Even so, the walls were moving in. “Come and get some sun on your face,” he said, more than once. “You’re so pale.”
Her reply never varied. She could not go from there.
The mantra repeated itself softly in his mind when she was with him and when she was not. I cannot go from here.
In her soft company, he only loved, he never thought. But when he was alone, he thought a lot—about how long this could go on and, increasingly, about how to get beyond the impasse where she would go nowhere and see no one else. Prudence was . . . wispy. Wispy, yet firm. He could neither understand her, nor influence her, but outside their cozy playhouse reality knocked. He had to make a living, one way or another. His salary would soon be stopped—he would inevitably be fired from the School of Music—but if he went out to work every day, she might wander off, never to return. Somehow he had to tear her from the anchor of the house and anchor her instead in his life, and if she was indeed a jinniya, he would have to consult with those who could tell him how man and jinn could live together.
For that, he needed to talk to the men in the suq, who could tell him everything he needed to know—if only he could speak their language. Without Arabic, their knowledge was locked away. He could learn it, but not quickly enough to be able to grasp subtleties. How to inquire about the insubstantial with an insubstantial grasp of the language? He needed an interpreter, not only of Arabic but also of folklore, and he had to find one without involving his sister.
His best bet was Ali, a trader who spoke fairly good English and made very good tea. Gabriel had often stopped for a chat on his perambulations, although more recently he had been too eager to be home and passed Ali with a dismissive wave and a long stride. Now, again, he ambled into the suq and stopped at Ali’s stall, where he sold scarves and garments, and accepted a glass of tea and a smoke. They sat for a time, chatting, but it was toward the end of the evening, when night was spreading in and the suq was emptying, that Gabriel asked Ali about jinn.
Ali, it turned out, had many jinn stories, but then so did everyone, and as he told that first tale, with the shops closing around them, others gathered, a few old boys with decayed teeth and sad eyes, who didn’t understand, but nodded and praised God and sometimes added their own wisdom. The stories were convoluted, tangential, but Gabriel got the gist, and in any case enjoyed the throwback to those times, as a child, when he had sat around fireplaces, listening to old folk tell tales of the unsettled dead.
“There was a man, Abdullah,” Ali began, that first time, “from Zanzibar, and he was suffering from illness, but nobody knew what this illness was. He felt sick all the time and he get very thin. His mother, she knew jinn had came into his body and after a few months, she found out who cast that spell—a woman who lived in the town, so they went to see her. When he saw that woman, he said, ‘I know her.’ She used to come to his bed, until he sent her away one day, and this makes her very angry. She cast the spell on him and sent a jinniya to make him suffer. When they got the spirit out of him and Abdullah felt well again, he left to come to Oman to get away from this jinniya. Long journey, but he was okay, until the day the boat is approaching Oman, and there is no one to say he has a job there.” Ali’s watery eyes looked down the alley. “In Muscat, nobody can come out of the boat until he knows someone. Someone who says, ‘I know this man.’”
“Like a sponsor.”
“Yes, but Abdullah, he is left in the fishing boat. . . . He didn’t understand what is happening. He speak Swahili, not Arabic. He didn’t know why they wouldn’t let him get out of the boat and he’s very scared that he has to go back again. But suddenly he is speaking in Arabic. He could not believe it! How he is doing that? So one of the fisherman invited Abdullah to come work with him and stay with his family.
“Until today he does not know how he spoke Arabic, except that it was the jinniya made him do it so that he would like her. And he stayed here. He’s still alive, got kids, good job. Sometimes he used to dream and call the jinniya to come to him.”
“The Zanzibar jinn?”
“Yes. After she helped him know Arabic, he wanted her to come back in his life. He wanted to feel safe. So he called her.”
“Did she come?”
“Sometimes,” Ali said, with a deep nod, looking at the ground. “Sometimes.”
Sometimes, Gabriel thought. A powerful word.
Prudence didn’t show up for several days. Perhaps his insistence that they should go out had bothered her. More likely, she was enjoying a normal existence of proper clothes, plentiful food and regular showers—none of this lying about, being mysterious. But in her absence, the fables that skirted around his reason kept
