Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

  “You must try to understand a little the Saudi viewpoint.” She seemed to distance it from her own, by implication; and yet she seemed on edge. Her husband’s position, Frances thought. “She tried to go out of the country disguised as a man.”

  “Did she really?”

  “They caught her at the airport.”

  “Obviously you see these things differently.”

  “I am not a Saudi, of course. I am only giving … the Eastern viewpoint.”

  “To me it seems incredible, to kill a woman for something like that.”

  “But they did not, Frances. She is not dead. Her family have her in one of their houses.”

  This is quite stupid, Frances thought. “But she was executed, Yasmin. Her death was reported.”

  Yasmin smiled knowingly, as if to say, how simple you are. “Excuse me,” she said, “but it is nonsense. The execution was made up by the filming people.”

  Frances was silent. Then she said, “Why should they do that?”

  “It is their mentality,” Yasmin said. “It is the mentality of the West, to discredit the Eastern people.”

  It was now that Shams came in, with the baby in her arms; a little boy like a doll, half asleep, his head drooping on the servant’s shoulder and his curved eyelashes resting on his cheeks. Frances stood up. She felt she was blushing, burning inwardly. Have I been rude to her? But what a topic! Why plunge straight into it like that?

  Gratefully, she turned her flustered attention to the baby. “He’s beautiful, Yasmin.” The beetle-browed housemaid put the child in her arms. “How old is he?”

  “So you think he is cute?” Yasmin asked. She fluttered; her face yearned. The baby nuzzled his head into Frances’s shoulder. She is so anxious, Frances thought, that I don’t get the wrong impression. She knows we have prejudices. She wants me to hear her version, that’s all.

  “He walks a little,” Yasmin said. “So active! Do you think he is forward?”

  “Very forward.”

  “Ah, what a lovely picture you make,” Yasmin said fondly. She spoke as if she had known her neighbor for half a lifetime. “No, Selim, naughty.” She untangled the baby’s fingers from Frances’s hair. “He is fascinated, your hair is so light, he just wants to grasp it.”

  It was a leave-taking scene now. Yasmin touched Frances’s elbow timidly. “You will come again? Any morning.”

  “Yes, of course. Or come to me.”

  “If there is anything you need … or anything Raji can do for you. He knows this town so well.”

  Yasmin took her to the door. Before she opened it she plucked the wisp of a veil from the hallstand and flicked it over her head. “I will watch you across the hallway,” she said. Frances looked up into the stairwell. Those two closed doors at the top. She took her key out of the pocket of her skirt. Yasmin watched her until the door of Flat 1 clicked shut behind her; then gently drew herself inside, and closed her own door.

  “No introductory moves,” Frances said. “Just, when are you going to start your family, and then—wham—Death of a Princess. How the West gets us wrong. I don’t think I was supertactful.”

  “No,” Andrew said, “I don’t suppose you were.”

  “Did you bring the Saudi Gazette home?”

  “Yes, here it is.”

  He had been kept late at the site, and she had been alone all afternoon. She followed him into the bedroom, the newspaper in her hand. He took off his shirt and dropped it onto the floor. She could see the muscles, knotted, at the back of his neck. He had just driven through the evening traffic; “They are mad,” he breathed as he drove along, “they are mad.” But he could see the day coming soon when he would be able to hold a normal conversation as he inched and swerved along. The drivers sit at traffic lights, reading magazines, their fists poised over their horns; when the lights change they bang down their fists together, the horns blare, and at the slightest sign of a delay, another lane will form; the cars roar forward, cutting each other off. Each intersection bears an accident that has just occurred.

  “I have to take a shower,” Andrew said.

  “I hope I didn’t offend her. Yasmin.”

  “I shouldn’t worry.”

  “Only she seemed so much on the defensive. As if I were bound to be building up some bad impressions.”

  “You are, aren’t you? You’re not exactly seeing the country at its best.”

  “No, but what do I do about it?”

  “Frances, stop following me!” He turned on her, naked. “I told you, I have to go and have a shower.”

