The Turtle of Oman Page 8

  Sidi climbed out of the driver’s seat very slowly. He groaned. “Oh my, I thought I had stretched, but I am really too stiff. I am turning into a tree trunk.” He pressed on one side of his back and bent to the left, to ease his muscles.

  “Buy ten melons!” the ancient lady called out. “If you buy ten, you can have them very cheap!” She giggled as if what she had said was very funny.

  “I am sure of that!” Sidi said, laughing too. “But no one needs ten, hajja! Only two—one for my grandson and one for me. We will pay the price!”

  “Ten is better!”

  “Two are enough! Say, where do you get your water for watering your fields?” He had begun selecting his two melons.

  “I have a well that is older than the prophet’s beard,” she said.

  Sidi poured some coins into her skinny hand. Aref noticed three cats peering out the door of her small hut, as if they hoped a fresh food delivery had arrived.

  The lady stood up with great difficulty and hobbled over to the jeep. Aref worried that she was going to try to get in.

  Sidi placed the two melons carefully on the backseat. He arranged their backpacks on either side. “We don’t want them to roll around,” he said. She peered into the jeep with interest.

  “Can you stay for lunch? Would you like some tea?” the lady asked.

  “Thank you,” Sidi said, “but my boy here has to get to America and I am going to drive him. This jeep grows fins and swims when it needs to.”

  “I would like to see that!” she said. Now she coughed into her hand and squealed like a cat with its tail caught in a cabinet door.

  Aref stared at Sidi.

  “Allah bless you on your journey!” the lady said. She seemed full of energy.

  “And you forever, kind grower of melons and teller of tales.”

  When they were back on the road, Aref said, “You talked silly to her.”

  “She needed it.”

  “Does anyone buy ten melons?”

  “Only if they have ten children. Or can’t count.”

  “Or are having a party. Or want to serve melons to the whole class.”

  Leaning with the curves of the road, they ate all the salty pumpkin seeds, cupping them in their hands. Sidi was careful not to go too fast. “I am driving more slowly because of snacking,” he said.

  Aref felt his feelings about juicy tangerines might be changing—when he peeled two more for Sidi, he felt inspired to eat one himself. It was a perfect combination snack. His cheeks and hands felt sticky and salty at once.

  The day grew bright and hot. Sidi asked Aref to get his sunglasses out of his pack. “Now I am James Bond,” he said when he put them on.

  They passed three hikers wearing orange baseball hats, carrying orange backpacks. Everyone waved. “See how people love our country? They come here just to hike around,” said Sidi. “It is exciting to them. You will feel like that in America.”

  They passed a broken-down wooden boat with no paint on it, abandoned next to the road. “How did it get here, do you think? Not even beside the water?” asked Aref.

  “I think it had a hole, and someone dumped it.”

  “Maybe it is a famous boat from history waiting to be discovered.”

  “Noah’s Ark?”

  “Was that a real boat or just a story?”

  “Or maybe this sad boat belongs to that wild donkey tribe and the donkeys have gone off to find a boat craftsman to repair its holes.”

  Sidi had just seen some donkeys in the distance. Now they were part of his tale. “Look! Look at that swirl of dust in front of the striped cliff! It’s an oryx running! We are very lucky today!”

  Aref leaned forward to see the oryx leaping out of sight. “Maybe the oryx and donkeys are living together over in a cave.”

  “They have started a secret society.”

  “Sidi, do you think geckos have a private language?”

  “I do. I think everything has a private language.”

  “Even a tree?”

  “Especially a tree.” They were passing some bending palm trees at that moment. “And those big ants we saw in the sand? For sure they were communicating.”

  Talking with Sidi felt like a sky of floating words. You could say anything. Words blended together like paint on paper when you brushed a streak of watercolor orange onto a page, blew on it and thin rivers of color spread out, touching other colors to make a new one. Blue and red to purple, yellow and blue to green, drip and slide and shiver and BING, a new color. Just the way the sea looked, off in the distance now, shimmering like a full paintbox of deepest greens and blues.

