Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Jamadi al-awal

Anyone for Jeddah gin?

Take four large potatoes, four oranges, four lemons, four grapefruit. Cut them up into small pieces. Put the pieces in a plastic jerrican. Add five kilos of sugar. Top up with water. Dissolve a tablespoonful of yeast; tip it in. Forget it for two weeks.

Then pour the stuff out of the jerrican into saucepans. Leave it till the sediment settles: two days. Pour it into bottles—use a tea strainer, because there will still be large bits of brownish fruit bobbing on the surface.

Tonic? Ice and lemon?

Frances Shore’s Diary: 1 Jamadi al-awal

I really don’t know how I went on before I had the Saudi Gazette and the Arab News to tell me how to run my married life. For a start I haven’t been treating Andrew right when he gets home from work. When he says, “What sort of day have you had, petal?” I say, “Rotten. I have a headache, and the pipes have burst”—or something to that effect. This is not the right way to do it, because according to the Arab News, “When he enters his home it is his right to find complete relaxation to regain his great powers and abilities in order to face the next day.” If there are any problems I’m supposed to have dealt with them myself, so that I can “greet him with a beautiful smile”—and if the problems have been beyond my wits or capacity (and many problems must be beyond the capacity of the Saudi housewife) then I must wait for a suitable time, before raising them in the most tactful way. “It’s not reasonable, for example, to bring them up while eating. This might ruin the man’s appetite and lead to an exchange of words between the two partners that could disturb the calm in their lives.”

Samira asks me probing questions about my past life. I don’t know why I won’t oblige her with tales of drunken parties and sexual perversion. Surely that’s what she wants to hear. Or does she really care for me? In that case I could put her mind at rest, and tell her I was married a virgin. She would clasp my hands, and smile into my face, and her bracelets would jangle. The Arab News says, “Love after marriage is the true, the long-lasting fond. Love before marriage is naïve, weak, and baseless.”

Since New Year there have not been many parties. All the people who saw too much of each other over the holiday are now staying at home, by unspoken agreement—as if they had called a truce. Andrew and I are alone most evenings, and meanwhile Yasmin’s mother is still in residence across the hall, and the junketings get more strenuous week by week, and Yasmin gets more weak and tearful. In the mornings, if she can, she comes here for a cup of coffee, and for five minutes’ refuge—and I commiserate with her. She does not mention our meeting on the roof. She says, And where have you and Andrew been? And I say, Oh, nowhere really.

I wish this man Fairfax would come. I’d like to spend an hour with someone from the real world.

Andrew and I talk a lot about our leave, about what we are going to do in the summer. July seems a long way off. I realize that we live in the future. That seems no healthier than living in the past.

Andrew’s paycheck hasn’t come yet. It’s not just Turadup. Other people are in the same position, all over town. Until now everyone was paid on time, by the Arabic calendar. So the men would look at the full moon, and say, in their romantic fashion, “Ah, halfway to pay day.” But they don’t say that anymore.

We talk: about the building. Even when funds start to flow again, Andrew will have to cut corners, which is foreign to his nature. What can I say to him? There are other things I would like to talk about. How long are we going to stay here, and what kind of person will I have become before we leave? I might have become a Muslim. Or I might have joined one of those feminist groups which believes men should be kept in cages and periodically milked for their semen, so that it can be used for artificial insemination—there being no other use for them, and no other need, and they being the source of all misery and wars.

But when Andrew asked me if I wanted to go, I couldn’t say yes. I know he would leave tomorrow, if he thought I was seriously unhappy. I’m not unhappy, not really. I just want to talk about the things that really bother me, but when I try to do that I get some sort of block, some sort of impediment in my throat. I think I am afraid that Andrew will laugh at me.

The Saudi Gazette says: “Love may be a most important basis for marriage only in novels and poetry. In practical life, however, it does not provide a firm foundation for a happy married life. This is due to the fact that people change with the passage of time. It is well known in all societies that the overwhelming majority of marriage cases based on love do not last long.”

