Dubai
The country behind the city
The Quiet Arrival
I had told her, on the descent, that the city she would see out the right side of the plane was not the city we were going to.
She took that in the way she takes most of what I say at altitude, which is to fold it once and put it somewhere her own thinking would unfold later. The right side held the skyline. The towers of Downtown rose out of the haze of the gulf, a row of pale fingers against a sky the color of unfired clay, and at the southwest end the Burj Khalifa stood by itself, taller than the haze and the eye and the imagination of the men who had set its first piling. She looked. She did not say anything. The Burj is a thing the eye has to look at when it is presented. After ten seconds she turned her face from the window and did not turn back.
The wheels touched in the long copper-pink of the late hour. The terminal at DXB took us out the way terminals here take a certain kind of arrival, which is to clear the desk and then forget you have been seen. A man in a charcoal thawb met us beyond passport control, inclined his head, took her case in his right hand and mine in his left, and walked a lane that did not pass through the duty-free corridor.
The car was a black SUV with cooled seats and a small inlaid box on the console that held three varieties of date. The driver pressed his hand to his chest, waited for us to settle, then took the southern ring road that runs out of the airport away from the towers.
The towers fell behind us in the side mirror.
Her Highness watched them go.
“We are not going there,” she said.
“No. To the older Dubai.”
She did not ask anything else. The road climbed onto an elevated section above a plain of new asphalt and new sodium light, the city of cranes and glass sliding into a smaller and smaller frame in the back glass, and when the elevated section descended again the road had turned inland and the lights were gone from the windows on either side.
The drive to Al Maha runs out into the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, the fenced country the government set aside in 2002 for the oryx and the gazelle and the small remnant of falcons that had not been hunted out of the sand a generation ago. The road ends at a gate. A man who knew the car opened it. The road beyond was finer asphalt, narrower, the sodium light gone, the only light now the headlights and the high pale violet of the western sky still holding the day.
She rolled her window down. The desert came in, cool and dry, carrying the small woody smell of the ghaf trees that grow alone in the basins of the dunes, the trees that survive on water none of the other plants can reach.
A herd of Arabian oryx crossed the road ahead of us. The driver slowed. He did not stop. The animals walked across the asphalt in a slow line, the long straight horns held up against the violet sky, the cream coats darker on the legs. The last of them looked at the car. The driver lifted his hand briefly off the wheel. The oryx walked on.
“This country,” she said.
She did not finish the sentence. I did not finish it for her. Petra had taught us not to.
The resort sits in a basin between low ridges of red sand, each suite a low stone-and-canvas pavilion with a private plunge pool set against the curve of a dune, positioned so that no other roof is visible from any window. A man with grey at his temples greeted us at the door of the long open lobby and led us along a sand path to our suite without lifting his hand to point at anything along the way, because the things along the way did not need pointing at.
The suite was the desert in a room. Stone floor. Heavy linen on the bed. A low fire already laid in the open hearth. The plunge pool outside the glass door under the long arm of a date palm. Beyond the deck the dune rose, lit by a single lamp at its base, the red of the sand going to copper at the top where the last of the sun still held. He set a bowl of dates and a small brass pot of Arabic coffee on the low table, inclined his head, and withdrew.
Her Highness walked to the glass door and slid it open. The desert smell came in stronger here, the ghaf and the warm stone and the faint trace of oud-wood from a brazier burning somewhere in the lobby behind us. She stood at the door with one hand on the frame, her shoulder against the wood, her back to me.
I let her have the door.
I unpacked. The desert clothes for tomorrow had to be laid out tonight: the wide-legged cotton drill in a pale sand color, the long-sleeved shirt in oat, the soft leather boots my bootmaker in Florence had built for me on the wooden form he keeps to my measure, broken in over five winters. A scarf of fine cream wool for the cold of the morning. A wide-brimmed hat of straw the color of dry grass. In the other half of the closet, the register for the family’s table: a single linen suit in cream, my Bangkok tailor’s lightest weight, no tie, a white shirt with the buttoned cuff cleaner than the dressed cuff for this part of the world. The cufflinks were small plain rounds of brushed steel, the choice deliberate, the desert refusing ornament.
I set the bottle on the writing desk. Pappy Van Winkle 23. I had brought it in my own case, wrapped in a wool sweater and packed inside a second sweater, because the regulations here are clear and a man does not arrive in this country with a bottle of bourbon in a duty-free bag. It would not leave this suite. It would not appear at any table where a host of mine could see it. It would be poured here, in a tumbler at this writing desk, on the nights and at the hours the suite allowed.
She came back from the door.
“How long until dinner.”
“Forty minutes.”
“I want to swim first.”
“The pool is yours.”
She undressed and stepped into the plunge pool. The water was the temperature the desert holds it at on a November evening, cool enough to wake the skin and warm enough not to drive the body out of it. She did three slow lengths, came to the edge, rested her forearms on the stone, and looked out at the dune.
“Tell me about the day tomorrow,” she said.
“We drive an hour at dawn, to the western edge of the reserve. And then we are guests.”
