Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read online

  Safar

  1

  The man on the plane—Fairfax’s colleague—had been quite wrong. There was a map of Jeddah. Andrew brought it home. “Now I can begin to make sense of it,” Frances said.

  She spread out the map on the dining room table. Five minutes later she looked up, disappointed. “It’s useless. It’s too old. The shape of the coastline is different now. This road appears to end in the sea. And look where they’ve put Jeddah Shops. They’re five blocks out.” She traced the length of Medina Road. “How old would you say these flats are?”

  “Five years.”

  “On this map we’re a vacant lot.”

  “Sorry,” Andrew said. “Only trying to help. Thought bad maps were better than no maps.”

  “That’s not so.” She picked up her pen and wrote on the map CARTOGRAPHY BY KAFKA. “We don’t exist,” she said.

  Pollard called her on the new telephone. “Daphne Parsons will come for you with a driver on Tuesday morning,” he said, “and take you to the souk.”

  “Oh, will she?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Well … thank you for arranging that for me.” Though I could hardly claim, she thought, that I was doing something else. Everyone knows what my life is like; I’m at their disposal.

  “That’s okay,” Pollard said. “Any time. Dryer all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Happy with it?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause. He said, “Is there anything else you want?”

  “Yes, let me see … how about some flock wallpaper for the bathroom? And a half tester bed?”

  “Joking, are you?” Pollard said. She got rid of him. Only later she realized, with a kind of sick shame that she knew was unwarranted, that he might have been making her a sexual proposition.

  She reported the conversation to Andrew; not to make trouble, but so that she could have his opinion. “He asked me if there was anything else I wanted.”

  “He probably meant a new ironing board,” Andrew said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “You’re fussy about ironing boards, aren’t you?”

  She trawled her memory for instances. Perhaps she had expressed an occasional opinion about them, over the last week or two. Hausfrau’s conversation, now. She felt that a change must be coming over her, but that Andrew took the change for granted.

  “Yasmin said that she would teach me to do some of their cooking,” she said.

  “Oh good. I like curries.”

  From eleven each morning the smell of Yasmin’s cooking hung over the flats. Shams was useless in the kitchen, she complained, and there was a dinner party most nights, and soon Raji’s mother would be coming from Islamabad to stay for weeks and weeks, and she’d be asking all her Jeddah friends around. Yasmin stood in the kitchen, barefoot, chopping and frying, frying and chopping, dicing and stirring, her face shiny, the smell of ghee and herbs impregnating her clothes; tasting, muttering, licking her lips and frowning into the pans. Frances stood in the kitchen doorway, Selim straddling her hip. The air of formality between them had abated; the guest need no longer be entertained. One busy morning, when twenty people were expected, Frances washed the best dinner service, thin white china with the sheen of a pearl and a single chaste gold line, and then she polished the heavy crystal glasses that Shams was not allowed to touch, and set them out on the table, ready for the mineral water and orange juice they would contain that evening. “I’ve got nothing like this,” she said.

  Yasmin said, “I’m sure you have very fine china, at your home in England. I’m sure you have beautiful things.”

  “No, honestly. I haven’t got anything.”

  Yasmin looked up momentarily from the pan she was stirring, where something bubbled gently, something venomously red.

  “Did you not have wedding presents, you and Andrew?”

  “No, not to speak of. We didn’t really have that kind of wedding. We just had a couple of witnesses down at the DC’s office, and then we went for a drink. We got married in a bit of a hurry.”

  Yasmin’s wooden spoon hovered in the air for a moment. “I see. Well, I didn’t know that, Frances, you didn’t tell me.” She looked at her appraisingly. “Not to worry, I think most people have had some miscarriages.”

  “Oh no … not that sort of hurry.”

  “I thought you meant …” Yasmin broke off, and sighed. “You see, because of living in England, I know how some young girls act. But not you, I felt sure.”

  “I was in Africa when I got married. I just meant, it was informal.”

  “A pity for you. It is a big day in a young girl’s life.”

  “I daresay. I wasn’t a young girl exactly.”

  “You had … men friends? Before?”

  “One or two.”

  Yasmin wished to know more. She took a cucumber and a sharp knife and began to dice it very finely on to a wooden board. “When I was in St. John’s Wood …” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “They were going to pass a law that all young girls in England must not go out at night, except with their fiancés.”

  “Oh, but Yasmin, they couldn’t. We could never have such a law.” Frances shifted Selim’s weight to her other hip. “You look hot,” she said crossly, “shall I get you a drink out of the fridge?”

  “I will have Fanta,” Yasmin said. “Yes, because you see, most girls in the UK have lost their virginity by the age of twelve.”

  “That’s rubbish. Who told you that?”

  “You only have to read the newspapers. Naturally Parliament is concerned.”

  “But you must have got it wrong. We don’t have those sort of laws. We don’t have laws to make people moral. We don’t think that’s what law is for.”

  “You should try to make people more moral,” Yasmin said. She pushed back a long strand of her black hair, and leaned over the pans again. “The West is so decadent, and such behavior makes people unhappy. In the long run. I am telling you.”

  “England’s not like that. Not really.”

  “But I have seen it.”

