Читать книгу The Face in the Cemetery - Michael Pearce - Страница 7

War had come to Egypt like a bolt from the blue. Looking back, Owen could see that there had been plenty of signs that it was coming, but at the time he, like everyone else in Egypt, had not taken them seriously. He had put them down to the infantile war games that the Great Powers were forever engaging in, manoeuvres which were merely ritual. And then, suddenly, barely more than a month ago, the manoeuvres had turned out to be not merely ritual.

What had made it even more of a surprise was that no one in Egypt had been paying much attention. The declaration had come during the hottest part of the year, when everything in Egypt had closed down. Most members of the Government were on holiday on the Riviera. Those British officials whose turn had come round had left for England. Egyptian officials had headed for the coast. Kitchener himself, the Englishman in whose hands most of the strings of power in Egypt lay, had departed for Europe; for which relief Owen, who had not got on with the Consul-General, had been giving much thanks.

The great Government offices were largely empty, their occupants having migrated, like the rest of the population of Cairo, to the cafés, where the Mamur Zapt, confident that in the extreme heat even the most desperate of criminals would not be thinking of crime, tended to join them.

And so when the news hit Egypt it did not at first really register. After the initial shock, Egypt had shrugged its shoulders and got on with doing what it normally did in August. That is, nothing.

But then the first orders began to arrive from London and among them was the instruction to arrest, detain and place in internment all German nationals and other suspicious foreigners. In the cafés, unkind Egyptians asked if that included Englishmen.

Owen had hardly got into his office when he heard the phone ringing; and he had hardly got it into his hand before the person on the other end was speaking, or, rather, bellowing.

‘Owen, is that you? Look, this is damned silly! They’ve taken Becker.’

‘Becker?’

‘Sluices. He’s the one who knows about sluices. Do you know about sluices? No, I’m not surprised. Not many do. They’re tricky things. And once you’ve got someone who knows about them, you don’t muck him about! What is more, you hang on to him. Because if he goes, you won’t find another.

‘Now this chap’s really good. He’s been working for us for fifteen years. It’s got so now that I can’t do without him. With him gone, the whole bloody system will close down. Sluices, dams, then the lot.

‘How would they like that, then? You tell me. The whole country depends on water, the water depends on the dams, the dams depend on the sluices and the sluices depend on – yes, you’re right: this man Becker!’

‘I take it he’s German.’

‘Of course he’s German! Or something. What the hell’s that got to do with it? He does his job, like everyone else. Only much better, that’s the point.’

‘Yes, I know, but there’s a war on, and there’s this policy of intern –’

‘Sod the war! The whole system will collapse, I tell you. Look, Owen, you’ve got to do something, make an exception …

‘You can’t? It’s nothing to do with you? Then who the hell is it to do with? Don’t tell me. I know. It’s London, is it? I might have guessed. Well, look, you can bloody tell London –

‘Yes, I know, but they’ll listen to you more than they will to me. I’m just a stupid engineer, just someone who makes everything work. You’ve got the gift of the gab, their gab –

‘They won’t? All right, talk to someone here, then. How about Kitchener? He’s not entirely without sense, have a go at him –

‘He’s not here? He’s in London, too? I might have bloody known it! Look, there must be someone you can talk to about this man of mine –

‘All right, all right, I know there’s a policy of internment, and it’s got to be general, I can see that. But surely it can be applied sensibly? Surely people can be reasonable, surely you –

‘Why should you be an exception, Owen?!’

He decided, nevertheless, that he ought to do something. Calls like this were coming in all the time. He took his helmet and went across to the Consulate to have a word with his friend, Paul. Paul had been one of Kitchener’s ADCs and was now the Oriental Secretary.

He found him in Kitchener’s office; sitting indeed, in Kitchener’s chair.

‘At last!’ said Paul, with a dramatic sweep of his hand. ‘They held me back, but now I’ve made it!’

‘You’re not really in charge?’

‘Cunningham is nominally.’ Cunningham was the Financial Adviser. ‘But, as always, the reality of power is different.’

He wriggled in his seat.

‘Just trying it out for size,’ he said. ‘I find it a little small for me.’

‘All right, if you’re really in charge, there’s something you can do. It’s this damned internment policy.’

‘Laid down by Whitehall,’ murmured Paul. ‘Can’t touch it.’

‘What I want is power of discretion. That wouldn’t solve everything, but it might help.’

