The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  ‘I’m not sure I accept that.’

  ‘Where do you think it occurred? Here?’

  ‘No, no. If there genuinely is a problem—and I’m not sure that I accept that—I suspect it occurred between Cairo and Minya.’

  ‘On the voyage?’

  ‘Yes. We do get pilfering.’

  ‘Two hundred guns?’

  The Egyptian back-tracked once more.

  ‘That does seem a lot. In fact,’ he said smoothly, ‘that is one of the things that makes one doubt whether the problem is quite as you envisage. I suspect that in the end we shall simply find a clerical error in the paperwork.’

  ‘To which no real loss of guns corresponds?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The reason for my being here is, actually, that I would like to check the paperwork.’

  ‘It has, of course—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. Been thoroughly checked already, both inside the Ministry and by people from the Ministry of Finance. I don’t expect to find anything different. But I have seen the paperwork at the Minya end and now I would like to be able to say I’ve seen the paperwork at this end, too. I wonder if you would give me the necessary authorization?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course.’

  ‘A written authorization, perhaps? Let’s get this part of the paperwork right at last.’

  He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ***

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to go down to Minya again,’ he said to Zeinab.

  ‘Again!’

  He felt her flinch.

  ‘It will be for the last time,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’

  She turned away.

  ‘It gets harder for me here all the time,’ she said. ‘Without you.’

  ***

  Owen was sitting outside a café in the Ataba when he saw McPhee go by, riding home on his donkey.

  The Ataba was, as usual, crowded. It was the terminus for both the new electric trains and the old, horse-driven, simple cart-like native buses, and passengers waiting for either milled about in the middle of the square. Also in the square were peanut sellers, loofah sellers, sugar cane sellers, pastry sellers and dozens of other sellers, including hundreds of men, or so it seemed to Owen, offering banned seditious newspapers. Not to mention camels, donkeys, chickens and Passover sheep. Unsurprisingly, the traffic, including McPhee, had come to a stop.

  McPhee, tall anyway and with the advantage of his donkey, was able to look over the heads of the crowd. He caught sight of Owen and waved a hand. He seemed preoccupied, as well he might be in such a mêlée.

  A surge in the crowd brought him up alongside the tables in the café. He looked down at Owen.

  ‘Owen,’ he said. ‘I think, actually, that it’s sheep.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Sheep. Not cats.’

  ‘You do?’ said Owen cautiously; and then, as that did not seem sufficient, ‘Why shouldn’t it be cats?’

  ‘Because you can’t eat them,’ said McPhee triumphantly.

  This was it. He had finally gone. He had been threatening to do it for some time. Now it seemed that something had snapped. Perhaps it was the Army call-up that had precipitated it.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said gently. ‘No. That’s very true.’

  And then, after a pause:

  ‘Why would you want to eat them?’

  ‘It’s not so much that, it’s that you wouldn’t want to feed them unless you could eat them. Not if you were very poor, as, of course, most Egyptians always have been. So they go for sheep.’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  Sometimes McPhee’s strange mental processes actually led somewhere. Could that be the case here?

  ‘As pets.’

  ‘Pets?’

  ‘I was thinking, you see, of our conversation down in Minya. At the cat cemetery.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ He tried to remember. ‘About cats, was it?’

  ‘And whether the Egyptians looked on them as pets. I don’t, on reflection, think that they did. They certainly don’t now. It’s sheep.’

  There was some truth in what McPhee was saying. Many Egyptian families, even those in the city, did keep sheep. They fattened them up for Passover. And it was true, they did treat them as pets. They dyed their wool bright colours and decked them with pretty ribbons. And then they let them wander the streets, getting in the way of everybody, as they were doing now, here in the Ataba.

  But—

  ‘Cats, on the other hand,’ said McPhee seriously, ‘are a luxury. It would be all right if you were a temple. You wouldn’t have to bother about the cost of feeding them, people would donate food. There would be no economic problem. But for everyone else, for ordinary Egyptians, it would be a problem. So I was wrong in thinking they could be pets.’

  ‘You are talking about the cats in the temple down in Minya?’

  ‘And in the cemetery, yes. It was precisely because they were not pets that they could be singled out for veneration. They could not be absorbed into domestic life, not in the way, for example, that Passover sheep can. They were other. Yes, other.’

  Owen considered.

  ‘The German woman, too,’ he said, ‘was she “other”? Is that what you are saying? Was that why they put her in the cat cemetery?’

  McPhee looked at him earnestly.

  ‘You know, Owen, I think, in a way, that it was.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The mudir met him with a great, beaming smile.

  ‘Effendi,’ he cried, ‘you time your return well. All is ready for you. You can go to any village you want. You will find that everything is in order. The ghaffirs are as new. Talk to any of them! You will find them fine, upstanding men.’

  ‘Simple?’

  ‘Only a few, Effendi, only a few.’

  ‘Old?’

  ‘Not a dodderer among them! Well, one or two, perhaps, but then they’ll bring experience to the job.’

