going backward, not forward.”
“World War One rolled up with a nuclear threat,” Jasper said grimly. “Something for everyone.”
That night, as the night before, Gabriel remained trapped in restless sleep, his dreams intrusive, his consciousness too close to the surface. This was the very state he feared—the wretched half-sleep that suspended and exposed him. That was when blackness came. . . . Live burial, coffin closed, closed on the living, sinking into quicksand, drowning in sand, in water, mud, like Flanders, Flanders-like mud. . . . Every type of burial. Always burial, always alive. It rushed at him from the depths whenever he was off his guard and had lost grasp of his own thoughts. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t contain his thinking.
He opened his eyes. Turned. Threw off the sheet. Silence hummed in the background, in this quiet, quiet town. He wanted to switch it off. Silent Night Effect: Off.
Several times he shook himself, like a dog, head to tail, to throw off the sleeplessness. It will wear itself out, he thought. All I can do is wait. Time, Time, the Medicine Man. . . . He trusted in it, waited for it to do its thing. He would let time bleed him, imagine the blood flowing into the tin dish, like in the Elizabethan era, believing it would make him better, while in truth every hour was making him worse. Still, he would go on hoping for a lighter day. An easier day. He was, had always been, an optimist.
He closed his eyes and thought of Sandra, of making love to her . . . and of never making love to her again.
When the first shades of daylight pushed slowly across his walls, opening out the night, it brought some relief. Gabriel slept for an hour and woke again in a sunlit, breathless house. He got up and went downstairs, glancing into the diwan, where beams of sunlight slid in from high windows, slanted across the air, and landed, like children’s slides, on the red rugs.
The kettle was burbling in the kitchen, so he walked in, saying, “Sleep any better?” And as quickly realized that he was talking to a stranger.
“I didn’t know there was someone else staying here,” he said to Annie, when she came down some hours later, poorly slept and cranky.
“Huh?”
“Your friend. She was in the kitchen earlier.” She had been leaning against the sink, wearing a long blue kaftan.
Annie blinked at him. “What?”
“You could’ve told me you had another guest.”
“We don’t.”
“Well, she sure as hell wasn’t the maid. Not in a kaftan that was slit up to here.”
“You been dreaming, Gabe?”
“No. Tawny hair. Long legs, knobbly toes. Went upstairs. At least, I think she went upstairs.”
Annie picked up the coffee pot, took off the lid and inhaled, as if the aroma alone would keep her going until fresh coffee brewed. “You need to wake up, Gabriel. Red hair, long legs? Dream on.”
Perhaps she was right, he thought. Bad night, early sun, dazzling. . . . Maybe he had dreamed her. If so, he must do so again.
He helped Annie set up breakfast on the glass table in the front room. “I don’t know how you two can leave this house, I really don’t.”
“I told you. I don’t like it.”
“But why not?”
She shrugged. “Dunno. It has a kind of atmosphere, I suppose.”
Rolf joined them in ebullient mood. As he sliced a mushy peach with meticulous care, he told Gabriel about a particular spot near Nakhal where he liked to paint.
Gabriel watched him fuss over the fruit, then suck its gooey slices into his mouth, disintegrating on his lips. She—the woman in the kitchen—had been holding an apple and, with her eyes fast on him, had bitten into it. Silently. No crunching. It confused him that he could not hear her munch in the dead quiet, but then she had dipped her head, walked past him and out of the room.
Annie was right. Must have been a dream, since dreams have no sound.
“Over and over,” Rolf was saying, with his forceful enthusiasm, “I’ll paint the Ghubrah Bowl until I catch its light and pin it down. You will see, this weekend, how it changes.”
After he had hurried off to work, Annie and Gabriel sat in silence. Annie turned her engagement ring around her finger with her thumb. Voices and screeches filtered in from the street.
“Well,” she said eventually, “I’ve a lot to do, packing and so on.”
“I can help.”
“It’s fine. You should go out, explore the town. You’ll only get under my feet otherwise.”
So Gabriel took himself through the suq where, for the first time, he properly opened his eyes to the Middle East. The narrow alleys, mostly shaded by corrugated-iron sheeting hanging over the shops, were busy enough, though nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. There were scarcely any women about, and those he glimpsed were shrouded in black, so it was mostly the men who were buying the groceries, and sitting on the steps of their own shops—Indians, Arabs, Africans—calling out to Gabriel, some of them, in unintelligible Arabic. When he came to the seafront, the Corniche, he set off toward the old town, expecting to find it around the bend. The hills, which hugged Muttrah like a protective ring of friends, glowed in the morning sun, and below them white buildings—old merchants’ houses mostly, with roofed balconies and intricately latticed railings—curved along the sea in a graceful arc. Dhows bobbed about in the port, their prows raised and their back-ends boxy, like grand old dames wearing bustles. Gabriel stopped by the railing and, for a moment, could almost feel Max beside him, leaning on the railing also, his spectacles on the end of his long sweaty nose. He would have loved these beautiful boats. As kids, they had messed around in dinghies and talked of sailing the world together when they grew up.
On the horizon, oil tankers were waiting offshore. Muttrah formed a perfect natural harbor, a horseshoe of sea pressing into the coast. As Gabriel walked on, Muttrah Tower looked down on him from its perch on one of the hills.
Old Muscat was not where he’d thought it would be. He went around another bend, and another, until finally he skirted a hill and saw a gathering of houses tucked into the mouth of a ravine. A fort perched over it—al-Jalali Fort, perhaps, which had once looked out for the little town and its inhabitants. Gabriel’s legs were beginning to feel the walk, but he wandered between the low houses, climbing back streets, lifted by every minute of solitude and by every face that passed him wearing no expression of condemnation.
That evening, when they were all in the diwan—Rolf reading, Annie and Gabriel playing cards at a low table—Gabriel nudged Annie’s knee with his foot and nodded toward the door.
She glanced over her shoulder. “What?”
“Your mysterious guest.”
Annie looked around again, and back at him.
Gabriel spread out his hand. “Don’t you think we should be introduced?”
“What are you on about?”
“I just saw her go into the kitchen.”
“Gabriel,” she said wearily.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Dreaming again, am I?”
His sister’s shoulders seemed to retract, come closer to her body. “There’s nobody here except us.”
“In this room, maybe, but there is somebody in the kitchen.”
Annie put down her