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over the years.”
    A former American ambassador to Tunisia came in—I wondered if he’d turn out to be my contact. One or two of the guests were Moroccans, whose unfamiliar names I didn’t retain. I had worked on learning common Muslim names but found them elusive except for the main Koranic ones—Mohammed, Ali, and so on.
    The most unexpected arrival was the same Saudi woman I had seen on the plane and again with her husband at the airport, only now we were introduced: Gazi and Khaled bin Sultan Al‐Sayad. As they came in, she was still wearing a black veil—the abaya—though not over her face, but she whisked it off and was wearing a beige pantsuit underneath, with lots of gold chains that emphasized her dramatic sort of harem-slave beauty, like a concubine out of the Arabian Nights, maybe Scheherazade herself, and seemed to symbolize the enslavement implied by the veil. Her husband, Khaled, who had worn white robes and a red-and-white head cloth at the airport, now was wearing a Western‐style suit and was a good-enough‐ looking man of maybe thirty, though with a remarkable nose that grew like a falcon’s beak between his dark eyes. How I admired the way Ian had mastered their long string of names, laced with “bins” and “bints” like a refrain! They lived next door—that is, in the next nearest villa estate—and were apparently well-known to everyone else here and deeply admiring of Shakespeare.
    “Of course. I went to Brown University,” said Gazi to me. “And Khaled went to Yale. Not that we’re pro-American particularly, it was just the only game in town educationally, though many Saudis go to the Oxbridge colleges instead. And who else but Americans can control Israel?” She made these somewhat disconnected observations with a provocative smile that seemed to invite some response or comment, but I had no idea what to say. I wasn’t even sure she realized I was American.
    “I know you must think it’s odd for me to have a man’s name,” she said. “Gazi—it’s more or less a family joke. My real name is Ghaniyah. We go to London and Stratford every winter to see the performances,” she continued. It seemed to me that Shakespeare was as good a foundation for international understanding as any other—better, really—and I was glad to hear that educated Arabs admired him. Do we know as much about their great poets? I knew the names of two Persian poets, Hafiz and Saadi, and Omar Khayyám, but that was about it.
    Waiting to begin, the party spoke in several languages—English, French, and what I took to be Arabic, lending an air of baroque multicultural sophistication I found thrilling. We sat in a ring of chairs, I next to Gazi, so I dared to ask when and how it was that she wore the veil, even here in Marrakech, where most women didn’t appear to.
    “Always worn at home in Riyadh, naturally, but here only sometimes—when I’m out with Khaled, who prefers it on the street.
    He’s not a benighted jerk, not at all,” she said in her perfect but slightly odd English . “He went to Yale, after all. But it reduces the chance that someone from Riyadh might see me. There’s a certain amount of resentment there of people who have homes elsewhere or send their kids away to school. They all would if they could.” I assumed that Khaled must be rich, like all Saudis, but I didn’t know enough about that to ask even an oblique question about his business or profession. I admit that I also thought, What good is it to be beautiful if you have to live in Saudi Arabia?
    The guests, now fifteen in number, sat in the ring of chairs in the courtyard by the pool and studied their parts for a few minutes while a maid lit the hundreds of candle lamps that ringed the swimming pool. Ian’s servant, Rashid, passed drinks—orange juice, whiskey sodas, and white wine. The evening cool was beginning, but the air was somehow dusty. There were no mosquitoes. In the distance, from somewhere, it was just