The Last Cut (13 page)

He caught sight of Selim on the other side of the cone, chatting to some heavily hennaed peanut sellers who were cackling loudly at his jokes. He abandoned them when he saw Owen and came across to him.

‘Effendi,’ he said, ‘they have been here.’

‘Who?’

‘The gravediggers. They said they wanted to look the dam over. It was in case the Jews dropped out.’

‘Did you let them?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t let them get too close. I said—you’ll like this, Effendi, it’s a good one—I said, “my boss will bite your ass”. And they said: “Oh, yes; and who’s your boss, then?” And I said—this is it, Effendi—I said: “It’s the Lizard Man!” And they said: “What the hell’s he got to do with it?” And I said: “He’s been doing what you’ve just been doing: looking the job over.” Well, they didn’t like the sound of that. And then they asked, how did I know? And I said: “He was sniffing around the other night and left his mark.” And they didn’t like the sound of that, either. “So, my little petals,” I said, “you’d better watch your butts if he’s taking an interest in proceedings this time!” And they spoke big, and said he wasn’t the only one who was taking an interest in proceedings this time, and they weren’t the ones who needed to watch out. But, Effendi, I could see that they were worried. And, besides, Effendi, the biggest of them is but a flea compared with me.’

‘Suppose,’ said Zeinab, ‘she
had
died as a consequence of the circumcision: what would you have done then?’

Mahmoud shifted in his chair uneasily.

‘The issue doesn’t arise,’ he said.

‘But it must arise all the time,’ objected Zeinab. ‘Circumcision of women is common in the poor quarters; and in those conditions it must often go wrong.’

‘The practice is not against the law,’ said Mahmoud.

‘So you would do nothing?’

‘I would look at the circumstances,’ said Mahmoud, ‘to see if a legal issue arose.’

‘Ah, so it could arise?’

Owen could see that Mahmoud was in for a hard time of it. He had arranged the meeting at Zeinab’s request. Women did not ask for meetings with men and Mahmoud would have been paralysed if she had. He found talking to Zeinab difficult enough as it was. Not only was she a woman, she was the daughter of a Pasha; and not only was she the daughter of a Pasha, she was the daughter of a particularly free-thinking one, brought up to converse with a freedom that Mahmoud found shocking.

This business of circumcision, for instance, was something a woman should never discuss with a man, not unless he was her husband. True, Owen was here, but then he wasn’t, strictly speaking, Zeinab’s husband. Tormented, he cast a despairing look at Owen.

‘Presumably, there could be issues of negligence,’ said Owen.

Mahmoud seized on this with relief. On female circumcision he could think of nothing he could with propriety say; on legal issues he could talk forever. He launched into a highly technical, safely logical explanation.

‘You surely don’t expect a woman in the Gamaliya to understand all this?’ said Zeinab.

‘Well, no. She would have to consult a lawyer.’

‘You, for instance.’

‘Well—’

The thought filled him with panic. On other occasions Zeinab would have enjoyed tormenting him. Today, however, she was concentrating on the law, not the lawyer.

‘I think trying to find a remedy that way is no good,’ she said. ‘It’s too complicated. It’s the practice itself that’s got to be attacked.’

There was a little silence.

‘I think I’m coming to agree with you,’ said Mahmoud, surprisingly.

‘You are?’

Zeinab looked at him with favour.

‘The trouble is,’ said Mahmoud, with a slight shrug. ‘I don’t see how it is to be done.’

‘Education,’ said Owen, ‘of women.’

‘Men,’ said Zeinab.

‘Legislation would, of course, be the answer,’ said Mahmoud. He looked at Zeinab. ‘Perhaps your father—?’

‘Suicide,’ said Zeinab firmly. ‘Political suicide. That’s how he would see it. In any case, it’s no good hoping for anything from the old guard. But perhaps the Nationalists—?’

She looked at Mahmoud.

‘Not on a thing like this,’ said Mahmoud unhappily. ‘Not yet, at any rate.’

They both looked at Owen.

‘The Government?’