  “Then it must be a funny place, St. John’s Wood, that’s all I can say.”

  Yasmin never raised her voice, never insisted; just plowed her lonely furrow. Almost every day she would unveil some new, astonishing viewpoint. Shams was on her knees in the hall, working on the carpets with a brush and pan, on red hand-knotted rugs whose seamless geometry recalled the unfathomable nature and eternal vigilance of Allah himself. The kitchen filled with steam.

  When she was back in Flat 1 Frances found she could not follow Yasmin’s recipes. “Oh, you just take a handful of this,” Yasmin would say, “and take some of that—”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, just what you think you need …”

  And to Frances’s objections, and queries, she would say, “It comes with practice. All English food,” she would say, “is boiled. That is why it has no taste.” She would tap her spoon against the side of the pan, and exhale with theatrical weariness, and hold out her hands so that Frances could pass her a towel to wipe them; the artistry was over, Shams would clear up the mess. “I will send you some of this, later,” she would say. “Shams will bring you a dish of it across.”

  Frances got Andrew to take her uptown, to the lending library run by the British community. “I want to borrow some cookery books,” she said, “and get it all straight in my mind. Listen, Andrew, why doesn’t Yasmin distinguish … why doesn’t Yasmin distinguish … between private morality and public order?”

  “Because Islam doesn’t,” he said, his voice toneless, his eyes on the moving traffic. “This country is governed by the Sharia law, which is Allah’s own sentiments as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In Islam there are no private vices.”

  “So there is no difference between sins and crimes.”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “So if you commit a crime—”

  “You appea
r before a religious court. This is a theocracy. God rules, OKAY? Frances, shut up now, I’m driving.”

  KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD AND AVOID DISTRACTION, a notice warned. The city passed: Shesh Mahal Restaurant, Electric Laundry, Wheels Balanced Here; a sculpture, twenty-five feet high, made of blue metal tubes like organ pipes. Small children swarmed loose in the speeding cars, scrambling over the seats, pulling at the drivers’ ghutras, while the women in charge of them sat like black pillars, their hands in their laps; in any given year, how many of these little mites must crash howling through the windscreen to death or mutilation? “Haven’t they heard of seat belts?” Frances inquired.

  “Bit of a dodgy concept,” Andrew said. “Allah has appointed a term to every life.”

  “Who tells you this stuff?”

  “Oh, guys at work.”

  It was sunset; oily colors mingled in the sky. An airplane hung low over Prince Abdullah Street, unmoving, its roar drowned out by the usual noises of the city. On their left was a private villa built to resemble one of the minor Loire châteaux. On their right was a big expatriate housing compound, where the apartments looked like packing cases, stacked one on top of the other. YOU ARE FAST, said a sign, BUT DANGER IS FASTER. Another sculpture; a human fist.

  At the British Community Library there were several excellent cookery books. They enrolled, and were given tickets. It all seemed so normal; there was a lady volunteer behind the desk, who wore a nice white blouse with a tie neck, and behaved as if she were in Tunbridge Wells. There was a notice-board, giving details of forthcoming concerts, and offering cars and hi-fi sets for sale. “So many people are going home,” the nice lady said, “you’ve come in at the end of things really. We’ve done seven years, it’s passed in a flash. Well, yes, I’d say I’ve got a lot out of it really, I don’t think it’s right to moan all the time. We’ve learned scuba diving, it’s great fun, there are clubs if you’re interested.” And “Poor you,” she said, “stuck in a block of flats without any European neighbors, no, I really don’t envy you.”

  It took them the best part of an hour to get home through the traffic. “Do we need any shopping?” Andrew asked. “Everywhere’s open till ten o’clock.”

  “No. I’m sick of shopping. Yasmin is sending us some food tonight. Would you like to be here for seven years?”

  “No. But think of the money they must have stashed away.”

  “Do you think they’ve suffered for it?”

  “Not really. It depends what you want out of life. I can’t think of anywhere better … for scuba diving.”

  They pulled up in front of the flats. “Well, there you are,” Andrew said. “Dunroamin.”

  “Yes, what a good name for it. Perhaps we could get one of those pokerwork signs made, and hang it on the gate.”

  They went inside. “I’ve got work,” Andrew said. He wandered off. Frances sat down at the desk in the living room where she wrote her diary. She read the information sheet the library woman had given her, with its regulations and list of opening times. There was only one indication that life in Saudi had its tiny upsets. “PLEASE,” begged the handout, “make EVERY effort to return your books if you have to leave the Kingdom hurriedly and unexpectedly.”

  The doorbell rang; there was Shams on the threshold, her face stretched in the grim ghost of a smile, an oval stainless steel platter resting across her forearms. Legs and wings of chicken protruded from a great bed of rice. “Thank you, Shams.”

  Shams stepped back a pace. From beneath her arm, like a conjuror, she produced a length of black cloth. “From Madam,” she said. “For the souk. Tomorrow.”

  Balancing the dish on one arm, Frances put out her other hand, hesitantly. “A veil? She’s telling me I need a veil?”

  “For the head only,” Shams said, in her gloomy mutter. “Leave open the face.”

