Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed—and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces, and souks; gray-faced, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and—with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils—confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-colored dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.
     
     
    Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air-conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamed she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.
    Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site. “Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,” he said. “I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.”
    “What time is it?” She shivered.
    “Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?”
    “No. Yes, a bit.”
    “There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.”
    So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of tabletop, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.
    “I may have been dreaming,” Andrew said, “but did you go on a predawn tour?”
    “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
    “The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there—you said you didn’t want him for a neighbor. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice; Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.”
    “Who owns these flats?”
    “I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.”
    “Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?”
    “The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.”
    “They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.”
    “Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.”
    “But here they care?”
    “They try to keep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,” he said, recollecting himself, “the money’s the thing.”
    Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. “One thing that seems rather odd … last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway,
but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?”
    “You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were