The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Given?’ suggested one of the other men.

  ‘Given,’ said the omda gratefully.

  ‘Who by?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘God?’ suggested one of the villagers.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the omda, relieved.

  ‘If God gives, He usually does it through someone.’

  They looked at him blankly.

  ‘The factory?’

  Was this some kind of company town?

  ‘Factory?’ said the omda, puzzled.

  ‘Listen,’ said Owen, ‘it’s got to be somebody. Who put that girl in as ghaffir?’

  He couldn’t get it out of them. They just sat there woodenly.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last, exasperated. ‘On your own heads be it. I shall find out and then there will be trouble. It is monstrous putting a little girl like that up as your ghaffir. Suppose there was big trouble? Suppose the brigands came?’

  ‘Oh, no, Effendi,’ said the omda confidently, ‘they won’t come. Not now that the girl is here.’

  ***

  The truck turned into the compound and drew to a halt. Owen and the driver got out. It was nearly noon and the workmen were beginning to stop for lunch. He could see them sitting in the shade of the edge of the sugar cane, the big coloured handkerchiefs in which they had brought their bread spread out beside them.

  One truck was still being unloaded. Schneider was standing by the conveyor belt watching the cane being fed in. He turned when he saw Owen and came across, hand outstretched.

  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you here again? What is it this time? Not us, I hope. We’re Swiss.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Owen.

  Schneider glanced at his watch.

  ‘It’s lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Care to join us?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a lot to do before I go back. I gather there’s a truck going in this evening?’

  ‘About seven. Just a drink, then?’

  He took Owen to his office but then, instead of staying there, he picked up a bottle and glasses and took them outside to a small table and two wickerwork chairs standing in the shade of the factory wall. This far south you didn’t stay indoors much if you could help it, thought Owen.

  ‘What is it you’ve got to do?’ asked Schneider, pouring Owen a drink.

  ‘I’d like to have a word with Hanafi. Would that be possible, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s up and about now. Pulling himself together. He’s been in to the factory once or twice. I’m letting him suit himself. No need to be hard on a bloke when he’s gone through what Hanafi has. What did you want to see him about?’

  ‘It’s something that has cropped up in connection with a job I’m working on in Minya. I’m staying at the rest house and I noticed that at one point Hanafi was there quite a lot.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘It was when Fricker was staying there. You remember Fricker?’

  ‘The one who used to sing?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, they got quite pally.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have looked at it, only he was there during the day. The working day. Four days, in fact. In not much more than two weeks.’

  ‘Not much more than two weeks?’

  ‘I wondered if he was over there on business?’

  ‘Four times?’

  Schneider looked slightly upset.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We do sometimes have business in Minya. But four times!’

  ‘That’s what struck me. I wondered if you knew about it?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know everything he does, and I don’t really want to know, either. I don’t like sitting on a man’s tail. I like to let him get on with it. But four times in just over two weeks!’

  ‘He also went to see the mudir.’

  ‘I do sometimes send him in to see the mudir. But—’

  ‘What do you send him in to see the mudir about?’

  Schneider did not reply at once. He seemed to be thinking.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my job is to run a sugar factory. And I like to keep on the right side of people. It helps, especially around here. That way you’re less likely to run into trouble. Well, from time to time I send Hanafi in to have a chat with the mudir, tell him what we’re doing, you know, so that it doesn’t come as a surprise to him. If, say, we’re going to have an unusual number of shipments going out from the port, and it’s going to be blocking up the waterfront for a few days, well, I like to see he knows about it.’

  ‘And that’s what it might have been this time?’

  Schneider hesitated.

  ‘I don’t see how it could have been,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Not four times in just over two weeks. If I send him in, it’s about once a month.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t your business but Fricker’s?’

  ‘Fricker’s?’

  ‘Could it have been anything to do with ghaffirs, do you think?’

  ‘Ghaffirs? Why the hell would he have wanted to talk to Fricker about ghaffirs?’

  ‘Fricker was interested in ghaffirs.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘The mudir might have been too.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but our business is sugar cane, not ghaffirs.’

  ‘So what business was he seeing Fricker on, then? Four times in so few days? Working days?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know. All I know is that if he was seeing him four times in a couple of weeks it was on his business, not mine.’

  ***

  Hanafi himself came to the door. Owen had thought he might not remember him, but he nodded in recognition and led him into the room with the piano. It was still there. Owen had half expected it not to be.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  Hanafi shrugged.

  ‘Schneider says you’re beginning to get back to work. That’s good.’

  Hanafi shrugged again.

  ‘It is best to keep occupied.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanafi, without conviction. ‘So they say.’ He looked down at his hands and then up again. ‘But what is the point?’ he said. ‘What is the point now? Everything I did, I did for her. She was my point. She gave my life meaning.’

  ‘You will have to find other meanings,’ said Owen gently.

