by Hyde, Robin
The entire shipload of men, brown-clad, red-faced, pressed against the deck-rails and portholes. Starkie, looking down on a crowded wharf in which he had no desire to single out any one person, was suddenly startled by the dreadful expression on the faces of the women. Those faces, ordinary enough in daily life, seemed torn right in two like paper masks. Mouths, wide open, made gashes in them, the eyes, whether staring up at the ships or shut in that deathly exhaustion, were shadowed so that they looked huge as the eye-sockets in skulls…. Blackness, blackness, blackness…. Those hollow faces, pitted with the dreadful fear of a final parting, the upstretched arms, which looked like roots torn from the flesh of the black-clad bodies, communicated to the men their own foreboding. Sobs began to break out from wharf and ship, a convulsion of sound. All uptorn, the voices, the faces, the straining arms. Time presaged a disaster for them. They had barely known that they were one flesh, but they knew it now. Torn apart, they would never be joined together again, and consequently they were destroyed. The individuality of the women had become fused with that of the men; it wasn’t only their partners who were taken from them, it was themselves: their flesh and spirit and their secret, buried thoughts—the thoughts you do bury in a man when you wake in the morning and find him at your side, his sleeping face a profile upturned in the pale light from between drawn window-curtains, one hand helplessly uncurled on the white counterpane. Father, lover, son, all drawn together in the one person, and the receptacle of your secret thoughts—in God’s name, how can you lose that and remain the same? How could the men on the ship expect to come back to the same women when, departing, they had destroyed them?
The Maunganui sailed at two o’clock. When the ship was several hundred yards away from the wharf, the sobbing of the women could still be plainly heard, a fused wailing sound that outraged nature. Many of the men climbed into the rigging, and at half past three they were still staring back at the place where the wharf had been—where it still was, firmly defined on their inner sight. Half the men of this Fifth Regiment never came back at all, or came back wounded and shattered.
Paddy Bridgeman’s Irish wit came to the rescue of the staring men. He produced a note-book, went from one to another of them: ‘Can you swim?’ he asked gravely.
Presently some of them plucked up life enough to ask him why he wanted to know.
‘It’s the torpedoes and the mines, darling,’ said Paddy. ‘A mile out of harbour, and maybe we’re liable to be blown up or sunk. They kape a record of the ones that can’t swim, and give them a place in the boats, maybe, if there’s room enough.’ He shook his head pessimistically and went on to the next group. Recollection woke in the staring eyes. Presently there was a shout of laughter as some spark fathomed the truth of Paddy’s tale.
New Zealand was cut off from them by a bank of cloud which lowered itself soundlessly and with great dignity, like the blue curtain of a theatre, between the Maunganui and the wild golden gorse on the coastline hills.
6 Conjurer and Pigeon
STARKIE picked up two championships aboard the Maunganui, the welter-weight and the C.B., the first after a series of bouts conducted with much joy and few rules among the boys, the second just for things in general. He paid the price of being a good sailor. Not far out of New Zealand waters the ship struck heavy weather, and for eleven days remained miraculously cleared of sergeants, while the mess orderlies—of whom Starkie was one—staggered up galley stairs and down corridors, life just one strawberry-box after another. This heavy fate he combated by eating a little soap, which produced signs enough of seasickness to keep him out of the way for a while.
The ship rolled into the Indian Ocean, and the waves calmed down. Officers appeared as giants refreshed, a drill system which meant sudden alarums and excursions in the dead of night was put under way; and a regular item on the programme was the series of lectures on ‘How to stay Healthy in Egypt’. Summed up, these advised the soldier to stay in camp and read a book. A more practical knowledge Starkie got from an Invercargill man among the stokers, who was making his third trip between Egypt and New Zealand, and who had loved not wisely but too well. ‘Stay sober’, was his slogan. The eight in the rowdiest cabin on the Maunganui committed it to memory.
It was barely daybreak when Starkie was awakened by a shout from Paddy Bridgeman: ‘Come along up, you old scoundrel, and have a look at your brother Gippos.’
‘Come along, Choclit—there’s thousands more baboons like you on shore,’ grinned Fleshy McLeod, looming huge over Starkie’s bunk.
Starkie missed him and hit the mirror, breaking it, the outraged splinters assuring him seven years’ bad luck. Dolefully he drew on his trousers, snapped his belt, cocked his hat.
