Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Online Free PDF

just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.”
    “What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?”
    “No. Twit.”
    “I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.”
    “They don’t pray all day,” Andrew said, “just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and at night.” He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself “It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.”
    “This doorway, Andrew …”
    “Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbors, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?”
    “I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?”
    “No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.”
    “How eminently sensible.” She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet. Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.
    “It must be hot,” Andrew said, “under those veils.” He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing table. “Oh, there’s yogurt,” he said, “if you feel like yogurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.”
    “Will you ring me?”
    “No phone. Next week, ins’allah. ” He paused in the doorway. “I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.”
    “Yes.” She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.
    It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbors came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.
    She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak-laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.
    2
    When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a skeptical expression, and a