Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

  “It takes weeks to learn your way around. It comes in time.” They turned off the main road. Now they were close to home, driving between apartment blocks. Subdued lights burned behind closed curtains. At just one first-floor window, at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street, the curtains were drawn back; on a balcony, brilliantly lit from the room behind, a small dark man in a singlet stooped over an ironing board. Andrew slowed at the intersection; Frances looked up. The man swept a garment from the ironing board, and held it aloft; it was a thobe, narrow, shirtlike, startling white against the shadows of the walls and the night sky. She imagined she could see the laundryman’s face, creased with the weariness of long standing; as they turned the corner he laid the garment down again, and began to arrange its limbs.

  They were back at Ghazzah Street. She got out of the car. The laundryman seemed to her as clear and sharp and meaningless as a figure in a dream; she knew she would never forget him. As the metal gate clanged shut, and Andrew turned to lock it, the dream closed in on her; they walked around the side of the building and he let them in through the kitchen door, into the dark cold silence of the apartment.

  3

  Frances Shore’s Diary: 14 Muharram

  At last the doorway has been unblocked, and I feel that I am going to end this rather peculiar isolation in which I have been living. When I began this diary I described my first morning in the flat as if it were going to be exceptional. When Andrew locked me in, I thought, it doesn’t matter, because I won’t be going out today. As if not going out would be unusual. I didn’t know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and day-dreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.

  Andrew thinks that perhaps after all we should have gone to live on a compound, where, he says, it is all bustle and sociability, and the wives run in and out of each other’s houses the whole time. I’m not sure if I’d like that. I still think of myself as a working woman. I’m not used to coffee mornings. I think of myself in my office at Local Government and Lands. I was run off my feet, or at least I like to think so. Being here is a sort of convalescence. Or some form of sheltered accommodation. You think that after a dose of the English summer, after the hassle of getting out here, you will need a recovery period. You need peace and quiet. Then suddenly, you don’t need it anymore. Oh, but you have got it. It is like being under house arrest. Or a banned person.

  After Andrew had spoken to Turadup, and they had spoken to the landlord, he sent some men around to unblock the doorway. Andrew had to stay at home for the event. It seems that workmen don’t like to enter a house where there is a woman alone. In theory this is to protect me, but really it is to protect them from any accusation I might choose to level against them. From what I have seen so far it seems to me that the sexes here live in a state of deep mutual suspicion.

  I did not mind the terrible mess the workmen left behind, because I am so interested at the prospect of meeting my neighbors. On the ground floor there is a Pakistani couple. Andrew has met them briefly and says they are very pleasant. They have a small child, but he is vague about age and sex. The man’s name is Ashref Aziz Al Rahman, he is known as Raji, and he works for the Minister in some personal capacity. Andrew, who has become cynical in quite a short space of time, says that this means he organizes the importation of the Minister’s personal crates of Scotch.

  Then there are two fiats on the floor above. The one directly over our head is empty. In the other.flat there is a young Saudi couple, also with a baby I think. The man’s name is Abdul Nasr, and Andrew says he is on the Ministry payroll, though not often seen there, and no one is sure what he does, if indeed he does anything, and this state of affairs is quite usual. I notice that this diary is full of “Andrew says” but I have no other source of information yet. Every day he comes home with something else to tell me, usually something funny. Expatriates do have this habit of laughing at everything. I suppose it is the safest way of expressing dissent. Sometimes I think we should be more open-minded, and not think that we are the ones who are right, and that we should contrive to be more pious about other people’s cultures. But after all, as Andrew says, we’re not on Voluntary Service Overseas.

  The company has given us a warning about our Arab neighbors. They say they are very religious, and like to keep to themselves, so we shouldn’t make overtures to them, just be quiet neighbors and polite, and if we meet on the stairs—which I’m sure we will now the doorway is unblocked—we shouldn’t strike up a conversation, but wait until we are spoken to, and meanwhile just nod and smile, but of course, if I am on my own and I meet the husband, better not smile too much. Eric Parsons came round one morning just to tell me this. I said, I know how to go on, in Africa I met the Queen. This is true, but the remark didn’t go down well.

  Jeff Pollard has been round as well. He came to show us how to make wine. We are going to begin on our social life, it seems, dinner parties and barbecues, and you must be able to give people something to drink. It is true that brewing liquor is illegal, but there seems to be a concept of some things being more illegal than others. So although it’s very foolish to try to import proper stuff, you can make it in your home for your own consumption secure in the knowledge that the Saudi police do not enter private homes on a whim. They’ll come if you attract attention to yourself—by, for instance, having a violent death on the premises—but if you manage to avoid that you’ll probably get away with it.

  Everybody knows it goes on. The shops sell grape juice, white and red, by the case. You pick up your sugar and your yeast and your plastic jerricans and off you go, some kind friend like Pollard comes round to instruct you, you brew the stuff up in your bathroom, say, or wherever you have room, and just watch it for a day or two to make sure the yeast hasn’t died, and then four or five weeks later you draw off some of the results and see if it’s fit to drink. There are some people who go into it very seriously, of course, and strain it and clarify it and bottle it and declare vintages, and compete with each other in undercover competitions, but most people are content with something clean and drinkable, with no offensively large bits floating around in it.

