Next day Frances went up to see Samira. The workmen stared at her rudely as she stepped over their planks and scaffolding. They were doing their best, she thought, to make sure that she felt in their way; they were doing their best to make it clear that she shouldn’t be out. They were preparing to line the stairwell with patterned tiles; these, she supposed, must have been in the wooden boxes. The tiles were small, with a whirling pattern of black, white, and red. Samira had taken a peep outside her front door. She sighed. “I know what you will say, Frances. You will say, oh, Saudi taste!”
“Not at all,” Frances said politely. “Though it’s going to take them ages, and I think I preferred the plain white paint.”
When she came out of Samira’s apartment, the men had stopped work. They must have gone to eat; it was quiet again, and fine plaster dust hung in the air. Across the landing the Egyptian stood at the door of the empty flat, fist raised as if to tap on it. She hurried across to him and touched his elbow. He sprang away from the contact. “No one home,” she said. She smiled, and shook her head at him. “No one lives there.”
The man glared at her; he put his hand to the spot she had touched, and held it, as if her fingers had burned him. “No one home.” But still he glared.
Surely he understood a little English? Everyone did, especially Egyptians. She knew the Arabic for “a house.” But not for “an empty house.” Not for “an illicit love nest.” Not for “push off if you know what’s good for you.”
She cast a glance back at the closed door of Samira’s apartment. Samira wouldn’t come out to explain to him; and Sarsaparilla couldn’t explain. Anyway, he understood her. She felt sure of that. It was just that she had upset him in some way. The glare, now, was positively threatening. “Okay,” she said, in a pleasant firm tone. “You knock all you like, sunshine. And if the man comes out and twists your balls off, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She went downstairs. A few tiles had been stuck on near the front door, and others on the top landing. When they met in the middle, the effect would be hellish. I mustn’t come out here when I’ve been on the Jeddah gin, she thought. She stopped, in the dim light, to consider the pattern. Small faces: each tile with its splash of scarlet, its swirl of black. She felt as if she were being watched, by bloodied eyes; by the victims of some Koranic punishment. And soon the men would start work again and the watchers would multiply.
Frances Shore’s Diary: 13 Jamadi al-awal
Tarannum Siddiqi of Dhahran has written to the Saudi Gazette.
“I cannot imagine why some women are always moaning about male domination. Why can’t they accept that the male has been created superior to the female? God has meant it to be this way. It is also referred to in the Koran in Surah ‘Al-Nisa,’ verse 34: ‘Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other.’”
There is an item from Abu Dhabi, about a Filipino maid who has been put in jail for setting fire to her employer’s house and then trying to commit suicide. She says her employer attacked her with a knife, but her employer says her wounds are self-inflicted. Authorities in Sri Lanka have announced that maids who are going to work in the Gulf must undertake a martial arts course before proceeding to the region.
There has been a small earthquake in the Yemen. Russel and some of the other geologists are flying down there to see if they can find out why. But religious leaders say it was caused by Sin.
Andrew had decided to worry about her. Perhaps that was his New Year’s resolution.
“You don’t get out much,” he said.
“No.”
“It’s not healthy.”
“What do you think I should do? Go jogging?”
“Maybe you could make some arrangement to share a car. Just once or twice a week. Carla goes to a yoga class. Couldn’t you do that?”
“Why?”
He couldn’t think why.
“Stop nannying me,” she said. “It’s bad enough with Mrs. Par sons.”
Mrs. Parsons was worried about her too; or so she said. “How do you feel now about getting a job?” she asked her, over the phone. “Do you want Eric to put out feelers?”
She found it hard to be polite to Daphne. Hard to talk to her at all. Since Christmas her facility in making small talk seemed to have slipped away.
“I’m concerned about the kind of life you’re leading,” Daphne said. “If Turadup had a house free, Eric would move you. Perhaps he could rent you a house from somebody else. Terrex Mining must have houses coming free, because they’re cutting back on their staff. They’re out of town, up north, you go on the freeway. Shall I ask Eric?”
