“Probably. You know what Rickie Zussman was telling me? He’d been to this management seminar, and they’d had a lecture from some Indian psychiatrist, a chap from Hyderabad. He was making a tour of the Middle East to research into the effects of stress on immigrant workers.”
“Strange,” Frances said, “how Indians are immigrant workers, but we’re professional expatriates.”
“He said all the Indians who work here are shot to pieces mentally. Totally paranoid. They come here and they’re suddenly cut off from their families, they’ve got language problems, and they start to think everybody’s out to get them. Our Indians are like that, at Turadup. They think all the other Indians are after their jobs. They think people are talking about them behind their backs. And they’re always going up to Eric Parsons and asking him complicated questions about the labor law. They think he wants to cheat on the terms of their contract, do them out of their baggage allowances or something. They’re obsessed with their baggage allowances.”
“I expect Europeans are the same, when they’ve been here for a while.”
“Yes, sure. This psychiatrist says so. He says there are phases. When you get here and everything’s so strange, you feel isolated and got at—that’s Phase One. But then you learn how to manage daily life, and for a while the place begins to seem normal, and you’ll even defend the way things are done here, you’ll start explaining to newcomers that it’s all right really—that’s Phase Two. You coast along, and then comes Phase Three, the second wave of paranoia. And this time around, it never goes.”
“So what do you do?”
“You leave, before you crack up.”
“But some of your lot at Turadup—they’ve been here a few years. They may not be up to much, but you can’t say they’ve cracked up.”
“Oh, not in any obvious way. I don’t mean they attack people, or scream and hammer the walls. They’re just cracked up in small ways. You just listen to their conversation.” Andrew stared into the depth of his empty mug, as if he were reading the tea leaves. “Parsons,” he said. “You know that big flash car of his? It’s got a tinted windscreen. It’s tinted at the top, so you’ve got this arc of blue sky.”
“That’s not insane, Andrew. It’s just tacky.”
“It seems insane to me,” Andrew said. “Nine days out of ten the sky is as blue as you could want. Unnaturally blue. But the real sky isn’t good enough for these madmen.”
Frances was thoughtful. “I wonder what phase we are in?”
“Getting into the second one, I suppose. Because we seem to be coping, don’t we? There are days when I really feel the place is normal.”
Speak for yourself, Frances thinks. Dunroamin begins to feel a more and more problematical world. When she goes out into the hallway she is watchful; she listens; she casts a glance over her shoulder and up the stairs. If she hears a door open, her heart leaps. There is a feeling that something is going on, just outside her range of vision. If the time and the place came together, she would grasp it; she would know what it was.
“Perhaps the process can be accelerated,” she said to Andrew. “Perhaps I’ve already reached the third stage.”
“Oh no,” Andrew said seriously. “No, I wouldn’t worry, Frances. This psychiatrist was talking about guest workers, expatriate labor. I don’t think it applies to women at home.”
Letters home. Frances writes to her cousin Clare, and gives the letter to Andrew: “Can you post this?”
Andrew’s heart sinks. “I’ll be late then,” he says.
The post offices of Jeddah are breezeblock cubes, sited on vacant lots; they are difficult of access, and have eccentric opening hours. The people who man them seem to be chosen for their piety, because post offices are almost always closed for prayer. When at last the staff take down the gates from the main door, and throw the office open, a long and cosmopolitan queue forms at once, and snakes outside the cube and into the dust by the roadside. The clerks deal with this queue at their own speed; they take time out to read the newspapers,
In the year 1403, a great innovation appeared in the Kingdom: post boxes. Mostly these too were situated on vacant lots, but a few were near the habitations of men, and friends could exchange news of them, and draw each other maps. At first it seemed that everyone would be saved a great deal of time and aggravation. But of course, to post letters in the post boxes, one needed stamps, so it was necessary to go to the post office anyway.
What happened next was a shortage of stamps. On the pavement outside the main post office, which in those days was situated near the Happy Family supermarket, a sort of sub-post-office system grew up; enterprising men sat on blankets, and sold stamps at blackmarket prices.
A little while after this, the main post office closed down. Overnight, it stood deserted, and for days no one knew where to find its successor. Post office boxes went missing, and clerks were out and about all over the city, looking for them.
O, Bride of the Red Sea! You give your suitors a hard time.
The post boxes, too, were a failure. They were seen every day to be stuffed with letters and small packages, with overflowing mail to Madras, to Salt Lake City, to Kuala Lumpur and to Leamington Spa; but was it fresh mail, or the same mail every day? A rumor got about that the boxes were never emptied; and the Europeans, at least, started their search for post offices again.
It was, of course, only a rumor. The
3
A week passed; and they were, as Yasmin put it, called for dinner. Yasmin had been cooking for three days; but when she opened the door to them she had banished the sweat and grease, the smell of spices that crept into her clothes and hair, and stood, smiling guardedly, in an embroidered
She led them around the room. “This is Shabana. This is her husband Mohammad, this is Mohammad’s friend Farooq.” The men wore dark business suits; the women were dressed as Yasmin was, or else in their evening-party saris; one or two wore long velvet skirts, and high-necked blouses with frills. They smiled politely, and asked the routine questions: and how do you like Jeddah? And with the arrival of the Shores, the whole party, which had been