The entire human cargo of the Maunganui was crowded at the deck rail; but the ship crowd was nothing to the confusion which bobbed, waved, and shouted alongside. Egypt liked the troopships. Thousands of dinghies, pontoons, dhows, scows, crazy craft with brown matting sails, danced under the Maunganui’s towering sides, and coffee-coloured men in white robes and black-tasselled scarlet caps like flower-pots or cocktail-shakers kept up one unending scream in praise of their wares. There were huge blood-red oranges—fifty for the piastre—sweet as nectar; watermelons, vast and stripy: long, pale-yellow Egyptian cigarettes which smelt like the floor of a camel-stable, and turned the stomachs of the uninitiated; chocolates, queer fat sweetmeats, pink and pale green, spiked on little wooden skewers. Behind lay a dreamlike silhouette of white buildings black-pitted with window-spaces.
‘Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Wait till we get ashore,’ murmured Paddy.
The rest improved the shining hour by buying oranges from the Gippo boys and knocking off their scarlet tarbushes with well-aimed shots, hot contests ranging between gangs of soldiers as they scored up their tallies. Starkie lost the show poker game which decided who was to pay for the boys’ fruit and cigarettes, and sent down a pound note.
A smiling Egyptian sent back the change in a sugar-bag. Starkie’s eyes bulged. The bag was a quarter full.
‘Christ!’ whispered Jack Frew. ‘He’s mistaken your note for a tenner, Choclit. Skip below and hide it. Treat’s on you when we get ashore.
Ready and willing to spoil the Egyptians, Starkie skipped, and turned over his coin to the Invercargill stoker, who knew Egypt all too well. Stan counted the coin in silence. Then he said pityingly, ‘You poor mug.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’re nine and threepence short, soldier. See these here little things?’ He held up a copper coin. ‘Well there’s about twenty of those goes to make up a halfpenny—or maybe now it’s forty of the ducks. Anyhow, don’t think you’ll take in Mother Egypt. Hear them yelling for backsheesh?’
‘They yell it all right,’ Starkie agreed sadly; ‘but what does it mean?’
‘It means gimme something for nothing. It’s the way they say their prayers out here.’
Up on deck the boys took a stern view of the orange-vendor’s crime. Pelting him with fruit was no good, there being hundreds exactly like him, and Starkie’s robber lost in the throng, a rich man for a day. With bugles shrilling, the troops marched off the Maunganui’s gang-planks. At the bottom of each gangway stood a tall Egyptian with a coin-tray strapped around his waist, shouting monotonously, ‘Money changed here, money changed here!’
The old combine from Tent Eight, plus Paddy Bridgeman, landed together.
‘Look at all the money he’s got,’ murmured Paddy.
Somebody’s foot slipped. Somebody else flung a sturdy arm round the money-changer’s waist, bringing him to the ground. There was a howl of protest. In every direction scattered copper bits, piastres, half-piastres, greasy notes. The line of men from the gangway crowded relentlessly on. An Egyptian, minus his tarbush and with his spotless white raiment ruined, wailed that he had been robbed of a thousand piastres, but those who could hear him didn’t believe him, and those who believed him didn’t care.
Thus came the Fifth to t
he land of Egypt.
On the wharves sleight-of-hand men and magicians of every race under the moon had taken up their stance and shouted, ‘Half-piastre, me show’, to the marching men. Tent Eight stopped to admire one stately Arabian Nights gentleman, his white robe and black scarf garnished with tinsel stars, his tarbush lifting his height proudly above their heads. They surrendered their half-piastres, gaping at him.
The conjurer smiled and produced from a wicker cage a live pigeon. The boys handled it, stroking the sleek feathers, opal and green upon the little creature’s trembling breast, hearing its fussy murmurings. The conjurer took the pigeon, popped its head into his gaping red mouth, twisted the bird’s body in his two hands, and pulled out the body of a headless bird.
They gasped, feeling a trifle sick. ‘Some trick!’ one of them shouted, not to be outfaced by an Egyptian knave.
The conjurer smiled again, eyes silky.
‘You watch,’ he ordered, and put the red stump into his mouth again. Out it came, a whole pigeon, alive and squawking, and fluttered helplessly in his hands.
Starkie paid his half-piastre thrice over to learn the trick, but there wasn’t any trick; it just happened. The bird’s neck-stump bled; then it was fluttering again, and its little heart beat fast in panic, as though whatever black, fabulous country it had inhabited during that five seconds’ death terrified it out of its pigeon senses.
