Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

What was it he expected? Was it a drink? Normally there would be homemade wine on the table. Tonight you’ve left it out, in deference to Islam—and because of the risk if your Saudi friend should later turn against you. He may drop a hint that he would like a little something; you produce it, but you’re still afraid. Or he might not drop the hint, and let you suffer, on Perrier water, the drying up of the conversation and the covert glances at watches. And if you should so suffer, you will not know why; whether it is because he is really religious, or whether it is because he is as frightened as you; or whether it is simply that he has plenty of Glenfiddich at home.

Khawwadjihs, the Saudis call the white expatriates: light-haired ones. And nowadays the turnover in light-haired ones is so quick. Eighteen months is the average stay. There are people in Jeddah today, Mrs. Parsons reflects, who didn’t even know the Arnotts, who weren’t here when Helen Smith died. People are scarcely around long enough to get involved in serious entertaining, or in the Hejaz Choral Society, or in running a Girl Guide troop. There are never enough helpers for the British Wives’ annual bazaar at the Embassy, and the British Community Library staggers on with too few volunteers for weekend evenings. There is almost no one around, nowadays, who remembers what it was like before the giant shopping malls were built, when people had to shop for groceries in the souk. And Mrs. Parsons does not know anyone who attended that fabled party in 1951, when young Prince Mishari, eighteenth surviving son of the great King Abdul Aziz, turned up in a drunken rage, sprayed all the guests with bullets, and murdered the British Consul.

Those were the days.

That evening Andrew drove her downtown. Her sense of unreality was intensified by the slow-moving traffic, bumper to bumper, by the blaring of horns in the semidarkness; by the prayer call, broadcast through megaphones to the hot still air. Neon signs rotated and flashed against the sunset; on Medina Road the skyscrapers were hung with colored lights, trembling against the encroaching night.

They executed a U-turn, inched through the traffic, and swerved into a great sweep of white buildings. They edged forward, jostling for a parking space; with no anger in his face, but with a kind of violent intent, Andrew put his fist on his horn. Cadillacs disgorged men in their thobes and ghutras and handmade Italian sandals; women, veiled in black from head to foot, flitted between the cars.

Andrew took her hand briefly and squeezed it, standing close to her, as if shielding her with his solid body from view. “I mustn’t hold your hand,” he said, “we mustn’t touch in public. It causes offense.” They moved apart, and into the crowds.

Inside the supermarket, on the wall where the shopping carts were parked, there was a notice which said

THIS SHOP CLOSES FOR PRAYER. BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PROMULGATION OF VIRTUE, AND THE ELIMINATION OF VICE.

“The religious police,” Andrew said. “Vigilantes. You’ll see them around. They carry sticks.”

“What do the secular police carry?”

“Guns.”

Frances took a cart. She maneuvered it to a gigantic freezer cabinet. Pale chilled veal from France and black frozen American steaks swept before her for fifty feet. “Do we need any of this?”

“Not really. I brought you to show you that you can get everything. Come and look at the fruit.”

There were things she had never seen before in her life; things grown for novelty, not for eating, bred for their jewel-like colors. “They don’t have seasons,” Andrew said. “They fly this stuff in every morning.” She bought mangoes. She put them in a plastic bag and handed them to a Filipino man who stood behind a scale. He weighed them, and twisted the bag closed and handed it back to her, but he did not look her in the face. Andrew took the cart from her. “Don’t think about the prices,” he advised. “Or you’d never eat.”

In Botswana, in the last town where they had lived, the vegetable truck came twice a week. Carrots were a rarity, mushrooms were exotic. In the garden, baboons stripped the fig trees. Fallen oranges rolled through the grass; the gardener collected them up in baskets. There were tiny peaches, hard as wood, and the cloying scent of guavas in the crisp early mornings. Around her, women plucked tins from shelves; women trussed up in their modesty like funeral laundry, women with layers of thick black cloth where their faces should be. Only their hands reached out, sallow hands heavy with gold.

She caught up with Andrew, laying her hand on the handle of the cart beside his, carefully not touching. “Let me drive,” he said.

“I didn’t know the veil was like this,” she whispered. “I thought you would see their eyes. How do they breathe? Don’t they feel stifled? Can they see where they’re going?”

Andrew said, “These are the liberated ones. They get to go shopping.”

They took their groceries to the car. “We’ll eat soon,” Andrew said. They wove themselves into the crowds; each brilliant window collected its admirers. The buildings here looked new, perhaps a month old, perhaps a week; perhaps they had sprung from the desert that morning, gleaming and stainless, and some old-style genie, almost redundant now, had caused to appear in them by an instant’s magic all the luxury goods of the Western world. Cameras, television sets, Swiss watches, so crammed that they seemed to spill out onto the pavement; ancient silk carpets, and microwave ovens, and electric guitars. There was a furrier: fox, wild mink, sable. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. The smell of fried chicken mingled with the scent of Chanel and Armani. Between the Porsches, a fountain played in a marble basin. She stopped before a shoe shop; a window of tiny high-heeled sandals, green, lilac, red, gold. “Why these?” she said. “Westerners have more sober shoes.”

“I suppose that if you have to go out draped in black to your ankles, you want some way to express yourself.”

She followed Andrew. “Can’t they buy furs when they go abroad? They can’t need them in this climate.”

“Money is a burden all the year round.”

They bought cassette tapes; cheap copies, pirated in Asia and imported by the shopful. All the latest stuff was on the shelves; rock music, and Vivaldi’s Greatest Hits. She didn’t buy the Vivaldi. She planned to fill the flat with noise. I am thirty years old, she thought, and I still buy this, whatever is current, whatever is loud. When they came out of the music shop it was time for night prayers, and men were unrolling prayer carpets on the ground.

“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet,” Andrew muttered. Gates clashed down over the shop windows, doors were barred. In a space by the fountain—which now, unaccountably, had run dry—the worshippers jostled together in lines behind the imam, and then in time fell to their knees, and touched their foreheads to the ground, elevating their backsides. It was just as she had seen it in pictures; she was always surprised if anything was the same.