Free Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Page A

stared at her,” he said with distaste. After the divorce he had kept the children, as was his right in Saudi law. He had no plans to remarry. “I can have a woman any time,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Filipina. “Last winter I paid a model to be with me for fifteen days in Switzerland.”
    I was baffled by this man’s hypocrisy until I read Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Palace Walk, in which the main character is a man of strong faith who strictly sequesters his womenfolk, but each night goes out whoring with Cairo’s famous singers. When a sheik chastises him for his fornication, he replies that “the professional women entertainers of today are the slave girls of yesterday, whose purchase and sale God made legal.”
    The Saudi clearly looked upon the women dancing in his disco room in a similar way. Most of them worked for Saudia, the national airline. It was one of the few jobs available for foreign women in Saudi Arabia, which generally didn’t grant work visas to women other than housemaids. The airline needed foreigners since no Saudi women could be employed in a job that required unchaperoned travel and constant contact with men.
    When I rose to leave, the Filipina asked if she could get a lift with my driver. She reached for her abaya—the Arabian version of the chador—and face veil. Aware of the men’s eyes on her, she twitched the black silk slowly forward, letting it insinuate itself inch by inch over her cleavage and pour slowly down her thighs. Taking the piece of gauze that covers the face, she tossed her long tresses forward, leaning suggestively toward the men for a moment, then turning slightly to provide a view of her curvaceous rump. She flipped her head back, catching all her hair in the veil. It was a reverse strip tease. At the end of it she stood there, a black cone, the picture of Saudi female probity.
    At first it surprised me that my hypocritical host would risk such a lifestyle in a country with such harsh laws against fornication. But eventually I realized that he was quite safe behind the high walls of his compound. In sexual offenses, executions and floggings usually take place only if the accused confesses. To get a conviction otherwise is almost impossible under Islamic rules of evidence, which demand that four male witnesses (or, since the testimony of a woman equals half a man’s, two female and three male witnesses) testify to having seen penetration. Accusers without the right number of witnesses to back their testimony will be charged with slander and sentenced to eighty lashes.
    But often, for women, none of these rules apply, because executions are carried out long before the accused ever gets near a court.
    “My father died when I was nine years old,” said Tamam Fahiliya, raking her nails through a wedge of curly, cropped hair. “Lucky for me. If he was here, maybe I would have been killed many years ago.”
    Tamam reached across the low coffee table in her apartment and stubbed out a cigarette. As she leaned forward, flesh rippled over the top of a low-cut bustier. Tamam lived alone, and lived dangerously, for a thirty-seven-year-old Palestinian Muslim woman. For three years she had had a lover: a handsome young Palestinian doctor who claimed to be a feminist.
    “Of course, it was just talk. In the end he went back to his village and married his cousin. A man can always go back. But not me. No one would marry me now but a geriatric or a crazy man.”
    Tamam wasn’t exaggerating to say her father might well have killed her if he had known of her affair. Every year about forty Palestinian women die at the hands of their fathers or brothers in so-called “honor killings” that wipe away the shame of a female relative’s premarital or extramarital sex. Most of the killings happen in the poorer and more remote Palestinian villages. Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man