The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  A punctilious note came back from Mahmoud the next day. He would certainly keep Owen informed. Perhaps they could meet when he returned from the visit he would shortly be paying to Minya? Meanwhile, could Owen see what information might be gleaned from the Consulate about the woman’s background?

  Owen got in touch with the Consulate and the next day he received a couple of sheets of paper: copies from the records which the German Consulate had handed over to them.

  Hilde Langer had been born thirty-five years before in a village in West Saxony, that is to say, in Germany not Egypt. Her father had been pastor of the local church. Her mother had died three years after she was born, giving birth to another daughter, who had, alas, not survived her. The father, considerably older than the mother, had himself died not long after, and relatives had sent the small girl to her mother’s sister in Alexandria.

  The girl had grown up in Alexandria, where her uncle was an exporter of tobacco, but then, when she was eighteen, the family had moved to Cairo.

  Only two years later the uncle had been severely incapacitated by a stroke and the aunt had sold the business and taken him back to Germany. Hilde Langer, however, had not returned with them.

  What she had done then was not clear. There was a gap of five years and then the next item recorded was the date of her marriage to an Egyptian national, a Mr Aziz Hanafi.

  Shortly after this there was a note of a change of residence to an address in Assuan. The couple appeared to have remained there for two years and then there was a brief indication that the registree had left the country. The final item, dated four years later, was a note of re-registration on return to the country. The address this time was the sugar factory down in Minya.

  About the only thing that could be gleaned about the latter years, thought Owen, was that she had been meticulous in her registrations.

  He wondered where the information had come from about her earlier years.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the man at the Consulate, ‘or why the Germans had it on record. But I know someone you can ask about the time at Alexandria. It’s an old lady who knew the family quite well.’

  ‘Are you sure she’s still around?’

  ‘She’s not German, if that’s what you’re saying,’ said the man, with a touch of acerbity. ‘She’s registered with us.’

  ‘Swiss?’

  ‘Yes. She’s quite old now and we’ve been keeping an eye on her. One of us goes down twice a year. In fact, it’s quite a treat. She’s a mine of information on the old expatriate communities.’

  Owen took her name.

  ‘If I were you, I’d write,’ said the man. ‘She likes to take her time these days, and she’s one of that generation that writes good letters.’

  ‘What about the Cairo years? They’re actually the ones that are likely to be most relevant.’

  ‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. It was before I came here. Wait a minute, I’ll ask Müller.’

  Another voice came on the line.

  ‘Müller here. How can I help?’

  ‘Owen, the Mamur Zapt.’

  ‘The Mamur Zapt?’

  ‘Yes. I’m looking for information on a Hilde Langer, who would have been in Cairo, oh, ten to fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Langer? I’m sorry, I don’t remember anyone…’

  ‘She would have been in her early twenties.’

  ‘It sounds as if I ought to have known her. Was she pretty?’

  ‘Hard to tell.’ He thought back to the face in the cat cemetery. ‘Fair, anyway.’

  ‘They’re all fair. At least in memory. Anything else you can tell me?’

  Owen looked at his papers again.

  ‘She came here from Alexandria with an uncle and aunt. The uncle was a tobacco exporter. Knipper, his name was.’

  ‘I remember the Knippers. But the niece…I really ought to. If she was with the Knippers. The Swiss community here was very small in those days.’

  ‘She was German.’

  ‘We would have met. All the German speakers. We liked the chance to speak German. Otherwise it was Arabic all the time, or French, or English. There were things every week. Parties, musical evenings, that sort of thing. Cards. Any excuse to get together. So I should have met her. Especially if she was young. I was just out from Switzerland, an unattached male, nostalgic for home beauty…But I don’t remember her at all. Odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t know anyone else who might remember those days?’

  ‘The Kleins, the Grünmanns. The Spitzers, perhaps…Wait a minute, was she at all musical?’

  ‘She might have been,’ said Owen, remembering the piano. ‘She might well have been.’

  ‘Well, look, as a last resort you could try Puttendorf. But God knows what state he’s in nowadays.’

  ‘Where will I find him?’

  ‘In a bar, certainly. Try Fritz’s, just off the Ezbekiya. Most evenings. And afternoons and mornings for that matter.’

  ‘Lunch-times?’ said Owen.

  ‘Especially. Offer to take him to the Continentale for a drink. He’ll like that. It’ll remind him of old times.’

  ‘Look, thanks very much. I hadn’t realized the Swiss–German connection would be so helpful.’

  ‘Just don’t confuse the two, please. Especially at the moment.’

  ***

  The Kleins lived in a tall house just off the Midan Nasriya. They were obviously well-to-do. A suffragi opened the door and led Owen to an upstairs sitting room, where the Kleins were having afternoon tea. They were an elderly couple, rather frail now, but still mentally alert. They remembered the Knippers very well. But the niece?

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Mrs Klein doubtfully. ‘I don’t remember a niece.’

  ‘I remember a girl, I think,’ said Mr Klein.

  ‘You always remember a girl,’ said his wife, somewhat tartly.

  ‘But was her name Hilde?’

  ‘Eva, I think,’ said Mrs Klein.

