Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page B

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