Dark olive skin like a fine grade of sandpaper folded over the rigid white collar of his shirt. His eyes were black as mine, eyes like my ancestor Nudar’s. “Tell me why you’re surprised,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
Talk? “You can start.”
“Do you know my age, Ben?”
“Sixty-six.” According to Fortune. I reached for my glass. Talk.
“Dru is thirty-one. What do you suppose our marriage is like?”
The beer went down. A breeze brought a taste of scallops and salt water and brine. Everything wet, the gray air soaked in the sea. The damp suffocated me. So much water. The dogs collapsed at a distance. I still saw an eleven-year-old Dru at a Nubian oasis, water slipping through her hands beneath her ghost eyes. She was the one who’d been seized by the jinn, and the women danced to placate the demon. The rest of us went on, in our own ways. I found a scorpion. Tristan found a tribe. Skye found an Australian backpacker.
“Every marriage is different,” I said. Even in the desert. The nomadic Bedouin, occasionally with an extra wife. The Tuareg and their brides. An anthropologist and a minister’s daughter. A lone American journalist in a hundred-and-thirty-degree sun…
Omar smiled. “You’re diplomatic and wise. Dru and I are happy.” A pause—because of dissembling or curiosity? A pause that made me wonder which. “How are you?”
“Well.”
Omar’s forehead formed crevasses. He looked the same on the cover of Money. Then the lines smoothed. “Death is hard.” Difficult silence. “I still remember your grandfather’s death. We should all have died that day. Mixed seas. Bob and I couldn’t find him. Can you imagine making the decision to bring in the catch and the boat? And on another day, to go out again?”
He and Dru shared this; her father had also died at sea. But I already knew what Omar told me. My grandfather’s assets were divided equally between his two sons, the absent Mary ignored. Omar sold the boat. My father kept the house. They both went to college. Omar studied finance, philosophy and religion, went into investments. Robert—Bob—became an anthropologist and left for the Sahara, later traveling with his wife and baby, looking always, I think, for the father he’d lost. The father who’d fallen from the sky into the desert and was never seen again. Not the veteran who adopted a Bedouin boy and gave him to his family. I wanted to know about Omar’s other father, the sheikh. More than his name, which had been enough for my father to find some of Omar’s relatives who had survived the war, for Omar to meet them. “You lost two fathers.” The words hollowed the air, like a prophecy.
“Yes.” Omar closed his eyes. “My father.” My only father, his voice said.
I forgave him. Almost. For things of which we’d never spoken. And that I fantasized we would.
“I remember very little. I dug myself into the sand. A tank passed over me.” He shook his head. “The next thing I knew, your grandfather and I were in Tripoli, with the possessions I’d salvaged. He was good to me. And your father was a good brother. Bob asked me things. He wanted to know everything. About the desert.”
The blue brindle, Ehder, brushed my leg. Did he know my scent or remember the border post where no one loved the Tuareg or their puppies? I petted him, dreaming Niger and the last days of my father, Robert Hall. He’d said, I’m dying. It won’t be long. Inshallah. White filled the crevices in his sun-beaten skin. His cataract-ridden eyes, blue, red-lined, had sunk deep. He lay in the hot shade of his tent. He’d rejected the mud walls of the house where he kept his research materials. Sand had begun to blow. Heaping outside. It could bury a tent or a village. He was bleeding from the rectum again. Diarrhea. Vomiting. He wouldn’t leave this place, and he told me he had cancer, had known for seventeen months. I was a sorry parent, he’d said. I’d said, You’re a great man. I love you. He’d said, Does a good son always lie? Is it the job of a child to make the parent great? I recited the Koran to him in the language in which I’d learned it. The men came to talk with him. Magicians came. I had brought morphine, and an American trekker had more. I sat with him five days, reciting the Koran until dehydration won and he lay with his lips gaping and eyes already shut.
I considered the nature of fraud. I had lived among the devout and among the Tuareg—refugees, caravan traders, pastoralists, the descendants of nomadic bandits, a people whose Arab name means “abandoned by God.” My father had chosen them, the traditional enemies of the Bedouin, had finally chosen their independent faith and untouchable spirit. He had fought the painful war for their mountain territory. Omar called himself an atheist. But the rest of my family played hard at their connection to the desert world. The women and their singing and dancing. My father in his pain had said, Inshallah. Allah willing. He had believed that our days are numbered by God, and that nothing can change that plan. He had worn an ancient silver cross, a bowed and beautiful thing. The proof missionaries gave that the Tuareg in their indigo robes had been Christian once. I’d asked Tanelher about it. She’d laughed, and I’d smiled, wishing I were of her tribe, a masked blue man of the desert. Instead of seen and vulnerable—to spirits and the scrutiny of a beautiful woman.
Who are these people, the Tuareg? A photographic negative of the Bedouin? another journalist once asked me. The Tuareg men mask themselves, while the women veil only against the elements. Descent is matrilineal, traditionally. They and the Bedouin have settled on opposite edges of the vast Sahara. But the analogy of a photographic negative fails, limited by its two dimensions. I know because I grew up wandering in the shadow of an anthropologist, and as a man I’ve tried to know—and rescue, in arrogance—the Tuareg and Bedouin and others.
Maybe I, too, seek the father I lost.
“Ben.” Omar leaned closer over the cold wrought-iron tabletop. Perhaps to take my mind off Dad. He blushed again, another blushing smile. “I want you to follow Dru. She’s…indifferent to her safety. And has some unwise notions of where to look for—our man. I want you to protect her. But don’t let her know.”
Dru. I’d forgotten this. Omar’s plan for a baby.
This Tribe
LONG AGO, a New Bedford whaling captain named Haverford left his town and settled on the island of Nantucket, where he married and had children who had children. From Nantucket’s harbor, he sailed his ship, and his descendants sailed their ships. One of these men was Tobias Haverford.
In the winter of 1840, a storm blew Tobias’s ship to the shores of Morocco, where he took on a passenger, a girl named Nudar. He brought her home to Nantucket and married her.
Nudar was a Muslim. That much is known. Her husband allowed her to practice her faith, and she kept many customs of her culture, as well. She passed these traditions to her daughter, who passed them to her daughter, and so on. Her son’s life was the sea. His descendants were Haverfords. His daughters, too, learned the ways of Nudar. In the privacy of their rooms, they sang and danced in a manner alien to Puritan New England. Their tambourines and single-string boxes and ululating zaghareets could be heard on the street. This eccentricity they passed to their daughters as well.
Being Americans, these women became dissatisfied with what was passed down and added to it with the dancing and singing of other cultures. By the year 2000, no one was certain where Nudar had really come from or who her people were.
But these are members of her tribe, by birth or marriage:
My grandmother, Faith Hall, who fell from the stoop, and her husband, Ben Hall, who fell from a plane. Their son, my father, Robert Hall, who died in the desert.
Their adopted son, Omar Hall, who fell. Who fell.
Their daughter, Mary Hall, who embraced the traditions of Nudar and other women who sing and dance in the ways called raqs sharqi, danse du ventre, Middle Eastern dance, Oriental dance. Belly dance.
Mary’s husband, Daniel Mayhew, her brother Omar’s attorney and an Islander.
Their daughter, Keziah Mayhew, a midwife