His landlady, however, showed up without warning the following evening in the company of a man, Juma, who spoke English and introduced himself as her nephew. Gabriel invited them in; she pulled her abaya around her, strode in and perched on the end of the bench against the wall. Her name was Farida. She had heard reports, Juma explained, of jinn in her brother’s house.
Farida’s eyes wandered around the walls.
“You have questions,” Juma said. He was as thin as a board, had high pointy cheekbones, and wore tiny round spectacles.
“I, umm . . .” If his landlady suspected that he was entertaining loose women, she could have him arrested, but this fragile opportunity could not be wasted. “Things happen,” he mumbled.
“Like what?”
“Glasses of water emptied. Fruit disappearing. A sense, a strong sense, of someone else in the house. Noises.”
Farida’s eyes stopped on him.
“Noises like what?” Juma asked.
“The sea.”
“But the sea—” Juma raised his chin toward the coast.
“No, no—big seas. An ocean. I can hear waves crashing, and voices.”
“Your neighbors,” he suggested.
“It isn’t Arabic I’m hearing. I can’t say for sure what language it is, except that it isn’t Arabic.”
Juma looked skeptical. How could Gabriel explain that he too was entirely skeptical? He stood like a man at an interview while Juma talked to Farida.
“Why are you asking about jinn?”
“I’ve heard that, sometimes, certain houses can have a presence. In Ireland also we have houses that have spirits and others . . . others with a history of strange happenings. I thought maybe this house had some such history.”
The landlady rattled away at her nephew. Good, thought Gabriel. Finally he was getting somewhere. She was agitated. Her brother had perhaps married a jinniya and the jinniya had stayed on. In fact, might that not be why the landlord had gone away—to escape her?
Why was he thinking like this?
They were gabbling. Standing up, Farida announced that she would look around the house and made for the stairwell. Gabriel died a death—the house was a complete tip. She would throw him out for untidiness if nothing else.
“Maybe,” Juma said to him, “it will be necessary to bring someone here to . . . make go away the jinn.”
“You think there is one?”
“We will see.”
“Look, Juma, I don’t really need anything to be done or anyone . . .” interfering, he thought, “. . . getting involved. I’m simply curious about this place.”
“My aunt says there were no jinn in this house before.”
“What about new ones? Can that happen?”
Juma sighed. Probably not much of a believer, Gabriel reckoned. “Yes, they say jinn can come in a house or yard.”
“Why? Why would they come?”
“Sometimes they will come where there is something empty.”
“Empty.”
“Yes.”
Juma’s eyes were cloudy, so it was impossible to tell whether he was very intelligent, but embarrassed by it, or dim, like his eyes. Either way, he was an English speaker and Gabriel would have liked to talk to him more, but Farida came back then, her face wrinkled with . . . something. She spoke to Juma, but her eyes never left Gabriel’s face.
“Your aunt looks concerned,” he said.
“She is worried for your safety.”
Gabriel glanced at his arm. There was no mark where Prudence had bitten him. “She thinks I might come to harm?”
Juma responded with a sort of a sweep of his dishdasha, his body twisting, his hands deep in his pockets.
“Please reassure her that I’ll be fine. I’m interested, that’s all, in the way things work here. I have so much to learn.”
Farida smiled suddenly, a coy, teasing smile, and addressed Gabriel, the language slipping off her tongue like a spell.
“She says, Aisha Qandisha has you by the forelock!”
“Excuse me? Aisha . . . ?”
“Qandisha.” Juma also smiled. “This is a Moroccan jinniya. She makes men go mad.”
“Oh. . . . Great.”
“The men, they go, you know, wandering, always searching for her and hoping she’ll return. Whenever they catch sight of her, they have to have relations with her.”
Farida rattled on some more. “Um, um,” Juma said, nodding. “My aunt says love is possession.”
But I didn’t mention love, Gabriel thought. Or speak of any woman.
“You see,” Juma was warming to the subject, “when men fall in love with a jinniya—if he is struck, mdrub, by a beautiful jinniya, he will lose interest in human women.”
“I see. And what then?”
Juma was matter-of-fact. “These men, they may suffer psychological effects, or even physical.”
Farida pulled her veil closer to her face and moved toward the door, saying with a chuckle, “Aisha Qandisha!”
Closing the door behind them, Gabriel turned. The room was tidy, which it had not been when they had arrived. He went upstairs to see what his landlady would have seen: order, everywhere. His dirty clothes were no longer on the floor of his bedroom, the junk he had dropped around the place had been tidied away; in the kitchen, mugs were upturned on the draining board.
This was the kind of poltergeist he could live with.
Pity, he thought, about the other stuff.
What you say about your parents isn’t quite true, is it?
Gabriel started. He had been asleep, alone, and he woke to hear her say this, or something like it. He was wary of Prudence now. It was no longer a question of who she was but of what she was. Jinn were often capricious. But, then, so was he.
You are angry with them, but you long for their forgiveness.
Perhaps it was his own voice that had woken him. He no longer knew whose thoughts were in his head.
The weather turned up its thermostat. March had given way to April and April was behaving like May. Gabriel swam at work, when he wasn’t meant to, wiped down lavatories, collected empty glasses, and got his fingers
