The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

For days the detention centre had been buzzing with the rumour that a high official from Bagestan was expected at the camp. His reason for coming wasn’t known, but hopes were very high among the Bagestanis in the camp that it had something to do with repatriating them, now that the new Sultan was safe on the throne. And even the ragtag representatives of the half-dozen other strife-torn nations here were half convinced it meant their own salvation.

“He was travelling alone, not even a driver. Diplomats on missions to refugee camps don’t come without assistants and the media,” the boy said with cynical wisdom.

“Perhaps his entourage is coming later. Why else would such a man be in a place like this? Ya Allah! The Sultan’s own Cup Companion! If only he doesn’t realize you are the thief, Hani! Do you think he will recognize you if he sees you again?”

An abrupt knocking sounded against the door.

The young mother jerked spasmodically, clutching the wallet, and the baby opened her mouth, let the new teething ring fall, and began to wail again.

“What shall we do?” Farida hissed.

“Give it to me,” Hani said and, stretching out one thin arm, plucked the wallet from Farida’s trembling hand. In a moment it had disappeared again under the baggy T-shirt.

“Hani!” Farida whispered, but another knock sounded, and there was no time to argue. Her eyes black with anxiety, Farida opened the door.

It was one of the “guards,” men from the refugee community who were badged and assigned the task of liaison between the staff and inhabitants of the community. What the camp authorities didn’t understand, or didn’t want to, was that on those badges a ruthless camp mafia was founded and nourished.

He frowned at Hani.

“You went into town today,” he growled in the camp patois. His eyes went past Farida to the bed, where the pathetic rewards of the foraging expedition still lay. “Let me see!”

Hani leapt for him, grabbing his arm, in a bid to protect the hard-won treasures. But the guard was big and ruthless, and merely threw the boy to one side, so that he fell against the sink. For a moment he clung there, half kneeling, nursing his injured ankle.

He cursed the guard with the fierce contempt of the powerless. “A baby soother!” he said. “Do you want to suck on it? Maybe your rotten teeth will grow again!”

Then he was up again, jumping onto the brute’s back as he bent over the bed. His small fist pummelled the man’s ear. A big, powerful hand grabbed the thin wrist and brutally twisted, so that the boy cried out and submitted. He was tossed down like a sack of waste.

The guard’s eye had fallen on the telltale sparkle of the bracelet. He snatched it up, scooping two chocolate bars at the same time.

“My share,” he said, grinning. He held up the bracelet to admire. “Someone will like this.” His voice held a gloating note, and the boy’s wide mouth twisted with helpless fury.

“May God make you too limp to enjoy her!”

“What else?” said the man, ignoring the insult, his eyes hot with anger, but hotter still with greed. He held out his hand toward the boy on the floor, palm up, the fingers moving invitingly. Hani and Farida gazed at him, willing themselves not to glance at the yogurt pot.

“Give.”

A step outside the door broke the tension.

“Farida, where are you? Have you heard? The Sultan’s envoy has arrived at last! A Cup Companion himself! They say he is searching for someone!” a voice cried from the doorway. “He is visiting every room. Come out and see!”

Her eyes liquid with terror, Farida stared at Hani. But it was impossible to get rid of the wallet now.

“Good morning, Rashid, morning Mrs. Rashid,” the camp director said cheerfully. “What’s the story here, Alison?”

His assistant wiped her damp forehead, replaced her hat and consulted the sheaf of documents on her clipboard. “Rashid al Hamza Muntazer, his wife, seven children. Joharis. We don’t have their exact ages, but the nurse has estimated them as all under twelve.”

Sharif Azad al Dauleh, Cup Companion to the Sultan of Bagestan, touched his fist to his heart in respectful greeting to the family. The brief conversation that followed differed little from thousands of others he had heard over the past weeks. Please tell them the children should be in school, that my wife is very depressed. I am a construction engineer. I want to work. Please ask them how long we will be kept here.

The group moved on, the anguish ringing in his ears. As at every camp, it was the same tale of nightmare and waste, endlessly repeated. Each one a variation of hell on earth.

