Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read online

  “Yes, I know.” Frances threaded her fingers into the mesh of the security fence. “I may be wrong, but isn’t there a lot more actual wall than in the artist’s impression? It seemed to be made entirely of glass.”

  “Mm.” Andrew frowned. “There were certain impracticalities in the basic design.” He cheered up. “The mosque will be over there.”

  “It’s going to have its own mosque?”

  “Oh yes. Every public building needs one. And there’s going to be a heliport on top. At the center will be a courtyard, with a fountain rising out of a base shaped like an incense burner. There are sixty-four fountains in Jeddah, and this will be the biggest. If you come here—”

  Her loose sandals full of grit and dust, she skittered toward him over the clawed-up ground. He touched her shoulder lightly, turning her to see. “If you look over there, that’s going to be the Minister’s private entrance.”

  “Can’t he go through an ordinary door?”

  “No, he doesn’t seem able to.”

  “What about trees, are you having trees?”

  “There are ten thousand flowering shrubs on order. They’re going to be planted out along the street frontage, approximately where we’re standing now. You don’t know what a treat it is, to work without the penny-pinching you get everywhere else. This architect, he’s an Egyptian, I did think at first that he’d got carried away, but they’re prepared to back it, they’ll put the resources in. You have this confidence, you see Fran, that when it’s done it’ll be absolutely right.”

  “What about sculptures? Are you having sculptures?”

  “Yes, there’s a big one planned for the south side. It’s a model of the solar system.”

  “Working, is it?”

  He squeezed her arm. “It’s going to be great. You’ll see. The architects in Cairo have ordered this scale model, about tabletop size—they’re having it built specially in Los Angeles. I can’t wait to have it, it should have been here before I came. Then, you see, I’ll be able to get it over to people what it’s going to look like.”

  “I wish I could see it, when it comes. But I can’t go to your office, can I?”

  “I’ll try to sneak you in, some weekend. During Friday prayers is the best time, when everybody’s at the mosque.”

  What a lot this building meant to him. She looked up into his face. “It will be splendid. I’m sure.”

  “Yes … but even so, I wish I’d been here a few years back, when it was really boom conditions. They’re not building so much now, and not the space-age stuff, all those novel shapes. It’s all socalled Islamic architecture now. There’s no challenge in it, anybody can build some piffling little archways round a courtyard. Now this Egyptian, he’s the right stuff; he’s got all the little nods to the religious element, but he’s got a sense of adventure as well.”

  “Andrew—” she swiveled a glance over her shoulder, uneasy—“there’s a policeman across the road, he’s staring at us.”

  “Yes, better go, I suppose.” Andrew seemed unable to tear his eyes from the stacked-up pipes, the piles of builders’ rubble.

  “Do you know something, Fran—this will be the last of the best. Now the oil price is coming down they won’t build on this scale again. I should have come here years ago.”

  He looked wistful as he said it, as if a golden age had passed. Construction sites were the pleasure gardens of his mind. As she picked her way over the ruts and gullies he put out a hand to help her, despite the policeman’s presence. There was a great ditch between the site and the road. She teetered over it across a plank; Andrew followed.

  Frances Shore’s Diary: 15 Safar

  The last of our air freight arrived today. There were things in the tea chests I’d forgotten I’d packed. Those straw baskets we used to buy from boys on the streets, and those candlesticks from the pottery at Thamaga. And my soapstone tortoise, I’d missed him. I got him from a young boy who was selling them on the platform at Francistown station, when we were on our way to Victoria Falls. We went while the war was still on. The hotels were cheap. People on the sunset river cruise were getting shot out of the water.

  Unpacking our stuff gave me a funny feeling. I was imagining myself when I packed the crates, thinking about the exciting future, which is now the dull present. I found places for the things around the flat. I imagined they’d make it seem more like home. But they didn’t look right. They seemed to come from another life.

  I have met a woman called Marion, who lives on Jeff Pollard’s compound. She’s the wife of one of the people at Mineral Resources, and they’ve got two little girls. They used to be in Zambia, so we have quite a lot to talk about, and I’ve found that I can actually walk round to her compound and get there before I expire from the heat or am accosted by curb-crawlers more than a few times. There are twelve houses in the compound, which is where we would have been living if things had gone otherwise. I wonder what it would have been like to have Marion for a neighbor. But chance has made our life quite different.

  The houses are all prefabs, quite big, but shabby. They were built to last five years, but they’re now in their ninth. I’m sure that people at home think we lead glamorous lives here, bronzing ourselves by palm-fringed pools, and sipping “illicit liquor,” which always sounds more exciting than the normal kind, doesn’t it? There are not quite so many cockroaches at Marion’s place, but on the other hand their baths are held to the walls with sticky tape, and they have rats running about in their roofs.

