The Girl in the Nile Page 15

  “I’ve seen women onstage here,” Owen objected.

  “Ah yes. Foreign women. And sometimes we have Jews. But not Arab women; that wouldn’t be right.”

  “It’s not right to have boys,” said Zeinab, “not when it’s a question of making love.”

  “It’s not making love,” said Gamal. “It’s talking love.”

  “There’s something to be said for that,” said Zeinab, with a sidelong glance at Owen.

  “In England in Shakespeare’s time,” said Owen, disregarding her, “the women’s parts would probably have been played by boys.”

  “I am against confusion on a matter like this,” said Zeinab.

  Fortunately, some of Gamal’s friends burst into the box at this point.

  “Brilliant, Gamal! Exquisite!”

  “The wit!”

  “You think so?” said Gamal, pleased. “I was worried—”

  They bore him off to their favorite café.

  Owen and Zeinab tailed along. Zeinab was talking to a tall, thin youth who seemed rather overwhelmed by her presence.

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  “Yes,” said the youth, shyly but firmly.

  Zeinab dropped back alongside Owen.

  “This is Hafiz. He works on Al-Liwa.”

  “A paper I always read,” said Owen truthfully.

  “Really?” said the young man, gratified. “I’ve only just started there. They don’t let me do much yet. Copyediting, that sort of thing.”

  “They have a very small staff. You’ve done extraordinarily well to get onto it at all.”

  “Well,” said the young man modestly, “I suppose I had quite a reputation. I used to edit a radical student newspaper. Sword of Islam. I don’t suppose…?”

  “Oh yes,” said Owen, again truthfully. “I have read it.”

  He read all the radical papers.

  “Excellent,” he assured the young man. “I am sure you have a considerable career ahead of you.”

  “I was asking Hafiz,” said Zeinab, “if Hargazy was the one who came to the office.”

  “Which is Hargazy?”

  Zeinab pointed out a balding man in an opennecked red shirt.

  “And was he?”

  “Yes,” said Hafiz.

  When they reached the café, Zeinab drew up a chair beside Hargazy.

  He responded to her at once. Most people did.

  “I don’t think we’ve met?”

  “Although I’ve certainly seen you,” said Zeinab. “You must be one of the few friends of Gamal that I don’t know.”

  “I know Feisal better than I know Gamal. He brings me along,” said Hargazy, smiling, “to occasions like this.”

  They talked about the play.

  “You obviously know a lot about writing,” said Zeinab.

  “I should,” said Hargazy. “That’s how I earn my living.”

  “Really? A playwright? Or perhaps a novelist?”

  “Not yet,” admitted Hargazy, a trifle grudgingly. “I’ve got one or two things coming along. Rather good things, actually. But at the moment I’m still freelancing.”

  He told her he contributed to Al-Liwa.

  “That’s a real paper,” said Zeinab enthusiastically. “I wish I could work for it.”

  “Well,” said Hargazy, laughing, “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. A woman, after all—”

  “Women do write,” said Zeinab. “In France they write.”

  “Ah, in France.” Hargazy shrugged his shoulders.

  “I have seen you before,” said Zeinab. “And wasn’t it with a girl? An Arab girl? I remember, because it was so unusual. What was her name?”

  “Leila.” He looked at her a little warily.

  “That’s right. How is she? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  The man didn’t reply. He looked down at the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” said Zeinab. “Perhaps you’ve split up?”

  “No,” said Hargazy, “no.”

  “She looked an interesting girl. I had a sort of fellow feeling for her.”

  “Really?” Hargazy looked at her sharply. “Why should you have a fellow feeling for her?”

  Now it was Zeinab who shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing, really. It was just that she was another Egyptian girl. Among so many foreign ones.”

  “That was it,” said Hargazy. “That was what made her stand out.”

  “I shouldn’t ask about her,” said Zeinab. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, not at all. It’s good to ask about her.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Zeinab. “I remember now: She is dead.”

  “Yes,” said the man, “she is dead.” He looked down at the ground, then looked up. “They killed her,” he said.

  “‘They’?”

  “The ones who kill us every day.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Zeinab.

  “You must understand,” said the man. He waved an arm excitedly. “The ones who hold us down. Stamp on us. Destroy what is best of Egypt.”

  “The British?”

  “They are just the tools,” said Hargazy contemptuously. “If it wasn’t them it would be the Turks. Or the French. No, it’s the ones who bring them in, who brought them in in the first place—”

  “The Khedive?”

  “And the rich. The whole pack of them. They are like a great yoke sitting on our shoulders. They weight us down, they rob us, they starve us. They beat us—”

  His shoulders heaved.

  “They beat me,” he said in a strangled voice. “When I was a boy. The Pasha’s overseer struck my father. I said: ‘Do not do that.’ He said, ‘I will teach you to talk to me like that.’ And then he beat me, and my father watched—and did nothing!”

  His voice choked.

