Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris Page B

remembered his childhood as a series of digs. They typically lasted for months at a time, and he often missed school to accompany Samir to the desert. As Samir had always been preoccupied with work, Nayir had been left to take care of himself. He became a loner but also an adventurer, even as a boy sneaking off on his own to explore the desert.
    Despite the independence, or perhaps because he had too much of it, his childhood had provoked an intense longing for a family, a longing that lasted well into adulthood and that he was certain would never be satisfied. His deepest fear was that he'd never marry. Parents arranged marriages. Parents had brothers and sisters who had children who needed to be married. They organized the complicated social visits in which a man got to meet a prospective bride—veiled, of course, but the groom could at least study her fingers and feet (unless she was socked and gloved as well) and learn what he could from those extraneous parts. (The best insight, of course, was a thorough study of her brother's face.) Samir could provide him with none of these things—there were no cousins to marry, not in Saudi at least—and even if he could have arranged a marriage for Nayir, Samir felt strongly that a man should "do some living" before settling down. Samir himself, now sixty-five, was still doing some living.
    Nayir often remarked that the Quran encouraged marriage, in fact made it imperative, saying,
Marry those among you who are single.
But Samir always replied with another verse:
Let those who find not the wherewithal for marriage keep themselves chaste until Allah gives them means out of His grace.
And Nayir couldn't argue with that.
    He sometimes felt that what his childhood had most lacked was the presence of a woman. A mother or an aunt, even a sister. Samir had known one or two women in his time—foreign women who didn't think it was inappropriate to befriend a nonfamily man—but those relationships had been brief. The archaeology digs were almost completely male; it was rare to meet a woman in the desert, even rarer than meeting one in Jeddah. Nayir joked with his friends that everything he knew about women had been gleaned from rumor, the Quran, and an assortment of bootleg television videos:
Happy Days, Columbo,
and
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Although his friends laughed, it was sadly true, and Nayir was left with the depressing sense that the world of women was one that he would never be allowed to enter.
    It was Samir who had first set him up as a desert guide, arranging for him to take the Shrawis to the desert. Samir had met the Shrawis because the family donated huge sums of money to archaeological research. Soon other families began to request Nayir's services, and now he was involved in the business full-time, escorting tourists and wealthy Saudis to all corners of the map. Being a desert guide was satisfying—it gave him a sense of community and allowed him to live well, even if he chose to live on a boat, which was, in Samir's oft-stated opinion, "living like a teenager in a tin can." Nayir's job with the Shrawis had been intended as recreation, not a career, and however much he was enjoying himself now, there was the future to think about. Once he realized that he was no longer sixteen, he would have to get a proper house and a job that involved books, desks, and framed diplomas. Nayir would rather have suffered lifelong hiccups
and
an embolism than gone into a "legitimate" career, but he never said so to his uncle.
    That afternoon Nayir had brought some samples from Nouf's body that he had managed to obtain, hoping that Samir could help him analyze the finds in his basement laboratory.
    Samir broke the silence with a gentle cough. "So you think the Shrawi girl didn't run away?" he asked. They had discussed Nouf at dinner, but only briefly.
    "It's confusing," Nayir said. "All of the evidence points to a kidnapping. She was hit on the head. The family thinks that she overpowered the