Kingdom of Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page A

are you?”
    “I am
not—”
    “I’m a cop, Saffanah. I know when someone’s lying. Just tell me; I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
    She stared at him. She did a damn good job of pretending indignation. In fact, she’d done a damn good job of pretending everything. And she was stubborn. There was no way she was going to admit to the truth, and bullying would only entrench her resistance. He sighed.
    “All right,” he said, letting go of her hand. “I just thought—with you throwing up back there…”
    She turned back to the camel pen. The camels kept nudging her, and she continued to pet them, but her hand worked mechanically.
    He realized that they could never send her back now. If her father found out, he’d make Zaki pay for the child forever. If Jibril found out that it wasn’t Zaki’s kid, he would have his daughter tried for adultery.
    Ibrahim’s arms were still tingling and he realized he was afraid for her now. “Well,” he said, “after what happened today, I think the best idea is to go home and have sex with Zaki.” At the word
sex
her hand froze on the camel’s ear, then slowly continued. “After a while, you get pregnant and have a baby. If you want to do it differently, Zaki’s going to realize that it’s not his. Does my wife know?”
    She gave him a look of outright disgust.
    “Well, thank God for that,” he muttered.
    Something was forged between them in that moment, the magnetism of shared secrets. She stopped petting the camels, curled her arms around her waist, and stared at the fence. If this were his own daughter—one of the twins, say, because Farrah was hopeless—and if she weren’t already pregnant, he’d tell her she’d better get an education before ruining her lovely figure with pregnancies and the kind of slovenly overeating that comes from boredom and from being stuck at home like a good Saudi housewife. He’d tell her she’d better get a career in case her husband turned out to be a jackal and left her with kids to raise on her own. He’d try to forge some strength in her, the kind of fierce, dignified personal power that was, in his family at least, the most highly regarded quality in a woman. But he sensed that Saffanah would recoil at these sentiments.
    The Bedouin brought back her burqa, and Ibrahim thanked him. It was wet with camel spit and torn at the edge, but Ibrahim insisted it was fine. Saffanah took it gratefully and put it on at once.
    They walked back to the car, but Ibrahim forced her to sit inthe front seat, and he wouldn’t start the car until she put on her seat belt, which she did slowly, like a reluctant child. They didn’t talk, but he could tell that she wanted to say something. Probably:
You don’t really think I’m pregnant, do you?
He wasn’t in the mood.
    By the time they reached the main road, the sun was setting. It filled the sky with a dazzling pink and for a moment he felt cocooned in a spool of cotton candy. It reminded him of being a child and going to the funfairs in the evenings. He’d gone to those same funfairs with his own kids, but Jamila had always made it a torturous experience. And now what would happen to Zaki and Saffanah, going to funfairs openly hostile to each other with a child that wasn’t even theirs?
    He reached into the door pocket and found his cigarettes, lit one, and dropped the pack on the dash. He felt vaguely guilty for smoking around a pregnant woman, but lo, the surprises weren’t over that day. Saffanah picked up the packet and took out a cigarette. He was too amazed to speak. Saffanah—smoking? She didn’t even shoot a guilty look in his direction before lighting it, inhaling right through her veil.
    In that moment, everything became clear. Saffanah as he knew her was a total lie. Her religiosity looked like a pretense now, a shield to keep Zaki away—perhaps because she was in love with someone else? Hell, she’d been trying to alienate the whole family. Who she genuinely was, he