Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

to tell me. What is it? They don’t actually stone the woman to death, she said. Not nowadays. They just throw a few stones, as a ritual, and then somebody shoots her.

This cheered me enormously. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying, oh well that’s all right then, isn’t it, very merciful. Yasmin probably wonders why I’m pursuing the topic with such energy. What if this couple made enemies? I try to imagine the four male witnesses, swaying about on ladders outside Dunroamin. But the blinds are always down in the empty flat. There’s not even a chink you could peer through. You’d have to charge down the door. The more you think of it the more ludicrous it becomes.

But I wonder when they come here, at night or during the day? I wonder if they are in love? Perhaps one day I shall see a car draw up and the lady slip out, in her veil, and glide silently up the stairs. If I see her I shall press myself against the wall, as if I were a servant, and turn my face away. She has enough to worry her.

Rabi al-awal

1

“Wait till the rain comes,” Samira said. “Then you will see some shooting up. Even that old tree.”

At eleven in the morning, Samira’s sitting room had a twilit air; a heaviness in the atmosphere, a preponderance of fringes and beadings, gold tiebacks on the velvet curtains, and wallpaper of crimson flock. There was a scent of mothballs, spices, of lemon spray polish, and the ineradicable smell of onions. A lamp in the shape of a clipper ship glowed dully on the sideboard. At one end, sofas were grouped about a glass coffee table; at the other end, made insignificant by the dimensions of the room, stood a dining table and twelve chairs in the ornate and gilded style known unkindly as Louis Farouk.

The large window, fronted by its balcony, looked on to the street; but the brown tree blocked the view, and made the room dark. Neither Yasmin nor Samira minded spending their days under artificial light, and it was often midmorning before they would wind up the heavy slatted wooden blinds. And it was overcast today, the low sky seeming to press on the city’s half-finished buildings. A chill damp blast from the air-conditioner stirred the pendant crystals of Samira’s chandelier—which had been obtained, she said, as part of her marriage settlement, from Top Furniture of Palestine Road.

Frances shivered a little. “Oh, you are becoming one of us,” Yasmin said. “You feel the cold.”

Samira crossed the room and turned the air-conditioner to a lower setting. She asked, “Would you like a shawl?”

“Thank you, I’m fine,” Frances said, with a formal courteous nod, and, vying with her in politeness, Samira said,

“It’s no problem.”

“When will it rain?” Frances asked. “It hasn’t rained since I got here.”

“She misses her English weather,” Yasmin explained.

Samira looked doubtful. It seemed she would do everything she could to entertain her guest, but there were some things she could not guarantee. “Oh, soon,” she said. And then, compelled to honesty, she added, “There isn’t any fixed season for it.”

“But when it does rain,” Yasmin said, “I promise you it will rain hard.”

Frances sat on the edge of her armchair, her thin ankles wrapped tightly together, and even her voice sounding thin, constrained. It seemed impossible to relax; and the other two women looked wary, as if they thought a chance utterance might cause offense. Whereas really, Frances thought, it was much more likely that she would upset them. Every day she bridled at something, but she did not think of herself as the one offended. That was a step she had yet to take.

Samira went to the door, and spoke; and a moment later the maid hurried in, yellow face downcast, and handed Frances a shawl. “There, much better,” Samira said, leaning forward to arrange it around Frances’s shoulders. She gave her a brief, affectionate pat. Her child, Fat’ma, played on the floor with Selim. She was a sturdy infant, bigger than Selim though younger by some months; she wielded a plastic skittle which she used as a weapon, sometimes pounding the carpet, sometimes pounding the small curly-haired skull of Yasmin’s child. Selim’s cries of pain and protest were no more than squeaks, as if rigidly suppressed by a code of good manners. “He must grow up hardy,” Yasmin said. “He is a boy.”

“What’s your maid’s name?” Frances asked.

Samira told her. But she was no wiser. It sounded like “Sarsaparilla.” But that was not possible. In answer to her questioning look, Samira merely shrugged. “I did try to call her something simpler,” she said. “But she won’t answer to it.”

Sarsaparilla came in again, with a tray of coffee, and Samira stood up, took it from her, and put it on a sidetable, Frances tried to catch the maid’s eye; perhaps she might, just with a look, express her concern? But she failed. The girl slid out of the room, seeming to melt into the shadows of the heavy furniture, the gilt tassels, and out into the hallway with its bitter chemical tang of insecticides. “Nescafe freeze dried,” Samira said, with no little pride. “Not Arabic coffee. No sugar?” She made a face. “Frances, how can you?” She made another, more expressive face, for Yasmin’s consumption.

Samira was a sallow, stockily built young woman, with a cascade of coarse dark hair that had something of an animal quality about it—as if it led a separate life from its owner, but on a lower plane. As she arranged the cups, it swung over her shoulder, crackling with static. She wore blue jeans, tight-fitting, very new and stiff, and a scarlet sweatshirt with a designer’s monogram on the collar. On her left hand she wore a single carat solitaire diamond, in a surprisingly restrained setting; it blinked coldly in the gray light, like another eye.

“I was telling Frances,” Yasmin said, “that your maid has left some children behind in Indonesia. That is why she goes about crying the whole time.”

“She’s new, is she?” Frances asked.

Samira shrugged again. “Not so new. I am training her. Not easy, as she doesn’t speak any language. I just take her arm and I say, look you, do this. She is learning.”

“Well, she must speak some language,” Frances said.

“If she does nobody has found out what it is.”