The Last Cut (4 page)

‘No one else in the family?’

‘They had moved from the country. The father is a water-carrier, poor, and’—Labiba sniffed—Very ignorant. Do you know what is the greatest cause of crime in the country, Mr el Zaki? Ignorance. Not even poverty, for we can be poor without being ignorant. Admittedly, the two usually go together.’

Mahmoud bowed his head gravely. He had expected a lecture at some point.

‘So he knew no better. That is why, Mr el Zaki, I am in some difficulty. On the one hand the case is in the public eye, and an issue of principle is involved, an issue which we can make narrow enough—the age, not the fact, of circumcision—to enlist public support. On the other, the person in the dock should be ignorance, not some poor, lowly, uneducated man. Nor the poor, lowly, uneducated woman who performed the circumcision.’

‘You know the woman?’

‘I do.’

‘And the girl?’

‘I know of her.’

‘So,’ said Mahmoud, putting down his coffee and looking at Owen, ‘the issue of principle is very close.’

Which way Mahmoud would go on the issue when the moment of decision came, Owen did not know. No one could rise as far and as fast in the Parquet as Mahmoud had done without being worldly wise. Yet there was at the same time an odd streak of naiveté in Mahmoud which took the form of an obstinacy about principle. He remained, thought Owen, as he walked down to the river the next morning, an idealist at heart.

He was on his way to see how preparations for the Cut were getting on. As he neared the point where the Khalig Canal came out into the river and where the Cut would be made, there were increasing signs of the coming festivities. Banners had appeared on some of the houses and brightly-coloured strings of bunting hung across the streets.

He had arranged to meet McPhee and when he turned a corner he saw him ahead of him. Along with a group of small boys and half the neighbourhood he was watching the public crier crying the height of the river.

‘Fifteen digits today and still rising!’ the crier intoned sonorously.

A hand was pushed through the lattice-work of one of the harem windows above and some coins thrown down. The crier scooped them up swiftly before the small boys got to them and bowed to the window.

‘Blessed be the mistress of this house!’ he called.

‘Digits?’ asked Owen.

‘On the Nilometer,’ said McPhee.

It stood at the end of Roda Island, just opposite them.

‘It’s very important, you know,’ said McPhee. ‘In the old days it used to relate to tax. There was a law which said that you couldn’t levy land-tax until the river had reached a height of sixteen cubits. Very sensible, really, because people’s capacity to pay depended on the irrigation of their land. Of course, the Government used to fake it.’

The dam, a simple earth one, ran across the canal just at the point of its entrance into the river opposite Roda Island. Its top was now only some six feet above the level of the water but its builders had been in this business for a thousand years and knew what they were doing.

Some way in front of the dam, in the dry bed of the canal, a tall cone of earth had been constructed. Its top had been sown with millet.

‘Obvious fertility associations,’ said McPhee.

When the Cut was made, and the dam breached, the water would pour through and demolish the cone, to the great satisfaction of onlookers. In the past, tradition had it, a young virgin had been sacrificed simultaneously, no doubt to their even greater satisfaction.

‘Although there is possibly some confusion here,’ said McPhee. ‘You see, the cone is also called “The Bride”—the Nile, as it were, impregnates it—and popular imagination may have distorted that into a real woman.’

Popular imagination was still alive and kicking in Cairo and one of the distortions it had threatened was the absorption of Mahmoud’s dead young woman into the traditional story. That had been stopped, fortunately, by the release of the autopsy findings. There was little purchase for the popular imagination in a woman who had died in so apparently ordinary a way.

McPhee, however, was reluctant to let the connection go. ‘You don’t think,’ he said wistfully, ‘that the woman who was found—’

‘No,’ said Owen firmly, ‘I don’t.’

He made the mistake, however, of telling Zeinab about it when they met for lunch at her father’s house later that morning. It was a mistake firstly because female circumcision was exactly the kind of topic likely to intrigue Nuri Pasha.

‘It is a barbaric practice,’ he said, ‘and I am totally opposed to it. They say it improves the woman’s beauty, that unless you do it, the labia minora dangles unbecomingly, but I have never been able to see that myself. I have always felt that the more a woman is developed in that area, the better. And then the cutting pares away the most interesting parts. It diminishes the woman’s capacity for pleasure. I am totally against that,’ said Nuri, shaking his head. ‘It diminishes mine.’

He looked tenderly at the latest painting he had acquired: a Renoir nude. Nuri was fond of things French; especially women.

