The Faithful Spy

He showered and dressed slowly, savoring the rush of power that came from handling Y. pestis. He didn’t want to leave the basement. This place belonged only to him, and no one could take that away. Finally he headed upstairs. A strange trembling rose in him as he walked up the steps to face his wife. Fatima needed to support him, support his work, not disrespect him by coming home late. She had given herself to him as a good Muslim woman, a daughter of the Prophet, and she would keep her word to him and to Allah. He almost didn’t care at this moment if she loved him, as long as she respected him. He felt a mix of anger and relief when he opened the top door of the stairs and found her sitting at the kitchen table, writing on a yellow legal pad. His lovely wife. Still, his temper rose as he saw that she was wearing a skirt that showed her legs. When had she bought that? She looked like a kafir. He had warned her about dressing immodestly when she took her job at the law firm and stopped wearing robes. But she’d dismissed his complaints, telling him she needed to fit in at work. No more, Tarik thought. From now on she would do as he said.

“Hello, my sweet,” he said, and walked over to kiss her. She turned her lips from his, offering her cheek instead. “How was work?”

She didn’t respond.

“My sweet, we’ve talked about this many times before. Why are you so late? You must call—”

“Tarik—”

“Fatima.” The anger on her face stopped him for a moment, but he decided to press ahead. “Listen to me—”

“Tarik!” she yelled. “I’m through listening! Now you listen!”

Her voice echoed in the tiny kitchen, and he found himself shocked into silence. She had never raised her voice to him before. She pushed back from the table and stepped out of her chair. He noticed a small black suitcase at her feet, a cheap softsided bag he had never seen before. He tried not to think about what it might mean. He realized he had lied to himself. He didn’t just want her respect. He wanted her to love him again, to smile the way she had when they had first met.

She took a deep breath, composing herself. The kitchen was eerily silent, and Tarik felt as if he had suddenly been given superhuman powers of sight and sound. He heard the slow drip of water from the leaky kitchen faucet, and saw the faint dark fuzz on the peaches that she always kept in a bowl on the counter, the grain of the cheap dishrag in the sink. He looked up and found that the light from the overhead bulb burned his eyes.

When Fatima spoke again, her voice was quiet and firm.

“Tarik. I can’t live with you—”

His thoughts contracted to a single word: No. “My sweet. Of course you can live with me.”

She laughed bitterly. “Don’t you see you’ve proven my point? I say I can’t live with you and you don’t even let me finish my sentence—”

“Don’t you love me, Fatima?”

A pained expression crossed her face. “Do you know why I married you, Tarik? I thought you were a scientist. That you would understand a modern marriage. But you’re as bad as the rest of them. Worse.”

“This is no way to speak.” He tried to keep his voice steady.

“Tarik.” Her voice broke. “Do you think I want to do this? Since spring I’ve tried to talk to you a dozen times, a hundred times, but you don’t listen.”

“I want to talk—”

“You say you want to talk, but you don’t. You disappear into that hole”—she pointed accusingly at the locked basement door—“and don’t come back for hours. Days. You don’t tell me what you’re doing. You never let me bring anyone over. I feel like a prisoner in this house.”

“You’re not a prisoner—”

“And you’re changing, Tarik. You don’t sleep—”

“I sleep—”

“You don’t. You’re not the same man you were even a month ago. I don’t know what you’re doing down there”—again she looked at the basement door, and Tarik felt his stomach clench—

“but you’ve turned into someone who scares me. You beat me last week, Tarik. I never would have imagined that.”

“I didn’t beat you—”

She pulled up her shirtsleeve, exposing black-and-blue welts the size of credit cards on her left arm, above the elbow. “What would you call this?”

Shame and rage rose in him. “I didn’t mean—” But even as he said the words he could feel his fist clench. She picked up her suitcase. “I’m leaving, Tarik. It will be better for us both.”

Now the shame was gone. A pure white rage filled him. He remembered finding his mother dead in her bed in their apartment in Saint-Denis. The yellow paint peeled from the walls, and Khalida’s eyes yellow too, the needle still in her arm. He had hated his mother so much at that moment. But this was worse.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “Where will you go?”

“You think I don’t have friends?”

“What kind of friends?” he said. “I won’t let you. You belong to me.”

At his words an ugly sneer formed on her lips. “You think I don’t have a boyfriend? My poor little Tarik—”

Had she really said that? He slapped her hard, across the face.

“No more, Tarik—”