‘I don’t think the Khedive—’

‘The British,’ said Zeinab, whose knowledge of the political situation, though sketchy, was realistic.

‘I don’t think we would interfere with local practice on a thing like this,’ said Owen.

‘You interfere with the women,’ said Zeinab nastily.

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‘But,’ said Mahmoud, ‘it wasn’t circumcision, it was garotting.’

He and Owen were lingering over their coffee, Zeinab had departed for art galleries unknown, and Mahmoud was bringing Owen up to date with where he had got to on the Leila killing.

The key information from his point of view was that, according to the stall-holder’s wife, Leila had left the
souk
with a man who appeared to be known to her. Now there were not many men she could have known, or should have known, added Mahmoud primly. It was the other side of the seclusion of Islamic women.

‘They are not all like Zeinab,’ said Mahmoud, getting, perhaps, his own back.

Leila came from a poor household and did the shopping herself so she was known to such people as the stall-holders in the
souk
, although that did not mean that they had ever seen her face. Figure, they knew, and voice, and some of their wives had been to her house where they might have seen her unveiled; and some of the older people remembered seeing her face when she was a little girl and played with the children on the rubble heaps among the derelict houses.

‘She had a sweet nature,’ they said.

And that was the general opinion of the quarter. Timid and retiring she might have been, invisible she might have thought herself behind the long black veil, but everyone seemed to have known her. And the one thing they were all agreed on was that she was certainly not a loose woman.

‘Her?’ scoffed one of the women. ‘She was that proper she never even looked at a man.’

And yet she had been seen with one, appeared to have gone off with one.

‘Well, if she did, you can be sure there was nothing wrong with it!’ declared a woman, one of a group assembled by Um Fattouha.

‘She went with the boy,’ Mahmoud had pointed out. Smiles all round. Apparently that did not count. The Gamaliya ladies were romantics at heart.

‘They were like babes!’ they said.

‘I doubt if they ever got as far as holding hands.’

‘You all knew about it?’ said Mahmoud, surprised.

‘We weren’t born yesterday!’

‘You could see it in his face!’

‘They used to wait for each other.’

‘She was that put out one day when he didn’t come. And then when he arrived all huffing and puffing, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Made him walk behind her.’

Which was not the way it usually was.

‘Ah, but then she felt sorry for him, didn’t she?’

‘Within about two yards!’

They all burst out laughing. And they dismissed out of hand any possibility that Suleiman could have been the attacker.

‘It’s not in him!’

Mahmoud was not so sure.

Or, at any rate, he was not ruling it out. Because if it was not Suleiman, who else could it have been?

‘However unlikely,’ he said, ‘you have to look at all the men she knew.’

And so he had come to her father.

First, though, he had scrupulously checked for others. Had she uncles? Cousins?

‘Not up here,’ they said. ‘Back in the village, maybe. But they never come up here.’

‘Sometimes they do,’ someone objected, ‘I remember a cousin once.’

‘Ah, but he was up here to do his corvee. He didn’t come up to see them especially.’

Men from the village did drop in from time to time if they happened to be in Cairo. Usually it was when they came up to do their annual duties maintaining the Nile banks and dams. It wasn’t usually the same person, however, just whoever happened to be up that year from the village, bringing the villagers’ greetings and a few presents.

‘There were no regular visitors?’

Not that they remembered.

Friends? What about other friends?

‘Friends?’ said one of the women. ‘That old bastard never had any!’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Owen, sipping his coffee. ‘What about Fatima’s husband? He and Ali Khedri seem to hang around together.’

‘I asked about him,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Fatima said that in fact they weren’t very close.’

‘Close enough for them to take Leila in when her father threw her out,’ said Owen.

‘That was her doing, not his. She had known Leila since she was a child. But the two men hadn’t been very close. It was only in the past year that they’d been getting together. She rather agreed with the others: Ali Khedri didn’t have friends.

‘Not even among the water-carriers?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘They’re a tight-knit group over in the Gamaliya,’ said Owen.

‘Yes, but the others don’t like him. They say he’s too bitter.’ A surely devil,’ one of the women had called him.