  ‘Blind?’

  ‘Not very, Effendi. Most of them. No, Effendi, you will find them strong, stout-hearted men, I promise you.’

  ‘They’ve all been properly elected?’

  ‘They certainly have, Effendi. I’ve made sure of that. There’s not an omda that’s not felt the toe of my boot. And, Effendi…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s not a girl among them! How about that?’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said the mudir, ‘there weren’t that many. But there’s no doubt that the idea was catching on. You were right to warn me. But there’ll be no more of that sort of thing, believe me. Not now that I’ve had a word with a few people. No, Effendi, you can start when you like. We’re all ready for you.’

  Owen said there was a thing he’d like to check first in the accounts. The mudir waved a hand relaxedly and Owen went on to the small office, where the clerk was bent over some papers.

  ‘Effendi?’

  He jumped up.

  ‘I’d like to consult your files once again, if I may?’

  ‘What, particularly, would you like to see, Effendi?’

  ‘The consignment note,’ said Owen. ‘The one for eight hundred and fifty guns that you worked to here at the Minya end.’

  The clerk produced it from the filing cabinet and laid it before him.

  Owen studied it for a moment, then folded it and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Effendi!’ said the clerk, shocked. ‘You cannot take it away!’

  Owen took it out again and spread it on the desk.

  ‘You may make a copy,’ he said, ‘for your records. But the original, I keep.’

  ***

  When he came out of the mudiriya a truck was waiting and
in it was the mamur, relaxed and smiling. They drove out in the direction of the sugar cane factory, calling at several villages on the way. At each the ghaffir was indeed a fine, upstanding man; more than that, a real tough.

  They called in at the village where he had seen the girl ghaffir. She was no longer there. Instead, there was a brawny individual with scars on his cheeks and what looked suspiciously like an old bullet wound down the side of his head.

  ‘There!’ said the mamur proudly. ‘A real man, yes?’

  The man grinned and touched one of the assembly of daggers tucked into the ammunition belt that ran from shoulder to hip.

  ‘Gun?’ said the mamur.

  The ghaffir unslung it and tossed it familiarly to Owen. Owen caught it and looked at it. It was one of the new ones, all right. He squinted down the barrel. It was as shiny as any of the guns in the armoury of the barracks at Abbassiya. He handed it back.

  ‘It’s well kept,’ he said.

  ‘Of course it is!’ said the man indignantly.

  ‘An improvement, yes?’ said the mamur, smiling.

  ‘Well, you would think so,’ said the omda surlily, ‘but the girl was better.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘At scaring away the crows. This bloke thinks it beneath him.’

  ‘But you chose him?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the omda hastily. ‘At least, not I. The men of the village.’

  ‘Dead right,’ said the ghaffir.

  Owen already knew that it would be a waste of time.

  ***

  When they came to the sugar cane factory they changed to donkeys and set off along a track which led out of the village. At once the sugar cane closed about them, closing out the sky and light, closing in the heat. The tall canes, sometimes ten feet high, occasionally touched overhead. More often they had been cut back and there was a strip of blue sky above the track. There was never anything other than sky and cane, however.

  When the cane touched overhead it was like going through a tunnel. The shade gave no relief from the heat, though. Instead, the cane seemed to trap it in, even when it had been cut back. Within seconds Owen’s tunic was completely wet with sweat.

  After a while they came to a village. It consisted of a few houses, some palm trees and a dovecote. The mamur ordered the ghaffir to present himself. A tough came forward, armed to the teeth. Owen inspected his gun, asked a few questions and they rode on.

  They came to another village. Another tough.

  It was the same at the third village. Only, while they were stretching their legs, after speaking to the ghaffir, Owen saw a small girl looking at him. Her face seemed familiar.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘you’re not the ghaffir here, then?’

  The girl removed her thumb from her mouth and grinned, pleased to be recognized.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘they sent me home.’

  ‘This is your village?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She pointed to one of the houses. ‘That is where my uncle lives. He doesn’t beat me now.’

  ‘Not now that you’ve been a ghaffir?’

  ‘Not now that I’ve got a gun,’ she said.

  ‘You still have it?’

  She looked around, took him by the hand and led him off behind the houses. They were at once in the sugar cane. She stooped down and crawled along a kind of burrow among the stalks. At the end she felt in among the roots and pulled out a gun wrapped in leaves.

  ‘There!’ she said proudly. ‘You can inspect it, if you like,’ she said.

  It looked pretty good to him.

  ‘Didn’t you have to give this back?’

  ‘They didn’t like to ask.’

  Owen wondered what he ought to do. In the end he decided to do nothing.

  They went back to the village, where the mamur was waiting for him. They mounted the donkeys and rode on. As he left, he gave the girl a wave. She took her thumb out of her mouth and waved back.

