The Camel of Destruction (7 page)

‘We don’t. We won’t,’ Barclay assured him.

‘Then why is it in the budget?’

‘The Minister said it had to be. It will be struck out later, of course. All the same…’

‘I don’t like it. Once these things get on paper, they never get off it.’ Barclay stood up.

‘Just thought you’d like to know,’ he said.

Paul pooh-poohed the idea.

‘Not a hope! I can tell you the attitude to the budget this year: chop anything that moves, even if it only wriggles. A project of this size? Ha ha!’

‘I don’t like it. Once it’s in the budget—’

‘That doesn’t mean to say it will ever happen. There are a lot of things we include in the budget just so that we can cut them out. They always want saving, so it’s as well to have something you can offer.’

‘It’s a dangerous game, though, Paul. Suppose they nodded it through?’

‘In a fit of absence of mind, you mean, like we acquired the colonies? There’ll be no absence of mind this time, not in this year’s budget round, I can assure you!’

‘Yes but, taken together with this application for planning permission—’

‘I don’t know what that’s about,’ Paul confessed. ‘Perhaps the Khedive’s behind it and they’re telling him to put it in just to keep his mind off important things.’

‘But this
is
important!’

‘He has enthusiasms, you see. We let him indulge them so long as they don’t actually ever get anywhere.’

Owen was not convinced. However, at that moment an orderly came rushing into the room and called Paul to the telephone.

Paul was upset.

‘Things are reaching a pretty pass,’ he said darkly, ‘when economic crises start interfering with a chap’s drinking.’

Ali was waiting for him as he came down the steps of his office.

‘Effendi, you’re in luck!’ he greeted him. ‘She will see you this afternoon.’

‘Good.’

‘She pines for you, she pants for you. Her breast burns for you.’

‘She didn’t say that!’

‘Well, not quite that,’ Ali admitted. ‘But that’s what she means.’

‘She doesn’t mean anything of the sort. Now, what is it?’

‘Strike while the iron is hot, effendi,’ Ali advised, ‘and then sweet success will be the fruit of your labours.’

‘Thank you. And now let’s get down to what she actually said.’

‘Be at the El AMr. mosque just before evening prayers. She will be there with her cousin. Her cousin knows all and will assist.’

He pocketed the milliemes.

‘I myself,’ he said airily, ‘will, of course, be there.’

The El AMr. mosque, perhaps the oldest in Cairo, was no longer in regular use. Palm trees grew in its central courtyard. The side colonnades had fallen. Only the marble columns of the central
liwan
remained.

Yet use of some sort there still was. Here and there among the pillars the black forms of women could be seen. The aura lingered in a place which had once held power and women came for their own purposes.

They came to certain spots especially. One of these was a carved recess in a wall which looked like an antique altar. Its two little columns had worn away leaving holes the size of cuttle-fish. These were where for generations mothers had rubbed the stone with lemon so that their babies might cry when their mouths were held against it; for if they went away from Amr’s Mosque without a cry, was not this a sign that they would grow to be dumb?

As Owen watched, two women, both heavily veiled and in the shapeless black which rendered unprovocative any suggestion of woman’s form, one of them carrying a baby, came through the pillars and went up to the altar.

The baby, lifted from its warm cocoon in the woman’s arms, gave a little cry as it was held to the stonework. Satisfied, though hardly surprised, the woman folded it back again and then sat down on a fallen pillar nearby and gave it suck.

The other woman moved off into the pillars. Owen moved after her.

‘Aisha.’

‘Effendi.’

‘I have something to ask you.’

She moved to where a pillar stood close against a wall. Between the wall and the pillar there was just space for a person to stand. She pushed Owen into it so that he could not be seen and then stood with her back against the pillar as if resting or in thought.

‘Ask on.’

‘There is a man, a friend of your brother’s. His name is Jabir. Can you tell me anything about him?’

Aisha did not reply. He thought that perhaps she had not heard him, and repeated the question.

Aisha made a little gesture with her hand.

‘I know him,’ she whispered.

‘He was at school with Osman. Or perhaps at college.’

