Maelmihi’s Reviews > Eight Months on Ghazzah Street > Status Update

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.