Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s not waste time.”

  In the tiny office of the man in charge of the mortuary, there were four or five hangers-on whose function was uncertain; perhaps they were his cousins, or merely his cronies. Eric and Andrew seemed to take it for granted that these men should be there, leaning on the walls, reading the newspapers, smoking and chattering. They stood in the doorway, keeping Frances blocked from view with their shoulders, and waiting for some attention to come their way.

  It was a while before the man in charge extricated himself, came out from behind his untidy desk, and held some conversation with Hasan. He was desultory, and scratched his head, and he seemed to say, though she could not follow any of his Arabic, that he did not know if what they wanted could be done. Then at last it seemed that Hasan uttered certain unspecified threats, which he indicated came from the khawwadjihs, and which he only translated; and at this the little man, who was jaundiced and paunchy, became agitated, and gave vent to a stream of invective, and a series of operatic gestures; his cronies put down their newspapers, and stood up straighter around the walls, and looked vaguely interested and alert. Hasan said, “He tells you this body cannot be released until he has the paperwork. He tells you he has been brought two bodies this morning and that is enough. But,” Hasan added surprisingly, “he says he can do what you ask.”

  They followed him out of his office, and through a corridor. Two hospital trolleys were parked at an angle, their wheels askew, and on them were bundled the two burdensome corpses to which the man had referred: white sheets covered them entirely, knotted casually above their heads. They turned into a long cold room that was itself like a corridor, with walls of steel, and a blue-burning striplight overhead. The man made a fussy gesture, to hurry them on; then briefly slid open the mortuary drawer, and showed them Fairfax’s dead face. There was no error, no mistake in identity, and for all the inexpert eye could tell, he had died just as the police had given out. The head seemed twisted on the spinal column, the face was clamped, jaundiced, marked by a trickle of black blood; the expression was meaningless.

  They went outside. A security guard with a rifle lounged against Eric’s car, and as they came toward it he shifted unwillingly, his eyes moving above the bandanna he wore. “It is a quarantine hospital,” Hasan explained. “That is why the guards. The man says he will fix up the body to send it to its home, he says he is the best for doing that in the whole of the Kingdom.”

  “So that is what he was doing,” Frances said. “Boasting.”

  She thought of the two corpses in their knotted sheets. She had passed them with scarcely a look; they were not her affair. She felt cold, and strange, and speechless, and removed from what was happening about her. Once again Eric put his hand on her arm; perhaps he wondered if she might faint, or hoped she might, or do something else to discredit herself. But no, he was trying to get her attention; and she realized that he had been talking to Andrew, that he had begun some narration whose beginning she would never hear. “ … with so much going on,” Eric said, “we will never sort out the facts from the rumors, even if it were our affair, and I only tell you because you are the neighbors, you are in some sense caught up in it.”

  “Is Yasmin dead?” she said.

  Eric turned to her, surprised. “Oh, no, thank God, nothing like that. Didn’t you hear me, weren’t you listening? She tried to leave the country. They stopped her at the airport. I was there this morning and I saw it with my own eyes, that’s how I know, and Hasan here, he caught the drift … She had a ticket for Amman, but they think she was trying to pick up a connection from there to Tehran. The security men weren’t happy, she—well, obviously she didn’t have permission to travel from her husband. And the next thing was the police turned up, and took her away.”

  “With your own eyes,” Frances said. “You saw it with your own eyes. Some people’s eyes are better than others, aren’t they? They have higher status. They believe what they see.”

  She leaned against their car, under the scrutiny of the armed guard, and she felt the slow heat move in the metal at her back, like a sulky fire. I shall never see Yasmin again, she thought. The woman’s end was part of the woman’s world; information was received at second hand, by courtesy, through the mouth of one of the city’s male keepers. “Did you know her?” she said. “I mean, did you recognize her?”

  “Yes. They pulled off her veil.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “They took her away.”

  “I wish I had been there.” Frances raised a hand and pushed her hair from her forehead. “I wish I had come with you to the airport. Then I would have seen it myself.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  Andrew said softly, “You have no choice.”

  “What will happen to her?”

  “God knows,” Eric said. “Shouldn’t think we ever will. People disappear in this place, don’t they? I expect they’ll want to keep her until they find out the ramifications of it. I shouldn’t think her government will raise a fuss, if the Saudis tell them that she was mixed up in a plot to kill her husband.” He said, musingly, “Daphne always said that they didn’t get on. Seems a bit extreme, wouldn’t you say? Most of Jeddah would be dead, wouldn’t it, if we all went in for violence against our spouse?”

  “I don’t think you quite understand,” Frances said. “It wasn’t personal. Or not only a personal thing. It was a matter of ideals.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “He wasn’t just a man, he wasn’t just her husband. It was what he represented.”

  Eric said, mystified, not hostile, “Was it some feminist thing?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Or was it religious?”

  “Partly.” She shifted away from the car and straightened up. She took a cotton scarf out of her pocket and slowly shook it out. “My hair is full of dust, I should have done this before.” She folded the scarf into a triangle and flipped it over her head, knotting it firmly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes appeared larger, her features drawn. “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps she just wanted to kill someone. Perhaps she just wanted to see them bleed.”

  Eric looked down at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I have to concede it’s quite possible that there have been certain comings and goings at your place. But if the police should come bothering you, of course you know nothing.”

  “Yes, I’ve grasped the point. I know the drill.” She thought, if I had been there, if I had gone to the airport with Eric, there would have been nothing I could have done for her. I could not have helped her. Now I have to think of my own life. What she had heard from Eric did not surprise her. The possibilities in the air of Dunroamin—those wraiths of violence and despair—had taken on flesh at last. She would never know more than she knew now; would never know, for instance, the name of the man who had been crated up alive. What had he done? What had he known? Someone—a torturer, perhaps—would find out the whole of it. But what’s one body, more or less? Life is cheap enough. Islam hurries to inter the dead; but the story is not over. Allah has something reserved for corpses, whose nervous system, we must presume, remains intact; predicated on one’s misdeeds in life, it is known to the writers of the religious columns as “torment in the grave.”

  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, aband
oned, 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.