Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Page 5

  “And isn’t it a sufficient deterrent?”

  “It can’t be, can it? I have noticed that the papers don’t carry reports of crimes, just reports of punishments. But if there are punishments, there must be crimes.”

  He had been upset by something today, she saw, made angry, or very surprised. “I’ll make some tea, shall I?” she said. Because all I can do is be a good practical housewife, and offer a housewife’s clichés. The fact is that he has come here and he knew it wouldn’t be easy, he said that; and now he thinks that he has contracted for his problems, and deserves what he gets, and that he shouldn’t be shocked, or baffled, or put into a rage.

  “The truth is that you can’t know if there are burglaries or not,” Andrew said. “Except you hear that there are. You hear rumors.” He looked up. “Everything is rumors. You can’t ever, ever, find out what’s going on in this bloody place.”

  She got up. He followed her out to the kitchen. “Frances,” he said, “you must give it a chance. You’ll make friends. People will start to call on you … people’s wives. If there is anywhere you want to go I’ll always take you.” She took a packet of milk out of the fridge. She waited. “There’s this man at the office,” he said, “a kind of clerk, his name’s Hasan. I thought he was mainly there for making the tea, and driving Daphne about, but it turns out that his speciality is bribing people. No wonder you can never find him when you want somebody to put the kettle on, he’s out slipping baksheesh to some prince’s factotum. He only bribes the lower officials, though, not the high-ups.”

  “Who bribes the high-ups?”

  “I don’t know yet. Eric, maybe? They paid to get you your visa, and they paid to get me my driver’s license, and you just go on paying out at every turn, you have to bribe people’s clerks to get them even to pick up the telephone and speak to you. But it’s a funny thing, because officially there is no bribery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that again is a damn funny thing, because bribery in Saudi Arabia is a very serious crime, and people are charged with it and put in jail and deported for it. Though of course it never happens, because it just doesn’t exist.”

  She took cups out of the cupboard. She was locating everything; this was home. “Well, what did you expect?”

  “I didn’t know it would be quite like this. I didn’t know there would be so many layers to the situation.” He paused. “Do you think I’m naïve?”

  “You are, a bit, if you need to ask the question. I expect you’ll get used to it.”

  “You’d think it would be a sort of abstract problem,” Andrew said, “a matter of conscience. But then about once a day I realize what’s happening in some particular situation, and I realize what I’ve let myself in for …” He put a hand to his ribs. “It’s like being kicked.”

  Turadup, William and Schaper first came to Saudi Arabia in late 1974, a few months before King Faisal was shot by his nephew, when oil revenues were riding high, property prices in Riyadh had doubled in a month, and so urgent was the need to build that the Jeddah sky was black with helicopters ferrying bags of cement from the ships that packed the harbor. Since then they had expanded to Kuwait and the Emirates, been chucked out of Iran when the Shah fell, and accommodated themselves to Saudi labor law and the rise of Islamic architecture. They had a contract for a shopping mall in Riyadh, several schools in the Eastern Province, a military hospital, warehousing in Yanbu; there was the military project they did not talk about much, and there was the marble-and-gold-leaf ministerial HQ … Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.

  Throughout the seventies, Schaper flew in and out, disbursing great wads of used notes. His briefcase became a legend, for what came out of it. Conscious of his role, he took to clenching Havanas between his rubbery lips, and to wearing eccentric hats, as if he were a Texan. “Buccaneering” was a word he liked to hear applied to himself.

  Turadup flew in teams of construction workers from Britain, and housed them in temporary camps outside the cities, giving them a makeshift supermarket selling fizzy drinks, a mess serving American frozen burgers, a lecture on sunstroke, a tetanus shot, a dartboard, and three leave tickets a year to see the families they had left behind. The physical stress was crushing, their hours were ruinous, their pay packets enormous. Off-duty hours they spent lying on their beds, watching mosquitoes circling the cubicle rooms; unused to letter writing, they became like long-term prisoners, subject to paranoia; to fears that were sometimes not paranoid, but perfectly well-grounded, that their wives were preparing to leave them for other men. When letters reached them they were full of news about burst pipes and minor car accidents, and vandalism on the housing estates where they lived; and seemed to conceal much else, lying between the blue-ballpoint lines on the Basildon Bond Airmail.

