The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

Sharif inclined his head. “If he is here, I would like to meet him.”

“Alas, he is not well, Excellency! I have told him to stay in bed, though he was very eager to meet you. We are Sabzi people, Excellency, from the islands,” she said brightly, in an obvious effort to turn the conversation.

“Is your son here now?”

“Yes—no!” the woman began, and then her eyes moved, and her small gasp made Sharif look towards the door of her room. There was the boy, gazing straight at him with an accuse-and-be-damned look. He limped towards his mother and she put an arm around his shoulder, drawing him against her.

“Here is Hani, Excellency!” she said, her voice going up an octave, though she tried to appear calm. “You see he is not so ill that he will stay in bed when a Cup Companion of the Sultan visits!”

She looked anxiously between Sharif and the boy as if expecting him to denounce the boy, and almost wept in relief when instead he said, “You say you are from the Gulf Islands?”

“Yes, Excellency. Our home was the island of Solomon’s Foot. They destroyed our house and drove us out of the island. My husband was arrested. Fifteen months, Excellency, and I have heard no news of him!”

“The Sultan’s people are working to reunite all political prisoners with their families. I hope you will soon hear news of your husband, Mrs. Sabzi.”

“But here we are so far away! Many, many thousand miles, they say. How will my husband find us? Please tell the Sultan that we want to come home.”

Unless she was a miracle of preservation, she was not old enough to be the boy’s mother. Sharif’s gaze raked her face for a resemblance to the boy. Family connections were often constructs in the camps, partly because of Western ignorance of the importance of certain relationships in other cultures, partly because distant relationships increased in importance when many family members had been lost. So great-uncles became fathers, and second cousins became brothers and sisters, to satisfy the requirements of an alien authority.

But he could see no trace of family resemblance at all.

“Your husband, Mrs. Sabzi…” he began.

“I think you have dropped something, Excellency,” the boy interrupted.

The mother choked with alarm.

Sharif glanced down to see his wallet lying against his foot. The boy bent to retrieve it, straightened and, with a level, challenging look, offered it to him.

The director blinked. “Is that your wallet?” he cried in English. “How did it get there?”

“It must have fallen from my pocket,” Sharif replied.

“I doubt it very much,” said the director dryly. “You’d better check to see what’s missing.”

“Shokran,” Sharif said to the boy. Thank you. He took the wallet, his fingers brushing the boy’s with a jolting awareness of his painful thinness. Why didn’t this woman who called herself his mother take better care of her adopted son? And what were the camp authorities about, to allow a child to starve like this?

Sharif flipped the wallet open. The cash was gone. He understood the boy’s deliberate, self-destructive challenge, but instead of anger he felt a deep sorrow.

“Everything accounted for,” he said quietly, pocketing the wallet.

“Excellency, you are a good man!” the mother exploded in a rush of relief, lifted her arm from the boy’s shoulders, seized his hand and kissed it. “We are simple people, and life is so empty here. Our house must be rebuilt, but we are ready for hard work. Only tell us that we may go home!” The boy, meanwhile, looked stunned. His eyes were black with confusion and mistrust as he gazed at Sharif. Kindness completely unsettled him, and that, too, flooded Sharif’s heart with sadness.

Three

Hani sat on a rock and gazed out over the barren plain in the profound darkness, his stomach aching with a hunger that was not for food. A light breeze was blowing from the mountains. The air was dry, with the desert dust and the astringent perfume of a plant whose name he didn’t know combining to create the familiar scent of desolation. Stars glittered in the black, new moon sky overhead, their alien configurations reminding him how far away from home he was. Along the distant highway now and then long fingers of light dragged a lone car through the darkness. The town lay fragmented on the distant horizon, a broken wineglass catching the starlight.

Everything else was night. Behind him, the camp had a ghostly glow, throwing barbed wire shadows on the desert floor, but the rock where he sat hidden shrouded the thin figure.

