V. (12 page)

Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi of '83, was believed by some to be sleeping not dead in a cavern near Baghdad. And on the Last Day, when the prophet Christ re-establishes el-Islam as the religion of the world he will return to life to slay Dejal the antichrist at a church gate somewhere in Palestine. The Angel Asrafil will trumpet a blast to kill everything on earth, and another to awaken the dead.

But the desert's angel had hidden all the trumpets beneath the sand. The desert was prophecy enough of the Last Day.

Gebrail lounged exhausted against the seat of his pinto-colored phaeton. He watched the hindquarters of the poor horse. A poor horse's ass. He nearly laughed. Was this a revelation then from God? Haze hung over the city.

Tonight, he would get drunk with an acquaintance who sold sycamore figs, whose name Gebrail didn't know. The fig-hawker believed in the Last Day; saw it, in fact, close at hand.

"Rumors," he said darkly, smiling at the girl with the rotting teeth, who worked the Arabian cafes looking for love-needy Franks with her baby on one shoulder. "Political rumors."

"Politics is a lie."

"Far up the Bahr-el-Abyad, in the heathen jungle, is a place called Fashoda. The Franks - Inglizi, Feransawi - will fight a great battle there, which will spread in all directions to engulf the world."

"And Asrafil will sound the call to arms," snorted Gebrail. "He cannot. He is a lie, his trumpet is a lie. The only truth -"

"Is the desert, is the desert. Wahyat abuk! God forbid."

And the fig-hawker went off into the smoke to get more brandy.

Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here.

Back came the Englishman, with his gangrenous face. A fat friend followed him out of the hotel.

"Bide time," the fare called mirthfully.

"Ha, ho. I'm taking Victoria to the opera tomorrow night."

Back in the cab: "There is a chemist's shop near the Credit Lyonnais." Weary Gebrail gathered the reins.

Night was coming rapidly. This haze would make the stars invisible. Brandy, too, would help. Gebrail enjoyed starless nights. As if a great lie were finally to be exposed . . .

VI

Three in the morning, hardly a sound in the streets, and time for Girgis the mountebank to be about his nighttime avocation, burglary.

Breeze in the acacias: that was all. Girgis huddled in bushes, near the back of Shepheard's Hotel. While the sun was up he and a crew of Syrian acrobats and a trio from Port Said (dulcimer, Nubian drum, reed pipe) performed in a cleared space by the Ismailiyeh Canal out in the suburbs near the slaughterhouse of Abbasiyeh. A fair. There were swings and a fearsome steam-driven carousel for the children; serpent-charmers, and hawkers of all refreshment: toasted seeds of abdelawi, limes, fried treacle, water flavored with licorice or orange blossom, meat puddings. His customers were the children of Cairo and those aged children of Europe, the tourists.

Take from them by day, take from them by night. If only his bones weren't beginning so much to feel it. Performing the tricks - with silk kerchiefs, folding boxes, a mysteriously pocketed cloak decorated outside with hieroglyphic ploughs, scepters, feeding ibis, lily and sun - sleight-of-hand and burglary needed light hands, bones of rubber. But the clowning - that took it out of him. Hardened the bones: bones that should be alive, not rock rods under the flesh. Falling off the top of a motley pyramid of Syrians, making the dive look as near-fatal as it actually was; or else engaging the bottom man in a slapstick routine so violent that the whole construction tottered and swayed; mock-horror appearing on the faces of the others. While the children laughed, shrieked, closed their eyes or enjoyed the suspense. That was the only real compensation, he supposed - God knew it wasn't the pay - a response from the children; buffoon's treasure.

Enough, enough. Best get this over, he decided, and to bed as soon as possible. One of these days he'd climb up on that pyramid so exhausted, reflexes off enough, that the neckbreaking routine would be no sham. Girgis shivered in the same wind that cooled the acacias. Up, he told his body: That window.

And was halfway erect before he saw his competition. Another comic acrobat, climbing out a window some ten feet above the bushes Girgis crouched in.

Patience, then. Study his technique. We can always learn. The other's face, turned in profile, seemed wrong: but it was only the streetlight. Feet now on a narrow ledge, the man began to inch along crablike, toward the corner of the building. After a few steps, stopped; began to pick at his face. Something white fluttered down, tissue-thin, into the bushes.

