Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

for any men. Except your relations, of course. She held out an arm, and Samira’s black silk abaya floated onto it; Frances laid it over the back of a chair. Samira wore her jeans again, and a silk shirt with a sequined butterfly embroidered across her large bosom. She had brought her little girl; the child had been dressed for an outing, in a frilly white dress with a sash which made her appear as wide as she was high. Her dark round face was truculent; she had a doll in one hand, hanging by its blond hair, and with the other hand she clutched and patted at her mother’s unyielding denim thighs.

“Oh, that woman of mine!” Samira said. She seated herself, and threw her head back so that her long electric hair crackled over Turadup’s tasteful oatmeal cushions. “That ignorant woman! I have brought the kid down so that she can get on with the sweeping.”

“Does she still cry so much?”

“All the time. Do you know, Frances, before we brought Islam to those people they lived in the jungle and ate pigs.” And now they are not grateful, her tone implied. “They colored their body with pictures, what do you call it, tattoos. Sometimes they ate each other.”

“Some coffee?”

“Yes, but don’t set up that machine, just make it quickly in the cup, it’s all right.” Her exasperation, temporarily quelled, broke out again. “He says—Abdul says—I should be glad that she doesn’t speak Arabic. He says I don’t want her corrupting our children with foreign ways. By the by, I am expecting again.”

“Are you?” Frances said. “Congratulations. Are foreign ways always corrupting?”

“You can’t complain if we think so,” Samira said, with a sigh. “After all, we have seen so much of the youth going to Europe and getting into bad ways with women and nightclubs. The newspapers are always ready to give them bad publicity.”

“Have you been to Europe, yourself?”

“Yes, of course. We often go. Paris. Rome. Only,” she said fretfully, “Abdul never tells me his plans. He just says, come on, we are traveling.”

Frances brought the coffee. Another illuminating morning, she thought. She felt she was receiving a sentimental education; but that there was more to learn. The child, with tiny strong fingers like pincers, was pulling out her doll’s hair. Samira reached for the sugar bowl. Her mood of complaint had deepened.

“Abdul is never at home,” she said. “He goes out in the evening on men’s parties.”

“Did you know Abdul, before you were married?”

“No, it was arranged, of course.”

“So you didn’t know what to expect?”

“Well, if he is a little kind … It is not good to have too many expectations.”

“Yes, people say that.” Frances raised her cup to her lips. “But I didn’t know expectations were wrong. I never thought of it that way.”

“Afterward, after your marriage, then you get to know each other. We don’t have many conflicts. Do you have many?”

“Oh, a few.”

“Because we don’t talk all that much, you know. His life, my life—they are different. But that’s natural, isn’t it? Men and women, it has to be.”

“I don’t know. You could get an education. Get a job. If you lived somewhere else, that is. In another country.”

“Oh, but,” Samira said. “But. I have been to the Women’s University, Frances.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I have studied French. English poetry, the works of Robert Burns. Anthropology—that is people’s customs, you know. And biology.”

“Biology?”

“Helps one to run the home better. So you know how to take care of the children’s health. And of course, Frances, we have women who work. There is the staff at the ladies’ banks. And at some of the Ministries, they have women. They arrange it for them. They have a separate lift, and a floor by themselves.”

“But they must need to talk to the men sometimes. Consult them.”

“They can phone them up. And they have computers. They can send them a disk.”

“But what would happen … I mean, what would be so awful … if they did meet up?” “Why, it would be like the West,” Samira said. “There would be harassment. People would be all the time having love affair.”

How difficult it is, Frances thought, to fit it all together. Shabana told her that Adam and Eve were reconciled to God. The Arab News, which writes on these matters every Friday, says there is no original sin. People are naturally good, and they have free will, and Allah does not ask very much of them, certainly nothing unreasonable. The rules take account of human weaknesses; they are easy to keep. But the penal code does not reflect this optimism. Nor does the general tenor of society. It seems to expect depravity, the unreflective behavior of animals; man and woman together, five minutes, clothes off, carnal knowledge; rape, mayhem, murder. Oh come, she says to herself: don’t exaggerate. Drink your coffee. Be a good hostess and keep the conversation light. And she notices how Samira’s careful orthodoxy cracks sometimes, as if by nature she were a wishful, rebellious girl; as if, by deduction, she had discoered there was something wrong in her life. Now she put down her coffee cup. “Did you ever have an affair at your office?”

“Certainly not,” Frances said. “It never crossed my mind.” She thought, no one ever asked me.

Samira looked skeptical, and perhaps disappointed. “Also,” she went on, “we need women to work as doctors. Many girls are attracted to this, thank God. Because some Saudi men would kill any male doctor who looked at their wife.”