The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  As Owen got down from the cab, Schneider was saying angrily:

  ‘But I saw her, I tell you! She was in my office. Bending over my desk. Naked.’

  ‘Naked?’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘Not a stitch. It took me aback, I can tell you. Seeing her there like that.’

  ‘You weren’t expecting her?’

  ‘Expecting her? For Christ’s sake! She had broken in. She was stealing something from me.’

  ‘What was she stealing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to look yet. She had a paperweight in her hand.’

  ‘A paperweight?’

  ‘Yes. A big glass one. Like a ball. My wife gave it me. I keep it on my desk. Well, she’d picked it up. And then, well, she saw me and—and just ran.’

  ‘Past you? You were in the doorway?’

  ‘Well, I was so taken aback. She just pushed past me. And then she was off. Down the corridor and out into the yard. I ran after her, but then—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just as I got out into the yard, she jumped. Jumped clean over the wall.’

  ‘Scrambled, perhaps.’

  ‘Jumped. Look, I bloody saw it! Jumped. I never would have believed it. She went clean over the wall.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I ran to the gate. But by the time I’d done that, and got it open, she’d gone. Into the sugar cane, I imagine.’

  ‘You didn’t see her?’

  ‘No. I shouted, but—’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyway, that’s it. I sent for you. And a fat lot of good you’ve been!’ he said bitterly.

  Mahmoud disregarded him.

  ‘Did any of you see her?’ he said to the workmen.

  They all looked away.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ said Schneider. ‘You must have seen her! Abu, you were right by the feed—?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Suleiman, surely you—’

  But he, too, did not respond.

  ‘Someone must have seen her!’ said Schneider.

  The men stood there woodenly.

  ‘Look,’ said Schneider. ‘I didn’t imagine this! Tariq? Hassan?’ he appealed.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better go and see if she had tried to take anything else,’ said Mahmoud.

  Schneider looked around for a moment, then shrugged and went inside.

  The yard had filled up with people. Women, as well as men, had come out of the houses. They were standing there silently. But then, as Schneider went inside, a buzz of excited chatter broke out.

  Among the women Owen thought he recognized Fatima, although it was difficult to tell, heavily veiled and wrapped up as she was. She was standing with a group of men and women: the Hanafi household, Owen imagined. An older woman was there too, the mother, presumably. Some of the men were talking angrily to her.

  ‘It’s your doing,’ they were saying. ‘You’ve brought her back!’

  ‘She does what she wants,’ said the old woman.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it! Killed those cats!’

  The old woman ignored them.

  ***

  Owen felt a touch on his arm. It was Fatima.

  ‘She came to our house, too,’ she whispered.

  ‘And spoke with you?’

  ‘She spoke with no one. She just came into the house.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘She came into the house,’ said Fatima, ‘while we were eating our meal. The door was open.’

  ‘But—?’

  ‘She went to the Sitt’s room and took a dress. No one saw her but I.’

  ‘A dress? What sort of dress?’

  Fatima shrugged.

  ‘Just a dress,’ she said. ‘She had it over her arm. I saw her when she was leaving.’

  ***

  The men were going back to work. A truck had been halfway through discharging its load. The men began to feed the conveyor belt again.

  Owen heard them talking.

  ‘Did you see her tits, then, Ibrahim?’ one of them asked enviously.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Colossal.’

  ***

  The omda was standing nearby, talking to a group of villagers.

  ‘She’s always doing it!’ the omda was complaining. ‘It’s got to stop!’

  ‘What that woman needs is a good beating,’ said the ghaffir.

  ‘Are you going to give it her, then, Ja’affar?’ asked someone.

  ‘Me?’ said the ghaffir, nervously. ‘I don’t fight women!’

  ‘It’s not a question of fighting—’

  ‘Oh, yes, it is,’ said the ghaffir. ‘With that one, it is. She’s a real wild one.’

  ‘They say she’s half cat,’ said one of the villagers nervously.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ objected the omda. ‘I mean, how would it come about?’

  ‘They say her mother mated with a leopard,’ said the villager. ‘They have leopards down there where she comes from, you know.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is that her mother must have been a dirty bitch.’

  ‘They say it jumped on her one day as she was going to the river.’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘Anyway, she needs a good beating,’ said the ghaffir.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to beat someone who’s half leopard,’ said someone uneasily.

  ‘She isn’t half leopard! That’s a lot of nonsense!’ said the omda angrily.

  ‘The way she is,’ said the ghaffir, ‘it doesn’t make much difference.’

  ***

  Mahmoud came out of the office with Schneider. Schneider turned angrily away and went to his house. Mahmoud came across to Owen.

  ‘Have you seen Hanafi?’ he said.

  Owen looked across to where the Hanafi household were standing.

  ‘Isn’t he there?’

  ‘No. And Schneider doesn’t know where he is, either.’

  ‘Why do you want him?’

  ‘He was seen talking to her this morning. Early. When the children were taking the goats out.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘This woman. The Cat Woman. They say he’s done it before.’

