Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.

“It must be hot,” Andrew said, “under those veils.” He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing table. “Oh, there’s yogurt,” he said, “if you feel like yogurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.”

“Will you ring me?”

“No phone. Next week, ins’allah.” He paused in the doorway. “I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.”

“Yes.” She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.

It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbors came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.

She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak-laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.

2

When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a skeptical expression, and a capacity for sitting out any situation; this latter attribute had stood him in good stead in his professional life. In Africa it was always counterproductive to lose your temper. It made the local people laugh at you, and gave you high blood pressure. If you wanted to get anything done, the best way was to pretend that you were not interested in doing it at all; that you would, in fact, be happy to sit under this tree all day, and perhaps drink a can of beer. If you put pressure on people they cracked very quickly; then they pretended that what you were asking for was impossible, and that anyway there was no petrol, and that the laborers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.

When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, “We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.” When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold-and-onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.

“This is Mr. Shore,” Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. “I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.”

The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.

Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, traveled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near- painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy Minister was talking on the telephone again.

“Is that it?” Andrew said, in the corridor. Parsons did not reply; but persisted, to Andrew’s annoyance, with his pseudomysterious smile. He was a company man, he knew the system and he played it; you would not find him muttering under his breath, or making V-signs outside closed office doors. They walked downstairs and out into the sun.

They were in the car park, and it seemed that the Deputy Minister had made it before them; he must have come down in his private lift. As he strode across to his Daimler, his white thobe flapping about his legs, and his white ghutra fanning out around his head, a dozen people appeared as if from nowhere and mobbed him. They were identically dressed, except that some wore white headcloths, and others wore the red-and-white ghutra of tea-towel check. A stiff breeze got up, blowing in from the sea, and billowed out the men’s thobes. With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.

Andrew stopped to watch. “What’s happening?”

“They’re just saying hello,” Parsons said. “After all, he doesn’t get to the Ministry very often, he’s too busy for that.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Running his businesses.”

“It’s not a full-time pursuit then, being a Minister?”

“Oh my goodness, no. After all, he’s not one of the royal family, you know. Why should he neglect his own business to run theirs?”