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  “How long is his bath?” Ian asked.

  “Twenty minutes or so,” Gazi said, hardly enough time to run the key over to the locksmith.

  “You have to make an impression,” I said. “In wax or something. I’ve seen it in movies.” Ian gave me a “We’ll talk about this later” look.

  “Suma, at least agree that you won’t tell Mr. Al‐Sayad that you’ve seen his wife,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Je ne sais rien. I need to think, I need to ask,” she said, opening her arms dramatically, as if to invite divine intervention. Ian, exasperated, stomped out of the room, followed by Gazi, leaving it to Posy and me to drink our tea with Suma and utter mollifying sentences about poor Gazi and her terrible life. Suma seemed ruffled, even distraught, though having refused to help us, she was presumably spiritually clean and soon relapsed into a mood of surly serenity, if such can exist. I wish I had realized how actually distraught she felt, with her murderous brother in town, her mother sick, being pressured to filch things from Khaled’s safe. I knew nothing of her life really.

  We switched the subject to the medical examination her brother had proposed. Here she was more tractable. She sighed.

  “Maybe I should agree. I refused before. Why should Muslim girls have to endure these things?” But it seemed she meant, more or less, that non-Muslim girls should be as prepared to prove their virginity as Muslim girls were; it still hadn’t occurred to her that virginity was not an ideal, universally prized quality. It hardly seemed the time to reexamine that old subject.

  “You know what’s involved?”

  “Of course I know what’s involved. Has my mother ever spoken of anything else? ‘Sumaya will not take the gym class. Sumaya, never jump over anything, you might break your precious puce, then your life will be over!’ If I lose it, her friends will despise her, people will laugh at the family; I am the sole bearer of the family reputation, it’s all up to me. Your father and I want the best for you. No nice boy—no nice Algerian boy—French boys out of the question—no one will marry a girl who’s been spoiled.” I couldn’t help but think how horrible the men must be, brought up to think this way. No wonder they had produced the ugly writings in Arabic—“Know, O Vizir (God be good to you!)”—about those bad exhalations and cures for a wide vagina and so on.

  “How awful,” said Posy, as if reading my mind. “I’d have given mine away tout de suite just to end the matter.” I supposed she was fishing, to find out what the doctor would likely find in Suma’s case.

  “It’s not simple,” said Suma. “You can’t just live for yourself. I do care about my family. Luckily we had the sorceress in.” Suma smiled. “That calmed my mother. The sorceress puts a sort of spell on you that keeps you intact.” Sometimes ’s moral certitudes were more French than the French, but sometimes she seemed to be speaking ironically, and I never knew which.

  “We can call someone if you like. Is there a special doctor? You’ll have to see about this yourself,” said Ian, who was back but was clearly uncomfortable with this female subject.

  It was a strange conversation for Christmas, and of course Christmas brings back all Christmases, all incidences of family love, all memories of infantile credulity, the better to throw in relief the bleak present reality of a furtive Christian holiday in an Islamic country, a tenuous relationship with an English man of uncertain loyalty, and a clandestine job of indistinct utility and considerable improbability—all this a metaphor for real life, maybe, but not conducive to a mood of happiness.

  33

  Brabantio: Are they married, think you?

  Roderigo: Truly, I think they are.

  Brabantio: Oh Heaven! How got she out?

  —William Shakespeare, Othello, act 1, scene 1

  Of course we knew it was only a matter of time before Khaled learned where Gazi was; there was no real possibility of hiding her, only of protecting her behind our fortress walls. We lived with the constant expectation of a furious Khaled Al‐Sayad arriving on our doorstep, so that it was almost a relief when it happened, a few days after Suma’s visit. He drove up, parked outside the outer gate, and confronted the gate boy, a fourteen-year-old, who stuck to his instructions about not opening up.