They had covered over half of the detention centre now, and Sharif had almost despaired of finding the boy. His instinct told him that a child as wily as that would have some hiding place, and having stolen Sharif’s wallet—a fact which Sharif had discovered without surprise when he returned to the car—he had every reason to hide to avoid a meeting.

But it was imperative that he find the boy again.

At the next door, a Bagestani woman held a baby, another child clutching her skirt.

“This is Mrs. Sabzi,” the assistant read aloud. “She has three children—a son, Hani, a daughter, Jamila, and the baby.”

Sharif brought a fist to his breast and bowed.

“Excellency.” Farida returned the salute, then stood rocking the baby and looking anxiously at him. Her eyes wide with fascination, the baby reached one hand to the Cup Companion, letting go of her teething ring.

The blue rubber teething ring that he had last seen under his own foot on the highway.

Sharif smiled. Got you! he told the boy mentally, putting out a finger to the baby, who clutched it and fixed him with a heart-rending look.

“You have a son, Mrs. Sabzi?” he asked.

Alarm darkened her eyes, and she licked her lips. “I—yes, my son, Hani.”

Sharif smiled. “May I meet him?”

“Excellency, you are very kind! It is good of you, but you are an important man and my son…” She shrugged to show how unimportant her son was.

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.

“She is the daughter of my cousin Mahlouf. Uncle Safa’s son.”

Sharif’s thick eyelashes flicked with surprise. Among the first of the royal family to be assassinated by Ghasib after the coup, it was Prince Safa whose death had prompted the old Sultan to command all his heirs to take assumed names and go into hiding. This was the first Sharif had heard that Prince Safa had left descendants, but anything was possible.

“Safa had a child by his first wife—the singer Suhaila.”

“I had no idea that Safa had been married to Bagestan’s Nightingale!”

“Few did. It was an ill-fated, short-lived marriage, when he was very young. She left him while she was still pregnant. In later years, although a connection was kept up, the public was not aware that Prince Safa was Mahlouf’s father. But the files of Ghasib’s secret police prove that they knew. Mahlouf, with his wife and family, died in a traffic accident in the late eighties. We now learn that it was no accident.”

A muscle tightened in Sharif’s jaw as he glanced at the document Ashraf handed him. By its markings, it had been culled from the files of the dictator’s secret police. Mechanically he noted the code name of the agent who had masterminded the assassination.

“We have this man, Lord,” he said in grim satisfaction.

“So I have been informed. But that isn’t the issue here. A child escaped. We had always believed that the whole family was killed in the accident. But these files suggest that we were wrong, and that Mahlouf’s youngest daughter, Shakira, was not in the car. The secret police got wind of this rumour, but apparently never managed to trace her.

“We’ve now received independent confirmation of the rumour, from someone who says Shakira was secretly adopted by the dissident activist Arif al Vafa Bahrami.”

“Barakullah!” Sharif sat up, blinking.

“Yes, he was even more loyal than we knew. But we have no further information. Bahrami escaped to England, and the family was there for years, waiting for their appeal for asylum to be heard, before Arif was assassinated in the street,” Ash said. “If the story is true, Shakira should have been with them. But there’s no record of a child with that name.”

“Would they have given her a different name?” Sharif suggested.

“Maybe.” The Sultan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “But there are compelling arguments against the idea, Sharif. After Arif Bahrami’s death the British Home Office ruled that his wife and children were no longer at risk and must return to Bagestan. There was an appeal. We’ve now received the transcript of that appeal from the British government. Arif’s wife made no mention of harbouring a descendant of the Sultan. Yet such information would surely have strengthened the family’s case for being allowed to stay.”

“The child would have gone straight onto Ghasib’s death list,” Sharif pointed out. “And not merely Princess Shakira—the whole family would have been in danger.” He paused and took a sip of juice, set down his glass. “What was the result of the appeal?”

“It failed. The family were deported from Britain.”

Sharif’s lips tightened into grimness.

“They were accepted by Parvan, however, and went there—not long before the Kaljuk invasion.”

The Sultan absently tidied the file, putting the photograph on top. He sat for a moment with his hands framing it, gazing down on his young cousin’s face.

“Records from Parvan show the name Bahrami in a refugee camp that was bombed during the Kaljuk War. Survivors apparently went to an Indonesian refugee camp, but after that records are chaotic. Someone who might be one of the Bahrami children appears among the records of orphans there, but that camp was closed down.”

