Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

attitudes. But it was just an ordinary office, in an ordinary street. She sat in the car, waiting for Andrew, watching the passersby. Jeddah is a cosmopolitan city, it is said. All languages are heard, all colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. Ghettos are formed, even on the pavement; garments are twitched aside. The stranger you see today will be stranger still tomorrow. People fall into their national stereotypes; you note the beef-red complexion, the kinked hair, the epicanthic fold.

She fiddled with the radio dial, trying to get some news from the World Service. It was the usual news when she found it, sliced through with a static crackle: bombs in Belfast, bombs in Beirut. But everything that concerned her seemed to be happening close to home. You see, she had said to Andrew, I was right; I did hear footsteps in the empty flat.

It was hot in the car; with the window open the dust blew in. A litter of ginger kittens ran like spiders up the side of a rubbish skip. Some larger cats, covered in scabs and scars, dragged a chicken carcass down the street. Old residents say that stray dogs used to be a menace, roaming in packs around the building sites. But they were rounded up by the municipality; and we hear no more of them.

Behind her sunglasses she could watch the Saudi men, and say to herself that if they returned her glance they would see a blank face, no expression, nothing more revealing than they would see if she were veiled. What an unflattering garment the thobe is, she thought. Before she came she imagined that they would wear flowing robes, not these stiff elongated white shirts. The late afternoon light shone through them. She saw spindly legs, and string vests.

But why should they dress like the cast of a nativity play, just to please her?

She looked at her watch. Go after him, why not? They have separate “ladies’ banks,” but she has never heard of a ladies’ money changer. Nobody seems to know exactly where women are allowed and where they are not. At least the South Africans put up notices: NIE BLANKES.

Once she was inside the money changer’s, no one took the least notice of her. The place was crowded; she threaded her way through to Andrew and touched his arm. He jumped, and gave her a blank, dazed look, as if at first he hadn’t recognized her. “You’re here,” he said.

It was down-at-heel: far from the pleasure domes. As if this was where the serious business of the Kingdom was transacted, and comfort for once did not matter; the stuffing was coming out of the vinyl chairs. The customers shuffled from one disorderly queue to the next, thrusting banknotes at one grill, flourishing forms at the next; collecting signatures, amassing stamps, their eyes flickering constantly to the wall clock, to see if prayer time was imminent, and they were going to be locked in—locked in and left to mill and shout for thirty minutes, sweating, their clothes adhering to their backs and their earnings to their hands. Even the air-conditioning didn’t seem to work properly. There were cheap carpet tiles on the floor, cigarette butts spilling out of ashtrays. Torn scraps of carbon paper lay where they fell.

The manager and his assistant sat behind their desks, in full view; the manager’s desk had a black mirror surface on which the dust lay thick. His assistant’s desk was metallic, less imposing, shorter by a foot and with fewer drawers; its dust lay even thicker. Sometimes the assistant, and after him the manager, would stretch out a careless hand, and sign with a flourish what the frantic queue pushed at them. But they seemed, on the whole, detached; like lords of the manor looking in at a villeins’ feast. They grinned, talked on the telephone, scratched their chins. A contingent of Thai cleaning workers, still in their scarlet overalls, revolved from counter to counter in a fatigued minuet. An American, in a baseball cap and sneakers, waved his papers above his head; his eyes were bright, his belly swamped his belt. Three Brits, temporarily hors de combat, leaned against the wall. They were blue-chinned and balding, they sported sagging chain- store trousers, the polish had long worn from their shoes. They had an air of purposeful frailty, like Jarrow marchers. The hot burnt stench of money was in the air.

Andrew had no time to talk. He brushed her touch off his arm. Outside the traffic swarmed by, and the sun was setting over the sea. A little wooden cupboard disgorged yen, and thousands and thousands of Swiss francs. Two cheap suitcases stood casually under the stairs, as if for the use of more ambitious customers, and as Andrew, his face gleaming with aggression and sweat, signaled that they were finished, a rotund Arab descended the staircase, and picked them up; as he flexed his arms his cuff buttons strained, and his Rolex Oyster gleamed fatly. Outside, at the bottom of the steps, a vendor had spread out a tablecloth on the ground and was selling pocket calculators. Andrew took a deep breath of cooler air. The heat inside the office was increasing; the glass front doors were opaque with greasy smudges, the desperate palm prints of the patrons hurrying in.

“The pound’s fallen,” Andrew said, as they climbed back into the car. “Shall we go and get something for the headache?”

“Have you got one too?”

They were turning under the flyover by the Pepsi-Cola plant when the wail of the muezzin broke over the racetracks. The cars kept speeding; the Prophet said that travelers need not pray. “Bugger,” Andrew said, hearing the prayer call. “You always lose a half hour somewhere.”

The night, now, in long purple swathes, in soft gradations of lemon and pink, hung over a vast car park; a sky like ruffled silk. SANYO SANYO said a neon sign, beginning to wink. “Why are Jeddah sunsets so beautiful?”

“It’s all the dust in the air.”

“There’s no wind today. It’s not coming in from the desert.”

“No. It’s from the cement works.”

“Andrew, what you told me … about the empty flat—”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Don’t go on about it, Fran.”

I was wondering, how often … ?”

“How should I know?” They sat in silence for a moment. The spaces around them began to fill up, as the end of prayers approached. Black shapes were disgorged from cars. Maids, and a few blond nannies, clutched the hands of the small children. Little girls too young for the veil, with saucer eyes and beribboned topknots, wore sequined dresses with bouffant skirts, sewn over with scratchy lace. Charm bracelets clinked around their thin brown wrists; and sometimes a mother’s abaya would drift a little, and you would see that she was draped and weighted with gold, with mayoral chains of it, from which hung gemstones the size and color of boiled sweets.

“Just the average Saudi housewife, having a casual evening out,” Frances said. “They look like … I can’t think what they look like.”

“Prussian empresses … on coronation day.”