He starts with the easiest, most logical, most inexpensive step. He calls Fareed and asks to visit on a Thursday evening.
“Of course, my son, you’re always welcome,” Fareed says, as though nothing unusual has happened, as though a hole has not been torn in their family and two people fallen through it. On the phone, he sounds like a radio announcer: in control of his words, on top of the story.
At Fareed’s villa, Muneer is buzzed through the gate. In the courtyard, he leaves the garbage-ripe smells of the street behind. Here, jasmine and gardenia perfume the night. Fareed opens the villa door himself. He is casual, the collar of his thawb unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up. As the two men lower themselves onto cushions in the family room, rather than a formal salon, Muneer feels the scratch of his own starched collar and ghutrah. Fareed settles in next to a shisha, its coals glowing orange, and brings the nozzle to his mouth. He exhales and offers the pipe to Muneer, who gestures no.
There are phrases of greeting people normally pass between them at the start of a conversation: “God protect you and yours.” “How is the family?” “It’s been too long.” “How are the children?” These things go unsaid. Muneer sees no point in stalling. The awkwardness of his topic is unavoidable.
“Have you talked to them?” Saying their names would be painful. Besides, Fareed knows who they are.
“She told us she was going to California.” Fareed says the words slowly, as though carefully lifting drinking glasses out of a cardboard box. “You didn’t know that? That was more than a month ago.”
He offers Muneer the shisha again. Muneer says no. Fareed must know Muneer suspects the family of covering up for Saeedah. But at first, Muneer can’t keep himself from pretending he believes Fareed. He feels the stress of playacting along his cheekbones, through his forehead and his jawline. His face wants to break into a grimace of disgust. But he can’t call this man he’s looked up to for years a liar. He searches Fareed’s face for signs of distress. Perhaps the casualness of his clothing is a sign—perhaps his grief has kept him from getting dressed.
Muneer hates to be so charitable. He wants someone to blame. If Saeedah was going to California with his daughter, someone should have told him. Randah should have told him. Lie or omission, they have deceived him.
A young woman in a black headscarf and floor-length cotton dress comes in with a tray of sodas. Muneer was rude to say no to the shisha. To atone, he takes a glass, though he doesn’t want it.
“Can you learn where they are?” Muneer’s voice chips at the edges. “Saeedah can do what she wants, go where she wants. I want my daughter back.”
“Young man, I want the same thing.” Fareed sets down the nozzle and presses his fingers into the bones beneath his eyes. “We have prayed. We have spoken to private investigators. We have spoken to the ambassador in Washington.”
“Thank you, Aminah,” Fareed says as the woman leaves with the tray.
They’re alone again. The privacy emboldens Muneer and dissolves his mask of respect for a man who raised a daughter who would run away from her family.
“It’s not possible you don’t know where your daughter is.” He senses how wrong the words are as they leave his mouth, but he doesn’t regret saying them. “You might not have spoken to her, but she must call her mother.”
The shisha bubbles as Fareed sucks. In Muneer’s eyes, the smoke he breathes out is an obfuscation.
“We’re devastated. But at least we must believe your girl is with her mother, and that is a good place for her to be.” He touches his heart. “As I said, we have an American looking for her. But there’s no reason for the world to know they’ve disappeared. We’ll find them soon, and this situation will be like nothing.”
Muneer wishes he hadn’t twice said no to the shisha. He inhales Fareed’s fragrant smoke. He needs something to soothe his nerves.
Fareed laughs, a sound like a warning. What he is about to say is not what Muneer wants to hear.
“Don’t forget, we fathers are fourth in respect, after mothers: your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father.”
Muneer loves this saying of the Prophet. But he wishes Uncle Fareed had not spoken it, and asks God’s forgiveness for the thought.
“Ya’qub went blind when he lost his child Yusuf,” Muneer says. He understands the English expression of “blood boiling.” Heat surges in his body.
“God forbid,” Fareed says. “Thank God, we are healthy. We have our sight.”
“Our sight, but not our children. Let me give you something for the investigator.”
“I won’t take your money.”
Muneer sits a beat longer. “You have to tell me when you hear from her. Swear you will, Uncle.”
“Of course. God willing, we’ll tell you,” Fareed says. “And may God give your upstart paper great success. Competition is good for us newsmen.”
Fareed sucks on the shisha, and then smiles for the first time during this meeting. He lets the smoke come out the corners of his mouth and tells a story Muneer has heard before: how Fareed’s father came up with the idea of an upstart paper in the 1920s while he was smoking shisha with fellow veterans of the Hejazi army, in the open air of a café in downtown Jidda, which was a small yet important port city at the time. Their breath infused with apple-scented smoke, their minds animated by camaraderie and regional pride, the friends imagined a broadside that would tell the truth about everything and reflect their cosmopolitan city, the most vital organ of their beloved Hejaz, which they saw as a strip of land containing everything: mountains, plains, valleys, coastline, oases, agriculture, and the two holiest sites in the world. An English merchant named Fitzworth financed the partners. They told him, “One day, one of us will own Harrods, and we’ll pay it back.”
“None of those guys ever owned Harrods,” Fareed says. “The Egyptians beat us to it, like they beat us to everything else.” He always tells this joke when he talks about the founding of his paper. Muneer found it funny once.
At first, they called the paper Voice of the Hejaz, but soon, the Hejaz belonged to the Saudi kingdom, and the paper belonged to the new nation. It became, in the 1930s, al-Sharqiyah.
“That was my father’s idea, too,” Fareed says. “A paper to unite the people of our whole region.”
Many years later, Imad and Muneer had started Akhbar al-’Urus—News of the Bride—with big aspirations, too: a paper for the people of Jidda, where Eve was said to be buried, a city affectionately called the Bride of the Red Sea.
Muneer knows neither paper belongs to the people any longer. Both are bankrolled by the royal family, like every paper in the kingdom. But Fareed has deeper connections than Imad does. He can ask permission to say the things no one else is allowed to say, to say them in such a way that they ruffle no feathers.
He has money to find his daughter, and Muneer does not.
Fareed stands, a cue for Muneer to leave, but Muneer remains seated and Fareed is forced to look down at him. What should seem like a position of submission beneath the older man’s gaze instead feels powerful to Muneer. He knows he has the higher moral ground.