The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Then he sat with his paws folded over his neat grey waistcoat, glum as a foetus in a bottle, as Mountolive delivered his strongly worded protest and produced the monument to Maskelyne’s industry. Nur listened, shaking his head doubtfully from time to time, his visage lengthening. When Mountolive had done, he said impulsively, standing up: ‘Of course. At once. At once.’ And then, as if plunged into doubt, unsteadily sat down once more and began to play with his cuff-links. Mountolive sighed as he stood up. ‘It is a disagreeable duty’ he said, ‘but necessary. May I assure my Government that the matter will be prosecuted with speed?’

  ‘With speed. With speed.’ The little man nodded twice and licked his lips; one had the impression that he did not quite understand the words he was using. ‘I shall see Memlik today’ he added in lower tones. But the timbre of his voice had changed. He coughed and ate a sweetmeat, dusting the castor sugar off his fingers with a silk handkerchief. ‘Yes’ he said. If he was interested in the massive document lying before him it was (or so it seemed to Mountolive) only that the photostats intrigued him. He had not seen things like these before. They belonged to the great foreign worlds of science and illusion in which these Western peoples lived — worlds of great powers and responsibilities — out of which they sometimes descended, clad in magnificent uniforms, to make the lot of the simple Egyptians harder than it was at the best of times. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes’ said Nur again, as if to give the conversation stability and depth, to give his visitor confidence in his good intentions.

  Mountolive did not like it at all; the whole tone lacked directness, purpose. The absurd sense of optimism rose once more in his breast and in order to punish himself for it (also because he was extremely conscientious) he stepped forward and pressed the matter forward another inch. ‘If you like, Nur, and if you expressly authorize me, I am prepared to lay the facts and recommendations before Memlik Pasha myself. Only speak.’ But here he was pressing upon the shallow, newly-grown skin of protocol and national feeling. ‘Cherished Sir’ said Nur with a beseeching smile and the gesture of a beggar importuning a rich man, ‘that would be out of order. For the matter is an internal one. It would not be proper for me to agree.’

  And he was right there, reflected Mountolive, as they drove uneasily back to the Embassy; they could no longer give orders in Egypt as once the High Commission had been able to do. Donkin sat with a quizzical and reflective smile, studying his own fingers. The pennant on the car’s radiator fluttered merrily, reminding Mountolive of the quivering burgee of Nessim’s thirty-foot cutter as it slit the harbour waters.… ‘What did you make of it, Donkin?’ he said, putting his arm on the elbow of the bearded youth.

  ‘Frankly, sir, I doubted.’

  ‘So did I, really.’ Then he burst out: ‘But they will have to act, simply have to; I am not going to be put aside like this.’ (He was thinking: ‘London will make our lives a misery until I can give them some sort of satisfaction.’) Hate for an image of Nessim whose features had somehow — as if by a trick of double-exposure — become merged with those of the saturnine Maskelyne, flooded him again. Crossing the hall he caught sight of his own face in the great pierglass and was surprised to notice that it wore an expression of feeble petulance.

  That day he found himself becoming more and more short-tempered with his staff and the Residence servants. He had begun to feel almost persecuted.

  XIV

  If Nessim had the temerity to laugh softly now to himself as he studied the invitation: if he propped the florid thing against his inkstand the better to study it, laughing softly and uneasily into the space before him; it was because he was thinking to himself:

  ‘To say that a man is unscrupulous implies that he was born with inherent scruples which he now chooses to disregard. But does one visualize a man born patently conscienceless? A man born without a common habit of soul? (Memlik).’

  Yes, it would be easy if he were legless, armless, blind, to visualize him; but a particular deficit of a glandular secretion, a missing portion of soul, that would make him rather a target for wonder, perhaps even commiseration. (Memlik). There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray — became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them — ‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value — the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that — men walking inside a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them. Was this also Memlik? Nessim felt all the passionate curiosity about the man which an entomologist might have for an unclassified specimen.

  Light a cigarette. Get up and walk about the room, pausing from time to time to read the invitation and laugh again silently. The relief kept displacing anxiety, the anxiety relief. He lifted the telephone and spoke to Justine quietly, with a smiling voice: ‘The Mountain has been to Mahomet.’ (Code for Mountolive and Nur.) ‘Yes, my dear. It is a relief to know for certain. All my toxicology and pistol-practice! It looks silly now, I know. This is the way I would have wanted it to happen; but of course, one had to take precautions. Well, pressure is being put upon Mahomet, and he has delivered a small mouse in the form of an invitation to a Wird.’ He heard her laugh incredulously. ‘Please, my darling’ he said, ‘obtain one of the finest Korans you can get and send it to the office. There are some old ones with ivory covers in the library collection. Yes, I shall take it to Cairo on Wednesday. He must certainly have his Koran.’ (Memlik.) It was all very well to joke. The respite would only be a temporary one; but at least he need not for the moment fear poison or the stealthy figure lurking in an alley which might have.… No. The situation seemed not without a promise of fruitful delay.