‘It’s a lower class practice, of course. But, do you know, my dear, I was talking to Shukri Pasha this week—he’s just taken another wife, she’s only fourteen, but a beauty, I gather—and he told me that when Khadiya came to him—she is his second wife—or is it his third?—anyway, when she came to him he was astonished to find that she had been circumcised. “My dear Shukri,” I said, “that’s what you get if you marry out of your class.” Anyway—’

He continued happily for some time.

‘Anyway, my dear,’ he said suddenly to Zeinab, ‘that’s why I didn’t have you circumcised.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Zeinab. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on anything.’

Zeinab was the second reason why it was a mistake to raise the subject. She wasn’t very interested in circumcision but she was interested in Labiba Latifa. Modern in spirit, although not quite in the way that Mahmoud was, Nuri had raised his daughter to be independent. That was a very difficult position for women to be in in Egypt at that time and Zeinab was eager to hear about others in the same position.

‘Do you think she would like some help?’ she asked suddenly.

‘No,’ said Owen.

It was Greek day in the Gardens. There was a festival of some sort and they were doing their national dances. The women were in traditional costumes, in which a fine lawn chemisette seemed to play a great part, and danced in a group, with much spirited skipping and rhythmic stamping of feet. The men were dressed more drably, in shiny black clothes and black wideawake hats. They took off their coats and waistcoats to dance, but were less stripped down than the Levantines, some of whom came in singlets, as for the gymnasium. Their women, too, appeared to be feeling the heat, for they had removed their dresses and were sitting in their petticoats, retaining, however, the white wreaths round their heads.

A pretty young woman danced across to Owen.

‘He’s in the shade,’ she said, ‘with the beer.’

She took Owen in among the bamboos to where a rug had been spread for a picnic. There was a hamper but no beer. Rosa, who knew her husband’s habits, led Owen further into the shade. Georgiades was standing beside a gadwal talking to the gardener. He was embracing an armful of bottles.

‘I was asking him if he could let some water into the gadwal,’ he explained.

‘And I was telling him I couldn’t,’ said the gardener. ‘This isn’t the right day.’

‘I was just wondering if you could make an exception,’ said Georgiades, fishing in his pocket.

The gardener looked at the coins.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t. Look, there’s a stream just over there. Why don’t you put the bottles in that?’

‘It’s too far.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Rosa. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’

‘Yes,’ said Owen, eyeing the Greek’s bulk. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’

‘Besides,’ said Georgiades, ignoring all these remarks, ‘there are always thieves about in a place like this. I’ll bet you’ve had some trouble—’

‘Well,’ said the gardener, ‘as a matter of fact—’

Owen walked back with Rosa to the picnic place.

‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to dance?’

‘I’m not familiar with the Greek dances,’ Owen excused himself.

‘Perhaps there wouldn’t be much point,’ Rosa conceded. She had always had a soft spot for Owen, especially since that business of the ransom. Indeed, if ever Zeinab should fall by the wayside, and if, by any unfortunate chance her husband, too, should be struck down, then—She brushed aside the possibility that Owen might have his own views. Rosa believed that whoever her mate was, she and he would be of one mind; hers.

She offered him some tsatsiki. While he was eating it, she squatted down beside him and asked about the regulator.

‘You know,’ she said, looking in her husband’s direction, ‘he’s not really the man for this. Water is not a liquid he’s had much to do with. And he knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about gardens. I’m the only flower he’s heard of.’

‘I know,’ said Owen, ‘but he’s a wonderful man at getting people to talk to him.’

Georgiades and the gardener were coming back through the bushes.

‘Yes, well, I could put them in the stream, I suppose,’ Georgiades was conceding, ‘but I’m not happy about it. Not with all these thieves about. Now if there was a ghaffir around—’

‘Him?’ said the gardener. ‘He’d be the first to take them!’

At the regulator all was calm. The water winked placidly in the sun. Some papyrus heads which had crept through the main barrage circled slowly up to the breach and then spun away again. The workmen were sitting up on the bank. Macrae and Ferguson stood on top of the regulator looking down into the breach and conferring.

‘We’ve stopped it up,’ said Macrae. ‘Now we’ve got to find a way of letting the water through again.’

‘But controlled,’ said Ferguson.

‘We’re thinking of using the undamaged gate. It’s the other one that’s the problem.’

‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.

They took Owen back to their little office and produced coffee. Then Macrae sat back.

‘We’ve talked to the men,’ he said.

‘Talked to the men?’

