Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  She held the door open. The maid did not move. Frances pointed to a spot on the floor of the hall, where she wished her to stand; and she kept pointing, as you might command an animal, a dog you were training; and after a moment Sarsaparilla stepped inside.

  “Why were you going into Flat 4?” Frances said. “Who’s in there?” The woman shook her head, lost; and again that smell seeped out of her, out of her pores, out of her guts. “Who are you feeding? Who are you hiding in there?”

  The woman’s eyes were blank. She withdrew them from Frances, and looked at the walls.

  “Please tell me,” Frances said. “If you can.”

  But she had not understood. She had not understood anything. Only the parrot phrase: “From Madam.”

  Frances took the tray from her. This, no doubt, was the evening’s real food exchange. Frances dropped her head. She felt ashamed of herself. “Okay,” she said. “Go.”

  Sarsaparilla moved toward the door. Then she stopped, and looked back imploringly at Frances. She raised her arm, and pushed back a fold of her abaya, above her elbow. She showed Frances the inner side of her arm; tattooed there, in blue ink, was the name ELIZABETH.

  Andrew said, “I have to work out how to pay our Indian laborers. I have to find the money from somewhere.” He was pacing the living room, and what he was worrying about didn’t concern her at all. “I can’t repatriate them,” he said, “then bring them back when the next year’s budget comes through. But if I keep them here I have to feed them. Eric doesn’t seem to see that. I have to whistle up some funds from somewhere.”

  Frances said, “Come up to the roof with me.”

  “No.”

  “I want you to see.”

  “I am not interested in any trouble.” He spoke in distinct, obstinate syllables. “I am not interested in any trouble with our neighbors.”

  “There won’t be any. Just come with me.”

  “You don’t seem to have grasped, do you, even the fundamentals about living in this place?”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No, I think you’re overwrought.”

  “But can you explain what I’ve seen?”

  His look said, what you have seen is not reliable. It doesn’t need explanation. It doesn’t merit it. “Perhaps,” he said, with a half smile, “the girlfriend has herself delivered. Perhaps it’s some perversion they enjoy.”

  “The maid has a name,” she said. She told him.

  For a second he looked interested. He said, suddenly illuminating, “That’s a mission name. It must be. Do you remember, before we were married I had that housegirl called Matweshyego? And I couldn’t get my tongue round it, so I just called her ‘you.’ And then when she was leaving, she suddenly upped and said, ‘I have a mission name, sir. It is Rosie.’”

  The recollection seemed to give him pleasure. Is he just an idiot, Frances thought, is he just an unfeeling brute, or am I failing to make myself clear? Something is wrong. I cannot give you chapter and verse, but something is horribly wrong. Those days with the blinds down, the noise, the footsteps, and everyone free to come and go, except the women trapped in Dunroamin, with the doors locked, in the dark. But what she said was, “Yes, it must be a mission name.”

  “Poor lass. It sounds as if she’s been colonized before.”

  “Andrew,” she asked, “what does fear smell like? In my crime books it always says that fear has a smell.”

  “People put a lot of stuff in books, don’t they?” He considered, and said, “Books are irresponsible. They give people ideas.”

  The food that the maid had brought was a fish, baked whole. A crust of red spices lay on its hard blackish scales and spines, and it looked up at her with a small, dead, prehistoric eye.

  Frances should go to Andrew and apologize. She should go to him and say, I should not entertain such ludicrous and fantastic thoughts. And then they can get on with their lives.

  Next morning, early, she went up to the roof again. The crate had gone. The balcony had been swept clean.

  “I see Ramadhan’s begun,” Andrew said.

  “I thought it was two months away.”

  “Yes, but you know how back in the UK people complain that Christmas is getting earlier and earlier each year? It’s just the same with Ramadhan. It’s a time for an increase in holiness, you see. So all the khawwadjihs with their evil ways have to be given a bad time.”