  She went back into the bedroom and threw herself on the bed. Her throat ached with resentment. Talk to me, please, when you come home. I can’t live like this; this is not a natural sort of life. She heard the rushing and bubbling of water from next door; her eyes slid around to Andrew’s shirt, lying on the floor.

  She sighed, and rolled over; opened the newspaper, propping it against the pillows. The correspondence column was what she mostly liked. She located it, folding the paper over. Here’s a letter from one Abdul Karim of Riyadh: The Kingdom’s social and cultural heritage does not allow women to mix with men either in life activities or in work. The right place for a woman is to look after her husband and children, prepare food, and manage the housework. But foreigners were coming into the Kingdom, Karim alleged, and saying there was more to life than this. When you work in another country, you should study its traditions and characteristics before you get in it.

  She folded up the paper and turned on her back again, letting Abdul Karim slide to the floor. I knew the facts, she thought, but I didn’t know what impact they would make on me. I knew there were restrictions, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to live under them. And now here is Yasmin, an intelligent woman, telling me that things are different here and I must swallow my objections.

  Andrew was back. Holding a bath towel, he sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Shouldn’t have shouted. Just another bloody day. The Turadup people who are working at the missile base won’t talk to me. They enjoy being secretive. You ask them a perfectly straightforward question about the best way to get something done, and they start tapping the side of their noses, you know what I mean? Americans run that base. They’re even in uniform. It’s no secret, but it is a secret. It’s supposed to be missiles for local defense, but that’s not what people say. They say it’s a base for intercontinental missiles. And yet the Saudis loathe the Americans. Because they support Zionism. They’ve banned Ford cars. They’ve banned Coca-Cola. They’ll just have weaponry, thank you.”

  “And hamburgers and Cadillacs.” She reached for the newspaper. “Have you seen the cartoon?” The President of the United States, a wizened mannequin in a Stars-and-Stripes waistcoat, balanced on the tip of a huge, hooked, disembodied nose. “That’s meant to be a Jew’s nose, not an Arab’s. You’re supposed to understand that. It says in the letters column that you should study the customs of a country before you get in it, but I think there’s nothing like studying them when you’re there. Much more enlightening.”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. If we are going to dislike all these things so much.”

  “It’s hard to take umbrage on a salary like yours.”

  “I expect we’ll survive it,” Andrew said. “We’ll have leave in the summer. We can start planning it.” He broke off. “Oh, look at that cockroach. There were five in the shower when I got up this morning. There were three in there just now. Where the hell do they come from? Where’s the spray?”

  Swearing to himself, he padded out in his bare feet. Frances slid off the bed, rubbed her eyes, straightened the cover. She looked at Andrew’s discarded shirt on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it in the basket.

  Ten o’clock. Like someone testing the water, Frances stepped out through the glass sliding doors, and stood on the paving stones in the shadow of the wall. I’m going to come to grips with this place, she thought. The heat of the sun struck h
er lifted face. Satisfied, she turned, stepped inside again, and drew the door behind her.

  Five minutes later she went out of the front door. She wore her baggiest smock, flat sandals. She held up a bunch of keys, peered at them in the light of the hallway. First the door of Flat 1. Then the main door. Then the iron gate. Perhaps I shall never get back in, she thought.

  She was alone, out in the street. The stray cats fled away. A dark-faced boy in a car blew his horn at her. He cruised along the street. He put down his window. “Madam, I love you,” he called. “I want to fuck you.”

  She walked on to the corner of the block. Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch curb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and that pavements are for walking on. But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.

  By the time she reached the street corner she realized that it was far hotter than she had thought. The air felt wet, full of the clinging unsavory fragrance of the sea. A trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades and down the backs of her legs. On her right stood a row of half-built shops, wires snaking from the brickwork. She stuck close to the wall; she had reached a main road. The dark fronds of shrubs spiked the air over the central reservation. A hotdog van trundled past. A skip full of builder’s rubble forced her into the road again. From out of the dazzling sunlight, moving. slowly toward her, came two fellow pedestrians, two women in long zigzagged gowns, in African headcloths of vivid stripes; their blueblack flesh rolled toward her, and she saw their large spread feet, pale gray with dust, planted on the hot concrete. Smiling dazedly, hardly seeming to know that she was there, they parted to let her slip between them. Yasmin had told her of the West African hajjis, the pilgrims on their way to Mecca, who dropped their garments onto the shingle of the Corniche and ran naked into the waves. These women had stayed on, washed up in the city. They left behind them the scent of their passage; onions, the hot pepper smell of their skin and hair.

