Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

‘It’s in the safe at the office. Turadup keep it. I’ve got this identity document, it’s called an iqama.’ He produced it from his pocket and tossed it to her. ‘I have to carry my driving licence too. If the police stop you and you haven’t got your documents they take you off to gaol till it’s sorted out. They’re very keen on establishing who people are, you see, because of illegal immigrants. People come in at the end of the summer to do their pilgrimage to Mecca and then they try to get a job. I think there’s some kind of black market in servants. They try to make a few bucks and get back to Kerala or wherever before the police catch up with them.’

‘I can’t think that the police would mistake you for somebody’s illegal houseboy.’

‘Well, what are you saying? That they should only stop people with certain colours of skin?’

‘That would be the practical recommendation.’

‘Oh, there’s no colour prejudice in Saudi Arabia. At least, that’s the theory. Somebody told me that when marriage settlements are negotiated the girl’s skin is a major consideration. If the bloke’s never seen her without her veil, I suppose he has to weigh up her brothers’ pigmentation and take it on trust…What were we talking about?’

‘Your passport. Can’t you bring it home? You never know…suppose something went wrong and we had to leave suddenly?’

‘Having a passport wouldn’t be any use. You can’t go out of the country just like that. You have to apply for an exit visa. You need signatures. An official stamp.’ Andrew pushed his iqama back into his pocket. He didn’t mean to be parted from it. ‘If you want to leave you need permission from your sponsor. My sponsor’s His Royal Highness the Minister. Your sponsor is me. If you wanted to go to another city even, I’d have to give you a letter.’

‘Would you? And that would be true if I were a Saudi woman?’

‘Oh yes. You can’t just move around as you like.’

‘It reminds me of something,’ she said. ‘The pass laws.’

‘It’s not that bad. A lot of countries have these rules. It’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives subject to a different set. This isn’t a free society. They haven’t had any practice at being free.’

‘Freedom isn’t a thing that needs practice,’ she said. ‘If you have it, you know how to use it.’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ He sounded very tired. ‘We’re not quarrelling, are we? I can’t do anything about the system, we’ll have to make the best of it, and most of it needn’t bother us and is no concern of ours.’ They sat in silence for a moment. ‘The first thing is to find out,’ he said at last, ‘how to make daily life tolerable for you. I shall go and see Pollard and insist that he gets on to the telephone company. And we’ll have to have that doorway unblocked, so you can talk to the neighbours.’

‘Do we need to have those blinds down?’

‘We do at night. They’re a security precaution. Against burglars.’

‘I didn’t think there’d be burglars. I thought they cut people’s hands off.’

‘They do. You get reports of it in the papers.’

‘And isn’t it a sufficient deterrent?’

‘It can’t be, can it? I have noticed that the papers don’t carry reports of crimes, just reports of punishments. But if there are punishments, there must be crimes.’

He had been upset by something today, she saw, made angry, or very surprised. ‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ she said. Because all I can do is be a good practical housewife, and offer a housewife’s cliches. The fact is that he has come here and he knew it wouldn’t be easy, he said that; and now he thinks that he has contracted for his problems, and deserves what he gets, and that he shouldn’t be shocked, or baffled, or put into a rage.

‘The truth is that you can’t know if there are burglaries or not,’ Andrew said. ‘Except you hear that there are. You hear rumours.’ He looked up. ‘Everything is rumours. You can’t ever, ever, find out what’s going on in this bloody place.’

She got up. He followed her out to the kitchen. ‘Frances,’ he said, ‘you must give it a chance. You’ll make friends. People will start to call on you…people’s wives. If there is anywhere you want to go I’ll always take you.’ She took a packet of milk out of the fridge. She waited. ‘There’s this man at the office,’ he said, ‘a kind of clerk, his name’s Hasan. I thought he was mainly there for making the tea, and driving Daphne about, but it turns out that his speciality is bribing people. No wonder you can never find him when you want somebody to put the kettle on, he’s out slipping baksheesh to some prince’s factotum. He only bribes the lower officials, though, not the high-ups.’