  ‘The only ones left for me now are the old ones,’ said Hanafi despondently. ‘The ones I wanted to get away from.’

  ‘There are other meanings.’

  ‘That is what we thought. She and I. We thought we could find them together. And if they weren’t there, we thought we could build them. Together.’

  He was no longer talking to Owen. He seemed to have forgotten him altogether, to be talking to himself.

  ‘It was not just our lives that we were building, it was everyone’s lives. We thought we would build a new society, a society with new meanings.’ He made a little, hopeless gesture. ‘But then we came up against society and found that it had already built its meanings and didn’t want ours. Its meanings were like walls and held people apart. They held you in and if you tried to cross them they wouldn’t let you. And if by any chance you did succeed in crossing them, then the walls closed behind you and locked you out. We tried to break them down but they were too strong for us. And in the end we had to settle for the old meanings. The ones I had tried to get away from. And if it was hard for me, it was—well, impossibly hard for her.’

  ‘You must not blame yourself.’

  ‘Who should I blame, then?’

  ‘I do not think,’ said Owen, ‘that in these things it is wise to look for blame.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hanafi doubtfully, ‘you may be right. What was it that you wished to see me about?’

  ‘It is a small thing,’ said Owen, ‘and I hate to trouble
you at such a time. But it may be that you can help me. It is to do with some work I have.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘It touches on Fricker Effendi and the time when he was at Minya.’

  ‘Ah, Fricker Effendi!’

  Hanafi’s face brightened.

  ‘You knew him, of course.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘And had lunch with him, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘I wonder—would you mind telling me what you talked about?’

  ‘Talked about?’

  ‘It was business, I presume?’

  ‘Business? No.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought—’

  ‘Oh, I see. What was I doing in Minya on a working day, you mean?’

  ‘Four working days. In such a short time.’

  ‘I was there on business. But the business was not with Fricker Effendi. It was with the mudir.’

  ‘The mudir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Schneider Effendi does not remember this business.’

  ‘He wouldn’t, it was with me. The mudir summoned me directly.’

  ‘Four times?’

  ‘Yes. He wanted me to carry messages for him to people here. And then I had to take back their replies. But then he had questions and they needed further replies. So I was going into Minya a lot.’

  ‘Without Schneider Effendi knowing?’

  Hanafi shrugged.

  ‘He does not need to know everything. He wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘What was the subject of the messages?’

  ‘That,’ said Hanafi, with a touch of reproof, ‘is for the mudir to say.’

  ‘Of course. I ask only in connection with my work. They were not about ghaffirs, by any chance?’

  ‘Ghaffirs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ said Hanafi, ‘they were not about ghaffirs. Fricker Effendi asked me about ghaffirs,’ he volunteered.

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Yes, but that was when I first met him. At the mudir’s. They had been talking about ghaffirs, I think, and Fricker Effendi turned to me. But I know nothing about ghaffirs.’

  ‘You did not talk about it at your lunches?’

  ‘No.’ Hanafi smiled. ‘I think that for Fricker Effendi that was work, and he didn’t want to talk about work. Neither did I, for that matter.’

  ‘So what did you talk about?’

  Hanafi’s face lit up.

  ‘Everything. Music, of course, and the time when he used to sing and Hilde used to play for him. But not just that. Ideas—everything! What they were talking about in Cairo, whether there would be war, and what changes it might bring. He said that in Cairo everyone was talking change. The politicians, the young effendis in the Ministries, the Ministers themselves! It was, he said, a ferment of ideas. And when he spoke, it was like—it was as if a hole had been opened in one of those walls, and suddenly I saw again what I had seen once before, when I went up to Cairo for the first time, and everything was possible.’

  His eyes continued to shine for a moment; then they dulled.

  ‘There was a time,’ he said quietly, ‘when I, too, believed in change. I went to meetings, I distributed leaflets, marched in processions, shouted for Mustapha Kamil. And Hilde was part of it. She did not shout as I did, she did not march; but she shared in the excitement, she shared in the belief in change.’

  He looked again at Owen.

  ‘So what did we talk about? And what did we talk about when I took him home so that Hilde could listen too? Life,’ he said. ‘Life, that was what we talked about.’

  His cheeks suddenly caved in.

  ***

  Owen walked away from the house, thinking. This was a new side of Fricker that he was seeing and it was an unexpected one. Fricker, the bringer of sweetness and light? That pedant? That believer in systems and procedures, in lists of suggestions? That archetypal, as he had thought, apostle of Germanic efficiency?

  But he could see how he would have appeared to the Hanafis: to Aziz a reminder of that bright new world he had once aspired to, and to Hilde a reminder of that life that had once, nearly, been hers.

  They had thought they could take on the world. The world, unfortunately, was always likely to be a victor in such encounters.

