The Turtle of Oman Read online

  Dedication

  For my wonderful editor, Virginia Duncan, and 20+ happy years of working together.

  Always remembering Aziz and the love he shared. To everyone at The American International School of Muscat—thanks for making a little throne for your guest, and for passing the date plate.

  And an ongoing “Mahalo” to Frank Stewart of Honolulu, who changed our lives forever.

  Epigraph

  “The flowers of the garden

  guide us with their smiles.”

  SIDI ABOU MADYAN (TWELFTH CENTURY)

  Note: Sidi is pronounced “See-Dee.”

  Map

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Earplugs

  Lemon

  Good-bye, Turquoise and Limestone

  The Most Important Word in the World

  Memorize

  Better or Worse

  Slow

  Know Your Michigan Turtles

  Cat Without a Map

  Get Me Out of Here

  Peace to All Sardines

  Looking

  Big Day

  Faces

  Harmony

  How Quickly a Mood Changes

  Delicious Detours

  Almost Lost

  No Roof

  Sidi the Sphinx

  No Missing Feathers

  One More Star

  Homeward, with Turtles

  Candle on Your Back

  To Drive After Standing Still

  The Candy Bowl and Everything Else

  Ahhhhhhhhh

  Missing Something

  A Hundred Flavors

  Sidi Nets a Sea Stone

  Boat Trip

  Stretched-Out Day

  Open Air

  Contagious

  World Traveler Leaves Friendly Note in Empty Closet

  The Rule of Muscat

  Strange Animal

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Earplugs

  Aref Al-Amri stared at the Muscat International Airport security guards. They looked very serious in their brown uniforms, checking tickets, waving travelers forward. He was standing with his parents. His dad hadn’t stepped into the security line yet. Aref wished he had planned to give his dad a tiny turtle to carry in his pocket. A turtle might hide his head and pretend to be a stone when the plane took off, then stick his head out of the shell again when the plane was flying. His dad could feed him a piece of lettuce from his sandwich.

  The airport lobby swirled with people wearing bright scarves, hats and turbans. They pushed baggage carts and dragged trunks and suitcases behind them. Who were they, where were they going, and why? Some people seemed anxious or worried, clumping together with family members, trying to keep track of belongings. Others looked bouncy and chatty. Aref’s own mom, standing next to him, attempted to answer her phone in the middle of all that noise. She resembled a tourist from Bahrain.

  “Dad,” he said, “look how big their suitcases are.”

  “Even bigger than yours.” Aref’s father shook his head. “People want to take everything with them. So loaded down!”

  Aref’s father had checked a large blue suitcase. He’d been urging Aref to get rid of extra possessions for weeks now, so Aref wouldn’t try to pack too much. But Aref didn’t like letting go of his things. It was hard to decide. A baby shrieked. Aref shook his head. His mom covered her ear that wasn’t on the phone.

  “See you soon! Take care of your mom and Sidi and Mish-Mish,” said his dad, rumpling Aref’s thick hair. “Don’t forget to keep speaking English, so you’ll be all warmed up. I’m glad you didn’t get a haircut. Good choice.”

  Aref smiled. He didn’t even like letting go of his hair. Speaking English was easy, though—everyone spoke it at his American international school and he’d spoken it since he started talking, along with Arabic. It felt natural to speak both. His mom was an English professor at the university, so his family spoke more English than most people. His dad taught biology, so they liked talking about science too. They’d all spoken mostly English at home since his parents had decided to go to the United States. These days, they mostly talked to other people in Arabic—their neighbors, and Sidi, people in restaurants and stores. And they dreamed in Arabic too.

  Aref’s Dad was wearing a crisp new yellow-and-white checkered shirt and a dark blue jacket with bulging pockets. “What’s in your pockets?” Aref asked, patting one. “They’re huge!”

  “Well, my passport, I hope!” his dad said. “And my ticket and boarding passes and gum and mints and money and earplugs and my telephone . . .”

