Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Jamadi al-thani

Frances Shore’s Diary: 4 Jamadi al-thani

I wish I could tear the roof off and let some light into the flat. I thought it would be better when the blinds went up again, but it doesn’t seem to have made much difference.

I have been reading in the New Scientist about a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is a more serious version of getting miserable during a long winter. It seems that human beings need sunlight, fluorescent tubes are not enough. Some people are more sensitive to the deprivation than others, and become severely depressed. Now that the cause of their disorder is known, they can be cured by getting up in the middle of the night, and sitting in front of special lamps, which have the properties of daylight.

There is a gland in the brain called the pineal gland, which is sensitive to light and dark. I wonder how sensitive it is? Sometimes it is called the Third Eye. A third eye is what I need, perhaps—one that would see more deeply than the other two.

One evening the wind changed. The moon hung huge and pallid in the sky, bisected by a lamppost; a fuzzy globe of electric light encircled it, like another satellite. Toward morning there was a little rain. When Frances got up, drew back the curtains, wound up the blinds, she saw the leaves of the tree washed clean, saw for the first time their true, green color.

Frances went up to the roof. It was nine A.M.; the heat was building up, and there was a shimmer in the air. Traffic moved in the distance; the highways were thin bleached lines, and beyond them was another line, another highway, which was the sea. You could sense it this morning, and those few drops of rain bred hope; flowers might bloom out of concrete, trees shoulder through the dereliction. She looked down into her neighbors’ courts and enclosures, at the broken line of roofs below her. Thirty feet down a striped cat lay, looking up; its eyes gazed into hers, offended. The cat should be above her, looking down; that was nature. Morning haze hung over the building sites, and gilded the scaffolding, like a veil over bones.

On the balcony of the empty flat there was a wooden crate. It was only by accident that she had spotted it; she had leaned over the branches of the parapet, to put her face into the tree, to catch the fugitive scent of leaves. She leaned farther, and there was the logo of the Hejaz Removals and Storage Company.

What she noticed, next, was the balcony floor, thinly veneered with mud. So when Sarsaparilla was cleaning, she didn’t get round to the balcony; cement dust and sand had lain there for months, blown in through the leaves of the tree, and had stood, and thickened, and now formed a wet sticky deposit on the tiles. The balcony was not visible from the street; you could only see it by leaning over, by twisting your neck at an angle. That crate, she thought, must be classed as an unsightly wooden structure; and under the landlord’s very nose. Even the most desperate hajji wouldn’t live in it, though it was just big enough for a man, if he didn’t mind doubling himself up, if he didn’t mind some pain.

“It is just for some things of Raji’s,” Yasmin had said. Someone has told me a lie, Frances thought. Or, what seems more likely now, someone has told me a series of lies.

Andrew came home. “There’s a crate on the roof,” she told him.

“What I mean is, there’s a crate on the balcony of the empty flat.”

“Oh yes?”

“I think I’ve seen it before, that crate.”

Andrew was not attending. He was pulling documents out of his briefcase. “Where’s my pocket calculator?” he said.

“Is there a panic?”

“Only the annual panic. Or so Eric calls it. The end of the financial year’s coming up.”

“Surely that was foreseeable.”

“Yes. Don’t make sarcastic remarks, please. We’re living on next year’s expectations. Turadup’s running out of everything. We’re running out of building materials. If something breaks down I can’t get it replaced. We’ve run out of photocopying paper, I’ll have to go out tonight and buy a ream. God damn it, we’ve even run out of lavatory paper. We don’t know what sort of money we’re going to get in the new budget. Eric’s gone to Riyadh. We might know something when he gets back.”

“What do you think this crate is?”

“Mm? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a chicken coop.”

Frances Shore’s Diary: 11 Jamadi al-thani

… well, I don’t know, but I don’t think it is a chicken coop.

I was talking to Marion today. She says that Russel has had a bit of a setback in the Yemen. It seems that the geologists had gone along in their helicopter to the earthquake zone, and were putting their measuring instruments into the cracks, when two National Guardsmen arrived, in a truck with a machine gun mounted on the back. Russel speaks some Arabic, but not enough to be persuasive, and although their papers were in order, and they had a permit from the government, that didn’t help, because the National Guardsmen couldn’t read. So they rounded up the whole party, and took them to the nearest jail.

