“We must take you to Nakhal,” Rolf said to Gabriel over breakfast the next morning. “It’s a beautiful spot, with hot springs and a fort. I like to paint there.”
Whenever he wasn’t ordering spare parts for heavy plant machinery down at the refinery, Rolf was painting. Self-taught, and good, he was neither immensely successful nor struggling, but he was generally preoccupied with his canvases and colors, and Annie knew how to live with that. She had come well prepared for life with an obsessive.
“Great, yeah,” said Gabriel. Tone of voice was everything, he was learning. In Cork, he hadn’t spoken much of late. No one had wanted to hear what he had to say, and they had had nothing to say to him, so he had been getting the silent treatment, far and wide. But not this far, he hoped. Here, he would surely find his voice again.
“So what will you do today?” Rolf asked him.
“I have to go to the house.” Annie wiped some crumbs off the table and into her palm. “Check on the painters.”
“I’ll go with you, so,” Gabriel said, looking around the neat front room. “I don’t know how you can leave this place, though.”
“It’s too small,” said Rolf. “The villa is very nice. You’ll like it.”
Gabriel didn’t like it. It was in a new suburb made up of low houses with high walls, big gates, and yards too young to have sprouted so much as a weed. The house was spacious, open-plan, and had a huge window overlooking an uncultivated space, the kitchen was wall-to-wall with dapper American units, and the three square bedrooms each had their own bathrooms.
“But this is the best bit,” Annie said, flicking a switch in the hall. “Air-conditioning! It’ll make such a difference. It’s pleasant now, but the summers are . . . well, they don’t call this ‘hellish Muscat’ for nothing.”
“How do you cope?”
“By leaving. I’ll get away again this year, for the hottest months. Go to Switzerland and then home. Poor Rolf has to stick it out, though. It’s like a furnace.” She led him down a corridor to one of the bedrooms, where easels were stacked against the walls, and canvases, used and unused, stood in clumps. “And, look, Rolf can have his own studio now. Honestly, I cannot wait to get out of Muttrah.”
“But it’s lovely there. Authentic.”
“Maybe, but that house never felt right to me.”
When they got back home, Annie went to the kitchen to make lunch, while Gabriel stood in the front room facing the wide, narrow window, hands in his pockets. Annie was right. There was something odd about this place. He had come indoors, yet felt as though he was still outside. Warmth permeated his bones, like the heat of direct sunlight, even though he was in the cool indoor umbra. Someone passed through the room behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Whoever it was had gone to the kitchen, but all he could hear was Annie banging about.
Gabriel shivered.
There was something odd about this house.
They were invited out again that night, to a party in the home of soon-to-be-neighbors. Gabriel played it Annie’s way—he chatted and flattered, laughed at jokes he didn’t altogether understand, and frowned in concentration when the conversation turned to the atrocities just north of them, across the Strait of Hormuz.
“Saddam Hussein is as much of a tyrant as the Ayatollah,” said Thomas, a Dutchman, standing with a small group by the outdoor buffet. “They should both be wiped out.”
“I thought he was the good guy,” said Gabriel. It hadn’t impinged much on his existence, the Iran‒Iraq war, but now he was a lot closer to it—uncomfortably so—and he realized the only thing he knew about it was that the Ayatollah was a raving madman.
“Hussein—a good guy?” Thomas exclaimed.
Embarrassment drenched Gabriel; he had said “baksheesh” again.
“He took power in a coup, wiped out his own cohorts, and now the West is throwing him garlands!”
“No, no,” said Jasper, all earnest, “America is neutral! Just like the Soviets.”
Everyone laughed.
“Hussein’s tanks are Soviet,” Thomas explained to Gabriel, “but his intelligence is American.”
“The West has no choice,” Mark said flatly. “If Saddam doesn’t win this war, the Ayatollah’s fundamentalism will flow out of Iran, and God knows where that will lead.”
Gabriel glanced around the walled-in, paved yard, with a solitary tree in the corner, and noticed how the men were all standing together, while the women were chatting indoors, draped across the living room. Voluntary segregation.
“This is propaganda,” said Thomas. “America should not be assisting this dictator. If he’s still in power when this war is done, his own people will pay.”
“They are already paying,” said Jasper, “with their young men.”
“And he’s building a nuclear reactor,” said Thomas. “And using chemical weapons, according to the Iranians.”
Gabriel was aghast. “Chemical weapons?”
“Yes,” said Thomas. “We seem to be going backward, not forward.”
“World War One rolled up with a nuclear threat,” Jasper said grimly. “Something for everyone.”
That night, as the night before, Gabriel remained trapped in restless sleep, his dreams intrusive, his consciousness too close to the surface. This was the very state he feared—the wretched half-sleep that suspended and exposed him. That was when blackness came. . . . Live burial, coffin closed, closed on the living, sinking into quicksand, drowning in sand, in water, mud, like Flanders, Flanders-like mud. . . . Every type of burial. Always burial, always alive. It rushed at him from the depths whenever he was off his guard and had lost grasp of his own thoughts. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t contain his thinking.
He opened his eyes. Turned. Threw off the sheet. Silence hummed in the background, in this quiet, quiet town. He wanted to switch it off. Silent Night Effect: Off.
Several times he shook himself, like a dog, head to tail, to throw off the sleeplessness. It will wear itself