She nodded. She knew what the word meant. She had crossed enough countries with me to know the difference between the kind of day you buy and the kind a man you have known for many years opens for you.
“And the night.”
“The night is in the family’s own camp. Black tents. The desert beyond the fence. Not a place you can book.”
She was still for a moment.
“Names off the page,” she said.
“Names off the page. You already know the rule.”
She lifted herself out of the pool, walked to the robe on the chaise, and wrapped it around herself without looking at me. The water ran down the side of her calf into the stone of the deck and stopped at the small drain set there for it.
We dressed for dinner the way we dress for each other. Not required. Expected.
Her Highness came out of the dressing room in a long-sleeved column of black silk, high to the neck, the cut so clean it was almost monastic, the fabric falling from her shoulders to the floor in a single line that did not break at the waist. No back to the dress; a single line of silk ran from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, where it gathered to a small clasp and stopped. Her hair was up in a low twist at the base of her skull, the gold of it darker in the lamplight. She had taken the line of the country she had landed in and worn it: covered to the throat, covered to the wrist, the silk refusing any host of mine the right to look at any part of her she had not chosen to show. The bare back was for me. The room behind us was a room only I would enter.
I wore the cream linen suit. White shirt. The brushed steel at the cuff. No tie. She came across the floor and put her hand against the front of the jacket, just below the lapel, and held it there for a second.
“Cream,” she said.
“For the country.”
“Yes.”
She did not say more.
The dining room at Al Maha is on the open terrace under a long woven roof of palm thatch, the tables spaced wide enough that the conversation at one does not enter another. The headwaiter walked us to a table at the far western corner, the view the dune rising to the ridge, the last of the day a thin band of orange behind it, the first star already up in the east. He set down a small dish of olives, a basket of warm Arabic bread, and a bowl of muhammara deep enough to catch the candle.
She ordered the fattoush to start, the sumac on the rim of the bowl, the pomegranate seeds catching the candle in small wet rubies. For her main she chose the machbous chicken, the rice and saffron and lime-dried loomi. I ordered the same. The loomi gives the chicken a sourness that opens the palate to the spice rather than fighting it.
The wine list at Al Maha is what a wine list is in this country in a hotel of this register, modest in scope and careful in choice. She took an Australian chardonnay from the Margaret River. The sommelier poured a finger, waited, watched her taste and nod, then filled both glasses. I asked for mint tea. The bourbon would wait for the suite.
The candle moved once in the small wind that came down off the western ridge.
“Tell me how you know him.”
“From a different chapter. Many years ago, a piece of work that took me through the region for some time. He was on the other side of a table for part of it. We solved a thing together. We have been in touch since.”
“And the family.”
“His father. His brothers. The cousins who run the falconry. The women who run most of what the men think they run.”
She smiled at that.
“They will host you tomorrow afternoon, if you wish. The majlis where the men sit and the majlis where the women sit will be different rooms. At the camp the rules are the family’s own. The women may sit with us at the fire. They may not. You will not have to ask. You will be told.”
Her Highness nodded once. She had known the shape of this. She had asked because she had wanted to hear me say it.
“And the falcon.”
“She flies in the cool of morning, before the sun has the heat on it. The master falconer has been with the family for four generations. The bird is a peregrine. Her name belongs to the family.”
She did not ask the bird’s name. She had understood that the question would have been wrong.
The fattoush arrived. She broke the bread. She closed her eyes once on the first bite of the muhammara, the way she closes them on a thing the kitchen has gotten exactly right, the walnut crushed coarse enough to give the paste its body, the pepper smoked enough to give it its weight. She opened her eyes again. She did not close them again at the meal. The gesture had been spent.
The machbous came on a copper platter, the rice mounded in the center, the chicken laid in long strips across it, the loomi cut and scattered, the fresh cilantro bright on the top. The waiter served us both. The rice was loose under the spoon, the chicken tender enough to fall apart at the touch of it.
We did not speak much through the meal. A small white owl crossed the basin behind the dining room in a single low arc and was gone into the dark beyond the lamps. She watched it pass without comment. The man at the nearest table, a European in his sixties dining alone, registered her once and did not look again. The country of this hotel respects the looking and the not looking in the same measure.
After the platter was cleared, the waiter brought small cups of Arabic coffee and a plate of dates in three varieties. She took one of each and ate the khalas first. I had her hand in mine on the linen. I did not speak. When she was done she turned the cup over on its saucer, a small gesture of the country she had picked up somewhere; I did not ask where. The waiter saw it, nodded, and did not pour again.
We walked back to the suite along the sand path. The moon had come up over the eastern ridge, a waxing half, bright enough to throw a faint shadow ahead of us. The desert held the cold and would release it through the night. She had put a long shawl over her shoulders against it.
In the suite I poured one finger of the Pappy 23 into the tumbler the hotel had set on the writing desk. I drank it in two short pulls. I did not pour a second. The bottle went back into its sweater in the case. She had sat on the edge of the bed and was unpinning her hair. It came down in a single column of darker gold. She did not turn to look at the desk.
“Tomorrow at dawn,” she said.
“Tomorrow at dawn.”
I went to her.