Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (20 page)

The rules are different in Saudi Arabia. The same U.S. government that drummed up public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women goes to Saudi Arabia and keeps its mouth shut. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks make women stand in separate lines. Hotels like the InterContinental and Sheraton won’t rent a woman a room without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone are regarded as prostitutes. Saudi Arabia is still the place where America colludes, where we have quietly decided that women’s rights are negotiable.

Terrorism and security are questions of cost. That’s what a Saudi oil official told me when I interviewed him that summer. He was irritated with America for urging its citizens to leave the kingdom.

“The U.S. government is discouraging people from coming to Saudi Arabia, and at the same time they’re recruiting people to go to Iraq,” he snorted. “As if that were safer.”

We were sitting in a Riyadh skyscraper, one of the many anonymous towers hemmed in by webs of freeway. Far below Mercedeses and Hummers coursed through the dusk toward a flat horizon, along corridors of shop windows asparkle in silver and silk.

“I believe in the human capacity for making good things and making bad things,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a question of cost. It’s an economic issue.”

Saudi men often raised the question of women with me; they seemed to hope that I would tell them, out of courtesy or conviction, that I endorsed their way of life. They blamed all manner of Western ills, from gun violence to alcoholism, on women’s liberation. “Do you think you could ever live here?” they asked. It sounded absurd every time, and every time I would repeat the obvious: No.

I was there when, inspired by the war in Iraq and a general enthusiasm for Arab voting, the kingdom called for municipal elections. Women couldn’t vote, let alone run, in elections that filled just half the seats on impotent city councils. Still, in a simulacrum of democracy, candidates pitched tents in vacant lots and hosted voters for long nights of coffee and poetry readings. I stepped inside a tent one night; men milled around on thick layers of carpet, sipping thimbles of coffee in white robes bleached spotless by a hidden army of women. When they caught sight of me, they turned their backs and muttered. The campaign manager, who had invited me to the tent in a flourish of liberalism, rushed to my side, apologies spilling from gritted teeth. The citizens were angry at the sight of a woman, he said. I was costing his man votes; if I stayed, he’d lose the election. So I picked my way back out of the tent, eyes dazzled by portable lights, and waited in the vast desert night for one of the men to drive me home.

A few days later, a U.S. official from Washington gave a press appearance in a hotel lobby in Riyadh. Sporting pearls, a business suit, and a bare, blond head, she praised the Saudi elections.

“[The election] is a departure from their culture and their history,” she said. “It offers to the citizens of Saudi Arabia hope … It’s modest, but it’s dramatic.”

The American ambassador, a Texan oilman named James Oberwetter, chimed in from a nearby seat.

“When I got here a year ago, there were no political tents,” he said. “It’s like a backyard political barbeque in the U.S.”

One afternoon, a candidate invited me to meet his daughter, a demure twenty-something who folded her hands in her lap and spoke fluent English. I asked her about the elections.

“Very good,” she said impassively.

So you really think so, I said, even though you can’t vote?

“Of course. Why do I need to vote?”

Her father interrupted. Speaking English for my benefit, he urged her to be candid. But she insisted: What good was voting? She looked pityingly at me, a woman cast adrift on rough seas, no male protector in sight.

“Maybe you don’t want to vote,” I said. “But wouldn’t you like to make that choice yourself?”

“I don’t need to,” she said, slowly and deliberately. “If I have a father or a husband, why do I need to vote? Why should I need to work? They will take care of everything.”

Some Saudi women are proudly defensive, convinced that any discussion of women’s rights is a disguised attack on Islam from a hostile Westerner. But some of them fought quietly, like the young dental student who sat up half the night for months to write a groundbreaking novel exploring the internal lives and romances of young Saudi women. Or the oil expert who scolded me for asking about driving rights, pointing out the pitfalls of divorce and custody laws: “Driving is the least of our problems.” I met women who worked as doctors and business consultants. Many of them seemed content enough.

But they are stuck, and so are the men. Over coffee one afternoon, an economist told me wistful stories of studying alongside his wife in the United States. His wife drove herself around; she was an independent, outspoken woman. Coming home to Riyadh had depressed both of them.

“Here, I got another dependent: my wife,” he grumbled. He chauffered and chaperoned her as if she were a child. “When they see a woman walking alone here, it’s like a wolf watching a sheep. ‘Let me take what’s unattended.’”

Both he and his wife believed, desperately, that social and political reform needed to materialize. Foreign academics were too easy on Saudi Arabia, he argued, urging only minor changes instead of all-out democracy because they secretly regarded Saudis as “savages” unsuited for a surfeit of freedom.

“I call them propaganda papers,” he said. “They come up with all these lame excuses.”

