The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  Owen could see the ferry more clearly now. The goats seemed to be on it. He could see the black-and-white backs milling around.

  He watched as it came in. Just before it reached the jetty, the boatman stooped and threw one of the goats over the side. It floundered and splashed for a moment and then made its way to the shore. Then the man threw the others. He ran back to the tiller and turned it into the wind. It lost way and came gently into the jetty. The boatman threw a rope out. The constable caught it and made it fast.

  ‘Hello, Salah,’ he said. ‘Cheated the crocodiles again, have you?’ He peered down into the boat. ‘But not for long, I fancy. There seems more water in here than usual. And more shit.’

  ‘There is no more water in here than usual!’ retorted the boatman indignantly. ‘It just washes in and washes out.’

  ‘Bloody great hole, is there?’ said the constable. He turned to the women as they came forward. ‘You want to watch out, girls!’

  ‘Thank you, Mustapha. We’ll bear your words in mind.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mustapha. As soon as the boat gets going, Salah sticks his behind in the hole and stays there till we get to the other side.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’

  A truck came bouncing along the bank and drove down to the end of the jetty. It must be one of the sugar factory ones, thought Owen. Some workmen jumped out and came down to the ferry carrying their baskets of tools. The driver went across to the tea seller and squatted down.

  The workmen greeted the constable and got into the ferry with the women. Two of them held the edge of the jetty while the constable cast off.

  He stood for a moment watching the boat put out and then began to make his way up the bank in the direction of the tea seller.

  Owen fell in beside him.

  ‘Hello, Effendi. Did you find the mudiriya all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The tea seller looked up as they approached.

  ‘Hello, Mustapha.’

  The constable seemed to be on good terms with everybody on the waterfront, thought Owen.

  ‘Made your fortune yet, then, Ibrahim?’ he inquired.

  ‘It grows greater day by day.’

  ‘Let me add to it, then,’ said Owen, laying out some coins on the sand. ‘For my friends, too.’

  The constable and the truck driver inclined their thanks.

  The tea seller put out two little tin cups and poured them both tea from a tall jug with a long spout, then refilled the driver’s cup.

  ‘He’s been to see the mudir,’ the constable informed them.

  ‘Lucky him!’ said the truck driver.

  The tea seller looked Owen up and down in exaggerated fashion.

  ‘He’s still got his trousers on!’ he said.

  ‘That’s because he’s an effendi,’ said the driver.

  ‘That old bastard would have the very clothes off your back,’ said the constable, grinning.

  ‘He’s like that, is he?’

  ‘All mudirs are,’ said the driver.

  The tea seller looked at him curiously.

  ‘He doesn’t bother you, though, Sidi, does he?’

  ‘No,’ said the driver, ‘he doesn’t bother me.’ He put his cup down on the sand and made to get up. ‘I’ve got some things to collect for the factory,’ he said.

  ‘They’re over there at the end of the jetty,’ the constable said.

  ‘They can wait,’ said the tea seller, refilling the driver’s cup.

  ‘They can wait,’ agreed the driver, subsiding.

  Owen sipped his tea. It was black and hot.

  ‘You were right about the shooting,’ he said to the constable. ‘When I got there, there were ghaffirs all over the place.’

  ‘There are ghaffirs all over the place all the time these days,’ said the tea seller. ‘They’re always here.’

  ‘It’s that training they’ve got to do,’ said the constable.

  ‘Training?’ said Owen. ‘What does a ghaffir want training for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the tea seller. ‘He never used to.’

  ‘It’s these new guns,’ said the constable.

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen, ‘I saw them. Why does a ghaffir need a gun like that?’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ said the constable. ‘It’s just one of these daft ideas they have up in Cairo.’

  ‘You know what, though?’ said the tea seller. ‘They really think they’re somebody now. Ever since they got the guns they’ve been walking around as if the sun shone out of their backsides.’

  ‘They’re getting to be a real pain,’ agreed the constable.

  ‘What’s a ghaffir, after all? We always used to pick the village idiot.’

  ‘Well, that made sense, didn’t it? That way you knew they were never likely to make any trouble.’

  ‘It’s different now, though. You tell them to bugger off and they don’t. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’

  ‘They’re getting above themselves, and that’s a fact,’ agreed the constable. He turned to the driver. ‘You have any trouble with ghaffirs out your way, Sidi?’

  The driver finished his cup.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t have any trouble with ghaffirs.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, though, would you?’ said the tea seller. ‘Not out your way.’

  Chapter Ten

  There were no hotels in Minya and Owen was staying at the Government rest house. It was where officials usually stayed in their tours of the province and he saw Fricker’s name higher up the page when he signed the Visitors Book.

  The rest house was small—there were only half a dozen bedrooms—but the food was good and it was possible to have guests for meals. Fricker had signed in several. Among them, on no fewer than four separate occasions, was the name Hanafi.