I have to say that Marion doesn’t seem too bothered. She says, oh, the Ministry will sort it out, when the telephone lines to Sana’a are working. I expect he’ll be out in a day or two, she says. He’ll be in a filthy temper when he gets back.

I cannot imagine what a Yemeni jail might be like. But Marion seems to feel that Russel deserves all its amenities.

When Frances finished her diary, Andrew was still muttering and frowning over his papers. She got up, and wandered about the flat; she sorted some dirty clothes, and loaded the washing machine and thought, go up to the roof. She measured the detergent out and thought, go up to the roof. She turned the knobs to set the cycle and thought, go up to the roof.

“I’m off now,” Andrew called. “Do you want anything from the stationery shop?”

“Yes, I want another exercise book for my diary.” She slid down the hall, away from his voice, and locked herself in the bathroom. She didn’t want him to see her plans written on her face.

“I’ll have to be quick,” he said, from behind the closed door. “I might just make it before they close for evening prayers.”

She heard the front door slam. She emerged. She waited; and when she had given him time to drive away, she let herself out of the apartment and began to climb the stairs.

There was someone on the top landing. She ran; two steps at a time, grabbing for the handrail at the top and swinging herself round on to the landing to confront, head-on, Samira’s maid. Sarsaparilla held in her hands a small covered dish, and a piece of flat Arab bread. She stepped back. Her face was stricken, and her hands closed like claws; and again Frances caught that strange thin smell from her skin, and as she caught it her mouth dried, and she also stepped back a pace, as if the air between them had become infected by consternation.

Then suddenly, the maid smiled. It was a terrible parody of a smile, a rictus, in which she might have been rehearsed; she held out toward Frances the bowl, the piece of flat bread. “For you from Madam,” she said. Her first words: high-pitched, quavering. Frances took the bread, took the bowl. Her hands shook. Sarsaparilla made a little gesture, gracious and rueful, to indicate that she had just that moment been on her way down. She kept her shoulder turned to the door of the empty flat; she kept her eyes averted from it.

Holding the food, Frances turned away. She could not bear the sight of the girl’s panic. She went downstairs, much more slowly than she had come up. The maid remained, standing, looking after her. She will stay there for a decent length of time, Frances thought, and then she will go back into her own flat, and she will pretend that she has delivered the food, and whoever is in the empty flat will have to go without.

It was not that the food exchange had fallen into desuetude; but this little dish of lentils had not been meant as a gift. Neither had this piece of bread, which could be bought for a few hallalas on any street corner. She put the bowl down on the worktop in the kitchen, and thought, it is not just recently I have been told lies, I have been lied to all along, or rather I have been in error as to what I chose to believe. Is lentils the food of love? Will they wake, in their dangerous postcoital languor, these mystery lovers, this man with no face, this woman with no face, but whom I do not now think is Yasmin: will they wake up for a beggar’s banquet? No, because there are no lovers. Someone is in the flat, but it is not who we think. I have swallowed down the rumor. It is a rumor that was tailor-made. It was tailor-made for Westerners, with their prurient minds; it was a rumor that we cherished, because it said everything about the Kingdom that we wished to believe.

She went into the hall again, and looked up the stairs. It was sunset, and she could hear the prayer call, and she wondered, casually, if Andrew had got to the shops in time. She thought of him driving away, fifteen minutes ago, by the clock; as if it were half a lifetime away, and in another country. She felt sick with knowledge.

She had taken the torch from the side of their bed. In Africa they had kept a pickax handle by their bed. Some people had kept guns.

It was still light enough, when she got to the roof, to survey the vacant lot. Holes had been dug; a few upright posts had been placed in the ground. No doubt that was progress. Cement bags blew across her path, and battered at the parapet.

She positioned herself carefully at the angle of the roof from which, yesterday, she had looked on to the balcony of the empty flat. The crate was still there. It was light enough to see; but she shone the torch anyway.

“I know it has moved,” she said.

Andrew said, “It’s dark.”

“It’s dark now. An hour ago it wasn’t. And I know it has moved because the corner of the crate has scraped a track through the mud.”

“Well, you say it’s moved. You make it sound like a mystery. What you mean is, somebody’s moved it.”

“How? By thought control?”

“No, just in the ordinary way.”

“To move the crate you’d have to step out onto the balcony. If you stepped out onto the balcony you’d leave your footprints in the mud. There are no footprints.”