  Frances turned back into the smaller streets, between apartment blocks, to cut back on herself. Over to her right, cranes and derricks split the sky. On her left a wall had been built, enclosing nothing; a gate gave access to nothing but a tract of muddy churned-up ground and some stagnant pools.

  She stopped for a moment, unsure of where she was. Her sense of direction had almost never failed her. She steadied herself, her hand against a burning wall. Her own block of flats was ahead of her, seeming to shimmer a little in the heat; in the two first-floor apartments the wooden blinds were drawn down securely over the balcony windows, and the building had a desolate, uninhabited air.

  A man in a Mercedes truck slowed to a crawl beside her. “I give you lift, madam?” She ignored him. Quickened her step. “Tell me where you want to go, madam. Just jump right in.” He leaned across, as if to open the near door. Frances turned and stared into his face; her own face bony, white, suffused with a narrow European rage. The man laughed. He waved a hand, dismissively, as if he were knocking off a fly, and drove away.

  Inside the hallway, Yasmin stood by her front door. Her face was agitated. “Frances, Frances, Shams was looking out and saw you just now in the street. Where have you been?”

  “I went for a walk.”

  “Come in, come in.” With a flapping motion of her arm, Yasmin drew her inside. Her bracelets clanked together. “Sit, please sit. I will fetch you a cold drink.”

  Frances perched on the edge of one of the heavy brocade armchairs. She felt dirty. She took a tissue from a box and wiped her hands. Yasmin hurried back with a little silver tray: a glass of Pepsi-Cola, a dish of ice, a saucer of sliced limes. She produced a spindle-legged table from its nest, placed the tray at Frances’s elbow. She hovered above her, speaking not out of curiosity, but in proprietorial wrath. “What made you do it?”

  “I just wanted to see how I would get on.”

  “But it is so hot, Frances. And men will shout at you from cars.”

  “Yes. I know that now.”

  “I could have told you and saved you the trouble. Frances, could not your husband’s company give you a driver?”

  “I think Mrs. Parsons, the boss’s wife, has got a monopoly on them.”

  “I can get drivers. Raji’s office will send a car, if I call up, but I don’t like to ask too often.” She pressed her hands together. “Just tell me where you want to go. I will arrange it. But don’t be walking the streets.”

  “It was only round the block,” Frances murmured.

  “We can go to Al Mokhtar if you want anything for sewing. We can go to Happy Family Bakery. We can make an evening tour to the souk, Raji would be so happy. Just tell me where.”

  “The trouble is, I don’t know where. How can I find out about the city? How can I meet people? Can I learn Arabic?”

  “I can teach you a few phrases. It is enough.”

  “But what if I want to study it?”

  “You can get a teacher. I have a private teacher, but it is for classical Arabic, it wouldn’t interest you. Or perhaps, I don’t know, maybe there is a class somewhere. Don’t think about this now, Frances. You have to get your household in order. You will be meeting your husband’s colleagues and entertaining them. You will be busy, I think.”

  Yasmin leaned forward, and brushed the back of her sticky hand with a long, opalescent fingernail. “Listen, Frances, I remember when I first got in Jeddah. I had come from Karachi, you see, where my family were all around me. I have been to Britain, fifteen months in St. John’s Wood, you know, when Raji was working over that side. I am a modern woman, Frances. I have the British passport. I have not lived my life behind the veil. It is hard, I know.” She paused, to let Frances feel her sympathy; took her hand. “Soon you will meet the colleagues’ wives,” she said persuasively. “They will send their cars and carry you away to drink coffee every morning. Perhaps, who knows, you can have a baby soon. The Bakhsh hospital has very well-known and excellent maternity care.”