  ‘She was up at the house afterwards.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘The Hanafis’ house. Fatima told me. She went in and took a dress.’

  ‘A dress?’ said Mahmoud.

  ***

  Schneider came out on to the verandah with Mrs Schneider and they stood for a moment talking. Then Schneider came down the steps and went back to the factory. Mrs Schneider turned and saw Owen. She waved a hand.

  ‘Coffee?’ she called. ‘Just made!’

  She led him into the dining room, where a tray was standing on a low table. The house-boy came and cleared away the cups, and then brought fresh ones. Mrs Schneider waited until he had finished and then said quietly:

  ‘What is all this about?’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s about anything. It appears to be an attempted break-in, that’s all.’

  ‘Gerhardt says she was naked.’

  ‘I wouldn’t make too much of that. It’s not uncommon here. Thieves sometimes strip naked before breaking into a house. Then they grease their bodies. It makes them hard to hold if anyone catches them.’

  ‘Yes, but—a woman!’

  ‘It’s usually children.’

  Mrs Schneider paused for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all right really,’ she said. She laughed. ‘He wouldn’t have told me, otherwise, would he? It’s just that—well, one wonders. One’s on one’s own so much down here that one doesn’t always see things straigh
t.’

  She poured him some coffee.

  ‘It’s nice to have you here again. You and Mr el Zaki. One sees so few people. It’s strange. We go on for years in our little enclave and nobody takes any notice of us; and then suddenly people are coming all the time. The world has remembered us.’

  ‘I don’t know I’m the world.’

  ‘Oh, you are, you are. When you came the first time, it wasn’t just you, it was the great world breaking in. Not just Cairo with all its rules and regulations and interfering bureaucracy, but the world outside Egypt, the Great Powers, Britain, Germany: their preoccupations, their wars. And you, with all that internment business, were the face on that.’

  ‘It did not affect you, though?’

  ‘No. Not directly. Switzerland is neutral. Even so, we were worried when we heard about the Government’s plans for internment.’

  ‘You need not have been. It was just Germans.’

  ‘Not just Germans. Buried in one corner was a reference to suspicious aliens. Were we suspicious? I had not thought so, but suddenly I looked at us through the eyes of others and, yes, we were suspicious. We spoke German, didn’t we? Gerhardt said it was important to stress that we were Swiss, neutral, and that all he was interested in was doing his job.

  ‘Well, that was easy for him. All he is interested in is his job. But what about me? What was I interested in? Christ knows!

  ‘We thought that in all the confusion people might not be too concerned about making careful distinctions. Even the admirable Captain Owen! We thought he might be so busy, what with all the people to be interned, that he might not be able to afford to make careful distinctions. We were afraid that we might be taken away and put in some awful camp.

  ‘Of course, if it was hard for us, it was worse for the Hanafis. She really was German.’

  ‘They talked about it with you?’

  ‘Yes. Hanafi came to see Gerhardt several times. They talked about it a lot and Gerhardt told me. They were terribly worried. Well, worried isn’t the word for it. They just couldn’t contemplate it, couldn’t bear the thought. It would mean them being apart, and they had never been apart, not once, through all the hard times they’d had. They were in despair. She even came to see me.’

  She grimaced.

  ‘That “even”. I feel guilty now. It ought not to have been “even”. She ought to have been coming to see me anyway. I ought to have been going to see her. It was for me to take the initiative. But that awful house, that awful family!

  ‘Well, I didn’t go to see her. But then she came to see me. It took something like the prospect of internment to make her do that. She was proud. She didn’t want to turn to me for help. She didn’t want to turn to one of her own kind. Perhaps because she felt that they had rejected her.

  ‘It was easier for her husband. He could go to Gerhardt and talk things over, he was used to doing that. They were close to each other, in that strange way that people who work together sometimes are. And Gerhardt would want to help. You mustn’t mind him; his bark is worse than his bite. He wanted to help Hanafi, but it wasn’t easy to see how. He was worried about us ourselves, about the war in general. The world seems so big when it breaks in on you. It fills the sky.

  ‘And so it must have been hard for her to come to me. It ought not to have been so hard. I feel ashamed. I knew what it was like for her in that house. I ought to have made things easier. Or at least tried to. Long before.

  ‘It was only when she was desperate that she came to me. When she thought it was going to end. Even life in that dreadful house seemed preferable to it all coming to an end, their togetherness, which was all they had.

  ‘And, of course, when she came to me, I couldn’t help her. She wanted reassurance, and what could I give her? She said that surely since she was married to an Egyptian, she counted as Egyptian, that her German nationality didn’t count. I asked her if she was registered with the German Consulate. What an awful, crass thing to say when a woman comes to you desperate for help.’

  She was crying now.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said, pulling herself together. ‘Sorry.’

  She broke down again.

