Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Page 3

  The district is not opulent, not sleazy either. The small apartment blocks, two and three storys high, are walled off from the street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home. Women and babies are bundled from curb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbors know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.

  At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes—and it will come—all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.

  The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in color and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the seafront, and crown the intersections of the endless, straight, eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt air and smog.

  On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water jugs, seahorses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange, and cerise.

  If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and faraway, like the mutinous cries of the damned. “The people in hell remain alive,” says a Muslim commentator. “They think, remember, and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh.” And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servant’s eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TVs. A skin diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.

  Back on the road the teenaged children of the Arab families catcall and cruise, wrecking their Ferraris. Hot-rodding, the newspapers call it; the penalty is flogging. A single seabird hovers, etched sharp and white against the sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.

  Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed—and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces, and souks; gray-faced, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and—with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils—confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-colored dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.

  Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air-conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamed she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.

  Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site. “Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,” he said. “I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.”

  “What time is it?” She shivered.

  “Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?”

  “No. Yes, a bit.”

  “There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.”

  So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of tabletop, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.

  “I may have been dreaming,” Andrew said, “but did you go on a predawn tour?”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there—you said you didn’t want him for a neighbor. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice; Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.”

  “Who owns these flats?”

  “I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.”

  “Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?”

  “The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.”

  “They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.”

  “Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.”

  “But here they care?”

  “They try to k
eep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,” he said, recollecting himself, “the money’s the thing.”

  Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. “One thing that seems rather odd … last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway, but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?”

  “You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.”

  “What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?”

  “No. Twit.”

  “I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.”

  “They don’t pray all day,” Andrew said, “just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and at night.” He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself “It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.”

  “This doorway, Andrew …”

  “Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbors, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?”

  “I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?”

  “No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.”

  “How eminently sensible.” She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet. Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.

  “It must be hot,” Andrew said, “under those veils.” He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing table. “Oh, there’s yogurt,” he said, “if you feel like yogurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.”

  “Will you ring me?”

  “No phone. Next week, ins’allah.” He paused in the doorway. “I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.”

  “Yes.” She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.

  It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbors came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.

  She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak-laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.

  2

  When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a skeptical expression, and a capacity for sitting out any situation; this latter attribute had stood him in good stead in his professional life. In Africa it was always counterproductive to lose your temper. It made the local people laugh at you, and gave you high blood pressure. If you wanted to get anything done, the best way was to pretend that you were not interested in doing it at all; that you would, in fact, be happy to sit under this tree all day, and perhaps drink a can of beer. If you put pressure on people they cracked very quickly; then they pretended that what you were asking for was impossible, and that anyway there was no petrol, and that the laborers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.

  When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, “We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.” When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold-and-onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.

  “This is Mr. Shore,” Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. “I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.”

  The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.

  Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, traveled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near-painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy Minister was talking on the telephone again.

  “Is that it?” Andrew said, in the corridor. Parsons did not reply; but persisted, to Andrew’s annoyance, with his pseudomysterious smile. He was a company man, he knew the system and he played it; you would not find him muttering under his breath, or making V-signs outside closed office doors. They walked downstairs and out into the sun.

  They were in the car park, and it seemed that the Deputy Minister had made it before them; he must have come down in his private lift. As he strode across to his Daimler, his white thobe flapping about his legs, and his white ghutra fanning out around his head, a dozen people appeared as if fro
m nowhere and mobbed him. They were identically dressed, except that some wore white headcloths, and others wore the red-and-white ghutra of tea-towel check. A stiff breeze got up, blowing in from the sea, and billowed out the men’s thobes. With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.

  Andrew stopped to watch. “What’s happening?”

  “They’re just saying hello,” Parsons said. “After all, he doesn’t get to the Ministry very often, he’s too busy for that.”

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Running his businesses.”

  “It’s not a full-time pursuit then, being a Minister?”

  “Oh my goodness, no. After all, he’s not one of the royal family, you know. Why should he neglect his own business to run theirs?”

  “You mean that the Kingdom is a family business?”

  “If you like,” Parsons said. “You could put it that way.” The Deputy Minister had almost reached his car now, but delayed further while the petitioners kissed him on the cheek. “They’re the Ministry’s suppliers, I imagine.”

  “They seem unnecessarily matey. For suppliers.”

  “Most of them are probably his relatives as well. It’s their tradition. Accessibility. You wouldn’t want them walled off, would you, behind their civil service?”

  Andrew looked sideways at Parsons, his expression incredulous. Parsons took his pipe out of the top pocket of his bush shirt and stuck it in his mouth. It seemed an odd time to choose; unless it was a tic, which expressed his real feelings, like the pinch on the elbow he had delivered earlier. “I have to remark,” Andrew said, “that he didn’t seem very accessible to me.”