  “It was then I realized: he could do nothing. Nothing, while all those people were in place. Nothing, while they were the ones who held the curbash.”

  Zeinab, that daughter of a Pasha and representative of the rich, sat silent.

  “They kill us,” said the man bitterly. “And they killed Leila.”

  “If they killed Leila,” said Zeinab, “then that should be made known.”

  The man looked at her sharply and seemed about to speak. Then he thought better of it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “If you need help,” said Zeinab, “call on me.”

  ***

  There was, said Nikos, a deputation waiting to see him.

  “Show them in,” instructed Owen.

  “I can’t. They won’t fit in.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Sixty,” said Nikos. “So far.”

  Owen had been conscious for some time of growing movement in the courtyard below. He went to the window and pushed open the shutters. The courtyard was full.

  “I revise my estimate,” said Nikos. “Eighty.”

  “What do they want?”

  “It’s something to do with bodies,” said Nikos.

  Owen went down into the courtyard. A little group of men were standing by the door waiting for him. Their faces seemed half familiar.

  Georgiades suddenly appeared beside him.

  “Marwash,” he said, indicating one of the half-familiar faces. “He’s the father of the girl.”

  “Girl?”

  “The one whose tomb they used to put the arms in.”

  “Oh yes.”

  He recognized some of the faces now. There was the village omda and there was the local sheikh. And there was the fiki who had gone to the tomb with the women to chant the readings.

  Georgiades, for some reason, was looking at him closely.

  “Haven’t I seen you b
efore?” he said.

  “You saw me at the tomb,” replied the man.

  “Somewhere else too.”

  The sheikh came towards Owen. He was a religious sheikh and presided at the mosque the girl’s father attended.

  They exchanged the prescribed greetings.

  “A sad business,” said Owen. “My heart goes out to the father and to all the family. Those responsible will be caught and punished.”

  It was a serious matter to profane a tomb. Apart from the distress it caused, there was the affront to religious susceptibilities. The authorities were always prompt to support the Mufti and the religious sheikhs on a thing like this. It could so easily spill over into civil disorder and violence.

  “So they should be,” said the sheikh. “Ali Marwash is greatly respected. However, that is not the reason why I have come to see you.”

  “No?”

  Owen looked round. The courtyard was now overflowing with serious-faced, white-galabeahed men. There were others outside the gates. Outside the gates, too, he could see some respectably dressed women. It was unusual for women to appear at such a public occasion.

  Policemen, armed, filed out of the building and took up position. He signed to them to keep back.

  “Your troubles are my troubles,” he said to the sheikh. “What can I do to help you?”

  “It is the girl’s body,” said the sheikh.

  “That it should be disturbed in this way is most regrettable.”

  “It is not there.”

  “Not there?” said Owen, dumbfounded.

  “It is not in the tomb.”

  Surely his men had not removed the body with the guns?

  “When we looked, it was not there.”

  “How can this be?”

  “I don’t know,” said the sheikh, “but these are evil times.”

  “Has search been made?”

  “Where should search be made?”

  Perhaps the arms runners had removed the body, finding there was not enough room for the arms. But then, where would they have put it?

  “The Place of Tombs,” said Owen. “Perhaps it has been cast aside.”

  “We have looked,” said the sheikh, “but we could not find it. And so we have come to you.”

  “It is wrong,” said one of the men beside him, “wrong to trouble the dead.”

  There was a murmur of assent from the crowd.

  “Cannot a body be left to rest in peace?” asked someone else.

  The mutter grew louder. Beyond the gates a woman began to ululate.

  “Who can have done this evil thing?”

  “Not one of us,” someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

  “No,” the fiki called back, “it was some unbeliever, I’ll be bound!”

  “Shut up!” snapped Owen.

  “Shut up!” said Georgiades, pressing the fiki back against the wall. He peered in the man’s face. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  There were shouts now from all sides. Some men at the back of the crowd tried to force their way forward. The crowd surged alarmingly. The policemen fingered their rifles.

  “Enough!”

  Owen stepped forward and held up his hand.

  “Enough! This wrong will be righted. But that is for the Mamur Zapt and not for you. Go back to the Place of Tombs. My men will come with you. We will search together until the body is found and restored to its rightful place.”

  This was well received but no one actually moved. Owen pushed his way into the crowd.

  “I will lead you!” he shouted.

  The crowd opened up and he headed for the gate. The sheikh fell in behind him.

  “To the Place of Tombs!” shouted Georgiades, thrusting with his shoulders. The constables joined in enthusiastically. Gradually the crowd began to move.

  Outside the gates they fell into a more or less orderly procession, Owen at their head. When they got to the Place of Tombs he would find a way of breaking them up. If they could find the body, that would be fine. He would assure them that the perpetrators would be punished and they would all go home happily.

  It should not be too difficult to find the body. It must have been dumped somewhere nearby.