‘Discretion is normally understood,’ said Paul. ‘You’ve got to leave some latitude to the man on the spot. However …’

He thought about it.

‘However, I’d be a bit careful about it, if I were you. Have you read the newspapers lately? The English ones? They’re full of spy scares. There’s all sorts of panic at home and some of it is spilling over here.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘And then there’s another thing: they’re making changes. They’re bringing some new people out here. One of them is something to do with security.’

‘That’s my job.’

‘Sure. I expect he’ll be working to you. But, Gareth, he’ll have contacts back at home and he, too –’ he waved his hand again – ‘might be wanting to try other people’s seats. I daresay he’ll be no problem, but you see what I mean when I say that you ought to be a bit careful just at the moment.’

‘Don’t use too much discretion – is that what you’re saying?’

‘That, and also that you ought to get some kind of formal approval, in writing, of your powers.’

‘You can give me that, can’t you?’

‘Yes. But I think it would be better if it came from Cunningham.’

‘OK, I’ll try and have a word with him.’

The bar at the Sporting Club was much less crowded than it usually was at lunch-time. This was because so many people were on holiday. Owen had been hoping to find Cunningham, but he wasn’t there. However, he did find someone he knew from the Ministry of the Interior, a man named McKitterick.

‘Guns?’ McKitterick said, leaning his arm easily on the bar. ‘Well, yes, and not before time. Look what the ghaffirs had to make do with up till now.’

‘Yes, but these are service rifles. You don’t want to put them in the hands of untrained men.’

‘They won’t be untrained. We’ve got a big training programme going.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard about that. But it’s the wrong sort of training. It’s military training.’

‘Isn’t that what they need?’

‘Ghaffirs? Village watchmen? Mostly they shoot crows.’

‘But sometimes they have to shoot brigands, and when they do, they’ve got to have a weapon decent enough to put up a show with.’

‘Very rarely, only in some parts of Egypt, do you have to fight brigands. And when you do, you don’t want ghaffirs doing it. You want police or soldiers. It’s a confusion of functions, from an administrative point of view. A ghaffir’s function is much more limited.’

‘Yes, we know about confusion of functions, thank you,’ said the other man, nettled. ‘And we know about ghaffirs, too. Look, we’ve gone into this very thoroughly, more thoroughly, I suspect, than you have, and the conclusion we’ve come to is that there is a need to do something about the ghaffirs. Both in terms of training and in terms of weaponry. One of our inspectors looked into this in great detail and came up with a really first-class report.’

‘Which suggested turning ghaffirs into a sort of internal army?’

‘If that’s the way you want to put it, yes.’

‘Answerable to whom?’

‘The Ministry, of course.’

‘The ghaffir used to be answerable to his own village.’

‘And still will be. But there’s a need for wider coordination. Look, you’ve just come back from Minya, haven’t you? What chance has a single ghaffir there got against a pack of brigands?’

‘You use the police. Or the Army.’

‘I think, Owen, that the Army’s got other things on its mind just at the moment. And the whole point of this is to take some of the load off the police. I really don’t see what it is that you’ve got against reforming an antiquated, inefficient, and frankly useless service.’

‘It’s just that I don’t like the idea of a well-armed, militarily trained force of fifty thousand men operating independently in the country at a time when it’s at war.’

McKitterick stared at him incredulously.

‘God, Owen, what’s got into you? “Operating independently”? It’s not operating independently, it’s operating under us. Do you think the Ministry’s going to launch some kind of coup? You must be crazy! Aren’t you taking a perfectly sensible reform a little over-seriously? Perhaps you’ve been working too hard. Why don’t you just stay out of the sun for a day or two?’

When he got back to his office he found that Nikos had pushed to one side the lists he had been working on and put in a conspicuously central position on his desk the memorandum from Finance that he had been trying for several weeks to ignore.

We first wrote to you some seven weeks ago requesting an explanation of how your apparent disbursements under Headings J, P, Q and Y of your Departmental Expenditure Statement are to be reconciled with the figures you give in Section 5 (c) ii and 8 (g) iv, not to mention Financial Regulations (see Sections 4 (d) i, 6 (b) v and 7). Despite requested requests …

Didn’t these blokes know there was a war on? Hadn’t they realized that people might have something better to do than answer their potty memoranda? And how could anyone be expected to answer a memorandum that might have been written in Pharaonic hieroglyphics for all the sense he could make of it?