  Marion complains about the compound a lot, it’s falling down and they can’t get maintenance, etc., and they have distressing episodes with their drains, but she seems to be happy here in a way. She’s been in Jeddah for two years and perhaps when we have been around that long I’ll be used to it and see it in the same light. After all, she said yesterday, you can get anything you want in the shops. Now in Zambia there was no soap, we had no sugar for months, the eggs were always stale, we had to eat stringy chicken all the time and some weeks we had to live on spaghetti. So if somebody locked you in your local Sainsbury’s, I asked her, would you be happy? She stared at me. She’s an easygoing woman, too lethargic to be offended. It was meant to be a joke, but I think something is happening to my sense of humor.

  The Brits here are all earning far more than they would anywhere else in the world. They talk about how their shares are doing, and about their next leave, which is usually going to be a round-the-world trip by air, taking in really boring places like Miami and Hong Kong, where they can spend their time in shopping malls, just in case they get homesick for Jeddah. Some people, though, are parsimonious. They stash away everything they can and treat their time here like a prison sentence, or a stint in an up-country field camp. They intend to stay on until they get a certain sum of money in the bank, but as they get toward their target, they decide they need more. They want to buy a house but house prices are rising so fast. They’ve put their children in boarding school so that they could come abroad, but now the children are settled and it’s unfair to take them away, so they’ve got to stay abroad to pay the fees. They’ve put Mother in a nursing home because they weren’t around to look after her and now she’s got older and sicker and got ideas above her station. They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.

  No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin—as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department. They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed—war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else.

  The Americans are different. Usually they don’t stay long. They don’t know how to behave anywhere at all.

  Marion’s topic of conversation is her husband. Russel won’t take her shopping. He doesn’t think that�
��s a man’s job, bothering with groceries. His office sends her a car once a week, for a couple of hours, but she has to account for everything she spends, and he’s not too keen on the idea of her shopping alone; she gets carried away, he says, and buys things like prawns. His idea is that they go out once a month and do everything, we’ve got a freezer, he says, so use it. But at the same time, he expects her to have everything on hand that he might want to eat. You’re doing nothing else all day, he says, so why can’t you organize the household? The other night he was going on, haven’t we got any beetroot, why isn’t there any beetroot?

  Plus her Magimix has broken down.

  When it gets a bit cooler, she says, we can sit outside and have coffee.

  Men don’t come very well out of this diary. On the other hand, women don’t come very well out of it either. I said when I was writing before that the sexes live here in a state of deep mutual suspicion, but now I’m beginning to think it’s more like a state of mutual terror. I wasn’t sure before I came here if people were really executed for adultery. But since I’ve been here the Saudi Gazette has carried two or three reports of double executions. If you miss one, somebody will have cut it out, and will give you a photocopy. We’re fascinated, we can’t help it.

  There was an execution in Mecca a little while ago. The woman of the house was having an affair with her driver. The husband got suspicious, and sacked him. The following night the woman let the driver into the house. Her husband was asleep. Her lover stabbed him to death. They put the body in a sack and tipped it down a well. Then they took off to Taif, posing as husband and wife. When they were caught they confessed. The man was publicly beheaded, for adultery and murder, and the woman was stoned to death for adultery.

  I suppose there is no call to jeel cultural superiority. The murder, anyway, is the same as crimes in the West. The punishment is not so different from what we have had until recently. But what chills my blood is the pious last paragraph that the newspaper tags on. “While giving out details of the offense and punishment, the Interior Minister made it clear that the government would vigorously implement the Sharia laws to maintain the security of the land and to deter criminals … The executions were carried out after Friday prayers.”

  I really must talk to Yasmin. When I read things like this it’s beyond me how people like Marion can say, “Oh, I don’t mind it here really”—because you see, there are these nightmare occurrences. Probably I spend too much time on my own in the flat, reading the newspapers and trying to work things out. When Andrew came home yesterday he told me something very disturbing about the empty flat upstairs. I don’t know if I should write it down. What if somebody gets hold of my diary, and reads it?

  3

  What she remembered now was the sound of sobbing she had heard, echoing through the bathroom pipes. She was not sure any longer which flat it had come from. Best to assume that it was Samira. Did people cry a lot, in arranged marriages? Marion’s complaints nagged at her. People seemed to cry enough in the marriages they fixed up for themselves.

  Perhaps Abdul Nasr had been exercising the right the Koran gave him to beat his wife. She saw him once more, midmorning, striding out to his car. His sandals skidded over the marble, and the ends of his ghutra whiplashed out behind him. Yet Andrew said you never saw a Saudi in a hurry. She had time to notice only his frown, and the flash of his wristwatch. The contrast stuck in her mind—the clean Cartier lines, and the cloying odor of goatflesh which floated day after day down the stairs.

  Frances had a headache. Perhaps, she thought, it was the effect of living with the air-conditioning; it couldn’t be healthy, could it? Or perhaps it was the tension which was building up at the back of her neck.

  She mentioned it to Andrew. “What have you got to be tense about?” he asked. Then, “Guess what, I’ve been paid. I’m going to the money changer’s. Want to come?”

  He would have to drive downtown to the bank first, and turn the Ministry’s check into cash. Riyal notes are what work here—not personal checks, not credit cards. He would extract a bundle of notes which would be their housekeeping money; and later they would subdivide it into smaller bundles, and stow it about the flat in cunning hiding places.

