Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

hair. “I know he has asked her many times to move to a nice villa in Al Hamra, that is more suitable for their station in life. But she would not. She has always said, No, I want to stay in these apartments.”

There was a time, Frances thought, when I didn’t want to move. I would like to move, now. But the herb, mehti, has shriveled in its pot. Andrew says she has overwatered it.

“Frances,” Shabana said, “would you go out, please, and see if my driver is at the gate? That man has the bad habit of going shopping. And it is not the right thing to hang about on the street.”

She went out on to Ghazzah Street; the driver was waiting, his eyes closed, his window down, his radio playing. She returned, took Shabana through the hall, and let her out. “I don’t care for these tiles at all,” Shabana said. “Saudi taste. Like eyes watching you. Thank you for the coffee.”

Each morning now the dawn prayer call wakes her from a doze. The morning sounds of the city—the early traffic, the first planes into the airport—remind her of a giant vacuum cleaner suddenly switched on. The weather is warming up, and the days seem long if you go without a siesta. But if she sleeps in the afternoon, she wakes up in the twilight with a start, her mouth full of saliva and a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

By nine in the evening she is wretchedly tired. She goes to bed, but can’t sleep. Her body feels cramped, her hair irritates the skin of her neck, the pillow seems to have been filled with marbles. She dozes, dreams, wakes again, listening to the night sounds of the apartment, and perhaps for something more. “If you think there is some crisis with them, if you hear quarrels …” After the dawn prayer call, she falls into a heavy sleep. Andrew gets up at six. He takes a shower, brings her coffee. It goes cold by her bedside. They hardly speak; she mutters something, incoherent fragments from a dream. He tiptoes out. Sometimes, absentmindedly, he locks her into the apartment, as he did in the early days. It is as if she does not exist anymore as definitely, as firmly as she used to. And it is true that she is going thin.

It is about nine o’clock when she surfaces. In a hot climate, this is late; the morning is half over. She feels guilty. People confuse early rising with moral worth; she is someone in whom this confusion is marked. She goes into the bathroom, and standing on the threshold, inspects the floor for cockroaches; then she inspects her own swollen face.

She feels shaky; each day a degree worse. She takes herself into the kitchen, washes Andrew’s breakfast dishes, picks at something from the fridge—fruit, or a carton of yogurt. She has no way of knowing what has happened in the three hours between six and nine, while she lay in that oblivious state, that trancelike, paralyzing sleep. Anything might have happened, in other apartments, other rooms; but she has abdicated control. She feels that she once had a grip on the situation, but that now she has lost it.

On almost the last day of the month, Frances went to see the doctor. For the occasion, she borrowed Hasan and his car. She wondered at getting them so easily, for Daphne could seldom be parted from her transport. But when Hasan arrived, he put her in the picture. “Garage this afternoon, Mrs. Andrew.” He made alarming signs to indicate a fault in the steering; then added, as if it were a technical term, “Is fucked-up.”

“Oh, Hasan, what have you done to it?” He was on his third clutch, Andrew had told her; there were dents in the sides, and hardly a week went by without a smashed indicator light and a fresh scrape. But if the office car died, would Eric find funds for another? “Can it be fixed?” she asked him. “I mean, is this car finished?”

Hasan regarded her irritably. He spoke the lingua franca of drivers, mechanics, and maintenance men, left over from when Europeans did these jobs. “Not finished, I told you. This car is just fucked-up, madam—not totally buggered.”

The doctor was an Englishman; he had a modern clinic near the Pepsi-Cola factory.

“We haven’t met, Mrs. Shore,” he said, rising from behind his desk and offering his hand.

“I’ve never been ill.”

The doctor had American colleagues; he had picked up their turn of phrase. “How may I help you?” he said.

“My period is late.”

“How late?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah, you don’t keep a diary.”

“Well, I do, but not that sort.”

“Anything else? A little nausea in the mornings?”

“Yes. As you mention it.”

He wanted details. Her gynecological history. “We’ll do a little test,” he promised.

“But I don’t think I can be pregnant,” she said. “I’m losing weight.”

“Mrs. Shore,” he asked her, “are you under some sort of strain?”

Hasan dropped her off at the gate. It had been a futile excursion. The pregnancy test would prove negative, and the doctor would call her in, puzzle over her, order blood tests; in the end, no doubt, he would offer her a little bottle of tranquilizing pills. What is wrong with you, Mrs. Shore? Doctor, I have a neurotic imagination.

Someone was in the hall, moving ahead of her—a veiled figure, going upstairs. I no longer believe in the veiled lady, she thought; I know she is a fiction, a lie. Has Samira a visitor? The figure moves, not at a visitor’s pace, but headlong: not furtive, decisive; and the momentary glimpse she caught seemed to contradict some observation that she had once made. She heard the weighty, the unapologetic tread. She turned out the hall light.

It was true what the doctor said; she needed a holiday. She needed a little trip, an excursion, and she would take it now; from the circumspect habits of a lifetime. She waited. She stood in shadow by her front door, the picture of patience; she stood listening to her own shallow breathing, her face tilted upward to the stairwell.

Ten minutes passed. She heard the click of a front door: Flat 4. With the same hasty but deliberate tread, the figure came back down the stairs. Frances stepped forward, out of the shadow of the gleaming tiles with their multiple insect eyes. She blocked the foot of the stairs.

The visitor stopped dead. An outline of features beneath black cloth, no surprise discernible, no fear, no challenge, no expression at all. The visitor was tall; a strapping lass. Frances raised her hand. The visitor pulled back, but she had made contact. She tugged at the concealing abaya, felt it part, felt something cold, metallic, under her hand. She reached up, with her other hand, and clawed at the veil. But a veil is not something you can pull off. You can dream