The Fierce and Tender Sheikh
Was it that he was finally doing something, however small? He would save one soul, pluck one suffering child from the nightmare of wasted, desolate life he saw.
Sharif suddenly felt how much of a toll the weeks of bearing witness to so much suffering had taken on his inner reserves.
He was glad to be going home. He needed a breather.
“Home?” Hani whispered. “Take me home?”
The vision of the fountain trembled before his mind’s eye, and his heart thudded with hope.
Sharif realized his mistake. This was the most difficult interview he had ever conducted, and he hoped he would never have another like it.
“Home to Bagestan.”
But the child was lost in a dream. “Is my mother there? My father?”
Sharif swallowed. Allah, what had made him think he could handle this himself? “I don’t think so, Hani.”
“They died,” Hani agreed, hollowly. For a long moment the boy gazed at him, with an expression almost of worship in the dark, hungry eyes. “Are you my brother?” he whispered.
The question shook him.
“No,” he said gently. “I am not your brother.”
Hani bit his lip to hold back the sudden, urgent tears.
“Who am I? Do you know who I am?”
“I’m sorry, Hani. All I have are questions, like you. If there is anything you can tell me, it may help to find out who you are. Do you remember any names?”
He hadn’t meant to start like this. His plan had been to say the minimum possible—only what was necessary to get the boy aboard the plane. But in the face of such a deep and urgent need to know, his resolve failed.
The eyes were liquid with sadness as Hani shook his head. “I had to forget all the names, when I was very small. I don’t remember any, not even my brothers’ and sisters’. They said someone would kill me if I spoke the names. A bad man.”
Sharif struggled to keep what he felt from showing on his face. Although there had been many victims, only one group of people in Bagestan had been in danger from Ghasib on the strength of name alone—members of the royal family.
“Who said it?”
“My—she said she was my mother, but I knew she wasn’t. I always thought of her, in my heart, as my stepmother. But I wasn’t allowed to say so.”
A strange, powerful silence surrounded them. Outside the director’s office the usual sounds of the camp were dimmed, as though the air had become too thin to carry them.
“What was your stepfamily’s name?”
Hani was holding his breath. The world seemed to still its own breath with his. Somehow, even before he spoke the name, he sensed that this one word had the power to change everything.
“Bahrami,” he breathed.
The name fell into the silence like a cut diamond into a still pond.
This time Sharif could not stifle his reaction, because every atom of body and soul was electrified. He could only stare at the boy.
“Bahrami.” He repeated the word softly. “Arif al Vafa Bahrami.”
“Yes!”
Suddenly all the torment of his missing past boiled up in him.
“Tell me! Tell me who they were! A man and a woman, and other children, and a house with a fountain. Roses and…so many roses. Who were they?”
Sharif swallowed hard. Pity, he found, tore at the heart with eagle’s claws.
“Hani, I think—please understand that we can’t be sure—that your father might have been Mahlouf Jawad al Nadim. Does the—”
His heart kicked so hard his body jerked. Shivers ran over his skin. “My father? Is that my father’s name? Is he—is he alive, then? Did he send you to find me?”
“I’m sorry, Hani, no. He died many years ago. Does the name sound familiar?”
He shook his head, half blinded by tears. Was that his name, his father’s name, words he didn’t know at all? “Why don’t I know it, if it was my father’s name? My own name,” he added softly, and then repeated it, as if to test the flavour. “Mahlouf Jawad al Nadim. My father.”
“You must have been very young when they died,” he suggested consolingly. “Maybe you never knew it.”
Sharif turned to his briefcase and drew out the Princess Shakira file. Watched by Hani with huge dark eyes, he opened it. “I want to show you a photograph,” he said quietly. “It may be that she was also living with the Bahramis. Do you remember this face?”
He drew out the photograph and set it in front of Hani on the low table, watching the boy’s face closely, noting the terrible differences that hunger, horror and deprivation had created in two faces with such a strong family resemblance.
