They stood watching, in the heat. Andrew looked as if he wished to speak; but perhaps he had no right to an opinion? She glanced at him sideways. “Oh go on,” she muttered. “Spit it out. I know you hate religion.”
“Oh, they must do as they like,” he said. “It’s not my business, is it? It’s just the ablutions I mind. They have to wash before they pray, all sorts of inconvenient bits of themselves. When you go into the lavatories at the Ministry all the floor is flooded, and people are standing on one leg with their other foot in the handbasin. You can’t … you want to laugh.” He took out his handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and mopped his brow. “We timed this trip badly. But people are always getting caught like this. There’s only a couple of hours between sunset and night prayers.”
And then, she thought, eight hours till dawn. Her feet ached, still swollen perhaps from the flight. When prayers were over they went into a fast-food shop. Small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers behind the counter, and stacked trays, and busily cleaned the tables. There was an all-male party of young Filipinos in one corner, and Saudi youths sprawled across the plastic benches, nourishing their puppy-fat and their incipient facial hair.
A sign said FAMILY ROOM, and an arrow pointed to a corner of the cafe marked off by a wooden lattice screen. Andrew steered her behind it. There were three tables, empty. They ate pizza and drank milk shakes. Conversation between them died; but for a moment, over the comforting junk food, she did feel real again, and uncalculating, whole, as though she were a child. But it is not really myself, she thought, as she pushed an olive around her plate, it is just an image I have been sold, in a film somewhere. A wide-eyed child of America; the innocent abroad.
The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. “At this hour,” Andrew said, “Saudi men go out to visit their friends.”
“They drive like maniacs,” she said.
“Just think if they had alcohol.” His face was grim and set. He was almost used to it now, the six near-misses a day.
Each highway was straight; the same neon signs flashing between the streetlamps, NISSAN SANYO MITSUBISHI. On the center divide, saplings wilted in the exhaust fumes. “I don’t know where we are,” she said.
“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.