  When he looked in the tomb he had not really noticed the body was missing. He had seen the arms and thought that was that. He had presumed the body was somewhere in the background.

  God! Another body going missing! He’d thought for a moment that the fates had it in for him. But this, surely, was straightforward.

  He hoped.

  Chapter Nine

  At this time of day, late in the morning, there was no shade in the Place of Tombs for anyone, apart from those underground. The sun shone down with a bright, hard glare and was reflected off the stonework of the tombs. In the space between the tombs the heat was in the 130’s.

  This helped proceedings enormously. The crowd, which had at first congregated expectantly round the tomb, evidently hoping that the Mamur Zapt would conjure the girl, Lazarus-like, from the dead, wilted as the miracle continued to be deferred.

  Weaker spirits spread out quickly in search not so much of the body as of shade. With the sun now almost directly overhead, the shadows cast by the tombs were thin and soon crowded. Stronger, or possibly more curious, spirits who deferred dispersal were obliged to seek further out. Thus in a short time the crowd dwindled to manageable proportions.

  Georgiades, eager as always to get somebody else to do the work, organized those who remained into little groups which began to explore the area systematically. This thinned the crowd even further.

  Where there was space to move, Owen set the constables to work. He expected to find the girl’s body dumped unceremoniously in some gap between the tombs, not very far away, perhaps tucked under some slanting tombstone. The arms runners would not, he thought, have gone far out of their way to dispose of it.

  The sheikh and the girl’s father looked at him expectantly. They obviously hoped for more.

  Owen couldn’t think for the moment what more there was to be done, so he climbed up on an old ruined tombstone to survey the scene.

  The Place of Tombs was a vast necropolis which over the centuries had spread until it occupied the space virtually to the horizon, where the light quavered in continuing mirages. You could date the different parts of the cemetery not just by the state of disrepair or ruination of the tombs but also by their style: the tombs of the Mamelukes often had cupolas raised over them painted blue and with golden lettering.

  Here, where Ali Marwash’s family were buried, and where he hoped to be buried himself—he had already purchased the ground and designed the tomb—were humbler brick tombs decorated only by upright headstones with turbans carved at the top of them. These were the graves of the middling to well-to-do folks. Poorer people had simple pottery shells. The poorest, of course, had nothing.

  Apart from the dust devils and heat spirals flitting over the tombs, there was little to see. Owen scrutinized the area carefully to satisfy the sheikh and Ali Marwash but didn’t really expect to see anything significant. The main purpose of being up there was to keep an eye on the constables, who might otherwise have joined the general search for shade.

  They were not having much luck with their search. Owen had expected to find the girl’s body relatively quickly. Surely the arms runners wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of taking the body away with them?

  But as time went by and no body was found, that increasingly appeared to be what they had done.

  The constables, even with Owen’s eye on them, were definitely lagging. He saw a suspicious human gap, got down from his vantage point and went over. The constable was, as he had expected, sitting down.

  “By God, it is hot!” said the offender, looking up at him.

  “By God, it will be hotter for yo
u if you do not soon get on your feet!” said Owen.

  The man grinned and rejoined the searching. Owen had some sympathy. He had seen the sweat running down the man’s face, could feel it running down his own.

  Back near the tomb Georgiades was also sitting down. He had taken out a handkerchief and was mopping his neck.

  “Why go to hell when you can have it here?” he said to Owen, before rising to his feet and shambling off.

  Georgiades was on a patrol of his own, sniffing round the tombs. Owen let him carry on. The Greek usually knew what he was doing.

  Owen, too, felt like sitting down. The sheikh and Ali Marwash had sat down. He went over to talk to them, using it as a pretext to squat for a moment himself.

  “Alas!” he said to Ali Marwash. “It begins to look as if those evil men have taken your daughter’s body further afield than I had thought.”

  “Why should they go to the trouble?” asked the sheikh.

  Why indeed? thought Owen. A body was surely as conspicious as a load of arms.

  Georgiades came and hovered. When Owen stood up, he turned and walked quietly away. Owen walked back casually in the general direction of the girl’s tomb. Georgiades suddenly appeared beside him.

  “Want to come and look?” he asked.

  He led Owen to a tomb some distance away from where they had found the arms cache. It was a big square family tomb and had obviously been built some years ago, for the sand had drifted halfway up the sides. The headstones on top drooped towards each other.

  “Old grave, new work,” said Georgiades.

  He took Owen round to the entrance. It looked intact. The roofing stones were still in position over the entrance house and sand was piled over the top.

  But there was something odd about it. It didn’t quite fit the pattern of drift. And there, to one side, were distinct spade marks, still not yet filled by the drifting sand.

  Owen stood looking at it.

  “Do you want me to open it?” asked Georgiades.

  Some way across the cemetery a little party of men, supposed to be searching, came to a stop and stood for a moment talking. One or two of them looked idly in Owen’s direction. Beyond them he could see another party. And, just coming into sight were some constables scanning the ground halfheartedly.