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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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BOOK: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
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“Thank you,” Frances said. She took a piece. Yasmin gave her another composed smile; poured tea. “How?” Frances said. “How do they commit suicide?”
“They throw themselves from the balconies. Silly girls. But this one, I have got a reference for her. She is all right, I think.”
“What’s her name?”
“It is Shams.”
Frances repeated it, tentatively. “I can’t quite get hold of it.”
“Shams,” Yasmin said. “As in ‘Champs Elysées.’”
“Oh, I see.”
“Means ‘sunny.’” She tittered. “I do not find her a little ray of sunshine about my house. But Raji was six months waiting for the work permit for her. He doesn’t like to ask the Minister for favors. You are used to a servant, Frances?”
“I’m used to help. But it doesn’t bother me, either way.”
Yasmin sighed. “It is a problem,” she said.
In Yasmin’s apartment, there was flowered wallpaper and patterned rugs, and little gilt tables with glass tops, and an enormous sideboard, crowned by family photographs. Yasmin with her newborn; earlier, Yasmin beneath a wedding veil of gold lace, her mouth painted emphatically red, and her delicate hand on the dark-suited arm of her plump husband. He looks older by some years; a handsome man, though, with a full expressive face, liquid eyes. Yasmin’s own age is not easy to determine; she sits swinging one slippered foot, a long-nosed, spindly young woman, with a flawless ivory skin, a festinate way of speaking, and large eyes which are lustrous and intractable, like the eyes of a jibbing horse.
“So your husband’s building is coming along?” she asked.
“I haven’t been to see it yet.”
“Your husband is shy, I think. He runs away.”
“Really?”
Yasmin smiled. “Samira would like to meet you.”
“The lady up above?”
“You will be surprised. She speaks good English.”
“I should like to meet some Saudi women.”
“She is very young. Nineteen. Some more tea?”
“Thank you.”
“You will see Selim, my son, when he wakes up just now. You are thinking of starting your family soon?”
This question. Oh dear. “I’ve always worked,” Frances said.
“Jeddah is a good place for families.”
“Is it?”
“You have not been here long enough to see the advantages. You are still missing England, I expect. Your parents.” Yasmin’s tone was encouraging. She proffered the biscuits again. “Do take another one, Frances. You are so slim. You have seen this film,
Death of a Princess
?”
She did rush straight at things, Frances thought. Suicidal housemaids, decapitation. She put her shortbread down on her plate. “I heard about it. But I didn’t see it. I wasn’t in England at the time.”
Relief showed on Yasmin’s face. Is she the custodian of Saudi culture then? “I remember the fuss it caused,” Frances said. “Princess Misha, wasn’t that her name? She was married, and she took off with another man. They caught her and she was executed.”
“This film has caused a lot of trouble between Saudi Arabia and Britain,” Yasmin said. “They do not understand why it should be shown.”
“Oh,” Frances said, “we are interested in other parts of the world. Foreign customs.”
Their eyes met. “In any case, it is false,” Yasmin said firmly.
“False?”
“Oh yes. These things do not happen. Princess Misha, this girl, she was extremely spoiled, always wanting her own way.”
“So you think she deserved what she got?”
“You must try to understand a little the Saudi viewpoint.” She seemed to distance it from her own, by implication; and yet she seemed on edge. Her husband’s position, Frances thought. “She tried to go out of the country disguised as a man.”
“Did she really?”
“They caught her at the airport.”
“Obviously you see these things differently.”
“I am not a Saudi, of course. I am only giving … the Eastern viewpoint.”
“To me it seems incredible, to kill a woman for something like that.”
“But they did not, Frances. She is not dead. Her family have her in one of their houses.”
This is quite stupid, Frances thought. “But she was executed, Yasmin. Her death was reported.”
Yasmin smiled knowingly, as if to say, how simple you are. “Excuse me,” she said, “but it is nonsense. The execution was made up by the filming people.”