  They began to occupy themselves in brewing up liquor. They wandered off toward the desert looking for a bit of privacy, and caused search parties. Their skins, after every precaution, turned scarlet and blistered in the sun. Strange rashes and chest complaints broke out. When they were released for leave they sat at the back of the plane and got sodden drunk within an hour of takeoff; they squirted each other with duty-free Nina Ricci, and laid hands on the stewardesses, and threw their dinners about, and vomited on the saris of dignified Indian ladies who were seated on their path to the lavatories. At Heathrow they vanished, sucked into the rain, an allowed-for percentage never to be seen again; this was part of the company’s calculations, for they were cannon fodder, quick and easy to recruit and cheap to replace. Cheap, that is, by the standards of what Turadup was making in those years; and cheap compared to what skilled men of other nationalities might have taken as their due.

  Then again, a certain number would be deported for misbehavior, for offending against the tenets of Islam; run out of the country, sometimes flogged beforehand and sometimes not, or beaten on the streets by the “religious police” for lighting up a cigarette during the Ramadhan fast. They were all informed of the risks upon arrival, and Turadup took no responsibility in such cases; they were adults after all, and they knew the rules. There came a point when these men became more trouble than they were worth, and so now only a few foremen and site managers were British. The labor was recruited from Korea, yellow, tractable men, reeling through a desert landscape: indentured coolies, expecting nothing.

  On the other hand, Turadup had always prided itself on how it had treated its professional staff. Plush if prefabricated villas were erected, with fitted carpets and icy air-conditioning, and instant gardens of potted shrubs. School fees would be paid for the older children left behind, and there would be Yemeni drivers to run the wives about, and a swimming pool for each compound (carefully fenced from local eyes), and perhaps a squash court. And perhaps a weekly film show, as TV in the Kingdom is in its infancy, and mainly confined to Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Prayer Call from Mecca, and expositions of the Holy Koran; and certainly, soft furnishings coordinated in person, down to the last fringed lampshade, by Daphne Parsons herself. Turadup picked up the medical bills, and gave its professionals and their families a splendid yearly bonus and ten weeks off every summer; so that they would say, “We only have to last out till Ramadhan, and we don’t come back till after Haj.” It was important that their lives should be made as smooth as possible, that they should not be ground down by the deprivations and the falsity of life in the Kingdom. They must be comforted and cossetted, because Turadup’s professionals were responsible, discreet men, who could Deal With The Saudis; and they do not come ten-a-penny.

  But by the time the Shores arrived in Jeddah the great days of Turadup were over. They had sold off their big housing compound and let some of their staff go. The price of oil was falling and the construction boom was finished. It was true that buildings were still going up all over the city, but
every stage of a project needed an infusion of money, and often it was delayed, or doubtful, or didn’t come at all. Eric Parsons got used to waiting on the Minister of Finance. He spent a lot of time in other people’s offices, sipping cardamom coffee, waiting for people to get around to him. He had a sense, at times, of things eluding his grasp; of the good years slipping away.

  Daphne Parsons would tell you, if asked, that the Jeddah social scene was not what it had been. The Saudis, of course, had never really mixed with the expatriates. That was as it should be; it avoided mutual embarrassment, and the thorny question of illicit liquor. The odd groveler would ask a Saudi to dinner, a colleague or a boss; but the man would turn up two hours late and without his wife (one should have known) and a place setting would hastily be removed, and a man you had thought was a liberal, a modern Saudi, would sit glowering at the tense, sober company, as if expecting something.

