Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Shaban

The new house is square and white. It has large rooms, full of sunlight, and plain stark white walls. When I came here the house had been empty for months, and on every surface clammy dirt lay thick.

We are outside the city now. Terrex has given us a house. This used to be a bustling compound, of a hundred units perhaps, but almost no one lives here anymore. The cutbacks and the sackings have made it a ghost town, and since the storm weeds have pushed up through the cracks in the tennis court. But there is still a guard on the main gate. There are spaces between the houses; each one has its dusty plot. I never see my neighbors. I must have neighbors. They must be around somewhere.

The floor of the house is made of grayish vinyl tiles, of the sort I imagine might be used in a sanitarium. The main room has what estate agents call a double aspect, and four large windows; I have no curtains yet. From these windows you can see the plain slab walls of the neighboring houses, their carports and empty rooms; and if you look above the line of their roofs and into the distance you can see the freeway, the Mecca-Medina road, with its overpass raised on concrete pillars, its regiment of sodium lamps arched like scimitars, and the silent toy cars creeping by to the city.

When we came here all the furniture was arranged around the outside of the room; as if some entertainment was to take place.

On the wall of the living room there are two geckos. They are yellow-green, translucent, like jewels crawling on the white paint. One is slick and lithe; the other has a plump body and stubby legs. I spend a lot of time watching them, but I seldom see them move. I might go into the kitchen though, and when I come back, moments later, one of them has turned upside down. Are they male or female, I wonder? Do they know of each other’s existence? Or does each of them think he is the only gecko in the world?

Every morning they are there: every evening.

Outside the main room of the house, there is a sort of patio, reached by sliding doors. I saw Andrew look at them with some suspicion, but it does not seem necessary to take any kind of security measure. We have put some folding chairs on the patio, and we could sit there, if the heat relented. Unobserved, quite private, we could sit and wait for the weeks to pass. Then it would be time to take our suitcases out. Then it would be time to ask for our exit visas. And then, if they are granted, it would be time to drive to the airport.

But all that seems very far ahead; the past seems very far behind. I have arranged the furniture; I have hung our clothes in the closets. I don’t seem to make much impact on the dirt, but perhaps I am using the wrong cleaning materials. Perhaps one evening we should go to a supermarket to get some more. Yet I feel reluctant to move off the compound. The hours go by here, each one the same. No one comes. The present moment draws itself out forever. The harsh light never changes, until suddenly night falls.

There is a cane chair out on the patio, and I wonder, if I brought it in and put it in a corner of the kitchen, would it make the room look better? I draw back the sliding doors and step out, into the heat and light of the morning. There are a few trees up here, sustained by hard salty borehole water; their branches, no thicker than twigs, are bent by the currents of air that blow straight from the desert. Squinting into the sun, I can see the black spine of a stony hill, topped by a string of barbed wire. The sky is clear. It must be over 100° today The glare bounces back at me from the walls of the carport. I seem to flicker, I am whited-out. I pick up the chair, bounce it gently on the concrete to shake out the dust. I turn with it, and catch my reflection in the glass doors. My face is black, deeply shadowed, with empty eyes, and a pale ragged aureole encircles my head. I have become the negative of myself.

I go back into the house and put down the chair. I look out through the glass, on to the landscape, the distant prospect of traveling cars. Window one, the freeway; window two, the freeway. I turn away, cross the room to find a different view. Window three, the freeway; window four, the freeway.