Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

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 hates 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