Kingdom of Strangers Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t have said.
    “You shouldn’t smoke,” he said lamely. “Not if you’re pregnant.”
    She didn’t reply. Glancing over, he saw that her veil was sticking to her face; a wet trail was streaking down each cheek. She was crying.
    “Oh, Saffanah.”
    Ibrahim parked on the corner farthest from the house. He wanted to give her a chance to collect herself before facing the family,should any of them happen to be lurking outside. The street was empty. They sat quietly in the car, Saffanah facing the window and probably seeing nothing. It was dark, and he knew from experience that wearing a face veil in the dark made you the equivalent of blind. He had actually tried it himself one night—he and his brother Omar had walked up and down the block with their wives’ burqas on their faces, trying to settle an argument about whether Omar’s wife, Rahaf, could possibly have walked into the neighbor’s car accidentally, thus setting off the car alarm and infuriating the neighbor. Omar had insisted she’d done it on purpose, but Ibrahim argued that even if your burqa had eyeholes, it was hard to see what you were doing. So Saffanah’s being turned away from him seemed like a silent plea for privacy—or forgiveness, he couldn’t say which.
    Once he finished his last cigarette, they got out of the car, Saffanah fumbling in the dark. He came around to her side of the car and said, “Walk beside me. I don’t want you setting off any car alarms.” She obeyed and they made their slow way down the street, Ibrahim watching her every step to make sure she didn’t trip. When he got her to the house, he heard his wife’s voice as she came down the staircase, a low grumble that was unintelligible but which he implicitly understood. She was complaining about something, probably Ibrahim’s inability to get his son a divorce.
    Saffanah refused to remove her veil until they reached the second-floor landing. (The downstairs neighbors were a constant threat to propriety.) So he walked her to her door. She gave him one last frightened look before she went inside.
    Ten minutes later, he was driving back into the city. He took the Corniche road. Roundabouts and their statuary glittered in the lights—from traffic, streetlamps, floodlights, and apartment buildings, a flowing river of light at the edge of the dark Red Sea.
    He parked in his usual space beneath Sabria’s building, the space allocated to her apartment and that she might have used had she been allowed to drive. If the neighbors paid any attention to him at all, they assumed he was her father. He looked old enough. (Although once a female neighbor had mistaken him for a driver and asked him for a ride.) In paranoid moments, he considered parking on the street so no one would suspect that Sabria had a male visitor, but parking was scarce here. It was a relief to have a dedicated slot, because it seemed the more he came here, the more urgent he was to see her. In the beginning, she had needed him more—for sexual fulfillment, for comfort, and even for simple things like going to the doctor. They weren’t married, yet she had become, in essence, his second wife. Over the past two years, his need for her had grown greater than he had expected.
    He saw a woman going into the elevator, so he took the stairs. The neighbors were mostly foreigners—a doctor from India, a few Egyptian couples, not the kind of people who gave much thought to Sabria’s marital status or to the man who visited her every night and left before dawn. All the same, he thought it prudent to avoid talking to them.
    He took the stairs two at a time and wasn’t even out of breath when he reached the fourth floor. He went straight to her door. When she didn’t answer, his chest started to feel tight. His heart was pounding. He should have taken the elevator. He knocked again. No answer.
    Fishing in his pocket, he found the key. She had given it to him a year ago, and he kept it on his key chain, dangling