Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (5 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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On that first day, Andrew came home at half past three. She followed him around the flat. “Will it always be like this?” she asked.
Preoccupied, he dumped his briefcase on the table. “I’m sorry I locked you in.”
“What about going out? How do I get around?”
“I’ll have to talk to Jeff Pollard to see if the office can let you have a car to go shopping sometimes.”
“I’m not that fond of shopping, you know?” she said mildly. Andrew flipped the briefcase open and took a sheaf of papers out. He began to flick through them. “Well, I don’t know that besides shopping there’s much else to do.”
“How do people get to see their friends?”
“I suppose they must come to some arrangement. Some of the women hire their own drivers. I don’t think we can afford that.”
“Are there buses? Can I go on the bus?”
“There are buses.” He had found the piece of paper he wanted and was reading it. “But I don’t think it’s advisable to take them.”
“What’s wrong?” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a bad day.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“No, I don’t think I could begin to explain.” He tossed the papers back into his briefcase and snapped it shut. Need we sound so much like a husband and wife? she wondered. We have never had this conversation before. It is as if it came from some central scripting unit.
Andrew crossed the room and threw himself into an armchair. She followed him. This big decision again; none of the chairs was so
placed that they suited two people who wished to sit companionably, and talk to each other. It would seem unreasonably portentous to start moving the furniture now; although it was true that he had been in the house for ten minutes, and had not looked at her once, and this in itself seemed unreasonable. She chose a chair, rather at an angle from his own, and leaned back in it, trying consciously to relax; or at least to capture the appearance of it.
“I was tidying up,” she said, “filing papers away. I couldn’t find your passport.”
“It’s in the safe at the office. Turadup keep it. I’ve got this identity document, it’s called an
iquama.
” He produced it from his pocket and tossed it to her. “I have to carry my driver’s license too. If the police stop you and you haven’t got your documents they take you off to jail till it’s sorted out. They’re very keen on establishing who people are, you see, because of illegal immigrants. People come in at the end of the summer to do their pilgrimage to Mecca and then they try to get a job. I think there’s some kind of black market in servants. They try to make a few bucks and get back to Kerala or wherever before the police catch up with them.”
“I can’t think that the police would mistake you for somebody’s illegal houseboy.”
“Well, what are you saying? That they should only stop people with certain colors of skin?”
“That would be the practical recommendation.”
“Oh, there’s no color prejudice in Saudi Arabia. At least, that’s the theory. Somebody told me that when marriage settlements are negotiated the girl’s skin is a major consideration. If the bloke’s never seen her without her veil, I suppose he has to weigh up her brothers’ pigmentation and take it on trust … What were we talking about?”
“Your passport. Can’t you bring it home? You never know … suppose something went wrong and we had to leave suddenly?”
“Having a passport wouldn’t be any use. You can’t go out of the country just like that. You have to apply for an exit visa. You need signatures. An official stamp.” Andrew pushed his
iquama
back into
his pocket. He didn’t mean to be parted from it. “If you want to leave you need permission from your sponsor. My sponsor’s His Royal Highness the Minister. Your sponsor is me. If you wanted to go to another city even, I’d have to give you a letter.”
“Would you? And that would be true if I were a Saudi woman?”
“Oh yes. You can’t just move around as you like.”
“It reminds me of something,” she said. “The pass laws.”
“It’s not that bad. A lot of countries have these rules. It’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives subject to a different set. This isn’t a free society. They haven’t had any practice at being free.”
“Freedom isn’t a thing that needs practice,” she said. “If you have it, you know how to use it.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.” He sounded very tired. “We’re not quarreling, are we? I can’t do anything about the system, we’ll have to make the best of it, and most of it needn’t bother us and is no concern of ours.” They sat in silence for a moment. “The first thing is to find out,” he said at last, “how to make daily life tolerable for you. I shall go and see Pollard and insist that he gets on to the telephone company. And we’ll have to have that doorway unblocked, so you can talk to the neighbors.”
“Do we need to have those blinds down?”
“We do at night. They’re a security precaution. Against burglars.”
“I didn’t think there’d be burglars. I thought they cut people’s hands off.”
“They do. You get reports of it in the papers.”
“And isn’t it a sufficient deterrent?”
“It can’t be, can it? I have noticed that the papers don’t carry reports of crimes, just reports of punishments. But if there are punishments, there must be crimes.”
He had been upset by something today, she saw, made angry, or very surprised. “I’ll make some tea, shall I?” she said. Because all I can do is be a good practical housewife, and offer a housewife’s clichés. The fact is that he has come here and he knew it wouldn’t be easy, he said that; and now he thinks that he has contracted for
his problems, and deserves what he gets, and that he shouldn’t be shocked, or baffled, or put into a rage.
“The truth is that you can’t know if there are burglaries or not,” Andrew said. “Except you hear that there are. You hear rumors.” He looked up. “Everything is rumors. You can’t ever, ever, find out what’s going on in this bloody place.”
She got up. He followed her out to the kitchen. “Frances,” he said, “you must give it a chance. You’ll make friends. People will start to call on you … people’s wives. If there is anywhere you want to go I’ll always take you.” She took a packet of milk out of the fridge. She waited. “There’s this man at the office,” he said, “a kind of clerk, his name’s Hasan. I thought he was mainly there for making the tea, and driving Daphne about, but it turns out that his speciality is bribing people. No wonder you can never find him when you want somebody to put the kettle on, he’s out slipping baksheesh to some prince’s factotum. He only bribes the lower officials, though, not the high-ups.”
“Who bribes the high-ups?”