  Then he would need to take the cash that was left over, and exchange it for a sterling check. The money changer’s sounded interesting: as if there might be a table in the open air, with people standing about in biblical attitudes. But it was just an ordinary office, in an ordinary street. She sat in the car, waiting for Andrew, watching the passersby. Jeddah is a cosmopolitan city, it is said. All languages are heard, all colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. Ghettos are formed, even on the pavement; garments are twitched aside. The stranger you see today will be stranger still tomorrow. People fall into their national stereotypes; you note the beef-red complexion, the kinked hair, the epicanthic fold.

  She fiddled with the radio dial, trying to get some news from the World Service. It was the usual news when she found it, sliced through with a static crackle: bombs in Belfast, bombs in Beirut. But everything that concerned her seemed to be happening close to home. You see, she had said to Andrew, I was right; I did hear footsteps in the empty flat.

  It was hot in the car; with the window open the dust blew in. A litter of ginger kittens ran like spiders up the side of a rubbish skip. Some larger cats, covered in scabs and scars, dragged a chicken carcass down the street. Old residents say that stray dogs used to be a menace, roaming in packs around the building sites. But they were rounded up by the municipality; and we hear no more of them.

  Behind her sunglasses she could watch the Saudi men, and say to herself that if they returned her glance they would see a blank face, no expression, nothing more revealing than they would see if she were veiled. What an unflattering garment the thobe is, she thought. Before she came she imagined that they would wear flowing robes, not these stiff elongated white shirts. The late afternoon light shone through them. She saw spindly legs, and string vests.

  But why should they dress like the cast of a nativity play, just to please her?

  She looked at her watch. Go after him, why not? They have separate “ladies’ banks,” but she has never heard of a ladies’ money changer. Nobody seems to know exactly where women are allowed and where they are not. At least the South Africans put up notices: NIE BLANKES.

  Once she was inside the money changer’s, no one took the least notice of her. The place was crowded; she threaded her way through to Andrew and touched his arm. He jumped, and gave her a blank, dazed look, as if at first he hadn’t recognized her. “You’re here,” he said.

  It was down-at-heel: far from the pleasure domes. As if this was where the serious business of the Kingdom was transacted, and comfort for once did not matter; the stuffing was coming out of the vinyl chairs. The customers shuffled from one disorderly queue to the next, thrusting banknotes at one grill, flourishing forms at the next; collecting signatures, amassing stamps, their eyes flickering constantly to the wall clock, to see if prayer time was imminent, and they were going to be locked in—locked in and left to mill and shout for thirty minutes, sweating, their clothes adhering to their backs and their earnings to their hands. Even the air-conditioning didn’t seem to work properly. There were cheap carpet tiles on the floor, cigarette butts spilling out of ashtrays. Torn scraps of carbon paper lay where they fell.

  The manager and his assistant sat behind their desks, in full view; the manager’s desk had a black mirror surface on which the dust lay thick. His assistant’s desk was metallic, less imposing, shorter by a foot and with fewer drawers; its dust lay even thicker. Sometimes the assistant, and after him the manager, would stretch out a careless hand, and sign with a flourish what the frantic queue pushed at them. But they seemed, on the whole, detached; like lords of the manor looking in at a villeins’ feast. They grinned, talked on the telephone, scratched their chins. A contingent of Thai cleaning workers, still in their scarlet overalls,
revolved from counter to counter in a fatigued minuet. An American, in a baseball cap and sneakers, waved his papers above his head; his eyes were bright, his belly swamped his belt. Three Brits, temporarily hors de combat, leaned against the wall. They were blue-chinned and balding, they sported sagging chain-store trousers, the polish had long worn from their shoes. They had an air of purposeful frailty, like Jarrow marchers. The hot burnt stench of money was in the air.

  Andrew had no time to talk. He brushed her touch off his arm. Outside the traffic swarmed by, and the sun was setting over the sea. A little wooden cupboard disgorged yen, and thousands and thousands of Swiss francs. Two cheap suitcases stood casually under the stairs, as if for the use of more ambitious customers, and as Andrew, his face gleaming with aggression and sweat, signaled that they were finished, a rotund Arab descended the staircase, and picked them up; as he flexed his arms his cuff buttons strained, and his Rolex Oyster gleamed fatly. Outside, at the bottom of the steps, a vendor had spread out a tablecloth on the ground and was selling pocket calculators. Andrew took a deep breath of cooler air. The heat inside the office was increasing; the glass front doors were opaque with greasy smudges, the desperate palm prints of the patrons hurrying in.

  “The pound’s fallen,” Andrew said, as they climbed back into the car. “Shall we go and get something for the headache?”

  “Have you got one too?”

  They were turning under the flyover by the Pepsi-Cola plant when the wail of the muezzin broke over the racetracks. The cars kept speeding; the Prophet said that travelers need not pray. “Bugger,” Andrew said, hearing the prayer call. “You always lose a half hour somewhere.”