Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (10 page)
Read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Online
Authors: Hilary Mantel
Around the souk area the traffic slowed almost to a standstill. The driver put them down on the pavement outside a hotel. Mrs. Parsons leaned through the window and spoke a few words of Arabic into the driver’s face. “An hour will be enough,” she said, over her shoulder to Frances. “It’s too hot for more than that.” She jerked her head back to Hasan, and as if doubting the power of her Arabic to do the job, she spat out the words “One hour, one,” and she jerked up a forefinger under Hasan’s nose, as if she were an umpire giving him out.
Hasan drove away. Frances looked around her. “Gabel Street,” Mrs. Parsons said, indicating with her head that they should make a dive through the traffic and enter a narrow street on the far side. She took Frances by the elbow. With her free hand Frances wiped her hair from her forehead, feeling it sticky and damp. “How do you find the heat?” Daphne inquired, above the rumble of the traffic.
“It’s the humidity I mind. It’s different from where we lived before.”
“We were in Zambia for a couple of years. Of course, it’s not what I call Africa.”
“Oh no?” They teetered on the curb.
“Now,” Daphne said. They began to thread their way through the crawling cars. “When I was first married, we were in Nigeria.” Frances stepped on to a traffic island. She saw Mrs. Parsons’s face, blotched and mottled already by the heat. “We had a lovely life. A lovely home. We had four gardeners.”
“Really?” They sallied out again, into the traffic.
“Then we were in Malaya.” A long black Pontiac braked to let them pass. Frances inclined her head in thanks, but the sun struck across the windscreen, hiding the driver’s face from view. They had reached the far side.
“And how many gardeners did you have in Malaya?” Frances asked.
Now it was for Mrs. Parsons to dislike her tone. But her mind was elsewhere; she wanted to get into the goldsmiths. The souk, Frances saw, was modern and paved, with streetlighting and the same metal-box shops she had seen uptown. But above and beyond the souk were the houses of old Jeddah, with their leaning faded pastel walls, their crumbling harem grills, the wood bleached out by sunlight and neglect to the color of ashes.
“What’s up there?” Frances said. Her spirits rose. All the time she had known that there was something more than she was seeing. “Can we go up there and look?”
“I don’t think Eric would like me to do that,” Mrs. Parsons said with dignity. They plunged into Gabel Street.
Frances Shore’s Diary: 7 Safar
You should come at night to get the flavor of it, Mrs. Parsons said, and this is what people do, apparently, they get up parties to go to the souk. I have to say that at 11 A.M., anyway, it’s disappointing. Mainly there are just rows and rows of the little metal shops, selling perfectly ordinary things
—
tea sets, and shock-absorbers, and lurid lengths of fabric with gold and silver threads
running through. I did buy a set of orange nonstick saucepans, which seemed very cheap. I wondered if I should haggle over them, but Daphne said, no dear, just pay the price. I was relieved.
—
tea sets, and shock-absorbers, and lurid lengths of fabric with gold and silver threads
running through. I did buy a set of orange nonstick saucepans, which seemed very cheap. I wondered if I should haggle over them, but Daphne said, no dear, just pay the price. I was relieved.
The goldsmiths are quite spectacular. The shops look so poverty-stricken and dreary, compared to the new places uptown, and it’s hard to take in the value
—
thousands of riyals, millions of riyals
—
of what’s in their windows. They go by weight here, they don’t regard workmanship, and they certainly don’t regard taste. Mrs. Parsons walked into one of these shacks and peered around, nobody taking very much notice of her
—
as she said, they know that Europeans aren’t going to buy, or not much more than a trinket, but if you shuffled in there in a veil they’d spring to attention all right. She said to the man behind the counter, what is today’s price? Just as if she were after salad tomatoes. From some fold of her flowing garments she produced a pocket calculator, converted grams to ounces, then got him to weigh her a few bracelets. After she had done some more sums she said to him, thank you, sucran, and walked out. Then we went into a couple of shops selling Indian clothes, and she tossed the stock about a bit and said, trashy stuff. No one tried to sell us anything particularly, except that one shopkeeper pulled out a cardboard box from under a counter, which seemed to have in it the kind of dresses that get left behind at jumble sales. He held one or two up and said, viscose very smart, 100 percent polyester, madam you love it. It was obvious we didn’t, and he wasn’t very interested anyway
—
his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs. Parsons told me not to smile at people too much, they might run away with the wrong idea. The souk smells quite a lot, and this seems an affectation in it. There are drains and street cleaners, so why should it smell?
