“But this is the best bit,” Annie said, flicking a switch in the hall. “Air-conditioning! It’ll make such a difference. It’s pleasant now, but the summers are . . . well, they don’t call this ‘hellish Muscat’ for nothing.”
“How do you cope?”
“By leaving. I’ll get away again this year, for the hottest months. Go to Switzerland and then home. Poor Rolf has to stick it out, though. It’s like a furnace.” She led him down a corridor to one of the bedrooms, where easels were stacked against the walls, and canvases, used and unused, stood in clumps. “And, look, Rolf can have his own studio now. Honestly, I cannot wait to get out of Muttrah.”
“But it’s lovely there. Authentic.”
“Maybe, but that house never felt right to me.”
When they got back home, Annie went to the kitchen to make lunch, while Gabriel stood in the front room facing the wide, narrow window, hands in his pockets. Annie was right. There was something odd about this place. He had come indoors, yet felt as though he was still outside. Warmth permeated his bones, like the heat of direct sunlight, even though he was in the cool indoor umbra. Someone passed through the room behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Whoever it was had gone to the kitchen, but all he could hear was Annie banging about.
Gabriel shivered.
There was something odd about this house.
They were invited out again that night, to a party in the home of soon-to-be-neighbors. Gabriel played it Annie’s way—he chatted and flattered, laughed at jokes he didn’t altogether understand, and frowned in concentration when the conversation turned to the atrocities just north of them, across the Strait of Hormuz.
“Saddam Hussein is as much of a tyrant as the Ayatollah,” said Thomas, a Dutchman, standing with a small group by the outdoor buffet. “They should both be wiped out.”
“I thought he was the good guy,” said Gabriel. It hadn’t impinged much on his existence, the Iran‒Iraq war, but now he was a lot closer to it—uncomfortably so—and he realized the only thing he knew about it was that the Ayatollah was a raving madman.
“Hussein—a good guy?” Thomas exclaimed.
Embarrassment drenched Gabriel; he had said “baksheesh” again.
“He took power in a coup, wiped out his own cohorts, and now the West is throwing him garlands!”
“No, no,” said Jasper, all earnest, “America is neutral! Just like the Soviets.”
Everyone laughed.
“Hussein’s tanks are Soviet,” Thomas explained to Gabriel, “but his intelligence is American.”
“The West has no choice,” Mark said flatly. “If Saddam doesn’t win this war, the Ayatollah’s fundamentalism will flow out of Iran, and God knows where that will lead.”
Gabriel glanced around the walled-in, paved yard, with a solitary tree in the corner, and noticed how the men were all standing together, while the women were chatting indoors, draped across the living room. Voluntary segregation.
“This is propaganda,” said Thomas. “America should not be assisting this dictator. If he’s still in power when this war is done, his own people will pay.”
“They are already paying,” said Jasper, “with their young men.”
“And 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
