The Mark of the Pasha

by Michael Pearce

  ‘—and find that you’re so much in advance of us—’

  She led Zeinab off into a corner.

  ‘Lovely roses, here, Willoughby,’ someone was saying to the High Commissioner.

  ‘They’re my wife’s pride and joy.’

  ‘Beautiful fragrance!’ sniffing them.

  ‘We’re very fortunate in Egypt. The climate is so good for growing. By the river, that is. You should see our sweetpeas!’

  ‘I noticed the ones in the hotel. Lovely! The scent is everywhere.’

  ‘Not everywhere,’ said a short, squat man, who was perspiring vigorously. ‘There was a damned great camel turd right at the entrance of the hotel. You’d have thought they would have cleared it away. And then there are all those donkeys just below the terrace—’

  ‘Ah, the donkey-vous.’

  ‘Donkey—?’

  ‘Vous. Donkey-vous. It’s where you go to get a donkey. “Vous voulez donkey, Monsieur?” That’s what they say, and so it is called a donkey-vous.’

  ‘Why don’t they speak English?’

  ‘They do, of course. As well.’

  ‘I don’t like it. Does that mean the French are getting in on the act?’

  ‘Actually, they were in on the act before we got here. That’s why so much French is spoken. Their legal system, for instance, is based on the Napoleonic Code.’

  ‘You want to watch that. They could take advantage of that. You want to get them out.’

  ‘In fact, we did get them out. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Oh!’

  A burly man was accosting Paul.

  ‘What about the workers, then?’

  ‘Working away happily,’ said Paul.

  ‘But are they working away? What’s your unemployment figures?’

  ‘They are difficult to ascertain in Egypt. So many people do casual jobs—’

  ‘That’s it! They need to get organised. What are you doing to help them get into unions?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Start with transport. Those camel drivers. I’ll bet they’re not in unions. You could start with them and then widen it out. First them and then the donkey-drivers. Not paid much, I’ll bet. Get them into unions and then you’ll be able to exert a bit of pressure. Drive wages up. Transport is a good place to start, you’d be able to get a strangle-hold.’

  All over the lawn such conversations were going on. Owen felt depressed. Were these the people who were going to deliver Egypt’s dream?

  A man beside him was wiping the sweat from his face.

  ‘Bloody hot, here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Warmish, yes.’

  ‘They ought to bring fans out. Put them on the lawn. And not the old ones they’ve got inside. Do you know what? I looked at them and—can you imagine? In the Residency! The British Residency, they’re all Swiss! What’s the point of having a colony if you don’t get them to buy British?’

  ‘Actually, it’s not a colony—’

  ‘Or whatever. Amounts to the same thing. Money follows the flag, that’s what I say. And the flag follows money!’

  Meaning? Still, it sounded good. Whichever.

  Behind him a loud voice was saying:

  ‘Retrenchment and rigour! Financial rigour. That’s what this country needs.’

  Give them a country to play with and they were all happy. Like kids with a new toy. But, damn it, it wasn’t a toy, it was a country!

  ‘Aren’t we going to be allowed out at all?’ Someone else was complaining.

  ‘Of course!’ cried Paul. ‘You can see as much of the country as you wish! Naturally we shall be working you hard, but I’m sure it will be possible to arrange a few excursions…’

  ‘Not the bloody Pyramids again!’

  ‘A mosque, perhaps? Or perhaps not,’ he said hastily, seeing Owen, mindful of security, waving frantically at him.

  ‘I was hoping to get to the races,’ said a tall, thin man languidly.

  ‘Races?’ said Paul, taken aback for once.

  ‘Perhaps the car races?’ suggested Owen. ‘Out at Helwan.’

  Miles out in the desert, where there would be no security problems.

  ‘That sounds promising,’ said the languid gentleman. ‘What have they got?’

  ‘Braziers,’ said Owen, ‘and De Dions.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I was hoping to get out and meet the people,’ said Mrs. Oliphant.

  ‘And so you shall!’ said Paul, beaming. ‘Only you won’t be going to them, they will be coming to you. To give evidence.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant,’ said Mrs. Oliphant.

  ‘We’ll want to meet leading politicians,’ said the man who had been talking with the High Commissioner about roses.

  ‘Of course. Starting tomorrow with the Prime Minister, Rushdi Pasha.’

  ‘We don’t want just Government figures. We’ll need to see someone from the Opposition.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Zaghlul Pasha,’ said someone.

  ‘Well, now, that may be a bit difficult. He’s actually in Malta at the moment—’

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Can’t he be persuaded to come back to address us? He is the Leader of the Wafd, after all.’

  Paul glanced at Willoughby.

  ‘I’m sure that could be arranged. Couldn’t it, sir?’

  The High Commissioner swallowed.

  ‘I suppose it could,’ he said.

  ***

  When they had all gone, Owen said to Paul:

  ‘They don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Except that bloke who mentioned the Wafd.’

  ‘We’ll have to watch him,’ said Paul.