—
thousands of riyals, millions of riyals
—
of what’s in their windows. They go by weight here, they don’t regard workmanship, and they certainly don’t regard taste. Mrs. Parsons walked into one of these shacks and peered around, nobody taking very much notice of her
—
as she said, they know that Europeans aren’t going to buy, or not much more than a trinket, but if you shuffled in there in a veil they’d spring to attention all right. She said to the man behind the counter, what is today’s price? Just as if she were after salad tomatoes. From some fold of her flowing garments she produced a pocket calculator, converted grams to ounces, then got him to weigh her a few bracelets. After she had done some more sums she said to him, thank you, sucran, and walked out. Then we went into a couple of shops selling Indian clothes, and she tossed the stock about a bit and said, trashy stuff. No one tried to sell us anything particularly, except that one shopkeeper pulled out a cardboard box from under a counter, which seemed to have in it the kind of dresses that get left behind at jumble sales. He held one or two up and said, viscose very smart, 100 percent polyester, madam you love it. It was obvious we didn’t, and he wasn’t very interested anyway
—
his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs. Parsons told me not to smile at people too much, they might run away with the wrong idea. The souk smells quite a lot, and this seems an affectation in it. There are drains and street cleaners, so why should it smell?
After we had walked about aimlessly for half an hour, I noticed a few tables and chairs set out in front of a doorway, and just inside there was a very ancient decrepit man tending one of those rotating plastic bubbles of orange juice, the kind you get in British Home Stores cafeterias. Can we get a drink? I said. Daphne said, I wonder, or is it men only? She said, it’s not what you’d call a reliable café, I have got a drink here once or twice, but it depends if
the religious police have been around lately. I said, what, you mean we can’t sit down, because we’re women, we can’t have a drink? She looked around, and said better not risk it.
the religious police have been around lately. I said, what, you mean we can’t sit down, because we’re women, we can’t have a drink? She looked around, and said better not risk it.
I was enraged, because I was so hot, and my nonstick pans were so heavy, and I was so tired of carrying them
—
perhaps I shouldn’t have bought them, but every so often a woman must have a wild impulse, mustn’t she? I said, my God, it’s exactly like South Africa. Mrs. Parsons smiled. She seemed pleased. Why, so it is, she said.
—
perhaps I shouldn’t have bought them, but every so often a woman must have a wild impulse, mustn’t she? I said, my God, it’s exactly like South Africa. Mrs. Parsons smiled. She seemed pleased. Why, so it is, she said.
All the way home Mrs. Parsons talked about something she called Entertaining. I gather that I am expected to give dinner parties. I am not quite sure how I am going to do this. In Africa people would come round and you would give them what you had by you, which was exactly what they had in their fridge at home. There was no place for one-upmanship, and spag. bog. was on the whole considered quite exotic. But I gather that spag. bog. will not do here.
Mrs. Parsons goes to the British Wives’ coffee morning at the Embassy on the first Monday of every month. They do handicrafts and good works and have lectures with slides about the wonders of the coral reef. She talked about this, and also about her Magimix, which she says is the Rolls-Royce of food processors.
When I got home I took my box into the kitchen and unpacked it, and when I examined my pans closely and read the labels on the bottom, I found that they were not what I thought and not such a bargain after all, as the nonstick coating is made of something called Saudiflon. It was quite a blow. I lay on the bed for half an hour. I tried to compose some phrases about the souk which I could use in letters home. People talk so much about going to the souk that I feel I must be missing something. Perhaps I am blinkered.
No doubt.
The architect who had designed the Ministry’s new building had been given a commission to excel all the other strange and wonderful
buildings of modern Jeddah. The building was to defy, for scale and cunning, the green giant of the Petroline building, and the Ministry of Labour’s silver-and-chrome fantasy on Al Hamra Street. It was to exceed in strangeness, in denial of gravity, the flying tented roofs of the airport’s Haj Terminal; it was to induce wonder and reverence, even greater awe than the pure white 3-D triangle of the National Commercial Bank, which floats above Bagdadia lagoon.
buildings of modern Jeddah. The building was to defy, for scale and cunning, the green giant of the Petroline building, and the Ministry of Labour’s silver-and-chrome fantasy on Al Hamra Street. It was to exceed in strangeness, in denial of gravity, the flying tented roofs of the airport’s Haj Terminal; it was to induce wonder and reverence, even greater awe than the pure white 3-D triangle of the National Commercial Bank, which floats above Bagdadia lagoon.
