“With your own eyes,” Frances said. “You saw it with your own eyes. Some people’s eyes are better than others, aren’t they? They have higher status. They believe what they see.”
She leaned against their car, under the scrutiny of the armed guard, and she felt the slow heat move in the metal at her back, like a sulky fire. I shall never see Yasmin again, she thought. The woman’s end was part of the woman’s world; information was received at second hand, by courtesy, through the mouth of one of the city’s male keepers. “Did you know her?” she said. “I mean, did you recognize her?”
“Yes. They pulled off her veil.”
“And then what happened?”
“They took her away.”
“I wish I had been there.” Frances raised a hand and pushed her hair from her forehead. “I wish I had come with you to the airport. Then I would have seen it myself.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
Andrew said softly, “You have no choice.”
“What will happen to her?”
“God knows,” Eric said. “Shouldn’t think we ever will. People disappear in this place, don’t they? I expect they’ll want to keep her until they find out the ramifications of it. I shouldn’t think her government will raise a fuss, if the Saudis tell them that she was mixed up in a plot to kill her husband.” He said, musingly, “Daphne always said that they didn’t get on. Seems a bit extreme, wouldn’t you say? Most of Jeddah would be dead, wouldn’t it, if we all went in for violence against our spouse?”
“I don’t think you quite understand,” Frances said. “It wasn’t personal. Or not only a personal thing. It was a matter of ideals.”
“I don’t see that.”
“He wasn’t just a man, he wasn’t just her husband. It was what he represented.”
Eric said, mystified, not hostile, “Was it some feminist thing?”
“You might say that.”
“Or was it religious?”
“Partly.” She shifted away from the car and straightened up. She took a cotton scarf out of her pocket and slowly shook it out. “My hair is full of dust, I should have done this before.” She folded the scarf into a triangle and flipped it over her head, knotting it firmly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes appeared larger, her features drawn. “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps she just wanted to kill someone. Perhaps she just wanted to see them bleed.”
Eric looked down at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I have to concede it’s quite possible that there have been certain comings and goings at your place. But if the police should come bothering you, of course you know nothing.”
“Yes, I’ve grasped the point. I know the drill.” She thought, if I had been there, if I had gone to the airport with Eric, there would have been nothing I could have done for her. I could not have helped her. Now I have to think of my own life. What she had heard from Eric did not surprise her. The possibilities in the air of Dunroamin—those wraiths of violence and despair—had taken on flesh at last. She would never know more than she knew now; would never know, for instance, the name of the man who had been crated up alive. What had he done? What had he known? Someone—a torturer, perhaps—would find out the whole of it. But what’s one body, more or less? Life is cheap enough. Islam hurries to inter the dead; but the story is not over. Allah has something reserved for corpses, whose nervous system, we must presume, remains intact; predicated on one’s misdeeds in life, it is known to the writers of the religious columns as “torment in the grave.”
Eric said, “I think we’d better have you out of those flats today. It could be unpleasant. Go home and pack. You can stay with us tonight.”
Andrew took her arm, and led her to their car. Her face stung, her lips were raw; the sky had darkened over the huts behind them. Eric glanced up, apprehensive. “Let’s try to make it home before the rain,” he said.
But within minutes, the storm broke. The sky split open, and sickly lightning glimmered over the high-rise blocks; before they were uptown, the streets were a foot deep in water. Andrew drove. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “If we have to stop we’re finished, we’ll never get started again.” The landscape emptied of moving life; cars, abandoned, were slewed across their path. The wind tore up saplings and the urban currents carried them along, as if they were making for the sea; the wind lifted the workmen’s shelters from the building sites, and bore them away and smashed them to matchsticks against the habitations of the living. On Tahlia Street a billboard bearing the King’s portrait had its center punched out by the violence of the gale, leaving only the royal headcloth and a fringe of beard to oversee the flooded highway. At the airport the lights went out. Planes overshot the runways.
They didn’t leave Dunroamin that day. The roads were impassable; the city was not built for floods. They slept; falling on to their bed together, not touching, dropping through layers of fatigue into a willed annihilation; when they woke, groping in darkness, hungry, disorientated, the storm was over. Their throats ached; the air inside the flat was clammy and chilled.
“I want to phone Shabana,” she said. “But I don’t know her number. My address book is missing.”
“The burglars,” Andrew suggested.
“Probably.” They spoke grudgingly; simple words, simple thoughts. She did not know Shabana’s full name. Her husband (she thought of everyone now in the past tense) had been called Mohammad. In a Muslim country, you cannot trace one unknown Mohammad. And besides, Jeddah has no telephone directory.
She telephoned Samira’s flat, but there was no reply: number unobtainable.
The next morning the police came. She stood with her door open and watched them. If they had wanted secrecy, they should have come in the night. They ignored her. Perhaps they did not even notice that she was there; perhaps their religion had trained them so well.
They carried boxes down the stairs; they were the boxes that, some weeks before, the painters had carried up. But some evidence of the “beautification” remained; the tiles looked down from the walls, each with its hostile eye and single scarlet tear.