  Suddenly Sidi turned right off the road onto a flat spot of land and stopped the jeep. He clicked off the engine. There, spread wide before their eyes, a vast white beach. A few giant turtles sunning in the sand. Their backs were as big as small tables.

  Sidi hadn’t forgotten. “Ras al Hadd,” Aref whispered. “The nesting grounds.” Although he hadn’t mentioned the turtles even once today, Sidi had taken a special detour to check on them.

  A turtle was crawling out of the water just then. “Is that a Loggerhead? A Green? A Hawksbill?” Aref knew their names, but couldn’t always tell them apart.

  “I don’t think it’s an Olive Ridley. It’s too big,” said Sidi.

  If it were midnight during nesting season, there might be hundreds out there. If the babies were hatching, there would be countless tiny turtles scrambling around covered with sand. Aref knew that the Green Turtle would return to the exact same beach for egg-laying for decades. Turtles had invisible maps inside their shells.

  “I think there’s a better viewing spot up that little hilltop,” Sidi said. “Come on.”

  Aref kept staring at the sleeping turtles on the beach as they climbed. Turtles weren’t just cold-blooded reptiles. They were miracles.

  Candle on Your Back

  Were the sleeping turtles dreaming? Were they aware, through tiny reverberations in the earth, when cars, trucks and buses passed by on the roads? Aref had learned that turtles had intricate systems of tactile perception—they could feel the thudding of your feet on the ground, if you got close enough.

  “I wish I could be here when all the baby turtles crack out of the eggs,” Aref said. “That is what I wish most.” But it was summer right now and the eggs had already hatched. The babies were out there swimming around in the sea, going to Somalia, stopping for holidays on little islands.

  Older kids from his school had talked about seeing the eggs hatch. They carried bedrolls and tents and spent the night in a camping ground at Ras Al Junayz.

  Sidi had seen the baby turtles hatching long ago. “I know,” he said. “It’s one of the wonders of the world. I can’t believe how smart those little turtles are, the moment they are born. They know exactly where the water is, by smelling it. They must have imprints inside their cells—turtle directions. No one has to tell them. It pulls them right in. And it pulls all of them back and back to the same beach for years.”

  “They are really smart.”

  “And think of all the things they have to avoid—crabs, birds, hungry foxes, people . . .”

  “Their lives aren’t easy,” said Aref.

  Turtle Life Is Not Always Easy

  1. People hunt turtles for their meat. Yucko.

  2. People hunt for turtle eggs in sand—this is all illegal!!

  3. People hunt turtles for their shells to make stupid things that could easily be made from plastic, like eyeglasses and combs.

  4. People hunt turtles for their oil. ?? I don’t really understand this one but I read about it.

  5. People hunt turtles even for their leathery skin but my mom said she would never carry a purse or a wallet made from turtle skin. Illegal, people!

  6. The first turtles lived more than 185 million years ago. They saw dinosaurs. They saw dinosaurs become extinct. Maybe this is why they look a little like dinosaurs—they remember them.

  7. Fossils of ancient turtles h
ave been discovered in Oman.

  8. Some people say turtles allowed the whole earth to be born on their backs. They were here first. Anyone who does something mean to turtles is very, very bad.

  Sidi was raising his head high like a turtle in the sun, pushing its neck far out from its shell. “Can you smell the water?” he asked.

  “Yes. Can you?”

  “Yes. We will come see the babies hatch someday,” Sidi said. “I promise you. You may camp with your school, but we will also come together and stay longer.”

  “We will do everything,” said Aref. He spun around on his tiptoes. The sand on the turtle beach was covered with wide turtle tracks.

  Sidi pointed. “Look there, far up at the crest of the waves! When a wave rolls over, you can see big turtles inside it, paddling hard.”

  Aref looked and saw blurred, beautiful turtles, suspended in the moving water. It was a wet, blue-green world out there. The turtles were surfing inside the waves.

