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tend lovingly to her husband’s needs? He had proposed marriage a month ago. It was a painfully long time to make a man wait, and she still hadn’t given him an answer.
    She didn’t have one.
    It took her another hour to be seen, then another fifteen minutes of wrangling. They had accidentally closed her checking account, into which she had recently deposited her paycheck. The manager had no record of Katya’s ever having been a patron of the bank. Even the deposit slip Katya produced from her purse had no effect. The manager studied Katya, clearly wondering what sort of scam she was working. With typical efficiency, she drank another cup of coffee and fussed at her computer for ten useless minutes, then got up from her desk and went to talk to her boss,who was, apparently, the
real
manager of the bank. Half an hour later, she returned, reopened the account, and reassured Katya that all was well. But nothing was well, not when one’s livelihood was stored so tenuously in the memory of a machine, as if one’s livelihood didn’t already face a dozen more powerful forces bent on wiping it away.
    He was talking to a neighbor. When he hauled the rope from the water—bent over, one knee on the ground, and his head turned at an odd angle, like a man inspecting the underside of a camel—the fabric of his shirt pulled taut against his back. Even from five meters, she saw the muscles—a landscape of softly cut dunes, elegant, vast. She would normally have averted her gaze, but she let her eyes rest on his back for a moment.
I could touch it
, she thought,
if we were married. I could fall asleep with those great arms around me
. It was illusory, that form. As solid as it was, it would be subject to shifting winds all the same.
    What surprised her was the relief she felt when he stood up and saw her and his face lit quietly with pleasure that even the neighbor noticed and that caused the man to excuse himself. Nayir coiled the last of the rope and dropped it on the ground, a gesture that said firmly that he’d lay down anything for her, and for a very brief moment, her million grains of doubt were blown clear away.
    Then she told herself not to be an idiot.
    “Sabah al-khayr,”
she said. Good morning.
    He averted his gaze and greeted her with a simple “Good morning.” She wasn’t wearing a veil. She didn’t wear one at work, so why should she pretend to be more devout here?
    They had talked on the phone, but this was the first time she’d seen him since the night he proposed. He was wearing his favorite well-worn blue robe. He’d taken off his headscarf, and his short curly hair shone black in the sun. A slight redness on his cheeks, acoating of dust on his sandals, the confidence in his shoulders all told her that he’d recently been to the desert. He took families on desert excursions to help them get in touch with their Bedouin roots or simply to give them the experience of the wilderness. On occasion, he worked search-and-rescue.
    “I hope I’m not coming at a bad time,” she said.
    “Of course not.” He glanced past her shoulder, a gesture she understood at once to mean
Who escorted you here? And is it all right with him that we’re talking?
    “My cousin Ayman gave me a ride,” she said. “He’s just gone to buy cigarettes.”
    Nayir nodded, perhaps better able to accept the impropriety of the two of them being alone now that a marriage proposal was on the table. He started walking toward his boat. It was too hot to stand in the sun.
    “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” she said. “I’ve been working overtime on a big case.”
    “Oh,” he said. If he’d been worried about her lack of response to his proposal, he didn’t show it. Rather, he seemed relaxed, and the poise in his manner that she had ascribed to time spent in the desert might just as easily have been religiously inspired.
    He led her onto his boat and she saw, with some surprise, that he’d situated a large beach umbrella above the