The Ministerial HQ was to suggest to the beholder a miracle compound of all the elements, of earth, air, water, and fire; as if to convey the mysterious grandeur of the Ministry’s activities, the transcendent quality of its paper shuffling. It must be better than anything the West could do; but it must also be Islamic. Glorifying God was part of the brief.
In the architect’s imagination, the Ministry’s new building seemed lighter than the air around it; it was a shimmering iceberg, soaring above the hot pavements and the jungle of greenery that would root it to earth. At the time of Maghreb prayer, when the sun dipped into the ocean in a great flaring gaseous ball, its glass walls would melt and grow liquid. It would glow on the darkening skyline, a terror and a portent, a Koranic column of fire.
When this conception had to be put on paper, reduced to an artist’s impression of color and line, a more prosaic quality was sure to enter: still, the drawings in Andrew’s paper folder were highly impressive. Tiny figures in
thobes
and
ghutras
rode the escalators, which looped smoothly behind the glass walls. Giant scarlet flowers bloomed in the foreground, a crystal fountain scored the summer air, and above all, a fluffy cloud sailed through a wash of cerulean blue.
thobes
and
ghutras
rode the escalators, which looped smoothly behind the glass walls. Giant scarlet flowers bloomed in the foreground, a crystal fountain scored the summer air, and above all, a fluffy cloud sailed through a wash of cerulean blue.
When Frances went to see the building it was a humid, gray, and overcast day. The air was laden with dust; it was a Friday, and the site was deserted. The project had reached that stage in the life of a building when it presents a picture less of construction than destruction; her first impression was of a bomb site. The brick looked raw; a confusion of pointless-looking wires snaked out of holes in walls. Some parts seemed almost finished; others were just foundations.
“You have to try to imagine what it will look like when we get the marble cladding,” Andrew said. “It’s supposed to be white,
translucent, a sort of sheen, that’s the idea, so that it looks less solid than it is. But I haven’t seen the marble yet. I hope we don’t end up with the kind that looks like old paint with brown cracks. The kind, you know, that they’ve got on the Bugshan hospital.”
translucent, a sort of sheen, that’s the idea, so that it looks less solid than it is. But I haven’t seen the marble yet. I hope we don’t end up with the kind that looks like old paint with brown cracks. The kind, you know, that they’ve got on the Bugshan hospital.”
“Yes, I know.” Frances threaded her fingers into the mesh of the security fence. “I may be wrong, but isn’t there a lot more actual wall than in the artist’s impression? It seemed to be made entirely of glass.”
“Mm.” Andrew frowned. “There were certain impracticalities in the basic design.” He cheered up. “The mosque will be over there.”
“It’s going to have its own mosque?”
“Oh yes. Every public building needs one. And there’s going to be a heliport on top. At the center will be a courtyard, with a fountain rising out of a base shaped like an incense burner. There are sixty-four fountains in Jeddah, and this will be the biggest. If you come here—”
Her loose sandals full of grit and dust, she skittered toward him over the clawed-up ground. He touched her shoulder lightly, turning her to see. “If you look over there, that’s going to be the Minister’s private entrance.”
“Can’t he go through an ordinary door?”
“No, he doesn’t seem able to.”
“What about trees, are you having trees?”
“There are ten thousand flowering shrubs on order. They’re going to be planted out along the street frontage, approximately where we’re standing now. You don’t know what a treat it is, to work without the penny-pinching you get everywhere else. This architect, he’s an Egyptian, I did think at first that he’d got carried away, but they’re prepared to back it, they’ll put the resources in. You have this confidence, you see Fran, that when it’s done it’ll be absolutely right.”
“What about sculptures? Are you having sculptures?”
“Yes, there’s a big one planned for the south side. It’s a model of the solar system.”
“Working, is it?”
He squeezed her arm. “It’s going to be great. You’ll see. The architects in Cairo have ordered this scale model, about tabletop size—they’re having it built specially in Los Angeles. I can’t wait to have it, it should have been here before I came. Then, you see, I’ll be able to get it over to people what it’s going to look like.”
