Those were the days.
That evening Andrew drove her downtown. Her sense of unreality was intensified by the slow-moving traffic, bumper to bumper, by the blaring of horns in the semi-darkness; by the prayer call, broadcast through megaphones to the hot still air. Neon signs rotated and flashed against the sunset; on Medina Road the skyscrapers were hung with coloured lights, trembling against the encroaching night.
They executed a U-turn, inched through the traffic, and swerved into a great sweep of white buildings. They edged forward, jostling for a parking space; with no anger in his face, but with a kind of violent intent, Andrew put his fist on his horn. Cadillacs disgorged men in their thobes and ghutras and hand-made Italian sandals; women, veiled in black from head to foot, flitted between the cars.
Andrew took her hand briefly and squeezed it, standing close to her, as if shielding her with his solid body from view. I mustnt hold your hand, he said, we mustnt touch in public. It causes offence. They moved apart, and into the crowds.
Inside the supermarket, on the wall where the wire trolleys were parked, there was a notice which said
THIS SHOP CLOSES FOR PRAYER. BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PROMULGATION OF VIRTUE, AND THE ELIMINATION OF VICE.
The religious police, Andrew said. Vigilantes. Youll see them around. They carry sticks.
What do the secular police carry?
Guns.
Frances took a trolley. She manoeuvred it to a gigantic freezer cabinet. Pale chilled veal from France and black-frozen American steaks swept before her for fifty feet. Do we need any of this?
Not really. I brought you to show you that you can get everything. Come and look at the fruit.
There were things she had never seen before in her life; things grown for novelty, not for eating, bred for their jewellike colours. They dont have seasons, Andrew said. They fly this stuff in every morning. She bought mangoes. She put them in a plastic bag and handed them to a Filipino man who stood behind a scale. He weighed them, and twisted the bag closed and handed it back to her, but he did not look her in the face. Andrew took the trolley from her. Dont think about the prices, he advised. Or youd never eat.
In Botswana, in the last town where they had lived, the vegetable truck came twice a week. Carrots were a rarity, mushrooms were exotic. In the garden, baboons stripped the fig trees. Fallen oranges rolled through the grass; the gardener collected them up in baskets. There were tiny peaches, hard as wood, and the cloying scent of guavas in the crisp early mornings. Around her, women plucked tins from shelves; women trussed up in their modesty like funereal laundry, women with layers of thick black cloth where their faces should be. Only their hands reached out, sallow hands heavy with gold.
She caught up with Andrew, laying her hand on the handle of the trolley beside his, carefully not touching. Let me drive, he said.
I didnt know the veil was like this, she whispered. I thought you would see their eyes. How do they breathe? Dont they feel stifled? Can they see where theyre going?
Andrew said, These are the liberated ones. They get to go shopping.
They took their groceries to the car. Well eat soon, Andrew said. They wove themselves into the crowds; each brilliant window collected its admirers. The buildings here looked new, perhaps a month old, perhaps a week; perhaps they had sprung from the desert that morning, gleaming and stainless, and some old-style genie, almost redundant now, had caused to appear in them by an instants magic all the luxury goods of the Western world. Cameras, television sets, Swiss watches, so crammed that they seemed to spill out on to the pavement; ancient silk carpets, and microwave ovens, and electric guitars. There was a furrier: fox, wild mink, sable. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. The smell of fried chicken mingled with the scent of Chanel and Armani. Between the Porsches, a fountain played in a marble basin. She stopped before a shoe shop; a window of tiny high-heeled sandals, green, lilac, red, gold. Why these? she said. Westerners have more sober shoes.
I suppose that if you have to go out draped in black to your ankles, you want some way to express yourself.
She followed Andrew. Cant they buy furs when they go abroad? They cant need them in this climate.
Money is a burden all the year round.
They bought cassette tapes; cheap copies, pirated in Asia and imported by the shopful. All the latest stuff was on the shelves; rock music, and Vivaldis Greatest Hits. She didnt buy the Vivaldi. She planned to fill the flat with noise. I am thirty years old, she thought, and I still buy this, whatever is current, whatever is loud. When they came out of the tape shop it was time for night prayers, and men were unrolling prayer carpets on the ground.
