After an initial barrage of unintelligible Arabic, Lucy had to endure a stony silence from Assad until he deposited her inside the palace gates, leaving her with a cursory bow. With no idea how to retrace her steps to her room, Lucy wandered toward the main offices where she was directed to wait in the public reception rooms where the King had granted a public audience to some people embroiled in a land dispute. Lucy thought it appeared medieval somehow that people were allowed to sit in on meetings but she went and sat on the seats arranged at the rear of the room.
There was only a handful of people there watching. What struck her was the distance between Razeen and the people to whom he was listening. She thought he’d get up at any moment to bridge the gap that so obviously existed, not just physically but in the tone of the people. But he didn’t. Razeen looked so alone up there. Why didn’t people sit with him? Why weren’t the people talking to him made to feel comfortable, at ease? He appeared a different man to the one she was getting to know. There was no humor, no approachability, no sense that he was listening to the people. And he was, she was sure of it. Only it didn’t look as though he was. She slipped outside and waited for Razeen to finish.
At last the people drifted away through the public entrance and Razeen stepped outside the rear door with his ministers. He caught sight of Lucy sitting under the shade of a tree and came toward her. She jumped up, her heart racing at the sight of him, and smiled in response to the flare of heat in his eyes.
“I hear you gave Assad the slip. He wasn’t impressed with your vanishing act.”
He drew his arm around her and they walked up through the sprawling palace.
“I wanted to go to the women’s market and, well, he couldn’t come too, could he? One of the women found him and told him what I was doing. He knew I was safe. What did he think would happen to me there?”
“You’d be surprised. An unauthorized foreign visitor arrived some years ago and was stoned by the women.”
Lucy was shocked. “I can’t believe it. Those women were just wonderful, they wouldn’t do something like that.”
“They’re good women. But they’re also traditional women. They don’t like strangers coming into their world wearing clothes that are distasteful to them. It threatens everything they live their lives by. It frightens them. And frightened people are dangerous people.”
“Well, they appear to accept me OK. I guess the abaya and hijab helped.”
“So what did you do there?”
“Cooked.”
He raised his an eyebrow. “Now that, I hadn’t imagined.”
“They showed me how to make chicken kabsa and khubz and I showed them how to make spicy bean fritters with a yummy lemon sauce.”
“You must have made an impression on them.”
“And they, on me.”
He frowned and turned to her, searching her eyes for an answer as if her answer was of the utmost importance to him. “Good or bad?”
She paused briefly. “Beyond good. I hadn’t imagined they would be so wonderfully welcoming, so interesting and so…”
He looked away as if confused by her answer. “Different? They must have thought your behavior very strange, for someone staying at the palace.”
“They did. And I didn’t understand why. But I’m beginning to.” She searched his face, wondering if he would answer the question she was dying to ask him. It was personal but he’d ceased to be the King. She could only think of him as Razeen: the man who loved people but who was forced to keep his distance, the man who was doing a job he’d not been raised or educated for. “Why are you so distant with people?”
“Distant?” Any sense of outrage at her personal question was quickly contained. “It’s just the way it is; the way it’s always been. If I were more familiar, the people wouldn’t like it. Our culture is very different to your own, Lucy. You mustn’t forget that.”
She opened her mouth to disagree but had second thoughts. As she gazed out at the tumble of roofs of the city buildings below the palace, she no longer saw inanimate objects, but imagined the people beneath them: living, breathing people with desires and interests like her own. They were different, yet not so very much. “Perhaps, in some ways. But in others, they’re very similar. I guess people are people anywhere. One thing with my business, people have to eat. It’s the same the world over. Wherever I go I connect with people over food.”
They’d reached her door. “Speaking of which, will you join me for dinner? Just us.” He added as if reading her mind.