Skin? Girgis shivered again. He had a way of repressing thoughts of disease.

Apparently the ledge narrowed toward the corner. The thief was hugging the wall closer. He reached the corner. As he stood with each foot on a different side and the edge of the building bisecting him from eyebrows to abdomen he his balance and fell. On the way down he yelled out an obscenity in English. Then hit the shrubbery with a crash, rolled and lay still for a while. A match flared and went out, leaving only the pulsing coal of a cigarette.

Girgis was all sympathy. He could see it happening to himself one day, in front of the children, old and young. If he'd believed in signs he would have given it up for tonight and gone back to the tent they all shared near the slaughterhouse. But how could he stay alive on the few milliemes tossed his way during the day? "Mountebank is a dying profession," he'd reckon in his lighter moments. "All the good ones have moved into politics."

The Englishman put out his cigarette, rose and began to climb a tree nearby. Girgis lay muttering old curses. He could hear the Englishman wheezing and talking to himself as he ascended, crawled out on a limb, straddled it and peered in a window.

After a lag of fifteen seconds, Girgis distinctly heard the words, "A bit thick, you know," from the tree. Another cigarette-coal appeared, then abruptly swung in a quick arc downward and hung a few feet below the limb. The Englishman was swinging by one arm from the limb.

This is ridiculous, Girgis thought.

Crash. The Englishman fell into the bushes again. Girgis got cautiously to his feet and went over to him.

"Bongo-Shaftsbury?" the Englishman said, hearing Girgis approach. He lay looking up at a starless zenith, picking absently at flakes of dead skin on his face. Girgis stopped a few feet away. "Not yet," the other continued, "you haven't got me quite yet. They are up there, on my bed, Goodfellow and the girl. We've been together now for two years, and I can't begin, you know, to count all the girls he's done this to. As if every capital of Europe were Margate, and the promenade a continent long." He began to sing.

It isn't the girl I saw you wiv in Brighton,

Who, who, who's your lady friend?

Mad, thought Girgis, pitying. The sun hadn't stopped with this poor fellow's face, it had gone on into the brain.

"She will be in 'love' with him, whatever the word means. He will leave her. Do you think I care? One accepts his partner as one does any tool, with all its idiosyncrasies. I had read Goodfellow's dossier, I knew what I was getting . . .

"But perhaps the sun, and what is happening down the Nile, and the knife-switch on your arm, which I did not expect; and the frightened child, and now -" he gestured up at the window he'd left "have thrown me off. We all have a threshold. Put your revolver away, Bongo-Shaftsbury - there's a good fellow - and wait, only wait. She is still faceless, still expendable. God, who knows how many of us will have to be sacrificed this coming week? She is the least of my worries. She and Goodfellow."

What comfort could Girgis give him? His English wasn't good, he'd only understood half the words. The madman had not moved, had only continued to stare at the sky. Girgis opened his mouth to speak thought better of it, and began to back away. He realized all at once how tired he was, how much the days of acrobatics took out of him. Would that alienated figure on the ground be Girgis someday?

I'm getting old, Girgis thought. I have seen my own ghost. But I'll have a look at the Hotel du Nil anyway. The tourists there aren't as rich. But we all do what we can.

VII

The bierhalle north of the Ezbekiyeh Garden had been created by north European tourists in their own image. One memory of home among the dark-skinned and tropical. But so German as to be ultimately a parody of home.

Hanne had held on to the job only because she was stout and blond. A smaller brunette from the south had stayed for a time but was finally let go because she didn't look German enough. A Bavarian peasant but not German enough! The whims of Boeblich the owner got only amusement from Hanne. Bred to patience - a barmaid since age thirteen - she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm which served her now in good stead among the drunkenness, sex for sale and general fatuousness of the bierhalle.

To the bovine of this world - this tourist world, at least - love comes, is undergone, and goes away unobtrusive as possible. So with Hanne and the itinerant Lepsius; a salesman - said he - of ladies' jewelry. Who was she to question? Having been through it (her phrase), Hanne, schooled in the ways of an unsentimental world, knew well enough that men were obsessed with politics almost as much as women with marriage. Knew the bierhalle to be more than a place to get drunk or fixed up with a woman, just as its list of frequent customers did comprise individuals strange to Karl Baedeker's way of life.