“You could do.”
“Leave it with me,” Daphne said.
The words come grudgingly out of Frances; she drags them out. It is as if, she thought, I am learning a foreign language, speaking it every day, and forgetting my own. But she has not learned Arabic; not more than a few words. Yasmin continues to insist that it is too difficult, that there is no need. It is as if she wishes, herself, to be the interpreter of the world. Samira says, “Why do you need to learn Arabic? We are all speaking perfectly good English, aren’t we?”
Andrew took her to the bookshop at the Caravan Shopping Center. She bought a language tape, and a book to go with it, and during Jamadi al-awal she pored over this book, and set the careful slow voice of the language tutor echoing through Dunroamin. “Good morning. Good morning, how are you? Well, praise be to God. Welcome! Will you drink coffee? How are your children? How is your wife?” A footnote points out that customs vary widely within the Arab world; in some areas it would be considered insulting to ask after someone’s wife. “Families,” says the book, “are safer, but not entirely without danger.”
The hero of her language book is a businessman, Mr. Smith. Occasionally, in later lessons, he will express concern for the welfare of his wife and children, who are back in the U.S.A. But mostly he leads a free, gay kind of life; the Arabic speakers he meets take a keen interest in all his doings. He goes to the souk to buy a carved chest; he travels a lot; he gets into endless wrangles about small change. It is a man’s book; not for her. She would not need half these phrases. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red. We sit in our garden. The weather is fine.”
Each guttural phrase, spoken aloud, was broken down for her on the page; but she didn’t seem to make progress. Carla lent her another book. “This is of cultural interest,” Carla said. Its title: Courtesies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. It is full of utterances, for greeting and parting; ceremonial utterances, from a gentle, ordered world.
Wednesday morning: she was returning from Marion’s house. Marion seemed distracted these days; she was always smiling, at some privately gratifying thought. Frances had no idea what it might be. She wanted to take her by the arm, to shake her; to say to her, a man with a rifle is hanging about on Ghazzah Street.
A young man in a sports car slowed up beside her, and crawled along the curb, his head stuck out of the window and the late January wind plucking at the ends of his checked ghutra. “You are my baby,” he called. “You are my darling.” She supposed it was courtesy: of a kind.
As she let herself into Dunroamin she heard the noon prayer call. The varnishing had begun, and the smell crept under the doors and into the hall. The tiling was half finished now; the malign pattern was growing.
In the hall, she heard a door open, up above. Not Samira’s. She ran up to the bend in the stairs. Now the door slammed shut. Bare feet slapped on marble. Samira’s maid had come out of the empty flat, and vanished, with a swirl of skirts, into her own.
So what now?
“I suppose Abdul Nasr has keys,” Andrew said. “She must go in to—change the sheets, or something. Do the dusting. Even if you only use a place to go to bed in, it still gets dusty, doesn’t it?”
“Then Samira knows,” Frances said.
“Obviously.”
“I thought Abdul Nasr was meant t
o be very religious. Superpuritanical.”
“That’s what I was told. But you can’t believe what you’re told, can you?”
“Would you risk a maid knowing?”
“It’s not much of a risk. You said yourself that they never let the girl out. You said she doesn’t know Arabic, and that she speaks some peculiar dialect that no one understands.”
“That’s true. They don’t think of Sarsaparilla as a person. She’s just labor.”
Andrew took her wrist. “Frances,” he said, “don’t get involved.”
Andrew was not in a good mood. The check had come through at last, but Eric didn’t know when he would be able to pay them again. Previously it had been such a consolation to unfile the bank statements, and see how the deposit account was building up. Andrew had been receiving brochures from a firm of London estate agents. They should buy a flat, he said, something to give them a base; something small, central, easy to let. “We ought to have somewhere, you know. At our age. We can’t keep drifting, can we, just crating things up and sending them from one country to the next, everything serviceable and disposable, no books, nothing of our own—living with other people’s furniture?”
