Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (31 page)

BOOK: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

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Eric said, “I think we’d better have you out of those flats today. It could be unpleasant. Go home and pack. You can stay with us tonight.”

Andrew took her arm, and led her to their car. Her face stung, her lips were raw; the sky had darkened over the huts behind them. Eric glanced up, apprehensive. “Let’s try to make it home before the rain,” he said.

But within minutes, the storm broke. The sky split open, and sickly lightning glimmered over the high-rise blocks; before they were uptown, the streets were a foot deep in water. Andrew drove. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “If we have to stop we’re finished, we’ll never get started again.” The landscape emptied of moving life; cars, abandoned, were slewed across their path. The wind tore up saplings and the urban currents carried them along, as if they were making for the sea; the wind lifted the workmen’s shelters from the building sites, and bore them away and smashed them to matchsticks against the habitations of the living. On Tahlia Street a billboard bearing the King’s portrait had its center punched out by the violence of the gale, leaving only the royal headcloth and a fringe of beard to oversee the flooded
highway. At the airport the lights went out. Planes overshot the runways.

They didn’t leave Dunroamin that day. The roads were impassable; the city was not built for floods. They slept; falling on to their bed together, not touching, dropping through layers of fatigue into a willed annihilation; when they woke, groping in darkness, hungry, disorientated, the storm was over. Their throats ached; the air inside the flat was clammy and chilled.

“I want to phone Shabana,” she said. “But I don’t know her number. My address book is missing.”

“The burglars,” Andrew suggested.

“Probably.” They spoke grudgingly; simple words, simple thoughts. She did not know Shabana’s full name. Her husband (she thought of everyone now in the past tense) had been called Mohammad. In a Muslim country, you cannot trace one unknown Mohammad. And besides, Jeddah has no telephone directory.

She telephoned Samira’s flat, but there was no reply: number unobtainable.

The next morning the police came. She stood with her door open and watched them. If they had wanted secrecy, they should have come in the night. They ignored her. Perhaps they did not even notice that she was there; perhaps their religion had trained them so well.

They carried boxes down the stairs; they were the boxes that, some weeks before, the painters had carried up. But some evidence of the “beautification” remained; the tiles looked down from the walls, each with its hostile eye and single scarlet tear.

At ten o’clock a limousine drew up outside the open gate, plowing and splashing through Ghazzah Street’s mud and standing pools. A Yemeni driver got out, a man she did not know.

The door opposite opened a crack, and Shams looked out, peeping up and down the hallway. She saw Frances, and drew back;
and then after a few moments the door opened wider, and Raji came out, very pale, in his dark business suit, his features puffy. Frances thought, he is an old man. He was carrying an airline bag; he did not look at her, yet he spoke; his words quite casual, as if they had met just an hour before, but his tone empty and drugged. “They say I should take a holiday, Frances. They say I should go out of the Kingdom. They tell me the airport is back to normal, except for the passengers stranded from yesterday.” He gave the ghost of a chuckle at the passengers’ discomfiture; as if he were a man above the normal laws.

“Where are you going?” she asked him, from the doorway.

He did not reply, but marched out of the front door: out of her life. Shams followed him, her arms laden with baggage, darting a last look at Frances from under her beetle brows; and then finally came mother-in-law, vast, crumpled, yellow, her sari trailing in the thick wet dirt that had blown under the front door. She did not acknowledge Frances, but kept her eyes straight ahead; and in her arms, aged but still muscular arms, she held the child Selim. He slept against her shoulder, not caring where he was taken; and she carried him just as Frances, coming through the hall on the night of the burglary, had carried her bag of groceries.

Frances checked her watch. The police had gone, and in half an hour Andrew would be home. Their cases were in the hall; they were to go to Eric and Daphne. Though I hardly see why we should move out, she thought; it is all over now.

She went upstairs. There was an unaccustomed shaft of daylight on the landing; the front doors of the two upper flats were wide open, just as the police had left them. More than boxes had been taken away; and perhaps they had been in the night after all, while she and Andrew slept.

She went first into Abdul Nasr’s flat. There was the familiar smell of goatflesh, of onions and herbs, of chemical air-freshener and baby powder, of the expensive scent that Samira wore; but the air-conditioners had been turned off, and this smell had now a thick
and tangible quality, as if it were a tapestry with which the walls had been draped. The people had been removed: Samira with her snug denims and gracious manners, Abdul Nasr with his dictator’s eyes, and the displaced servant, smelling of fear, holding up her tattooed arm. Fat’ma was gone; and the child Samira carried. The model ship sailed gaily on. The Tree of Life flourished on the fringed rug. Samira’s chandelier, from Top Furniture of Palestine Road, reflected the clogged and still yellowish light. She walked through the bedrooms, the kitchen; a few pots and pans were left about, curiously dirty and cracked and old, like the kind of thing that slovenly people leave behind them when they move house.

She crossed the landing, letting the door swing shut behind her. It would lock itself; whoever had keys could unlock it again. She walked into the empty flat; who was to stop her? And there was little to see. She examined its tufted oatmeal carpet, its plain cream painted walls. It had been furnished by Turadup, she saw, for notional tenants; for lovers, gunmen, for all tastes and all requirements. Daphne must have chosen that pink lampshade, she thought; I recognize it. She recognized, too, the many armchairs, the tweed upholstery, the pale curtains with their open weave. There was nothing she did not recognize, for it might have been her own home: not a mirror image of it, but the thing itself.

When she emerged on to the landing and closed that door behind her, she was in near-darkness; it was just as it had always been. She went up the half flight to the roof She looked around her. What was it but an innocent square of asphalt, where washing lines hung, and litter accumulated, blown up by the recent high winds? The vacant lot was deserted; the workmen’s huts had been carried away, and water filled the deep trench that the mechanical diggers had gouged out by the side of the road. It would be some days before the dislocated city recovered itself, and building work began again. The air, which had freshened after the storm, now had its familiar twice-breathed fetor.

