Status Updates From Acht maanden in de Gazastraat

There is a leaden sky and a hot wind; the dust, blowing continuously lends a lunar aspect to the vacant lots. You expect to see comets and portents, rabid alien life-forms scuttling at your feet.

The temperature had been moving upward for a week; and suddenly, the approaching summer moved into a new dimension. All night, while they had been insensibly dreaming together under a flowered sheet, the heat had been abroad, gathering its forces in other rooms to hang in dense clots from the walls; there was a white, scaly sky, diseased and enfeebled by its own heat.

Then I think, perhaps everyone is like this, and their need to be together is only just a bit stronger than their need to be apart. I agree that love doesn’t guarantee anything. But with the odds stacked up as they are, love certainly doesn’t do any harm.

We sit in the evenings, looking at each other, and I feel that he wants something that I can’t give him, and that I want something that he can’t give me. A familiar problem in marriage, I suppose. I feel weak with need for him, mental need, physical need. Isn’t it strange that no matter how many times you sleep together, you don’t get any closer? I feel that perhaps by nature we are lonely people.

I really don’t know how I went on before I had the Saudi Gazette and the Arab News to tell me how to run my married life.

Pour it into bottles—use a tea strainer, because there will still be large bits of brownish fruit bobbing on the surface. Tonic? Ice and lemon?

Anyone for Jeddah gin? Take four large potatoes, four oranges, four lemons, four grapefruit. Cut them up into small pieces. Put the pieces in a plastic jerrican. Add five kilos of sugar. Top up with water. Dissolve a tablespoonful of yeast; tip it in. Forget it for two weeks. Then pour the stuff out of the jerrican into saucepans. Leave it till the sediment settles: two days.

"-Cree que deberíamos alegrarnos de que los hombres nos mantengan?
-Si, porque es su responsabilidad, del mismo modo que la nuestra consiste en criar a la próxima generación".

He said, the money is running out. I was amazed. I thought that in the Kingdom I would never hear those words. It can’t be running out. He said, we are running out of money to pay the subcontractors, because the Saudi government has not paid us. Why not? Because oil has fallen, they’re cutting back. It’s hitting everybody, all the government departments. They’re all fighting each other for cash.

she scuttled ahead, keeping close to the wall. She looked as if she had no right to be out. You could put a Western woman under all those layers, Frances thought, but she’d never achieve that apologetic gait. She’d never fool anyone; the way the Saudi woman walks is quite unique.

Diana looks out of all the magazines, peeping from under her fringe; blackish sapphires, like lacquered beetles, cling to her ears, and her coy expression is looped and scored with Arabic script. She is a heroine, a glamorous royal bride. Her décolletage, because it is a royal one, is somehow less indecent than others; the censor’s felt-tip spares it.

“Tell me,” she said dreamily, “have you ever met Princess Diana?” “I’m afraid I haven’t. I don’t exactly move in those circles.”
“You don’t know anyone in your royal family?” “Ours is not as big as yours. They keep to themselves.” “A pity. I would like to meet her. She is very beautiful, I think. Very fair.”

“And so what will you do with your education?” she asked. “Your university education?” “We have a saying,” Samira smiled. “‘We will hang our certificates in the kitchen.’”

But she looked across the table and saw Yasmin watching Raji, with an expression that was narrow and appraising. It was the face of a nun in a lingerie department: baffled, almost hungry, and yet full of a growing appreciation that things are worse than one had thought.

Well, you know how the young men hang around there. They just slip it to someone, and then they phone up.” Shabana tittered. “They have a relationship on the telephone.” “It’s rather sad,” Frances said. “Don’t you think?”

“Young women will find some way to flirt,” Raji said indulgently. “It is the way of the world.” Mohammad darted a look at Frances. “Quite a hotbed, they say, the Jeddah International Market. The story goes that the girls walk around looking in the shop windows, with a piece of paper hidden in their hand, and their telephone number on it. Well, you know how the young men hang around there.

“Young women will find some way to flirt,” Raji said indulgently. “It is the way of the world.” Mohammad darted a look at Frances. “Quite a hotbed, they say, the Jeddah International Market. The story goes that the girls walk around looking in the shop windows, with a piece of paper hidden in their hand, and their telephone number on it. Well, you know how the young men hang around there.

“The police are banning mirrors in the jewelers’ shops. Or so they say. The Saudi women are down there provoking the shop assistants, getting them to fasten necklaces on them, while they look in the mirror.” “That’s right,” Shabana said, almost in a whisper. “And they stretch out their hands, with their nails painted red, and let the men try bracelets on them.”