AT ABU ALI

Alison Moore

It is late summer in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. Iran and Iraq are declaring jihad, a holy war on each other, and on the day the missiles begin to rip through the air we think about being in the water. We think about swimming, pretending we're somewhere other than the Middle East for an afternoon. We drive to find a beach at Abu Ali.

Giff and Ardelle sit in the front of the pickup, Dennis and Bob and I ride in the back. The little sliding window at the back of the cab is open so we can all hear the classical music hour from Radio Bahrain. Beethoven urges us forward and we leave a plume of dust behind. We can't get away fast enough, out of Jubail and the industrial project where the men work endless hours trying to carry out the erratic whims of the Saudi Royal Commission. As women in an Islamic country, Ardelle and I struggle to find ways to fill our time. We are forbidden to work, to drive a car, even to sit on the seat of a bicycle. We walk to the commissary in 125-degree heat with 100% humidity in long-sleeved, full-length kaftans, thankful at least not to be veiled. At Abu Ali we will be almost naked in bathing suits, visible if only for an afternoon, and very nearly free.

We are stopped at a barricade on the narrow causeway to the island. A teenage Saudi soldier sits slouched on a tall stool in the tiny guard hut, listening to a tape of the Rolling Stones on his cassette player. He switches the music off, then saunters slowly toward our truck, scuffing across the asphalt in his dusty sandals. He grips a machine gun in his small hands. He leans down to our open window, peering in at our I.D. badges, warily comparing us to the tiny, laminated photographs on the cards. Straightening up, he flicks one of the tasseled ends of his

red and white-checked shemagh over his shoulder, then waves us through with the barrel of the gun.

Abu Ali is a wild, uninhabited island. Except for the road and the pipeline, there is nothing but camel grass and low dunes. Sand tracks lead off the narrow road at abrupt angles, veering to either shoreline. We pick a track at random and stop to put the truck in 4-wheel drive. We head for the dunes, growling in the lower gears. It is only a kilometer or so to the shore of the  Persian Gulf. Lapping against the white sugar sand is water bluer than the stone in a Navajo ring, shimmering in the thick, humid air.

We climb out, laughing and stretching. A blanket is laid down, a square of white cloth like a flag of truce on the sand. We drag our provisions to it—all the things necessary for survival: water, food, paperback novels, sunscreen. We sit down cross-legged, eating fried chicken with our bare hands, tossing the bones over the side, and guzzling iced tea until it drips down our chins. We wear an odd assortment of hats: Giff in a sailor's cap with the brim folded down, Ardelle in a safari helmet. Bob wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Dennis has a homemade gutra made of a white T-shirt that says "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" held on his head with a bungee cord, and I wear a frayed straw cowboy hat with a blue-black crow's feather stuck in the hatband. We gaze out over the gulf, north to Iran.

When the flies begin to drive us mad, we submerge ourselves up to our shoulders in water. The tide is moving out fast, leaving us sitting in the shallows. The water is not exactly refreshing—it’s thick with salt and close to body temperature. But it lulls us, an amniotic fluid gently rocking our weightless bodies.

We are so still that a large, white bird, an egret, drifts close to us on the current. Very slowly, I begin to follow it, walking my hands on the sandy bottom, trailing my legs out behind me. I move parallel to it, keeping the same languid pace, and the bird, if it notices anything at all, sees only a floating hat, which memory tells it is not a dangerous thing. I turn carefully to look over my shoulder and see the others behind me. Now the bird leads the five of us and we all move north along the shoreline as if pulled along on a string. It is the bird who breaks the silence, opening its beak to let out a shrill cry. It rises heavily, beating its spreading wings, and the sound the air makes moving through its feathers is the sound of a lasso in the wind. Its legs hang, black stalks beneath the white body, the toes like the long tines of forks dripping salty water.

We watch it go, flying low over the Persian Gulf. We watch until we can't see it clearly anymore, until the white wings disappear into the wisps of black smoke that drift slowly towards us from the north, from the burning city of Abadan.

Originally published in The North American Review, March 1987.

I lived near Jubail, Saudi Arabia as an expat from 1980 to 1982. My husband was a photographer on contract and had spent two years there already when I joined him. Abu Ali was an uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf where we occasionally went to get away from the restrictions of living in a Muslim city, not behind the walls of an American compound. This is the story of our breakaway, one day, with friends, when a bit of the Iran-Iraq War broke through. "At Abu Ali" was a breakthrough in that it was my first published piece.