Frances was silent. Then she said, “Why should they do that?”
“It is their mentality,” Yasmin said. “It is the mentality of the West, to discredit the Eastern people.”
It was now that Shams came in, with the baby in her arms; a little boy like a doll, half asleep, his head drooping on the servant’s shoulder and his curved eyelashes resting on his cheeks. Frances stood up. She felt she was blushing, burning inwardly. Have I been rude to her? But what a topic! Why plunge straight into it like that?
Gratefully, she turned her flustered attention to the baby. “He’s beautiful, Yasmin.” The beetle-browed housemaid put the child in her arms. “How old is he?”
“So you think he is cute?” Yasmin asked. She fluttered; her face yearned. The baby nuzzled his head into Frances’s shoulder. She is so anxious, Frances thought, that I don’t get the wrong impression. She knows we have prejudices. She wants me to hear her version, that’s all.
“He walks a little,” Yasmin said. “So active! Do you think he is forward?”
“Very forward.”
“Ah, what a lovely picture you make,” Yasmin said fondly. She spoke as if she had known her neighbor for half a lifetime. “No, Selim, naughty.” She untangled the baby’s fingers from Frances’s hair. “He is fascinated, your hair is so light, he just wants to grasp it.”
It was a leave-taking scene now. Yasmin touched Frances’s elbow timidly. “You will come again? Any morning.”
“Yes, of course. Or come to me.”
“If there is anything you need … or anything Raji can do for you. He knows this town so well.”
Yasmin took her to the door. Before she opened it she plucked
the wisp of a veil from the hallstand and flicked it over her head. “I will watch you across the hallway,” she said. Frances looked up into the stairwell. Those two closed doors at the top. She took her key out of the pocket of her skirt. Yasmin watched her until the door of Flat 1 clicked shut behind her; then gently drew herself inside, and closed her own door.
 
 
“No introductory moves,” Frances said. “Just, when are you going to start your family, and then—wham—
Death of a Princess
. How the West gets us wrong. I don’t think I was supertactful.”
“No,” Andrew said, “I don’t suppose you were.”
“Did you bring the
Saudi Gazette
home?”
“Yes, here it is.”
He had been kept late at the site, and she had been alone all afternoon. She followed him into the bedroom, the newspaper in her hand. He took off his shirt and dropped it onto the floor. She could see the muscles, knotted, at the back of his neck. He had just driven through the evening traffic; “They are mad,” he breathed as he drove along, “they are mad.” But he could see the day coming soon when he would be able to hold a normal conversation as he inched and swerved along. The drivers sit at traffic lights, reading magazines, their fists poised over their horns; when the lights change they bang down their fists together, the horns blare, and at the slightest sign of a delay, another lane will form; the cars roar forward, cutting each other off. Each intersection bears an accident that has just occurred.
“I have to take a shower,” Andrew said.
“I hope I didn’t offend her. Yasmin.”
“I shouldn’t worry.”
“Only she seemed so much on the defensive. As if I were bound to be building up some bad impressions.”
“You are, aren’t you? You’re not exactly seeing the country at its best.”
“No, but what do I do about it?”
“Frances, stop following me!” He turned on her, naked. “I told you, I have to go and have a shower.”
She went back into the bedroom and threw herself on the bed. Her throat ached with resentment. Talk to me, please, when you come home. I can’t live like this; this is not a natural sort of life. She heard the rushing and bubbling of water from next door; her eyes slid around to Andrew’s shirt, lying on the floor.
She sighed, and rolled over; opened the newspaper, propping it against the pillows. The correspondence column was what she mostly liked. She located it, folding the paper over. Here’s a letter from one Abdul Karim of Riyadh:
The Kingdom’s social and cultural heritage does not allow women to mix with men either in life activities or in work. The right place for a woman is to look after her husband and children, prepare food, and manage the housework
. But foreigners were coming into the Kingdom, Karim alleged, and saying there was more to life than this.