  “Damn right,” Frances said. She thrust the cloth back at Shams. Shams backed off another pace, and put her hands behind her back. The ghost of a smile had quite vanished. She rested her eyes on the dusty hall floor; thinking, perhaps, I shall have to clean this soon.

  Frances closed the door on her. She carried the dish into the kitchen. Then she made for the bathroom, the cloth trailing from her hand. One edge of it had soaked up some of the fiery sauce which smothered the chicken. She turned on the bathroom light. On the floor, a party of ants, like pallbearers, were carrying a dead upturned cockroach. The cockroach influx had not been temporary; it was part of Jeddah life, she was told, a squalid corrective to luxury. She stepped over the funeral procession, which was making for the back of the bidet. Looking at herself in the mirror, she held up the material and draped it over her head. Outlined in black, she looked pale and tired. She pulled the folds down over her face. Now, together with the smell of pine disinfectant, she inhaled a faint odor of mothball. The outlines of the bathroom furniture were fuzzy; only the cold tiles under her hands told her that the world was solid and sharp.

  She reached for the door handle, fumbled down the hall. “Hi, Andrew. I’m a headless monster.”

  Andrew had plans spread out all over the desk and the big table. He looked up. “Where did you get that?”

  “Yasmin sent it with the curry. She sent Shams to do the dirty work. She thinks I need it for the souk. She’s propagandizing me. Trying to make me into a good Eastern wife.”

  “Take it off. I don’t like it.”

  She spoke from beneath the layers. “This morning she told me that the Saudis didn’t mind seeing women’s legs, it’s their arms they mind. She said, since she is a Muslim, but she’s not a Saudi, she doesn’t feel she need cover her face, just her head, and her arms, and her legs. I can’t work it out, can you?”

  “Please take it off. It’s sinister.”

  She swept the veil off, and stood smiling at him. “You’ve got something on your forehead,” he said, “something red, what is it?”

  It was very quiet in the flat; just the hum and rattle of the air-conditioners. She went back into the bathroom to wash away the red sauce. Perhaps Jeddah life is making me slightly deranged, she thought. It was strange how sound carried down the well at the center of the building, echoing around the plumbing and the sanitary fittings of Dunroamin. Quite distinctly, she could hear, from the floor above, the sound of a woman sobbing.

  Tuesday. Mrs. Parsons’s driver parked in Ghazzah Street and blew his horn for Frances to come down. She picked up her bag from a chair in the hall, took the house keys in her hand. Andrew had locked her in again. You’re always asleep when I leave, he said, or half asleep, what else can I do? She turned the key to let herself out of the apartment—it was stiff, a poor fit—and found she had turned it the wrong way, and double-locked the door. She fumbled, felt her face flush, dropped the keys. How incompetent I am becoming, she thought, about even quite ordinary things.

  She found the front-door key again, and again fitted it into the lock; she felt an irrational urge to hammer on the door, shout to whomever was listening, in the outside world, to come and spring her, get her out. The door opened. She stepped into the hall, closed the door, locked it behind her; double-locked it again, without meaning to. A long blast of the horn came from the street: Daphne and her driver, wondering where she was.

  She looked over her shoulder, up the stairs. So far she had not even had a glimpse of Samira; though she had heard her, perhaps, last night. She glanced across at the closed front door of Flat 2. Was Yasmin standing behind it, her luminous long-tailed eye applied to the spyhole? I shall get you one of those spyholes, Andrew had said, and she had snapped at him, I’m not a child; if someone comes to the door I shall answer it, what do you think this is, Manhattan?

  Now her sandals slapped against the hard marble floor. She wrenched open the heavy front door. It swung behind her on its stiff hinge, firmly ushering her out. Then the paving-stones, two paces, rank air, the gate in the wall; she drew back the metal bolts, swung it open, clattered it shut behind her. She chose another key. Wrong o
ne. Another. Wrong one. She could feel the driver’s eyes on her back, and a blush spreading upward from her throat. When would she learn these keys? Locking in Yasmin, and Samira, and their children and maids; Parsons had told her to do it, told her she must remember, or her neighbors would be annoyed. Finally she dropped the bunch of keys into her handbag. Mrs. Parsons was waiting in the backseat of her car, and she smiled as she leaned over and flicked the door handle for Frances to get in beside her.

  “Always in the back when you’re with a driver,” she said. “Give the door a good slam, dear. I was just going to come after you. Weren’t you ready?”

  “Yes,” Frances said, “I’ve been ready for an hour. But there are a lot of doors to lock and unlock.”

  “Funny old block,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Very Saudi.” She leaned forward and said distinctly, “Hasan, we want Queen’s Building, you understand me, Queen’s Building.”

  “Yes, madam,” Hasan said.

  “Because we don’t want some other souk,” Mrs. Parsons said, “we want the main souk.” Her pale eyes slid to Frances. “So how are you finding it?” she inquired.

  Frances hesitated. Already she felt uncomfortable, her dress sticking to her under the arms. It would cool down toward Christmas, people said. She reached into her bag, checking that the keys were still there, not dropped in the gutter or down the car seat. She considered Mrs. Parsons’s question. “It’s … stultifying,” she said at last.