Prism - By Rachel Moschell Page 0,86
was sitting on the middle of the white lacquer table. Gabriel extracted one of them, sliced it open with a serrated knife from the table, and began to spread Regia margarine and strawberry jam on each side. As he bit into the chewy, warm bread, the thought crossed his mind: These are exactly like the ones my mom used to make, in the clay oven in the back yard.
Gabriel’s mouth twitched into a smile at the image of his fashionable, upper-class mother, standing in the backyard in a pink apron and huge oven mitts, waiting for the crust of the marraquetas to reach just the right texture so she could snatch them from the steaming mouth of the oven in the corner of their backyard. The Shara family had maids and servants to do every kind of manual labor, but baking bread had been his mother’s hobby. Gabriel thought it was in her blood, passed down from her Arab ancestors who had baked flat bread in outdoor ovens in Palestine.
He sighed deeply at the memory of his mom.
It stunk that she couldn’t know about his work, and especially about the assignment Gabriel was on today. It was such an honor that the Khan had thought of him for this job.
His mom would be so proud. But she would probably never find out.
Gabriel frowned in frustration and slowly chewed his bread, then glanced nervously out the window, watching for Manuel.
Gabriel was waiting in a large, newly-constructed house on a high slope at the north of Cochabamba, one of many rented by the Khan’s foundation. No one else was here besides Gabriel, and that fact was beginning to make Gabriel sweat.
He swore silently as he took a swig of Nescafe and stood up again to try to see over the concrete wall surrounding the house and down the hill where a car could be coming up the cobblestone street.
Nothing. The morning was silent, except for the sound of a few song birds flitting around the coral and white flowering trees in the neighborhood.
Where was Manuel?
After the disastrous scene with Alejo at Pairumani and the subsequent rush to Univalle, Gabriel and Stalin had made it just in time to the Jorge Wilstermann airport to meet Benjamin and Ishmael. Until the moment that the men were to check in for their flight to Asuncion, where they would meet Lázaro after his three-day sabbatical and regroup, only Ishmael had known that Gabriel would be staying behind. As he clapped all his friends on the back good-bye, Gabriel had casually explained that he had a contract for a job, and would meet them in Asuncion after the weekend, Inshallah. Allah willing.
Okay, so Gabriel wouldn’t carry out the actual mission today, of course. That was where Manuel came in. Gabriel was the mastermind behind the whole thing, providing all the technical support.
The client who had hired him was going to pay him a cartload of money. Last night Gabriel had stayed up much later than he should have, playing the violin much too fast while dreaming what he would buy for Ambrin with the money. He was thinking maybe a trip to Europe for the honeymoon, because what girl didn’t want to go to Europe?
In two more months, Ambrin would graduate from nursing school and Ishmael had said the wedding could happen after that. The whole idea was enough to make Gabriel downright delirious.
But he really didn’t feel at peace. Of course he wanted to marry her! But that was just the problem. Allah had given Gabriel back his life that night in Peshawar when his throat had been slit. What right did he have to just marry Ambrin and go on honeymoon to Paris and live happily ever after? The world was full of people suffering, their daily lives full of misery.
A good example was the people of Palestine, where his grandparents had lived before immigrating to Bolivia. He probably still had relatives there, whom he had never met, trapped in what many considered the world’s largest jail. Conditions there were abject poverty, as the Palestinians had been forced off their land by the Israelis and left with nowhere to go. They belonged to no country, thus had no passport and could never leave that place to study overseas or work. And in Palestine, there was no work.
Wouldn’t Allah be more than a little mad if Gabriel just married Ambrin and sat around drinking coffee with her in the mornings and laughing about all their kids’