  Today in the sixties the house of Memlik Pasha has become famous in the remotest capitals of the world chiefly because of the distinctive architecture of the Banks which bear their founder’s name; and indeed their style has all the curious marks of this mysterious man’s taste — for they are all built to the same grotesque pattern, a sort of travesty of an Egyptian tomb, adapted by a pupil of Corbusier! Irresistibly one is forced to stop short and wonder at their grim façades, whether one is walking in Rome or Rio. The squat pillars suggest a mammoth stricken by sudden elephantiasis, the grotesque survival, or perhaps revival, of something inherently macabre — a sort of Ottoman-Egyptian-Gothic? For all the world as if Euston Station had multiplied by binary fission! But by now the power of the man has gone out through these strange funnels into the world at large — all that power condensed and deployed from the small inlaid coffee-table upon which (if ever) he wrote, from the tattered yellow divan to which his lethargy held him tethered day by day. (For interviews of particular importance, he wore his tarbush and yellow suède gloves. In his hand he held a common market fly-whisk which his jeweller had embellished with a design in seed-pearls.) He never smiled. A Greek photographer who had once implored him in the name of art to do so had been unceremoniously carted out into the garden under the clicking palms and dealt twelve lashes to atone for his insult.

  Perhaps the strange mixture of heredities had something to do with it; for his blood was haunted by an Albanian father and a Nubian mother, whose dreadful quarrels tormented his childhood sleep. He was an only son. This was perhaps how simple ferocity contrived to be matched against an apparent apathy, a whispering voice raised sometimes to a woman’s pitch but employed without the use of gesture. Physically too, the long silky head-hair with its suggestion of kink, the nose and mouth carved flatly in dark Nubian sandstone and set in bas-relief upon a completely round Alpine head — they gave the show away. If indeed he had smiled he would have shown a half-circumference of nigger whiteness under nostrils flattened and expanded like rubber. His skin was full of dark beauty-spots, and of a colour much admired in Egypt — that of cigar-leaf. Depilatories such as halawa kept his body free from hair, even his hands and forearms. But his eyes were small and set in puckers, like twin cloves. They transmitted their uneasiness by an expression of perpetual drowsiness — the d
iscoloured whites conveying a glaucous absence of mind — as if the soul inhabiting that great body were perpetually away on a private holiday. His lips too were very red, the underlip particularly so; and their contused-looking ripeness suggested: epilepsy?

  How had he risen so swiftly? Stage by stage, through slow and arduous clerkships in the Commission (which had taught him his contempt for his masters) and lastly by nepotism. His methods were choice and studied. When Egypt became free, he surprised even his sponsors by gaining the Ministry of the Interior at a single bound. Only then did he tear off the disguise of mediocrity which he had been wearing all these years. He knew very well how to strike out echoes around his name with the whip — for he was now wielding it. The timorous soul of the Egyptian cries always for the whip. ‘O want easily supplied by one who has trained himself to see men and women as flies.’ So says the proverb. Within a matter of a year his name had become a dreaded one; it was rumoured that even the old King feared to cross him openly. And with his country’s new-found freedom he himself was also magnificently free — at least with Egyptian Moslems. Europeans had still the right, by treaty, to submit their judicial problems or answer charges against them at Les Tribunaux Mixtes, European courts with European lawyers to prosecute or defend. But the Egyptian judicial system (if one could dare to call it that) was run directly by men of Memlik’s stamp, the anachronistic survivals of a feudalism as terrible as it was meaningless. The age of the Cadi was far from over for them and Memlik acted with all the authority of someone with a Sultan’s firman or dispensation in his hands. There was, in truth, nobody to gainsay him. He punished hard and often, without asking questions and often purely upon hearsay or the most remote suspicion. People disappeared silently, leaving no trace, and there was no court of appeal to heed their appeals — if they made any — or else they reappeared in civil life elegantly maimed or deftly blinded — and somehow curiously unwilling to discuss their misfortunes in public. (‘Shall we see if he can sing?’ Memlik was reputed to say; the reference was to the putting out of a canary’s eyes with a red-hot wire — an operation much resorted to and alleged to make the bird sing more sweetly.)

  An indolent yet clever man, he depended for his staff work upon Greeks and Armenians for the most part. He hardly ever visited his office in the Ministry but left its running to his minions, explaining and complaining that he was always besieged there by time-wasting petitioners. (In fact he feared that one day he might be assassinated there — for it was a vulnerable sort of place. It would have been easy, for example, to place a bomb in one of the unswept cupboards where the mice frolicked among the yellowing files. Hakim Effendi had put the idea into his head so that he himself could have a free play in the Ministry. Memlik knew this, but did not care.)