For the first time in a long time, Hani was thinking about the past. The stranger’s voice had stirred memories in him. Those strange memories he didn’t understand—of a handsome man, a smiling woman…other children. In those memories he had a different name.

Your name is Hani. Forget that other name. You must forget.

He had been obedient to the command. Mostly he had forgotten. In the dim and distant memory that was all that remained—or was it a dream?—life was a haze of gentle shade, cool fountains, and flowers.

She had played in a beautiful courtyard by a reflecting pool, amid the luscious scent of roses carried from flower beds that surrounded it on all sides. In that pool the house was perfectly reflected, its beautiful fluted dome, its tiled pillars, the arched balconies. When the sun grew hot, there were fountains. Water droplets were carried on the breeze to fall against her face and hair.

Now, in this water-starved world, he could still remember the feeling of delight.

And then one day the fountain was silent. He remembered that, and her brother—was it her brother?—his face stretched and pale. There are only two of us now, he had said, holding her tight. I’ll look after you.

Will we watch the fountains again? she had asked, and though her brother had not answered, she knew. They had stayed alone in the silent house, she didn’t know how long. One morning she had awakened to find herself in a strange place and her brother gone.

You must be a boy now, they had told her. Your name is Hani. And when she protested that she already had a name, Forget your old name. That is all gone. Your brother is gone. We are your family now, we will look after you. See, here are your new brothers and sisters.

And he had forgotten the name. He became Hani, a boy, without ever knowing why, and the old life faded. He had shared a bedroom with four others in a small, hot apartment that had no pool, no fountains, no rose beds. If he asked about such things, his stepmother first pretended not to hear, and then, if Hani persisted, grew angry.

Who were the people he remembered? His heart said the tall man was his father, the smiling woman his mother, the other children his sisters and brothers, whose names he could, sometimes, almost remember.

No. We are your family. Here are your sisters and brothers.

Something about the stranger made him remember that life long since disappeared, that life that he had been forbidden to remember. The memory ached in him, as fresh as if the loss were the only one he had suffered, as if the dark years since had never blunted the edge of that grief with more and then more.

The stranger’s voice had been like the voices he had heard long ago, like his father’s, summoning up another world.

Don’t think about that, don’t say anything. You must forget….

Was it a dream only? Had his childish, unhappy mind made it all up? And yet he remembered his father and mother smiling at him, remembered a cocoon of love.

One day, when you are older, you must know the truth. But not now…

And then it was too late. After the bomb, his stepmother had stared at Hani helplessly before she died, her eyes trying to convey the message that her torn, bleeding throat could not speak.

Who were they, the people whose faces he remembered, the memory of whose love sometimes, in the bleakness of a loveless existence, had surged up from the depths of his heart to remind him of what was possible? Where was that home, that he could sometimes see so clearly in his mind’s eye, and why was it all suddenly so fresh before him now?

In the nearest thing to a luxury hotel the town had, Sharif Azad al Dauleh stood on a darkened balcony, a phone to his ear, waiting to hear the Sultan’s voice. Although the desert air was cool, he was naked except for the towel around his hips. Above it the smoke-bronze skin, the long, straight back, the lean-muscled stomach, arms and chest gave him the look of a genie from a particularly beautiful lamp.

“I offer you a mission,” the Sultan had said.

The manservant had brought a tray of cool drinks as the Sultan bent over a document file and opened it. Tall glasses of juice had been poured out and set down, a dish of nuts arranged, invisible traces of nothing at all removed with the expert flick of a white cloth.

On top of the thin sheaf of documents was the photograph of a young child, a girl. Ashraf slipped it off the pile and handed it to Sharif, then sat back, picked up his glass and drank.

The Cup Companion examined the photograph. The child’s eyes gazed at him, trusting and happy, with the unmistakable, fine bone structure around the eyes that was the hallmark of the al Jawadi. Sharif knew that members of the royal family were still surfacing from every point on the globe, but this child he had never seen.

“My cousin, Princess Shakira,” Sultan Ashraf had murmured.

Sharif waited.