  ‘It’s the others I’m worried about.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Paul. ‘The less they know, the easier they are to handle.

  Chapter Nine

  Owen had decided that the High Commission’s Reception was an important enough occasion for him to use his car and it was waiting for them when they came down the steps. As they were driving home he thought there were more people in the streets than usual and when they came to the Midan el Azhar he was sure of it.

  ‘Do you mind if we make a bit of a detour, sir?’ said the driver, ‘looks pretty jammed ahead.’

  ‘And perhaps I could drive,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Not in these crowds!’ said Owen.

  ‘Maybe if I took you out a bit?’ suggested the driver.

  He turned off along the Sharia es Sanafiri and along the Bab-el Khalk, past Owen’s office, as it happened, and then continued out to the Bab Zouweleh, one of the great gates of Cairo, where they turned north. Immediately they ran into columns of marching students, most of them in black gowns and carrying brass ink pots.

  ‘Jesus!’ said the driver, and braked hard.

  ‘They’re from the El Azhar,’ said Owen. ‘We’d better give them a miss.’

  ‘Too right!’ said the driver.

  ‘Turn off down the Bardire,’ said Owen.

  They did, but then ran into more students, who looked at them with as much curiosity as hostility.

  He had expected the latter. The students at the El Azhar, the greatest university in Egypt and possibly the greatest in the Muslim world, studied mainly theology. Some of them were carrying their books under their arm. Actually, not many of them had books. Instruction was mostly oral. You could see some professors in the crowds, dressed in their purple gowns. The El Azhar was seen, not always fairly, as a hot-bed of fanaticism. And the views of its students, on such subjects as cars and Westerners, might well be the same as Yacoub’s. He had not, however, made sufficient allowance for the pull of the West, and a few
of the students were inspecting the car knowledgeably and critically.

  But not all of them. Some were looking at them fiercely and beginning to wave their arms.

  ‘If you don’t mind, sir,’ said the driver. ‘I think it would be best to get Mrs. Owen out of this.’

  Zeinab had put on her veil again and Owen didn’t think that would be enough. She was dressed in too many Western things.

  The driver turned off down a side street.

  He had just gone a little way along it when he had to come to a stop behind a bullock cart unloading heavy stones for a new building.

  ‘Sod it!’ said the driver.

  There were not many students around at this point.

  ‘There are some public gardens ahead,’ said Owen, ‘just down by the Bab el Ghoraib. By that rise. We’ll get out and walk. Can you work your way round and pick us up by the Gardens?’

  ‘Will you be all right, sir?’

  ‘I think so. I’ll take my jacket off and leave it with you.’

  He had been in uniform for the Reception. Without his jacket, and in his shirt sleeves, and wearing the usual red Governmental tarboosh, he should be able to pass as an ordinary Egyptian Effendi out with his wife.

  It wasn’t far to the gardens but the streets here doubled back on themselves, taking them up towards the El Azhar. He could see its pinnacles and minarets rising above the houses in front of him.

  Just at that moment a great column of students burst out of a gate and flooded along the road ahead of them. He pulled Zeinab quickly into a doorway.

  The students, though, were not coming this way. They had turned right up the street and now were marching in quite an orderly fashion, chanting as they marched. It was part of a demonstration, of course. The students were always demonstrating, now more than ever. But what was it that they were chanting? Not ‘Down with the Government!’ Or ‘Out with the British!’ Something he was not familiar with.

  ‘Say-ed Ali, Say-ed-Ah! Say-ed Ali, Say-ed Ali, Say-ed-Ah!’

  Who was Sayed Ali? That was a new one. The ones he’d heard earlier, the big Wafd demonstration, had always been chanting ‘Zaghlul.’

  The last files of the column went past at the end of the street. Cautiously he continued up it.

  The street at the end now was empty. There were occasional students but they were the law-abiding ones going in to their lectures.

  Far away now to the left he could hear the chanting.

  ‘Say-ed Ali, Say-ed Ali, Say-ed-Ah!’

  He and Zeinab turned right down the street away from them and in the direction of the Gardens. It meant going past one of the entrances to the University but that was all right. There were other people passing too.

  Through the entrance he could see the students clustered round the pillars. That was where they had their classes. The teacher would sit with his back to the pillar reading from a book or else reciting, and the students would sit on the ground writing down what he said on ‘slates’ of tin or yellow wood. Only a few of them would have paper, usually just loose leaves, and mostly they kept their ink-pots for writing after the lecture was over. They usually carried as well water-bottles and bread, which they put on the ground beside them, together with their slippers, which they took off when they entered, for the University was one great mosque.

  No women were allowed, and Owen found it a bit incongruous to think of Zeinab, excluded, but reading Proust. Of course, you could look elsewhere: to the more modern university, over towards the Kasr-en-Nil, or the Schools of Law or Engineering, where, incidentally, a few women were allowed to study.

  And yet, oddly, it was not, probably, from the traditional El Azhar that the bomb intended to be used against the Khedive had come. Behind that there was modern knowledge, acquaintance with science. And the knowledge of science was not yet so widespread in Egypt as to make you think it would exist far from one of the new university colleges.

