Hilary Mantel - Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

Then I unpacked my cases. The customs men had churned everything into a knot, and I found that one of my shoes was missing. Only one, and there I was with the other shoe in my hand, new and unworn, and although I knew that my feelings were out of proportion I felt overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste, and I thought damn them, damn those customs men, who do they think they are, and I said out loud, damn, damn, damn. Then I put most of my clothes in the washing-machine and ironed the rest, and hung them in the wardrobes, and it was still only half-past eleven.

I walked around the flat, thinking dire kinds of thoughts, such as, here I am, here I stay. I went into the bathroom and there, sitting in the washbasin, was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen. I looked at it for some time in a kind of admiring revulsion. Then the thought came to me that there were other people in the building, other lives going on around mine. I heard the distant ring of a telephone, and footsteps in the flat above. It seemed to wake me out of a dream. I can’t go on like this, I thought, just wandering round aimlessly.

I went into the living-room. There aren’t, as I’d thought earlier, a dozen armchairs, but there are eight, scattered here and there, and two long overstuffed oatmeal-coloured sofas. When there are so many choices there doesn’t seem to be any reason for sitting in one chair and not another, so I stood there for a while thinking about it. Eventually I took the chair nearest the window, and sat in it rather stiffly, as though someone were watching me, and read the paperback I’d been reading on the flight. This made me feel as if in fact I hadn’t arrived at all, as if I were still in transit, with my passport in my handbag, waiting for it all to begin.

After a few minutes I got up and put on the overhead light, and I thought, that will always be necessary, how depressing, because I hate the lights on during the day. It was very quiet. I heard the prayer call at noon. It seemed strange not to speak to another person all morning, and yet to know that people were there, in the flat next door, and up above my head, and in the street beyond the wall, and that there was a whole country out there which I had not yet seen.

At about two o’clock the cockroach entered the room. It strolled across the huge expanse of carpet and began to climb up one of the curtains. Somehow I was quite glad to see it.

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 iqama. ’ He produced it from his pocket and tossed it to her. ‘I have to carry my driving licence too. If the police stop you and you haven’t got your documents they take you off to gaol 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 colours of skin?’

‘That would be the practical recommendation.’

‘Oh, there’s no colour 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 iqama 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 quarrelling, 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 neighbours.’

‘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.’