  Instead he had set aside the old rambling house by the Nile for his audiences. It was surrounded by a dense grove of palms and orange-trees. The sacred river flowed outside his windows there was always something to see, to watch: feluccas plying up or down-river, pleasure parties passing, an occasional motor-boat.… Also it was too far for petitioners to come and bother him about imprisoned relations. (Hakim shared the office bribes anyway.) Here Memlik would only see people who were relatively too important to dismiss: struggling upright into a seated position on the yellow divan and placing his neat shoes (with their pearl-grey spats) upon a damask footstool before him, his right hand in his breast pocket, his left holding the common market fly-whisk as if to confer an absolution with it. The staff attending to his daily business transactions here consisted of an Armenian secretary (Cyril) and the little doll-like Italian Rafael (by profession a barber and procurer) who kept him company and sweetened the dullness of official work by suggesting pleasures whose perversity might ignite a man who appeared to have worn away every mental appetite save that for money. I say that Memlik never smiled, but sometimes when he was in good humour, he stroked Rafael’s hair thoughtfully and placed his fingers over his mouth to silence his laughter. This was when he was thinking deeply before lifting the receiver of the old-fashioned goose-necked telephone to have a conversation with someone in that low voice, or to ring the Central Prison for the pleasure of hearing the operator’s obvious alarm when he uttered his name. At this, Rafael particularly would break into sycophantic giggles, laughing until the tears ran down his face, stuffing a handkerchief into his mouth. But Memlik did not smile. He depressed his cheeks slightly and said: ‘Allah! you laugh.’ Such occasions were few and far between.

  Was he indeed as terrible as his reputation made him? The truth will never be known. Legends collect easily around such a personage because he belongs more to legend than to life. (‘Once when he was threatened by impotence he went down to the prison and ordered two girls to be flogged to death before his eyes while a third was obliged’ — how picturesque are the poetical figures of the Prophet’s tongue — ‘to refresh his lagging spirits.’ It was said that he personally witnessed every official execution, and that he trembled and spat continuously. Afterwards he called for a siphon of soda-water to quench his thirst.… But who shall ever know the truth of these legends?)

  He was morbidly superstitious and incurably venal — and indeed was building an immense fortune upon bribery; yet how shall we add to the sum of this the fact of his inordinate religiosity — a fanatical zeal of observance which might have been puzzling in anyone who was not an Egyptian? This is where the quarrel with the pious Nur had arisen; for Memlik had established almost a court-form for the reception of bribes. His collection of Korans was a famous one. They were housed upstairs in a ramshackle gallery of the house. By now it was known far and wide that the polite form in which to approach him was to interleave a particularly cherished copy of the Holy Book with notes or other types of currency and (with an obeisance) to present him with a new addition to his great library. He would accept the gift and reply, with thanks that he must repair at once upstairs to see if he already had a copy. On his return, the petitioner knew that he had succeeded if Memlik thanked him once more and said that he had put the book in his library; but if Memlik claimed to possess a copy already and handed back the book (albeit the money had inevitably been extracted) the petitioner knew that his plea had failed. It was this little social formula which Nur had characterized as ‘bringing discredit upon the Prophet’ — and had so earned Memlik’s quiet hate.

  The long-elbowed conservatory in which he held his private Divan was also something of a puzzle. The coloured fanlights in cheap cathedral glass transformed visitors into harlequins, squirting green and scarlet and blue upon their faces and clothes as they walked across the long room to greet their host. Outside the murky windows ran the cocoa-coloured river on whose further bank stood the British Embassy with its elegant gardens in which Mountolive wandered on the evenings when he found himself alone. The wall-length of Memlik’s great reception-room was almost covered by two enormous and incongruous Victorian paintings by some forgotten master which, being too large and heavy to hang, stood upon the floor and gave something of the illusion of framed tapestries. But the subject-matter! In one, the Israelites crossed the Red Sea which was gracefully piled up on either side to admit their fearful passage, in the other a hirsute Moses struck a stage rock with a shepherd’s crook. Somehow these attenuated Biblical subjects matched the rest of the furniture perfectly — the great Ottoman carpets and the stiff ugly-backed chairs covered in blue damask, the immense contorted brass chandelier with its circles of frosted electric light bulbs which shone night and day. On one side of the yellow divan stood a life-size bust of Fouché which took the eye of the petitioner at once by its incongruity. Once Memlik had been flattered by a French diplomat who had said: ‘You are regarded as the best Minister of Interior in modern history — indeed, since Fouché there has been no-one to equal you.’ The remark may have been barbed, but nevertheless it struck Memlik’s fancy, and he at once ordered the bust from France. It looked faintly reproachful amidst all that Egyptian flummery, for the dust had settled t
hick upon it. The same diplomat had once described Memlik’s reception-room as a cross between an abandoned geological museum and a corner of the old Crystal Palace — and this also was apt though cruel.

  All this detail Nessim’s polite eye took in with many a hidden gleam of amusement as he stood in the doorway and heard his name announced. It appealed richly to him to be thus invited to share a prayer-meeting or Wird with the redoubtable Memlik. Nor were these functions uncommon, strange though it seems to relate, for Memlik frequently enjoyed these so-called ‘Nights of God’ and his piety did not seem inconsistent with the rest of his mysterious character; he listened attentively, unwaveringly to the reciter, often until two or three in the morning, with the air of a hibernating snake. Sometimes he even joined in the conventional gasp ‘Allah’ with which the company expressed its joy in some particularly felicitous passage of the Gospel.…