‘Who bribes the high-ups?’

‘I don’t know yet. Eric, maybe? They paid to get you your visa, and they paid to get me my driving licence, and you just go on paying out at every turn, you have to bribe people’s clerks to get them even to pick up the telephone and speak to you. But it’s a funny thing, because officially there is no bribery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that again is a damn funny thing, because bribery in Saudi Arabia is a very serious crime, and people are charged with it and put in gaol and deported for it. Though of course it never happens, because it just doesn’t exist.’

She took cups out of the cupboard. She was locating everything; this was home. ‘Well, what did you expect?’

‘I didn’t know it would be quite like this. I didn’t know there would be so many layers to the situation.’ He paused. ‘Do you think I’m naive?’

‘You are, a bit, if you need to ask the question. I expect you’ll get used to it.’

‘You’d think it would be a sort of abstract problem,’ Andrew said, ‘a matter of conscience. But then about once a day I realize what’s happening in some particular situation, and I realize what I’ve let myself in for…’ He put a hand to his ribs. ‘It’s like being kicked.’

Turadup, William and Schaper first came to Saudi Arabia in late 1974, a few months before King Faisal was shot by his nephew, when oil revenues were riding high, property prices in Riyadh had doubled in a month, and so urgent was the need to build that the Jeddah sky was black with helicopters ferrying bags of cement from the ships that packed the harbour. Since then they had expanded to Kuwait and the Emirates, been chucked out of Iran when the Shah fell, and accommodated themselves to Saudi labour law and the rise of Islamic architecture. They had a contract for a shopping mall in Riyadh, several schools in the Eastern Province, a military hospital, warehousing in Yanbu; there was the military project they did not talk about much, and there was the marble and gold-leaf ministerial HQ…Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.

Throughout the seventies, Schaper flew in and out, disbursing great wads of used notes. His briefcase became a legend, for what came out of it. Conscious of his role, he took to clenching Havanas between his rubbery lips, and to wearing eccentric hats, as if he were a Texan. ‘Buccaneering’ was a word he liked to hear applied to himself.

Turadup flew in teams of construction workers from Britain, and housed them in temporary camps outside the cities, giving them a makeshift supermarket selling fizzy drinks, a mess serving American frozen beefburgers, a lecture on sunstroke, an anti-tetanus shot, a dartboard, and three leave tickets a year to see the families they had left behind. The physical stress was crushing, their hours were ruinous, their pay packets enormous. Off-duty hours they spent lying on their beds, watching mosquitoes circling the cubicle rooms; unused to letter-writing, they became like long-term prisoners, subject to paranoia; to fears that were sometimes not paranoid, but perfectly well-grounded, that their wives were preparing to leave them for other men. When letters reached them they were full of news about burst pipes and minor car accidents, and vandalism on the housing estates where they lived; and seemed to conceal much else, lying between the blue-biro lines on the Basildon Bond Airmail.

They began to occupy themselves in brewing up liquor. They wandered off towards the desert looking for a bit of privacy, and caused search-parties. Their skins, after every precaution, turned scarlet and blistered in the sun. Strange rashes and chest complaints broke out. When they were released for leave they sat at the back of the plane and got sodden drunk within an hour of take-off; they squirted each other with duty-free Nina Ricci, and laid hands on the stewardesses, and threw their dinners about, and vomited on the saris of dignified Indian ladies who were seated on their path to the lavatories. At Heathrow they vanished, sucked into the rain, an allowed-for percentage never to be seen again; this was part of the company’s calculations, for they were cannon-fodder, quick and easy to recruit and cheap to replace. Cheap, that is, by the standards of what Turadup was making in those years; and cheap compared to what skilled men of other nationalities might have taken as their due.