‘He was better before his wife died.’

‘She was a saint; and Leila took after her.’

‘Never a cross word!’

‘He could have done with a few. Particularly after his wife died. The way he treated that girl!’

‘Yes, but he treated everyone like that.’

‘It got so that people didn’t like going to his house.’

‘What about when people did go to his house?’ asked Mahmoud. ‘Did they see Leila?’

‘They wouldn’t have done. He was very strict. He always used to send her out. They only had the one room so she used to have to go out into the yard.’

‘There was no one, then, who might have had his eye on her?’

‘They didn’t get the chance.’

‘Omar Fayoum?’

The women looked at each other.

‘I don’t know how he came to light on her. Maybe he’d seen her about in the streets. Bringing her father’s food. I’ll bet he liked that! Thought that was the kind of girl he wanted!’

Patiently Mahmoud had worked through all the men she might have known. And in the end he was left with the father.

‘He had just quarrelled with her,’ Mahmoud pointed out. ‘Badly enough to throw her out of his house. He had built a lot on her. And then it had all collapsed. He blamed her.’

‘Well, yes, but—’

‘I know. But most murders occur within the family. And this wasn’t a particularly good family Anyway, I checked his movements that night. Fatima had gone to see him when Leila had not come back, and she had found him in. We know that because there are independent witnesses. They heard them quarrelling. But that was probably after the assault. What about earlier in the evening?’

Mahmoud had asked Ali Khedri that.

‘What business is it of yours?’ Ali Khedri had said truculently.

Mahmoud had told him.

Grudgingly Ali Khedri had told him that he had finished his water-carrying rounds early that day and gone to help Omar

Fayoum’s driver to unharness the horse. They had stayed for a while, chatting.

‘How long?’ asked Mahmoud.

‘How do I know?’

About a couple of hours, he had finally acknowledged.

‘Who was there?’

Omar Fayoum, the cart driver, Ahmed Uthman and one or two others.

When had he left?

When it began to get dark; which would have put it at just about the time that Leila was setting out for the
souk
.

‘Did you leave with anyone?’

Ahmed Uthman; but then they had parted, Ahmed to his house, Ali Khedri to his.

‘Ahmed Uthman confirms that,’ said Mahmoud. ‘But what of course we don’t know is what happened after they separated.’

According to Ali Khedri, he had stayed at home. He had made himself some supper. He had not gone out. No one had called; until that silly bitch Fatima had burst in with all her shouting.

‘I’ve had people out checking if anyone saw him that night,’ said Mahmoud. ‘So far without success.’

‘Why are you asking me these questions?’ Ali Khedri had shouted in the end.

‘You attacked one,’ Mahmoud had said. ‘Might you not have attacked another?’

‘My own daughter?’

‘From the way you have spoken of her,’ said Mahmoud,

C    5

yes.

‘It’s not me you want to be talking to,’ Ali Khedri had shouted. ‘It’s that boy!’

It was the last time—or so everyone present hoped—that they would have to meet, the last occasion, as McPhee, with a sense of history, pointed out, on which there would actually be a meeting of the Cut Committee.

‘When will they start filling in the canal?’ asked the Kadi. ‘Oh, not for some months yet,’ said the Minister. ‘We’re still not quite sure of the money.’

‘Surely some has been set aside?’ said Paul.

‘Yes, but there’s talk of raiding it. To pay for the new Manufiya Regulator, you know.’

‘Is there any chance of the whole thing being put off?’ asked the Kadi. ‘At least for another year? That would be very popular.’

‘I doubt it,’ said the Minister. ‘The contracts have been let.’ They had reviewed the arrangements for the day. It would start early. During the night the workmen would have been busy cutting away the dam until only the thickness of a foot was left. At sunrise the Kadi’s barge would appear and the Kadi would read a proclamation.

‘The usual turgid stuff, I’m afraid,’ said the Kadi.

Then a boat would be pushed through the remaining earth wall.

‘Not mine, I hope?’ said the Kadi anxiously.