If we did leave here, where would we go? We don’t belong anywhere, physically. If we didn’t have each other we wouldn’t belong anywhere emotionally. We sit in the evenings, looking at each other, and I feel that he wants something that I can’t give him, and that I want something that he can’t give me. A familiar problem in marriage, I suppose. I feel weak with need for him, mental need, physical need. Isn’t it strange that no matter how many times you sleep together, you don’t get any closer? I feel that perhaps by nature we are lonely people. Then I think, perhaps everyone is like this, and their need to be together is only just a bit stronger than their need to be apart. I agree that love doesn’t guarantee anything. But with the odds stacked up as they are, love certainly doesn’t do any harm.

One thing is clear, anyway. I cannot bring up the matter of the rifleman while Andrew is having his grilled sirloin and green salad. That would not be the time to do it. I cannot find a time to do it that would not upset our long-lasting fond.

January weather: overcast, windy, cool. A stack of concrete slabs has been moved on to the vacant lot, and some builders’ vehicles; the Yemeni workmen have knocked together little shacks, which will keep the sun off them, when the sun comes back. But today the sky hangs low over Ghazzah Street, and the crane that bisects the view from the window seems very close to the ground. Every speck of gray dust is visible on the leaves of Dunroamin’s single tree. Soon the King, the court, and the Muslim scholars will hold rain-prayers; but as they wish to reinforce faith, not to injure it, they will not ask for rain until the weather forecasters promise that it is in the offing. Meanwhile Dunroamin is quiet: the pipes gurgle, there is a crackle of voices from a radio, but there are no footsteps up above. Even the rats seem to have gone back into their holes. The branches of the tree toss soundlessly. A car engine splutters, out of sight. Inside the flat a dim silence reigns; but the doors rattle in the draft.

At a quarter to nine there was a battering at the door. It was the landlord, greasy and rotund as ever. Behind him stood a wan and gangling figure, unkempt, straggle-haired, knock-knees bare under a tunic and dhoti.

The landlord smiled at Frances. “Madam,” he said, “we are going to paint you. All buildings in Jeddah must be brilliant white. By Order. All unsightly wooden structures must be demolished.”

The bare-legged man rested his gaze on the lintel. He didn’t acknowledge Frances, didn’t seem to notice her presence at all. He looked, with his sepulchral features and his wrappings, like the subject of some dull religious painting, who is rising from the dead; and whose thoughts, understandably, are elsewhere.

“We haven’t got any unsightly wooden structures,” Frances said. She felt unfriendly; blocked the doorway with her body.

The landlord stabbed his finger in the direction of the vacant lot. “Uncomformable to regulations,” he said. “All these must go. Otherwise you will get the hajjis living in them. The pilgrims, if you understand me, madam. They come for their pilgrimages and try to stay. They will set up anywhere.”

“Really, will they?”

“These Third World persons are disease-bearing,” the landlord said. “Have you not had the hajji flu, madam?”

“We weren’t here at the pilgrimage season.”

“They have plagues,” the landlord said. “Still, it is unlucky for them. Madam—” he paused, and smiled his bristling smile, seeming to remember why he had come; he pointed to the gangling man, drawing attention to him, as if he were an object in a picture book. “Madam, this is an Egyptian. I want you to know this man.”

“Is he your foreman?”

“Boss-man, yes. I’m telling you so he don’t alarm you, going up and down, up and down the stairs.”

“He don’t alarm me,” Frances said. She felt an urge to stretch out her hand and give the Egyptian a little push, to see if he would keel over. Still he stared ahead of him; a film of sweat glistened on his face. “Will he be going up and down for very many weeks?” she inquired.

“Finish next week,” the landlord said. “I promise you.”

“Ins’allah?” Frances said.

“Ins’allah.”

Later that day the men began work. They wedged open the gate in the wall, and carried vats of white paint to various points about Dunroamin. They took great brushes, and sloshed about, accidentally painting the ground, and sometimes their feet. They broke off for noon prayers, and then brought ladders, and came at the upper story; they splashed paint on to Samira’s balcony, and splattered the leaves of the tree.