“I wish I could see it, when it comes. But I can’t go to your office, can I?”
“I’ll try to sneak you in, some weekend. During Friday prayers is the best time, when everybody’s at the mosque.”
What a lot this building meant to him. She looked up into his face. “It will be splendid. I’m sure.”
“Yes … but even so, I wish I’d been here a few years back, when it was really boom conditions. They’re not building so much now, and not the space-age stuff, all those novel shapes. It’s all socalled Islamic architecture now. There’s no challenge in it, anybody can build some piffling little archways round a courtyard. Now this Egyptian, he’s the right stuff; he’s got all the little nods to the religious element, but he’s got a sense of adventure as well.”
“Andrew—” she swiveled a glance over her shoulder, uneasy—“there’s a policeman across the road, he’s staring at us.”
“Yes, better go, I suppose.” Andrew seemed unable to tear his eyes from the stacked-up pipes, the piles of builders’ rubble.
“Do you know something, Fran—this will be the last of the best. Now the oil price is coming down they won’t build on this scale again. I should have come here years ago.”
He looked wistful as he said it, as if a golden age had passed. Construction sites were the pleasure gardens of his mind. As she picked her way over the ruts and gullies he put out a hand to help her, despite the policeman’s presence. There was a great ditch between the site and the road. She teetered over it across a plank; Andrew followed.
Frances Shore’s Diary: 15 Safar
The last of our air freight arrived today. There were things in the tea chests I’d forgotten I’d packed. Those straw baskets we used to
buy from boys on the streets, and those candlesticks from the pottery at Thamaga. And my soapstone tortoise, I’d missed him. I got him from a young boy who was selling them on the platform at Francistown station, when we were on our way to Victoria Falls. We went while the war was still on. The hotels were cheap. People on the sunset river cruise were getting shot out of the water.
buy from boys on the streets, and those candlesticks from the pottery at Thamaga. And my soapstone tortoise, I’d missed him. I got him from a young boy who was selling them on the platform at Francistown station, when we were on our way to Victoria Falls. We went while the war was still on. The hotels were cheap. People on the sunset river cruise were getting shot out of the water.
Unpacking our stuff gave me a funny feeling. I was imagining myself when I packed the crates, thinking about the exciting future, which is now the dull present. I found places for the things around the flat. I imagined they’d make it seem more like home. But they didn’t look right. They seemed to come from another life.
I have met a woman called Marion, who lives on Jeff Pollard’s compound. She’s the wife of one of the people at Mineral Resources, and they’ve got two little girls. They used to be in Zambia, so we have quite a lot to talk about, and I’ve found that I can actually walk round to her compound and get there before I expire from the heat or am accosted by curb-crawlers more than a few times. There are twelve houses in the compound, which is where we would have been living if things had gone otherwise. I wonder what it would have been like to have Marion for a neighbor. But chance has made our life quite different.
The houses are all prefabs, quite big, but shabby. They were built to last five years, but they’re now in their ninth. I’m sure that people at home think we lead glamorous lives here, bronzing ourselves by palm-fringed pools, and sipping “illicit liquor,” which always sounds more exciting than the normal kind, doesn’t it? There are not quite so many cockroaches at Marion’s place, but on the other hand their baths are held to the walls with sticky tape, and they have rats running about in their roofs.
Marion complains about the compound a lot, it’s falling down and they can’t get maintenance, etc., and they have distressing episodes with their drains, but she seems to be happy here in a way. She’s been in Jeddah for two years and perhaps when we have been around that long I’ll be used to it and see it in the same light. After all, she said yesterday, you can get anything you want in the shops. Now in Zambia there was no soap, we had no sugar
for months, the eggs were always stale, we had to eat stringy chicken all the time and some weeks we had to live on spaghetti. So if somebody locked you in your local Sainsbury’s, I asked her, would you be happy? She stared at me. She’s an easygoing woman, too lethargic to be offended. It was meant to be a joke, but I think something is happening to my sense of humor.
for months, the eggs were always stale, we had to eat stringy chicken all the time and some weeks we had to live on spaghetti. So if somebody locked you in your local Sainsbury’s, I asked her, would you be happy? She stared at me. She’s an easygoing woman, too lethargic to be offended. It was meant to be a joke, but I think something is happening to my sense of humor.
