“And I thought you’d come to save me.”
Later, she said.
“But I need saving right now.”
Again soft-spoken, she went on, What’s left of you is for others. Your sister needs you.
“And you need to stop talking. You know nothing about anything.”
You buried him. That’s what I know.
As they came around a bend in the road from Nizwa, the huge fort at Bahla came fully into view, standing proud of its oasis against a backdrop of copper mountains. Annie was quiet, and when Bahla’s ancient wall came out to meet them, curving around the plantations, Gabriel could feel her anxiety. He squeezed her forearm. She stared ahead. Sabah and Marie were chattering in the back. They had told Rolf they were taking a picnic and had left for Nizwa, on the other side of the Hajar, then headed out toward Bahla, known for sorcery, magic, and jinn.
“In Bahla,” Sabah said, “you should keep your head lowered and not look at anyone. They might give you the evil eye.”
“What will happen, exactly?” Annie asked. “At this thing. I won’t be the main act, will I?”
Sabah patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry. There will be others. She will recite verses over you, from the Holy Quran, and give you a little stone or something.”
“A stone? Like a talisman?”
“Or an amulet,” said Marie, fanning herself. “Golly, it’s warm for April. Turn up the air-con, Gabriel.”
In the village, Sabah asked for directions, first from a man on a donkey, then from two Bedouin, in crinkly calf-length dishdashas wearing belts and turbans and carrying rifles, who were themselves looking for a bus stop.
“Getting to these places is the easy bit,” said Marie. “Actually finding the right spot takes much longer.”
Gabriel did his best to follow Sabah’s directions: “We have to go down that road.”
“Which road?”
“Back that way.”
They were looking for the home of a woman who performed exorcisms and would be holding court for three days. She had a good hit rate with infertility. There were two types of exorcism, Gabriel had learned: legitimate, carried out according to correct Islamic practice by holy men, and the rest, performed by anyone who had a reputation for cures and magic. This was a magic woman; a witch, in his view.
He had to get out of the jeep several times to knock on doors so that Sabah could ask for directions from the back seat, only to be sent off in another direction, but Sabah seemed confident that they were homing in on their target.
When, finally, she instructed Gabriel to stop, they parked in a back street and followed Sabah, her narrow ankles and dusty sandals hurrying along under her abaya, down a dusty track to a mud-brick house. The door opened onto a courtyard where a woman, swathed in blue and black and wearing the most intimidating, and alluring, burqa—beak-like leather strips masking her face—immediately screeched at Gabriel and shooed him away. This was women’s business. His gut tightened when Annie stepped into the courtyard where, beyond the heavy wooden door, he glimpsed clay pots and baskets stacked against a wall. The door closed behind his sister and her friends.
He was adrift, alone in this place. He grabbed a bottle of water from the jeep and set off along a path with a high mud wall on one side, which took him into the palm grove, where he followed the falaj. It whispered with a thin stream of water. The shade was calming. There was something soft about this country, he thought. The landscape was harsh, by and large, but these oases, the cover of palms and the trickle of water, and the kindness of the people, in town and out of it, made him increasingly reluctant to leave. So much was happening in Oman: Qaboos was educating and modernizing, and while there were slim pickings for a piano teacher, Gabriel was sure he could find work. Proper work. The life Annie and Rolf led—beach parties, barbecues, and lunches—held little appeal, but his own lifestyle did: sitting in the suq with Ali, waking to the call to prayer, watching dhows bob in the harbor. Oman, he realized, as he wandered among the trees, had brought him a kind of contentment, which he had believed he would never experience again.
And he had yet to see the desert, learn the language, know the people.
The high ramparts of the fort loomed above the gaps in the palmtops, so he headed in that direction and emerged at the foot of the promontory on which it stood. It looked like a Crusader stronghold, perched on its hill, but it was being watered down, year by year, during the rainy season, and its walls were melting into one another, so that the whole edifice was doomed to collapse. Gabriel found the best approach and scrambled up to the base, climbing over rocks and sliding on scree, followed for a time by a set of children, who slithered away before he reached the point where lumpy stone became a smooth mud-brick wall rising to battlements. High above, windows that had lost the rooms from which to appraise their view stood bravely in an unsupported wall, like a mask held away from a face. Gabriel’s ankles strained at an angle. Steadying himself, with one hand on the hot brick, he reached the tower on the corner. What a lovely old wreck, he thought, falling apart like a rotting galleon on a bay.
Sweat soaked into his shirt, cooling him. Below, the palm groves concealed houses and alleys, and as he slid and stepped down, he wondered how the hell he would find Annie again.
Back in the shade, the trees were at first like a crowd gathering around to protect him from the sun’s hitman-aim, but then he began to feel increasingly small, shrunken, and the palms no longer appeared kindly. They didn’t seem to acknowledge his vulnerability, and if they rushed at him, as he felt they might,