  ***

  They plodded on all afternoon. The ground became rougher and the track narrowed. The great walls of sugar cane pressed in on either side. If anything it was even hotter than it had been before. By now it was late afternoon and the heat had had time to build up in the spaces between the cane. It reached up at him from the ground, closed in on him from the sides, gripped him as in a vice.

  He was drenched with sweat. He could feel it running down inside his shirt, prickling inside his trousers where his skin rested on the donkey’s back. He was riding in the Arab way, perched on its rump, his feet not dangling down but crossed in front of him over the donkey’s neck. The donkey’s movement was regular, almost soothing. He closed his eyes against the sweat and fell into a doze.

  Occasionally he blinked them open. Whenever he did, he would see the mamur’s donkey ahead of him, the mamur nodding drowsily on its back.

  It was taking longer than he had expected. The mamur had said that it was a matter of a couple of miles but perhaps he had been speaking loosely. Distance, though, in the sugar cane, was hard to judge. The sweat was making his eyes smart and he closed them again for a brief moment.

  He came to with a start. The mamur’s donkey was no longer in front of him.

  The track ahead was straight for perhaps fifty yards. If he had fallen behind it must have been by a considerable distance.

  He struck the donkey’s flank and urged it forward. At the end of the fifty yards the cane bushed out slightly into the track, obscuring the view, and perhaps beyond that…But beyond that the track continued again, straight for almost a quarter of a mile, straight and empty. Surely he couldn’t have fallen behind to that extent!

  The mamur must have turned off some way back and not noticed that he wasn’t following.

  Owen cursed himself. He turned the donkey round and retraced his steps. There wasn’t a turning off for quite a long time and when he looked along it, the track was empty.

  He went on to the next turning, with the same result. Surely the mamur couldn’t have turned off before that! Perhaps he had turned off after all at the previous track and got so far along it that by the time Owen had looked, he had disappeared from sight.

  Owen knew that this was serious. The sugar cane stretched for a score of miles and in it you could get lost forever.

  He decided that the reasonable thing was to stay on the track he had originally been on. He turned the donkey again and rode back up it, cursing himself.

  What struck him now was the emptiness of the sugar cane. In the whole of their ride they had not come upon a single person or animal, much less a sign of human habitation. The cane stretched all around him, reaching up high overhead, and, to his unused eye, completely featureless.

  He cursed again; not just himself but also the mamur.

  He had been riding along the track for some considerable while now. If the village had lain ahead, surely he would have come to it.

  Then a thought struck him. If there was no village ahead, there certainly was behind—the one he had originally come from. He hadn’t been aware of them taking any side-turnings.

  He wheeled the donkey again and set off back. The sun was getting low in the sky now. Before long it would be dark. Well, in a way, that didn’t matter. He would continue as long as he could and then simply stop for the night. In the morning they would be looking for him.

  All the same, it was vexing. He cursed himself for being a fool and cursed the mamur, too, again.

  And then, suddenly, behind him, there was the sharp crack of a rifle.

  ***

  The donkey jumped, and that probably saved his life, for there was another crack and this time he felt the bullet go past him, so close it seemed to touch his cheek.

  He threw himself off the donkey and scrambled into the cane.

  The donkey brayed with alarm and then ran off down the track
.

  Owen waited. And now he was cursing himself again, this time for a different reason: his folly in coming without a gun.

  In Cairo he hardly ever carried a gun. If he thought one was likely to be needed, then he took one. But mostly, with his kind of police work, it was better not to. The violence that he was usually concerned with was that between ethnic groups, and talking was better than shooting in that sort of situation.

  But this wasn’t Cairo. It was territory infested by brigands, and he ought to have known better. Sitting peacefully chatting in Minya, or with the Schneiders, or with Mahmoud in the village, he had allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security, treating it as if he was on some kind of official trip.

  But, hell, it was an official trip! It had been set up by the mudir, with the mamur as an official guide.

  And then the realization came to him. Set up, indeed! This was a trip from which he was not intended to return. He had told the mudir too much.

  He could see it all now. The mamur’s disappearance had not been accidental. He was part of it. It had been his role to bring Owen out here and then somehow find an opportunity to take him out into the sugar cane and leave him where those more expert at the next bit than he could complete the job.

  ***

  He knew that after a while they would come looking for him. He half-toyed with the idea of burrowing through the sugar cane back alongside the track and then coming up behind them, but he knew at once that this would be no good. There were at least two of them, armed very probably not just with guns but also with daggers, and he would never be able to jump the two of them together. His only hope was to wriggle deeper into the sugar cane and give them the job of finding him, to make the cane his ally not his enemy.

  He began to crawl deeper. Each cane plant was separate and there was enough room for him to wriggle between them. However, the base of the plants was choked with undergrowth; not just the thick, sharp-edged leaves of the cane itself, but also the mass of tendrils and vines that hung between them, often so thickly that he had to tear them apart.

  But if it was hard for him, it would be hard for them. They would have knives, of course.

  There was another thing, though, in his favour. It was getting dark. Once it was night, they would never find him. And in the morning there would be people out looking for him.