  You can brew beer, too, from the cans of nonalcoholic malt drinks that you find in the supermarkets. A few years ago these were banned for a time, because the religious authorities were afraid that the smell and taste of them might make the faithful imagine that they were the real thing—and that would be a sin. There’s also a spirit called siddiqui which you can get expensively on the black market. It’s just sugar and water distilled but when people try to make their own they usually blow their apartments up. And if you want it, and know who to ask, and are prepared to pay about ten times the UK price, you can always lay your hands on whiskey or gin.

  I am glad I have got that down. It will be sure to fascinate my cousin Clare, and she can tell it to her pitiful suburban neighbors when they have their Beaujolais Nouveau parties this year.

  As Pollard says, you have to drink something. Here you are amongst all these people with whom you don’t necessarily have anything in common, except that perhaps you work for the same outfit, and you’re drifting through each other’s lives, in transit, trying to make a go of your casual friendships so that even if you get bored you don’t get lonely. But it’s difficult to make conversation, difficult to keep each other entertained. The risk seems extraordinary—jail, flogging, deportation (and who knows if this theory is true about how the police are supposed to behave) but I needed a drink really to get through the evening with Jeff—his silly, sniggering jokes, and the way he seems to hate the Saudis and resent them because they have all the money and he (comparatively) hasn’t. Andrew got quite angry when he had gone, and said, what’s he complaining about, he’s coining it, he’s on the take; what’s he got to complain about, he’s working the system to suit himself. Then Andrew said more thoughtfully, he probably h
ates himself for doing that, for what he has become. And we were very quiet, thinking, perhaps we shall become it?

  We felt rather miserable, sitting in that impossible room with all the unused chairs, so we drank the bottle of Jeff’s own wine that he had left behind for us, and next morning I was sick.

  Now the prisoner is released. Frances could walk in the street; but to what purpose? You could not get anywhere. Only, after long hot miles, to Medina Road, where the traffic goes screaming by, out of town to the bypasses and motorways and onto the Holy City. Walking is pointless; but she can go out into the hall, where gritty dust blows continually under the big front door, and makes patterns on the mottled marble underfoot. She can go up to the flat roof, with her basket of washing, and hang it out, to bring it back an hour or two later, dry and stiff with heat, burnt-smelling, and covered in dust if the wind has veered round in the interim. There are washing lines for each of the flats, but she hasn’t seen her neighbors use them. Perhaps they have more sense, or clothes dryers.

  She likes to be on the roof, and to look down onto the street, and onto the big secluded balconies of the two upper flats, and into the branches of the brown tree with its brown leaves. It is a secret view, a private perspective, and she reminds herself of some lonely woman, her own mother perhaps, peeping at the doings of the neighbors through a lace curtain. Not that she has learned much. The Saudi woman does not come out to take the sun and air; the doors to her balcony—a solid affair, like an extra room—remain firmly closed.

  And the fourth flat is empty. Curious, that, because on her very first morning she had heard footsteps above her head. She remembers it—she remembers every detail of her first day—as the incident which jerked her out of her maudlin state, and made her know that there were people around her, and a new life to be lived. But Andrew says she must be mistaken.

  From the roof of the apartment block there are long views over the dusty street; over the big turquoise rubbish skips that stand at each street corner, the property of Arabian Cleaning Enterprises; over the rows of parked cars. Fierce cats spit and howl and limp in the purlieus of the building, their fur torn into holes or worn away by skin diseases. As the first week of comparative liberty passes, the view comes to seem less edifying, the reasons for the climb fewer, and she begins to resent the two closed doors she passes on the way up, before she negotiates the final turn in the stairs and the short flight to the roof Abdul Nasr’s door, and the door of the fourth flat. And she begins to hate the stairs themselves, because they are made of that kind of marble patched with slabs of irregular rufus color, flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage. She avoids them. She phones up Eric Parsons and tells him that she is not happy and must have a clothes dryer herself. A van arrives with one the following day. Nothing is too much trouble for Turadup.

  So now she stays downstairs. From the living room, a sliding door leads out onto the cracked pavement in the shadow of the wall. Beyond the wall, between the parked cars, boys play football in the street. Andrew is not happy about the sliding door. He no longer believes that the crime rate is low; he has heard some terrible stories. Someone he works with has advised him to block the track with a length of wood, so that it cannot be slid back from the outside, even if the handle is forced. He has done this.

  If Frances is willing to pry out this piece of wood—not easy because he has made it fit so exactly—she can draw back the door and—careful to close it behind her, to keep the insects out and the cold air in—she can stand under the shabby tree, and the wall which is a foot higher than her head. She can hear car engines revving up, and the children’s shouts, and sometimes the soft thud of the football against the bricks. When she goes inside and shuts the door these sounds still come to her, muffled, very faint, as if they happened last year.