There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his Prophet, Andrew muttered. Grilles clashed down over the shop windows, doors were barred. In a space by the fountain which now, unaccountably, had run dry the worshippers jostled together in lines behind the imam, and then in time fell to their knees, and touched their foreheads to the ground, elevating their backsides. It was just as she had seen it in pictures; she was always surprised if anything was the same.
They stood watching, in the heat. Andrew looked as if he wished to speak; but perhaps he had no right to an opinion? She glanced at him sideways. Oh go on, she muttered. Spit it out. I know you hate religion.
Oh, they must do as they like, he said. Its not my business, is it? Its just the ablutions I mind. They have to wash before they pray, all sorts of inconvenient bits of themselves. When you go into the lavatories at the Ministry all the floor is flooded, and people are standing on one leg with their other foot in the handbasin. You cantyou want to laugh. He took out his handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and mopped his brow. We timed this trip badly. But people are always getting caught like this. Theres only a couple of hours between sunset and night prayers.
And then, she thought, eight hours till dawn. Her feet ached, still swollen perhaps from the flight. When prayers were over they went into a fast-food shop. Small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers behind the counter, and stacked trays, and busily cleaned the tables. There was an all-male party of young Filipinos in one corner; and Saudi youths sprawled across the plastic benches, nourishing their puppy-fat and their incipient facial hair.
A sign said FAMILY ROOM, and an arrow pointed to a corner of the cafe marked off by a wooden lattice screen. Andrew steered her behind it. There were three tables, empty. They ate pizza and drank milk-shakes. Conversation between them died; but for a moment, over the comforting junk-food, she did feel real again, and uncalculating, whole, as though she were a child. But it is not really myself, she thought, as she pushed an olive around her plate, it is just an image I have been sold, in a film somewhere. A wide-eyed child of America; the innocent abroad.
The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. At this hour, Andrew said, Saudi men go out to visit their friends.
They drive like maniacs, she said.
The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. At this hour, Andrew said, Saudi men go out to visit their friends.
They drive like maniacs, she said.
Just think if they had alcohol. His face was grim and set. He was almost used to it now, the six near-misses a day.
Each highway was straight; the same neon signs flashing between the streetlamps, Nissan, Sanyo, Mitsubishi. On the central reservation saplings wilted in the exhaust fumes. I dont know where we are, she said.
It takes weeks to learn your way around. It comes in time. They turned off the main road. Now they were close to home, driving between apartment blocks. Subdued lights burned behind closed curtains. At just one first-floor window, at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street, the curtains were drawn back; on a balcony, brilliantly lit from the room behind, a small dark man in a singlet stooped over an ironing-board. Andrew slowed at the intersection; Frances looked up. The man swept a garment from the ironing-board, and held it aloft; it was a thobe, narrow, shirt-like, startling white against the shadows of the walls and the night sky. She imagined she could see the laundrymans face, creased with the weariness of long standing; as they turned the corner he laid the garment down again, and began to arrange its limbs.
They were back at Ghazzah Street. She got out of the car. The laundryman seemed to her as clear and sharp and meaningless as a figure in a dream; she knew she would never forget him. As the metal gate clanged shut, and Andrew turned to lock it, the dream closed in on her; they walked around the side of the building and he let them in through the kitchen door, into the dark cold silence of the apartment.
3
FRANCES SHORES DIARY: 14 Muharram
At last the doorway has been unblocked, and I feel that I am going to end this rather peculiar isolation in which I have been living. When I began this diary I described my first morning in the flat as if it were going to be exceptional. When Andrew locked me in, I thought, it doesnt matter, because I wont be going out today. As if not going out would be unusual. I didnt know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.
