by Tom McCarthy
He spends most of his days trawling the markets-the antiques ones-buying, as Macauley suggested, trinkets. Ankhs and scarabs, signet rings, papyri, necklaces. The scarabs come in many shapes and styles: square, oval, decorated, some with beetle-armour moulding on their backs, others with images (the sun, a bird, a human figure writing something), others still with geometric patterns: circles, spirals, mazes. He buys them for his mother and his father, for Maureen, the schoolrooms. For Bodner he buys jars containing pulverised mummified cat, which, he’s informed in broken English by the seller, is a prodigious fertiliser.
“Is that true?” he asks Pollard a few hours later.
“Apparently,” Pollard replies. “The tombs they’ve been unearthing constantly for the last hundred years are so full of these bandaged creatures that they’re twenty to the dozen, and quite nutrient-rich to boot. Whether or not you’re getting the real thing each time you buy a jar of ground-down ancient cat in a market is another question. Same goes for the scarabs and papyri: half of them are fake.”
Wallis, warming to the theme of forgery, tells Serge to double-check his change in shops and cafés: there’s a glut of counterfeit 10-piastre pieces and 5-livre égyptienne banknotes going round these days. It’s not just currency that’s counterfeit: people themselves are often of dubious provenance-especially Europeans. You never know whether the person you meet in a restaurant is a surgeon or minor statesman as he claims, or a card-sharp, pimp or hustler. The Gazette’s awash with stories of well-spoken Englishmen who waltz into the Continental, introduce themselves as middle-men for jewellers and take consignment of gold watches and diamond rings to show to clients, never to reappear; or ones who scour the social pages to learn who’s pitched up in town and where they’re staying, then set out to befriend, seduce and generally swindle them. A well-known bigamist, one article announces, who’s wanted for gross deception, extortion and manslaughter, is rumoured to be passing through Cairo incognito: “HE COULD BE ANYONE,” the headline shouts excitedly. It’s true: anyone and everyone seems to pass through here; it’s the gateway to the Middle and Far East. Oil prospectors, irrigation-pump importers, engineers, brokers, general speculators: they’re all milling around, waiting for boats or business, trying to buy or sell something or other. One evening, in the Savoy Palace brasserie, Serge runs into his old Hythe training partner, Stedman.
“You survived!” they blurt out simultaneously, equally incredulous.
“Did anybody else?” Serge asks.
“Pepperdine got taken prisoner on his first flight, I heard. Spurrier got wounded and shipped home. The rest are dead, I think.”
“And you?”
“Bullet-resistant. Like a reverse magnet: they just veered away from me. Must be some magic powers those lacrosse girls had. I went through five observers-no, six. The best part of the ground crew in my squadron got killed too; but I was in the air each time the bombing raids came. I’ve been flying ever since: figure it’s lucky for me…”
“Flying where?”
“Joy rides over London until last year.”
“I read about those,” Serge says, his head filling with Amazonians and Osram Lamp advertisements. “From Croydon, right?”
“Exactly,” Stedman answers. “Now I’m heading for the Levant, to do aerial surveys for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.”
“If they can still afford it, that is,” a fellow diner to whom Serge was vaguely introduced some nights ago, and who’s been listening to their conversation while he reads the Gazette at the bar, chips in. “Their share price is down three-sixteenths.”
“Three-sixteenths isn’t so bad,” counters Pollard, who’s wandered over, having failed to secure an invitation to the table of a minister whose wife he’s been buying drinks for. “The Agricultural Bank’s down a whole pound, and the Banque d’Orient’s fallen two since independence. If they can take it, Angie-Percy can drop the odd sixteenth and bounce back.”
“Bounce back?” the Gazette-reader scoffs. “I’m not sure any of them can ‘take it,’ as you say. We’ll all be lucky to avoid a run.”
“I don’t think…” Pollard begins-but the man, warming to his subject, cuts him off:
“Least of our worries, anyway: says here there’s talk of a complete withdrawal.”