Frances watched from her window. Once she went out into the street, and watched from across the road, by the ditch. The landlord, bustling in and out, darted a look of horror at her short skirt and bare legs. He hesitated, and seemed about to cross the road and remonstrate with her; but she folded her arms, and gave him a hard look, and went back inside in her own good time.

The men carried some wooden boxes up the stairs; then they carried some wooden boxes down. Tools of their trade, perhaps; no doubt it was all part of the renovation work, of what Yasmin called The Beautification of Jeddah.

Early in the afternoon the landlord knocked at the door again.

“Hello, madam. We are going to varnish your blinds with shiny varnish. So when we are up to that, you must wind them down. You must keep them down for three days, to let the varnish dry.”

“But I’ll be in the dark,” Frances complained. “I won’t be able to see out.”

“But it is for the good of my building!” the landlord said. He gave her what he took to be an appealing glance. “Please give me the cooperation.”

“Okay,” Frances said. “But I’m not putting them down until you’re ready to start work. So just give me the nod, will you?”

The landlord looked at her dubiously; uncertainly, he nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

Frances understood that she must carry messages. It was her job to warn the other women of Dunroamin to stay indoors, because there were strange men at large. The landlord did her the courtesy of telling her what was happening, so that the far more important privacy of Muslim ladies would not be violated.

She rang Yasmin’s doorbell. An eye appeared at the spyhole, and blinked, and vanished; it was Shams who opened the door. Yasmin emerged from one of the bedrooms; she looked cowed and miserable.

“Oh, Frances,” she said. “I am missing talking to you.” Frances touched her shoulder. It was the most she could manage. If you want my sympathy, she thought, you must tell me what really ails you. To comfort you would be to embrace a time bomb, and listen to the tick.

“We’re being Beautified,” she said.

“Are we?” Yasmin managed a smile. But when she heard the extent of the work, she looked horrified. “Selim,” she said, “his chest is so delicate. The fumes, and the dust, and the noise … oh dear.”

“There will be people going up and down stairs. For a week.” Frances paused. She hoped it was a meaningful pause. “You must take care.”

Yasmin nodded. Her eyes slid away. “We must all take care,” she said.

Next day Frances went up to see Samira. The workmen stared at her rudely as she stepped over their planks and scaffolding. They were doing their best, she thought, to make sure that she felt in their way; they were doing their best to make it clear that she shouldn’t be out. They were preparing to line the stairwell with patterned tiles; these, she supposed, must have been in the wooden boxes. The tiles were small, with a whirling pattern of black, white, and red. Samira had taken a peep outside her front door. She sighed. “I know what you will say, Frances. You will say, oh, Saudi taste!”

“Not at all,” Frances said politely. “Though it’s going to take them ages, and I think I preferred the plain white paint.”

When she came out of Samira’s apartment, the men had stopped work. They must have gone to eat; it was quiet again, and fine plaster dust hung in the air. Across the landing the Egyptian stood at the door of the empty flat, fist raised as if to tap on it. She hurried across to him and touched his elbow. He sprang away from the contact. “No one home,” she said. She smiled, and shook her head at him. “No one lives there.”

The man glared at her; he put his hand to the spot she had touched, and held it, as if her fingers had burned him. “No one home.” But still he glared.

Surely he understood a little English? Everyone did, especially Egyptians. She knew the Arabic for “a house.” But not for “an empty house.” Not for “an illicit love nest.” Not for “push off if you know what’s good for you.”

She cast a glance back at the closed door of Samira’s apartment. Samira wouldn’t come out to explain to him; and Sarsaparilla couldn’t explain. Anyway, he understood her. She felt sure of that. It was just that she had upset him in some way. The glare, now, was positively threatening. “Okay,” she said, in a pleasant firm tone. “You knock all you like, sunshine. And if the man comes out and twists your balls off, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She went downstairs. A few tiles had been stuck on near the front door, and others on the top landing. When they met in the middle, the effect would be hellish. I mustn’t come out here when I’ve been on the Jeddah gin, she thought. She stopped, in the dim light, to consider the pattern. Small faces: each tile with its splash of scarlet, its swirl of black. She felt as if she were being watched, by bloodied eyes; by the victims of some Koranic punishment. And soon the men would start work again and the watchers would multiply.