  The real problem, though, was that they had sought, as Hanafi had put it, to cross one of society’s walls, and had paid the price. He found himself wondering whether it would be like that for Zeinab and him, if they, too, tried to cross the wall.

  He didn’t think it would. Not for him, at any rate. A man’s place in this kind of expatriate society was defined by his work, and that would continue. Unless, of course, Kitchener had other ideas. But then, especially in the general uncertainty of war, there would be other work for him, if only in the Army.

  But Zeinab?

  ***

  Mahmoud had been visiting Old Mother Tayi.

  ‘She didn’t put the evil eye on you?’

  Mahmoud looked at Owen uncertainly. He wasn’t quite sure how to take this. If it was a joke, he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  ‘These people are very backward,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t their fault.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He explained how he had come to hear of her doubtful gift.

  ‘That mamur,’ said Mahmoud, ‘he’s another. For an educated man—’

  ‘At least it shows he’s close to the villagers,’ said Owen.

  Mahmoud wasn’t sure about this, either. Was being close to the villagers a good thing if the villagers were backward and superstitious? He himself didn’t feel close to them at all. He didn’t know how to take the banter of the women, he could hardly believe the credulousness of the men and, although he wouldn’t allow himself to say it, even to himself, he couldn’t stand the squalor.

  ‘Of course, she has a wider role in the village,’ he said sternly. ‘She helps as a midwife, she lays out the dead, advises about the prospects for the crops—’

  He stopped. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t too happy about this, either, in so far as it was an aspect of her soothsaying. Advice offered on rational grounds was obviously acceptable, but advice offered on the basis of a supposed ability to predict the future…

  ‘What did she tell you?’ asked Owen.

  ***

  The door was opened this time not by Hanafi but by one of his brothers. Mahmoud asked if he could speak to the mother. The man disappeared. Again there was scurrying inside, and much muttering, and the feeling of there being many people. Then the mother came to the door.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘I would like to speak with you.’

  ‘You have spoken with me already.’

  ‘And now I wish to speak with you again. And ask you some questions.’

  ‘You have asked me questions before.’

  ‘These are new ones; and they need answering.’

  The mother hesitated. Someone called to her from inside. She shook her head impatiently and went on standing there.

  Hanafi suddenly appeared beside her.

  ‘Mother—’

  She shook her head again, sharply, almost dismissively.

  ‘Ask on, then,’ she said to Mahmoud.

  Mahmoud had been addressing her directly. Now, in the presence of her son, he put his questions through him, as custom prescribed.

  ‘She bought some poison from Old Mother Tayi,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Ask her what for.’

  ‘Mother—’

  She silenced him with a gesture. Then she stood there, looking at Mahmoud. Suddenly she laughed.

  ‘To kill the cats,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Mahmoud, taken aback.

  ‘To kill the cats,’ she said impatiently. ‘The cats
that that woman brought to the house.’

  ‘What is this?’ Mahmoud said to Hanafi.

  ‘There was a cat that Hilde fed,’ said Hanafi.

  ‘More than one,’ said the old woman sharply. ‘There was a plague of them.’

  ‘Where are they now?’ said Mahmoud, his eye travelling round the courtyard.

  ‘Dead.’

  There was a little silence. Then Mahmoud said:

  ‘Mother, a cat is a small creature, and it does not take much to poison it. Did it take all the poison that you bought?’

  ‘There were many cats.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘How would I know?’ retorted the woman. ‘The place was infested with them.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘Possibly.’ She shrugged.

  ‘I shall find out,’ said Mahmoud. ‘And then I shall ask you what you did with the rest of the poison.’

  ‘And I shall tell you,’ said the woman unexpectedly. ‘I have it still.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Very well.’

  She went back into the house and returned a little later with something wrapped in sugar cane leaves.

  ‘There!’ she said triumphantly.

  Mahmoud undid the leaves.

  ‘I shall take this,’ he said.

  ‘Take it, then.’ She smiled malignantly. ‘The cats are all dead,’ she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The sugar cane ran right down to the water. There was no jetty here or port area as there was in Minya because sand-banks came in close to the edge, but when they emerged from the sugar cane they found that the river bank had been cut away at that point and women were walking down into the shallows to fill their pots. When they had filled them, they put them on their heads and went gracefully back up to the village.

  Mahmoud led Owen aside—it would be unmannerly to stand there watching the women—and they sat down high up on the river bank. It was late afternoon by now and the shadow of the sugar cane was beginning to creep across the water. The women would be going back to prepare the evening meal.

  Mahmoud looked at his watch.

  ‘She usually comes about now,’ he said.

  They sat on for a little while, studiously not looking at the women but hearing all the time their cheerful chatter. And then they heard fresh voices in the sugar cane and a moment later a new group of women came out on to the river bank. They did not go down into the water at once but sat down on the bank talking.