The Brits here are all earning far more than they would anywhere else in the world. They talk about how their shares are doing, and about their next leave, which is usually going to be a round-the-world trip by air, taking in really boring places like Miami and Hong Kong, where they can spend their time in shopping malls, just in case they get homesick for Jeddah. Some people, though, are parsimonious. They stash away everything they can and treat their time here like a prison sentence, or a stint in an up-country field camp. They intend to stay on until they get a certain sum of money in the bank, but as they get toward their target, they decide they need more. They want to buy a house but house prices are rising so fast. They’ve put their children in boarding school so that they could come abroad, but now the children are settled and it’s unfair to take them away, so they’ve got to stay abroad to pay the fees. They’ve put Mother in a nursing home because they weren’t around to look after her and now she’s got older and sicker and got ideas above her station. They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.
No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin
—
as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department. They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed
—
war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else.
—
as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department. They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed
—
war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else.
The Americans are different. Usually they don’t stay long. They don’t know how to behave anywhere at all.
Marion’s topic of conversation is her husband. Russel won’t take her shopping. He doesn’t think that’s a man’s job, bothering
with groceries. His office sends her a car once a week, for a couple of hours, but she has to account for everything she spends, and he’s not too keen on the idea of her shopping alone; she gets carried away, he says, and buys things like prawns. His idea is that they go out once a month and do everything, we’ve got a freezer, he says, so use it. But at the same time, he expects her to have everything on hand that he might want to eat. You’re doing nothing else all day, he says, so why can’t you organize the household? The other night he was going on, haven’t we got any beetroot, why isn’t there any beetroot?
with groceries. His office sends her a car once a week, for a couple of hours, but she has to account for everything she spends, and he’s not too keen on the idea of her shopping alone; she gets carried away, he says, and buys things like prawns. His idea is that they go out once a month and do everything, we’ve got a freezer, he says, so use it. But at the same time, he expects her to have everything on hand that he might want to eat. You’re doing nothing else all day, he says, so why can’t you organize the household? The other night he was going on, haven’t we got any beetroot, why isn’t there any beetroot?
Plus her Magimix has broken down.
When it gets a bit cooler, she says, we can sit outside and have coffee.
Men don’t come very well out of this diary. On the other hand, women don’t come very well out of it either. I said when I was writing before that the sexes live here in a state of deep mutual suspicion, but now I’m beginning to think it’s more like a state of mutual terror. I wasn’t sure before I came here if people were really executed for adultery. But since I’ve been here the Saudi Gazette has carried two or three reports of double executions. If you miss one, somebody will have cut it out, and will give you a photocopy. We’re fascinated, we can’t help it.
There was an execution in Mecca a little while ago. The woman of the house was having an affair with her driver. The husband got suspicious, and sacked him. The following night the woman let the driver into the house. Her husband was asleep. Her lover stabbed him to death. They put the body in a sack and tipped it down a well. Then they took off to Taif, posing as husband and wife. When they were caught they confessed. The man was publicly beheaded, for adultery and murder, and the woman was stoned to death for adultery.
I suppose there is no call to jeel cultural superiority. The murder, anyway, is the same as crimes in the West. The punishment is not so different from what we have had until recently. But what chills my blood is the pious last paragraph that the newspaper tags on. “While giving out details of the offense and punishment, the
Interior Minister made it clear that the government would vigorously implement the Sharia laws to maintain the security of the land and to deter criminals … The executions were carried out after Friday prayers.”
Interior Minister made it clear that the government would vigorously implement the Sharia laws to maintain the security of the land and to deter criminals … The executions were carried out after Friday prayers.”
I really must talk to Yasmin. When I read things like this it’s beyond me how people like Marion can say, “Oh, I don’t mind it here really”
—
because you see, there are these nightmare occurrences. Probably I spend too much time on my own in the flat, reading the newspapers and trying to work things out. When Andrew came home yesterday he told me something very disturbing about the empty flat upstairs. I don’t know if I should write it down. What if somebody gets hold of my diary, and reads it?
—
because you see, there are these nightmare occurrences. Probably I spend too much time on my own in the flat, reading the newspapers and trying to work things out. When Andrew came home yesterday he told me something very disturbing about the empty flat upstairs. I don’t know if I should write it down. What if somebody gets hold of my diary, and reads it?
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