How upset Boeblich would be could he see her lover. Hanne mooned about the kitchen now, in the slack period between dinner and serious drinking, up to her elbows in soapy water. Lepsius was certainly "not German enough." Half a head shorter than Hanne, eyes so delicate that he must wear tinted glasses even in the murk of Boeblich's, and such poor thin arms and legs.

"There is a competitor in town," he confided to her, "pushing an inferior line, underselling us - it's unethical, don't you see?" She'd nodded.

Well if he came in . . . anything she happened to overhear . . . a rotten business, nothing he'd ever want to subject a woman to . . . but . . .

For his poor weak eyes, his loud snoring, his boylike way of mounting her, taking too long to come to rest in the embrace of her fat legs . . . of course, she would go on watch for any "competitor." English he was, and somewhere had got a bad touch of the sun.

All day, through the slower morning hours, her hearing seemed to grow sharper. So that at noon when the kitchen erupted gently into disorder - nothing outright: a few delayed orders, a dropped plate which shattered like her tender eardrums - she'd heard perhaps more than she was intended to. Fashoda, Fashoda . . . the word washed about Boeblich's like a pestilent rain. Even the faces changed: Grune the chef, Wernher the bartender, Musa the boy who swept floors, Lotte and Eva and the other girls, all seemed to've turned shifty, to've been hiding secrets all this time. There was even something sinister about the usual slap on the buttocks Boeblich gave Hanne as she passed by.

Imagination, she told herself. She'd always been a practical girl, not given to fancy. Could this be one of love's side-effects? To bring on visions, encourage voices which did not exist, to make the chewing and second digestion of any cud only mare difficult? It worried Hanne, who thought she knew everything about love. How was Lepsius different: a little slower, a little weaker; certainly no high priest at the business, no more mysterious or remarkable than any other of a dozen strangers.

Damn men and their politics. Perhaps it was a kind of sex for them. Didn't they even use the same word for what man does to a woman and what a successful politician does to his unlucky opponent? What was Fashoda to her, or Marchand or Kitchener, or whatever their names were, the two who had "met" - met for what? Hanne laughed, shaking her head. She could imagine, for what.

She pushed back a straggle of yellow hair with one soap-bleached hand. Odd how the skin died and grew soggy-white. It looked like leprosy. Since midday a certain leitmotif of disease had come jittering in, had half-revealed self, latent in the music of Cairo's afternoon; Fashoda, Fashoda, a word to give pale, unspecific headaches, a word suggestive of jungle, and outlandish micro-organisms, and fevers which were not love's (the only she'd known, after all, being a healthy girl) or anything human's. Was it a change in the light, or were the skins of the others actually beginning to show the blotches of disease?

She rinsed and stacked the last plate. No. A stain. Back went the plate into the dishwater. Hanne scrubbed, then examined the plate again tilting it toward the light. The stain was still there. Hardly visible. Roughly triangular, it extended from an apex near the center to a base an inch or so from the edge. A sort of brown color, outlines indistinct against the faded white of the plate's surface. She tilted the plate another few degrees toward the light and the stain disappeared. Puzzled, she moved her head to look at it from another angle. The stain flickered twice in and out of existence. Hanne found that if she focused her eyes a little behind and off the edge of the plate the stain would remain fairly constant, though its shape had begun to change outline; now crescent, now trapezoid. Annoyed, she plunged the plate back into the water and searched among the kitchen gear under the sink for a stiffer brush.

Was the stain real? She didn't like its color. The color of her headache: pallid brown. It is a stain she told herself. That's all it is. She scrubbed fiercely. Outside, the beer-drinkers were coming in from the street. "Hanne," called Boeblich.

O God, would it never go away? She gave it up at last and stacked the plate with the other dishes. But now it seemed the stain had fissioned, and transferred like an overlay to each of her retinae.

A quick look at her hair in the mirror-fragment over the sink; then on went a smile and out went Hanne to wait on her countrymen.

Of course the first face she saw was that of the "competitor." It sickened her. Mottled red and white, and loose wisps of skin hanging . . . He was conferring anxiously with Varkumian the pimp, whom she knew. She began to make passes.