  Well, perhaps that was not surprising. He knew that they had met and they had obviously struck up an acquaintance good enough for Hanafi to have invited Fricker to meet his wife. All the same, Owen was a little surprised. Four separate occasions? Over a period of—he looked—less than three weeks. It didn’t square with the picture he had had in his mind of the Hanafis living an isolated, closed-in life in that awful house among the sugar cane. Perhaps it was just the wife who had led the isolated life!

  Hanafi had, though, taken Fricker over to see her. They had sung together. Just once, or several times? He had the impression that it was more than once.

  How had they managed that? The sugar factory was quite some distance from Minya, two hours at least if you went by boat, which would be the normal way. Hanafi would, of course, probably have access to the factory’s trucks. Even so, that was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. These were working trucks.

  He looked again at the signings-in. They were all for lunch. That would certainly have helped. There might be a truck coming in regularly to the town, that truck, perhaps, that he had seen down on the waterfront. Hanafi could have come in by that; and then, probably, in the evenings the trucks would not be being used. Fricker would have been fetched and returned.

  But then there was another problem. Journeys and lunch would take up the best part of a working day. Four full days in just over two weeks? When Hanafi was a working manager? How had he managed that? Owen hadn’t the impression that his boss, Schneider, would look very kindly on that sort of thing!

  Unless, of course, Hanafi was coming to Minya on business. But what business was it that would bring him to Minya four times in such a short period?

  And had it anything to do with Fricker?

  ***

  The three Egyptians were also staying in the rest house. They came in when he was halfway through his meal and joined him later on the verandah for coffee. He asked them about their day.

  ‘Fruitless!’ said Kattim, mopping
his neck with a silk handkerchief. He seemed to be troubled by the heat. ‘Entirely fruitless!’

  ‘At least you got a feel for the books,’ said Hoseini soothingly.

  ‘These provincial bookkeepers!’ said Latif, shaking his head with a smile.

  ‘The books are all right,’ said Kattim. ‘They are consistent with the other documentation.’

  ‘But can that documentation be trusted?’ said Latif.

  ‘Can anything here be trusted?’ asked Hoseini. ‘Including, and perhaps especially, that clerk of his.’

  ‘It’s not just the books,’ said Latif. ‘Don’t forget, he was the one who checked the guns in, too. Against the consignment note, he says. But which consignment note?’

  ‘If the consignment notes were switched,’ said Hoseini, ‘he was the man best placed to do it.’

  He looked to Kattim for agreement but the man from the Finance Ministry said nothing. Owen was trying to read the by-play between them. He sensed there was some kind of tension. Was it just the usual tension between Finance and everybody else? Or was there more to it?

  Down below them the moon was silvering the river. The palm trees along the bank were black; but then suddenly a puff of wind seemed to catch them and it was as if they were shaking silver sparkles down into the water.

  ‘It’s really not so bad here!’ said Latif contentedly.

  Kattim sniffed.

  ‘Not if you like heat and flies,’ he said.

  There was a little silence, and then conversation resumed. They talked on for a while and then Latif stood up and announced his intention of going for a walk. Hoseini went with him. Kattim remained sitting.

  Owen waited.

  ‘I hate the provinces,’ said Kattim. He looked around with disgust. ‘I hate the flies, yes, and the dirt and the mosquitoes. But I also hate the ignorance and the stupidity and the narrowness, the general—’ he shuddered—‘absence of anything that makes life intellectually interesting.’

  He looked at Owen.

  ‘And I know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘Because I grew up in a place like this. When I went to Cairo, to the university, I said, “Never again!” And, fortunately, for the most part, that is how it has been. I hate the provinces. And yet it is not right. It is not right to blame the local officials whenever anything goes wrong.’

  ‘You think the mudir is being unfairly treated?’

  Kattim shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not say that. There is clearly something wrong. But I think if I were Mamur Zapt I would be asking myself why is it that the Ministry is so very anxious to show that whatever went wrong, went wrong at Minya. When it seems to me that there are important questions which could be asked at the Cairo end.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kattim, ‘why wasn’t the original requisition note, the one for eight hundred and fifty guns, cancelled? Why was it allowed to remain in the files, where it could lead to misinterpretation? And then the second consignment note, the one that the mudir’s clerk says was with the guns and which he worked to, and which my colleagues at the Ministry of the Interior say is clearly false: have you looked at it?’

  ‘Er, well…’

  ‘I have. Carefully. And I was also able to look, back in Cairo, at the dispatch clerk’s copy of the other consignment note, the one for one thousand and fifty guns. The second consignment note is also on Ministry paper and is drawn up in exactly the same way. That is to say, by someone familiar with the Ministry’s way of doing things. Each Ministry, you know, has its own peculiarities. It has, too, the same internal stamping as the other. You know, “Accounts”, “Despatch”, et cetera—each section stamps it as it passes through the system. The stamping appears to me genuine, and I see no reason to suppose that the second note didn’t go through the system in exactly the same way as the first.’

  ‘You mean that both notes were produced inside the Ministry?’

  Kattim smiled.

  ‘I mean only,’ he said, ‘that if I were Mamur Zapt, that is a question that I would be asking.’

  He stood up.