  “Look! Did you see those red flashes over by the rocks? I think those were clownfish. I’m still thinking about that weird candle thing you told me,” Aref said. “The candles on the backs of turtles. How did anyone ever think of doing that?”

  “Well, it would be easier to do than sticking a candle on a falcon,” Sidi said. “I guess they were just desperate for night-lights.”

  Now Sidi bent over and stretched his arms out again. He tipped to the left and to the right. “Ahhh, this feels so good for circulation. I am stiff.”

  Aref stretched his arms out too. The wind was blowing through their hair and clothes. “But I am not stiff, I am stuffed! We ate breakfast and then we ate all those other things!”

  “Probably we eat too much. I am as stuffed as a turtle inside a too-tight shell.”

  “I am stuffed as a bed full of monkeys!” said Aref.

  “I am stuffed as a squash packed with rice,” said Sidi.

  Aref laughed, picturing the cap of the squash, the tip-top with the stem end, pressed on Sidi’s head like a hat.

  “Okay,” Sidi said. “That’s enough stuffedness. Let’s go back to Muscat. Home is calling.” He leaned over and picked up one tiny, smooth, round white pebble and handed it to Aref. “Here you go. A miniature turtle egg. From the land of the turtles.”

  Aref held the stone tightly. “We could stay in this exact spot until I am in sixth grade,” he said. “We could pretend I went away and came back again. That would be good. I wish there were a button I could push. Just to stop everything right here. I don’t want to leave the turtles. And then we’d see the babies hatching too. We would see every single thing the turtles do, except when they are underwater.”

  “That’s nice. I like it,” said Sidi, smiling. “It makes me remember something. Once when I was fourteen or fifteen, I wished for a Stop Button very hard. I was sitting in a pool of sun on the stone step at our old house, just a regular day waiting for my father to walk up the road after working, and everything around me and inside me felt—all the right size. I wished I could stay that age with my own thoughts and my father coming home soon. But it wasn’t something you could say, really. You just carried it inside you. So, I know.”

  Aref looked out at the waves, then at his grandfather silently. He knew too. They walked down the hill and climbed into the jeep and drove away from the turtles. The turtles who carried their homes on their backs and swam out so far and returned safely to the beach they remembered.

  To Drive After Standing Still

  Monsieur carried them past slopes and cliffs and hillsides. Craggy caves and purple flowering bushes. Mounds and curves and dips and sudden views of the sea and rough spots in the pavement and a broken wagon that looked like a cousin of the abandoned boat. They talked about this and that. When you drove out in the country, you felt closer to the earth than you felt in the city. You had better thoughts in the country. Your thoughts made falcon moves, dipping and rippling, swooping back into your brain to land. Maybe the motion of spinning wheels relaxed and enlivened them. Your thoughts weren’t tied to one spot, and they weren’t nervous, either. They were just open, and rolling. Maybe this was why some people decided to travel all of their lives, going to new places, not knowing what they would see next.

  Aref slept a little, his head bobbing over to the side. Sidi played some Arabic music very softly on the radio.

  The Candy Bowl and Everything Else

  As they entered Muscat, Sidi started whistling. He sang in a high pitch, “I see a stoplight, Stop, Stop, Stop light.”

  Aref shook himself awake. “Did I sleep? I didn’t want to sleep!”

  “Sorry to bother you,” said Sidi, “but I knew you would want to see the historic landmark we are passing.”

  Aref sat up straight. There it was. Sidi’s funny old shop with the green and white awning and rows of brown sandals lined up on shelves behind the window. Aref knew how it smelled inside—smoky rich, like cut tanned leather. A man called Abu Pumpum was running the shop now, counting money, zipping it into a pouch. Pumpum was a nickname, not a real name. Sidi had sold the shop, complete with every single thing in it, to Abu Pumpum two years ago. Aref and his dad had gone with Sidi on the last day to say good-bye to the chairs and shelves and rulers for measuring feet and the candy bowl.