“I don’t know yet. Eric, maybe? They paid to get you your visa, and they paid to get me my driver’s license, and you just go on paying out at every turn, you have to bribe people’s clerks to get them even to pick up the telephone and speak to you. But it’s a funny thing, because officially there is no bribery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that again is a damn funny thing, because bribery in Saudi Arabia is a very serious crime, and people are charged with it and put in jail and deported for it. Though of course it never happens, because it just doesn’t exist.”
She took cups out of the cupboard. She was locating everything; this was home. “Well, what did you expect?”
“I didn’t know it would be quite like this. I didn’t know there would be so many layers to the situation.” He paused. “Do you think I’m naïve?”
“You are, a bit, if you need to ask the question. I expect you’ll get used to it.”
“You’d think it would be a sort of abstract problem,” Andrew
said, “a matter of conscience. But then about once a day I realize what’s happening in some particular situation, and I realize what I’ve let myself in for …” He put a hand to his ribs. “It’s like being kicked.”
 
 
Turadup, William and Schaper first came to Saudi Arabia in late 1974, a few months before King Faisal was shot by his nephew, when oil revenues were riding high, property prices in Riyadh had doubled in a month, and so urgent was the need to build that the Jeddah sky was black with helicopters ferrying bags of cement from the ships that packed the harbor. Since then they had expanded to Kuwait and the Emirates, been chucked out of Iran when the Shah fell, and accommodated themselves to Saudi labor law and the rise of Islamic architecture. They had a contract for a shopping mall in Riyadh, several schools in the Eastern Province, a military hospital, warehousing in Yanbu; there was the military project they did not talk about much, and there was the marble-and-gold-leaf ministerial HQ … Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.
Throughout the seventies, Schaper flew in and out, disbursing great wads of used notes. His briefcase became a legend, for what came out of it. Conscious of his role, he took to clenching Havanas between his rubbery lips, and to wearing eccentric hats, as if he were a Texan. “Buccaneering” was a word he liked to hear applied to himself.
Turadup flew in teams of construction workers from Britain, and housed them in temporary camps outside the cities, giving them a makeshift supermarket selling fizzy drinks, a mess serving American frozen burgers, a lecture on sunstroke, a tetanus shot, a dartboard, and three leave tickets a year to see the families they had left behind. The physical stress was crushing, their hours were ruinous, their pay packets enormous. Off-duty hours they spent lying on their beds, watching mosquitoes circling the cubicle rooms; unused to letter
writing, they became like long-term prisoners, subject to paranoia; to fears that were sometimes not paranoid, but perfectly well-grounded, that their wives were preparing to leave them for other men. When letters reached them they were full of news about burst pipes and minor car accidents, and vandalism on the housing estates where they lived; and seemed to conceal much else, lying between the blue-ballpoint lines on the Basildon Bond Airmail.
They began to occupy themselves in brewing up liquor. They wandered off toward the desert looking for a bit of privacy, and caused search parties. Their skins, after every precaution, turned scarlet and blistered in the sun. Strange rashes and chest complaints broke out. When they were released for leave they sat at the back of the plane and got sodden drunk within an hour of takeoff; they squirted each other with duty-free Nina Ricci, and laid hands on the stewardesses, and threw their dinners about, and vomited on the saris of dignified Indian ladies who were seated on their path to the lavatories. At Heathrow they vanished, sucked into the rain, an allowed-for percentage never to be seen again; this was part of the company’s calculations, for they were cannon fodder, quick and easy to recruit and cheap to replace. Cheap, that is, by the standards of what Turadup was making in those years; and cheap compared to what skilled men of other nationalities might have taken as their due.
Then again, a certain number would be deported for misbehavior, for offending against the tenets of Islam; run out of the country, sometimes flogged beforehand and sometimes not, or beaten on the streets by the “religious police” for lighting up a cigarette during the Ramadhan fast. They were all informed of the risks upon arrival, and Turadup took no responsibility in such cases; they were adults after all, and they knew the rules. There came a point when these men became more trouble than they were worth, and so now only a few foremen and site managers were British. The labor was recruited from Korea, yellow, tractable men, reeling through a desert landscape: indentured coolies, expecting nothing.
On the other hand, Turadup had always prided itself on how it had treated its professional staff. Plush if prefabricated villas were erected, with fitted carpets and icy air-conditioning, and instant
gardens of potted shrubs. School fees would be paid for the older children left behind, and there would be Yemeni drivers to run the wives about, and a swimming pool for each compound (carefully fenced from local eyes), and perhaps a squash court. And perhaps a weekly film show, as TV in the Kingdom is in its infancy, and mainly confined to
Tom and Jerry
cartoons, and
Prayer Call from Mecca,
and expositions of the Holy Koran; and certainly, soft furnishings coordinated in person, down to the last fringed lampshade, by Daphne Parsons herself. Turadup picked up the medical bills, and gave its professionals and their families a splendid yearly bonus and ten weeks off every summer; so that they would say, “We only have to last out till Ramadhan, and we don’t come back till after Haj.” It was important that their lives should be made as smooth as possible, that they should not be ground down by the deprivations and the falsity of life in the Kingdom. They must be comforted and cossetted, because Turadup’s professionals were responsible, discreet men, who could Deal With The Saudis; and they do not come ten-a-penny.
But by the time the Shores arrived in Jeddah the great days of Turadup were over. They had sold off their big housing compound and let some of their staff go. The price of oil was falling and the construction boom was finished. It was true that buildings were still going up all over the city, but every stage of a project needed an infusion of money, and often it was delayed, or doubtful, or didn’t come at all. Eric Parsons got used to waiting on the Minister of Finance. He spent a lot of time in other people’s offices, sipping cardamom coffee, waiting for people to get around to him. He had a sense, at times, of things eluding his grasp; of the good years slipping away.

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