The couple had already lost hope; their minds were on the next generation. All they could do, they thought, was speak frankly.

“For ourselves, the train has left the station. We are trapped,” the economist said. “I think about my kids. At least when I look at myself in the mirror I’ll say: ‘At least I said this. At least I wrote this.’”

The story was on the front page: A nine-year-old girl had been stabbed to death by her father and stepmother. It happened in Mecca—Islam’s most sacred city, home to the holiest of holy shrines.

I sipped Nescafé. I chewed on a sweet roll. I was in the oil-rich eastern provinces, in a stuffy hotel breakfast lounge with big glass windows and the flat sprawl of desert below. My eyes flickered down through the article. I swallowed, and the bread stuck in my throat.

I looked up from the page. All around me sat men—men from America and men from Great Britain and men from France, men eating their breakfasts and preparing for business meetings. Men who’d already begun their meetings, hunched with jovial, berobed Saudi men over platters of scrambled eggs. Men meeting for oil in this land of invisible women.

Pundits like to talk about Saudi reform. About how maybe women will be allowed to vote, or to drive. But after years in the Middle East, the word
reform
signified, to me, the tangled, unholy alliance between America and the Arab dictators who grant and revoke press laws, women’s rights, and political party laws on a whim. The flaw in the notion of Arab reform is the idea that people who lord over their land in autocratic splendor will voluntarily relinquish power. In truth, progress is doled out and taken back at the king’s pleasure. Rulers take one step forward and holler about it, wait until the world is busy elsewhere, and slide back to where they started. Generations of diplomats and journalists talk about reform, and in the meantime the stories pile up:

Or:

The word
woman
is not popular in Saudi Arabia. The going term is
lady
. I heard a lot about
ladies
from Saudi officials. They talked themselves into knots, trying to depict a moderate, misunderstood kingdom, bemoaning stereotypes in the Western press: Women banned from driving? Well, they don’t want to drive anyway. They all have drivers, and why would a lady want to mess with parking? The religious police who stalk the streets and shopping centers, beating “Islamic values” into the populace? Oh, Saudi officials scoff, they aren’t strict or powerful. You hear stories to the contrary? Sensationalistic exaggerations, perpetuated by outsiders who don’t understand Saudi Arabia.

On a morning when glaring sun blotted everything to white and hot spring winds raced off the desert, I stood outside a Riyadh bank, waiting for a friend. The sidewalk was simmering and I sweated in my black cloak, but I couldn’t enter the men’s section of the bank to fetch him. Traffic screamed past on a nearby highway, and I wobbled when wind spread my polyester robe like the wings of a kite.

The door clattered open and I looked up hopefully. No, just a security guard—stomping my way and yelling in Arabic. He didn’t want me standing there, I gathered. I took off my sunglasses, stared blankly, and finally turned my face away.

He retreated, only to reemerge with another security guard. This second guard looked like a pit bull—short, stocky, and all flashing
teeth as he barked: “Go! Go! You can’t stand here! The men can
see
! The men can
see
!”

“Where do you want me to go? I have to wait for my friend. He’s inside.” But he held his ground, arms akimbo, snarling and flashing those teeth.

“Not here. NOT HERE! The men can
see
you!”

I lost my temper.

“I’m just standing here!” I growled. “Leave me alone!” This was a slip. In a land ruled by male ego, yelling at a man only deepens a crisis.

The pit bull advanced, lips curled, pushing the air with little shooing motions. Involuntarily, I stepped back and found myself in prickly shrubbery. In the bushes, I was out of view of the window; the virtue of all those innocent male bankers was unbesmirched. Satisfied, the pit bull climbed back onto the sidewalk and stood guard over me. I glared at him. He showed his teeth. Finally, my friend reemerged.

A liberal, U.S.-educated professor at King Saud University, he was sure to share my outrage, I thought. Maybe he’d even call up the bank—his friend was the manager—and get the pit bull into trouble. I spilled my story, words hot as the pavement.

He hardly blinked.

“Yes,” he said. “Oh.” He put the car in reverse, and off we drove.

People asked, always: What’s it like, being a woman there?

You are supposed to say that it doesn’t matter a bit.
Gender? I never give it a second thought!
You are supposed to say that you navigate as a third sex, the Undaunted Western Reporter, clomping around in trousers and ponytails and clumsy head scarves slipping perpetually over your eyes. You are supposed to say that you were privileged, because you had a pass to the secret world of local sisterhood, to a place where faces showed and words were honest, where there was no husband to interrupt and bully. You are supposed to say, in an almost mystical voice, “I could write about the
women
.” And then you should pause and add, smugly: “Which the male correspondents could never do.” You leave the mythology intact lest you admit weakness and undermine the other women in the field.