  What was it he expected? Was it a drink? Normally there would be homemade wine on the table. Tonight you’ve left it out, in deference to Islam—and because of the risk if your Saudi friend should later turn against you. He may drop a hint that he would like a little something; you produce it, but you’re still afraid. Or he might not drop the hint, and let you suffer, on Perrier water, the drying up of the conversation and the covert glances at watches. And if you should so suffer, you will not know why; whether it is because he is really religious, or whether it is because he is as frightened as you; or whether it is simply that he has plenty of Glenfiddich at home.

  Khawwadjihs, the Saudis call the white expatriates: light-haired ones. And nowadays the turnover in light-haired ones is so quick. Eighteen months is the average stay. There are people in Jeddah today, Mrs. Parsons reflects, who didn’t even know the Arnotts, who weren’t here when Helen Smith died. People are scarcely around long enough to get involved in serious entertaining, or in the Hejaz Choral Society, or in running a Girl Guide troop. There are never enough helpers for the British Wives’ annual bazaar at the Embassy, and the British Community Library staggers on with too few volunteers for weekend evenings. There is almost no one around, nowadays, who remembers what it was like before the giant shopping malls were built, when people had to shop for groceries in the souk. And Mrs. Parsons does not know anyone who attended that fabled party in 1951, when young Prince Mishari, eighteenth surviving son of the great King Abdul Aziz, turned up in a drunken rage, sprayed all the guests with bullets, and murdered the British Consul.

  Those were the days.

  That evening Andrew drove her downtown. Her sense of unreality was intensified by the slow-moving traffic, bumper to bumper, by the blaring of horns in the semidarkness; by the prayer call, broadcast through megaphones to the hot still air. Neon signs rotated and flashed against the sunset; on Medina Road the skyscrapers were hung with colored lights, trembling against the encroaching night.

  They executed a U-turn, inched through the traffic, and swerved into a great sweep of white buildings. They edged forward, jostling for a parking space; with no anger in his face, but with a kind of violent intent, Andrew put his fist on his horn. Cadillacs disgorged men in their thobes and ghutras and handmade Italian sandals; women, veiled in black from head to foot, flitted between the cars.

  Andrew took her hand briefly and squeezed it, standing close to her, as if shielding her with his solid body from view. “I mustn’t hold your hand,” he said, “we mustn’t touch in public. It causes offense.” They moved apart, and into the crowds.

  Inside the supermarket, on the wall where the shopping carts were parked, there was a notice which said

  THIS SHOP CLOSES FOR PRAYER. BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PROMULGATION OF VIRTUE, AND THE ELIMINATION OF VICE.

  “The religious police,” Andrew said. “Vigilantes. You’ll see them around. They carry sticks.”

  “What do the secular police carry?”

  “Guns.”

  Frances took a cart. She maneuvered it to a gigantic freezer cabinet. Pale chilled veal from France and black frozen American steaks swept before her for fifty feet. “Do we need any of this?”

  “Not really. I brought you to show you that you can get everything. Come and look at the fruit.”

  There were things she had never seen before in her life; things grown for novelty, not for eating, bred for their jewel-like colors. “They don’t have seasons,” Andrew said. “They fly this stuff in every morning.” She bought mangoes. She put them in a plastic bag and handed them to a Filipino man who stood behind a scale. He weighed them, and twisted the bag closed and handed it back to her, but he did not look her in the face. Andrew took the cart from her. “Don’t think about the prices,” he advised. “Or you’d never eat.”

  In Botswana, in the last town where they had lived, the vegetable truck came twice a week. Carrots were a rarity, mushrooms were exotic. In the garden, baboons stripped the fig trees. Fallen oranges rolled through the grass; the gardener collected them up in baskets. There were tiny peaches, hard as wood, and the cloying scent of guavas in the crisp early mornings. Around her, women plucked tins from shelves; women trussed up in their modesty like funeral laundry, women with layers of thick black cloth where their faces should be. Only their hands reached out, sallow hands heavy with gold.

  She caught up with Andrew, laying her hand on the handle of the cart beside his, carefully not touching. “Let me drive,” he said.