Frances Shore’s Diary: 13 Jamadi al-awal

Tarannum Siddiqi of Dhahran has written to the Saudi Gazette.

“I cannot imagine why some women are always moaning about male domination. Why can’t they accept that the male has been created superior to the female? God has meant it to be this way. It is also referred to in the Koran in Surah ‘Al-Nisa,’ verse 34: ‘Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other.’”

There is an item from Abu Dhabi, about a Filipino maid who has been put in jail for setting fire to her employer’s house and then trying to commit suicide. She says her employer attacked her with a knife, but her employer says her wounds are self-inflicted. Authorities in Sri Lanka have announced that maids who are going to work in the Gulf must undertake a martial arts course before proceeding to the region.

There has been a small earthquake in the Yemen. Russel and some of the other geologists are flying down there to see if they can find out why. But religious leaders say it was caused by Sin.

Andrew had decided to worry about her. Perhaps that was his New Year’s resolution.

“You don’t get out much,” he said.

“No.”

“It’s not healthy.”

“What do you think I should do? Go jogging?”

“Maybe you could make some arrangement to share a car. Just once or twice a week. Carla goes to a yoga class. Couldn’t you do that?”

“Why?”

He couldn’t think why.

“Stop nannying me,” she said. “It’s bad enough with Mrs. Par sons.”

Mrs. Parsons was worried about her too; or so she said. “How do you feel now about getting a job?” she asked her, over the phone. “Do you want Eric to put out feelers?”

She found it hard to be polite to Daphne. Hard to talk to her at all. Since Christmas her facility in making small talk seemed to have slipped away.

“I’m concerned about the kind of life you’re leading,” Daphne said. “If Turadup had a house free, Eric would move you. Perhaps he could rent you a house from somebody else. Terrex Mining must have houses coming free, because they’re cutting back on their staff. They’re out of town, up north, you go on the freeway. Shall I ask Eric?”

“You could do.”

“Leave it with me,” Daphne said.

The words come grudgingly out of Frances; she drags them out. It is as if, she thought, I am learning a foreign language, speaking it every day, and forgetting my own. But she has not learned Arabic; not more than a few words. Yasmin continues to insist that it is too difficult, that there is no need. It is as if she wishes, herself, to be the interpreter of the world. Samira says, “Why do you need to learn Arabic? We are all speaking perfectly good English, aren’t we?”

Andrew took her to the bookshop at the Caravan Shopping Center. She bought a language tape, and a book to go with it, and during Jamadi al-awal she pored over this book, and set the careful slow voice of the language tutor echoing through Dunroamin. “Good morning. Good morning, how are you? Well, praise be to God. Welcome! Will you drink coffee? How are your children? How is your wife?” A footnote points out that customs vary widely within the Arab world; in some areas it would be considered insulting to ask after someone’s wife. “Families,” says the book, “are safer, but not entirely without danger.”

The hero of her language book is a businessman, Mr. Smith. Occasionally, in later lessons, he will express concern for the welfare of his wife and children, who are back in the U.S.A. But mostly he leads a free, gay kind of life; the Arabic speakers he meets take a keen interest in all his doings. He goes to the souk to buy a carved chest; he travels a lot; he gets into endless wrangles about small change. It is a man’s book; not for her. She would not need half these phrases. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red. We sit in our garden. The weather is fine.”

Each guttural phrase, spoken aloud, was broken down for her on the page; but she didn’t seem to make progress. Carla lent her another book. “This is of cultural interest,” Carla said. Its title: Courtesies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. It is full of utterances, for greeting and parting; ceremonial utterances, from a gentle, ordered world.

Wednesday morning: she was returning from Marion’s house. Marion seemed distracted these days; she was always smiling, at some privately gratifying thought. Frances had no idea what it might be. She wanted to take her by the arm, to shake her; to say to her, a man with a rifle is hanging about on Ghazzah Street.