  “Yes, who knows,” Frances said. She stood up.

  Yasmin smiled, archly. “So no more wandering the roads? Promise me?”

  Frances fitted the key into her front-door lock. Again Yasmin stood at the door, watching her across the hall. The taste of the sweet drink lingered in her mouth. She did not feel that she had conquered the street; but she did not feel, either, that the street had conquered her.

  Later that day she asked Andrew, “Would you describe me as a timid person?”

  “Quite the reverse.”

  “Good,” she said. She had not told him about her trip out. She was not sure why she had not told him. She had not done anything wrong, so why was she keeping it from him? They had been married for almost five years, and in that time they had never had any secrets at all.

  The following evening Raji rang the doorbell. “I’m off downtown,” he said. “What’s it to be?”

  Raji: silver wing tips of hair, a wide white boyish grin; a dark expensive Western suit, gold rings; comfortably plump, gently mocking. “Well, Miss Frances? What is your desire right now? Box of Medina dates? Some nice sticky baklava? Large gin and tonic?”

  “We’ve already made one major foray tonight,” Frances said. “We’ve been to Safeway for the greengrocery.”

  “Ah, a Safeway Superstore is streets ahead for iceberg lettuces. Say those who know.”

  “It’s such a major occupation, shopping.”

  “We have to keep the womenfolk happy.” Raji spied Andrew, appearing behind her. “Hello, old boy,” he said, his tone much more serious.

  “How’s tricks, Raji?”

  Raji shook his head, smiling, and made a plummeting motion with one hand. “Oil is down,” he said. “So our Minister’s temper not the best. We will be getting a cut in our
funding for the department if this goes on, those fellows at the Ministry of Finance are so tight. They are having one mighty royal sheep-grab in Riyadh tonight, so that the Princes can talk it all over. That is how I come to be on the loose.” He turned to Frances. “You’ve met Samira, from upstairs?”

  “Not yet. Yasmin promised—”

  “Me neither. I’ve seen her flitting shape, mark you. Yasmin chats with her every day, but I’ve never seen her face, you know, which I find somewhat bizarre. Abdul Nasr keeps her locked up, the old devil.”

  “That’s not unusual, is it?”

  “No, but that is one very religious man.” Raji slapped his palms together. “Nothing, then, for you good people?” Producing his car keys, he made for the front door. “I’ll get Yasmin to call you for dinner one night,” he said over his shoulder.

  Abdul Nasr was a young devil, in fact. Frances saw him striding down the stairs a couple of mornings later, about ten o’clock, when she was on her way out with a bag of rubbish. He was a lean young man, with a delicate bronze skin and a heavy black mustache. He nodded to her; did not look her in the face.

  “Eyes like coals,” she said later to Andrew. “Now I’ve seen them. I thought they were a fiction.”

  Frances Shore’s Diary: 28 Muharram

  Wrote a batch of letters home today, Clare, my mother, Andrew’s lot. He never writes to them, they wouldn’t know if he was dead or alive. Strange to think that by the real calendar it’s nearly November and that people in England are boosting up their heating bills and settling into their urinter dourness. It seems no cooler here, though it should be. Whenever you mention the heat the old residents say, “There’s worse to come.” They enjoy telling you that.

  When I look back on this diary it seems to be all about money. At least, it’s always there between the lines. Some of the writers in the newspapers take the line that Saudi Arabia has been spoiled by its wealth, that before the oil there was a golden age when everyone lived in tents and was simple and religious and kind to old people. I am suspicious of this, but certainly greed is not attractive in anybody, is it? I’m waiting to see what our humble wealth will do to me, and if I shall grow nastier and harsher in character, bank draft by bank draft. Andrew is quite right when he says that we must stay here and stick it out and make some money. We’ve spent our lives on living, not accumulating, and now it’s time to start trying to do both, and to grow up, and be farsighted, and not spend time agonizing over ideals we might once have possessed. In other words, we must try to have the same concerns as other people.