“So it can’t have moved.”

“Yes it can. If somebody is inside it.”

What am I saying? Again that inner protest, incredulity. The doorbell rings. They look at each other sharply. He does not offer. She does not want him to.

She opened the door herself It was Sarsaparilla. She held a tray, covered with kitchen paper. Again she said, “From Madam.”

“You’re practicing your English this evening,” Frances said. “Come in.”

She held the door open. The maid did not move. Frances pointed to a spot on the floor of the hall, where she wished her to stand; and she kept pointing, as you might command an animal, a dog you were training; and after a moment Sarsaparilla stepped inside.

“Why were you going into Flat 4?” Frances said. “Who’s in there?” The woman shook her head, lost; and again that smell seeped out of her, out of her pores, out of her guts. “Who are you feeding? Who are you hiding in there?”

The woman’s eyes were blank. She withdrew them from Frances, and looked at the walls.

“Please tell me,” Frances said. “If you can.”

But she had not understood. She had not understood anything. Only the parrot phrase: “From Madam.”

Frances took the tray from her. This, no doubt, was the evening’s real food exchange. Frances dropped her head. She felt ashamed of herself. “Okay,” she said. “Go.”

Sarsaparilla moved toward the door. Then she stopped, and looked back imploringly at Frances. She raised her arm, and pushed back a fold of her abaya, above her elbow. She showed Frances the inner side of her arm; tattooed there, in blue ink, was the name ELIZABETH.

Andrew said, “I have to work out how to pay our Indian laborers. I have to find the money from somewhere.” He was pacing the living room, and what he was worrying about didn’t concern her at all. “I can’t repatriate them,” he said, “then bring them back when the next year’s budget comes through. But if I keep them here I have to feed them. Eric doesn’t seem to see that. I have to whistle up some funds from somewhere.”

Frances said, “Come up to the roof with me.”

“No.”

“I want you to see.”

“I am not interested in any trouble.” He spoke in distinct, obstinate syllables. “I am not interested in any trouble with our neighbors.”

“There won’t be any. Just come with me.”

“You don’t seem to have grasped, do you, even the fundamentals about living in this place?”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No, I think you’re overwrought.”

“But can you explain what I’ve seen?”

His look said, what you have seen is not reliable. It doesn’t need explanation. It doesn’t merit it. “Perhaps,” he said, with a half smile, “the girlfriend has herself delivered. Perhaps it’s some perversion they enjoy.”

“The maid has a name,” she said. She told him.

For a second he looked interested. He said, suddenly illuminating, “That’s a mission name. It must be. Do you remember, before we were married I had that housegirl called Matweshyego? And I couldn’t get my tongue round it, so I just called her ‘you.’ And then when she was leaving, she suddenly upped and said, ‘I have a mission name, sir. It is Rosie.’”

The recollection seemed to give him pleasure. Is he just an idiot, Frances thought, is he just an unfeeling brute, or am I failing to make myself clear? Something is wrong. I cannot give you chapter and verse, but something is horribly wrong. Those days with the blinds down, the noise, the footsteps, and everyone free to come and go, except the women trapped in Dunroamin, with the doors locked, in the dark. But what she said was, “Yes, it must be a mission name.”

“Poor lass. It sounds as if she’s been colonized before.”

“Andrew,” she asked, “what does fear smell like? In my crime books it always says that fear has a smell.”

“People put a lot of stuff in books, don’t they?” He considered, and said, “Books are irresponsible. They give people ideas.”

The food that the maid had brought was a fish, baked whole. A crust of red spices lay on its hard blackish scales and spines, and it looked up at her with a small, dead, prehistoric eye.

Frances should go to Andrew and apologize. She should go to him and say, I should not entertain such ludicrous and fantastic thoughts. And then they can get on with their lives.

Next morning, early, she went up to the roof again. The crate had gone. The balcony had been swept clean.

“I see Ramadhan’s begun,” Andrew said.

“I thought it was two months away.”

“Yes, but you know how back in the UK people complain that Christmas is getting earlier and earlier each year? It’s just the same with Ramadhan. It’s a time for an increase in holiness, you see. So all the khawwadjihs with their evil ways have to be given a bad time.”