  So Khaled just came in through the smaller door at the side and walked into the compound and up to the house in plain view of anyone in the garden, which included me, waiting for Rashid, who was bringing the car around. Khaled was wearing jeans and a sport coat, and he seemed calm. Turning away from the door while he waited for someone to answer it, he saw me standing by the drive and waved. The door opened behind him, one of the maids, who said something, shook her head, spread her hands, saying what ever she’d been told to say. The door closed, and Khaled began to walk toward me.

  Of course I’d planned to lie when this happened. But when he came up, he seemed so completely informed, there was no point. Just as I was trying to think of how to circumvent the “I know you know my wife is here” part of the conversation inevitably to come, he said directly, “What do you think I should do?” With his beard, longish hair, and anguished, duped expression, he looked a little like the Jesus of Italian painting. It was a look of almost sweet resignation, as if to say “What a fool I’ve been, with my fancy American-formed ideas of female liberation. My friends are always telling me I should beat the shit out of her.”

  He didn’t look like he was going to kill her, though, and everyone knows that it’s often these nice guys and long-suffering spouses who somehow most invite the indifference and infidelity of their mates.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “These things—”

  “I can’t call the police, I can’t break down the door. Maybe I can call the police, I could say kidnapping.”

  “Everyone would just say—”

  “Well, God curse her, just tell her to go to hell,” he said, his voice breaking like a teenager’s. This seemed like a lame curse to me. He didn’t look frightening or murderous, he looked like a man in pain.

  “I’m sorry,” I said stupidly, and of course I was sorry, he didn’t know the half of it. Had he known the half of it, maybe he would have commiserated with me; we could have had at least a misery-loves-company kind of conversation. He looked at me rather wildly for a second more, then walked off down the path, and just then Rashid drove up anyhow.

  In the car, I said to Rashid, “Do you know who that was?”

  “The husband of the new lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “He who can’t control his women is a fool,” said Rashid. “ ‘Leave her ye in the sleeping‐place and beat her.’ ”

  I had begun to think of how nice it would be for me if Gazi got her passport and could fly off somewhere out of my life; the idea of Khaled’s key began to torment me. It would be easy to creep in and get it, if all was as Gazi had described it, and easy to make a wax impression, and get another key made, and open the safe and get the passport. Ian had only been speaking with bravado when he said he’d go get it, but I thought about it in earnest. As a clandestine action, it should not have been beyond me. Not only for reasons of love did I think about it, either; it was a sort of professional challenge, though I also knew it was absolute folly to take chances for merely personal reasons like getting rid of Gazi.

  I was obliged to confide in Posy to a certain extent, and she agreed it would be exciting to steal Gazi’s passport for her. We would go visit Suma, to discuss her virginity test or her brother, and Posy would distract her. It had to be during Khaled’s bath, and he would never know we were there anyhow. The keys would be on the dresser; it was the work of a minute. It wasn’t clear how we’d keep Suma from knowing, though.

  “You could ask to use the loo,” Posy said. “She and I’ll be talking.”

  “What about the other maids and people in the house? And the kids?” There were things to be worked out, certainly. We talked about this a few times, then let it drop, but I got Gazi to draw me a floor plan, and she was enthusiastically behind the idea.r />
  “An easy thing. Khaled is a predictable man. After afternoon prayers, he goes with his telephone into the bath, and there talks to Saudis and does various deals and talks to his office while soaking in the bath. How long he takes depends on what he has to do, but it is never less than one half-hour.”

  “What do the maids wear at your house?” I asked.

  From her stare, she thought this was an odd question. “Why doesn’t Suma help me?” she cried. “What have I done to make her angry? Nothing! She has to write a few letters in French for Khaled, type a little, she has her dinner with us, not the children, she has some time off every day.”

  “If I dressed up like a maid… ,” I said. I could imagine the safety of the black robe, the veil, my hair covered.

  “The maids would not go into Khaled’s room during his bath,” she said. “Never when he was in there.”