“It’s not that bad, Andrew. We have our Saudiflon pans.”
“I’m going to organize it this summer,” he said. “If they pay me, of course.”
“When are you expecting this man Fairfax?”
“Oh, quite soon. Next month maybe.”
Frances, taking out the rubbish, met the landlord on the stairs.
“You said one week,” she accused him. “You’ve been here two already.”
The landlord seemed harassed. He didn’t have time to chat. “Please to stay indoors, out of noxious fumes,” he said crossly.
“When can I put my blinds up?”
“Wait a few days. If you put them up too early they will be stuck, and much good work will be undone.”
Frances said nothing. He made a little shooing motion at her. She leaned one hand against the wall, leisurely, insolent. He shrugged his shoulders and left by the front door. Frances looked after him. “Hate the tiles,” she said softly. “Saudi taste.”
Outside Yasmin’s door, propped against the wall, was a wooden crate, in sections; it was stamped with the logo of the Hejaz Removals and Storage Co. “Is this yours?” she asked Yasmin. “Or does it belong to the landlord?”
“Mine,” Yasmin said. “It is in your way?”
“No, not at all. I’m just being nosy. You’re not moving, are you?”
“No. It is just for some things of Raji’s.”
“Only I was sizing it up—when that crate’s assembled you won’t be able to get it through the internal doors.”
“Then he must pack it in the hall.”
“I just thought I’d warn you. How’s mother-in-law?”
Yasmin drew her inside, dropped her voice. She seemed, as she so often did, on the point of tears. “Her visit is so ill-timed,” she said.
“I suppose it is.”
“For Selim, I mean—this important stage in his development. Frances, have you asked your friends—are you sure there is not some drug I can give him to make him grow? It is not good for the child’s psychology—she is holding his nose now, forcing him with orange juice.”
“Can’t you talk to Raji? Can’t he do anything?”
“Oh, he thinks she is always in the right. He is interfering with how I run the household. That is not what a man should do. Frances,” Yasmin moved closer, and touched her arm confidingly, “we have had some dispute. Because I want to wear the veil. Completely, you understand, like the Saudi women do. Because I feel it is right. But Raji says, ‘We are modern.’ He has forbidden me. And I am so unhappy.”
Frances looked at her in disbelief. “Have I got this right? You want to wear the veil?”
“Many Moslem women are doing this. In Pakistan. In Iran, which you know of. In Egypt even. Once they thought it was a great thing to get rid of the veil, but now they are not so sure. They see how men exploit them. They want to have their dignity back.”
“I’m the wrong person to talk to,” Frances said.
“I know you are. But to whom else can I talk? You are my friend.”
“What about Samira?”
“Oh, Samira—she has no deep thoughts. Getting jewelery is what she thinks about. Showing off her clothes, going to weddings. You are not like that. You are more like me.”
She savored the compliment. It was difficult to meet her neighbor’s eyes. “Sometimes,” Yasmin said, “it is my dearest wish to go away from these flats. I wish I could rewrite the past, but you cannot do that, can you?”
All this in whispers; a dark corner of the hallway, heads close together. Mother-in-law’s voice rises from the bedroom, wheedling, insisting, threatening. “What is it that you would like to change?”
Yasmin lifted her head, and in her luminous eyes there was an animal pain. She seemed about to speak, and to say—but then her expression clouded, she bit her lip, looked away. “Perhaps it is you who should move away,” she said. “There is a herb, it is called mehti. If you want to go away from where you are living, if you want a new home, this is the herb you plant. Shall I put some in a pot, Frances, and give it to you?”
Six months on Ghazzah Street, and spring was coming: bigger cockroaches, the smell of sewage. Hot weather would bring the strategies, the longueurs, of expatriate life: driver’s hand jumping from hot metal, the drawn, shiny faces of the women, the apathy, the dust, the wilting of the intellect. All this is familiar; they have adapted without problems. But Andrew does not feel at ease. He feels that something more is required of them.
