Into Suez (12 page)

‘Oh God, no. Please. Stupid fuss I made.’

‘Don’t you miss wet weather, Joe? A nice bit of drizzle. Cool and pleasant. Your body having a drink. We’ve got cooked minds out here. What wouldn’t I give for a deluge and no brolly.’ 

‘Culture!’ exclaimed Hedwig, pushing forward to join Ailsa and Irene in the NAAFI queue in Ish. The wives were not pleased with the German woman’s contempt for the decencies of Saturday queuing; they stared and muttered. Ailsa heard the word
Kraut
. Hedwig, oblivious, went on, ‘
Hochkultur
! At last we get a chance to hear some real music! Believe it or not! Beethoven in the desert!’ Her voice pronouncing the word
Beethoven
took on a note of reverence. She handed Ailsa a leaflet advertising a concert at the De Lesseps House. Under the auspices of the
Anglo-
Egyptian
Friendship Society, she read. In aid of refugees. Hedwig had been given it by her countryman, Erich Stolz the watchmaker. ‘And look who’s playing!’ She pointed at the name that had already leapt out at Ailsa. ‘You remember her, don’t you? From the
Empire Glory
?’

Ailsa blushed scarlet. She wanted to cry.

Hedwig was saying they must wear evening dress to the concert. Pearls and gloves. Unfortunately she had no
pearls and, alas, no decent gloves any longer, for her lilac evening gloves had gone astray in a previous move, no idea how, since she’d wrapped them in tissue paper. Her evening gown she had made herself in pink silk, hoping that no one could tell it was home-made. Bigwigs would attend the concert. High-ranking Egyptian ladies wearing gem-encrusted dresses. Cultivated, educated people would attend, Hedwig said. She pointed to the name above that of Mona Serafin-Jacobs:
Oum Koulsoum
. An Egyptian lady who would be singing classical songs. Erich had described her as the most famous woman in Egypt, a national hero. Erich had been interned as a prisoner of war from Rommel’s first desert campaign. Now he’d learned Arabic and lived and worked among the Egyptians. A highly civilised man, Hedwig said, and no mean violinist.

It was so important, Irene remarked, ignoring questions of high culture, to include the right amount of onion in mince, chopped up nice and fine, as on its own mince was so bland. Didn’t they think so? And plenty of seasoning. That had been how Irene’s mother had cooked mince. Also one must be careful not to over-cook.

‘But, Irene,’ Hedwig said, ‘minced animals are not what we should put in our mouths, so I feel.’

‘Well, they are not precisely
animals
…’

‘What in heaven are they then?’

Irene began half-heartedly to distinguish pig from pork. Common assumption was with her but reason had deserted her and she faltered.

‘Oy – why are you pushing in, you?’ one of the women in the queue demanded of Hedwig. She’d covered her curlers with a floral scarf for a do at the airmen’s mess. The faces of the sergeants’ wives all said,
Vulgar
, and the
woman read the message. She prodded Hedwig. ‘Wait your turn like we all have to.’

‘Excuse
me
,’ Hedwig rounded on her. ‘I am not here for these sausages but to talk with my friends. I would never queue-jump in my born days. Could you kill a cow?’ she asked Irene. ‘You yourself? Bludgeon her with a mallet or slice her throat? Are you happy to employ illiterate men to do this for you?’

Ailsa turned away, leaving them to wrangle. She steadied herself against the counter. Whatever it was that had sparked between herself and the Arab woman belonged in another world. A shipboard romance. Without the romance. So she’d told herself. But the name on the leaflet – the
prestige
of the name – brought their friendship out of hiding. Mona seemed to turn and look Ailsa straight in the eye, saying,
See what you have enabled me to do, habiba. And what you have turned your back on
. That characterful oval face, the changing weather of its moods; her hands. Hands that had been paralysed since Mona left her teacher but whose music Ailsa had somehow, by luck or grace, wakened.

Would there be Forces people at the concert? How would she broach it to Joe? For certainly, without the shadow of a doubt, Ailsa would attend.

Still parrying arguments about the legitimacy of mince, Irene told the woman in the queue, ‘She’s with me actually and she’s not in your way,’ and to Hedwig, ‘You have your ideas, I have mine. Let’s agree to differ. Oh look, there’s my Roy. Roy! Coo-ee!’

Roy – Ailsa had to be careful not to call him Chalkie in front of his wife – appeared, beaming, and took his wife’s basket as if it were an honour she bestowed. He escorted
the three women out. As they emerged into the
Place de la Gare
, the heat seemed to Ailsa stifling, the street clamour deafening. She looked round the square.