When you work in another country, you should study its traditions and characteristics before you get in it.
She folded up the paper and turned on her back again, letting Abdul Karim slide to the floor. I knew the facts, she thought, but I didn’t know what impact they would make on me. I knew there were restrictions, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to live under them. And now here is Yasmin, an intelligent woman, telling me that things are different here and I must swallow my objections.
Andrew was back. Holding a bath towel, he sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Shouldn’t have shouted. Just another bloody day. The Turadup people who are working at the missile base won’t talk to me. They enjoy being secretive. You ask them a perfectly straightforward question about the best way to get something done, and they start tapping the side of their noses, you know what I mean? Americans run that base. They’re even in uniform. It’s no secret, but it is a secret. It’s supposed to be missiles for local defense, but that’s not what people say. They say it’s a base for intercontinental missiles. And yet the Saudis loathe the Americans. Because they support Zionism. They’ve banned Ford cars. They’ve banned Coca-Cola. They’ll just have weaponry, thank you.”
“And hamburgers and Cadillacs.” She reached for the newspaper. “Have you seen the cartoon?” The President of the United States, a wizened mannequin in a Stars-and-Stripes waistcoat, balanced on the tip of a huge, hooked, disembodied nose. “That’s meant to be a Jew’s nose, not an Arab’s. You’re supposed to understand that. It says in the letters column that you should study the customs of a country before you get in it, but I think there’s nothing like studying them when you’re there. Much more enlightening.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. If we are going to dislike all these things so much.”
“It’s hard to take umbrage on a salary like yours.”
“I expect we’ll survive it,” Andrew said. “We’ll have leave in the summer. We can start planning it.” He broke off. “Oh, look at that cockroach. There were five in the shower when I got up this morning. There were three in there just now. Where the hell do they come from? Where’s the spray?”
Swearing to himself, he padded out in his bare feet. Frances slid off the bed, rubbed her eyes, straightened the cover. She looked at Andrew’s discarded shirt on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it in the basket.
 
 
Ten o’clock. Like someone testing the water, Frances stepped out through the glass sliding doors, and stood on the paving stones in the shadow of the wall. I’m going to come to grips with this place, she thought. The heat of the sun struck her lifted face. Satisfied, she turned, stepped inside again, and drew the door behind her.
Five minutes later she went out of the front door. She wore her baggiest smock, flat sandals. She held up a bunch of keys, peered at them in the light of the hallway. First the door of Flat 1. Then the main door. Then the iron gate. Perhaps I shall never get back in, she thought.
She was alone, out in the street. The stray cats fled away. A dark-faced boy in a car blew his horn at her. He cruised along the street. He put down his window. “Madam, I love you,” he called. “I want to fuck you.”
She walked on to the corner of the block. Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch curb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and that pavements are for walking on. But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.
By the time she reached the street corner she realized that it was far hotter than she had thought. The air felt wet, full of the clinging unsavory fragrance of the sea. A trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades and down the backs of her legs. On her right stood a row of half-built shops, wires snaking from the brickwork. She stuck close to the wall; she had reached a main road. The dark fronds of shrubs spiked the air over the central reservation. A hotdog van trundled past. A skip full of builder’s rubble forced her into the road again. From out of the dazzling sunlight, moving. slowly toward her, came two fellow pedestrians, two women in long zigzagged gowns, in African headcloths of vivid stripes; their blueblack flesh rolled toward her, and she saw their large spread feet, pale gray with dust, planted on the hot concrete. Smiling dazedly, hardly seeming to know that she was there, they parted to let her slip between them. Yasmin had told her of the West African hajjis, the pilgrims on their way to Mecca, who dropped their garments onto the shingle of the Corniche and ran naked into the waves. These women had stayed on, washed up in the city. They left behind them the scent of their passage; onions, the hot pepper smell of their skin and hair.
BOOK: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
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