The religious police, in fact, are out in force. It is the time of year when the vigilantes take up young men in the shopping centers, and shear off their hair if they deem it too long. One year, women considered to be flaunting their jewelry were stopped in the street, and had it confiscated. Their husbands had to go to the police station to reclaim it—a process which possibly was not made pleasant for them.

Western women, too, must be more cautious than usual. The religious police have cans of spray paint, with which they spray revealing garments, or exposed flesh—forearms for instance.

“This nurse, from the Bugshan hospital,” Marion said, on the phone. “She was shopping at Sarawat. They sprayed her jeans with green paint.”

“I’d kill someone,” Frances said. She actually thinks it. If she were molested on the street, she would physically fight, she thinks, she could not contain her rage, she would spit and scratch and disable and mutilate, and be damned to the consequences, because if she did not the humiliation would kill her, it would eat away at her like a cancer until she died.

“Yes, she was furious,” Marion said. “Because these jeans, they were a new pair, first time on.”

Russel had got out of jail. “He’ll be home in a few days,” Marion said. “Do you know what he says?” Her voice had the accents of satiated malice. “He says that while he was locked up he lost half a stone. I said to him, well Russel, that won’t do you any harm.”

Daphne Parsons phoned. “Frances dear,” she said, “do be careful when you go out.”

I can no longer be careful, Frances thought. Therefore perhaps I had better not go out.

“The police are getting very strict about dress rules. There was a nurse, from the Baksh hospital, she was shopping at the Sahari Center. They sprayed her jeans with green paint.”

“I bet they were a new pair,” Frances said. “First time on.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Daphne said.

There are times when the effort of avoiding something is greater than the effort of doing it. There are times when omission becomes a tyranny of effort, when the task of diverting the mind becomes physically exhausting. Frances was involved, now, in not-thinking, in not-speculating, and the effort made her clench her jaw, made her shoulders stiffen, and made the muscles rigid at the back of her neck.

The crate couldn’t fly down from the balcony. They can’t have brought up a crane. It must be inside the flat. It can’t go through the internal doors. It can’t go through the front door. So it must be in the living room above her head. Unless it has been taken apart again. And if it has, where are its contents?

Don’t think like this. There is no reason to. Andrew says she has been obsessed with the empty flat ever since they moved in. It indicates some lack of balance in her nature.

Whenever she thinks about the crate, whenever she thinks about its contents, a single image comes to her mind: she remembers the laundryman, high on the balcony at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street; the night laundryman, holding up a thobe to the light, with its splayed white arms like a flattened corpse; and twisting it, and folding it, to be packed away.

In the toils of not-imagining, time drips by. It is like the early days on Ghazzah Street. But nevertheless time is passing. It is Tuesday, 21 Jamadi al-thani, 12 March in the real world: eleven o’clock in the morning. The doorbell rings. A little voice, pleasant but anxious, says: “Do please let me in, Mrs. Shore, before someone sees me.”

Her visitor was Shabana, Yasmin’s friend, whom she had met at Raji’s party. “You do remember me,” Shabana said. “I am so glad. I do hope I am not intruding on you.”

“I wasn’t doing anything. Coffee?”

“That would be nice.”

“A car came for Yasmin. I think she’s gone shopping.”

“Yes, I was hoping so. It is you I have come to see. And I would be so happy if you would not tell her I have been here.”

Frances went into the kitchen to make the coffee. Shabana did not follow her, as one of her own friends would have done; instead she took an armchair, and was sitting, her plump hands in her lap, when Frances returned. “I am worried about Yasmin,” she said at once. “She speaks of you as her friend, and that is why I thought we might talk.”

“I’m worried about her too.”

“I have known her for quite a while now. These days she seems, so … uncharacteristic … I don’t know.”

“She’s miserable. It’s her mother-in-law. She came weeks ago and she doesn’t show any signs of going.”

“This is part of it, no doubt.”

“She’s run off her feet.” Frances found herself indignant. It is a false indignation, her heart warned her, grafted on to graver circumstances more deserving of it; but it seemed real, it sounded real, it was partly real. “She’s exhausted from pandering to that old woman’s whims. She’s worried about Selim. The mother-in-law, she’s put it into her head that there’s something wrong with him.”

“Yes, but you must understand,” Shabana said delicately, “that we cannot interfere. This is the way things are. One day she will do it to her own daughter-in-law.”