He pushed the memorandum indignantly aside.

‘There’s been a man phoning from the Ministry of Finance,’ said Nikos, watching from the doorway. ‘He says he’ll try again.’

On reflection, Owen thought he wouldn’t speak to Cunningham about discretionary powers. Not just at the moment.

He had recently moved into a new apartment in the Midan Kasr-en-Nil. Zeinab had moved in with him, which was a considerable act for a woman in Egypt at that time. It was a considerable step forward in their relationship, too, and Zeinab had doubts about it. Every time he came home he half expected to find her not there.

She wasn’t there now. However, her things were still scattered about the flat so he decided that it wasn’t permanent. He poured himself a whisky soda, took a shower and then went out on to the balcony, from where he could see right across the Midan to the Nile on the other side. He was watching the amazing sunset when Zeinab arrived.

She took off her veil and kissed him. Then she helped herself to a drink and came out on to the balcony.

‘Something terrible’s happened,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘They’ve taken Alphonse.’

‘Alphonse?’ He knew the names of most of Zeinab’s friends but couldn’t remember an Alphonse. He didn’t sound like an Egyptian. Perhaps he was a new artist friend?

‘I’d made my appointment as usual, but when I arrived he wasn’t there. Gerard said they had come and taken him that morning. I blame you.’

‘Me?’ said Owen, astonished.

‘You’re arresting them, aren’t you?’

‘Is he German?’

‘No, he’s a perfectly normal Levantine. However, he became a German because someone was chasing him for a debt. Or was it a woman who wanted to marry him? Breach of promise – yes, I think it was breach of promise. But he’s not really a German at all and I don’t think you should have arrested him.’

‘He’s down on a list, I expect.’

‘Can’t you take him off it?’

‘Well …’

‘Nikos could do it. Nikos is good with lists.’

‘Look, it’s not any old list, it’s a list for a purpose, and its purpose is the identification of German nationals so that they can be interned.’

‘But he’s not a German, as I keep telling you. He just became a German, and he certainly wouldn’t have done that if he’d known you were going to arrest him. I told him at the time that it wasn’t a good idea. He ought to have become a Panamanian or something, and then no one would really know what he was.’

‘Panamanian wouldn’t do. Panama doesn’t have consular privileges.’

Under international treaties imposed on Egypt many foreigners had so-called consular rights. Among them was the right to be tried not by an Egyptian court but by a court set up by the consul concerned, usually in another country and at a time far distant; which made possession of foreign nationality in some cases highly attractive.

‘If you can get him out,’ said Zeinab persuasively, ‘I’ll see he becomes something else.’

Nationality was a loose concept in Egypt. It could be acquired simply by recourse to a local consul, plus, of course, the payment of an appropriate sum; and brothel-keepers and the owners of gambling dens tended to change nationality with astonishing frequency.

Egyptians were cavalier about nationality partly because there was so much of it about. Egypt was one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world. One eighth of the population of Cairo was foreign born and the proportion was even higher in Alexandria. Greeks, Italians, French, Albanians, Montenegrins and Levantines of all sorts jostled shoulders in the narrow Cairo streets. The Khedive himself was Turkish. And then there were the British, of course.

The British kept themselves very much to themselves. They worked alongside the Egyptians, but outside the office they seldom met. A few people – Owen, himself, for instance – had Egyptian friends, and the people at the Consulate, Paul especially, mixed socially with upper-rank Egyptians. But to a very considerable extent the two nationalities kept apart.

If this was true of the men, and true, too, of the women for that matter, it was especially true of relationships between men and women.

An Englishman could be in the country for years and not meet an Egyptian woman. He would rarely meet an Italian, Greek or Levantine woman either, since all round the Mediterranean men kept a peculiarly jealous eye on their womenfolk; but in the case of Egyptian women it was even worse. They were perhaps no longer confined to the harem as in the past (only the rich could afford harems these days), but instead were relegated to some dark back room, from which they only emerged heavily veiled and dressed in a long, dark, shapeless gown that revealed nothing of the woman underneath.

They were never seen in public. If they went out, say, to do the shopping, they would be accompanied by a servant who would zealously defend them against any exchange with a man. If, rarely, they went to some public place such as a theatre, they would sit on separate, screened benches. If their husband received guests at home they would stay out of sight.

Young men of any kind, not just British, had a hard time of it and possibly would not have survived had it not been for the obliging ladies in the streets off the Ezbekiya Gardens.