  ‘Perhaps it was.’

  ‘But a Hilde Langer…’

  Mrs Klein shook her head.

  ***

  It was a similar story at the Grünmanns, where he was offered some cherry brandy and a thick slab of caraway seed cake covered with cream. Owen hadn’t tasted cream for some time. You tended to fight shy of milk products, both in Egypt and in India. It took him back to his childhood in a Welsh parsonage, and he had some more.

  It was very agreeable and so were the Grünmanns; but on Hilde Langer he again drew a blank.

  ‘In her twenties? Well, there wouldn’t have been many girls in their twenties, not out here all the time. Are you sure she didn’t come out just for the season?’

  ‘No, she was with her uncle and aunt. They moved here from Alexandria.’

  ‘I remember the Knippers,’ said Mr Grünmann. ‘He was in tobacco, wasn’t he?’

  ‘It was such a shock,’ said Mrs Grünmann. ‘I felt so much for Rumi Knipper.’

  ‘She was quite right to take him home. The heat out here…for a sick man…’

  ‘The niece didn’t go back with them. She stayed out here.’

  ‘I really don’t remember,’ said Mrs Grünmann, looking at her husband. ‘Do you?’

  ‘What was her name, again?’

  ***

  It was strange, thought Owen, how they recreated their homes in the style to which they had been accustomed. He had never had much to do with either the Swiss or the German expatriate communities and wasn’t aware of ever having entered their houses, but the houses he had visited today had had things in common and he was sure that was a reflection of styles back at home. Wood was very much in evidence, for example, in the furniture, the knick-knacks, even the eating utensils. The styles were inclined to the heavy—there was a world of difference between them and those he
had seen in the houses of French expatriates. Certainly you would never have thought you were in Egypt.

  The Spitzers were younger than the Kleins and the Grünmanns.

  ‘Did she play tennis?’ asked Mrs Spitzer.

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘I don’t think she could have,’ said Mr Spitzer. ‘Otherwise we’d have remembered her.’

  ‘Do you remember the Knippers?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I felt so sorry for them. It came as a complete shock.’

  ‘But there wasn’t much else they could do, was there?’

  ‘It was best to go home,’ said Mrs Spitzer firmly.

  ‘She was a young woman, fair-haired—’

  ‘She has disappeared from my mind completely,’ said Mrs Spitzer. ‘If she was ever there.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ said Mr Spitzer.

  ***

  She had disappeared from everyone’s mind completely, thought Owen, as he walked home. So completely as to make him wonder, too, if she had ever been there. But there was the name in the Consulate files and the meticulous registrations. There was also, indubitably, the body in the cat cemetery.

  And there was something odd about this. They all remembered the Knippers very clearly, yet the Knippers, by his count, had been in Cairo for not much more than two years. Whereas Hilde Langer had been there for seven.

  If, of course, she had been there. Perhaps she had merely registered in Cairo and then gone somewhere else. But where, in Egypt, could a solitary, unattached, young European woman go? What could she do? Not a job, in this most male-dominated of countries, certainly. How would she have lived? On an allowance made her by the Knippers? But even then, how, in a place like Egypt, would she have been able to manage on her own?

  Had she been on her own, though? What about her husband? He had seemingly only come into the picture five years later. Or had they been living together before the marriage?

  But, Christ, an Egyptian and a European? Hell, he and Zeinab were conscious of the pressures even now. How had it been then?

  Of course, she could simply have returned to Alexandria, where there might have been friends, or family, to support her. He would have to write that letter to the old lady the man from the Consulate had mentioned.

  And meanwhile, perhaps, he could try that evidently rather dubious character Müller had told him about. What was his name? Puttendorf. He would try him tomorrow, at lunch-time. Before he had soaked up so much alcohol as to be completely incapable of responding coherently.

  ***

  Fritz’s was in the Wagh-el-Birket, just off the Ezbekiya Gardens.

  Owen liked the Ezbekiya Gardens. He liked the donkey-boys squatting round the large trays in the pavement cafés, dipping their fingers into the meat dishes and helping themselves to the bread stuck on the spikes round the rim; he liked the camel men spreading green fodder all over the road for their camels, the Nubians sprawled on the pavement with mandarin oranges piled like cannonballs before them. He liked the chestnut sellers roasting chestnuts over the gratings round the young trees, the peanut and dried-bean sellers, the men who sold cups of hot sago.

  He liked the people who made shops out of the railings that ran round the Gardens, twining whips and ribbons and dirty postcards through the ironwork; he liked the leaning, Pisa-like towers of tarbushes piled on top of each other; the barber perching on the railings while he cut the hair of the man squatting on the pavement below; he liked even the sweet sellers, with their fly-speckled trays of caramel and Turkish delight and their big cheeses of nougat.

  But he did not like the Wagh-el-Birket, equally picturesque though it was, in its way. On one side was an arcade with dubious cafés under its arches, where from the tables outside the customers could view the houses opposite with their balconied upper floors from which, later, the ladies of the night would lean out in their flimsy robes, illuminated by the rose light of the lanterns behind them.

