Love? Gabriel was afraid to move. He was, at that moment, unseen, like a jinn.
“Love?” said Kim. “You mean Sachiv? But I thought that was just a crush. A flirtation.”
“Neither.”
“You were in love with him? But what did you know of him, really?”
“Quite a lot, as it happens. You could even say that his must be the only marriage saved by an infectious disease.”
On their way out of town, in tandem, they passed a group of fishermen who were practicing dances on the promenade. Following Abid’s lead, Gabriel pulled into the curb and they all stepped out to watch. He wandered over to stand with Thea. A few men were sitting on the low wall that ran along the seafront, playing drums or clapping, while others stood in a line, working out steps, trying different formations.
“Orange T-shirts, brown dishdashas,” Kim said into her machine, “hands clapping, movements coordinated, positions secured. The dance acquires shape—a star turning—while the beat gets harder and faster.”
By nightfall, they were near the tip of the country and their rendezvous at a maternity ward—the turtle sanctuary at Ras al-Hadd. After a short rest at their hotel, Gabriel drove his group to the beach at midnight, where they stood about in the parking lot behind some dunes, surrounded by vehicles, tourists and guides, all waiting for the sign—a flash of torchlight—which would confirm the presence of laboring leatherback turtles on the beach. An Omani family got out of the car beside them—some women and a man carrying a very small baby. His dishdasha glowed white in the moonlight, while the women’s long, slim shadows on the gravel were like well-meaning spirit guides. There was no sign of Abid’s party.
When a torchlight flashed on the dunes, Jamil, one of the guides, gathered the crowd of thirty or more around him. “If anyone uses flash, you will be removed from the beach. And do not make noise. Also—there are big craters in the sand, so don’t fall into them, okay? Now we can go. He has found a turtle.”
With only the moon for light, concentration was necessary to avoid the empty nests that perforated the beach. Hetty grabbed Gabriel’s arm. “Heavens!” she said cheerfully, having stumbled into one of the birthing holes. “Twisted ankle, here we come!”
The group gathered in a circle to peer at a turtle digging her nest, skimming her flippers across the sand, pushing it back. Working, digging. It never failed to move Gabriel, the sheer effort involved. Mobile phones were held high, pointed in her direction. Jamil, hunkering behind her, said quietly, “She will lay between eighty and one hundred eggs, but if she thinks the sand is too hot, or too cold, or if she is disturbed, she will go back to the sea and try again later.”
“And they always come back to the beach where they were born?” someone asked.
“Yes. They swim for thousands of miles to give birth.”
“Like salmon,” said another voice.
This turtle failed to deliver. Surrounded, she paused in her work, looked up, thought about it, and scraped her way out of the unfinished depression. People moved back, creating an exit.
“She’s had enough,” Hetty whispered. “Can’t say I blame her.”
The turtle forged her way through the gap in the crowd, her sad earnest eyes reflecting the torchlight, and made as tight a U-turn as a turtle could manage, then took her weight across the sand toward the sea, the birth postponed. “Poor thing,” said Betty. “Now she’ll be in labor even longer.”
A flash of light farther along the strand indicated that another warden had found another turtle; the tourists hastened over. Gabriel followed in his own darkness. He knew the beach well. The Milky Way was bristling and the sea breaking in white gushes. He stood on the outskirts of the crowd, beside the young woman from the parking lot, who was handing her bundle of baby back to her husband, and, from somewhere within this group, he heard the low voice that talked to itself: “. . . this organic prehistoric ritual. These great creatures, which move in the sea like paper drifting, are unwieldy, inelegant lumps on land.”
People were talking loudly, and Jamil had been set upon by an old woman who kept asking questions about the mating rituals of turtles. “Madam,” he said finally, “I am a tourist guide. I do not work here at the sanctuary.”
A dedicated tourist, trying to film the ping-pong eggs plopping into the excavated funnel, pushed his way deeper into the huddle, forcing someone else to back out. She stumbled on the rim of a crater. Gabriel reached out and caught her. “Careful.”
“Jesus!”
He couldn’t see her face, but he knew the feel of her. “Gabriel, actually.”
“Yes. Thanks.” Thea withdrew her elbow from his grasp.
The surf pounded beside them. He sought her eyes in the shadows of her face. “How is our performing turtle doing in there?”
“She’s in full delivery,” Thea whispered. “It’s mortifying. Nothing like the moving, timeless experience I’d envisaged. It’s actually upsetting to be disturbing a natural process that has gone on, right on this spot, for millennia.”
“People have mixed feelings about it.”
“I don’t. It’s intrusive. Horrible. I feel humiliated on her behalf. They’re lifting up her tail!”
“She’s in a trance,” he said gently. “They go into a kind of trance.”
“That doesn’t excuse it.”
“No.”
“Wish I’d been in a trance when I gave birth.”
“You have kids?”
“Two boys. Kieran and Marcus.”
“Careful!” one of the wardens called.
A baby turtle was rushing between the shifting feet. It scurried over the humpy sand, hampered by its own design, desperate to reach the sea. The warden scooped it up in his palm—it was barely two inches long—and put it down away from the tourist stampede, near Thea. “You see,” he said, shining his torch just in front of the hatchling, “see how he follows the light.” Patiently, he showed the baby the way to the sea. Its flippers pulled against the grains