‘No, a small one,’ said McPhee, ‘with an officer inside it.’

‘Stout fellow!’ murmured the Kadi, relieved.

‘Then the water will pour through and demolish “The Bride”.’

‘That will be all right, will it? I mean, it will be demolished?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘We wouldn’t want anything to go wrong. The Bride’s been a bit unfortunate this year.’

‘Look,’ said McPhee, ‘they’ve been doing this for nearly two thousand years.’

‘Just making sure.’

‘What about the gold?’ said McPhee.

‘Gold?’

‘They used to distribute purses of gold among the crowd.’

‘Well, they’re not going to this time!’ said Paul. ‘The treasury would have a fit.’

‘What about policing?’ asked Garvin.

‘All ready, sir,’ said McPhee. ‘I’ve got extra men out this time. In view of—well, you know.’

‘What about that?’ asked Paul. ‘Where have we got to over who is going to do the actual Cut?’

‘Still dangling. The Jews are still making up their minds about whether they’re prepared to do it but for no extra money. And the Muslim gravediggers are still hoping they’ll say no.’

‘Well, they’ll have to make up their minds tomorrow evening.’

‘That’s when we can expect trouble,’ said Owen.

‘We’ll be ready for them,’ promised McPhee, grim-faced, however.

Actually, I’ve got a suggestion,’ said Owen.

‘So long as it doesn’t cost money,’ said the Minister.

‘Well, it needn’t cost any extra money. It’s more a question of cost displacement.’

‘My God!’ said Paul. ‘He’s talking like an accountant! And I thought he was a friend of mine!’

‘It was your saying that they might raid the money to pay for the regulator that gave me the idea,’ said Owen, turning to the Minister.

‘Look,’ said the Minister, ‘one raid is enough!’

‘No, no. That wasn’t the idea. The thing is, the Canal is going to have to be filled in. And they’re going to have to pay people to do that. Well, why shouldn’t we promise that work to the Jews and the gravediggers? On condition that they don’t cause trouble tomorrow? The work will have to be done by someone, won’t it?’

‘I quite like this idea,’ said Paul.

‘It would get us off the hook,’ said Garvin.

‘Wouldn’t it be merely postponing trouble?’ asked the Kadi. ‘I mean, they’re still going to find it difficult to work together.’

‘They wouldn’t need to work together,’ said Owen. ‘The Jews could start at one end, the Muslim gravediggers from the other.’

‘I think this is a brilliant idea!’ cried the Kadi. ‘We could make it a race!’

‘First to get there gets a bonus, you mean?’ asked the Minister.

‘I was thinking of honour and personal satisfaction,’ said the Kadi reprovingly.

‘I was thinking that if they got to the middle at different times, they need never actually meet,’ said Owen. ‘And then there would be no trouble.’

‘You know,’ said Paul, ‘this suggestion has considerable merit.’

‘It is a suggestion,’ said the Kadi, admiring, ‘worthy of the Mamur Zapt.’

‘Right, then,’ said Paul briskly. ‘That settled? Anything else?’

‘Well, there’s the Lizard Man,’ said the Kadi.

‘Yes,’ said the Minister. ‘There’s the Lizard Man.’

‘Lizard Man?’ said Paul.

Active around “The Bride of the Nile”, apparently.’

‘I’ve got a guard on,’ said McPhee.

‘Against the Lizard Man?’ said Paul.

‘I hope there’s going to be no diversion of resources away from the dams,’ said the Minister. ‘Guards are needed there, too, you know.’

‘I thought the chap was in prison?’

‘No, no. Against the Lizard Man.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Paul, pulling himself together; ‘we’ve got guards everywhere against the Lizard Man?’

‘At the Cut, certainly.’

‘Exacdy why—would you tell me exacdy why—it has been found necessary to have guards against—against a—a Lizard Man?’

‘There have been rumours that he’s taking an interest in the Cut this year.’