In the case of the British, extra help came annually in the form of ‘the fishing fleet’, as it was known, the arrival of dozens of young women from England for the start of the Cairo season. One effect of this, though, was to reinforce the existing social division between the British and the Egyptians, which was almost complete; and Owen never ceased to give thanks that very early in his time in Egypt he had had the good fortune to meet Zeinab.

It had come about through a case involving her father, Nuri. Nuri was a Pasha and, like most of the old Egyptian ruling class, French-speaking and heavily Francophile in culture. Partly in reflection of this, and partly, it must be admitted, from his own idiosyncrasy, he had allowed his daughter a degree of latitude quite unusual in Egyptian circles. He saw no objection to his daughter meeting Owen; and, once met, things had developed from there.

Zeinab had established her independence to such an extent that quite early on she had acquired a flat of her own, where she lived, she assured her father, very much à la française. Nuri, impressed, had acquiesced; not, perhaps, quite comprehending that even in Paris at this time for young women to live on their own was not entirely comme il faut. In this unusual setting it had been possible for the relationship between Zeinab and Owen to develop; and over time it had developed very strongly.

Lately, however, they had begun to notice just how much time. They were both now over thirty and were becoming aware that many of their friends, even those as young as themselves, were getting married. They wondered whether they should do so too.

Here, though, they came up against that division between Egyptian and British, a division that was not just social but brought with it all the extra baggage that went with nationality: race, religion, customs, expectations and assumptions. And this was especially true when one of the nations concerned was an occupied country and the other the country that was occupying it.

It was not actually forbidden for a member of the Administration to marry an Egyptian, but there was a kind of invisible wash of discouragement. It manifested itself in all kinds of ways: questions about whether it would be possible for a person holding a post like Owen’s to be seen to be impartial if he were married to an Egyptian (no one else in Egypt thought the British were impartial, anyway); sudden shyings away in the Club; the frown of the Great (which was one of the things Owen had against Kitchener).

On Zeinab’s side, too, there were all kinds of cuttings-off: political separation from her artist friends, many of whom would see her as having gone over to the enemy; social repudiation by many of the circles in which Nuri moved and which she had grown up in; and, perhaps above all, an alienation from Egypt itself and a mass of Egyptians actually unknown to her but from whom she was reluctant to distance herself.

And yet, in the end, it was the walls inside themselves, not the obstacles outside, that were the problem. Or so they were coming, tentatively, to think. But those, argued Owen, were things they could do something about. They could try to work themselves through them. And somehow, by what chain of reasoning they were not entirely clear, this had led to their decision to move into a new apartment together.

Zeinab, Owen knew, remained far from convinced about it; but then she had a lot more to lose. Owen himself, aware of the extent to which she felt herself vulnerable and exposed, was beginning to think they ought not to leave things like that for too long. Whatever their doubts about themselves, they ought to resolve things one way or the other.

And, besides, he was coming to think, might not this be their chance? Surely, with Kitchener out of the way and everyone’s minds on the war, a private exercise of discretion – well, yes, you could call it that – might go unremarked; or if not quite unremarked, at least without having the same degree of significance attached to it as in more normal times.

Still unhappy about the issue of service rifles to ghaffirs, he rang up the Ministry and asked if he could see a copy of the inspector’s report.

‘By all means,’ said the Egyptian civil servant he spoke to. ‘It’s rather a good one, actually.’

And when it came round, Owen could see why people were impressed. It was immensely thorough. The inspector had visited lots of districts – Owen recognized the references to Minya – and gone into great detail. Certainly, from what he said about Minya, he appeared to have a good grasp of the nature of the ghaffir’s work and the sorts of local problems that he faced. The analysis was respectable, the arguments well set out, and the conclusions appeared to follow from the arguments. The only thing was that they were daft.

He rang up the Ministry again and got the same obliging Egyptian as before.

‘About the Report,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could have a word with your inspector?’

‘Fricker Effendi? Certainly.’

He hesitated, however.

‘Is there some problem? My interest is of a departmental nature. I have already spoken to McKitterick Effendi about it.’

‘No, no … It’s just that, well, Fricker Effendi is no longer available.’

‘No?’

‘No.’ The official hesitated again. ‘As a matter of fact, I understand that you are holding him.’

‘I am holding him?’

‘Yes. He has been taken into internment.’