  Sidi, driving very slowly, pulled to the curb. A large shuttle van beeped and roared around them. “Do you need new sandals from Abu Pumpum before you go?” he asked.

  “No,” said Aref. “But thanks. I wear mostly tennis shoes now. I will have to wear snow boots over in Michigan anyway.”

  “People wear sandals there too.”

  “They do?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  Cars were beeping all around them. Sidi pulled out slowly into the crowded lane, Monsieur chugging and the air full of city noise again.

  “Do you miss running the shop?” Aref asked Sidi.

  “I do. But now I have more time to play around with you and work in my garden and take naps.”

  They passed the stately white Marine Science and Fisheries Centre. “The last time I went there with my class,” Aref said, “we saw turtle hatchlings scrambling around inside a big tank. The man said they were three days old. Soon they were going to be taken back to the ocean.”

  “So you have seen them already!”

  “But not on the beach.”

  A woman stood at a crosswalk with a wide basket filled with bananas on her head. “I’m glad people still carry baskets that way,” Sidi said. “I’m glad there are still donkeys in the souk.”

  They passed the sign pointing toward Sinkhole Park, which they had driven to more than once. “Remember when we climbed down those hundreds of stairs,” said Sidi, “and I was clinging on to the handrail, while you ran like an oryx to the pool of water at the bottom? That was a steep climb! And I was even younger then. It was gorgeous.”

  “You want to go there again today?”

  “Next time.”

  They paused at a long red light. Crowds of lunchtime workers in dishdashas and dresses, suits and casual clothes, crossed the street. Sidi pointed out a new block of yellow villas being built. “Look how they are putting blue tiles over the doors. I like that.”

  They were gliding past the giant library where Aref used to crawl on the floor under the tables while his parents studied. He learned how to read shoes first. Then he learned how to read books.

  “Have you returned all your library books?” Sidi asked.

  “Yes.”

  It felt cozy seeing what you recognized. Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!

  Ahhhhhhhhh

  When they walked back into Aref’s house, his mother said, “Now that’s what I like to see, people smiling! How was the desert, you travelers? You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve gotten done, both here and at the university. My colleagues gave me a little party and I became my own assistant and never stopped moving for a minute.” She hugged Aref while Mish-Mish nuzzled his ankles.

  “The desert was
deep, as always,” said Sidi. “And your whole house is smiling. It looks very fresh. We, on the other hand, are somewhat rumpled and smelly, but we had a great time.”

  Aref was jumping and teasing Mish. “It was wonderful!”

  “Did you see camels?”Aref’s mom asked. “Were you cold? Did Monsieur behave?”

  Mish-Mish ran in circles around them, sniffing the desert on their clothes.

  “Everything was perfect,” said Sidi. “We saw camels, yes. Not close up as before. And turtles too and many small talkative birds, and something else which Aref will surely describe to you.”

  “The falcon! He flew so fast and came back to my arm. Mom, I got to hold him! And a black-and-white bird sat on my foot!”

  Aref flopped down on the cool carpet and spread his arms and legs out. “Ahhhhhhhhh. Why can’t I just keep going to school here? It would be so much easier. I could visit you in summers. I could live with Sidi. We could keep going on adventures.”

  His mother laughed. “Adventures! Get ready for the biggest adventure, dear heart. Your father says that people are being very friendly to him and he met some neighbors who also speak Arabic and they had a marvelous dinner together. There are children around your age who are looking forward to meeting you. Lucky boy!”

  Aref was not very interested in this. “Why does everyone say I am so lucky?” he said. “I don’t feel lucky. But our trip was great!”

  Aref’s mother handed Sidi a falafel sandwich with tomatoes and lettuce inside. Sidi ate it in four bites. She offered one to Aref, but Aref said, “No, thank you. Are you kidding? I am still stuffed!”

  He placed his hands over his head.

  “Do you have a headache too?” his mom asked.

  “No, I’m just thinking. There is too much to think about. It’s going too fast for me to finish one thought before another one comes.”