  “Earplugs?” asked Aref.

  “Well, you know . . . sometimes people talk too much,” his dad said. “Or I might be sitting next to that baby. What if he gets the hiccups after crying so hard? If the person next to me is old enough to speak, we’ll visit a bit before everybody starts to snore. Also, jet engines make a loud roar. I’ll need some good sleep before starting my new life. Ask Mom to get you earplugs too.”

  Aref’s mom handed his dad her telephone. “Maasalameh, shukrun, yallah, alif shukrun iktheer ya ammi,” he said loudly, over the din.

  Then he handed the phone back. “We’re not saying good-bye to each other,” he said, pointing to Aref and himself. “We’re just saying, ‘See you in a week.’”

  “If anyone else calls, I’m not answering,” said Aref’s mom.

  “Sitting next to that baby would be extremely bad,” said Aref.

  His dad leaned over and whispered in Arabic, “Do you know that someone tried to smuggle a parrot onto a plane last week?”

  “Why?”

  His dad shrugged. “It’s a mystery.” Then he glanced at his watch. “It would be strange to be arrested because of a parrot. Well, I won’t have to look far at all to be learning something every moment.” He smiled at Aref and Aref’s mom. “By the time you arrive, I’ll have a long list of discoveries.”

  “I believe you, Dad,” said Aref, standing on one foot like a pelican or a stork. “For sure, you always win.”

  Discovering Something New Every Day was an Al-Amri family motto. Aref’s father said people started playing this game the day they were born. That baby was probably just learning how loud his scream could be.

  In your notebook, you wrote down new ideas or even scraps of new information.Nothing was too small. Even the definition of a single word qualified. “Magnanimous.” (Very, very generous.) “Stupefaction.” (Shocking, astonishing.)

  Aref’s father liked making lists and had a stack of thin black notebooks he’d been keeping over the years with lists on every page. He wrote in Arabic and English, both. He wasn’t taking these notebooks to the United States, though—he was only taking a new, blank one. Aref liked making lists too, but used blue and red school notebooks. His mom kept her new discoveries in the computer.

  It was a game that never ended. Usually Aref and his parents traded discoveries at the dinner table. Last night his dad had said, “I learned my flight from Muscat to Ann Arbor will take approximately fifteen hours and nine minutes, not counting the time on the ground changing planes.”

  “That means you will have to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the sky,” said Aref.

  “And maybe a snack too,” said his dad.

  Even Sidi, Aref’s grandfather, played the game, but without writing things down.

  Sometimes Aref copied what he said. Sidi specialized in geographical information, such as:

  Sultanate Facts

  1. Oman is the last sultanate left on earth besides one other, Brunei Darussalam, that none of us has ever visited.

&nb
sp; 2. A sultanate has a sultan as ruler, not a president or a queen or a king or a Pharaoh or a Prime Minister.

  3. The sultan is the boss. You don’t really see him very much.

  4. One fourth of the people now living in Oman started out in other countries. They came to Oman to work, or to find a safe place to call their new home. Some just fell in love with the country, and stayed.

  Sidi was fascinated by this, because Oman had really changed during his lifetime. When he was a boy, there were very few people from other countries living there.

  Aref’s discoveries specialized in animals, his favorite topic.

  Turtles Are My Favorite

  1. Green sea turtles can stay underwater for as long as five hours, without coming up to the surface once.

  2. Their heartbeats slow down dramatically. Sometimes green sea turtles have 9 minutes between heartbeats. You think they are dead, but they are only floating.

  3. A leatherback turtle can be six and a half feet long.

  When Aref had made this discovery, he wondered how scary it would be for a diver swimming in the ocean if a six-foot turtle, big as a man, swam up to him. You would either want to jump out of the water, or ride the turtle. Aref had drawn a picture of a giant turtle and a regular-sized man in his notebook.