  The religious police, in fact, are out in force. It is the time of year when the vigilantes take up young men in the shopping centers, and shear off their hair if they deem it too long. One year, women considered to be flaunting their jewelry were stopped in the street, and had it confiscated. Their husbands had to go to the police station to reclaim it—a process which possibly was not made pleasant for them.

  Western women, too, must be more cautious than usual. The religious police have cans of spray paint, with which they spray revealing garments, or exposed flesh—forearms for instance.

  “This nurse, from the Bugshan hospital,” Marion said, on the phone. “She was shopping at Sarawat. They sprayed her jeans with green paint.”

  “I’d kill someone,” Frances said. She actually thinks it. If she were molested on the street, she would physically fight, she thinks, she could not contain her rage, she would spit and scratch and disable and mutilate, and be damned to the consequences, because if she did not the humiliation would kill her, it would eat away at her like a cancer until she died.

  “Yes, she was furious,” Marion said. “Because these jeans, they were a new pair, first time on.”

  Russel had got out of jail. “He’ll be home in a few days,” Marion said. “Do you know what he says?” Her voice had the accents of satiated malice. “He says that while he was locked up he lost half a stone. I said to him, well Russel, that won’t do you any harm.”

  Daphne Parsons phoned. “Frances dear,” she said, “do be careful when you go out.”

  I can no longer be careful, Frances thought. Therefore perhaps I had better not go out.

  “The police are getting very strict about dress rules. There was a nurse, from the Baksh hospital, she was shopping at the Sahari Center. They sprayed her jeans with green paint.”

  “I bet they were a new pair,” Frances said. “First time on.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” Daphne said.

  There are times when the effort of avoiding something is greater than the effort of doing it. There are times when omission becomes a tyranny of effort, when the task of diverting the mind becomes physically exhausting. Frances was involved, now, in not-thinking, in not-speculating, and the effort made her clench her jaw, made her shoulders stiffen, and made the muscles rigid at the back of her neck.

  The crate couldn’t fly down from the balcony. They can’t have brought up a crane. It must be inside the flat. It can’t go through the internal doors. It can’t go through the front door. So it must be in the living room above her head. Unless it has been taken apart again. And if it has, where are its contents?

  Don’t think like this. There is no reason to. Andrew says she has been obsessed with the empty flat ever since they moved in. It indicates some lack of balance in her nature.

  Whenever she thinks about the crate, whenever she thinks about its contents, a single image comes to her mind: she remembers the laundryman, high on the balcony at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street; the night laundryman, holding up a thobe to the light, with its splayed white arms like a flattened corpse; and twisting it, and folding it, to be packed away.

  In the toils of not-imagining, time drips by. It is like the early days on Ghazzah Street. But nevertheless time is passing. It is Tuesday, 21 Jamadi al-thani, 12 March in the real world: eleven o’clock in the morning. The doorbell rings. A little voice, pleasant but anxious, says: “Do please let me in, Mrs. Shore, before someone sees me.”

  Her visitor was Shabana, Yasmin’s friend, whom she had met at Raji’s party. “You do remember me,” Shabana said. “I am so gl
ad. I do hope I am not intruding on you.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything. Coffee?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “A car came for Yasmin. I think she’s gone shopping.”

  “Yes, I was hoping so. It is you I have come to see. And I would be so happy if you would not tell her I have been here.”

  Frances went into the kitchen to make the coffee. Shabana did not follow her, as one of her own friends would have done; instead she took an armchair, and was sitting, her plump hands in her lap, when Frances returned. “I am worried about Yasmin,” she said at once. “She speaks of you as her friend, and that is why I thought we might talk.”

  “I’m worried about her too.”

  “I have known her for quite a while now. These days she seems, so … uncharacteristic … I don’t know.”

  “She’s miserable. It’s her mother-in-law. She came weeks ago and she doesn’t show any signs of going.”

