Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

There is an item from Abu Dhabi, about a Filipino maid who has been put in jail for setting fire to her employer’s house and then trying to commit suicide. She says her employer attacked her with a knife, but her employer says her wounds are self-inflicted. Authorities in Sri Lanka have announced that maids who are going to work in the Gulf must undertake a martial arts course before proceeding to the region.

There has been a small earthquake in the Yemen. Russel and some of the other geologists are flying down there to see if they can find out why. But religious leaders say it was caused by Sin.

Andrew had decided to worry about her. Perhaps that was his New Year’s resolution.

“You don’t get out much,” he said.

“No.”

“It’s not healthy.”

“What do you think I should do? Go jogging?”

“Maybe you could make some arrangement to share a car. Just once or twice a week. Carla goes to a yoga class. Couldn’t you do that?”

“Why?”

He couldn’t think why.

“Stop nannying me,” she said. “It’s bad enough with Mrs. Par sons.”

Mrs. Parsons was worried about her too; or so she said. “How do you feel now about getting a job?” she asked her, over the phone. “Do you want Eric to put out feelers?”

She found it hard to be polite to Daphne. Hard to talk to her at all. Since Christmas her facility in making small talk seemed to have slipped away.

“I’m concerned about the kind of life you’re leading,” Daphne said. “If Turadup had a house free, Eric would move you. Perhaps he could rent you a house from somebody else. Terrex Mining must have houses coming free, because they’re cutting back on their staff. They’re out of town, up north, you go on the freeway. Shall I ask Eric?”

“You could do.”

“Leave it with me,” Daphne said.

The words come grudgingly out of Frances; she drags them out. It is as if, she thought, I am learning a foreign language, speaking it every day, and forgetting my own. But she has not learned Arabic; not more than a few words. Yasmin continues to insist that it is too difficult, that there is no need. It is as if she wishes, herself, to be the interpreter of the world. Samira says, “Why do you need to learn Arabic? We are all speaking perfectly good English, aren’t we?”

Andrew took her to the bookshop at the Caravan Shopping Center. She bought a language tape, and a book to go with it, and during Jamadi al-awal she pored over this book, and set the careful slow voice of the language tutor echoing through Dunroamin. “Good morning. Good morning, how are you? Well, praise be to God. Welcome! Will you drink coffee? How are your children? How is your wife?” A footnote points out that customs vary widely within the Arab world; in some areas it would be considered insulting to ask after someone’s wife. “Families,” says the book, “are safer, but not entirely without danger.”

The hero of her language book is a businessman, Mr. Smith. Occasionally, in later lessons, he will express concern for the welfare of his wife and children, who are back in the U.S.A. But mostly he leads a free, gay kind of life; the Arabic speakers he meets take a keen interest in all his doings. He goes to the souk to buy a carved chest; he travels a lot; he gets into endless wrangles about small change. It is a man’s book; not for her. She would not need half these phrases. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red. We sit in our garden. The weather is fine.”

Each guttural phrase, spoken aloud, was broken down for her on the page; but she didn’t seem to make progress. Carla lent her another book. “This is of cultural interest,” Carla said. Its title: Courtesies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. It is full of utterances, for greeting and parting; ceremonial utterances, from a gentle, ordered world.

Wednesday morning: she was returning from Marion’s house. Marion seemed distracted these days; she was always smiling, at some privately gratifying thought. Frances had no idea what it might be. She wanted to take her by the arm, to shake her; to say to her, a man with a rifle is hanging about on Ghazzah Street.

A young man in a sports car slowed up beside her, and crawled along the curb, his head stuck out of the window and the late January wind plucking at the ends of his checked ghutra. “You are my baby,” he called. “You are my darling.” She supposed it was courtesy: of a kind.

As she let herself into Dunroamin she heard the noon prayer call. The varnishing had begun, and the smell crept under the doors and into the hall. The tiling was half finished now; the malign pattern was growing.

In the hall, she heard a door open, up above. Not Samira’s. She ran up to the bend in the stairs. Now the door slammed shut. Bare feet slapped on marble. Samira’s maid had come out of the empty flat, and vanished, with a swirl of skirts, into her own.

So what now?

“I suppose Abdul Nasr has keys,” Andrew said. “She must go in to—change the sheets, or something. Do the dusting. Even if you only use a place to go to bed in, it still gets dusty, doesn’t it?”

“Then Samira knows,” Frances said.

“Obviously.”

“I thought Abdul Nasr was meant to be very religious. Superpuritanical.”

“That’s what I was told. But you can’t believe what you’re told, can you?”

“Would you risk a maid knowing?”

“It’s not much of a risk. You said yourself that they never let the girl out. You said she doesn’t know Arabic, and that she speaks some peculiar dialect that no one understands.”