A young man in a sports car slowed up beside her, and crawled along the curb, his head stuck out of the window and the late January wind plucking at the ends of his checked ghutra. “You are my baby,” he called. “You are my darling.” She supposed it was courtesy: of a kind.

As she let herself into Dunroamin she heard the noon prayer call. The varnishing had begun, and the smell crept under the doors and into the hall. The tiling was half finished now; the malign pattern was growing.

In the hall, she heard a door open, up above. Not Samira’s. She ran up to the bend in the stairs. Now the door slammed shut. Bare feet slapped on marble. Samira’s maid had come out of the empty flat, and vanished, with a swirl of skirts, into her own.

So what now?

“I suppose Abdul Nasr has keys,” Andrew said. “She must go in to—change the sheets, or something. Do the dusting. Even if you only use a place to go to bed in, it still gets dusty, doesn’t it?”

“Then Samira knows,” Frances said.

“Obviously.”

“I thought Abdul Nasr was meant to be very religious. Superpuritanical.”

“That’s what I was told. But you can’t believe what you’re told, can you?”

“Would you risk a maid knowing?”

“It’s not much of a risk. You said yourself that they never let the girl out. You said she doesn’t know Arabic, and that she speaks some peculiar dialect that no one understands.”

“That’s true. They don’t think of Sarsaparilla as a person. She’s just labor.”

Andrew took her wrist. “Frances,” he said, “don’t get involved.”

Andrew was not in a good mood. The check had come through at last, but Eric didn’t know when he would be able to pay them again. Previously it had been such a consolation to unfile the bank statements, and see how the deposit account was building up. Andrew had been receiving brochures from a firm of London estate agents. They should buy a flat, he said, something to give them a base; something small, central, easy to let. “We ought to have somewhere, you know. At our age. We can’t keep drifting, can we, just crating things up and sending them from one country to the next, everything serviceable and disposable, no books, nothing of our own—living with other people’s furniture?”

“It’s not that bad, Andrew. We have our Saudiflon pans.”

“I’m going to organize it this summer,” he said. “If they pay me, of course.”

“When are you expecting this man Fairfax?”

“Oh, quite soon. Next month maybe.”

Frances, taking out the rubbish, met the landlord on the stairs.

“You said one week,” she accused him. “You’ve been here two already.”

The landlord seemed harassed. He didn’t have time to chat. “Please to stay indoors, out of noxious fumes,” he said crossly.

“When can I put my blinds up?”

“Wait a few days. If you put them up too early they will be stuck, and much good work will be undone.”

Frances said nothing. He made a little shooing motion at her. She leaned one hand against the wall, leisurely, insolent. He shrugged his shoulders and left by the front door. Frances looked after him. “Hate the tiles,” she said softly. “Saudi taste.”

Outside Yasmin’s door, propped against the wall, was a wooden crate, in sections; it was stamped with the logo of the Hejaz Removals and Storage Co. “Is this yours?” she asked Yasmin. “Or does it belong to the landlord?”

“Mine,” Yasmin said. “It is in your way?”

“No, not at all. I’m just being nosy. You’re not moving, are you?”

“No. It is just for some things of Raji’s.”

“Only I was sizing it up—when that crate’s assembled you won’t be able to get it through the internal doors.”

“Then he must pack it in the hall.”

“I just thought I’d warn you. How’s mother-in-law?”

Yasmin drew her inside, dropped her voice. She seemed, as she so often did, on the point of tears. “Her visit is so ill-timed,” she said.

“I suppose it is.”

“For Selim, I mean—this important stage in his development. Frances, have you asked your friends—are you sure there is not some drug I can give him to make him grow? It is not good for the child’s psychology—she is holding his nose now, forcing him with orange juice.”

“Can’t you talk to Raji? Can’t he do anything?”

“Oh, he thinks she is always in the right. He is interfering with how I run the household. That is not what a man should do. Frances,” Yasmin moved closer, and touched her arm confidingly, “we have had some dispute. Because I want to wear the veil. Completely, you understand, like the Saudi women do. Because I feel it is right. But Raji says, ‘We are modern.’ He has forbidden me. And I am so unhappy.”