  ***

  The mamur had been in the village that morning, the omda said, hanging around and drinking tea, as if he was waiting for someone. But then he had disappeared. ‘Where to?’ asked Owen. The omda couldn’t say.

  Owen tried a number of other people, with the same result. Then he went up to the factory and questioned the drivers. They all agreed that he had come to the village the previous evening and spent the night there but where he was now they couldn’t say.

  He checked the trucks. They could all be accounted for. The mamur wasn’t with or on any of them.

  Owen found this hard to believe. Surely he would not have left the village on foot! Not in this heat, and among the sugar cane?

  But it appeared he had. He could only have gone to a village. Owen spent the afternoon eliminating these, some by talking to people, others by actually visiting them. In one case he borrowed a donkey, in two others he walked. It was extremely hot going anywhere in the sugar cane and by the end of the afternoon he was like a limp rag.

  Well before the time of the truck’s departure for Minya he was waiting in the compound. The truck was there but the driver wasn’t. He didn’t come until just before the truck was due to depart; but when he came, the mamur was with him.

  He seemed much more at ease than when Owen had last seen him; cheerful, even.

  ‘Hello, Effendi. What brings you out to a dump like this?’

  ‘The same thing as you, perhaps.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ the mamur said easily.

  ‘But you have been here on the mudir’s business?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘And have been successful?’

  ‘Yes.’ The mamur seemed to have no doubts now. ‘You needn’t worry, Effendi. The girl will be replaced. What a daft thing to do, to put in someone like that, where everyone can see! These people have no sense.’

  ‘These people?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The mamur stood aside to let Owen climb up into the cab. Then he went to the back of the truck and got in with the other passengers.

  ***

  The next morning Owen went to see the mudir. He found him in his usual place, sitting outside in the yard under the thatched awning. Although it was still early in the morning there was a bottle open on the table in front of him and beneath the table there were several more, standing in a bucket of ice.

  ‘Hello, Effendi!’ he said hospitably. ‘Come and sit down. This heat! It’s building up already.’

  He put a bottle on the table before Owen.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s all sorted out now. Hamid’s had a word with them. There’ll be a different ghaffir in place by this evening. Putting a girl there! When there are effendis about. Damned stupid!’

  ‘But what if there weren’t effendis about?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘How many more are there?’ said Owen. ‘And what does it tell us about these splendid systems of yours?’

  ‘Fricker Effendi—’ began the mudir.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. But they’re plainly not working. Not if powerful new service rifles can get handed over to twelve-year-old girls.’

  The mudir took a long, deliberate drink. Although he had already drunk quite a lot, the eyes were still sober. They were watching Owen carefully, calculating.

  Suddenly he smiled.

  He put the bottle down and spread his hands, palms upwards, on the table.

  ‘All right, Effendi,’ he said, ‘it’s bad. I’ve got to admit that. But it’s not as bad as you think. Look, Effendi, you’re a man of experience. You’ve been out in the world, not like these little pricks from the Ministry. You know that
things are a bit different down here in the provinces. It’s all very well dreaming up something in Cairo, but when you’ve got to make it work in a place like Minya, it’s a bit different.

  ‘I’ll be frank with you, Effendi. We’ve had to stretch Fricker Effendi’s systems a bit occasionally. And where there’s been stretching, well, perhaps one or two things have slipped through. But I think I know where it’s gone wrong, Effendi. And what I’m wondering is this: could you just leave it to me? I know it’s a lot to ask, but you’re a man of experience, Effendi, and you know that it’s sometimes best to let those on the spot sort things out. Leave it to me and I won’t let you down. I’ll find out where the system’s gone wrong and put it right. I’m sorry about the girl. That was just a mistake. But mistakes happen in all systems, don’t they?’

  ‘They do; but it’s a question of how often they happen.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Two hundred times, for instance?’

  ‘Two hundred—? No, no. Look, Effendi, you’ve got it all wrong. Believe me. Two hundred? No. One or two at the most. You’ve got it all wrong, Effendi. It’s not like that at all. Look, I’m sorry about the girl. It’s my fault, I admit it. My mind’s been on other things lately. Things have been a bit tricky, and it must have slipped through. But it’s just one case, Effendi. One case!’

  ‘There aren’t any other cases? Of other strange appointments? Of people being chosen from outside the village? Of people not being chosen at all but just drafted in from somewhere else?’

  The mudir’s hand felt below the table and gripped on a bottle. He thought better of it and let it go. By the time he had straightened up again, though, he had recovered his composure.

  He took his time about replying.

  Then the big smile reappeared and the hands spread out upon the table.

  ‘Effendi,’ he said, ‘I can see I’m going to have to do better. You’re quite right. About there being mistakes, that is. Not about the two hundred—that’s all nonsense, you’re barking up the wrong tree there. But about there being mistakes. The fact is, things have been a bit tricky here lately. And mistakes have been made. But I’ll put them right, Effendi, I promise you that.’

  He picked up another bottle, wiped the top with his hand and took a long drink. Then he put it back in the bucket.