Chapter 8

With tired, filmy eyes, Fareeha checked the flapping sheet for signs of damage. The door was symbolic rather than useful and it wouldn’t have made a lot of difference if in her absence it had been eaten off by goats or blown away by another rocket—or the wind. She wanted, however, to symbolise her privacy—KEEP OUT, she believed the linoleum told passers-by.

Her mind was full of numbers, some of which were already melting and dripping out and making a mess of things. She entered the kitchen, scaring a family of cockroaches that was playing on the dusty floor. They scurried as she picked up the broom; she hit one but declined to give chase to the others lest any more of the numbers should slop out and she’d have nothing left and have to go back to the bazaar again tomorrow.

She put her hand through the broken door of a cupboard and pulled out a few sheets of scrap paper—old wrappers from the market that she used to start fire in the hearth or the stove when she wanted to cook or boil water. She cleaned them off with a damp rag before realising she would need something with which to write on them.

Pens and pencils were once abundant in the Azziz house, as indeed were writing paper, notebooks, and envelopes. Hassan had seen to that, needing them for his important work of manufacturing pamphlets, manifestos and other writings as part of the glorious revolution’s propaganda mill. Now all that remained were a few leaky ballpoints—but she could not remember where they were. Her busy fingers pushed through more broken cupboards, into empty drawers, under the few bits of furniture that remained, and behind piles of junk. All the while she was losing numbers and cursing the elusive pens.

At last she found them on a ledge near the fireplace, in the living room—she had put them there for safety after the last time she had written to Hassan, at the end of the previous dry season. She took them through to the kitchen, where she quickly sat down at the old table and began to make marks on the paper. Words that should have been in columns, she put in rows; numbers that belonged in rows went into columns; and figures that shouldn’t have been anywhere in the table at all she printed neatly in the centre.

After ten minutes of frantic scribbling, she had offloaded her scant short-term memory. She sat back and scrutinised the scrap of paper. It looked as if the maimed cockroach from the kitchen floor had crawled through an inkwell and onto the paper, where it had performed a dance of death. It was a mess, but most of the important information was there.

‘Manufactured Cigarettes,’ she read out from the top right-hand corner of the table. She then scanned through the list below. Many of the famous brands had disappeared altogether from the city and next to their names she’d left empty spaces or comments such as, stopped selling at such and such dirhams’, or, not seen for a month. She’d fixed prices next to most of the regional brands, but they were high, unaffordable to all but the very rich, and she didn’t expect those brands to survive for very much longer.

Her column for the raw material—the cut and cured leaf—looked a little better. Virginia was expensive and most buyers were only picking up scraps of low-grade, medium-cut, blonde leaves. Turkish, however, seemed to be getting through at a reasonable price. Some merchants could still afford a bale of the black, medium-cut tobacco, but they said the quality was low: full of stems and stalks, under-cured, and badly cut. And Fareeha saw, from the final column in her table, that by the time it had passed through the middle men and then through the tender fingers of the starving women of Sa’ An, who hand-rolled it into short cylinders, the finished, barely-smokeable product was getting expensive.

And that was her morning’s work, concluded just as the distant guns in the mountains fell silent. She should have taken a notebook and gone about the market with more confidence, but she was just a woman who didn’t really know what she was doing or why, and she had preferred to work surreptitiously, eavesdropping on haggling merchants, watching forlorn customers fumbling with their few coins. And Mrs. Sharwalla; Fareeha had picked up more information from her neighbour who had started again to barter peanuts for cigarettes: sedatives for her husband, Farooq—to stay his busy hand.

It was Mrs. Sharwalla who had told her that coins were losing their value. ‘Dirhams!’ she had whooped. ‘Flour, Miss Chamoun; they want a day’s flour just for a miserable packet of Turkish cigarettes; and as for those wretched hand-rolled tubes of goat droppings, those women want a half-pint of milk for a dozen!’ Mrs. Sharwalla had raised her head like a snorting camel towards the line of rickety stalls. ‘Robbery,’ she whooped, flashing her yellow teeth. ‘Somebody should do something.’

Well, Mrs. Sharwalla, Fareeha thought to herself, I have done something. She didn’t really know what, and she had no idea where it might lead—but she had certainly used both her eyes and done something. Fareeha scooped up the leaky pens and marched into the living room where she put them back in exactly the same place she had found them—ready for the letter she would soon write to her husband.