A tall woman was walking away. A dark head wearing a red beret at an angle.

‘Sorry,’ Ailsa said. ‘Go on without me.’ Chasing full pelt after Mona, she ducked and wove through squaddies and black-gowned women. Stumbling into a portly Egyptian in a tarbush, she hurried down Empress Avenue, past the
Voyageurs
Hotel and the
Bon Goût
restaurant, where the person in the red beret crossed the street with long strides. But as the woman twisted her head to check the traffic, Ailsa realised it wasn’t Mona. Nothing like.

Pace slackening, she stopped, awash with sweat. Men in
gallabiyyas
flowed in all directions and a stately, whiskered official in an elegant suit carrying a fly whisk was forced to step out of her path, flashing the bare-armed white woman a glance of intrigued rebuke. Men’s faces leered. Clapped-out cars and an army Jeep rushed past; bells rang on bicycle rickshaws and a donkey bearing the deep red stripes of many beatings was dragged past her on a rope, a boy lashing its rump with a cane. Ailsa stared. She smelled the donkey’s stink as it gargled and foamed at the mouth. The eyes were huge and melting, but sticky with pus and beset by flies. Ailsa stood near enough to hear its harsh breathing as if its lungs were full of death.

And then came the boy.

‘Death to the British!’ the youth shouted. Burly military policemen bore down on him.

‘Evacuation with Blood!’ He bawled this slogan in English straight into Ailsa’s face. For a shocked moment, she thought of menstrual blood. His mouth seemed to
come at her; she smelt garlic breath; saw milk-white teeth, the pink interior of an open mouth. The whole face seemed to rear at her, a colt stampeded (for he was young, in his teens). She saw the whites of his eyes. And then he was taken. One towering military policeman at either side lifted the lad sheer off his feet. At once he went limp in their hands, still close to Ailsa on the surging pavement, where a new pandemonium had ensued, one he took no part in. She saw that his eyes were beautiful. Dark brown pools of sudden serenity, with long, curling lashes. His lips moved silently, as if praying, and this quiet at the eye of the storm seemed to go on for an age, which in reality could only have been the seconds it took for Ailsa to step back.

When the policeman’s fist slammed into the young man’s stomach, he bent double and cried,
Allahu Akbar!
God is great!

Scattering in all directions, passers-by cried,
Allahu Akbar!

Ailsa’s hands flew to her own stomach, in sympathy. She’d never seen, never imagined such violence. When one is struck, we all are. No man is an island, entire of itself. She whimpered out a cry like a cat’s mew.

‘Are you hurt, Madam?’ Another khaki man held her gently by the top of one arm. The boy gushed blood from nose and mouth. They were searching him, shoving their hands between his legs, lifting his
gallabiyya
. The boy’s blood spattered Ailsa’s blouse. Two front teeth hung from his lips on strings of bloody mucus. They’d beat him to a pulp in jail, she knew.

We’d
beat him rather.

Both her hands reached out to the young man, as to a child. But he shrank back in a way he’d not done from
the military policemen. To be touched by a woman. A foreign female without modesty, an infidel. Pollution. Taint. Infection. Defiling his perfect martyr’s moment and blocking the path to heaven. The knowledge flashed through Ailsa in a second that there was no sign she as a woman could offer that she abhorred these injustices, this occupation. For to them she was of no more worth than an army’s
impedimenta
. Chattel. Breeding stock.

Brakes squealing, more Jeeps arrived, and an army truck. Rifles sprang up everywhere. The young man was lugged away and tossed into a truck, from which another boy in white was gazing out, eyes wide with terror. She glimpsed her boy for a fraction of a moment, before they slammed the doors.

‘Did the bastard molest you?’ asked the tender policeman.

‘Not at all.’

‘Thank goodness.’

‘He’s just a child. He wasn’t armed, was he? What was he supposed to have done?’

The word terrorism was spoken. But anti-British slogans constituted the extent of the schoolboy’s trespass apparently. That was our justice and democracy, Ailsa saw. A bitter taste flooded her mouth. We are thugs. We take our thuggery all round the world, calling it civilisation. But it hurt her to think this. She did not want to think it. We were the civilisers, the educators. Recoiling, Ailsa said she was perfectly all right now; she would walk back alone. When she was ready. Not before. Thanks very much. The policeman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Should they alert her husband?
What, to come and round me up too?
Certainly not. She would go about
her business. Ailsa turned on her heel, head high. But shaking from head to foot. As she turned, a man with a moustache, bowing his head, introduced himself as proprietor of a nearby pavement café: he had seen what had happened. Would
Madame
care to step inside and rest, take a little refreshment, as his guest?

