Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Old Gold
I should say, before I describe what happened in the souk, that I did not plan to go to the souk.
My plan for the morning was as follows: breakfast alone (productive, efficient, no architectural insights that would accidentally solve my professional problems), three hours of the remaining client work I had systematically deferred, lunch at the hotel, and then a calm and organised transit to the airport at twelve-thirty for a one forty-five flight home.
This was a good plan. This was the plan of a woman who has learned from Tuesday and is not going to compound Tuesday.
What happened instead was: I came down to breakfast at eight and Alex was already there, and he had two coffees and the expression of someone who had found something interesting and was waiting with the patience of a person who knows the interesting thing will land eventually.
"Old Dubai," he said, before I'd sat down.
"No," I said, sitting down.
"The Creek. The gold souk. The abra."
"I know what Old Dubai is."
"Do you?"
"I have been to Dubai several times."
"The airport and the road to the hotel," he said.
"And the Burj Khalifa," I said. "As of yesterday."
"Yesterday doesn't preclude today."
"Yesterday was the one thing."
"Yesterday was the one thing I had planned," he said. "Today is a different category."
I looked at the coffee. Then at him. He had the expression of someone who had already constructed the argument and was presenting it at a relaxed pace because he had time and, he clearly believed, so did we.
"We fly at one forty-five," I said.
"The Creek is forty minutes from here by taxi. The abra is a five-minute crossing. The souk is a walk. We'd be back by eleven easily."
"You've mapped this."
"I looked at it, yes."
"When?"
"Six-thirty this morning."
I blinked. "You were awake at six-thirty planning our day?"
"I was awake at six-thirty because I don't sleep well in hotels past six, and planning seemed like a better use of six-thirty than lying there listening to the air conditioning." He said this without defensiveness. "I find it useful to have a shape for the day."
"That," I said, "is an optimising mechanism, not an overthinking mechanism."
He pointed at me with his coffee cup. "Exactly."
I looked at the window. Outside, Dubai was already bright and certain, the morning performing its reliable spectacle.
"I have work this afternoon," I said.
"The deck?"
"I finished the deck last night."
"Then what?"
"There are always more decks."
"Are they due today?"
I paused. Thought. Reviewed the actual contents of my inbox, which I had last seen at midnight and which contained nothing with a same-day deadline.
"This afternoon," I said.
"We'll be back by eleven."
"If anything runs over —"
"Then we adjust," he said. "But the abra has been running the same crossing for a hundred years. It's not going to run over."
I looked at him. He was entirely calm. I had the specific sensation of a person watching themselves make a decision they'd already made, and going through the performance of making it anyway for reasons of dignity.
"One hour," I said.
"Two," he said.
"One and a half."
"Deal."
We shook on it across the breakfast table, which was formal enough to be absurd, and he smiled at it — genuinely, the private smile — and I had to look at my coffee to avoid finding this as nice as it was.
Dubai Creek in the morning is not what I expected.
I had expected: tourists. Photo opportunities. The preserved-but-glossy quality of heritage districts in international cities, the ones that are technically old but feel like a museum built to look like a street.
What I got was: a working creek. Dhow boats laden with goods — actual goods, not decorative goods, boxes and packages and what appeared to be several industrial quantities of appliances. Abras crossing in both directions at a pace that was exactly what it had always been. The smell of the water and diesel and spice from the nearby souk, layered and specific and nothing like a reconstruction.
"This is real," I said.
"Most of it is real," Alex said. "The Creek has been a trading route for a hundred and fifty years. You can't fake that kind of wear."
"No, I mean — " I looked at the dhows, the merchandise, the people crossing who were not tourists crossing but people crossing because it was the fastest route across the water. "Most heritage districts feel like they've been cleaned up. This just — goes on."
"It does," he said. "Dubai is strange in this way. The new city and the old city exist side by side without one apologising for the other. There's no narrative about which version is the real one."
"That's unusually tolerant of a city."
"Or unusually confident," he said.
We took the abra. It cost one dirham each — I know this because Alex paid before I could and I noted this and filed it under: things to address later. The crossing was five minutes, the creek warm and brown in the morning light, the city on both banks a palimpsest of architectural eras: wind-tower houses and glass hotels and the minarets of mosques and cranes building whatever comes next.
I stood at the edge of the abra and held the railing and felt, for the second time in two days, the specific disorientation of being somewhere that was too much to take in at once. Not unpleasant. The opposite. Like when you read the first pages of a book you're going to love and you feel the story starting.
"Don't say it," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," Alex said, beside me.
"You were going to say something about the layers of the city and how it defies easy reading."
"That's very specific."
"It's the sentence that was coming."