  “I didn’t know the veil was like this,” she whispered. “I thought you would see their eyes. How do they breathe? Don’t they feel stifled? Can they see where they’re going?”

  Andrew said, “These are the liberated ones. They get to go shopping.”

  They took their groceries to the car. “We’ll eat soon,” Andrew said. They wove themselves into the crowds; each brilliant window collected its admirers. The buildings here looked new, perhaps a month old, perhaps a week; perhaps they had sprung from the desert that morning, gleaming and stainless, and some old-style genie, almost redundant now, had caused to appear in them by an instant’s magic all the luxury goods of the Western world. Cameras, television sets, Swiss watches, so crammed that they seemed to spill out onto the pavement; ancient silk carpets, and microwave ovens, and electric guitars. There was a furrier: fox, wild mink, sable. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. The smell of fried chicken mingled with the scent of Chanel and Armani. Between the Porsches, a fountain played in a marble basin. She stopped before a shoe shop; a window of tiny high-heeled sandals, green, lilac, red, gold. “Why these?” she said. “Westerners have more sober shoes.”

  “I suppose that if you have to go out draped in black to your ankles, you want some way to express yourself.”

  She followed Andrew. “Can’t they buy furs when they go abroad? They can’t need them in this climate.”

  “Money is a burden all the year round.”

  They bought cassette tapes; cheap copies, pirated in Asia and imported by the shopful. All the latest stuff was on the shelves; rock music, and Vivaldi’s Greatest Hits. She didn’t buy the Vivaldi. She planned to fill the flat with noise. I am thirty years old, she thought, and I still buy this, whatever is current, whatever is loud. When they came out of the music shop it was time for night prayers, and men were unrolling prayer carpets on the ground.

  “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet,” Andrew muttered. Gates clashed down over the shop windows, doors were barred. In a space by the fountain—which now, unaccountably, had run dry—the worshippers jostled together in lines behind the imam, and then in time fell to their knees, and touched their foreheads to the ground, elevating their backsides. It was just as she had seen it in pictures; she was always surprised if anything was the same.

  They stood watching, in the heat. Andrew looked as if he wished to speak; but perhaps he had no right to an opinion? She glanced at him sideways. “Oh go on,” she muttered. “Spit it out. I know you hate religion.”

  “Oh, they must do as they like,” he said. “It’s not my business
, is it? It’s just the ablutions I mind. They have to wash before they pray, all sorts of inconvenient bits of themselves. When you go into the lavatories at the Ministry all the floor is flooded, and people are standing on one leg with their other foot in the handbasin. You can’t … you want to laugh.” He took out his handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and mopped his brow. “We timed this trip badly. But people are always getting caught like this. There’s only a couple of hours between sunset and night prayers.”

  And then, she thought, eight hours till dawn. Her feet ached, still swollen perhaps from the flight. When prayers were over they went into a fast-food shop. Small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers behind the counter, and stacked trays, and busily cleaned the tables. There was an all-male party of young Filipinos in one corner, and Saudi youths sprawled across the plastic benches, nourishing their puppy-fat and their incipient facial hair.

  A sign said FAMILY ROOM, and an arrow pointed to a corner of the café marked off by a wooden lattice screen. Andrew steered her behind it. There were three tables, empty. They ate pizza and drank milk shakes. Conversation between them died; but for a moment, over the comforting junk food, she did feel real again, and uncalculating, whole, as though she were a child. But it is not really myself, she thought, as she pushed an olive around her plate, it is just an image I have been sold, in a film somewhere. A wide-eyed child of America; the innocent abroad.

  The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. “At this hour,” Andrew said, “Saudi men go out to visit their friends.”

  “They drive like maniacs,” she said.

  “Just think if they had alcohol.” His face was grim and set. He was almost used to it now, the six near-misses a day.

  Each highway was straight; the same neon signs flashing between the streetlamps, NISSAN SANYO MITSUBISHI. On the center divide, saplings wilted in the exhaust fumes. “I don’t know where we are,” she said.