Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

“Does she come from Bandung?”

“No. Some country place.”

“She must have her own dialect.”

“Well, I don’t know, I think she must,” Samira said. “My friend has Indonesian maid, and she cannot speak to her.” She dropped three spoonfuls of brown sugar into her coffee, and stirred it thoughtfully. “I expect maybe she is lonely.”

“Oh well,” Yasmin said. “It is better if she doesn’t have any contacts. At least she won’t go bringing gangs of thieves to the house.”

“Are there gangs of thieves?” Frances said innocently. “I didn’t think there were any. It never mentions them in the newspapers.”

The two women exchanged a glance. It’s funny, Frances thought, how two people think they can exchange glances without the third person noticing. “It’s not a problem,” Samira said. She sounded prim. But then she added, hotly, “It is only in the West that they say, thieving Arabs. It is the Western media. Always they show us as thieving and ignorant and suffering from diseases.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean …” Frances blushed faintly. “Besides, they don’t, you know. Not nowadays.”

“They are fair to the East?” Yasmin said. “I don’t think so.”

“But I’m sure people don’t have those prejudices.”

“It is in the Saudi Gazette,” Samira insisted. “Every day people are taken up in Marks & Spencer. They try to explain, no, no, I am not a thief, I am intending to pay for it, I am only taking it to that counter over there.” Her face lit, as she enacted the scene; her coffee cup trembled a little in its saucer. “Perhaps they have never been in that country before. Perhaps their English is not so good. But no one listens to their pleas. They are thrown into jail. And then they are asked huge sums of money, far more than what is the value of that original article.”

“That can’t be right,” Frances said. She tried to keep her tone light. “They couldn’t arrest them, because you see, they’d have to be outside the shop—”

She stopped. Samira had set her jaw firmly. “Many people who own shops in London,” she said, “are Zionists.”

Frances nodded vaguely, not in assent, but because she was remembering what she had been told by the businessman on the plane. You have to cut the labels out of your underwear … too bloody secretive to have maps … nobody knows the half of what goes on. How long ago that seemed now; and yet this was only her third month on Ghazzah Street. Yasmin and Samira exchanged another glance, and this time, a slight smile.

“I have told Samira of your interest in the Sharia law. You must read the Holy Koran that I gave you. Then you will see how sensible it is.”

“I have been reading it,” Frances said.

“Of course, you do not get the full idea in translation.”

“You get enough.”

“And?” Samira said timidly. “Yes?”

It was as if she had written it personally. Do be careful, Frances said to herself. Take care. “It reminds me of the Bible.”

“Yes, quite so.” Yasmin leaned forward, took up the coffeepot, and replenished her cup, as if she were at home. “We have the Prophets, just the same, peace be upon them. We have Abraham. Moses. Adam and Eve. And Jesus.” She helped herself to sugar. “We have Jesus.”

“It wasn’t that so much,” Frances said. “It was more the bits about gouging out people’s eyes, and cutting off their hands and feet alternately, that sort of thing.” Her inner voice complained, this is not being careful.

“They give a—what’s the word?” said Samira, unexpectedly.

She looked up from where she was kneeling on the rug, prying her daughter’s fingers from Selim’s hair. The dark, frail little boy had his neck bent at a painful angle; he did not utter, and Yasmin regarded him, from her armchair, with a self-satisfied composure. “An anesthetic,” she supplied.

“Yes,” Samira said. “That’s it.”

“When they do an amputation,” Yasmin looked down at her own long hands, with their lacquered nails, “there is a doctor in attendance. It doesn’t go poisoned, they make sure of that. They don’t let them bleed so much. Really, Frances, it isn’t like you think.”

Frances felt a minute contraction in her throat, a tiny wash of nausea; as if something small had moved inside her, deep inside. They were quite new to her, these minute reactions between body and soul—the tension headaches, the tightness in the throat. Until now her body had been a quiet, efficient machine. She might say, “It makes me sick, such a thing,” but until she came to Ghazzah Street, it had not really been true. She leaned forward, hiding her face, and put her coffee cup on the table.

“Some more?” Samira said. She gave a single, guttural yell, like a battle cry. It fetched Sarsaparilla. The maid stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over her bony chest. Frances kept her eyes on the floor. She examined the rug on which the children were playing. It was an antique rug, its chief color a gentle faded blue; it portrayed the Tree of Life, weighted with fruit.

“In America,” Yasmin said, when the tray had been taken away, “every criminal hopes to be saved on the defense of insanity. If they are shoplifting, they just say, ‘Oh, I don’t know what came over me.’ And if they have committed murder, they just say—”

“‘Oh, I don’t know what came over me,’” Samira put in helpfully. Yasmin nodded.

“They say, ‘When I did this I was temporarily not in my right mind, but I am okay now, so you may let me go.’”