‘It’s not the Cut I’m bothered about,’ said the Minister. ‘It’s the dams. We’ve got a lot of money tied up there, you know. If another went—’

‘I think the Cut is the more immediate danger,’ said the Kadi. ‘What makes you think a threat is posed to—to either the Cut or the dams by—by—by a Lizard Man?’

‘There have been incidents,’ said the Kadi.

‘Have there?’ Paul was looking at Owen.

‘Sort of.’

‘He’s blown one up,’ said the Minister. ‘He could blow up another.’

‘But I thought—?’

‘I doubt if the incidents themselves amount to anything,’ said Owen. ‘The point is, though, that the public thinks they do.’

‘I see. And you hope that when it sees a guard, it will feel reassured?’

‘I hope so. Actually,’ said Owen, ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that. As I say, I don’t think the incidents themselves amount to anything, but it’s what, in a way, they express that is important.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Anti-Government feeling,’ said the Kadi.

‘Anti-British feeling,’ the Minister corrected him hurriedly. ‘You think the Lizard Man is a Nationalist?’ asked Paul. ‘Well, no,’ admitted the Minister. ‘It’s just that there’s a lot of popular unrest at the moment over the ending of the Cut and they blame-—’

‘There’s a lot of feeling, too, about the dams,’ said the Kadi.

‘Well,’ said Paul, beginning to gather up his papers, ‘I don’t know that there’s a lot this Committee can do about either of those. As for the Lizard Man,’—he took care not to meet Owen’s eye—‘that, I feel, is the sort of thing that is best left to the Mamur Zapt.’

When Owen got back to the Bab-el-Khalk he found his orderly, Yussef, fussing around in his office, changing, among other things, the water in the earthenware pitcher which, as in all Cairo offices, stood in the latticed window. The theory was that the breeze would cool it but that, of course, worked only when there was a breeze. Today there wasn’t and the water was on the hot side of lukewarm. It had, moreover, a fly in it, which Yussef dispatched, with the water, out of the window. Then he refilled the pitcher from the big brass-beaked jug that he was carrying.

‘It’s the best, Effendi,’ he said reassuringly to Owen. ‘Straight from the river.’

‘Oh, good.’ Owen took a sip.

He put the glass down.

‘Straight from the river, you say?’

He had only just begun to think about such things.

‘It’s all right, Effendi,’ said Yussef anxiously. ‘It’s not green.’

‘Green’ water was the first of the year’s ‘new’ water, the beginnings of the new flood, so-called because of the greenish tinge given it by either the vegetable matter of the Sudd or the algae of the Sobat (opinion was divided). Opinion was divided again over the properties of the ‘green’ water. Did it induce love-sick-ness? Or did it merely cause diarrhoea?

Green or not, the water was the only water in town, or, at least, in the Bab-el-Khalk and Owen had been happily drinking it for the past two or three years. Now, however, he sipped it meditatively.

‘Effendi,’ said Yussef, eager, possibly, to divert him, ‘there is a man to see you.’

‘There is?’ Owen put the glass down. ‘How long has he been waiting?’ he demanded.

Yussef waved the question aside.

‘He is but a fellah, Effendi,’ said Yussef dismissively. Yussef had been but a fellah too but now that he had risen to the dizzy heights of orderly he was inclined to look down upon his country cousins.

‘Show him in!’

Suleiman’s father came diffidently into the room.

‘Effendi—’

‘Mr Hannam!’

And to show Yussef what ought to be what, Owen ordered coffee.

‘Effendi, I apologize for disturbing you when you must be so busy but Labiba Latifa told me—’

‘Labiba Latifa? You’ve met her?’

‘Yes, and she told me that you were concerned about— Effendi, I have tried to persuade him, I have even used a father’s authority, although that doesn’t seem to go far these days—’

‘What about?’

‘My son. You asked Labiba—’

‘Yes, indeed. I advised her to use her influence to get the boy out of the Gamaliya for a time. And you have been adding your efforts?’

