She longed to phone her mother, but didn’t want to alarm them at home, when there was nothing they could do and probably nothing to be worried about, although Reggie was clearly concerned. There were no health facilities he trusted. “Go into hospital here,” the saying went, “and you’ll come out with something worse.” The hotel had a doctor on call, though, and after two days without improvement he was summoned.
He looked like Einstein: white hair, long silver mustache, and a pocket watch. A lovely man, chatty. He had trained in Russia, he told Thea, and spoke four languages, but he didn’t know what to make of her symptoms. His diagnosis was unexpected: “You are homesick.”
“But I don’t want to go home.”
“Nausea, no appetite, this is symptomatic of being upset.”
“I’m very happy here.”
He smiled. “Perhaps you are in love.”
Perhaps you’re right, she thought, since she was certainly not pining for Dublin’s city streets. Her determination to get well was rooted in her dread of being forced to leave Iraq—but love. . . . Love could certainly disable appetite, and romantic turmoil had a habit of lodging itself in the stomach, but why then could she not drink? Einstein had no answer, but prescribed some pills, insisting, still, that the source of her indisposition was emotional, not physical.
So she continued, sick, and becoming more so.
Sachiv called up whenever no one was about, and fussed and flapped, feeling her forehead and urging her to drink water, lots of water. He seemed slightly panicked, as was she.
Unbidden, Kim moved into Thea’s room to help her through the dark hours, going with her on the relentless treks to and from the bathroom, where Thea delivered nothing into the bowl. They pondered what was wrong with her and cursed her rotten luck, because with every long, slow, miser-able day that passed like this, the risk of being sent home grew stronger. One evening Kim took her for a walk around the pools. The air would help, they told one another. It didn’t. Thea felt wretched. Kim’s arm linked hers. “I guess the woman who sweeps was right. There was a shadow over you, the other day.”
They walked back into the hotel slowly, both quiet, both scared.
What the hell was this?
Sachiv kept phoning. “Can I send some tea?”
“Coke,” she said. “Send up some Coke.”
“There is no Coke in—”
“All of Iraq. Yeah, yeah, I know.”
On the fourth afternoon, Reggie came. “You know you can be repatriated. You have only to say the word.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Okay, but bear in mind that it’ll take up to four days to get you an exit visa. And if you’re not improving, that’s quite a long wait.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
He nodded grimly and left the room.
Sickness and Iraq raged battles over her; Sachiv too was in the mix. And Kim, and the desert, and the Tigris, and the tangerine dawns. . . . Impossible. So much more to learn, so much still to do. Too much to do without. Leaving would be as insupportable as nausea, and every time she kneeled over the toilet and threw up the nothing from her gullet, she hoped that this would be the last time, that she was purging the dregs of this mystery disease. It would pass. Soon she would feel a change, a turn, and then she would wake, recovered.
Despairing, she longed to be in the office with Kim and the girls, to be anywhere other than this hotel sickroom, especially after another fiasco. Reggie thought he had sent for a doctor from one of the hospitals, but a very young man arrived in Thea’s room, claiming he had to examine her. She backed away, told him to get out.
A mere ambulance driver, it turned out, trying his luck—and once again Reggie and Sachiv had cause to hang their heads on Thea’s account.
Soon afterward, Reggie stood with his hands in his pockets at the end of her bed. “You should go home, Thea. Get this sorted, whatever it is, and come back in a few weeks.”
“No.” Orderly palm trees lined along the Euphrates. “I’ll be fine.” Babylon, where the voices still whispered and the brick foundations of houses lay like skeletons in the earth. The Marshes—the Marshes, of which there was no like in the world—the arched mudhif, the women punting through the reeds in their tarada—it all had to be seen, had yet to be seen! And the deserts, where she had once glimpsed in the distance a nomad encampment, with their tents and flocks, and the sand whipping over them. No. She could not let it out of her grasp. “I can’t go, Reggie.”
After he left, Thea lay thinking about the evening they had helped fishermen pull in their catch on the shores of Lake Habbaniyah. The net was so vast that another group of men, pulling at the other end, were so far along the beach that their grunting could barely be heard. The Westerners, quickly exhausted, had soon collapsed on the sand, but Thea had watched and photographed: the men, their eyes glinting, had rolled their skirts above their knees and wrapped the rope many times around their chests, which were protected by bits of cloth, and as they heaved and leaned, their feet slid in the muddy sand. The net stretched to such a distance that it would be hours yet before the catch was in, but the fishermen, hauling their weight against the lake, sang to keep the rhythm flowing, and, weeks later, Thea could still, almost, hear their song.
Good times. Good times in Iraq.
That was the weekend they had spent at a holiday complex full of vacant houses skirting the big, featureless lake. There was an impressive restaurant, designed like a Bedouin tent, which had
