Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read online

  Mrs. Parsons made no answer to this; or no immediate answer. Frances felt she knew her already, from a former phase of life: a sagging, soft-fleshed woman, with flushed weathered skin, a Home Counties voice. She wore a flowing kaftan with a batik pattern, and her freckled arms were encircled by heavy antique bracelets of traditional design; around her neck on a long chain she wore another beaten silver ornament, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to a gym-mistress’s whistle. Her manner was benignly poisonous.

  “I hope I’m properly dressed,” Frances said.

  “You ought to get some kaftans really. Especially for the souk, you know, and for when you’re out without your husband. The shop people won’t serve you, if they don’t think you’re properly covered up.” Mrs. Parsons looked her over. “You don’t want to be pestered, do you? You’ve got that fairish hair, you see, fair hair’s always an attraction to them.”

  “I thought I’d be all right if I covered my arms.”

  “Well, of course, there aren’t any hard and fast rules.” Mrs. Parsons passed a hand over her own bare forearm. “It isn’t arms they mind, I understand, it’s legs. Or if you want to just go out in your ordinary clothes, what you should do is get an abaya, you know, those black cloak things the Saudi ladies wear, and then you can just fling it on over everything.”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to do that,” Frances said. She was silent for a moment. She had seen European women with the black wraps shrugged on for half-concealment; they trailed and flapped, and slid off the shoulders, like a student’s or a barrister’s gown; as they stood at the supermarket checkouts the women twitched at them whenever they had a hand free. These women looked absurd, she thought, as if they had stopped off for some groceries on their way to a degree ceremony. “They’re just dressing up,” she said. “It’s an affectation.”

  “Oh, well,” Mrs. Parsons said. “They’re only trying to keep out of trouble.”

  “It’s selling out.”

  “You’ll have to talk it over with your neighbors. Have you met your neighbors yet?”

  “We’ve met the Pakistani couple, on the ground floor.”

  “Yes, I thought old Raji’s wife would be asking you over for a cup of tea.” She gave a little knowing laugh. “Raji knows all the expats. Doesn’t mix though. Oh no. Can’t, in his position.”

  “What exactly is his position?”

  “He’s very close to Amir, Eric tells me. That’s the Minister, Amir. Does all his wheeling and dealing on the stock market. He’s always jetting off to London or Tokyo. They have private fortunes, you know, these people, that they keep outside the Kingdom.” Again the laugh, without humor. “Knows a lot, does old Raji. Met the Arab girl?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know her,” Mrs. Parsons said, as if that settled the matter. “I don’t know her at all.”

  They had left behind the narrow streets around Dunroamin; the driver put his foot down. They shot through a red light. “Third one this morning,” Mrs. Parsons muttered. “Can’t you slow down, Hasan?”

  Frances looked out of the window. The sheer face of a twenty-story bank building rose on their right. A National Guardsman in camouflage gear lounged in the gateway of a white-walled palace. He held a rifle; the wind, blowing in from the desert, whipped his red and white ghutra before his face. Mrs. Parsons half-turned in her seat. “Are you hoping to get a job?”

  “I didn’t think one could.”

  “Oh, there are ways around it. There are sometimes office jobs. Secretarial work.”

  “I’m not a secretary.”

  “No, well, you seem a smart enough little girl, you’d pick it up. You can answer the telephone, I suppose?”

  They screeched to a halt. Hasan had stabbed his foot on the brake; they were flung forward against the front seat. Mrs. Parsons’s bracelets clashed together loudly. “Damn these women,” she said.

  Ahead of them, a collection of black-veiled shapes had drifted into the road. They hovered for a moment, in the middle of the great highway, looking with their blind muffled faces into the car; then slowly, they began to bob across to the opposite curb.

  “There you are,” Mrs. Parsons said sourly, as she rearranged herself in her seat and readjusted her jewelry. “That’s one of the few advantages of being female in this part of the world. They know that drivers will pull up for them.”

  “Where are they going? Where have they come from?”

  Mrs. Parsons gestured around her. “There are these little poor communities all along this road. It’s surprising where people live, in the middle of everything. They’ll be Yemenis, or something, like Hasan there.”

