It seems that there are three cities: the fossil city, the epic city, the trivial city. Once Jeddah encompassed more than a square mile, enclosed within its coral walls; coral walls are gray and gritty, not what they sound. In the souk there are leaning buildings with latticed balconies, the wood rotting, the wood crumbling away: as even the glories of Islam may crumble into dust. This is the fossil city, dim, precarious, the lattices concealing other times, and dim, shadowy lives; you cannot escape the prison insignificance of your own nature.
The epic city throws overpasses into the sky and nets the desert with freeways. It grinds out statistics: biggest fountain in the world, second biggest fountain in the world, a mile of plate glass, a universe of marble. There are 10,000 post-office boxes, and 80,000 electric lampposts, and 2,664 hospital beds; there are 136,000 telephones. The weight of the city’s daily garbage is 1,510 tons. There are eight million cultivated saplings, and all eight million are dying from their roots.
The trivial city runs between the giant roads and beneath bridges; black children kicking a football, a cart laden with watermelons, a shabby tree leaning over a wall. From the overpass near Sharia Siteen you can see this trivial city; as you roar above, imperiled and fast behind your windscreen, the alleys run far below, little one-story buildings set at angles, humble mosques, decrepit air-conditioners leaning from walls, tiny windows open a crack to the odorous air; sagging balconies with ragged washing, the blink of truck lights, the slow progress of a water- seller’s donkey between the shacks. There are figures in these streets, human figures, but they are not those seen elsewhere in the city. Distant, wide-shouldered, tapering toward the feet, they have the quality of those figures that architects use in their drawings; they are ghost people, functions of scale. Far below you, the men seem to wear robes and turbans, and the black-veiled women seem to glide, singly and in pairs; no sound reaches you from their deep-below world.
But if you reach the end of the overpass, and turn back on yourself, this eerie scene is in fact the trivial city; the smell of stale cooking, vehicles nose-to-tail, and clever tunes played on car horns.
“Best price,” says the man in the carpet souk. “I am giving you your first carpet very cheap, so that you will always buy from me.”
How many does he think we want? He looks homespun, shuffling in his slippers between the bales, but he was trading in Frankfurt last week, and the week before in New York, so he knows what the best price is. The shop is half dark, and smells of must, and wool. On the shelves, battered coffeepots jostle in sharp-snouted ranks, each one awaiting its buyer. On a display stand hang the beaded face masks of forgotten women, their former owners emancipated, or deceased.
Carla held one up. “Pretty,” she said.
Frances said, “I’d rather buy a ball and chain.”
With a shrug, Carla put the mask down again.
It was the evening souk trip. Everybody does them. They had been planning it, the Shores and the Zussmans. The carpets are stacked around them, waist high; Rickie heaves over their corners, to show a little of the pattern of each. “See that orange bit,” he says, pointing. “That’s aniline dye. That shows it’s modern.” He flaps the stack down again. That is what Rickie knows about carpets; that is what everyone knows.
You hold something up, perhaps a silver box, perhaps a woven mat; the vendor names some exorbitant price. You smile in polite embarrassment. He says, “What price you like?” Of course, this is a meaningless question. The only price you like is no price at all. But now it’s no good putting it down again, no good acting diminished interest; in the vendor’s mind, the only reason you do not buy is that the price has not been agreed. It’s no good saying you asked out of curiosity. It’s no use saying you’ve gone off it, or it’s too big, or it’s a nice design but the color is all wrong. He will shame you into buying it, by insistently lowering his price. The only way to leave without it is to stop talking, turn your back, walk out of the shop; and even then he will follow you into the street, lowering his prices for the passersby to hear.
And then the smell clings to your hair and clothes, that smell of lamp oil, of mothballs, of the pilfered assets of the dead.
“Well, I guess it is a nice carpet,” Rickie said. He was trying to keep his spirits up. He unrolled it again, on Dunroamin’s beige floor; it looked coarse now, and the dull color of venous blood.
Lamplight: a bottle of the new batch of wine. Carla settled comfortably with a glass, her legs curled beneath her and her feet hidden in the folds of her kaftan. “By the way, Frances,” she said, “I hear the Jane Fonda workout’s not the thing to do.”
“No?”
“No. Puts your back out.”
Rickie, squatting on the floor, toyed disconsolately with the rug’s tatty fringe. Then he looked up, remembering something, animated. “Hey, you guys, I saw this survey. I forgot to tell you.”
Nothing pleased Rickie like a survey. “It was,” he said, “about national attitudes to getting rich.”
“Oh yes?” Andrew poured himself another glass, and stretched out his legs.
“You know, British people are nothing like as interested in getting rich as the Americans or the Japanese.”
“They did a survey to establish that?” Frances said. “I could have told them.”
“What about your friend Pollard?” Carla asked. “I bet there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for a dollar.”
“There’s nothing he hasn’t done, for a riyal,” Andrew said. “Perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule?”
“That’s it, you see.” Rickie stabbed his forefinger at them. “That’s your typical British attitude. Forty-nine percent of Brits surveyed believe that if you had zero to start with, but had gotten rich, then you must have something to hide.”
“In Pollard’s case, one hundred percent of Brits believe it.”
“And also,” Rickie said, “twenty-six percent of Brits believe the rich exploit others, whereas in the U.S.A. thirty-nine percent believe the rich help others by creating jobs and prosperity.”
“It’s amazing,” Frances said, “how you keep all these statistics in your head.”
“Everybody’s good for something,” Carla said. “Rickie pretends to be some kind of idiot savant. He pretends it’s all effortless, but really when he gets one of these crappy surveys he sits up all night memorizing it, just so as he can astound people.”