  This was two days after Christmas. Taft had told me to be ready on Thursday to drive the van to Rabat: I should set up my excuses for being gone all day. He wouldn’t say why we were going to Rabat, though I knew we intended to pick up our “subject” then. I wondered if Taft didn’t altogether trust me and thought I would tell the colonel our plans. Or maybe he didn’t trust the colonel. If the colonel knew what we were up to, he would have time to warn Amid, and then if Amid wasn’t where Taft had determined he would be, we would know he’d been warned. The leak would point to me having told the colonel and would also mean that the colonel was in touch with Amid.

  But I did tell the colonel, and I will always wonder whether I was right. At the time, though, I had no paranoid suspicions and appreciated Taft giving me warning to allow for me to set up a cover story about going to visit a literacy program near Rabat.

  34

  One paradox of intelligence… is a further inherent problem in intelligence calculations. Certain military operations seem too risky to be taken seriously; yet precisely because of the tendency to discount extraordinarily high-risk operations as impossible, the risk involved is actually minimal.

  —Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

  On Monday afternoon, Posy and I walked over to the Al‐Sayad compound to tell Suma about our success in organizing the virginity test. Ian’s maid Miryam, who was in Posy’s confidence, had found a special doctor. “Miryam says, ‘Guaranteed results,’ ” Posy said. “Meaning, presumably, he finds what you hope he’ll find.” We wondered if it would be expensive and whether we should offer to pay.

  “The brother should pay if it’s so important to him,” Posy said, “but of course we’ll pay. I wonder if she is a virgin?”

  “Growing up in France? I can’t guess. Amid obviously thinks not.”

  We had discussed virginity tests with Gazi. “Girls are mortally afraid of them. They faint and scream with pain,” she said.

  “Why pain?” Posy had asked. “Are Muslim girls anatomically different from us?” Gazi had peered at her, as if unsure whether she was being made fun of.

  “Not at all,” she said.

  “Way more hung up about it,” I said.

  Gazi said, “I’m not sure I understand that expression.”

  “It’s so disgusting,” said Posy again now as she lumbered along. “I just couldn’t wait to not be a virgin, just to put it behind me, could you?” Not really. It had never been a focus of my thoughts, and not being one had not changed the essential me. But for girls like Suma, their lives were shadowed before and after the big event by the irrevocable, desperate step they were taking, and God knew what psychological damage was foisted on them by all these layers of rather dirty beliefs, shared by their mothers, brothers, fathers, friends. How could they ever shake this dirtiness off? All the smug disciples of cheerful, positive sexuality smirked with us from our corner, from D. H. Lawrence to the manuals we were given in seventh grade sex‐ education class, preaching its beauty and naturalness, while scraggly imams thundered at the poor Muslim girls about its forbidden nature and their mothers examined their underwear.

  “Have you ever noticed, in the Koran, if you substitute the word ‘cow’ for the word ‘woman,’ it still makes perfect sense? ‘Beat them, and then if they mind you, leave them alone,’ things like that,” Posy said.

  I was having trouble walking as slowly as Posy these days. My steps would run ahead; I would have to slow and wait for her. She was aware of this and cannot have been unaware of herself as an example of the pitfalls of nonvirginity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just as big as a cow. I can hardly put on my shoes.”

  When we drew nigh the Al‐Sayads’, their gatekeeper, seeing us, vanished inside, then came back out and opened the driveway gate, although we were on foot and could have gone through the door at the side. We had come at Khaled’s bath time, but I wasn’t committed in my heart to trying to get the key; I just planned to see how it went.

  Suma was waiting in the hall; perhaps she had risen to the post of official hostess in Gazi’s absence. She asked us in, not into the living room, or wherever the center of the house hold was, but into a room off the hall we had seen before. I tried to review the floor plan Gazi had drawn me, but it was turned around, and I had to re orient it in my mind. Either Gazi had drawn it wrong on purpose or had misremembered; it was just backward. If we’d come in the main entrance, then the kitchens were off to the left of this office, not the right, the bedrooms behind the court to the right, not the left, and so on. I didn’t think Gazi would mislead me, it was too important to her, but it was hard to reverse the plan in my mind.