  “This is part of it, no doubt.”

  “She’s run off her feet.” Frances found herself indignant. It is a false indignation, her heart warned her, grafted on to graver circumstances more deserving of it; but it seemed real, it sounded real, it was partly real. “She’s exhausted from pandering to that old woman’s whims. She’s worried about Selim. The mother-in-law, she’s put it into her head that there’s something wrong with him.”

  “Yes, but you must understand,” Shabana said delicately, “that we cannot interfere. This is the way things are. One day she will do it to her own daughter-in-law.”

  Shabana spooned sugar into her coffee; she poured in cream. “When I was first a bride,” she said, “I cried every night for a month. Mohammad had been chosen for me, he was everything my family desired, but somehow, you know, I was romantic, and he is not a handsome man, he did not meet my expectations. My head was full of film stars, you see. I thought he should bring me flowers and perfume, and talk to me,” she gave a little laugh, “of love. When he did not, I thought he was a monster of cruelty and neglect. I complained to my mother about my unhappiness. But she said, When I was a bride, I cried every night for a year.”

  That is an improving fable, Frances thought. “And are you happy now?”

  “Oh, I have accommodated. Yasmin, I think, was always more down-to-earth.”

  “I don’t think, though, that she is happy with Raji.”

  “They seem at odds.” Shabana put down her cup, and sat twisting one of her heavy gold rings around her finger. “Has she told you why?”

  “My neighbor, Samira, says she prays too much. But I can hardly think that is the reason.”

  “Has she spoken to you about the veil?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.”

  “The idea is repugnant to you.” Shabana sighed. “Yes, I am glad we are having this talk. I shouldn’t like you to make things worse for her, by lack of understanding.”

  “You don’t think, do you,” Frances said, “you have never thought, have you … that Yasmin might be involved with another man?”

  “God forbid!” Shabana said. “You have no evidence of that, surely?”

  “No. Only that one day she seemed to be waiting for someone … I did think it at one time. But I had no evidence. And I don’t think it now. I imagine she was waiting for the person … for some other reason.”

  “Her troubles are not of that nature, thank heaven.”

  “Would it be the worst thing in the world?”

  “You know the law here,” Shabana said drily. “Westerners are always very well informed about it.”

  “Okay,” Frances said. “I’m sorry. It’s a red herring.”

  Politely, Shabana raised her eyebrows. “A false clue,” Frances said. “I thought she had a guilty secret, and we usually think those are to do with sex. But there are other kinds.”

  She leaned forward and refilled Shabana’s cup. The movement seemed dreamlike, endlessly repeatable. She had done it for Yasmin, for Samira; six months of it. Pouring coffee, she thought, and passing it through the bars of our respective cages.

  “I am not sure she has guilt,” Shabana said. “It is rather the other way. You see, our religion is not a religion of excess, Mrs. Shore … may I call you Frances? It is a religion for practical men and women. Muhammad, after all, was a soldier and a ruler, as well as a man of God. But in some cases, let us say, in Raji’s case, one may become a little too practical. Raji is a businessman at heart. He flies here and he flies there. He spends time in London. He takes trips to New York. He prays and fasts, and Allah really hasn’t asked us to do any more—but when he is not in the Kingdom, who knows? He is a sociable fellow. And the Minister, his boss, he is just another of the same type.”

  “I gather from what Andrew says that the Minister isn’t liked by everyone in the royal family.”

  “That would be correct. He is a man who is fond of compromises. So is Raji, too. That is why Yasmin suspects he is not a very moral creature.”

  Raji drinks and eyes up other women, Frances thought. Who am I to shop him to his wife’s friend? Shabana, quite possibly, is Yasmin’s spy.

  The next moment she thought, that is ridiculous. I am far gone. I am paranoid. It has set in with me—Phase Three—just as the Indian psychiatrist said it would. She said, “When I came here I had some talks with Yasmin about Islam. She was quite relaxed about it. I thought she was a liberal. But she was only sugaring the pill for me. She is really a fundamentalist. Would that be the word?”