‘School. They were always together. Osman always wanted to be with him. He seemed fascinated by him. But he was a bad boy, effendi. He was always getting Osman to do things he shouldn’t.’

‘Like what?’

‘Little things. Silly things. Playing jokes on other boys, on the teachers. And it was always Osman who got caught. I said to him: “Why are you so silly? Why do you do what he tells you? He will get you into trouble.” But he wouldn’t listen to me, effendi. He—’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘He went with him all the more. As if he could not stop. It used to hurt me, especially when I learned they were doing nasty things together—’

‘What things, Aisha?’

Aisha swallowed.

‘There was a bird,’ she said. ‘It had hurt its wing and could not fly. Jabir took it and—and tormented it, effendi. He made Osman…And Osman did it, that is what I could not understand. I asked him how he could do a thing like that? I said, “Jabir is making you evil.” And then—’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘Osman must have told him what I had said. For after that…’

‘Yes?’

‘Jabir turned his attention to me. He began to say nasty things about me, dirty things. And then one day he told Osman he wouldn’t speak to him any more unless he arranged a meeting.’

‘A meeting? With you?’

‘Yes. Osman asked me. I refused, of course. I was angry. I told him not to be stupid, that he was being made a fool of. But…but…’ Her voice faltered.

‘Yes?’

‘Osman was so unhappy. Jabir was always teasing him, out loud, to all the other boys. “He is tied to his sister’s skirts,” he said. “He does whatever she tells him.” It went on and on and Osman was so unhappy—he didn’t want to go to school— that in the end, well…’

‘You saw him?’

‘Yes. He—he was disgusting. He said things…I wouldn’t see him again. Not even for Osman…In fact, though, he didn’t ask again. That, it seemed, was enough. All he wanted. Just to talk—talk like that…’ Her voice trailed away.

This was not quite what Owen had expected to hear.

‘I am sorry,’ he said awkwardly.

‘I don’t know what he did to Osman afterwards.’ Her voice was almost inaudible. ‘One day Osman didn’t come home. They brought him to us later. He had tried to throw himself in front of a train. I think it frightened even Jabir for after that things were better. They stayed away from each other for the rest of the time they were at school. But then…’

She gestured her bewilderment.

‘They started seeing each other again. It was after Osman had started working at the Ministry. I could not believe it. “What?” I said. “After what he had done?” “All that is past,” said Osman. Soon they were friends as before. One day he brought him home. Afterwards, when Jabir left, he said: “Greet your sister for me, Osman.” I said: “I do not want greetings from such as he.”

‘Osman said nothing. But the next day he took me aside and said: “You must not talk like that. All that is in the past. Encourage him. He is interested in you.”

“‘I am not interested in him,” I said. Osman shrugged. “You are getting old,” he said, “and time is going by. Beggars cannot be choosers.” ’

Aisha looked at Owen.

‘That was two years ago,’ she said. ‘Now I am even older.’

‘A man looks for all sorts of things in a wife,’ Owen said. Aisha shrugged.

‘Perhaps. “I would rather grow old alone,” I said, “than be wife to a man like that.” “What do you have against him?” Osman asked. “What do you see in him?” I countered, for I was angry that he should have forgotten. “He knows how to rise,” ’ said Osman.

Aisha’s cousin appeared through the pillars.

‘ “And you think he will show you how to rise?” I said to Osman. “He has friends who have helped him and could help me.” “If?” I asked.’

‘What did he reply?’

‘He walked away. But I think, effendi,’ she said, looking him in the face, ‘that if there was a beginning, then that could have been it.’

The cousin began to signal imperatively.

‘I shall have to go, effendi.’

As she walked away, Ali suddenly appeared beside him, studying the women in apparent bewilderment.

‘Haven’t we got this wrong, effendi,’ he asked. ‘Oughtn’t the babies to be coming later?’

There’s trouble in the Derb Aiah district,’ said Nikos.

Owen reached for his sun helmet. He kept both sun helmet and tarboosh in his office but when missiles started flying sun helmet was best. ‘What sort of trouble?’

‘Riot. The police are down there.’