‘Aye. About the dynamite. We’ve told them it won’t do. Now I don’t mind the odd spot of pilfering. But dynamite is different.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Y’see, that hole in the shed was clean cut. It was done with proper tools. Now we reckon that whoever did it must have brought his tools with him. And there’s a chance that the other men might have seen them. Of course, there’s also a chance that he brought them some other time and kept them hidden. But they keep close together and there’s a possibility that one of the others may have seen something. So we put it to them.’

‘Put it to them?’

‘Aye. We said now was the time to speak up. This wasn’t a private thing, this was a matter for everyone. Everyone suffered from a thing like this and if it happened again they would suffer more, their own villages, their own people.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘They didn’t say anything. But they will.’

‘They’ve got to talk it over first, you see,’ Ferguson explained.

‘And you think it will work?’

‘Aye,’ said Macrae.

In the Gardens the dancing was continuing furiously. The women had formed into a long line, their hands on the hips of the one in front of them, and were snaking about all over the place. The men had dropped back into a stationary row and were clapping the rhythm. The women danced up to them teasingly and then withdrew. Owen could see Rosa about half way down the line, plainly enjoying herself.

The dancers’ families had turned out in support. He recognized Rosa’s parents and formidable grandmother surrounded by lots of little children, themselves dressed for dancing, who must be cousins. Rosa belonged to a large extended family and to marry her was to marry the whole Greek community. Georgiades, a communal backslider, had had little choice in the matter. The marriage had been arranged; by Rosa.

Georgiades himself was nowhere to be seen. Owen began to walk round the group to greet Rosa’s family but then spotted him, beyond the dancers, among the bougainvillea, sitting on the edge of a gadwal talking to the ghaffir.

‘Lizard men!’ he was saying in appalled tones as Owen came up. ‘I wouldn’t meddle with them if I were you!’

‘Don’t worry!’ said the ghaffir fervently. ‘I won’t!’

Owen stepped back behind a bush.

‘Mind you,’ said Georgiades, ‘it could already be too late.’

‘Too late!’

‘Yes. I mean, you saw him, didn’t you?’

‘No! All I saw was his trail. I mean, I knew at once that it was a lizard man, you can tell by the marks, it’s their tail. But that’s not the same thing. I didn’t actually see him, not him himself—’

‘Well, then, you were a lucky man!’

‘I know, I know!’

‘I mean, you could so easily have seen him. It must have taken him some time to make that hole—’

‘Ah, no, it wasn’t like that. I mean, they don’t work like that. Not lizard men.’

‘They don’t?’

‘No. They don’t do it themselves, they get men to do it for them. That’s why you don’t see them. And that’s the way it was here. The wood wasn’t gnawed, was it? It was cut. If a lizard man had done it himself, it would have been gnawed. You don’t see lizard men with tools, do you?’

‘Well, no—’

‘No. He got someone to do it for him. Someone who had the tools. Then he came along afterwards, wriggled through the hole, took what he wanted and then was on his way.’

‘Well. I still think you were lucky. Because you could so easily have seen him at that point, couldn’t you?’

‘Yes, but I try to take care. I mean, that’s always the risk in a job like mine. You’ve got to be careful you don’t see too much. If you just go blundering around, you can easily walk into something, and then, bang! The next minute you’re in trouble.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘I creep. Then if you come across something, if you see something, or, more likely, hear something, like that night—’

‘So you
did
see him?’

‘No, no. like I said, you don’t see them. They get someone to do it for them.’

Ah, so
that
was the one you saw?’

‘I didn’t see anyone. But—’ the ghaffir lowered his voice—‘I knew he’d been there.’

‘Well, the hole, of course—’

‘No, no, not that.’

‘How, then?’

The ghaffir laid his finger along his nose.

‘Fair is fair, and if you take mine, I take yours. That’s fair all round, isn’t it?’

‘Depends what it is,’ said Georgiades.

But the ghaffir seemed to think he’d said enough. He picked up his gun and prepared to move away.

‘All the same, though,’ he said, with a slightly worried expression on his face, ‘it’s best not to meddle with the Lizard Man.’

Mahmoud seemed oddly uneasy Normally, although he was on the best of terms with Owen personally, he liked to keep his distance from him over legal matters. Constitutionally there was no place for the Mamur Zapt in the legal scheme of things, and Mahmoud was a stickler for constitutionality. Over this business of the Maiden, however, he seemed anxious to consult him at every turn. Owen knew that it was not because he had any doubts over the right course to pursue in terms of law. It must be something else; and Owen thought he knew what that was.