Frances looked at her in disbelief. “Have I got this right? You want to wear the veil?”

“Many Moslem women are doing this. In Pakistan. In Iran, which you know of. In Egypt even. Once they thought it was a great thing to get rid of the veil, but now they are not so sure. They see how men exploit them. They want to have their dignity back.”

“I’m the wrong person to talk to,” Frances said.

“I know you are. But to whom else can I talk? You are my friend.”

“What about Samira?”

“Oh, Samira—she has no deep thoughts. Getting jewelery is what she thinks about. Showing off her clothes, going to weddings. You are not like that. You are more like me.”

She savored the compliment. It was difficult to meet her neighbor’s eyes. “Sometimes,” Yasmin said, “it is my dearest wish to go away from these flats. I wish I could rewrite the past, but you cannot do that, can you?”

All this in whispers; a dark corner of the hallway, heads close together. Mother-in-law’s voice rises from the bedroom, wheedling, insisting, threatening. “What is it that you would like to change?”

Yasmin lifted her head, and in her luminous eyes there was an animal pain. She seemed about to speak, and to say—but then her expression clouded, she bit her lip, looked away. “Perhaps it is you who should move away,” she said. “There is a herb, it is called mehti. If you want to go away from where you are living, if you want a new home, this is the herb you plant. Shall I put some in a pot, Frances, and give it to you?”

Six months on Ghazzah Street, and spring was coming: bigger cockroaches, the smell of sewage. Hot weather would bring the strategies, the longueurs, of expatriate life: driver’s hand jumping from hot metal, the drawn, shiny faces of the women, the apathy, the dust, the wilting of the intellect. All this is familiar; they have adapted without problems. But Andrew does not feel at ease. He feels that something more is required of them.

It seems that there are three cities: the fossil city, the epic city, the trivial city. Once Jeddah encompassed more than a square mile, enclosed within its coral walls; coral walls are gray and gritty, not what they sound. In the souk there are leaning buildings with latticed balconies, the wood rotting, the wood crumbling away: as even the glories of Islam may crumble into dust. This is the fossil city, dim, precarious, the lattices concealing other times, and dim, shadowy lives; you cannot escape the prison insignificance of your own nature.

The epic city throws overpasses into the sky and nets the desert with freeways. It grinds out statistics: biggest fountain in the world, second biggest fountain in the world, a mile of plate glass, a universe of marble. There are 10,000 post-office boxes, and 80,000 electric lampposts, and 2,664 hospital beds; there are 136,000 telephones. The weight of the city’s daily garbage is 1,510 tons. There are eight million cultivated saplings, and all eight million are dying from their roots.

The trivial city runs between the giant roads and beneath bridges; black children kicking a football, a cart laden with watermelons, a shabby tree leaning over a wall. From the overpass near Sharia Siteen you can see this trivial city; as you roar above, imperiled and fast behind your windscreen, the alleys run far below, little one-story buildings set at angles, humble mosques, decrepit air-conditioners leaning from walls, tiny windows open a crack to the odorous air; sagging balconies with ragged washing, the blink of truck lights, the slow progress of a water-seller’s donkey between the shacks. There are figures in these streets, human figures, but they are not those seen elsewhere in the city. Distant, wide-shouldered, tapering toward the feet, they have the quality of those figures that architects use in their drawings; they are ghost people, functions of scale. Far below you, the men seem to wear robes and turbans, and the black-veiled women seem to glide, singly and in pairs; no sound reaches you from their deep-below world.

But if you reach the end of the overpass, and turn back on yourself, this eerie scene is in fact the trivial city; the smell of stale cooking, vehicles nose-to-tail, and clever tunes played on car horns.

“Best price,” says the man in the carpet souk. “I am giving you your first carpet very cheap, so that you will always buy from me.”

How many does he think we want? He looks homespun, shuffling in his slippers between the bales, but he was trading in Frankfurt last week, and the week before in New York, so he knows what the best price is. The shop is half dark, and smells of must, and wool. On the shelves, battered coffeepots jostle in sharp-snouted ranks, each one awaiting its buyer. On a display stand hang the beaded face masks of forgotten women, their former owners emancipated, or deceased.

