Chapter 29: A Reporter Visits

It was cooler in Kobekistan in the autumn, so that was when Tiggs Boush managed to get her editor to pull some strings in the State Department and arrange for the embassy in Kobek to have her allowed in to the country, ostensibly as the significant other of one of the Second Secretaries, since no visitor's visa was forthcoming. She was totally enraged about the treatment of women in Kobekistan even before she arrived, and had already written an exposé of the "shocking lack of civil liberty" in the country. When she was made to wear an abaya on the journey from the airport to the embassy she became incandescent. On learning that she could not go out in the streets of Kobek to interview people at all, even under an abaya, her wrath knew no bounds.

She immediately demanded to see the Ambassador, whom she tried to bully into arranging the affairs of the Embassy in such a way as to enable her to visit the Emir and interview him, preferably on camera. She might have had more success had she not approached the Ambassador with the firm conviction that he was as decadent in his approach to women as she assumed the Emir was; indeed he was obviously dedicated to demeaning and abusing women, after all he was a man. Her other assumption, that the most important facet of his duties was to meet every request of a newspaper reporter no matter how trivial, did not help.

Eventually, mostly by shouting and threatening, she persuaded 'her' Second Secretary in the Embassy to lend her some men's clothes and she cut her own hair, expecting that she could pass for a man. With her figure that seemed very unlikely to the Embassy staff, but out she went, ignoring all advice, and waltzed up to the Golden Palace demanding to see the Emir. Much to her surprise she was conducted very cordially to a large room full of men, with a small throne on a dais in the middle. Suddenly everyone knelt on the floor as a young man walked through the room and sat on the throne. Everyone except Tiggs that is.

"Come here," said the young man, and Tiggs walked over to the throne.

"When I heard that there was a woman trying to pretend she was a man, I thought it must be the American journalist who had herself smuggled into the country under false papers," remarked the Emir, "That must have been difficult to achieve. What do you want?"

Before she could answer he interrupted and said, "Just a moment, please."

Then he nodded pointedly at a Major Domo who struck the ground with his mace and everyone stood up.

"Go on."

"I want to interview some women on the repression they suffer in this country," she said.

"Don't you want to ask me anything?" inquired the Emir, "I rather thought you knew all about the Kobekistani repression of women already. Last month's edition of your magazine carried a scathing article about it under your by-line."

"Well, yes, but I expect to find that it is worse than even I imagined. I will want to ask you some very hard questions, but I want to see the women first."

"Now is not the time for us to talk. This is a public audience and many of these people have serious business with me. If you will go with the large fat man over there, he will take you to meet some of my wives, and my mother who is English. We can talk later."

Not waiting for her, the fat man waddled from the room and Tiggs found it difficult to keep up with him along a series of ornate corridors. Finally he passed through a pair of double doors into a room which was light and airy, though the only glass was the ceiling. The walls were covered in ornate mosaics depicting domestic scenes. When Tiggs looked a little more closely at the nearest, she realised it showed a woman being scourged with a multi-tailed whip. The artist had lovingly depicted the scars on her back and there were even tiny tesserae in blood red spattered in the floor of the room below the life-size picture.

"What is this place?" she demanded.

"It is the ante-room of the harem of the Golden Palace," replied the Chief Eunuch, "and my Master the Emir commanded that you be allowed to speak with his women in here. Here you will learn all you wish to know about the life of women in Kobekistan."

Under his breath he added, in Arabic, And perhaps more.~"