Mahmoud was not at home with this kind of case. It touched on things he knew very little about: women, for example. By this time most Egyptian men of his age would have married. Mahmoud’s father, himself a busy lawyer, had died young, however, and before he had had time to arrange that. Mahmoud had had to set about supporting his family and had immersed himself first in his studies and then in his career to the exclusion of all else. His mother broached the issue from time to time, indeed, was doing so with increasing frequency, but Mahmoud, determinedly modern, made it clear that he himself would see to the matter when the time came.

The time, however, had not so far come; and, since he had no sisters, and was, like many educated young Egyptians, distinctly prudish on sexual matters, the consequence was that he had had very little to do with women and knew very little about them. Given the way in which women were kept from any contact with men outside their own family, Owen doubted whether Mahmoud had ever spoken to a young woman of his own social standing.

The result was, thought Owen, that Mahmoud probably knew as much about female circumcision as he, Owen, did about water engineering.

And it was from this weak basis that Mahmoud was being called on to make a major, probably public, stand. Had the law been clear, Mahmoud would not have hesitated a moment. But the law, wisely, in Owen’s view, had left the matter vague. This was, as things stood, as much an issue of morality and social policy as it was of law.

Again, had things been clear, Mahmoud might well not have hesitated. He was, as Labiba Latifa had found out, a man of strong moral principle and firm social convictions. But he did like things to be clear, he needed them to be clear. And were they clear here? Mahmoud simply did not know enough about the subject to know whether they were or not.

And so he was unusually hesitant, unusually uncertain.

‘I was wondering,’ he said diffidently, ‘if you would like to come?’

‘By all means.’

They set out down the Mouski, on foot, because at this time of the evening the street was so full of people that even if you took an arabeah from one of the hotels, whose drivers were the most aggressive in Cairo, it wouldn’t have been able to force its way along at more than walking pace. Up near the Ataba the shops were quite good but the nearer one got to the bazaars, the cheaper and shoddier they became and the street was virtually taken over by stalls.

They forced their way through the crowds around the nougat sellers and Arab sugar sellers and—Owen could never quite understand this—spectacles sellers and made their way into the Khan-el-Khalil, the Turkish Bazaar. It was the bazaar most popular with tourists, who were there in throngs, studying the saucers of glittering gems, the lumps of turquoise, the flashing and densely-chased silver- and brass-ware and the gaudy keepsakes of Crusaders and Pharaohs. The shopkeepers were all in black frock-coats and tarbooshes. It was Oriental, all right. But not Egyptian.

Behind the bazaar was the real Egyptian: small, poor houses with the doors open and people sitting in them, catching the air; small, poor, dimly-lit shops with black-clad women fingering the last remaining—and reduced—tomatoes; stalls again, this time with sticks of sugar cane, small cucumbers and pickles.

It was here that Um Fattouha, Mother Fattouha, lived. She was one of the midwives in Labiba Latifa’s circle of contacts and the one, Labiba thought, most likely to be of use to Mahmoud.

Mahmoud stopped at the open door and called softly in. A large, fat lady, heavily veiled and dressed in black, came to the door. She led them into an inner room. It was very dark, lit by a single spluttering oil lamp, and furnished only with a single worn divan and a floor cushion on which a young man in the dark suit of an office worker was sitting, nervously playing with his tarboosh.

He sprang up when they entered.

‘Suleiman Hannam,’ he introduced himself. ‘Labiba Latifa told me to come. I—I knew Leila.’

The woman indicated that they should sit on the divan and then disappeared. The young man returned to the cushion at their feet.

‘How did you know Leila?’ asked Mahmoud.

The young man swallowed.

‘I—I had known her before,’ he said, ‘when we were children. Back at our village. Then her family moved away. I had forgotten about them but then one day I saw her father, in the street. I was wondering whether to go up and speak to him when I saw her. She was bringing him his lunch. I guessed at once that it was her. But she was so different! So—so—’

‘So?’

‘Womanly. I just stood there. All I wanted to do was look at her. She went away, but I guessed that she did it every day, so the next day I found out where he would be and I—well, I went there, and waited for her. And then I followed her home.’

‘Did you speak to her?’

‘No. Not at first. I just wanted to see and I followed her every day. And then one day she—she realized. At first it frightened her and just made her hurry all the more. But then—then she saw how it was. And then one day—one day she smiled at me—’ Owen sighed inwardly.

