But Kim was not yet done. In the yard, unable to let up, she asked Fatima if it was true that humans could sometimes see jinn.
“Of course not,” said Fatima. “It is in the Quran: humans cannot see jinn. They live alongside us, not with us. They are created, like humans, to honor God.”
“That’s not what we’ve been hearing.”
“If you are going to write about this subject, Kim,” Fatima said, a little tartly, “you must take it from a purely Quranic perspective. It is a religious matter.”
That drew a line right under the topic, and with a scrape too, but Kim didn’t hear it. “How about young people?” she blundered on, turning to Salim’s teenage sister. “Do you believe in jinn?”
Thea wished Kim would stop. This was delicate ground, private, a matter of faith. She had gone from being curious to being downright rude.
It was Fatima who took Kim in hand. “Why are you interested in this? It is not tourism.”
“We met a man, an Irishman, who apparently fell in love with a jinn lady. I’m trying to understand, that’s all.”
Fatima ran her finger between her chin and the fabric of her tightly bound scarf. “In love with a jinn?” she said, with a dismissive chuckle. “Jinn feed on bones and feces, and sometimes people leave dead animals, just like that, to decompose, so the jinn can have the bones! I don’t think this is very lovable.” Everyone laughed. “In the stories, men marry jinn! How handy it would be—one minute your wife could be Madonna, then Posh Spice.”
“Because jinn can be whatever you want them to be?” Kim asked. “That would explain some of the strange things that happened to our friend.”
“Listen,” said Fatima, “this is how it is. If you told someone two hundred years ago that men could get in a great steel bird,” she waved her arm in the air, “and be in Tehran two hours later, they would call it magic. If you’d said a hundred years ago that you could write someone a message and they would have it straight away, they would have said, ‘Never! Only Allah can do such things!’ One day, we will find the answers to strange happenings. What used to be magic is not magic anymore. It is science. And in the future we will explain things we cannot explain now.” She stood up. “Come, come, we must go to our uncle’s.”
And so, in another roomy house, more extended family welcomed them.
“Irlanda?” the old uncle said to Thea. “James Joyce!”
“Yes.” She smiled.
He spoke; Salim translated. “He says that many young writers try to be like Joyce, but they fail, because they are not true geniuses like him.”
Sipping her coffee, Thea tried to remember when last she had been asked about Irish writers and not the country’s booming economy. It was a welcome relief.
“He lived in Italy, didn’t he?” Salim asked. “A Portrait of the Artist—I love this book. He chose exile. Exile from nation, religion, family.” He shook his head. “I cannot really understand it. In Oman, family is everything, religion too. This is against everything I believe in, so it is fascinating to me.”
“I believe he felt these things restrained him creatively.”
The conversation then became a general moan about President Bush, the war in Iraq, and the media in general. The West, the uncle declared, had become empty because it had lost all spirituality.
“There’s something in that,” Kim agreed.
On the way out to the car, they heard the unusual cry of a bird hidden in the dusk. “What bird is that?” Thea asked.
“Ah,” said Salim, “we call that the jinn bird.”
“You know,” said Fatima, as they drove away, “you should look up ‘jinn’ in the dictionary. The root of the word—janna—means to hide, conceal, to fall into darkness. Jinaan, that means garden, like a secret place, hidden, Paradise even. Junna . . . protection, like, um, a wall, a shield.” The list of words rolled off her tongue in an absent-minded way. Kim pinged her recorder. Thea looked out at the remains of a highway that had been lifted and carried off by the floods. “Janaan for the heart, the soul. Istajanna—to become covered, concealed. Junna—to become possessed, crazy, because that is hidden, also. It is on the inside, you see?”
“Al junoun funoun,” said Salim. “Madness shows itself in many different ways.”
Gabriel took them to an Indian restaurant, vast and circular, with a panoramic view of the city—car lights filing along highways, minarets glowing under spotlights; suburbs rising and falling over unseen hills, like Chinese lanterns floating on a swell.
It was a curious evening, what with Kim trying to seduce Gabriel into revelations, while he tried to seduce Thea, addressing his answers to her, his arm stretched across the table so that his hand was almost on her elbow.
“So, a successful trip?” he asked Kim.
“Mostly. But I wish we’d got out to see those quicksands.”
“Which ones?”
“The ones that eat up flocks of sheep. I asked Abid, but he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He told us about a European couple getting lost last year and dying in their car, but they didn’t sink, so it can’t have been the same place.”
“They died in their car?” Thea asked, aghast.
“It happens all the time,” Gabriel said. “People die from exposure and stupidity.”
“Tourists?”
“Ill-prepared tourists and foreign workers. Guys out at the oilfields. They figure they can take a shortcut across the sands because they know where they’re going, but they don’t consider the monotony of the landscape—the same features
