fringed pools, and sipping “illicit liquor,” which always sounds more exciting than the normal kind, doesn’t it? There are not quite so many cockroaches at Marion’s place, but on the other hand their baths are held to the walls with sticky tape, and they have rats running about in their roofs.
Marion complains about the compound a lot, it’s falling down and they can’t get maintenance, etc., and they have distressing episodes with their drains, but she seems to be happy here in a way. She’s been in Jeddah for two years and perhaps when we have been around that long I’ll be used to it and see it in the same light. After all, she said yesterday, you can get anything you want in the shops. Now in Zambia there was no soap, we had no sugar for months, the eggs were always stale, we had to eat stringy chicken all the time and some weeks we had to live on spaghetti. So if somebody locked you in your local Sainsbury’s, I asked her, would you be happy? She stared at me. She’s an easygoing woman, too lethargic to be offended. It was meant to be a joke, but I think something is happening to my sense of humor.
The Brits here are all earning far more than they would anywhere else in the world. They talk about how their shares are doing, and about their next leave, which is usually going to be a round-the-world trip by air, taking in really boring places like Miami and Hong Kong, where they can spend their time in shopping malls, just in case they get homesick for Jeddah. Some people, though, are parsimonious. They stash away everything they can and treat their time here like a prison sentence, or a stint in an up-country field camp. They intend to stay on until they get a certain sum of money in the bank, but as they get toward their target, they decide they need more. They want to buy a house but house prices are rising so fast. They’ve put their children in boarding school so that they could come abroad, but now the children are settled and it’s unfair to take them away, so they’ve got to stay abroad to pay the fees. They’ve put Mother in a nursing home because they weren’t around to look after her and now she’s got older and sicker and got ideas above her station. They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.
No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin—as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department. They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed—war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else.
The Americans are different. Usually they don’t stay long. They don’t know how to behave anywhere at all.
Marion’s topic of conversation is her husband. Russel won’t take her shopping. He doesn’t think that’s a man’s job, bothering with groceries. His office sends her a car once a week, for a couple of hours, but she has to account for everything she spends, and he’s not too keen on the idea of her shopping alone; she gets carried away, he says, and buys things like prawns. His idea is that they go out once a month and do everything, we’ve got a freezer, he says, so use it. But at the same time, he expects her to have everything on hand that he might want to eat. You’re doing nothing else all day, he says, so why can’t you organize the household? The other night he was going on, haven’t we got any beetroot, why isn’t there any beetroot?
Plus her Magimix has broken down.
When it gets a bit cooler, she says, we can sit outside and have coffee.
Men don’t come very well out of this diary. On the other hand, women don’t come very well out of it either. I said when I was writing before that the sexes live here in a state of deep mutual suspicion, but now I’m beginning to think it’s more like a state of mutual terror. I wasn’t sure before I came here if people were really executed for adultery. But since I’ve been here the Saudi Gazette has carried two or three reports of double executions. If you miss one, somebody will have cut it out, and will give you a photocopy. We’re fascinated, we can’t help it.
There was an execution in Mecca a little while ago. The woman of the house was having an affair with her driver. The husband got suspicious, and sacked him. The following night the woman let the driver into the house. Her husband was asleep. Her lover stabbed him to death. They put the body in a sack and tipped it down a well. Then they took off to Taif, posing as husband and wife. When they were caught they confessed. The man was publicly beheaded, for adultery and murder, and the woman was stoned to death for adultery.
I suppose there is no call to jeel cultural superiority. The murder, anyway, is the same as crimes in the West. The punishment is not so different from what we have had until recently. But what chills my blood is the pious last paragraph that the newspaper tags on. “While giving out details of the offense and punishment, the Interior Minister made it clear that the government would vigorously implement the Sharia laws to maintain the security of the land and to deter criminals … The executions were carried out after Friday prayers.”
I really must talk to Yasmin. When I read things like this it’s beyond me how people like Marion can say, “Oh, I don’t mind it here really”—because you see, there are these nightmare occurrences. Probably I spend too much time on my own in the flat, reading the newspapers and trying to work things out. When Andrew came home yesterday he told me something very disturbing about the empty flat upstairs. I don’t know if I should write it down. What if somebody gets hold of my diary, and reads it?
3
What she remembered now was the sound of sobbing she had heard, echoing through the bathroom pipes. She was not sure any longer which flat it had come from. Best to assume that it was Samira. Did people cry a lot, in arranged marriages? Marion’s complaints nagged at her. People seemed to cry enough in the marriages they fixed up for themselves.
Perhaps Abdul Nasr had been exercising the right the Koran gave him to beat his wife. She saw him once more, midmorning, striding out to his car. His sandals skidded over the marble, and the ends of his ghutra whiplashed out behind him. Yet Andrew said you never saw a Saudi in a hurry. She had time to notice only his frown, and the flash of his wristwatch. The contrast stuck in her mind—the clean Cartier lines, and the cloying odor of goatflesh which floated day after day down the stairs.
Frances had a headache. Perhaps, she thought, it was the effect of living with the air-conditioning; it couldn’t be healthy, could it? Or perhaps it was the tension which was building up at the back of her neck.
She mentioned it to Andrew. “What have you got to be tense about?” he asked. Then, “Guess what, I’ve been paid. I’m going to the money changer’s. Want to come?”
He would have to drive downtown to the bank first, and turn the Ministry’s check into cash. Riyal notes are what work here—not personal checks, not credit cards. He would extract a bundle of notes which would be their housekeeping money; and later they would subdivide it into smaller bundles, and stow it about the flat in cunning hiding places.
Then he would need to take the cash that was left over, and exchange it for a sterling check. The money changer’s sounded interesting: as if there might be a table in the open air, with people standing about in biblical