The child was silent a long time, staring at the picture. Then one tiny jewel teardrop fell, and landed on Princess Shakira’s cheek. It lay on the photograph quivering and sparkling in a ray of sun. Hani looked up into Sharif’s face, swallowed, and wiped his cheek with one thin hand.
“What was her name?” the boy whispered. “What was her name?”
Sharif saw it then, finally. Not a strong family resemblance, no. Much more than that. Now that he saw it, it only amazed him that it had taken so long.
He spoke very, very softly, as if the air itself might break.
“Shakira,” he said. “Your name is—Shakira.”
Four
“Shakira.”
The name seemed to rush all around the room, crazily, like a whirlwind, before striking her heart a powerful, staggering blow. Her mouth opened in a slow, soundless gasp.
A spiral of light burned in her, wrapping her heart, spinning outward to warm her whole being and blast through the coldness of years, light the darkness, fill the emptiness. She stood up without knowing it, gazing at Sharif, then down at the photograph, then at Sharif again.
“Shakira.” She said it again, and then, inside, she heard what she had yearned and strained to hear for so many years: her mother’s voice speaking her own true name. And she saw the fountain as if it were there in front of her, blocking out the drab office with its ugly, utilitarian furniture; and the scent of water, the wonderful scent of water on desert air, and of roses trembling under the droplets and releasing their perfumes, flooded her whole being.
Shakira. She heard her mother’s voice in her ears. My own rose.
She knew that it was true—this picture was her, and her name was Shakira. And she had been loved—once, long ago. It was not a memory her wishes had invented. It was true. The memories of love were true. She had had a family and they had loved her.
The tears welled up and poured over her cheeks in an abundance Sharif would not have believed possible. He had never seen such a flood from any creature’s eyes, and it made him think of some old, half-forgotten fairy tale where the princess wept a lake and then sailed away on it.
Her drowned eyes glittering like black diamonds behind the tears, she looked up at him, begging, “Who am I? Please, who am I?”
He hadn’t meant any of this to happen. His intention had been to leave the Sultan and his family to deal with the whole delicate issue of identity and reclamation. But, however unintentionally, he had created this moment. He could not deny her now. He could not add to the intolerable suffering of years with even another day’s delay.
“You—” He discovered that he could hardly speak for the choke of feeling in his own throat. He coughed and swallowed and tried again. “Your full name is Shakira Warda Jawad al Nadim.”
“Why did you come for me? Who wants me? My family is all dead.”
Her black diamond eyes pierced him with such longing to be contradicted that his own heart nearly broke.
“No. Your own closest family are gone, but there are others. You have a large family of cousins, aunts and uncles,” Sharif began.
A wail tore from her throat, a howl that shook him in his deepest being, for it was the cry of release from a terrible, unimaginable grief. The child leapt to her feet, the noise still pouring from her throat as the tears from her eyes, as though nothing could stop the flood. She flung herself against his chest, her hands clutching folds of his kaftan as if to shake the truth from him, and the flooded eyes gazed up into his.
“Cousins? I have cousins, aunts, uncles? My own, my own family? They know who I am?” she demanded.
Someone opened the door of the office and a curious head peered around it at him, but with a frown Sharif sent the fool scuttling back, and they were alone again. He gently set his hands on the thin little shoulders as emotion racked her body.
“They are waiting to welcome you home.”
A thousand memories welled up inside Shakira now, potent and irresistible, a flood of grief and joy, as if the sound of her own name had unlocked a door behind which everything had been hidden. The faces of her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, flashed in her mind, one after another, all together. The house, the fountain, the rose garden, the beauty that had once surrounded her. Music. A book, with the picture of a prince and princess in gorgeous robes on a flying horse, high over a city of domes and minarets.
Voices. Her name, and others. A jumble of sensation and emotion that overwhelmed her. Those who had loved her, whom she had been forced to forget.
The memories flooded through her, and the memory of happiness, filling her so powerfully with both pain and joy that she felt she couldn’t hold it all.