  ‘I think I shall return to Cairo tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I really do hate the provinces.’

  ***

  Owen decided to go for a walk himself. Although it was still early in the evening the town was silent. Not like Cairo, thought Owen, when things only began to hum towards midnight. Down by the river, though, there were sounds of merriment, and when he came to the top of the road leading down to the jetty he could see them: about a dozen men, sitting on the end of the jetty, passing a jug between them.

  One of them looked up and saw him.

  ‘Hello, Effendi!’ he said, with a drunken giggle.

  ‘Hush, Mohammed! Do not be discourteous. He means nothing by it, Effendi. It is just that we are celebrating.’

  Owen went down to them.

  ‘What is it that you are celebrating?’

  ‘The end of our course.’

  ‘Ah!’ He had worked it out now. ‘You must be ghaffirs.’

  ‘That’s right, Effendi. We’ve come in here to learn to shoot.’

  ‘That is, perhaps a good thing, since you are ghaffirs.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Effendi. There’s not much call for shooting out where I come from.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Hussein,’ said a new, authoritative—or if not authoritative, at least relatively sober—voice. ‘We have to learn so that in case of need we might be called upon. That is what the mudir said.’

  ‘But what need could there be?’ asked Owen.

  ‘I don’t know, Effendi. To fight against the brigands, I think the mudir said.’

  ‘Ali,’ said a voice uneasily. ‘I don’t think I want to fight brigands.’

  ‘Well, of course, it might not actually come to that.’

  ‘I don’t want to fight anybody.’

  ‘Suppose someone attacked the village?’

  ‘I would run and tell the omda.’

  ‘Well, what the hell do you expect him to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ali. But he would tell me what to do.’

  ‘He might tell you to go back and fight them.’

  ‘On my own? Look, Ali…’

  ‘Not on your own, blockhead! That’s the whole point of getting us together and giving us these guns. If the village is attacked, the omda sends someone to fetch Mohammed from Fazkat and Isa from Arba’im, and the ghaffirs from the other villages nearby, and they all come running—’

  ‘But, Ali, suppose they don’t come running very fast?’

  ‘Well, then, you’ll just have to fight them off for a while by yourself, won’t you?’

  ‘Ali, I think I’d do much better to run off into the sugar cane—’

  ***

  Owen was up early, as was his custom, and was walking through the town while the smell of new bread was still fresh in the air. He half expected, when he got to the police station, to find no one there yet, but a sleepy constable was sitting on the doorstep drinking tea and in an inner room he found the local chief of police, the mamur he had met at the cat cemetery.

  ‘That was the start of it all,’ said the mamur gloomily. ‘Oh, Effendi, if only you had come a couple of days earlier. Then none of this would have happened. You would have taken that silly bitch off into prison and we wouldn’t have had any of this trouble.’

  ‘Trouble? What trouble?’

  ‘Effendi, I am not one to complain, but there’s this little bastard come down from the Parquet, who’s making us run around like a donkey with a hot brick up its backside. “What’s all the excitement for?” I said to him. “It’s only a woman, isn’t it?” Well, he gives me a nasty look. “She’s been murdered, hasn’t she?” “Not only that,” I say, “she’s a foreign woman.” “Foreigners are our guests,”
he says. “Oh,” I say, “that’s it, is it? Well, if they’re our guests, tell me who invited them? And, anyway,” I say, “you can tell what sort of a guest she is, for they send the bloody Mamur Zapt—” sorry, Effendi!—“down from Cairo to take her off to prison!”

  ‘Well, he gets very nasty and says what the hell do I know about it? “Nothing,” I say. “I don’t come from Cairo.” He looks at me in that cold way of his. “The crime occurred in your district, didn’t it?” he says. “Yes,” I say, “and I’m investigating it.” “Oh, good,” he says. “Tell me what you’ve found out, then.”

  ‘Now that was a bit of a problem because I’ve had a lot of other things to do, as I tell him.

  ‘“Did they include the things I asked you to do when I was last here?” he asks, all cold-like.

  ‘“Exactly…?”

  ‘“I asked you to find out where the poison came from,” he says.

  ‘“Well, we all know that, don’t we?” I say to him. “Old Mother Tayi. She’s the one you go to when you want to poison a buffalo. In this village, at any rate. Everyone knows that.”

  ‘“Did she know it?” he asks.

  ‘“She’s in the bloody village, isn’t she?” I say.

  ‘“But she was a foreigner. She might not know.”

  ‘“Someone in that house would,” I say.

  ‘“All right,” he says, “then find out who it was.”

  ‘“I can hardly ask them,” I say.

  ‘“No,” he says, “but you can ask Old Mother Tayi.”’

  The mamur stopped and sighed.

  ‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s a lot easier said than done. As you’d know if you met Old Mother Tayi. “Be off with you!” she shouts, and that’s before I even get a word out of my mouth. “Be off with you, or I’ll put the eye on you!” And she would, too, the old bitch. You don’t meddle with Mother Tayi, I can tell you. But how can you expect some stuffed-up little prick from Cairo to know that?’