Owen hurried along the corridor. As he went past the office of the Deputy Commandant he looked in but McPhee was not there. He went on and into the orderly room.

‘Where’s the Bimbashi?’

At Kasr el Aini, effendi.’

Kasr el Aini was on the other side of town.

‘There’s a riot in the Derb Aiah.’

‘Yes, effendi.’

‘I’m going over. Tell the Bimbashi when he gets back.’ Strictly speaking, immediate policing was the preserve of the police. The Mamur Zapt, however, was responsible for the preservation of order in the city and Owen took the view that the first thing was to get on top of any disorder and argue about the division of responsibility afterwards.

There was a one-horse arabeah in the street outside the Bab el Khalk; one-horse, unfortunately, in every sense. Owen jumped in and told the driver to hurry to the Derb Aiah.

This was asking for the impossible. The cab proceeded at its usual slow amble along the Khalig el Masri, past the House of the Grand Mufti, past the Syrian Church, the Maronite Church, the Armenian Church, the Coptic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and the French Church and, some time later, at last, turned into the Derb Aiah.

Where there was no sign of a riot. The street was deserted.

Suspiciously deserted. Shops were closed, stalls abandoned. There was just one solitary figure, an old man limping along with a stick.

Owen caught up with him.

‘Where is it?’ he said.

The man lifted his stick and pointed down a side-street. Owen hurried ahead. He found himself in a warren of mediæval alleyways and streets. All were deserted.

He stopped and listened.

This was puzzling. Usually you could hear. There was, indeed, a low murmuring, but…

He plunged on. At the end of a street he saw people.

He came up behind them. Tall, he was able to see over their heads. There was a little square, not so much a square as a widening of the street where several alleyways joined. The space was crammed with people.

But they were all quiet! What sort of riot was this?

He began to push his way through the crowd. Everyone was looking in one direction, towards the other side of the square.

All he could see was an old fountain-house. There was the fountain chamber, at ground level and open to the street, and there above it the usual arched second chamber.

There was someone standing in one of the arches. It was a woman, short and stout and dressed in black. Her arms were folded.

There seemed something familiar about her.

Owen pushed closer and looked up: the Widow Shawquat!

Around the bottom of the fountain-house was a thin line of harassed-looking policemen.

‘What’s going on?’ said Owen, in Arabic.

‘By God, she is putting salt on their tails!’ said someone in front of him with relish.

The voice, too, seemed familiar. Its owner looked round. It was Owen’s friend, the barber.

‘What’s up there?’

‘The
kuttub
.’

The school. The Widow Shawquat’s school. It all began to fall into place.

‘The police came, did they?’

‘Yes. Her son was hearing the children say their lessons and the police came and said “The
kuttub
belongs to someone else now: out you go!” And Abdul said: “I will send for my mother!” And the police said. “Ho ho!” And then the Widow Shawquat came.’

‘What happened?’

‘She kicked their ass.’

One of the constables at the foot of the fountain-house, hearing the exchange, turned round.

‘She attacked me brutally, effendi!’ he said indignantly. ‘She smote me savagely in the side!’

‘She kicked you up the ass!’ said the barber.

‘She thrust me from the
kuttub
!’

‘You, a policeman! What sort of man is this? To allow a woman to put him out!’

‘I’d like to see you try!’ retorted the constable. ‘You wouldn’t do any better!’

‘Twenty policemen? One woman?’ scoffed somebody from the crowd.

‘There weren’t twenty! There were just three of us,’ protested the constable who had been assaulted.

‘And then you called for reinforcements!’ jeered the scoffer in the crowd. ‘One woman!’

‘One woman!’ said the barber indignantly. He jumped up on to the steps of the fountain-house and turned to address the crowd. ‘One woman! Savagely assaulted!’

‘Here, wait a minute,’ said the policeman. ‘You’ve got it wrong. We were the ones who were savagely assaulted.’

‘A woman of the people!’ cried the barber. ‘One of us!’

‘Yes, yes!’

The crowd, excited, began to stir.

‘Brutally attacked!’ cried the barber.

‘Shame! Shame!’

‘Her first, us next!’