Andrew thinks that perhaps after all we should have gone to live on a compound, where, he says, it is all bustle and sociability, and the wives run in and out of each others houses the whole time. Im not sure if Id like that. I still think of myself as a working woman. Im not used to coffee mornings. I think of myself in my office at Local Government and Lands. I was run off my feet, or at least I like to think so. Being here is a sort of convalescence. Or some form of sheltered accommodation. You think that after a dose of the English summer, after the hassle of getting out here, you will need a recovery period. You need peace and quiet. Then suddenly, you dont need it any more. Oh, but you have got it. It is like being under house arrest. Or a banned person.
After Andrew had spoken to Turadup, and they had spoken to the landlord, he sent some men around to unblock the doorway. Andrew had to stay at home for the event. It seems that workmen dont like to enter a house where there is a woman alone. In theory this is to protect me, but really it is to protect them from any accusation I might choose to level against them. From what I have seen so far it seems to me that the sexes here live in a state of deep mutual suspicion.
I did not mind the terrible mess the workmen left behind, because I am so interested at the prospect of meeting my neighbours. On the ground floor there is a Pakistani couple. Andrew has met them briefly and says they are very pleasant. They have a small child, but he is vague about age and sex. The mans name is Ashref Aziz Al Rahman, he is known as Raji, and he works for the Minister in some personal capacity. Andrew, who has become cynical in quite a short space of time, says that this means he organizes the importation of the Ministers personal crates of Scotch.
Then there are two flats on the floor above. The one directly over our head is empty. In the other flat there is a young Saudi couple, also with a baby I think. The mans name is Abdul Nasr, and Andrew says he is on the Ministry payroll, though not often seen there, and no one is sure what he does, if indeed he does anything, and this state of affairs is quite usual. I notice that this diary is full of Andrew says but I have no other source of information yet. Every day he comes home with something else to tell me, usually something funny. Expatriates do have this habit of laughing at everything. I suppose it is the safest way of expressing dissent. Sometimes I think we should be more open-minded, and not think that we are the ones who are right, and that we should contrive to be more pious about other peoples cultures. But after all, as Andrew says, were not on Voluntary Service Overseas.
The company has given us a warning about our Arab neighbours. They say they are very religious, and like to keep to themselves, so we shouldnt make overtures to them, just be quiet neighbours and polite, and if we meet on the stairswhich Im sure we will now the doorway is unblockedwe shouldnt strike up a conversation, but wait until we are spoken to, and meanwhile just nod and smile, but of course, if I am on my own and I meet the husband, better not smile too much. Eric Parsons came round one morning just to tell me this. I said, I know how to go on, in Africa I met the Queen. This is true, but the remark didnt go down well.
Jeff Pollard has been round as well. He came to show us how to make wine. We are going to begin on our social life, it seems, dinner parties and barbecues, and you must be able to give people something to drink. It is true that brewing liquor is illegal, but there seems to be a concept of some things being more illegal than others. So although its very foolish to try to import proper stuff, you can make it in your home for your own consumption secure in the knowledge that the Saudi police do not enter private homes on a whim. Theyll come if you attract attention to yourself by, for instance, having a violent death on the premises but if you manage to avoid that youll probably get away with it.
Everybody knows it goes on. The shops sell grape juice, white and red, by the case. You pick up your sugar and your yeast and your plastic jerry cans and off you go, some kind friend like Pollard comes round to instruct you, you brew the stuff up in your bathroom, say, or wherever you have room, and just watch it for a day or two to make sure the yeast hasnt died, and then four or five weeks later you draw off some of the results and see if its fit to drink. There are some people who go into it very seriously, of course, and strain it and clarify it and bottle it and declare vintages, and compete with each other in undercover competitions, but most people are content with something clean and drinkable, with no offensively large bits floating around in it.
You can brew beer, too, from the cans of non-alcoholic malt drinks that you find in the supermarkets. A few years ago these were banned for a time, because the religious authorities were afraid that the smell and taste of them might make the faithful imagine that they were the real thingand that would be a sin. Theres also a spirit called siddiqui which you can get expensively on the black market. Its just sugar and water distilled but when people try to make their own they usually blow their apartments up. And if you want it, and know who to ask, and are prepared to pay about ten times the UK price, you can always lay your hands on whisky or gin.