He was Greek, all crinkly smiles, his hair raven black, oiled close to his head, his moustache a work of art, its ends rolled to points. The café in
rue Hussein
, beside the Grand Hotel, spilled out on to the pavement, where men in
gallabiyyas
rested in dusty sunlight with half empty cups and others in shirt sleeves chatted over a board game. As she stepped under the awning and walked through to the back of the shop, Ailsa was aware of the stares. An unaccompanied British woman was fresh meat displaying itself on a butcher’s slab. She held her nerve and her dignity, back straight, head high.

What a relief to sit down in the most private part of the café. The air, blue with smoke, was bitterly fragrant with the scent of coffee. The proprietor brought a silver tray with an elegant silver pot, above a methylated wick-burner. Presently he poured a thick brew into a tiny painted cup and stood back, a white cloth over his arm.
Merci, monsieur! C’est très bien
. Ailsa held an intense sip in her mouth, savoured its sensuality. Cheeks burning, she settled the delicate cup back in its saucer.
Mrs Ailsa Roberts
, her compatriots sneered in her mind,
is
drinking black faecal sludge from the bottom of the Sweet Water Canal
.

Thoughts of Mona confused themselves with the violence she’d just witnessed and with which she was stained. As she arranged a silk scarf over the
blood-speckled
bodice of her blouse, Ailsa again saw the blood
gush from the protester’s mouth – and the teeth he’d lost, hanging from strings. It was sad for the young man that he’d had his beautiful milk-white teeth knocked out. As had happened to the little conscript on the
Empire Glory
, when he stood up to the common-or-garden violence of his pals. The men who shot the dolphins. And Nia had seen the dolphins die. But the boy who’d cried
Allahu Akbar!
would take pride in his stigma; he’d parade it when we eventually freed him and say:
T
he filthy British imperialists did this to me
. He’d have lost them for Allah’s sake.

Ailsa took another sip of coffee. The shaking calmed. Dangerous to wander off the beaten track. You might bump into reality. The chain reaction might go on forever. But for all her foreboding, it was in Ailsa to wander. She’d do it again. Yes. It wasn’t even a matter of the will. Yes. Seeking Mona now was hardly a choice; it was a compulsion. Oh in some past life you were my sister or my wife.
Verboten
: the relationship was forbidden – which tempted you to enter a maze of dreaming and poetry.
Your hands on her hands
… A mirror-world crazy and dark and mystical, where all roads might lead to dead ends. But still you had to try.

Male eyes roved away or challenged hers. The voyeurs taking leisurely drags from Turkish cigarettes were handsome characters many of them, with green or tawny eyes, looking like rotters because of their mustachios. One Adonis lounged with an elbow round the back of his chair, head turned, leering at Ailsa with the frankest lechery.

In his rather splendid English, the hovering proprietor enquired whether
Madame
was happy with the coffee? The service? Could he offer her some of his home-made sweets or pastries?

Going to shake her head, because she truly was not hungry, Ailsa smiled, yielded and looked at the delicacies on the offered platter.
Baklava
, he said, and
Ma’amoul
. She took a tartlet and placed it on her plate.

‘These are works of art,’ she said. ‘Too good to eat.’

‘
Madame
must try them before she passes judgement. Are you feeling more yourself? May we telephone anyone to come and fetch you?’

She shook her head. Filo pastry, crisp and delicate, ambushed Ailsa’s mouth with almonds, melting on the tongue. Another exploded with dates.

A tall, pale Britisher in shirtsleeves two tables away caught her eye. Officer class – though they didn’t normally visit native cafés, let alone banter with Egyptian companions in what must surely be Arabic, sharing a joke.

Song poured from a loudspeaker. Ailsa sat back and listened to an Arab woman on the radio. Singing, obviously, of sadness. The café stilled. Men swivelled in their chairs towards the loudspeaker, looking up with devout, innocent expressions. It was not a music Ailsa understood. No clear shape, no sense of progression. All melismas and sobbing ornamentations, repetitions with variations of long complaints, so it seemed, expressed with luscious melancholy, in waves that rose and broke upon one another, soaked with desire, until the unseen radio audience cried out in frantic rapture and the men here in the Café Grec joined them, addressing compliments to the loudspeaker. And again they fell into a trance, as the powerful voice took up where it had left off. The unseen Arab woman flaunted her ache. And perhaps she was saying, this is how things stand behind the veil, perpetual longing: how would you like to share it? Heartbroken,
abandoned, the voice asserted the sensual desire forbidden by Muslim culture between man and woman. Which all the men in the café heard with unembarrassed ecstasy.