Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Online Free Page A

will. Jeff Pollard. At least he’d be a familiar face. “I’ve got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.”
    “You can’t take a taxi. They won’t carry you.”
    She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi drivers won’t let in their cabs. “What, really not?”
    “It’s bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can jail you for it.”
    “But he’s a taxi driver,” she said. “That’s his job, picking up strange people.”
    “But you’re a woman,” the steward said. “You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re not a person anymore.” Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: “Would you like champagne?”
     
     
    Soon, the crackle from the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Those seated on the left-hand side of the aircraft will see below you the lights of Jeddah … Kindly fasten … kindly extinguish … (And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow fires that seem to ring cities at night.) We hope you have enjoyed … we hope to have the pleasure … we hope … we hope … and please to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary …
     
     
    Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.

Muharram
    1
    Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the King’s New Palace, and in the district of Al Aziziyya. It is a small street, which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue, and a narrow street, made narrower by the big American cars, some of them falling to pieces, which its residents leave parked outside their apartment blocks. On one side is a stretch of waste ground, full of potholes; water collects in them when, three or four times a year, rain falls on the city. The residents complain about the mosquitoes which breed in the standing pools, but none of them can remember whether there was ever a building on the waste ground; no one has been in the area for more than a couple of years. Many of the tenants of Ghazzah Street still keep some of their possessions in cardboard boxes, or in shipper’s crates bearing the names of the removal and transport companies of the subcontinent and the Near East. They are from Pakistan or Egypt, salesmen and clerical workers, or engaged in a mysterious line of work called Import-Export; or they are Palestinians perhaps, or they are picking up a family business that has been bombed out of Beirut.
    The district is not opulent, not sleazy either. The small apartment blocks, two and three storys high, are walled off from the
street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home. Women and babies are bundled from curb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbors know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.
    At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every