  They have been out to dinner twice now, and to a party, and met a lot of people; they are becoming familiar with Jeddah cuisine, and with the strange but addictive taste of siddiqui and tonic. A telephone has been installed. The diary is kept less attentively, because her inner ear is attuned again to other people and the outside world. And yet, the first two weeks have changed her. Introspection has become her habit. There are things she was sure of, that she is not sure of now, and when her reverie is broken, and first unease and then fear become her habitual state of mind, she will have learned to distrust herself, to question her own perceptions, to be unsure—as she is unsure already—about the evidence of her own ears and the evidence of her own eyes.

  Within a day or two the unblocking of the hallway brought Yasmin to the door, gesturing gracefully behind her; I am from Flat 2, I hope you will come and have a cup of tea with me. Frances followed her across the hall. She felt dull and badly dressed in her limp cotton skirt. Yasmin’s glossy hair hung to her waist, and a gauzy veil floated about her shoulders. One slender arm from wrist to elbow was sheathed in gold bangles.

  She closed the door of Flat 2, swept off the veil, and handed it to her maid, who stood inside the doorway. “Put on the kettle,” she said to the woman. The maid scuttled away; a short, dark, low-browed woman, with a faintly pugilistic air.

  “She is from Sri Lanka,” Yasmin said. “She is not much use, but thank goodness I have got her. Raji calls so many people for dinner every night that I have no time for the baby.”

  “People don’t seem to have much domestic help here. It surprises me.”

  “In the grander households, of course, you will find it. But the Saudis are discouraging it now. They don’t like the foreign influence. Of course, it is a good point, these young girls come to the Kingdom as housemaids, and then they cause trouble.”

  “Do they?” Frances sat down, where she was bidden. “What sort of trouble?”

  “They get unhappy,” Yasmin said. “Because they have left children behind them at home. Also the Saudi men, you know, they find that these girls are not very moral.” The maid came in; put down the tea tray. Yasmin dismissed her with a nod. “Then the poor things are trying to commit suicide. You would like some of this Crawford’s shortbread?”

  “Thank you,” Frances said. She took a piece. Yasmin gave her another composed smile; poured tea. “How?” Frances said. “How do they commit suicide?”

  “They throw themselves from the balconies. Silly girls. But this one, I have got a reference for her. She is all right, I think.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “It is Shams.”

  Frances repeated it, tentatively. “I can’t quite get hold of it.”

  “Shams,” Yasmin said. “As in ‘Champs Elysées.’”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Means ‘sunny.’” She tittered. “I do not find her a little ray of sunshine about my house. But Raji was six months waiting for the work permit for her. He doesn’t like to ask the Minister for favors. You are used to a servant, Frances?”

  “I’m used to help. But it doesn’t bother me, either way.”

  Yasmin sighed. “It is a problem,” she said.

  In Yasmin’s apartment, there was flowered wallpaper and patterned rugs, and little gilt tables with glass tops, and an enormous sideboard, crowned by family photographs. Yasmin with her newborn; earlier, Yasmin beneath a wedding veil of gold lace, her mouth painted emphatically red, and her delicate hand on the dark-suited arm of her plump husband. He looks older by some years; a handsome man, though, with a full expressive face, liquid eyes. Yasmin’s own age is not easy to determine; she sits swinging one slippered foot, a long-nosed, spindly young woman, with a flawless ivory skin, a festinate way of speaking, and large eyes which are lustrous and intractable, like the eyes of a jibbing horse.

  “So your husband’s building is coming along?” she asked.

  “I haven’t been to see it yet.”

  “Your husband is shy, I think. He runs away.”

  “Really?”

  Yasmin smiled. “Samira would like to meet you.”

  “The lady up above?”
/>
  “You will be surprised. She speaks good English.”

  “I should like to meet some Saudi women.”

  “She is very young. Nineteen. Some more tea?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You will see Selim, my son, when he wakes up just now. You are thinking of starting your family soon?”

  This question. Oh dear. “I’ve always worked,” Frances said.

  “Jeddah is a good place for families.”

  “Is it?”

  “You have not been here long enough to see the advantages. You are still missing England, I expect. Your parents.” Yasmin’s tone was encouraging. She proffered the biscuits again. “Do take another one, Frances. You are so slim. You have seen this film, Death of a Princess?”

  She did rush straight at things, Frances thought. Suicidal housemaids, decapitation. She put her shortbread down on her plate. “I heard about it. But I didn’t see it. I wasn’t in England at the time.”

  Relief showed on Yasmin’s face. Is she the custodian of Saudi culture then? “I remember the fuss it caused,” Frances said. “Princess Misha, wasn’t that her name? She was married, and she took off with another man. They caught her and she was executed.”

  “This film has caused a lot of trouble between Saudi Arabia and Britain,” Yasmin said. “They do not understand why it should be shown.”

  “Oh,” Frances said, “we are interested in other parts of the world. Foreign customs.”

  Their eyes met. “In any case, it is false,” Yasmin said firmly.

  “False?”

  “Oh yes. These things do not happen. Princess Misha, this girl, she was extremely spoiled, always wanting her own way.”

  “So you think she deserved what she got?”