‘It certainly will be you if you don’t shut up,’ warned one of the policemen.

‘They are picking on our women!’

The policemen began to look anxious.

‘What are we going to do?’ one of them called to Owen over the heads of the crowd.

‘Who’s in charge here?’

The constables pushed forward a reluctant corporal. ‘What shall I do, effendi? I ought to arrest her for disturbing the peace, but…’

‘Just try it! Just try it!’ cried the barber.

‘Shall I knock him on the head?’ asked one of the constables.

‘You ought to go up and reason with her, Hamid,’ said one of the constables urgently.

The corporal seemed unwilling.

‘Yes!’ said the constable enthusiastically. ‘Go up and talk to her sweetly, Hamid!’

‘She might kick
my
ass,’ objected the corporal. ‘That would be bad for discipline.’

‘Call yourself a man?’ cried the barber.

The corporal turned on him threateningly. The Widow Shawquat was one thing; an ordinary street agitator quite another.

‘Are you disturbing the peace?’

The barber skipped hastily back into the crowd. With two or three rows in between him and the constables he felt bolder.

‘I’m not: she is,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you do something about her?’

‘Yes, why not!’ taunted the crowd.

‘We could rush her,’ said one of the constables doubtfully.

‘Right!’ said the corporal. ‘You go first.’

The constables looked at the staircase uncertainly.

‘You rush her,’ shouted someone in the crowd—it may have been the barber—‘and we’ll rush you!’

The crowd, good-humoured up to now and enjoying watching the police’s dilemma, suddenly surged menacingly forward.

The constables paled and fell back.

The crowd pushed forward again, driving them back and back until they came to the front of the stairs. One or two of the constables were forced up it. As more and more came on to the stairs, the ones at the top, realizing who awaited them above, clung to the balustrade in an attempt to resist their upward progression.

Owen had been trying to force his way through but the people in front of him were so tightly jammed together that he had been unable to move. The sudden eddies of the crowd, however, gave him some leverage and he succeeded in breaking through to where the policemen huddled on the stairs.

‘Back!’ he shouted. ‘Back! Make room! I will talk to the Widow Shawquat!’

‘This I long to see,’ said a satirical voice from the crowd.

‘Who’s he?’

‘What’s an Effendi doing here?’

‘It is the Mamur Zapt!’ said a well-known voice from above. ‘My Deliverer has come!’

The Widow appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Make way, make way there!’ she shouted. ‘Get out of it! Let him come up! Praise be to God! The Mamur Zapt has heard the prayers of a poor defenceless woman.’

The crowd fell silent.

‘By God, he has!’ said someone in an amazed voice. ‘That was quick!’

The police parted, only too willingly, to give Owen passage.

At the top of the stairs he found a class of children, goggle-eyed, the redoubtable Widow, and a slight, gentle-faced man shrinking back against the wall not so much in fear as in embarrassment, as if he was willing the walls to open and cover him. As Owen appeared, he buried his face in his hands.

The Widow Shawquat was less bashful.

‘Protector of the Poor!’ she hailed Owen joyfully. ‘Saviour of the Shawquats!’

‘What is all this?’

The Widow’s moment had come, however. She seized Owen by the hands and drew him forward to the balustrade which ran round the whole of the upper storey.

‘Behold!’ she cried to the crowd below. ‘Our Defender has come! He will right our wrongs! He will cast down the Mighty from their Seats!’

The crowd, thrilled beyond measure, and believing that the millennium had come, began to cry out in ecstasy. On the outskirts, two dervishes began to whirl.

‘What are the police to him?’ scoffed the Widow.

Beyond the houses, from somewhere in the warren of streets, came a loud honking. Owen knew what it was. It was the police force’s one car.

A moment later it appeared in one of the side-streets. Its roof was open and there, standing up beside the driver, was the tall, thin figure of the Deputy Commandant of the Cairo Police, McPhee. With him, in the back, were armed policemen.

‘Disperse!’ shouted McPhee. ‘Disperse at once! Return to your homes!’

The car pressed forward into the crowd.

People, panic-stricken, began to fall out of its way. Those at the edge of the crowd started to run off up the side-streets.

