Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Online Free Page B

vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes—and it will come—all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.
    The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in color and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the seafront, and crown the
intersections of the endless, straight, eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt air and smog.
    On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water jugs, seahorses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange, and cerise.
    If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and faraway, like the mutinous cries of the damned. “The people in hell remain alive,” says a Muslim commentator. “They think, remember, and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh.” And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servant’s eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TVs. A skin diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.
    Back on the road the teenaged children of the Arab families catcall and cruise, wrecking their Ferraris. Hot-rodding, the newspapers call it; the penalty is flogging. A single seabird hovers, etched sharp and white against the sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of
female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.
     
     
    Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are