  Between the palaces of commerce, small lock-up shops flourished, little metal boxes, metal shacks, selling cheap clothing and flat bread. Even under the glacial slopes of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, men lounged in the greasy doorways of cheap cafés, their eyes on the moving traffic. Frances felt an impulse of frustration. She put her hand, momentarily, against the glass of the window. Mrs. Parsons looked out at Jeddah, moving past them. “It’s called the Bride of the Red Sea,” she said. “You’ll find.”

  A broken-down butcher’s shop went by, the windows draped with gray intestines. A thobe maker displayed bale after bale of identical white cloth. Then Sleep-hi Mattresses, and Red Sea Video, and The Pearl of the Orient Cafeteria. “Would the drivers stop for me?” Frances asked.

  “I don’t know. It might depend how you were dressed.”

  These are such major preoccupations, Frances thought, nearly all-consuming preoccupations: the dress rules, the accident rate.

  “Of course, they’re not safety-conscious,” said Mrs. Parsons. “You know the worst thing? When there’s an accident, no one wants to get involved, because of the police, and the blood-money system. If you stop you’re a witness, and you might be held in jail. And if you give somebody first aid, you might be accused of making their injuries worse. Suppose you move someone, and they die? You might have to pay the blood-money yourself.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.”

  “So the injured just lie there. If something else comes along and hits them—oh, my dear girl, don’t look so alarmed. Everyone has accidents in Jeddah, but it’s mainly just a shunt and a scrape for us expats. It’s the Saudis that cause the havoc, all these twelve-year-olds in their sports cars, and all the Koreans and the Filipinos in those old wrecks they drive.”

  “I wonder what the chances are, of getting out in one piece?”

  “Oh, quite good, really. It’s on the freeways that you have to watch yourself. It’s not the roads in town that are dangerous. It’s the roads out.”

  Frances thought, I do not like the tenor of her conversation, I do not like the tone of it, and yet I should listen to what she says, because it is probably true. When she had first gone to Africa, she had expressed discomfiture, to an old resident, at the state of the servants’ quarters of her bungalow. “Wait till you see how they live in the villages,” the woman had said. Her tone had implied, they want nothing better. Frances hadn’t liked her tone; but the woman had been right. Her houseboy had considered himself in luxurious circumstances, with his concrete-floored shower, and single whitewashed room. He put up pictures and curtains, and invited friends around. The burden of guilt had eased a little; had been easing, ever since.

  “About this job,” she said. “I thought women weren’t allowed to have jobs that brought them into contact with men?”

  “Not legally,” Daphne said. “It’s become more difficult now, but a little while ago you got a lot of British and American girls working in offices. The police would raid them every so often.”

  “What, typist raids? Like drug raids?”

  “The firm would just get a car to the back door and slip the girls out and they’d have to stay away for a few weeks. But then as I say, it’s not so easy now, several companies got heavy fines, and nobody nowadays feels their position in the Kingdom is too secure.”

  “What do they do now for
typists?”

  “Oh, they get Pakistanis in.” Mrs. Parsons spoke as if she had said, they use robots, they’ve trained some apes. “I could probably put out feelers,” she said. “Eric knows a lot of people.”

  Frances turned her face away, tilting up her chin a little. The shops crawled by: Prestige Autos, Modern Fashion, Elegant Man. Two elderly men in turbans sat on the sidewalk deep in conversation, crouched in the scant shade of a sapling, their flip-flops inches from the passing cars.

  “There’s not much to office work,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Did you work before?”

  “I’m a cartographer.”

  “How unusual.” Mrs. Parsons thought for a moment. “Nursery teachers are always in demand,” she said. “You could have started a preschool playgroup. Pity you weren’t a nursery teacher.”

  “I’m sure I would have been,” Frances said, “if I’d thought of the advantages.”

  Around the souk area the traffic slowed almost to a standstill. The driver put them down on the pavement outside a hotel. Mrs. Parsons leaned through the window and spoke a few words of Arabic into the driver’s face. “An hour will be enough,” she said, over her shoulder to Frances. “It’s too hot for more than that.” She jerked her head back to Hasan, and as if doubting the power of her Arabic to do the job, she spat out the words “One hour, one,” and she jerked up a forefinger under Hasan’s nose, as if she were an umpire giving him out.