Shabana spooned sugar into her coffee; she poured in cream. “When I was first a bride,” she said, “I cried every night for a month. Mohammad had been chosen for me, he was everything my family desired, but somehow, you know, I was romantic, and he is not a handsome man, he did not meet my expectations. My head was full of film stars, you see. I thought he should bring me flowers and perfume, and talk to me,” she gave a little laugh, “of love. When he did not, I thought he was a monster of cruelty and neglect. I complained to my mother about my unhappiness. But she said, When I was a bride, I cried every night for a year.”

That is an improving fable, Frances thought. “And are you happy now?”

“Oh, I have accommodated. Yasmin, I think, was always more down-to-earth.”

“I don’t think, though, that she is happy with Raji.”

“They seem at odds.” Shabana put down her cup, and sat twisting one of her heavy gold rings around her finger. “Has she told you why?”

“My neighbor, Samira, says she prays too much. But I can hardly think that is the reason.”

“Has she spoken to you about the veil?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.”

“The idea is repugnant to you.” Shabana sighed. “Yes, I am glad we are having this talk. I shouldn’t like you to make things worse for her, by lack of understanding.”

“You don’t think, do you,” Frances said, “you have never thought, have you … that Yasmin might be involved with another man?”

“God forbid!” Shabana said. “You have no evidence of that, surely?”

“No. Only that one day she seemed to be waiting for someone … I did think it at one time. But I had no evidence. And I don’t think it now. I imagine she was waiting for the person … for some other reason.”

“Her troubles are not of that nature, thank heaven.”

“Would it be the worst thing in the world?”

“You know the law here,” Shabana said drily. “Westerners are always very well informed about it.”

“Okay,” Frances said. “I’m sorry. It’s a red herring.”

Politely, Shabana raised her eyebrows. “A false clue,” Frances said. “I thought she had a guilty secret, and we usually think those are to do with sex. But there are other kinds.”

She leaned forward and refilled Shabana’s cup. The movement seemed dreamlike, endlessly repeatable. She had done it for Yasmin, for Samira; six months of it. Pouring coffee, she thought, and passing it through the bars of our respective cages.

“I am not sure she has guilt,” Shabana said. “It is rather the other way. You see, our religion is not a religion of excess, Mrs. Shore … may I call you Frances? It is a religion for practical men and women. Muhammad, after all, was a soldier and a ruler, as well as a man of God. But in some cases, let us say, in Raji’s case, one may become a little too practical. Raji is a businessman at heart. He flies here and he flies there. He spends time in London. He takes trips to New York. He prays and fasts, and Allah really hasn’t asked us to do any more—but when he is not in the Kingdom, who knows? He is a sociable fellow. And the Minister, his boss, he is just another of the same type.”

“I gather from what Andrew says that the Minister isn’t liked by everyone in the royal family.”

“That would be correct. He is a man who is fond of compromises. So is Raji, too. That is why Yasmin suspects he is not a very moral creature.”

Raji drinks and eyes up other women, Frances thought. Who am I to shop him to his wife’s friend? Shabana, quite possibly, is Yasmin’s spy.

The next moment she thought, that is ridiculous. I am far gone. I am paranoid. It has set in with me—Phase Three—just as the Indian psychiatrist said it would. She said, “When I came here I had some talks with Yasmin about Islam. She was quite relaxed about it. I thought she was a liberal. But she was only sugaring the pill for me. She is really a fundamentalist. Would that be the word?”

Shabana hesitated. She smoothed the black folds of her abaya, which she had laid over the arm of her chair. “We must be clear,” she said. “When we are talking about fundamentalism we are not talking about some sect within Islam, as you Christians, I know, have your different churches. It is true, of course, that there are differences between Muslims, throughout the world, but fundamentalism transcends these. You must think, Frances, what is the meaning of the word? We are thinking of what is basic, of what is the essence of Islam.”

“I understand what the word means.”

“Of course you do, I don’t mean to patronize you. But it is not a question of choosing between doctrines, or feeling that one should have less of something, or more of something … It is a matter of being true to the essence. Things like the veil are only a symbol.”

“A symbol can be a very powerful thing.”