It seems that there are three cities: the fossil city, the epic city, the trivial city. Once Jeddah encompassed more than a square mile, enclosed within its coral walls; coral walls are gray and gritty, not what they sound. In the souk there are leaning buildings with latticed balconies, the wood rotting, the wood crumbling away: as even the glories of Islam may crumble into dust. This is the fossil city, dim, precarious, the lattices concealing other times, and dim, shadowy lives; you cannot escape the prison insignificance of your own nature.
The epic city throws overpasses into the sky and nets the desert with freeways. It grinds out statistics: biggest fountain in the world, second biggest fountain in the world, a mile of plate glass, a universe of marble. There are 10,000 post-office boxes, and 80,000 electric lampposts, and 2,664 hospital beds; there are 136,000 telephones. The weight of the city’s daily garbage is 1,510 tons. There are eight million cultivated saplings, and all eight million are dying from their roots.
The trivial city runs between the giant roads and beneath bridges; black children kicking a football, a cart laden with watermelons, a shabby tree leaning over a wall. From the overpass near Sharia Siteen you can see this trivial city; as you roar above, imperiled and fast behind your windscreen, the alleys run far below, little one-story buildings set at angles, humble mosques, decrepit air-conditioners leaning from walls, tiny windows open a crack to the odorous air; sagging balconies with ragged washing, the blink of truck lights, the slow progress of a water-seller’s donkey between the shacks. There are figures in these streets, human figures, but they are not those seen elsewhere in the city. Distant, wide-shouldered, tapering toward the feet, they have the quality of those figures that architects use in their drawings; they are ghost people, functions of scale. Far below you, the men seem to wear robes and turbans, and the black-veiled women seem to glide, singly and in pairs; no sound reaches you from their deep-below world.
But if you reach the end of the overpass, and turn back on yourself, this eerie scene is in fact the trivial city; the smell of stale cooking, vehicles nose-to-tail, and clever tunes played on car horns.
“Best price,” says the man in the carpet souk. “I am giving you your first carpet very cheap, so that you will always buy from me.”
How many does he think we want? He looks homespun, shuffling in hi
s slippers between the bales, but he was trading in Frankfurt last week, and the week before in New York, so he knows what the best price is. The shop is half dark, and smells of must, and wool. On the shelves, battered coffeepots jostle in sharp-snouted ranks, each one awaiting its buyer. On a display stand hang the beaded face masks of forgotten women, their former owners emancipated, or deceased.
Carla held one up. “Pretty,” she said.
Frances said, “I’d rather buy a ball and chain.”
With a shrug, Carla put the mask down again.
It was the evening souk trip. Everybody does them. They had been planning it, the Shores and the Zussmans. The carpets are stacked around them, waist high; Rickie heaves over their corners, to show a little of the pattern of each. “See that orange bit,” he says, pointing. “That’s aniline dye. That shows it’s modern.” He flaps the stack down again. That is what Rickie knows about carpets; that is what everyone knows.
You hold something up, perhaps a silver box, perhaps a woven mat; the vendor names some exorbitant price. You smile in polite embarrassment. He says, “What price you like?” Of course, this is a meaningless question. The only price you like is no price at all. But now it’s no good putting it down again, no good acting diminished interest; in the vendor’s mind, the only reason you do not buy is that the price has not been agreed. It’s no good saying you asked out of curiosity. It’s no use saying you’ve gone off it, or it’s too big, or it’s a nice design but the color is all wrong. He will shame you into buying it, by insistently lowering his price. The only way to leave without it is to stop talking, turn your back, walk out of the shop; and even then he will follow you into the street, lowering his prices for the passersby to hear.
And then the smell clings to your hair and clothes, that smell of lamp oil, of mothballs, of the pilfered assets of the dead.
“Well, I guess it is a nice carpet,” Rickie said. He was trying to keep his spirits up. He unrolled it again, on Dunroamin’s beige floor; it looked coarse now, and the dull color of venous blood.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel Page 20
