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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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BOOK: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
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Frances closed her eyes again. Drifting, she caught bits of their conversation: jargon, catchphrases. At home, at her widowed mother’s house in York, she had been reading books about her destination. Despite her skepticism, her better knowledge, their contrived images lingered in her mind: black tents at sunset, the call of the muezzin in clear desert air, the tang of cardamom, the burnish of sharp-snouted coffeepots, the heat of the sand. “We’re building up the infrastructure,” said the man who despised Fairfax. “Infrastructure” was a word she had heard on Andrew’s lips; he had grown fond of it. It seemed that when oil was discovered in the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia had no infrastructure, but that it had one now: roads, schools, hospitals, factories, mines, market gardens and chicken farms, airports and squash courts, telephones and filling stations, cold stores and police stations, take-away food shops, and the ten-pin bowling facilities at the Albilad Hotel. All this she knew from her reading, because after the romantic travelers’ tales came
Jeddah: A Businessman’s Guide.
The black tents of the Bedu have been replaced by aluminium shacks. Air-conditioning is universal. Gazelles are hunted from the backs of pickup trucks.
I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all. “No alcohol!” people say, as if you’d die without it. “And women aren’t allowed to drive? That’s terrible.” There are lots of things more terrible, she thought, and even I have seen some of them. She dozed.
A touch on her arm woke her. It was the steward. “We’ll be beginning our descent in half an hour. I’m just doing a final drinks round. Another brandy?”
“Keep the young lady sober,” the businessman advised. “She’s got the customs to face, and it’s her first time. They go through
everything,” he told her. “I hope you haven’t got anything in your suitcase that you shouldn’t have?”
“I haven’t got a bottle of whiskey or a shoulder of pork. What else will they be looking for?”
“Where do you buy your underwear?”
“What?”
“Marks & Spencer, you see, they call them Zionists. You have to cut the labels out. Didn’t anybody tell you that? And they look at your books. This colleague of mine, when he was last in the Kingdom, he had his book of limericks confiscated. It had this drawing on the cover, a woman, you know.” He gestured in the air, describing half circles. “Naked, just a line drawing. Chap said he hadn’t noticed.”
“That seems unlikely,” she said. She added, to herself, “a friend of yours.”
“It’s all unlikely. Even when you’ve been coming in and out for years, you never know what they’re going to be looking for. Our rep in Riyadh, he lives there, he should know. But then last year when he was coming back after his summer holidays they took away his Test Match videos. All his recorded highlights. Oh, they said he could have them back, when the customs had had a careful look. But he never went for them. He couldn’t take the hassle.”
“Poor man.”
“You’ve not got any art books, have you? Rubens or anything? Because they can be very funny about art.”
“It’s un-Islamic,” Frances said, “to worship the human form. It’s idolatry.” The man stared at her.
“So I can’t tempt you?” the steward asked. He peered into his empty ice bucket. “Gentlemen, don’t leave any miniatures down the seat pockets, please, we don’t want our ground staff flogged.” He looked down at Frances. “We’re relinquishing this route next year,” he said. “Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that’s what I say. No more to drink then?” He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred now, dribbling a little onto their airline blankets. There was a sound of subdued laughter; briefcases intruded into the aisles. The steward relented. He leaned over
her seat. “Listen, if anything goes wrong, if by some mischance hubby’s not there, don’t hang about, don’t speak to anybody, get straight in our airline bus and come downtown with us to the Hyatt Regency. You check in, and I’ll look after you, and he can come and find you in the morning.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be there,” she said. Or someone will. Jeff Pollard. At least he’d be a familiar face. “I’ve got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.”
“You can’t take a taxi. They won’t carry you.”
She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi drivers won’t let in their cabs. “What, really not?”
“It’s bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can jail you for it.”
“But he’s a taxi driver,” she said. “That’s his job, picking up strange people.”
“But you’re a woman,” the steward said. “You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re not a person anymore.” Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: “Would you like champagne?”
 
 
Soon, the crackle from the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Those seated on the left-hand side of the aircraft will see below you the lights of Jeddah … Kindly fasten … kindly extinguish … (And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow fires that seem to ring cities at night.) We hope you have enjoyed … we hope to have the pleasure … we hope … we hope … and please to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary …
 
 
Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.
Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the King’s New Palace, and in the district of Al Aziziyya. It is a small street, which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue, and a narrow street, made narrower by the big American cars, some of them falling to pieces, which its residents leave parked outside their apartment blocks. On one side is a stretch of waste ground, full of potholes; water collects in them when, three or four times a year, rain falls on the city. The residents complain about the mosquitoes which breed in the standing pools, but none of them can remember whether there was ever a building on the waste ground; no one has been in the area for more than a couple of years. Many of the tenants of Ghazzah Street still keep some of their possessions in cardboard boxes, or in shipper’s crates bearing the names of the removal and transport companies of the subcontinent and the Near East. They are from Pakistan or Egypt, salesmen and clerical workers, or engaged in a mysterious line of work called Import-Export; or they are Palestinians perhaps, or they are picking up a family business that has been bombed out of Beirut.
The district is not opulent, not sleazy either. The small apartment blocks, two and three storys high, are walled off from the
street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home. Women and babies are bundled from curb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbors know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.
At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes—and it will come—all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.
The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in color and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the seafront, and crown the
intersections of the endless, straight, eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt air and smog.
On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water jugs, seahorses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange, and cerise.
If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and faraway, like the mutinous cries of the damned. “The people in hell remain alive,” says a Muslim commentator. “They think, remember, and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh.” And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servant’s eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TVs. A skin diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.
Back on the road the teenaged children of the Arab families catcall and cruise, wrecking their Ferraris. Hot-rodding, the newspapers call it; the penalty is flogging. A single seabird hovers, etched sharp and white against the sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of
female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.
 
 
Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed—and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces, and souks; gray-faced, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and—with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils—confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-colored dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.
 
 
Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air-conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamed she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.
Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site. “Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,” he said. “I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.”
“What time is it?” She shivered.
“Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?”
“No. Yes, a bit.”
“There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.”
So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of tabletop, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.
“I may have been dreaming,” Andrew said, “but did you go on a predawn tour?”
“I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there—you said you didn’t want him for a neighbor. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice; Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.”
“Who owns these flats?”
“I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.”
“Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?”
“The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.”
“They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.”
“Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.”
“But here they care?”
“They try to keep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,” he said, recollecting himself, “the money’s the thing.”
Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. “One thing that seems rather odd … last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway,
but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?”
“You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.”
“What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?”
“No. Twit.”
“I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.”
“They don’t pray all day,” Andrew said, “just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and at night.” He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself “It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.”
“This doorway, Andrew …”
“Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbors, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?”
“I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?”
“No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.”
“How eminently sensible.” She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet. Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.
“It must be hot,” Andrew said, “under those veils.” He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing table. “Oh, there’s yogurt,” he said, “if you feel like yogurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.”
“Will you ring me?”
“No phone. Next week,
ins’allah.
” He paused in the doorway. “I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.”
“Yes.” She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.
It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbors came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.
She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak-laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.
BOOK: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
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