Read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street for Free Online Page B

but I was over it, still weak and full of aches and pains, and with no energy to do anything. The house was very quiet, because the maid was having her holidays and the dogs were asleep, and outside rain was falling steadily, that gray carpet of rain that used to come down sometimes for days on end. I remember that morning creeping by, in self-pity and looking at my watch every few minutes, and I couldn’t imagine how time could move so slowly. Our bedroom was in semidarkness, because I had wanted it that way when my head hurt so badly, and now although the pain had gone I didn’t have the strength or initiative to get out of bed
and let in what little light there was from outside. I felt utterly unreal on that day, and utterly alone, as if I were drifting on some tideless gray sea.
    Feeling this on my first morning in Jeddah, I blamed fatigue, and the upset of flying, and self-pity again, because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be here. But although flying does sap the energy it isn’t as bad as tick-bite fever, and besides, years have passed since then, and I have taken myself more in hand. So this time I did go and open the curtains.
    The curtains are the kind that look as if they are made out of knitted porridge. The carpet is beige and the wallpaper is beige and so is most of the furniture.
    When I drew back the curtains I couldn’t see out. There are blinds on the outside made of wooden slats, and hidden behind the curtains is a mechanism for raising them. In the living room the blinds were not down, and when I drew back the curtains I realized that this was the view I had treated myself to on what Andrew called my predaum tour. It was a wall.
    I felt that I was getting frustrated now—first blinds, then wall. I walked around the flat and looked out of each window in turn: bedroom one, wall; bedroom two, wall; bedroom three, wall. And into the kitchen, but the kitchen doesn’t have a window, though it does have the side door with a frosted glass panel. But that door was locked and I hadn’t found any keys. I went into the bathroom, which has a small frosted window which slides. So I slid it. And there was the wall.
    I suppose I hadn’t realized last night that it ran right round the apartment block. But I don’t think I’d expected a garden. There is one tree, the tree that I saw at dawn. It has a brown trunk and brown leaves.
    I am keeping this diary so that I can write letters home. People expect you to have something exciting to tell them, though the truth is that once you have been in a place for a few weeks it is not exciting, or if it is, then it is not exciting in a way that the people at home understand or care for. By and large people at home are
not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.
    When I was back in England waiting for my visa, I went over to Scarborough to see my cousin Clare. We used to get on pretty well before I went abroad. I took some photographs with me, of our house and garden in Botswana, which was probably a mistake and a boring thing to do, but it wasn’t a bad enough thing to account for those whiffs of hostility I kept getting from Clare. She said, I can’t think what induces you to live in such places, I never would. And then she said, I suppose Andrew can’t get a job at home? So I said, not at his new salary. I told her what it was, and that shut her up.
    It doesn’t matter, though, how uninterested people are, you still have to write them letters. And I have a feeling that very little will happen here. I couldn’t, for instance, write much on The View From Our Front Window. Andrew says that your first impression of the Kingdom is that it is a stable and orderly place where the telephones work (when you can get one) and the household rubbish is collected every morning from your front gate. I know Clare will not want to read