‘Well, yes, Effendi. But without success. He will not listen to me. He will not listen to his father! He says he is on the brink of finding out something that his chiefs will be very pleased about and that will make his career. He asks me if I do not wish well for him, if that is not what I want, him to do well, to make a success of his career? And, Effendi, I do, that is what I sent him up here for. Water is our life-blood, I told him, but it comes in different forms. In the fields it is sweat, in the city it is money. Effendi, I have laboured in the fields and done well enough, but that is not what I want for my boy. And now he says: “Father, I have done what you ask and now, just when I am getting somewhere, you bid me to leave!” “You can do as well elsewhere,” I said. But he said: “No, father. We get but one chance in our life—you have told me that yourself—and for me this is it!” So what shall I do, Effendi? What shall I say to him? I come to you!’

‘Has he said what he is on the brink of finding out?’

‘No, Effendi. It is to do with his work.’

‘I think I know what it is. It is important but it is nothing compared with his life.’

‘You think it may come to that?’ said Suleiman’s father, troubled.

‘I hope not. Nevertheless, he has enemies in the Gamaliya. As you have.’

‘He is too young to have enemies. Such enemies!’

‘I think so, too. And therefore I think he would be better out of the Gamaliya.’

‘I begin to wish I had never sent him up here. Terrible things happen in the city. First that girl. Then this!’

‘Good things happen also, and they can happen to him. But I think it would be well if he were out of the Gamaliya for a time. He stands on the brink, you say? How near is that? Is it a matter of days? Or weeks?’

‘I do not know. Days, I think.’

‘If it were a day or two, and if he watched his step, all could yet be well.’

‘I will tell him that,’ said Suleiman’s father, relieved.

‘But let it not drag on!’ Owen warned.

‘I will tell him that, too. And insist that a father’s authority shall not be set aside!’

Yussef brought coffee. Over its aromas, Suleiman’s father calmed down.

‘What things happen in the city, Effendi!’ he sighed. ‘What things happen in the city!’

‘Things happen in the country, too,’ said Owen, ‘and one thing that especially interests me is what happened once, years ago, between Ali Khedri and yourself.’

Suleiman’s father was silent for a while, a long while. Owen sipped his coffee and waited. He knew better than to hurry the old man. In Egypt, where all present things had roots in the past, such conversations took a long time.

‘It was a dispute over water,’ said Suleiman’s father at last. ‘In the villages most disputes are. We ploughed adjoining fields. Between our fields there was an old canal, not much used because now there was a new and better one which went past the end of my field but not past his. I allowed him to build a gadwal across my land and take off water from the new canal. The old canal was on my land and one day I decided to fill it in. Ali Khedri objected.

“You cannot do that,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “we have the new canal and I have allowed you water. The old canal stands idle, and it is on my land. I will plant it with cotton.”

‘But Ali Khedri said: “The canal is not yours but the village’s.’”

‘I said: “It is on my land.’”

‘Well, we went to the sheikh and to the omda and then to the Inspector and they said that I was in the right. So I filled it in and planted cotton. And Ali Khedri was very angry and one night he came and beat the cotton down. And I said: “If that is what you do, then I will beat you down!” And I tore out his gadwal.’

‘So then he was without water?’

‘He had to carry it. Well, it is hard to carry enough if you have fields, and his crops dwindled and my crops throve. I would have let him build his gadwal again if he had said a soft word, but he did not. So I hardened my heart against him.’

‘Did not the neighbours bring you together?’

‘They tried but he would not listen to them. “I would rather carry,” he said, “than accept from him, even though I go poor.” Well, he went poor and in the end he had to leave, and now I own his fields, and many others.’

He looked at Owen.

‘These things are not good, I know, but life in the fields is hard. Although not as hard as life in the city if you are a water-carrier.’

In this heat you needed to take fluid frequently and some time later Owen found himself pouring out another glass of water. As he raised it to his lips his conversation with Yussef came back into his mind. He put the glass down again.

‘Yussef,’ he said, ‘where does this water come from?’

‘The river, Effendi. Right from the middle. It’s the best.’

‘But how did it get here? Here, to the Bab-el-Khalk?’

Yussef shifted his turban to the back of his head and scratched. ‘How did it get here? In a water-cart, I suppose.’