  Hasan drove away. Frances looked around her. “Gabel Street,” Mrs. Parsons said, indicating with her head that they should make a dive through the traffic and enter a narrow street on the far side. She took Frances by the elbow. With her free hand Frances wiped her hair from her forehead, feeling it sticky and damp. “How do you find the heat?” Daphne inquired, above the rumble of the traffic.

  “It’s the humidity I mind. It’s different from where we lived before.”

  “We were in Zambia for a couple of years. Of course, it’s not what I call Africa.”

  “Oh no?” They teetered on the curb.

  “Now,” Daphne said. They began to thread their way through the crawling cars. “When I was first married, we were in Nigeria.” Frances stepped on to a traffic island. She saw Mrs. Parsons’s face, blotched and mottled already by the heat. “We had a lovely life. A lovely home. We had four gardeners.”

  “Really?” They sallied out again, into the traffic.

  “Then we were in Malaya.” A long black Pontiac braked to let them pass. Frances inclined her head in thanks, but the sun struck across the windscreen, hiding the driver’s face from view. They had reached the far side.

  “And how many gardeners did you have in Malaya?” Frances asked.

  Now it was for Mrs. Parsons to dislike her tone. But her mind was elsewhere; she wanted to get into the goldsmiths. The souk, Frances saw, was modern and paved, with streetlighting and the same metal-box shops she had seen uptown. But above and beyond the souk were the houses of old Jeddah, with their leaning faded pastel walls, their crumbling harem grills, the wood bleached out by sunlight and neglect to the color of ashes.

  “What’s up there?” Frances said. Her spirits rose. All the time she had known that there was something more than she was seeing. “Can we go up there and look?”

  “I don’t think Eric would like me to do that,” Mrs. Parsons said with dignity. They plunged into Gabel Street.

  2

  Frances Shore’s Diary: 7 Safar

  You should come at night to get the flavor of it, Mrs. Parsons said, and this is what people do, apparently, they get up parties to go to the souk. I have to say that at 11 A.M., anyway, it’s disappointing. Mainly there are just rows and rows of the little metal shops, selling perfectly ordinary things—tea sets, and shock-absorbers, and lurid lengths of fabric with gold and silver threads running through. I did buy a set of orange nonstick saucepans, which seemed very cheap. I wondered if I should haggle over them, but Daphne said, no dear, just pay the price. I was relieved.

  The goldsmiths are quite spectacular. The shops look so poverty-stricken and dreary, compared to the new places uptown, and it’s hard to take in the value—thousands of riyals, millions of riyals—of what’s in their windows. They go by weight here, they don’t regard workmanship, and they certainly don’t regard taste. Mrs. Parsons walked into one of these shacks and peered around, nobody taking very much notice of her—as she said, they know that Europeans aren’t going to buy, or not much more than a trinket, but if you shuffled in there in a veil they’d spring to attention all right. She said to the man behind the counter, what is today’s price? Just as if she were after salad tomatoes. From some fold of her flowing garments she produced a pocket calculator, converted grams to ounces, then got him to weigh her a few bracelets. After she had done some more sums she said to him, thank you, sucran, and walked out. Then we went into a couple of shops selling Indian clothes, and she tossed the stock about a bit and said, trashy stuff. No one tried to sell us anything particularly, except that one shopkeeper pulled out a cardboard box from under a counter, which seemed to have in it the kind of dresses that get left behind at jumble sales. He held one or two up and said, viscose very smart, 100 percent polyester, madam you love it. It was obvious we didn’t, and he wasn’t very interested anyway—his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs. Parsons told me not to smile at people too much, they might run away with the wrong idea. The souk smells quite a lot, and this seems an affectation in it. There are drains and street cleaners, so why should it smell?