Carla held one up. “Pretty,” she said.

Frances said, “I’d rather buy a ball and chain.”

With a shrug, Carla put the mask down again.

It was the evening souk trip. Everybody does them. They had been planning it, the Shores and the Zussmans. The carpets are stacked around them, waist high; Rickie heaves over their corners, to show a little of the pattern of each. “See that orange bit,” he says, pointing. “That’s aniline dye. That shows it’s modern.” He flaps the stack down again. That is what Rickie knows about carpets; that is what everyone knows.

You hold something up, perhaps a silver box, perhaps a woven mat; the vendor names some exorbitant price. You smile in polite embarrassment. He says, “What price you like?” Of course, this is a meaningless question. The only price you like is no price at all. But now it’s no good putting it down again, no good acting diminished interest; in the vendor’s mind, the only reason you do not buy is that the price has not been agreed. It’s no good saying you asked out of curiosity. It’s no use saying you’ve gone off it, or it’s too big, or it’s a nice design but the color is all wrong. He will shame you into buying it, by insistently lowering his price. The only way to leave without it is to stop talking, turn your back, walk out of the shop; and even then he will follow you into the street, lowering his prices for the passersby to hear.

And then the smell clings to your hair and clothes, that smell of lamp oil, of mothballs, of the pilfered assets of the dead.

“Well, I guess it is a nice carpet,” Rickie said. He was trying to keep his spirits up. He unrolled it again, on Dunroamin’s beige floor; it looked coarse now, and the dull color of venous blood.

Lamplight: a bottle of the new batch of wine. Carla settled comfortably with a glass, her legs curled beneath her and her feet hidden in the folds of her kaftan. “By the way, Frances,” she said, “I hear the Jane Fonda workout’s not the thing to do.”

“No?”

“No. Puts your back out.”

Rickie, squatting on the floor, toyed disconsolately with the rug’s tatty fringe. Then he looked up, remembering something, animated. “Hey, you guys, I saw this survey. I forgot to tell you.”

Nothing pleased Rickie like a survey. “It was,” he said, “about national attitudes to getting rich.”

“Oh yes?” Andrew poured himself another glass, and stretched out his legs.

“You know, British people are nothing like as interested in getting rich as the Americans or the Japanese.”

“They did a survey to establish that?” Frances said. “I could have told them.”

“What about your friend Pollard?” Carla asked. “I bet there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for a dollar.”

“There’s nothing he hasn’t done, for a riyal,” Andrew said. “Perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule?”

“That’s it, you see.” Rickie stabbed his forefinger at them. “That’s your typical British attitude. Forty-nine percent of Brits surveyed believe that if you had zero to start with, but had gotten rich, then you must have something to hide.”

“In Pollard’s case, one hundred percent of Brits believe it.”

“And also,” Rickie said, “twenty-six percent of Brits believe the rich exploit others, whereas in the U.S.A. thirty-nine percent believe the rich help others by creating jobs and prosperity.”

“It’s amazing,” Frances said, “how you keep all these statistics in your head.”

“Everybody’s good for something,” Carla said. “Rickie pretends to be some kind of idiot savant. He pretends it’s all effortless, but really when he gets one of these crappy surveys he sits up all night memorizing it, just so as he can astound people.”

“It astounds me,” Frances said. “Well, come on, Rickie, if the British aren’t interested in getting rich, what are they interested in?”

“Oh, they say they’re interested in living quiet lives. Eight percent even say that they’re interested in working on behalf of society. It’s no wonder you people are in postimperial decline, with a set of attitudes like that.”

“You’ve changed a lot,” Frances said. “Since you were in Peace Corps.”

“Don’t remind him,” Carla said. “He hates to think of when he used to ride around Gaborone on a bicycle.”