The car came to a halt. The policemen jumped out of the car and fanned out, guns at the ready.

‘Disperse!’ shouted McPhee. ‘At once.’

‘It’s all right,’ shouted Owen.

McPhee looked up, bewildered.

‘Owen! What are you doing here?’

What, indeed, thought Owen.

‘And when I arrived,’ said McPhee, ‘there was Owen orchestrating the crowd!’

‘Managing it,’ said Owen. ‘I was getting it to calm down.’

‘It didn’t look like that to me,’ said McPhee.

‘You should have been there a moment or two earlier!’

‘I came as quickly as I could,’ said McPhee, taking this as a reproach. ‘The car was being cleaned.’

Garvin sighed. He was the Commandant of the Cairo Police, weary in the ways of Egyptian policing.

‘As far as I can see, there was no actual violence.’

‘Three constables have lodged a complaint,’ said McPhee stiffly. ‘Undue violence perpetrated against their persons.’

‘She kicked them up the backside,’ said Owen.

‘That’s what I meant, sir,’ said McPhee, turning to Garvin. ‘Whose side is he on?’

‘If that was the extent of the violence,’ said Garvin, ‘I’ve seen worse cases: about twenty times a day.’

‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ said McPhee severely. Garvin sighed again.

‘Is there any reason,’ he asked, ‘why we should give any time to this whatsoever?’

Owen hesitated. ‘Yes, there is.’

He told them about the possible development of the Derb Aiah area. McPhee, especially, listened with interest.

‘But that would take in the
tekke
,’ he said.

‘The little mosque with the blue tiles? All sparkle?’

‘Yes.’

McPhee knew his mosques. He was an enthusiast less about things architectural than about things religious and collected shrines and feast-days and old Cairo saints with avidity. Garvin tolerated this eccentricity as he tolerated Owen’s. ‘It would be terrible if that was to go,’ McPhee said.

‘You think it could cause trouble?’ Garvin asked Owen.

‘I think there’s something else that would cause more.’ He told them about the proposed north-south road. ‘Through the City!’ said McPhee, appalled.

‘It’ll never happen!’ said Garvin dismissively.

‘There’s a planning application in.’

‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘The Khedive’s keen.’

‘Means even less.’

‘I don’t know about that. It could be another case like the Agricultural Society.’

‘What?’ said Garvin, caught off-balance and looking at Owen as if he had suddenly realized that he was suffering from sunstroke.

‘When he couldn’t get anywhere, he got on and did it himself.’

He told them about the founding of the Society.

Garvin looked at his watch.

‘Yes, well, thank you. Can I suggest you follow up other things? Both of you.’

‘Yussef,’ said Owen severely, ‘this is the second time in a month.’

‘This is the first time, effendi. The other time was last month.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I’ve written it down in my little book. See?’ Yussef, the office orderly, could not read but could recognize the large letter which began his name; and also, alas, the figures alongside it.

‘Effendi, I need it to buy seed.’

‘That’s what you told me last time. You said it was the planting season and that you needed the money to buy seed. What happened to it? What did you do with the money?’

‘I used it to buy seed. Some of it. But I owed my brother some money, effendi. And also my sister. And then there was my uncle and aunt—’

‘Look, I’m not supporting the whole family.’

He knew, however, that he was. Yussef, like many of the other orderlies, had left his native village and moved into the town in search of better paid employment. He still retained a strip of land in the village, however, which was now worked by his wife and children with occasional support from the rest of his family. The rest of the family were as much in debt as Yussef himself.

He regularly came to Owen for an advance on pay before the end of the month. Owen didn’t mind that as he thought a month was a long time to wait for people as lowly-paid as the orderlies. He did feel, however, a certain responsibility for Yussef and tried to see that he didn’t get too much into debt.

Unfortunately, the Government was not the only body to which Yussef owed money and there was not much Owen could do about the others. He lectured Yussef sternly and Yussef looked doleful but that was as far as it went.

‘Two advances in a month! Yussef, if I gave you that, what would you have left? We would come to the end of the month and then there would be nothing. You would have to borrow again.’