  At this hour of day the balconies were deserted, the curtains drawn. The few customers at the tables across the street could gaze only at the extremely large, heavily hennaed ladies of the less expensive lower floors, smiling indefatigably from the open windows.

  Fritz’s was at the far end of the street, just before the café with the female band (not strong musically, perhaps, but rumoured to be highly competent in other ways). As the cafés under the arches went, Fritz’s was not too bad a place. The floor was fairly clean and a one-eyed Arab was mopping the stone tops of the tables. In one corner of the room was a piano, at which a man was sitting.

  He was not playing—indeed, just at the moment he seemed hardly in a condition to—but from time to time one hand would touch, almost caress, the keys. But then it would immediately move to the glass standing on the end of the keyboard.

  There was a traditional European-style bar and a man behind it who may even have been Fritz, since he wore Bavarian braces.

  ‘Puttendorf?’ said Owen, jerking his head in the direction of the man at the piano.

  The bartender nodded.

  The man at the piano swivelled round.

  ‘Who asks for Puttendorf?’

  Owen went across to him.

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  Puttendorf tried to look at him but his eyes refused to focus. After a moment he turned back to the piano and said: ‘No one asks for Puttendorf.’

  Owen turned him round.

  ‘Puttendorf,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  Puttendorf shook his head.

  ‘No one wants to talk to Puttendorf. Not these days.’

  He collapsed back over the piano in tears.

  Owen looked at the bartender.

  ‘Is there a better time?’

  ‘To speak to him? No.’

  Owen considered.

  ‘If I take him outside,’ he asked, ‘will he fall over?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the bartender confidently, ‘not for some hours yet.’

  Owen bent down.

  ‘Puttendorf,’ he said, shaking him gently, ‘I want to have a talk. Let’s go somewhere else. How about the Continentale?’

  Puttendorf straightened up.

  ‘The Continentale?’ he said. ‘I was just on my way there.’ He tried to look at his watch. ‘Goodness me, I should have been there already. Fritz, why didn’t you tell me?’

  He tried to stand up. Owen helped him.

  ‘He’ll be all right now,’ said Fritz.

  Amazingly, once he was outside he seemed to recover; enough, at any rate, to walk the comparatively short distance along the south side of the Garden to the Hotel Continentale.

  Once inside, he sniffed the air appreciatively. It was cool from the great fans hissing overhead and carried faint aromas from the dining room of bouillon and coffee. Owen led him to a corner of the bar and they sat down.

  ‘Of course, they all know me here,’ said Puttendorf.

  He waved to the waiters.

  ‘Hello, François! Abdul!’

  François came across.

  ‘Hello, Mr Puttendorf! You’re still keeping well, I see. What can I get you?’

  ‘Two beers, please,’ said Owen.

  François came back with the beers and set them down.

  ‘He’s only allowed the one,’ he whispered to Owen.

  Puttendorf was looking puzzled.

  ‘Why aren’t they playing, François?’

  ‘They’re taking a break. In a moment you’ll hear them tuning up.’

  ‘Ah, good.’ Puttendorf seemed relieved. ‘I used to play here, you know,’ he said to Owen.

  ‘With the orchestra?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at his hands. ‘Not any more, though.’ He showed them to Owen. They shook continuously.

  Puttendorf laughed.

  ‘They used to say that everything
was vibrato with me! But that was only at the end.’

  ‘You were in the strings?’

  ‘Violins. I played first at one time, when I had just come out here.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Let me see…’ The eyes clouded, then cleared again. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘Twenty…thirty? Was it thirty years ago?’

  ‘A long time, anyway. Actually, I wanted to ask you something about that. Did you ever know a woman called Hilde Langer?’

  ‘What did she play?’

  ‘The piano, I think. But she may have played something else.’

  ‘No, the piano. That was the problem, you see. You can’t earn a living with the piano. Not unless you teach. Well, she did do some of that, as we all did. But she wanted to do more. She wanted to become a concert pianist. “Hilde,” I said, “we all fancy ourselves as concert musicians. But only a few of us ever make it. And that is especially true if you play the piano. What happens if you don’t make it? There is nothing to fall back upon. With other instruments you can always try for an orchestra.” “The trouble is,” she said, “my nature is that of a soloist.”

  ‘Of course, she didn’t get anywhere. A few concerts, perhaps, at the houses of friends. But even then it was mostly as an accompanist. She had a real talent for that, I will say. Especially for Lieder. We used to sing a lot of Lieder in those days. People would take it in turns to host an evening. It wasn’t always music. Sometimes it was cards. Or those dreadful charades. There was usually something every week. The German-speaking community was quite a small one then, and I suppose we felt the need. You know, in a foreign country. You keep together more, don’t you?

  ‘And I suppose to sing Lieder reminded us of home. They were German, weren’t they? Peculiarly German. Not like cards.

  ‘So for a time she did quite well. It was always, “Hilde, darling, you will play for us, won’t you?” They used to pay her, of course. They knew how things stood. “Hilde, dear, you’re a professional, after all, and we know professionals don’t do things for nothing. So…” And she would smile prettily and say, “Well, I’m only a little professional.” And they would say: “It’s only a little money,” and everyone would laugh.