“That is quite true. And I said that it was a symbol, I did not say that it was a side issue. To Westerners the veil seems ridiculous, but we cannot just fall in with your prejudices. It is simply not possible for us to look at the Western world, to look at other religions, and say, yes please, we will have this from you, we will have this, but we don’t want that. We cannot take your bits and pieces and fit them into Islam. You see, everything that you hold—what is it the Americans say?—that you hold self-evident … that democracy is good, that liberalism is good in itself … we have never taken these ideas as naturally true.”

“They’re not part of your mental furniture.”

“Yes, that is right. You grow up with them, we do not. That is why it is so very difficult for people like me, who were educated in the West, and for people like Raji, leading his kind of life. Even those things that you are quite sure are virtues—let us say, tolerance—they are not necessarily virtues for us.”

“I understand that. I’m never sure myself if tolerance is a good thing. There are some things that are intolerable.”

“You think, no doubt, that you have seen some of them in the Kingdom.”

“I’m not one of those people who think that when you go to a foreign country you must leave your judgment at home.”

“And you would impose your judgment on us?”

“Probably. If I could.”

Shabana smiled slightly. “It is people like you, Frances, who led the Crusades.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“And you and Yasmin have an instinctive sympathy, I suspect.”

“That’s why we’ve become friends.”

Watching her, Shabana played with her bracelets. She teased each one with her finger and thumb, pushing it a fraction of an inch along her arm, and letting it fall back, with a little clink of gold against gold. I hope, Frances thought, that the religious police don’t spot you on your way home.

“But I am getting diverted,” Shabana said. “Their marriage—Raji and Yasmin—was a very suitable one of course. He was a very good catch for her. But this is what may happen, in the very best arranged of marriages, that the two partners don’t have this sympathy … they may seem to agree on most things, but they don’t have just the same idea of how to manage life.”

“Andrew and I are like that.”

“You have found it?”

“Yes, we tackle things differently. He waits, and I act.”

“Then you may say he is at danger of being crushed by circumstances, but you, Frances, are at danger of collisions. If I may say … do be careful. This is not a good country for people who act.”

“Which sort of person are you?”

“Oh, I am your sort. That is why I came here today. I thought, Yasmin is my friend, she is unhappy, I will talk with her other friend, and maybe between us we will explain the situation.”

“And do you think that we have?”

“I think we may have explained one or two other things.”

“There isn’t much we can do to help.”

“I have thought of going to Raji, to ask him to accept that she may wear the veil, if that is what she feels she must do. But you see, Raji’s Minister is one of the modern faction. He is a man of progress.”

“It would be a political embarrassment for Raji.”

“Certainly. You see, this is not a good time for the Saudis. They are not so rich as they were, and this causes squabbling. Some of the senior princes are in poor health, this is no secret. People are wondering, which way is the country going to go? Yasmin is not alone in her opinions. I think she may despise her husband, because, you are aware, all the Westerners know Raji. He has done deals with them. He is a kind of symbol in himself.”

“You think he has a lot of enemies?”

“Oh yes. Yes indeed.” Shabana gathered up her abaya. “But now I must go. And I will give you my phone number. Then if you think that there is some crisis with them, if you hear quarrels, perhaps, then you may please telephone me.” She smiled brightly as she swathed herself in black. “And I will try to do the marriage guidance, before it is too late.”

Frances got up. “Here.” She proffered a pen. “Write it in my book.”

Shabana did so. “Do you know,” she said, “what will do her good? If she can move from here. Get away from these walls and doors, and being shut up with other women. Our own culture does not demand that. She is always with the Arab girl, I think she is a bad influence. You know what is the life of the Arab girl, Frances. Not like you or I.”

“She said she might like to move.”

“Did she? Well, that is an advance. Perhaps there is hope then.” Shabana arranged a flimsy token veil over her 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 of doing it, but you cannot just accomplish it, because the black cloth is wound around the head. The head strains back; and then she is pushed away with all the visitor’s ungirlish strength, sent flying against the wall. Her neck snaps backward, her head hits the tiles, two long strides and the visitor has crossed the hall, and while she is recovering herself is already out of the front door, and out of the gate, and onto Ghazzah Street.

Frances stood up shakily. Surprisingly, she felt no pain; no evidence of the encounter, except the chilly bar of flesh in the palm of her hand, where she had touched the metal of the gun’s barrel. She held her hand open for a moment, the fingers splayed to rid herself of the invisible stigmata. Cure this, doctor. Take my pain away.