He was quiet for a moment. "I was actually going to say that you're gripping the railing quite hard for someone who's managing fine."
I released the railing slightly.
"I'm not afraid of water," I said.
"I didn't say you were."
"I just like to hold onto things on boats."
"Reasonable," he said. Not gently, not patronisingly. Just: reasonable. Like it was a perfectly adequate policy.
I held the railing with slightly less force. The other bank grew closer. The abra man navigated the crossing with the expression of someone who had made this crossing six thousand times and found it, still, sufficient.
The gold souk was the gold souk.
There is probably no adequate way to describe the gold souk to someone who hasn't been, so I will not attempt adequacy. I will say: it is a covered arcade with the roof letting through thin strips of light, and the shops on both sides are lit from within by their own display cases, and the effect of all those cases and all that gold under their own illumination is something between bewildering and gorgeous. The vendors are present and energetic. There is a specific quality of attention in the souk that is both commercial and human in a way that feels genuine rather than performed — you are clearly someone they want to sell to, and they also clearly find it interesting that you're there.
We were not going to buy anything. I don't wear a lot of jewellery and I had a carry-on. Alex, I assumed, was not in the market for gold bracelets.
"Your sister?" I said, at the third shop, where Alex had stopped to look at a bracelet with the attention of someone actually looking.
"Her birthday's next month," he said.
"You're buying birthday gifts at a gold souk."
"It's a better gift than what I'd find in Clapham."
"You could order something."
"I find it depressing to order gifts," he said. "It feels like a transaction. I'd rather find something." He held up the bracelet — a narrow yellow-gold chain with a small charm. "She likes things that are delicate. Not statement pieces."
"She'd like that," I said.
He looked at me. "You don't know her."
"I don't need to. The bracelet is delicate without being frail. There's a difference." I looked at it. "Statement pieces say something about the person who gives them. That one says something about the person who wears it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, to the vendor: "I'll take it."
We moved on through the souk. I was not shopping but I was looking, which is a different thing. The precision of the display cases, the way the craftwork was both old technique and new design, the specific economics of a place that had been selling this particular thing for this long and knew exactly what it was doing.
"You should get something," Alex said.
"I don't wear gold."
"You don't have to wear it for it to be a record of being here."
I looked at him.
"That's a very — romantic argument for a souvenir."
"Architecture is a record of feelings," he said. "So is a bracelet. Or a tile. Or a spice." He gestured toward the spice souk, which was a few lanes over, fragrant and specific. "Something that says: I was in Dubai on a Tuesday in October and I brought this back."
"My carry-on is optimised," I said.
"It can accommodate one small object."
I looked at the cases. I found a ring — silver, not gold, narrow and simple with a small geometric cut that was exactly itself and nothing more. It was thirty dirhams. I tried it on my right hand. It fit the middle finger exactly.
"That one," Alex said.
"You were looking?"
"You were looking," he said. "I was watching you look."
Something shifted briefly in my chest — not alarmingly. More like a page turning.
I bought the ring.
A vendor outside the souk called us "madam and sir" collectively. A second vendor, selling dried fruit, made a comment in Arabic to his colleague while looking at us that made the colleague laugh, and I suspect I know what the comment was but I'm choosing not to confirm it. A third vendor, a woman selling perfume from a small cart, reached for both of our wrists simultaneously and sprayed them with the same scent before we could prevent it.
We stood holding our wrists at angles while the spray dried.
"Same scent," Alex said.
"That was deliberate on her part."
"Very deliberate."
"She looked extremely pleased with herself."
"She did," he said. "She's probably been doing that for thirty years."
I looked at my wrist. The scent was — oud-forward, slightly resinous, the kind of thing you'd smell in a very good hotel lobby and try to remember afterward. I looked at his wrist. The same.
"If you make a joke about this," I said, "I will revoke the two-hour agreement."
"I wasn't going to make a joke," he said. He was smiling slightly. "I think it smells good."
"It does smell good."
"Efficient of her."
"Extremely efficient," I said.
We walked.
We had lunch because we had been there an hour and fifteen minutes and it was noon and the light had that quality of asking us to sit down and the restaurant we found was exactly the kind of place that exists in old trading districts: not for tourists, not entirely, but not hostile to them either. We ordered mezze because it was right for twelve o'clock and right for the heat and right for having walked through a souk smelling of oud with someone you'd met thirty-six hours ago and whose company you had now spent the better part of two days in without running out of things.
We ate. We didn't perform anything. We were — easy, which is not a word I use about new people as a general rule. Easy is what you are with someone after years of accumulated understanding. I was applying it, against my usual policies, to day two.
"Tell me about the Oslo flight," he said. "The one that diverted."
"I already told you about that."
"You said you spent six hours in Gardermoen feeling quietly devastated. I want the version with the context."