  After we had walked about aimlessly for half an hour, I noticed a few tables and chairs set out in front of a doorway, and just inside there was a very ancient decrepit man tending one of those rotating plastic bubbles of orange juice, the kind you get in British Home Stores cafeterias. Can we get a drink? I said. Daphne said, I wonder, or is it men only? She said, it’s not what you’d call a reliable café, I have got a drink here once or twice, but it depends if the religious police have been around lately. I said, what, you mean we can’t sit down, because we’re women, we can’t have a drink? She looked around, and said better not risk it.

  I was enraged, because I was so hot, and my nonstick pans were so heavy, and I was so tired of carrying them—perhaps I shouldn’t have bought them, but every so often a woman must have a wild impulse, mustn’t she? I said, my God, it’s exactly like South Africa. Mrs. Parsons smiled. She seemed pleased. Why, so it is, she said.

  All the way home Mrs. Parsons talked about something she called Entertaining. I gather that I am expected to give dinner parties. I am not quite sure how I am going to do this. In Africa people would come round and you would give them what you had by you, which was exactly what they had in their fridge at home. There was no place for one-upmanship, and spag. bog. was on the whole considered quite exotic. But I gather that spag. bog. will not do here.

  Mrs. Parsons goes to the British Wives’ coffee morning at the Embassy on the first Monday of every month. They do handicrafts and good works and have lectures with slides about the wonders of the coral reef. She talked about this, and also about her Magimix, which she says is the Rolls-Royce of food processors.

  When I got home I took my box into the kitchen and unpacked it, and when I examined my pans closely and read the labels on the bottom, I found that they were not what I thought and not such a bargain after all, as the nonstick coating is made of something called Saudiflon. It was quite a blow. I lay on the bed for half an hour. I tried to compose some phrases about the souk which I could use in letters home. People talk so much about going to the souk that I feel I must be missing something. Perhaps I am blinkered.

  No doubt.

  The architect who had designed the Ministry’s new building had been given a commission to excel all the other strange and wonderful buildings of modern Jeddah. The building was to defy, for scale and cunning, the green giant of the Petroline building, and the Ministry of Labour’s silver-and-chrome fantasy on Al Hamra Street. It was to exceed in strangeness, in denial of gravity, the fly
ing tented roofs of the airport’s Haj Terminal; it was to induce wonder and reverence, even greater awe than the pure white 3-D triangle of the National Commercial Bank, which floats above Bagdadia lagoon.

  The Ministerial HQ was to suggest to the beholder a miracle compound of all the elements, of earth, air, water, and fire; as if to convey the mysterious grandeur of the Ministry’s activities, the transcendent quality of its paper shuffling. It must be better than anything the West could do; but it must also be Islamic. Glorifying God was part of the brief.

  In the architect’s imagination, the Ministry’s new building seemed lighter than the air around it; it was a shimmering iceberg, soaring above the hot pavements and the jungle of greenery that would root it to earth. At the time of Maghreb prayer, when the sun dipped into the ocean in a great flaring gaseous ball, its glass walls would melt and grow liquid. It would glow on the darkening skyline, a terror and a portent, a Koranic column of fire.

  When this conception had to be put on paper, reduced to an artist’s impression of color and line, a more prosaic quality was sure to enter: still, the drawings in Andrew’s paper folder were highly impressive. Tiny figures in thobes and ghutras rode the escalators, which looped smoothly behind the glass walls. Giant scarlet flowers bloomed in the foreground, a crystal fountain scored the summer air, and above all, a fluffy cloud sailed through a wash of cerulean blue.

  When Frances went to see the building it was a humid, gray, and overcast day. The air was laden with dust; it was a Friday, and the site was deserted. The project had reached that stage in the life of a building when it presents a picture less of construction than destruction; her first impression was of a bomb site. The brick looked raw; a confusion of pointless-looking wires snaked out of holes in walls. Some parts seemed almost finished; others were just foundations.

  “You have to try to imagine what it will look like when we get the marble cladding,” Andrew said. “It’s supposed to be white, translucent, a sort of sheen, that’s the idea, so that it looks less solid than it is. But I haven’t seen the marble yet. I hope we don’t end up with the kind that looks like old paint with brown cracks. The kind, you know, that they’ve got on the Bugshan hospital.”