conducted in Urdu, switched smoothly into English.
It was difficult. Shams, her eyes downcast, circulated with a tray: a choice of Pepsi, 7-Up, or a fizzy orange drink of a peculiar sickly sweetness. Shabana’s dimpled paw hovered over the tray, her diamond rings glittering. She was a little doll of a woman, with faint dark down on her upper lip; her mouth was plump and cushioned, her manner confiding. “And have you been to the carpet souk?” she asked. “Are you wanting to collect some carpets?”
Raji appeared at Frances’s side, and took her arm. “If she wants carpets I will show her the best buys,” he said. “Tell me, Frances, where do you want to go?”
Raji, that night, was ebullient, bouncing around from guest to guest. “What I’d like to see,” Frances said, “is this Tomb of Eve I’ve read about.”
“Ah,” Shabana said. “I see you are becoming interested in some bits of Islam.”
“Yasmin has been explaining things to me. Is it really the tomb of Eve?”
“They say so. After Adam and Eve got reconciled with God, Eve died and was buried—”
“Downtown,” Raji said, smiling, “behind a big wall. Near the Foreign Ministry, I think, isn’t it?”
“Haven’t you seen it?”
“I don’t think it is widely publicized,” Raji said. “It is not what the Saudis would make a tourist attraction. You must know, Frances, that here they are Sunni Muslims.” He sounded detached, almost cynical. “They don’t go for shrines and tombs and processions. They call these things superstition.”
“It is the Shia who go after such things,” Shabana said.
“You must ask Samira,” Raji said. “Frances has a Saudi friend,” he explained. “She will tell you that the Shia are so extreme. They are flagellants. Suicidals. Martyrs.” He touched his forehead delicately. “They are all martyrs, you understand me, in the head.”
Shabana said, “You must read the Holy Koran. Of course, in translation—”
“Yes, I know,” Frances said. “I understand that without Arabic you can’t really appreciate it. But you can look about you, and see its effects in the outside world.”
Raji laughed. “You are often amusing yourself at our expense, Frances. You think I cannot tell when you are sarcastic. You do not think much of us, and who is to blame you.” An arm around her waist, he patted her, like a fond uncle. “Come now, let’s not be so solemn. You ought not to bother about such things as tombs. You must take your husband down to the gold souk, and make him buy you something nice.”
“Ah, have you heard?” Shabana turned aside and touched her husband’s sleeve. “Mohammad, will you tell about the latest goings-on at Jeddah International Market? Do please tell Raji.”
Mohammad obliged, clearing his throat, pushing too large spectacles back on his nose. “The police are banning mirrors in the jewelers’ shops. Or so they say. The Saudi women are down there provoking the shop assistants, getting them to fasten necklaces on them, while they look in the mirror.”
“That’s right,” Shabana said, almost in a whisper. “And they stretch out their hands, with their nails painted red, and let the men try bracelets on them.”
“Young women will find some way to flirt,” Raji said indulgently. “It is the way of the world.”
Mohammad darted a look at Frances. “Quite a hotbed, they say, the Jeddah International Market. The story goes that the girls walk around looking in the shop windows, with a piece of paper hidden in their hand, and their telephone number on it. Well, you know how the young men hang around there. They just slip it to someone, and then they phone up.”
Shabana tittered. “They have a relationship on the telephone.”
“It’s rather sad,” Frances said. “Don’t you think?”
“Where’s your sense of humor?” Raji demanded. “We also enjoy laughing at the Saudis from time to time, you know. Oh, they know we do it. But then we are,” he said smoothly, “only the hired help.”
“We are the hired help too,” Frances said. “I was wondering, do you see much of Abdul Nasr? Our neighbor,” she explained to Shabana.
“I don’t know him well,” Raji said. “I don’t have contact with him in my work. Of course, his family are not Saudi, you know. I think he was born here, but they come from Iran. So, he will never really get on.”
Yasmin approached, to urge them toward the table. “Everything is ready, do please come and eat. You are talking of our neighbor?”
“We can hardly be on social terms,” Raji said. “If we called them to dinner Samira would have to sit behind her veil. Thank God we don’t all have to keep their rules, or there would be no parties like this one.”
“It seems a pity,” Frances said to Yasmin. “When you two are such friends.”
Yasmin caught her eye. “I don’t know why you think it is a pity,” she said quietly. “Whatever would Raji and Samira find to talk about?” Then she smiled, and turned back to her guests.
The fruits of Yasmin’s three days of labor were laid out as a buffet on the long table with its stiff white cloth. The party ate standing up, in a concentrated, voracious silence. Frances picked at the food, which was too spicy for her stomach, and turned it over with her fork. Andrew complimented Yasmin. He was enjoying himself. He could eat anything; it was one of his social assets. Raji alone talked between mouthfuls, holding forth on this and that. It seemed a pose, almost; look at me, he was saying, I am a worldly, charming man. If there had been a slight tension in the room— caused, Frances thought, by the European presence—it was now dissipating. But she looked across the table and saw Yasmin watching Raji, with an expression that was narrow and appraising. It was the face of a nun in a lingerie department: baffled, almost hungry, and yet full of a growing appreciation that things are worse than one had thought.
Samira came down. She rang the doorbell, and when Frances answered it—she had been busy in the kitchen—her neighbor was huddled into the doorframe, as if trying to efface her black shape into the texture of the wood. Inside the door, she unwound her head, revealing her perfect