When the storm had passed, she wiped her face with her hands and her T-shirt, and gazed hungrily up into his face.
“Are you my cousin?” she asked, yearning for a connection with him that would make her homecoming immediate. “Are you my family?”
Family. The word had a ring that he had never heard before, like a starving man pronouncing bread. An unfamiliar protectiveness welled up in him, and he wished he could be the person she wanted him to be.
“I am not related to you. I was sent to find you by your cousin, who is the head of your family. He has only just learned that you are alive. Until now, he believed that you had died in the accident with your parents.”
“He thought I was dead?” She gazed at him. “Who is my cousin? What is his name? Why didn’t he come to find me himself?”
Sharif pressed his lips together, and said slowly, “I think the answer to your questions will be a…an even bigger surprise to you. Your father was related to a very important Bagestani family.”
Her eyes showed such a kaleidoscope of doubt, incredulity and suspicion that Sharif could almost have laughed.
“Important?” she repeated, the child who had been among the forgotten of humanity for nearly ten years.
It was probably stupid to tell her like this, but the situation had been created now, and it was impossible not to go on.
“Mahlouf Jawad al Nadim was the grandson of the last Sultan. Your cousin is Ashraf al Jawadi, the newly crowned Sultan of Bagestan. Shakira, you—you are a princess.”
The polished domes and minarets of Medinat al Bostan gleamed in the afternoon sun as they flew in, hazy and shimmering, a dream city. The blue, turquoise and purple-tiled dome was the Old Palace, now restored, Sharif told her, to its former use as the home of the Sultan, and to its former name, the Jawad Palace.
“Like me,” said Shakira.
The Shah Jawad Mosque was a dome of burnished gold at the opposite end of a green and beautiful square that was the heart of the city. Under Ghasib it had been made into a museum. That, too, had been restored to its former use.
The templates had faded in her heart, like a dream that cannot be held. She had been so young when she had been torn from her home. The reality of life in the camps had battered the memory, for how could such beauty exist in the world side by side with what she knew?
Now it was as if a magic hand restored the dream images in all their glorious perfection of colour and shape, and her heart leapt with feeling. Home. At long last she was home.
“Will I see my family there?” she had asked during the long, interminable hours of waiting, while Farida and her little girl talked and laughed and ran to and fro, astonished at the jet’s unabashed luxury, as the stewardess showed them around.
Shakira had not joined them. She sat in her seat opposite Sharif with a grave face, her eyes dark with a mix of emotions. Against the background of the lavishly fitted jet, one of Ghasib’s private fleet that was being used by the Sultan’s government now, the marks of the Princess’s life of deprivation were thrown into sharp relief. The painfully thin body, the ragged, sunburnt hair, the cheap boy’s clothes, and, most of all, the haunted eyes were a reproach to the background of opulence. No one, he thought, could have looked less like a princess of the ruling house.
“Some of them,” he had assured her. “Everyone who can. Many have not returned to Bagestan yet.”
“Some,” she repeated, who had none. “Many.”
“Yes, that is how you will number your family in future.”
Nothing in his life had ever pulled at his heart as did this desperate child’s anguished yearning for someone to call her own.
“My cousins.” She breathed deeply. “Will you tell me about my family?”
Of course he told her. “Your great-grandfather Sultan Hafzuddin had three wives, Rabia, Sonia and Maryam. Between them they had many children and grandchildren….”
Shakira had sat wide-eyed, drinking it in like water in a desert, the story of her heritage. “My grandmother was a famous singer?” she said when he stopped.
Sharif nodded. “Her professional name was Suha, and she was very beautiful. She went into exile in protest at the time of Ghasib’s coup. Your cousins are searching for her now.”
“Oh!” Her gaze drifted into the middle distance and he saw what softness memories of her early life gave to the stern little face. “I—we visited someone once. She wore gold bracelets, and she let me put them on and told me one day I’d be a beautiful woman with bracelets of my own.” A tear fell from one eye, and she brushed it away as if it shamed her, then fixed a stern gaze on him. “Who else?”