  ***

  They walked on down to the Gardens, which had been flooded that morning. That was the way you watered gardens in Egypt: you flooded them with water from the Nile. A system of pipes led round to the main gardens and water was fed along them once a week. The water stood for only an hour or so but while it was there all kinds of birds came to delight in it: hoopoes and bulbuls and warblers and weavers, throwing the water over their backs, and buff-backed herons picking for frogs and beetles.

  The car was waiting discreetly on the other side of the gardens.

  ‘Better get those armoured plates back up,’ said the driver dourly, as they drove away.

  ***

  Georgiades sauntered into Owen’s office unusually early the next morning and dropped himself on the end of Owen’s desk.

  ‘Been talking,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘To the people on that water-cart’s run.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a regular run and people have got to know them. Hussein and Ahmet. They’re getting to know me, too,’ said Georgiades easily.

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘So they’re more ready to talk.’

  ‘And what do they have to say?’

  ‘The drivers are part of the community. They do errands for people along the route. Pass messages. Deliver things.’

  ‘Miss Skiff said those carts are like an unofficial postal service.’

  ‘They are. And sometimes they deliver people, too.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Old chap wants to see his daughter further along the route, gets a lift.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice.’

  ‘Children, too. A woman wants to deliver her son to her mother: puts the little fellow up on the box. The mother will be waiting for them. Very reliable, they are.’

  ‘I suppose their route covers quite a lot of the city, too.’

  ‘It does. But the funny thing is that they always call in at the hammam. There are other hammams on the route they take and they don’t call in at them. But they do at this one.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They drop things in, pick things up. Regularly.’

  ‘A sort of post office, is it?’

  ‘Sort of. But the thing is, you see, that they’re always doing it. They’re very well known at the hammam. So if you have been getting the impression that what happened the other day was a one-off, you’d be mistaken.’

  ‘Are you saying they might be delivering and carrying other things, too?’

  Georgiades nodded.

  ‘Drugs?’

  The Greek hesitated.

  ‘No reason to suppose that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Just thought you might be interested.’

  ‘I am.’

  Owen considered.

  ‘I think it might be a good idea if you stuck around that hammam for a while. Go in and have a bath.’

  Georgiades lifted himself off the end of the desk.

  ‘Are you telling me something personal?’ he demanded. ‘Look, I walk around a bit. It’s hot. It’s true I sweat. But—’

  ‘No, no. Strictly business, this is.’

  ‘Right, then.’

  Although after Georgiades had gone, Owen did wonder. What was it that Greeks were supposed to smell of? Camomile? Yoghurt?

  ***

  Owen went in to see Nikos.

  ‘Sayed Ali,’ he said. ‘Do we have anything on him?’

  ‘Which Sayed Ali?’ said Nikos. ‘There are dozens.’

  ‘This is the one whose name they are chanting in their demonstrations.’

  ‘There was a religious sheikh of that name,’ said Nikos thoughtfully. He went to his files. ‘But why are they chanting his name?’

  ‘That’s what I am wondering.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not tha
t. Or not just that. He is a very popular, much venerated sheikh. The thing is, though, he’s old.’

  ‘That doesn’t stop them from causing trouble.’

  ‘Eventually it does. And now he’s over ninety. Hardly ever leaves his house.’

  ‘He could still be active.’

  ‘There’s not the impression I have. I gather he’s rather frail. Doesn’t deliver sermons these days. Doesn’t see many people. Nearly blind, I think. Pretty much retired. From the world as well as religious affairs. That’s why I’m surprised.’

  ‘Has he any history?’

  ‘Of political involvement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A long, long time ago. And not in Cairo, either. He moved to the City about twenty years ago. Before that he lived in the country. It happened there. And even then it didn’t amount to much. Talk mostly. But inflammatory enough to attract our attention.’

  ‘Our?’

  ‘Your predecessor’s. One of your predecessors. Predecessor but three.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘That’s right. And that was the last time we had any trouble from him. That’s another reason why I’m surprised that they should be chanting his name now.’

  ‘Nothing more recent?’

  ‘Nothing more recent.’

  ‘And no sign of active political involvement?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It sounds as if someone is wheeling him out. Using him.’

  ***

  Owen went over to the hotel where the Commission’s members were staying. He wanted to check his security dispositions. He had men there in force. There were policemen, borrowed from Garvin, at all the entrances and policemen continuously patrolling round outside to see that no one got in at the windows. He had men on the roof. Roofs were significant things in Cairo. A lot of people lived there, for a start. Even more slept there, especially when it was hot. People were used to roofs. Thieves especially.

  Most of the men were stationed inside. He didn’t want them to be too obvious. Just enough to deter, not enough to antagonise the general population. At the front door there were just the usual burly policemen. But inside the door there were soldiers. He had been so short of men that in the end he had had to have them. And at the entrance to the corridor on which most of the Commission members were staying there were more soldiers.