“I can assure you that that option’s not being-” Pollard tries to tell him, but the man continues:
“Even the Copts want us out, apparently. If our fellow Christians won’t stand by us, then what hope have we got? And to top it all, we’re being assassinated left, right and centre.”
“Bit of an exaggeration…” Pollard answers soothingly.
The man waves his Gazette at him. “Page seven: ‘Italian Lawyer Shot in Labban.’ Page eight: ‘E. Brown, of Ministry of Public Instruction, Shot in Abdine.’ Further down the same page: ‘F. Bloch, of Egyptian State Railways, Bludgeoned-’ bludgeoned!-‘in Boulaq.’ ”
“Got a nice alliterative ring to it,” Serge says.
“Meanwhile,” the gazetteer continues, “they’re not even guaranteeing our pensions.”
“Not so,” Pollard disagrees. “Pensionable-age officials are being told that they can leave on ad-hoc-”
“Right,” the other jumps in again, “but only if we can show that we’re working under ‘unacceptable conditions.’ What’s unacceptable? Being shot at’s only unacceptable once it’s occurred, and by then it’s too late.”
“What ministry are you in?” Pollard asks him.
“Finance,” the man answers resentfully. “I’m having to help ratify this great injustice. And to add insult to injury, I’m being made to divest my own powers to some underqualified and smirking local. ‘Disentanglement,’ they call it; I call it rubbing ourselves out.”
He makes a frotting motion with his hand. Serge, his magnetic thought-poles influenced by Stedman’s presence, thinks of Walpond-Skinner’s ledger, then of balls of wool, then of Widsun, whose ‘appendix’ he has yet to write…
Besides British officials and their civil servants, labourers from all over Europe and entrepreneurs and hustlers from the earth’s four corners, the town’s also full of tourists. They seem quite oblivious to the political upheaval taking place around them-yet they have their own brand of disquiet. Serge spends an evening in the company of one: an Abigail he picks up, like some fraudster, at the Continental and, giving her parents, a Chelsea banker and a Lawn Tennis Association social secretary, the slip, takes to one café, then another, then another, the establishments’ respectability diminishing as they progress, until they find themselves surrounded by horse-players and their bookies, courtesans on breaks and worse. The conversation buzzing around them is full of High Nile stakes and boxing odds, of anxious speculation about what will happen if capitulations are repealed and foreign miscreants tried in native rather than consular courts before being locked up, unsegregated, in Manshiyya. Abigail, insensible to these strands that Serge’s ear’s unpicking, coughs on the Melkonian he offers her and, waving smoke from her eyes, complains:
“The brochure says we’re meant to ‘discover’ the Pyramids. But they’ve already been discovered. Egyptology’s a hundred years old. Did you know that?”
“I suppose-” Serge begins, but she continues:
“I read it in the Times before we left: a hundred years exactly since that French chap Champignon deciphered that old tablet.”
“Second Babel in three feet-” Serge starts to say, but she interrupts him again:
“I mean, my grandfather remembers seeing the Egyptian court in Crystal Palace as a child. And I read as well, in the same article-was it the same one? Doesn’t matter: that one or another like it-that until recently you could pitch up here with a compass and a map, and your hosts would arrange for you to find-to ‘find’-” her voice goes high and squeaky at this point-“a tomb, which they’d prepare overnight for you, mummy and all, while you slept on Oriental cushions. It’s all so… fake!”
She drags on her cigarette again, then,
puffing the smoke out in a rush, continues:
“We got all the guidebooks before we set out. The Cook’s one told us we should read Herodotus, so as to come here not as tourists but as ‘travellers,’ ‘individual explorers.’ So we got that too. But now it turns out everybody else on our tour is carting round a copy of Herodotus-which they got told to buy by Cook. What’s individual about that?”