She hung over the parapet, looking down on to the balcony of the empty flat. It was from this angle that she had seen the wooden crate, and she wondered again who its occupant had been; strange
country, strange Kingdom, where unaccountable corpses can blight your daily life. Possibly she had passed, at the mortuary, so close that they might have. touched. That is guesswork, she thought. There has been too much of that. She put her face into the branches of the tree, into the still sodden leaves; and she thought that it might have grown since she had looked at it last. All this time it had been as inert, as falsely promising, as a plastic tree. She feared that it might have been dying invisibly, from the inside out, from a helpless contagion: like a tree of knowledge. But the rain had come, and already, as Samira had forecast, it was putting out fresh green shoots.

She turned away, averting her face from the damage on Ghazzah Street. Scraping her sandaled feet through the mud, she went through the door from the roof to the stairs; she swung it closed behind her, and, from the inside, drew across the bolt.

Shaban

The new house is square and white. It has large rooms, full of sunlight, and plain stark white walls. When I came here the house had been empty for months, and on every surface clammy dirt lay thick.

We are outside the city now. Terrex has given us a house. This used to be a bustling compound, of a hundred units perhaps, but almost no one lives here anymore. The cutbacks and the sackings have made it a ghost town, and since the storm weeds have pushed up through the cracks in the tennis court. But there is still a guard on the main gate. There are spaces between the houses; each one has its dusty plot. I never see my neighbors. I must have neighbors. They must be around somewhere.

The floor of the house is made of grayish vinyl tiles, of the sort I imagine might be used in a sanitarium. The main room has what estate agents call a double aspect, and four large windows; I have no curtains yet. From these windows you can see the plain slab walls of the neighboring houses, their carports and empty rooms; and if you look above the line of their roofs and into the distance you can see the freeway, the Mecca-Medina road, with its overpass raised on concrete pillars, its regiment of sodium lamps arched like scimitars, and the silent toy cars creeping by to the city.

When we came here all the furniture was arranged around the outside of the room; as if some entertainment was to take place.

On the wall of the living room there are two geckos. They are yellow-green, translucent, like jewels crawling on the white paint. One is slick and lithe; the other has a plump body and stubby legs. I spend a lot of time watching them, but I seldom see them move. I might go into the kitchen though, and when I come back, moments later, one of them has turned upside down. Are they male or female, I wonder? Do they know of each other’s existence? Or does each of them think he is the only gecko in the world?

Every morning they are there: every evening.

Outside the main room of the house, there is a sort of patio, reached by sliding doors. I saw Andrew look at them with some suspicion, but it does not seem necessary to take any kind of security measure. We have put some folding chairs on the patio, and we could sit there, if the heat relented. Unobserved, quite private, we could sit and wait for the weeks to pass. Then it would be time to take our suitcases out. Then it would be time to ask for our exit visas. And then, if they are granted, it would be time to drive to the airport.

But all that seems very far ahead; the past seems very far behind. I have arranged the furniture; I have hung our clothes in the closets. I don’t seem to make much impact on the dirt, but perhaps I am using the wrong cleaning materials. Perhaps one evening we should go to a supermarket to get some more. Yet I feel reluctant to move off the compound. The hours go by here, each one the same. No one comes. The present moment draws itself out forever. The harsh light never changes, until suddenly night falls.

There is a cane chair out on the patio, and I wonder, if I brought it in and put it in a corner of the kitchen, would it make the room look better? I draw back the sliding doors and step out, into the heat and light of the morning. There are a few trees up here, sustained by hard salty borehole water; their branches, no thicker than twigs, are bent by the currents of air that blow straight from
the desert. Squinting into the sun, I can see the black spine of a stony hill, topped by a string of barbed wire. The sky is clear. It must be over 100° today The glare bounces back at me from the walls of the carport. I seem to flicker, I am whited-out. I pick up the chair, bounce it gently on the concrete to shake out the dust. I turn with it, and catch my reflection in the glass doors. My face is black, deeply shadowed, with empty eyes, and a pale ragged aureole encircles my head. I have become the negative of myself.

I go back into the house and put down the chair. I look out through the glass, on to the landscape, the distant prospect of traveling cars. Window one, the freeway; window two, the freeway. I turn away, cross the room to find a different view. Window three, the freeway; window four, the freeway.

NOTE

Saudi Arabia employs the Hijra calendar, which starts from the year A.D. 622, when Muhammad left Mecca for Medina. It is a lunar calendar, and the Hijra year is eleven days shorter than the Gregorian year. The months (with many variations in transliteration) are as follows: Muharram, Safar, Rabi al-awal, Rabi al-thani, Jamadi al-awal, Jamadi al-thani, Rajab, Shaban, Ramadhan, Shawal, Dhu-al-qudah, Dhu-al-hijjah. By a recent Royal Decree, a 365-day year has been instituted for fiscal purposes, and 22 December 1986 became 1 Capricorn. The recalculations involved make the fiscal year some forty years behind the Hijra year. So, not the least surprising aspect of life in the Kingdom is that time can appear to run backward.

ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL

Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Vacant Possession
A Place of Greater Safety
A Change of Climate
An Experiment in Love
The Giant, O’Brien
Fludd
Giving Up the Ghost

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First published in the United Kingdom by Viking

First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, LLC

First Picador Edition: September 2003

eISBN 9781429900614

First eBook Edition : June 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mantel, Hilary.

Eight months on Ghazzah Street: a novel / by Hilary Mantel.