“Rabia had another son, Wafiq. It is his eldest son, Ashraf, your father’s cousin, who is now the Sultan,” he said. “The Sultan has a brother, Haroun, and three sisters, Aliyah and Iman and Lina. Ash and Haroun are married, and their wives are Dana and Mariel.”
“Do I really have so many family?” she whispered, half to herself.
“Yes, and more. Since the Return, many are coming back to Bagestan. Queen Sonia’s granddaughters, Noor and Jalia, are about your age, and both are now engaged to Cup Companions. Their cousin Najib and his wife also live close. You have almost too many to count.”
She wasn’t satisfied until he had described them all, told her everything he could. At the end, she had stayed motionless and silent for minutes, as if still listening to what it meant.
A massive series of buildings in black and white marble came into view, looking alien and clumsy against the ancient perfection of the delicate arches and domes, and Shakira frowned.
“What is that?” she asked Sharif, pointing.
He glanced at her, half smiling at her wondering indignation. “That is the New Palace compound. Ghasib hired foreign architects. It took years to complete—it may not have been finished when you left Bagestan.”
“It looks like the sugar cubes from a relief plane at one of the camps,” she observed. “A huge box broke and the sugar spilled everywhere in the mud, in piles. We stood around, watching it dissolve into the earth, wondering who had sent us sugar cubes. Men shouted, ‘But where is the mint tea to go with it?’ The little children were so hungry, they couldn’t be stopped from eating it, and the mud, too. It was filthy. Many got dysentery as a result. Some died.”
Sharif listened, knowing that there were many such stories behind the tragic eyes, which now fixed him with urgent demand. “Why did they do that? We needed flour for bread, we needed food. Why did they send us sugar cubes? Men said it was a deliberate insult, to show us that the world did not care.”
“Bureaucracy creates many such stupidities,” he said, shaking his head in despair, for how was that an explanation?
She gazed out the window again as the New Palace disappeared behind them.
“Why didn’t he make something beautiful?”
Sharif laughed aloud, for the New Palace, when it was built, had been hailed as the architect’s “creative modernist blending of the influences of East and West.” But as with the emperor’s clothes, the child was right. It was a solidly ugly fortress, white marble notwithstanding.
“Ghasib was a modernist. He admired the architecture of the West. It would not look so grotesque in the capitals of Europe, perhaps.”
“No, because everything is grotesque there!” Shakira agreed emphatically. “What do they know of living? There they keep fresh water in their toilets! Did you know that? You pee into a big bowl of water! What waste! In the camps when I was thirsty and there was no water, I used to tell myself, well, today you are not drinking the water that you wasted in the toilet in England on May the sixteenth. And tomorrow there will be no water again, and then you will not drink what you wasted on May the seventeenth.”
She spoke as one who has returned to a place of sanity after years in the asylum, and he grieved a little, for those who expect perfection, even of a newly reborn country striving for the best, are doomed to disappointment. Sharif knew for a fact that there were flush toilets in the Jawad Palace. He wondered how Ash and the rest of the family would react to this little firebrand coming among them, with her uncompromising vision and straight talk.
Farida and Jamila sat down beside them. They were coming in to land, and it was not necessary for him to give her an answer. The stewardess began helping Farida fasten her belt, and Sharif did the same for Jamila. Shakira disdained help. Asking for help would be to show weakness.
“And now you will live in a palace and be a princess!” Farida said, to fill the empty waiting time before landing. Her voice held no trace of envy. “To think that my son was a princess all the time!”
She laughed loudly. “My husband will not believe it when I tell him. Oh, Excellency, how wonderful it will be to go home! Will my husband be there? Perhaps he is already building the house again. He is a very good provider. We pick and dry medicinal herbs to sell on the mainland. What a good husband he is! Are you married, Excellency?”
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