“Maybe-” Serge ventures; but she’s on a roll:
“And we got another book as well, that tells us how to do ‘research’: we’ve bought a sextant and chronometer, a siphon and barometer and measuring tape-oh yes: and paper to do pressings of inscriptions on these temples, like they haven’t been transcribed a hundred million zillion times before. And then, because it’s the latest edition that we’ve got-of the book, I mean-there’s a note telling us it’s now acceptable to photograph inscriptions rather than pressing them. Acceptable to whom? Who are we photographing for?”
Her voice has gone squeaky and breathless again; Serge, looking at her neck, sees that it’s flushed. She pauses for a while and sips her drink. Serge, following the red flush from her neck down to her blouse, recalls his nights spent DX-fishing in Versoie: the sense that, in transcribing all the clicks, notating all the messages, logging the stations and their outputs, he was performing a task so vital that a single wrong entry would have disastrous consequences for whole hierarchies of-of what? Committees, subcommittees? Of important bodies who relied on him, who’d process and act on his dispatches, who needed them. Beyond that: that the stations at the far end of the dial, the signals on the edge of audibility-from ships, or desert outposts, or more distant ships and outposts ever further still being picked up and forwarded through vast, static reaches-were coming from a place so remote and enchanted as to belong to another dimension entirely, a “there” as far divorced from “here” as angels from the mortals before whom they might briefly appear in flickering electric visions. Now, though, there’s no “there”: he’s here where “there” was and it’s not “there” anymore, just “here.”
“Do you know,” Abigail’s asking him, “what happened when we went past Gizah on the steamer? Well, I’ll tell you: at exactly half past four the dragoman came below deck and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ ” She slips into a mock-Egyptian accent and repeats: “ ‘La-dies and gentle-men. If you care to as-cent un-to the main deck now, the mar-vel of the Pyra-mids will be re-vealed to you.’ So we as-cented, and the Pyramids were there, just like in the photographs that I’d already seen in all those bloody books but not looking so nice and aesthetic; and people got their cameras out and started photographing them, although I don’t know why, because their photos won’t turn out as nice as the ones in the books and brochures either. And they didn’t even photograph the things for very long, because there was a buffet laid out on the deck, and they all wanted to get at it before the sandwiches and lemonade ran out; but then of course they realised that they had to show a certain reverence towards the Pyramids, while still not missing out on lunch, so they revered and ate and photographed and drank all at once. And our dragoman said: ‘Please don’t for-get your tem-ple tick-et, as it’s valid for the Sphinx tour too.’ ”
“And what did you do?” Serge asks.
“What could I do?” her voice goes high and squeaky and her neck flushes again. “I looked at the Pyramids, and tried to revere them, and photographed a little. Then I looked at the others looking at the Pyramids, and photographed these people too. I tried to eat a little, but I felt sick. It was obscene-like a pornographic film: this dirty entertainment laid on for us all to gape at.”
“I had that impression in the war,” Serge says.
“You were in the war?” she asks, looking straight at him for the first time. “Doing what?”
“Observing,” he says. “Gaping from a plane.”
“That sounds quite exciting,” she says. “Tell me more.”
He takes her back to his place. During sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and out along her rib-lines. Afterwards, they lie in silence for a while; then she asks him:
“So, did you kill anyone?”
She leaves the next day-on another steamer, heading down to Luxor and Assuan. He thinks of her two days later, though, when, leaving his flat by foot and turning the corner into Rue de Paris, he hears two gunshots and, looking down the street to where they came from, sees two black figures running from a growing patch of white that’s spreading across the pavement. It’s milk: their victim, an English professor at the Law School, had stepped outside his front door to collect it when they shot him-they were lying in wait. The man’s already dead by the time Serge reaches him. His blood, trickling from his head and abdomen, is running into the milk, marbling its pool with deltaed strands, like natron on a lake of soda.