  Posy began telling Suma about Miryam’s efforts and the doctor and so on. “You don’t seem thrilled,” she said, her French less fluent than mine but not bad. “Thrilled…”

  “Bouleversée,” Suma said. “Non. Oui, I’m insulted my family would think I’m so dumb that I would have a romance and throw away everything. I would not. I have my plans. But I do think it’s unfair that Muslim girls are held to standards other girls aren’t. Mais c’est comme ça. We are the winners too, to have our ideals and our faith.” She went on in this vein, the great unfairness of it, but it was clear that Suma thought there was something to virginity all the same, some idea of its sanctity that to us was just an excuse to put conditions on womens’ lives and control them.

  “Men are privileged in all religions and women inferior, it is the same in all,” Suma said. “They have twisted the Koran to mean things it doesn’t really say.”

  “One thing,” said Posy. “Supposing—even allowing that you aren’t worried about what the doctor will say…” I could see she was searching for a tactful way of saying this. “How do you know that you have a, well, an intact membrane? Anything can pop it, horse back riding, bikes, Tampax. Some people don’t have them in the first place?”

  “ ‘Sumaya, don’t lose your trésor,’ ” Suma said in her mother’s voice.

  “It’s nothing to regret. There’s a first time for every single thing in life,” I said, “and usually each new thing improves you.” I was thinking of the first time I drove a car or shot a gun.

  “My first brain surgery,” said Posy. “My first case of botulism.”

  “But you know what I mean.”

  “Well, when do I do it?” Suma asked. “I’m perfectly aware of what’s involved, it’s only a matter of a piece of paper acceptable to my parents, if that’s what it will take. Before, I said no, but…”

  “I don’t think you should do it,” said Posy suddenly. “Sod them, it’s so demeaning.”

  “May I use the toilette?” I asked, jumping up. She would probably send me to the powder room along the hall to the left. That would be near the living room, and it would be necessary to go out into the courtyard and across it to the first set of French doors, which we could actually see from the room where we were sitting, but Suma not from where she sat with her back to it. She rose and led me to the door.

  “The second door right there.”

  This caper seemed immensely foolhardy and risky, though noth
ing was really at stake, nothing fatal anyway. I was wearing a dark dress and in my bag had a black headscarf, in case anyone glancing out saw me. I put it on in the bathroom and tucked in my bright hair. I have the theory that women are somewhat invisible, especially in a house hold where there are lots of maids and visitors.

  Also in my bag was a pat of dental wax, melted down from the wax pencils in my kit of stuff. On the dresser would be a bunch of keys; Allah was going to help me know which one was the key to the safe, I was going to take an impression of it, and it would only take a few seconds. Posy met my eyes, so I knew she would keep talking, discussing Suma’s fate with her and organizing how we’d have to send a car from our house so no one at the Al‐Sayads’ would know where she was going.

  I scuttled across the courtyard, a distance of maybe forty feet, and opened the French door I thought would lead to Khaled’s room and did lead into a small foyer with an easy chair and magazines, like a shrink’s waiting room, with a door at either end. If the floor plan was truly reversed, the left-hand one would be the bedroom. I hesitated before opening that door, listening, and heard nothing. I prayed the door wouldn’t squeak. If someone was inside I’d say “sorry” boldly and walk away.

  No one was inside. It was dim, dark, the shutters closed, in the desert way I can’t get used to. The bed, grandiose headboard, neatly made with a leopard‐printed velvet spread; two doors, behind one of which, presumably, was Khaled in his bath. I thought I dimly heard splashing. The dresser sat between the two doors, so that I’d have to steal across the room and not rattle the keys, if they were there.