“We are getting married, Anna. It should be yours. I want you to have it.”
She was acutely aware of his chest so close to her back that the impulse to rest against its strength was near impossible to resist. But she did resist. She focused on the necklace in the mirror, and then glanced at him from under lowered lashes. His eyes glowed too, perhaps a reflection from the necklace.
“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
“You are beautiful.” He frowned slightly and almost absently hooked a thick strand of hair away from her necklace, as if to admire the necklace better. “But you need to hurry. Fatima will be waiting for you. And I will be leaving for a few days, as tradition demands.”
She sighed. “Yes, I know. Fatima told me. I’m nearly ready.”
She scooped her hair up into a French twist and struggled to contain it within the antique ivory comb that Matta had given her when she’d first arrived.
“Here let me help.”
With a practiced twist he swept her hair up and caught it with the comb.
“Where did you learn that trick?”
“The comb also belonged to my mother. I used to watch her get ready, help her sometimes.”
“Your mother?” She turned to stare at him. “I thought you hardly remembered her?”
There was a long silence. “One remembers moments, fragments of memories.” He opened the door and stood to one side. “Fatima will be waiting for you.”
They walked down the sun-streaked corridor in silence for a few moments as Anna absorbed the images that raced through her mind: of a boy who so intently watched a beloved mother do her hair that he could replicate the same twist and tuck two decades later, of a boy who lost her when he was far too young.
“Please, tell me more about your mother. Abduallah never talked about her.”
“He was too young. He never knew her and mother never knew him.”
“She would have liked him as well as loved him.”
“Of course. We all did. He would have had a great life if only he had not surrounded himself with negative influences.”
She stopped abruptly at the entrance to the library. “We have to talk. You blame me, but you don’t know the full story.”
“I know the end of the story. He died. That is enough.”
“No, really, there are some things you need to know.”
He shook his head. “No. There are some things you need to know. Abduallah wasn’t just my brother, he embodied all that I was fighting for. Those years spent half-starving in the desert, blood on my hands and blood in my heart, it was his image that I held in my mind; it was the only thing that kept me sane. Everything I did I did so that he could be free to lead a good Bedu life. Nothing could sully that image. Nothing. So don’t try.”
“I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, sully his image. But he was a man with problems—”
“His only problem was that he left Qawaran and met people who took advantage of him.”
“People like me I suppose you mean.”
He closed his eyes briefly and sighed.
“No. I don’t believe you took advantage of him. I believe you genuinely cared for him but it was the influence of others that led to his death.”
“I’m sorry. But—”
He placed his hand on her lips. “Anna, please, leave me my memories of him.”
Slowly she nodded her head. He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. He knew something—perhaps only a little—but he knew enough to know that he didn’t want to know any more.
“I must go now but I will see you when I return, the night before the ceremony.”
She felt a flutter of nerves and he narrowed his eyes.
“You know what to do at the ceremony?”
She nodded. “I’ve been over it with Fatima. It’s just that there are so many people here, so much expected of me.”
“When you enter the room, just look at me.”
She smiled. “And wouldn’t you just like that?”
He smiled a secret smile, turned and walked away, his soft leather-clad footsteps the only sound in the echoing hall.
She watched him leave, aware for the first time that this strong man had an inner vulnerability that he had carefully encased in stone. He was doing his best to ensure that nothing got through to it. If Abduallah had embodied Zahir’s hope for the future, what would it do to Zahir to know that Abduallah had been careening headlong down a path to self-destruction long before he met Anna? What would he do if he knew that the very traditions that Zahir held dear had destroyed Abduallah? As a gay man—albeit a celibate one—Abduallah believed, rightly or wrongly, that he could never live up to his family’s and culture’s expectations of him and he’d hated himself for it. The hate had eaten away at him until he’d wanted to destroy his body, just as surely as his soul was being eaten away. And there had been nothing Anna could do to help her best friend.