“Come on then,” Andrew said. “Let’s have facts and figures, young man. Now what percentage of the Japanese—”

Frances’s thoughts had been drifting all evening. “Twelve percent of Japanese—” Rickie was saying; but she was back with Yasmin, the badly lit hallway, her downcast face, the secrets on the tip of her tongue. Samira had laughed at Yasmin for being so pious. Was she really? Was it repentance? Was it hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is a science, here. The pure youth and chaste married men go to Bangkok, and bring back foul diseases. The Princes excoriate America, and beg it for missiles. And so is it possible that this moral city is just a network of pretenses and counterpretenses? Is it possible that this holy city has the best liars in the world?

“Frances, are you listening?” Andrew said. “When the rich were surveyed, eighty-five percent of them thought they hadn’t taken any particular risk to get their money.”

“Not like us,” she said. “Andrew wants a flat in London, did he tell you? We have to stick it out here till we save up a healthy deposit.”

“The Brits think the rich are lazy,” Rickie said, “and they think that they’re ruthless and greedy. Sixty-two percent think that they are snobbish.”

“You have to admit,” Andrew said, “that unlimited cash doesn’t seem to be good for people. I mean, if you judge by this place.”

“So what do you want, more than you want to be rich?”

“Peace,” Andrew said.

“Freedom,” Frances said.

“Yeah,” Rickie said. “These are the abstractions the typical Brit goes for.”

“I’d settle for fifty percent peace,” Andrew said. “And say, seventy percent freedom.”

“Freedom’s indivisible,” Carla said. She leaned forward, holding out her glass for a refill. “At least, that’s what we were told in high school, but I’ve never known what it means.”

At one A.M. the Zussmans rolled up their carpet and departed. “I’m tired,” Andrew said. He cleaned his teeth, dropped his clothes on the floor, fell into bed and into sleep. Within the space of five minutes she seemed to find herself alone, passed from polite chatter to restless isolation; she was wide awake, thoughts chasing each other like snapping dogs. She washed the glasses, went into the bathroom, and took a vitamin C tablet, as a precaution against a hangover. I will let myself out and go up on to the roof, she said; because every time I go up on to the roof, life gets more exciting.

She slipped the bunch of keys into her pocket, closing the front door quietly behind her; even the pressure of her finger on the hall light switch was slow and easy, as if just a click could galvanize Dunroamin, make the hibernating monster mutter and stir.

The walls watched her, each separate tile with its own maleficent stare. She climbed the main stairs, climbed the half flight, and opened the door to the roof. The air was cool. She took a deep breath. The whole city seemed to lie below her, as if she had climbed much farther than she thought; blank roads like distant snakes, and a million tiny lights. Somewhere, above the hazy emanations of light from factories and apartment blocks, there must be the stars. Samira had shown her a book, some ancient desert poet: “The evening is a black bride, wearing silver necklaces.” But now what lights the night sky? An alien zodiac: SANYO SANYO SANYO. What sparkles over Arabia, silver and green, what leaches the darkness from the night? A sign blinks and flickers over the Mecca Road, above the route to the Holy Places, over the path to the Ka’aba: 7-UP 7-UP 7-UP.

Frances stood for a while; then turned and went back down the stairs, onto the top landing. The workmen had nearly finished; there were a few planks of wood about, and empty paint tins. She stopped between the two closed doors; then moved toward the door of the empty flat, and put her ear to it.

Someone was in there. She could hear them speak; she could hear their movements. But not Yasmin, because Yasmin was entertaining: a buffet for twenty-five. She would have no chance to get away. Shams would not be asleep yet; she would be scrubbing pots in the kitchen, waiting for her billet on the dining room floor. And mother-in-law, too, would not be asleep; she ranges through the world, seeking whom she may devour.

I am sorry for what I thought, she says to herself, making a mental apology to Yasmin; how could I think you would be so reckless? Someone is in there, but it is not you. But I must know. Who walks about in the dark?

She lifted her hand, as if to knock. Then let it fall by her side. Listened for a further moment, head inclined toward the door. Went downstairs. Let herself in, and shut and locked the door behind her. Double-locked the door, and slammed on the bolt. Once, she thought, this bunch of keys was a persecution, but now it is my friend. Her pulse, which had been racing, began to slow.