  4. Did you know a turtle’s shell is called a “carapace”?

  5. Land turtles have backbones under their shells, sea turtles do not.

  A crackly voice boomed from the speakers. “All passengers for Dubai, please report immediately to gate fourteen. Flight thirty-six to Dubai will be boarding momentarily.” This was not his father’s plane.

  Aref liked the word Dubai. “Good-bye, Dubai, good-bye, Dubai . . .” He spun in a circle and skidded.

  Then he ran a little ways and slid across the shiny airport floor, as if he were on the snow slope at Ski Dubai, the indoor ski palace where they had traveled when he was five.

  “Careful, Aref!” called his mom. “Don’t bump into people!”

  Ski Dubai was the only time Aref had ever seen snow—fake snow, slick white bumps built into tubes and slopes, under sparkling electric stars. Outside it was 100 degrees, but inside, people were skiing. It seemed very weird. Michigan would be full of snow during the winters.

  “It’s time for me to go!” Aref’s father finally said. He was flying to Kuwait, Frankfurt, New York, then Ann Arbor, Michigan. Time for him to go through security, where Aref and his mom couldn’t follow.

  Aref’s dad leaned over and kissed the top of Aref’s head. “Take good care of your mom, promise? Help her get ready? Do everything she says?”

  But what if she said something silly?

  “Maybe,” said Aref.

  His dad punched him lightly. Then he hugged him hard. “See you in a week on the other side of the world!” It seemed impossible.

  Aref had planned to drop a stone into his dad’s pocket, but now slipped it into his father’s hand instead. He wanted his dad to see how unusual it was.

  “It’s for good luck,” said Aref. “Look, it’s a little pink on this side, and if you hold it in the sun, it glitters.”

  Aref’s father turned the stone over and smiled. “You are just like your grandpa,” he said. “I will hold it up in the window when the sun rises over the ocean. I will keep it in my pocket always when I arrive in the United States. I will say my son gave it to me, and you are coming soon.”

  Lemon

  Aref and his mother waved and waved until they couldn’t see Aref’s father anymore.

  Aref’s mother sighed. “There he goes! Now it’s time for you to get packing! Your big green suitcase needs attention!” She reached for Aref’s hand. “You could get lost in here. You could be in India before you know it.”

  They didn’t always hold hands like this anymore. But today Aref squeezed her hand tightly. They walked past a newspaper and gift shop featuring a table of small brown camels. Aref stopped to press the belly of a camel and it made a bleating sound. He pressed it again. A man from India or Kathmandu in an orange robe smiled at him.

  “Mom,” said Aref, “I wish we were going to India for a vacation instead of Michigan, then just coming home.” Many of Aref’s good friends at school were from India. He knew about the massive elephants and tigers in the parks and the monkeys that sneaked in through open windows and lifted the lids of pots to see what was cooking. Once his friend Jaz found a monkey on his auntie’s kitchen counter scooping up rice with its paw. Aref wished a monkey would sneak in through his window and do his homework. He would make friends with it. He would name it Brother.

  Boom! He bumped into a giant red suitcase being hauled by a sparkly diamond lady in super-tall shoes. “Mint-essif!” he said. “Sorry!” She frowned and kept on walking.

  His mom led him through the door toward the parking lot, chanting, “See you again next week, airport!”

  Aref shivered. He didn’t want to come back here. He did not want to move to Michigan.

  They stood in the blazing parking lot for a moment, staring toward the runways behind the airport. They could see airplanes marked Air India Express, Turkish Airways, and the giant shiny Lufthansa, which was his dad’s airplane. They would have stayed to watch him take off, but his plane wasn’t leaving for an hour and a half yet, and the parking lot was more than one hundred degrees with no shade.

  In the car on the way home, his mom asked, “Where did you get that rock you gave Dad?”