iii
The Central Station has its own building, a much more modern one than that housing the other ministries. Antennae sprout from its roof; soldiers guard the compound that surrounds it: Imperial Communications are indeed, as Ferguson intimated, “protected.” Its rooms are full of people and equipment, its corridors of well-directed bustle. Macauley leads Serge past rows of desks at which men sit with headphones on, transcribing letter sequences while other men move up and down the rows gathering the transcriptions and depositing them in front of yet more men who mark them up on blackboards. In a corner two more men are working their way through a pile of newspapers-Gazette, Wady et Nil, al-Ahram, al-Balagh, al-Jumhur, al-Akbar-underscoring certain words, then tearing out the pages on which these have been highlighted and passing them to the gatherers, who convey them to the marker-uppers, who, in turn, copy them out to mingle with the letters on the boards.
“They use all kinds of channels,” Macauley says to Serge, obscurely.
“Who do?” Serge asks.
“Everyone!” Macauley answers. “We’re at the crossroads here, the confluence of all the region’s interest groups’ transmissions. We’re listening to the Wafdists and the Turks; they’re listening to Ulamáists and Zionists; the French are listening to us, and we to them-but we share info on the Russians, who we both hate, although not as much as we all hate the Germans, who we listen to as well. Or is it the Spartacans? In any case, we listen to them all. Telegrams, radio messages, acrostics and keywords lurking within print: we try to pick as much of it up as we can. A thankless task, of course; who knows what tiny fraction of it all we actually get?”
“And that’s what all these men are doing?” Serge asks.
“All these men and more: my décryptage department. Headed up by Egyptologists. Got the right minds: used to cracking New Kingdom texts or something. Rebus logic. It all goes above my head, to tell you the truth. This stuff,” he continues, leading Serge through a door into the next room, “I can understand a little better: at least it looks like something vaguely recognisable.”
He’s pointing to a wall on which a huge map, as big as eight or so of the other room’s blackboards, is painted: a map extending from Izmir down to Khartoum and from Tunis to Baghdad. Pins of various colours have been jabbed into this-some small and some with heads as large as ping-pong balls, some all alone and some in clusters. More pins are being added all the time, by men consulting photographs, hand-written notes and smaller maps.
“ImagInt,” Macauley says. “Aerial, terrestrial, snapped, painted, scribbled on some scrap of fabric: it’s all there. Even livestock movements, locust swarms, what have you. All adds up-or at least, it’s supposed to. HumInt too, of course.”
“What’s humming?” Serge asks.
“HumInt: Human Intelligence. Got agents everywhere: here; Suq Al-Shuyukh, where the sheiks all meet; Nasiriyah, from whence sedition seems to spread down the Euphrates to the Arab tribes; the Shia holy cities, hotbeds of intrigue and points, if memory serves me righ
tly, of contact with Damascus, which, via them, can exercise remote control of Persia… or is it the other way round? Either way, we’ve got to keep an eye and ear out for what’s brewing. We have men doing the Hajj, or wandering around with herdsmen, or hanging out in mosques, bazaars, communal washhouses, village meetings…”
“Folklore?” Serge asks, pointing to a table labelled with this word, across whose surface lies a mish-mash of handwritten pages crudely illustrated with pictures of lions and eagles.
“Supposed to contain useful information,” Macauley responds. “Stories of curses going round, or afrits haunting districts, may be telling us something… or not…” He sighs. “It’s all pretty intangible: whispers and rumours drifting like some kind of vapour across swathes of desert…”
“Back in London,” Serge says, “I was reading about some chap named Laurice, Lorents, Laudence…”
“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense… ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad… Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home… Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”
“How?” Serge asks.
“With the other parties all spying on us, if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too. We call it ‘feedback’-no, hang on a second… ‘bleedback’: that’s it. Lots of those sequences you saw being written out across the blackboards in the other room get bled back too, mutated but still recognisable, in telegrams, transmissions, new acrostics… Make sure they’re confused as we are, eh? Plus, who knows? We might actually hit some nerve, activate something… maybe… Oops! Don’t let us get in your way: carry on!”