I looked at my food. Then at him. He was eating with the focused attention he gave most things, and he was waiting — not pressing, just: present and willing to hear it.
"I'd just ended a relationship," I said. "Not dramatically. We'd been — fading. For about a year. We both knew it and neither of us said anything because saying it meant deciding, and we were both, I think, too comfortable with the situation to decide." I paused. "He booked a trip to see friends in New York. I booked a trip to see a client in Stockholm. And the plane diverted for fog and I sat in Oslo airport at two in the morning reading Anna Karenina and I thought: Tolstoy understood something about this."
"About what?"
"About people who stay in situations because leaving is the larger disruption," I said. "About how quietly devastating it is to end something that was never dramatic enough to justify how much it mattered."
A silence.
"Did you end it?" he said. "When you got back?"
"I called him from the Oslo departures lounge," I said. "Six a.m. Norwegian time."
"He answered?"
"He answered on the second ring and said: I know." I looked at the ring on my right hand — the new one, the geometric silver. "He knew. That was the thing. We'd both known for months. Nobody just says it."
"Why not?"
"Because saying it makes it true. And true is harder to walk back from than known-but-unsaid." I met his eyes. "You understand that."
It wasn't a question. He'd said too many things in two days that were more true than they should have been for me to believe he didn't know what true cost.
He was quiet for a moment. "I've spent more time than I'd like on the wrong side of that threshold," he said. "Knowing without saying."
"What made you say it? When you finally did?"
He looked at his glass. "Someone told me that knowing without saying is a form of disrespect," he said. "That the person you're not saying it to deserves to know what you know, so they can make their own choices."
"That's — severe."
"It was meant to be. It landed." He paused. "I don't stay on the wrong side of it anymore."
I thought about this for a moment.
"Then what do you know right now that you're not saying?" I asked.
The directness of it surprised me as much as him, I think. A fraction of something moved in his face.
"I know," he said carefully, "that this is our last four hours in Dubai and I'm finding it difficult to be appropriately neutral about that."
The restaurant was busy with its own lunch. Somewhere outside, the creek was still running its crossings. On my wrist, the oud scent was still there.
"Appropriately neutral," I said.
"Given that we've known each other for thirty-six hours and live in the same city and presumably have each other's boarding information already from the hotel vouchers."
"We do," I said. "Theoretically."
"Theoretically," he agreed. And then, with the ease of someone shifting to safer ground before the weight gets unmanageable: "Shall we get the bill? You have three hours before you need to leave."
"Two and a half," I said. "I have a system."
"You always have a system."
"The system," I said, "has served me very well for four years."
"Except for Dubai," he said.
I looked at him.
"Except for Dubai," I agreed.
We paid the bill — he paid; I said I'd get the next one; neither of us addressed what next implied in this context — and stepped back out into the early afternoon, the creek glittering, the city going on in all its layered and simultaneous confidence.
I had the ring on my right hand. I had his wrist-scent on my wrist. I had two and a half hours before the system required me.
I felt, for the first time in what I was beginning to calculate had been a very long time, that two and a half hours was not enough.
Back at the hotel at one-fifteen, we stood in the lobby.
"You need to pack," he said.
"I'm carry-on only. It takes six minutes."
"Then you have — "
"Time," I said.
He looked at me. We were standing in the lobby of the Grand Horizon on a Tuesday afternoon with the ceiling fans overhead and the sound of the hotel going about its afternoon business around us, and it was the most ordinary place in the world to be standing and it was also somehow not ordinary at all.
"Thank you," I said. "For yesterday and today."
"I should be thanking you," he said. "I usually do these cities alone."
"How is that?"
"Quieter," he said. "And less interesting."
I held his gaze. "Less interesting."
"Significantly."
I looked down, briefly. At the ring. At my carry-on bag strap over my shoulder. At the practical arrangement of a woman who has a system and a flight to catch.
"I'll see you at the gate," I said.
"Noon," he said.
"Noon," I agreed.
I walked toward the lift. At the last moment, because I was finding it harder than anticipated to keep the policy of not turning around, I turned around.
He was still standing in the lobby.
He raised his coffee cup — the hotel lobby version, cardboard, the afternoon version. A small, contained gesture.
I raised mine. Then the lift arrived, and the doors opened, and I went in.
I stood in the lift going up seven floors and I thought: I know right now that this is our last four hours in Dubai and I'm finding it difficult to be appropriately neutral about that.
He had said it.
Out loud.
I went to room 715 and I packed in five minutes, not six, because I was apparently moving with a certain urgency today, and I sat on the edge of the king bed and looked at the window and thought: that's a true thing he said.
It is, I thought.
It absolutely is.