  Shabana hesitated. She smoothed the black folds of her abaya, which she had laid over the arm of her chair. “We must be clear,” she said. “When we are talking about fundamentalism we are not talking about some sect within Islam, as you Christians, I know, have your different churches. It is true, of course, that there are differences between Muslims, throughout the world, but fundamentalism transcends these. You must think, Frances, what is the meaning of the word? We are thinking of what is basic, of what is the essence of Islam.”

  “I understand what the word means.”

  “Of course you do, I don’t mean to patronize you. But it is not a question of choosing between doctrines, or feeling that one should have less of something, or more of something … It is a matter of being true to the essence. Things like the veil are only a symbol.”

  “A symbol can be a very powerful thing.”

  “That is quite true. And I said that it was a symbol, I did not say that it was a side issue. To Westerners the veil seems ridiculous, but we cannot just fall in with your prejudices. It is simply not possible for us to look at the Western world, to look at other religions, and say, yes please, we will have this from you, we will have this, but we don’t want that. We cannot take your bits and pieces and fit them into Islam. You see, everything that you hold—what is it the Americans say?—that you hold self-evident … that democracy is good, that liberalism is good in itself … we have never taken these ideas as naturally true.”

  “They’re not part of your mental furniture.”

  “Yes, that is right. You grow up with them, we do not. That is why it is so very difficult for people like me, who were educated in the West, and for people like Raji, leading his kind of life. Even those things that you are quite sure are virtues—let us say, tolerance—they are not necessarily virtues for us.”

  “I understand that. I’m never sure myself if tolerance is a good thing. There are some things that are intolerable.”

  “You think, no doubt, that you have seen some of them in the Kingdom.”

  “I’m not one of those people who think that when you go to a foreign country you must leave your judgment at home.”

  “And you would impose your judgment on us?”

  “Probably. If I could.”

  Shabana smiled slightly. “It is people like you, Frances, who led the Crusades.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “And you and Yasmin have an instinctive sympathy, I suspect.”

  “That’
s why we’ve become friends.”

  Watching her, Shabana played with her bracelets. She teased each one with her finger and thumb, pushing it a fraction of an inch along her arm, and letting it fall back, with a little clink of gold against gold. I hope, Frances thought, that the religious police don’t spot you on your way home.

  “But I am getting diverted,” Shabana said. “Their marriage—Raji and Yasmin—was a very suitable one of course. He was a very good catch for her. But this is what may happen, in the very best arranged of marriages, that the two partners don’t have this sympathy … they may seem to agree on most things, but they don’t have just the same idea of how to manage life.”

  “Andrew and I are like that.”

  “You have found it?”

  “Yes, we tackle things differently. He waits, and I act.”

  “Then you may say he is at danger of being crushed by circumstances, but you, Frances, are at danger of collisions. If I may say … do be careful. This is not a good country for people who act.”

  “Which sort of person are you?”

  “Oh, I am your sort. That is why I came here today. I thought, Yasmin is my friend, she is unhappy, I will talk with her other friend, and maybe between us we will explain the situation.”

  “And do you think that we have?”

  “I think we may have explained one or two other things.”

  “There isn’t much we can do to help.”

  “I have thought of going to Raji, to ask him to accept that she may wear the veil, if that is what she feels she must do. But you see, Raji’s Minister is one of the modern faction. He is a man of progress.”

  “It would be a political embarrassment for Raji.”

  “Certainly. You see, this is not a good time for the Saudis. They are not so rich as they were, and this causes squabbling. Some of the senior princes are in poor health, this is no secret. People are wondering, which way is the country going to go? Yasmin is not alone in her opinions. I think she may despise her husband, because, you are aware, all the Westerners know Raji. He has done deals with them. He is a kind of symbol in himself.”