Then again, a certain number would be deported for misbehaviour, for offending against the tenets of Islam; run out of the country, sometimes flogged beforehand and sometimes not, or beaten on the streets by the ‘religious police’ for lighting up a cigarette during the Ramadhan fast. They were all informed of the risks upon arrival, and Turadup took no responsibility in such cases; they were adults after all, and they knew the rules. There came a point when these men became more trouble than they were worth, and so now only a few foremen and site managers were British. The labour was recruited from Korea, yellow, tractable men, reeling through a desert landscape: indentured coolies, expecting nothing.

On the other hand, Turadup had always prided itself on how it had treated its professional staff. Plush if prefabricated villas were erected, with fitted carpets and icy air-conditioning, and instant gardens of potted shrubs. School fees would be paid for the older children left behind, and there would be Yemeni drivers to run the wives about, and a swimming-pool for each compound (carefully fenced from local eyes) and perhaps a squash court. And perhaps a weekly film show, as TV in the Kingdom is in its infancy, and mainly confined to Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Prayer Call from Mecca, and expositions of the Holy Koran; and certainly, soft furnishings coordinated in person, down to the last fringed lampshade, by Daphne Parsons herself. Turadup picked up the medical bills, and gave its professionals and their families a splendid yearly bonus and ten weeks off every summer; so that they would say, ‘We only have to last out till Ramadhan, and we don’t come back till after Haj.’ It was important that their lives should be made as smooth as possible, that they should not be ground down by the deprivations and the falsity of life in the Kingdom. They must be comforted and cossetted, because Turadup’s professionals were responsible, discreet men, who could Deal With The Saudis; and they do not come ten-a-penny.

But by the time the Shores arrived in Jeddah the great days of Turadup were over. They had sold off their big housing compound and let some of their staff go. The price of oil was falling and the construction boom was finished. It was true that buildings were still going up all over the city, but every stage of a project needed an infusion of money, and often it was delayed, or doubtful, or didn’t come at all. Eric Parsons got used to waiting on the Minister of Finance. He spent a lot of time in other people’s offices, sipping cardamom coffee, waiting for people to get around to him. He had a sense, at times, of things eluding his grasp; of the good years slipping away.

Daphne Parsons would tell you, if asked, that the Jeddah social scene was not what it had been. The Saudis, of course, had never really mixed with the expatriates. That was as it should be; it avoided mutual embarrassment, and the thorny question of illicit liquor. The odd groveller would ask a Saudi to dinner, a colleague or a boss; but the man would turn up two hours late and without his wife (one should have known) and a place-setting would hastily be removed, and a man you had thought was a liberal, a modern Saudi, would sit glowering at the tense, sober company, as if expecting something.

What was it he expected? Was it a drink? Normally there would be home-made wine on the table. Tonight you’ve left it out, in deference to Islam – and because of the risk if your Saudi friend should later turn against you. He may drop a hint that he would like a little something; you produce it, but you’re still afraid. Or he might not drop the hint, and let you suffer, on Perrier water, the drying up of the conversation and the covert glances at watches. And if you should so suffer, you will not know why; whether it is because he is really religious, or whether it is because he is as frightened as you; or whether it is simply that he has plenty of Glenfiddich at home.

Khawwadjihs, the Saudis call the white expatriates: light-haired ones. And nowadays the turnover in light-haired ones is so quick. Eighteen months is the average stay. There are people in Jeddah today, Mrs Parsons reflects, who didn’t even know the Arnotts, who weren’t here when Helen Smith died. People are scarcely around long enough to get involved in serious entertaining, or in the Hejaz Choral Society, or in running a Girl Guide troop. There are never enough helpers for the British Wives’ annual bazaar at the Embassy, and the British Community Library staggers on with too few volunteers for weekend evenings. There is almost no one around, nowadays, who remembers what it was like before the giant shopping malls were built, when people had to shop for groceries in the souk. And Mrs Parsons does not know anyone who attended that fabled party in 1951, when young Prince Mishari, eighteenth surviving son of the great King Abdul Aziz, turned up in a drunken rage, sprayed all the guests with bullets, and murdered the British Consul.

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 mustn’t hold your hand,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t 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. You’ll 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 don’t 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. ‘Don’t think about the prices,’ he advised. ‘Or you’d never eat.’