Mahmoud, however, frowned. This was loose behaviour. ‘Smiled?’ he said. ‘Was she not in her veil?’

‘Oh yes. But I—I knew somehow.’

Mahmoud looked stern.

‘And then?’

‘Well, I—one day I approached her. Not that day. Much later. I—I went up to her. And spoke.’

‘You spoke to her without asking her father’s permission?’

‘He wouldn’t have given it me. Our families—our families had quarrelled. Years before. In the village.’

‘You shouldn’t have spoken to her.’

‘I meant no harm! I—I spoke to her honourably.’

‘How could you speak to her honourably? Without her father knowing, and your father knowing?’

‘I was going to. I wanted to. Only—only Leila said I should wait. And I thought, perhaps that was a good idea, perhaps I would be able to talk my father round—’

‘Wouldn’t that have been better?’

‘It would have been difficult. The daughter of a water-carrier! He would have been very angry.’

All the same—’

‘I would have tried. We agreed that was best. Only—’

‘Only what?’

‘One day she told me her father was going to marry her to Omar Fayoum.’

‘Well—’

‘But he’s old! And foul! And not really very rich. All he does is run a water-cart. Well, that may look good to a water-carrier but it’s nothing really. I thought I would go to him and say, look, you can do better than that. I have a job at the Water Board, and if you will only wait—But Leila said no, the fates were against us, and I said, let us defy fate—’

Owen groaned again; inaudibly, he hoped.

Mahmoud, however, became fierce.

‘Did you touch her?’ he demanded.

‘No! I would never show her any disrespect, never—’

Are you sure?’

‘Never! Never! I was honourable, she was honourable. She was always honourable. She—’

The boy dissolved in tears.

All right, all right. All right!’

‘Never!’ sobbed the boy.

All right! So what did you do?’

‘Do?’ The boy looked at him in surprise. ‘We didn’t do anything.’

‘You must have done something. What happened next?’

‘Nothing. Leila said we must stop seeing each other now that she was betrothed.’

‘So—?’

‘So we stopped seeing each other.’

‘Come on, you don’t expect me to believe that!’

‘Just the once. I said I had to see her, she owed it to me. And then—’

‘Yes?’

‘I pleaded with her. I pleaded with her for hours. But she said no, she was betrothed, it was different now, and we must stop seeing each other.’

And what about the next time?’

‘There was no next time.’

‘You just went away?’

‘No. Not at first. I—I hung around. But she wouldn’t see me. And in the end—yes, I went away. The fates were against us!’

‘And you never saw her again?’

‘Never. I wanted to, but—Then one day I heard.’

‘That—?’

‘That she was dead.’

‘How did you hear?’

‘My work brings me down in these parts sometimes. I went into a shop to buy some oranges and I heard the women talking.’

‘And then you went away again?’

‘What else was there to do?’ the boy said.

After the boy had gone, they talked to the woman.

No, she said, she hadn’t done it, although she knew who had. It had all been very difficult because there was no mother to act on Leila’s behalf. If there had been, all this wouldn’t have happened. Leila would have been circumcised years before.

‘But that fool of a father—’

The mother had died soon after they arrived in Cairo and the father had not married again.

‘That was a mistake; the girl needed a mother.’

They were, of course, desperately poor. The father had been a simple water-carrier. It was one of the humblest jobs in the city. All you needed was a water-skin. Then you would go down to the river, fill it and then walk through the streets offering it for a millieme or two to the thirsty.

From a very early age Leila had had to take on the duties of the woman in the house, cleaning, cooking, carrying—even the water had to be fetched. From an early age, too, each day she had taken her father’s lunch to him.

‘Too much for him to carry, I suppose,’ said Um Fattouha tartly. ‘Though you’d have thought he’d have got used to carrying.’

With no woman in the house, Leila had been almost indispensable to him.

‘That’s why he wouldn’t let her marry. It’s not that there weren’t inquiries. There’s plenty of mothers who wouldn’t mind their son marrying someone who worked hard and didn’t complain.’

But of course he had known that he would have to let her go at some time. You could always get a woman in to do the housework. A marriageable woman, though, was worth something more than just her labour. The trouble was that she was a depreciating asset and the longer you left it, the less she would fetch.

‘So when old Fayoum came along, he had to do some hard thinking. Well, it wasn’t that hard. Fayoum was worth a bit— well, to a water-carrier, anyway. There was a chance, too, they say, of a job on the cart itself, and when you’re getting old, that’s the kind of job you fancy. So he didn’t have to think too long.’