“Your shawl—”
“No, keep it. Really you must. It suits you.”
“Oh, I can’t.”
“It is my gift,” Samira said. She leaned forward and kissed Frances on the cheek.
Poor diary. If only it could have a change of scene! She is ashamed of its content, which she feels has become trivial and repetitious. She will write down her conversation with the women, knowing that upstairs, sprawled in comfort on the cushions, they are discussing her.
When she spent her first day alone in the flat, time moved in a slow, dreamlike way; now it moves at a normal speed. And yet she cannot think how she passes it. Reading; patrolling with the cockroach spray; cooking food for the freezer. Sometimes she walks to Marion’s compound. The mornings have cooled slightly, and they sit outside the house. Marion sips Diet Pepsi; insects from miles around come specially to drown in her glass. Often the smell from the drains drives them indoors. And yet she is grateful for the outing. The compound has a small pool, fiercely chlorinated, and a few stunted trees. Perhaps, she thinks, when a house there comes free … But Marion says the compound families are always quarreling.
Her letters home have already ceased to read like frontier dispatches, and now they are full of householder’s complaints, and polite general inquiries: have you seen your sister lately, how is the cat? It is difficult to describe to people the kind of life they are living. And she does not describe their surroundings anymore. She has almost ceased to notice them. If it were not for the empty flat, perhaps Frances would have stopped asking questions already. Curiosity is a transient phenomenon here. It is not that you learn everything; but you soon learn whatever you will be allowed to known. This is a private society, which does not publish its flaws, or disclose its reasoning, which replies to pressing inquirers with a floodtide of disinformation, and then reverts to its preferred silence. One door closes, and—while you are gathering your platitudes—another door slams shut.
2
Frances Shore’s Diary: 9 Rabi al- awal
A few days ago I met Carla Zussman at the Sarawat supermarket. I last saw her in the audience at an amateur production of The Crucible, given in the Moth Hall, Gaborone. Hi there, Frances, she said. I asked, surprised to see me? Not really, she said. Still married? Yes, I said, and to the same man. You? Oh yes, she said, I’m here with Rickie, we’re still a going concern.
So I persuaded Marion that we ought to take the bus and visit Carla. The buses are segregated, of course. Most of the bus is for men, but there is a small compartment at the back for women. There is a standard fare of one riyal, and a box to put it in, and this is why the women travel at the back, they can be trusted to pay up, whereas the men won’t pay unless they’re under the eye of the driver. We only had about ten minutes to wait, but we got very hot, even though the segregated bus shelter did shield us from the full glare of the sun. Bus shelters are a big advance here, they have only just got them, and they write about them in the newspapers as if they were moonshots or something. Although we were very respectably dressed, people still stared at us, and shouted from cars, so we were glad when the bus came.
We went along fairly confidently, being the only female passengers. I told Marion, just look out for the American Embassy compound, we can’t miss it. As soon as we saw the Stars and Stripes fluttering between the construction sites, we leapt up and pressed the bell, but it didn’t work. The front compartment was nearly empty too, so I banged on the glass panel, trying to attract the driver’s attention, and shouted Hinna! Hinna! I was afraid to get involved in anything more complicated. But he didn’t hear me. Two Yemenis in the front compartment turned round and looked at us. I pointed to the driver, but all they did was stare. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d grinned, I wouldn’t have minded if they’d laughed at us, because everybody laughs at them. I thought, somebody might as well have some pleasure out of this excursion. But they just went on staring. They didn’t seem to have any initiative.
A few minutes later, Top Furniture went past, where Samira got her chandelier, and then we were on the Corniche. I persuaded Marion to get out, on the grounds that we knew where we were, and if we stayed on the bus any longer this might not be the case. There was hardly anyone around, just us, a few seagulls, and those strange nonhuman shapes, metal and stone objects on which the Mayor has spent so much—but it’s his town. We sat down on one of the sculptures. It was white marble, and the sea was a hard blue, and I felt so good at being out of the house that I could have stayed there forever. Marion got fretful, and the sun was burning. I would have liked to run down over the smooth brown rocks and into the waves. What a good thing I am not that sort of person. Another bus came along, and we got on it.
We thought, with luck, that we might find ourselves back near the Embassy, but we were not lucky that day, and Marion was getting more and more upset. The terminus is the place to be, I said, and then we can start again; but it would be too late to go to Carla’s, the best we could do would be to get .ourselves home. Think of it as an adventure, I said to Marion, but she said Russel wouldn’t see it that way. Don’t tell him, I said unfeelingly, and she looked at me in terror. I remembered the days, not very long ago, when I told Andrew everything too.
The bus got snarled up in the downtown traffic, and we ended up at the Queen’s Building, near the souk. Shall we go and look around? I said; there are two of us after all. Marion said, a mother and daughter were raped in the souk, mind you they were wearing shorts, they were asking for it. They were Australians, she added. As if that made some sort of difference.
I lost my temper with her. I said, how can you repeat this sort of gossip? Who were these women? When did it happen? Who told you about it? I said, life is difficult enough in this town without believing everything you hear.
I imagined Carla waiting for us, with iced coffee, and something like banana bread, chocolate chip cookies perhaps, and maybe ringing up Dunroamin to see what had happened. I felt almost tearful. I wanted to prove to Marion that it was all right, that we could go out on our own without something terrible happening to us, and now just because we missed our bus stop all these fantasies about Australians were running around in her head. Even though I had lost my temper, I felt sorry for her, standing there in the street. It was past midday, and I could see her suffering, covered in a clammy sweat, and her ankles swelling before my eyes. I have to keep away from women like Marion. They may be company, but they’re no good for me in the long run.
But then a day later, Marion turned up at Dunroamin. “I had to come and talk to someone,” she said. She revolved slowly in the living room, viewing the many chairs, a vacant and confused expression on her face. As soon as she had selected a chair, she began to cry, and mop up her tears with tissues which she tore angrily from a box on the coffee table.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said, “he’s just so mean, Fran, he’s so mean. He says we’re staying in Jeddah to see the next Five-Year Plan out, if they let him. That’ll be 1990! I’ll be forty! Can you imagine being forty in this place?”
Frances could not imagine being forty in any place at all. But she sat down to listen. “I thought you liked it here?”