  Aref didn’t want to say, I dug it up in the far corner of our yard, past the chairs and table, from between the roots of the fig tree. He knew his mom didn’t like it when he dug too close to roots. How had he known the rock was buried there? Sometimes he just obeyed his shovel and it told him where to dig. It was like a secret magnet to the treasures in the earth.

  “I don’t know,” said Aref quietly. “But it was a good one.” He stared out the window. Gazing left up the boulevard crowded with cars and buses, Aref could see the Hajar Mountains, which meant “Stone Mountains,” standing behind the low white buildings of the city. Everyone loved those brown mountains that loomed like a comforting wall. He slumped against the backseat and felt like crying.

  To the right, palm trees bowed over the road. They swayed and shifted their drying palm skirts. The giant turquoise Arabian Sea had been there every day of his life. He had always known it. Oman was his only, number one, super-duper, authentic, absolutely personal place.

  Aref knew how people moved, crossing a street, how they wrapped their scarves, how the call to prayer echoed across the city and made everyone feel peaceful and proud inside. He liked the way large white boulders were stacked beside the water. He even loved the clicking sounds of shoes and animal hooves on the old cobbled streets in the marketplace, called the souk. The buzzing and hammering from smoky shops and garages. He loved when shopkeepers who knew his family called to him, “Marhaba, Aref! Tylee shouf! Come see what we have today!”

  At the Souk

  1. You can stack fresh apricots like a mountain.

  2. Some stores sell kitchen matches in big boxes with smiling cat pictures on them.

  3. You can buy tiny red metal double-decker bus toys from England with doors that really open and spinny wheels.

  His father liked a grizzled man named Abu Aziz at an ancient corner shop. He sold clay and brass incense burners for chunks of frankincense and walking sticks with silver knob handles. His stall smelled delicious. An old donkey with sleepy eyes stood tied up outside. Once Abu Aziz had handed Aref a carrot to feed the donkey, who took it sleepily between his teeth and crunched, and ever since then, the donkey had remembered him.

  But would it remember him if he were gone for three years?

  In Oman, hotels by the sea glittered at night. Aref had watched some of those hotels being built. So he felt like he owned them. When he was younger, he and his grandfather, Sidi, had walked inside the gleaming lobbies and watched people pushing elevator buttons. He had tugged at his grandfather to ride the elevators w
ith him, and sometimes they rode to different floors and walked up and down the halls as if they were staying there. Once they joined a wedding party in a ballroom when the doorman thought they knew the people inside!

  In Oman, Aref knew the bulldozers and the birds.

  Three Birds We See a Lot at the Beach

  1. Storm petrels = smallest seabirds. They look a little like bats when they fly. They pick crustaceans and tiny fish out of the waves while hovering.

  2. Cormorants = seabirds that eat fish

  3. Frigate birds = they cannot walk or swim. Sometimes they fly for a whole WEEK without landing. The males have inflatable throat pouches and their wings make a big W when they fly.

  He loved the brightly colored school supply shop for paper and pencils and pens and folders. He knew the exact bin his purple pencil sharpener had come from. He liked Sami at the tennis shoe store who gave him extra shoelaces and Miriam at the dentist’s office who always offered him a new toothbrush. He knew the smooth white sidewalk at the Muttrah corniche that his parents said he had taken his first steps on.

  Aref leaned forward so he could see his favorite blue billboard shaped like a boat coming up. Yallah! it said in Arabic. Quickly! It was for a restaurant called MARHABA that served crispy fish in blue plastic baskets. The fish was so tasty Aref always ate it with his fingers, not a fork. And his mom always said, “Don’t gobble.” Aref had been keeping his eye on that same sign for years now. It meant they were almost home. How would it survive without him? And how could he say good-bye to a restaurant named “Hello”?

  Aref’s mother turned the steering wheel, circling a speedy roundabout brimming with pink flowers and tall iron lampposts. Cars whizzed past them. They turned at the shining silver water tower with sunlight gleaming on its head. Aref thought Muscat was surely the greatest place in the world.