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

“The inhabitants were then shipped to camps all over the world. The trail goes completely cold.”

Sharif picked up the photograph again. It showed a child four or five years old. Dark hair that tumbled down over her shoulders, glossy and curling. Rounded cheeks glowing with health and vitality, wide, thoughtful eyes, and a mischievous smile.

If ever he had a daughter, he thought irrelevantly, he would like her to look like this.

“How old is she now?” he asked.

“If the records we have are correct, twenty-one.”

“She has the al Jawadi look, all right.”

Ashraf nodded. “Yes.”

The Cup Companion, still gazing at the child’s face, was suddenly conscious of a powerful draw. He wondered what kind of woman she had grown into. If she had lived.

“You want me to find her?” he said.

“Yes. Or, more probably, some evidence of what her fate was. And yet, if there’s any hope… God knows how many camps you’ll have to visit. It’s a nearly hopeless task, Sharif. I know it.”

Sharif sat for a moment, accepting it with a slow nod. Then the two men got to their feet and embraced again. “Do your best. It may be impossible,” said the Sultan.

The mouth that some people thought cold had stretched in a quick smile. His hand had formed a fist at his heart.

“By my head and eyes, Lord,” Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh had said. “If the Princess is alive, I’ll find her.”

“Sharif.”

“Lord.”

“What news?”

“Something’s come up here, Ash.”

“You’ve got a line on her?”

“Not the Princess,” Sharif said. “Lord, brace yourself for something strange. I’ve found someone else here. I thought—”

“Someone else?”

“A boy, about fourteen or fifteen.” Far out in the desert, a distant glow pinpointed the detention centre. “An orphan, I imagine—he’s attached himself to a family that’s obviously not his own. If he’s not an al Jawadi, Ash, then neither are you. Any idea who he might be?”

There was the silence of shock being absorbed. Then he heard the Sultan’s breath escape in a rush.

“Allah, how can I say? We know so little about some branches of the family, and yet…might someone have mistaken the name? Or could it be that two of Mahlouf’s children escaped?”

“The boy speaks English, which would fit what we know of the Bahramis’ history.” Sharif hesitated. “He would have been a babe in arms at the time of the assassination.”

In the shadows on the table behind him, the file on Princess Shakira lay open. Sharif turned and picked up the photograph. Somewhere along the line he had become committed to finding this child alive. To knowing the woman she had become. He didn’t want to accept that this delightful, elusive little spirit had been wiped from the earth without having the chance to flower.

It was nothing but sentiment, and he knew well that he would have despised it in others. He despised it in himself. Many members of the royal family had been assassinated during the years of Ghasib’s rule, and countless other innocents. Why should he want to pull this one out of the darkness that had descended on his country thirty years before?

If it was the boy who’d been saved…had he been looking for the wrong person all along?

“What does the boy himself say?” Ash’s voice brought him out of the reverie.

“I haven’t asked, Lord. He’s been deeply affected by what he’s been through.” The image of the boy’s face, so stamped with grief and suffering, rose in his mind. Apart from the al Jawadi characteristics the two shared, the contrast between Hani and the little girl in the photograph covered everything, Sharif reflected sadly—she was trusting, where the boy trusted none; she was happy, while the boy suffered; she was nourished, the boy starved; she believed, the boy had learned cynicism. And yet they were connected by that one thread, which seemed to overpower all the differences. The family resemblance dominated.

“I’d like your permission to bring him home without first trying to establish his background. To raise his hopes and then leave him in these conditions because he proves not to be what I think—”

“No, of course we can’t do that. Do whatever your judgement suggests, Sharif.”

When he hung up, the Cup Companion remained where he was, staring out over the desert. Smoke trailed up from the thin cigar in his hand, its shape twisting and scudding before his absent eyes.

Sharif Azad al Dauleh was variously said to be cold, cynical, selfish, too intelligent for his own good, but none of those accusations hit the mark. Sharif was highly intelligent, and proud of a noble lineage. He was also courageous and impatient of weakness or cowardice. Weaker men—and women—might well resent such a combination. But if his compassion was rarely roused, it was perhaps because he first had none for himself.