When Starkie left the wharf it was still too pale a morning light for him to see much of Egypt’s outline. But Egypt stood bowing behind him, tall, white-robed, wearing a quaint hat and a silky smile. ‘Half a piastre, me show.’ Of course it was a lie. Egypt never showed anybody anything except sorcery and things that couldn’t happen. You were left with a picture of a red, cruel mouth, cruel as wet blood, and wings in their green and opal sheen fluttering with terror. The conjurer, if you dared turn back to look at him, might have grown taller than those white buildings you couldn’t see, and the black tassel on his tarbush might curl into a wreath of evil-smelling smoke.
The Fifth was encamped at Zitoun, about three miles from Cairo, thousands on thousands of white tents pricking up among sandy hills. The camp was remarkable for three things: food, lice, and medical lectures. They were handed out round little Dutch cheeses, pink-skinned like apples; beautiful fresh bread, much more palatable than the New Zealand bakings; fresh fruit, tobacco and meat. The butter ran like oil in the March heat. The lice were encountered as soon as the New Zealanders settled down in the tents. Lice are really Egypt’s oldest soldiers, with more martial blood in them for their size than any Ajax that ever strutted. These had been reared on soldiers’ blood for a hundred generations, and liked it: their descendants would be reared in the same tradition, and when one regiment moved on from their tents to the clutch of the larger leeches, the death-dealers waiting beyond the horizon, Egypt’s lice would turn to and prepare a welcome for the next batch.
Officers took a hand in the lectures. A captain who had been with the Otago crowd since the day the train pulled out of Invercargill skimmed the cream of good advice for them.
‘Don’t do what I do,’ he said. ‘Do what I tell you to do.’
On the third day, however, the New Zealanders broke camp. They had been restless ever since landing in Zitoun, where the powers-that-were endeavoured to keep them within bounds by holding back their pay. It didn’t work. The regiment footed it to Cairo, and those who had money picked up the Gippo gharries as soon as they reached the city—queer little four-wheelers, open like the English royal coaches, but far superior in point of horseflesh. The Gippo steeds were Arabs, and pranced with gay, fine-lady curvetting and flourish of creamy manes and long tails. Mounted on Arabs rode through the streets the Gippo ‘Villains’, military police who wore white uniforms and carried rifle, sword, revolver, and a knife on each hip. Each man among them bore a forehead tattoo-mark, a little blue ship or a bird with outspread wings, finely traced on the left side of the temple. The Gippo Villains very seldom interfered with white soldiers, but treated their own erring brothers worse than pi-dogs, flogging them through the streets with jagged chunks of wood. All the convicts in Cairo went chained; yet, with the crazy lack of logic which characterized the town, after nightfall most of the gaols turned their prisoners loose, and they could please themselves what they did between sundown and reveille. Abysseia Gaol, where military prisoners—white or coloured—were kept for transgressions that the police really didn’t like, was a good place to keep out of.
Starkie’s brother George, who had joined up with the Veterinary Corps some months before Starkie emerged from prison, ended a spree in Abysseia, where the Gippo police kicked his ribs in and didn’t report a sick man until he was strangling with pneumonia. It was his colour that gave them the guts to tackle a New Zealander. But he pulled through, and had Egypt for a convalescent home during the next six months; which, taking it all in all, was no bad way of winning a war.
When they struck Cairo, most of the men from Zitoun Camp headed straight for the Wazza. There were things to do if you wanted to take the day easily. The chocolate-coloured Gippo drivers set you down from their gharries at cafés where little tables stood in softly curtained alcoves. Stucco and stone, hard white or the colour of ivory, lay in the leaf-gold of March sunlight. The moment the soldiers sat down at table there was a scurry under their feet, and their ankles were firmly grasped by brown urchins, yelling, ‘Shoe-shine, saar! Shoe-shine, saar!’
It was no use denying the will of these imps, and if a quarrel arose between them, they settled it in their own fashion. Dan MacKenzie left his boots to their tender care, and arose to find himself with one brilliant tan boot, one lustrous black one. He cuffed the heads of the rivals impartially, and they backed away, crying, ‘All right, saar! All right, Mister MacKenzie!’
‘How the blazes did those little coots come to know my name?’ asked Dan, puzzled.
Three days in Cairo, and the troops knew that every white or near-white man was either Lord Kitchener, saar, or Mister MacKenzie, saar, among the Gippos.
Most of the drinking in cafés was wine, white or red, and cheap enough. In the better sort of place the girls wore costumes, like the pictures of nautch girls—brassière tops, petticoats short as a chemise, and all in bright, fierce primary colours. Their round olive arms were laden with bracelets, clear glass or solid gold. In some of the cafés they danced the can-can naked. This was an exhausting performance for dancer and onlooker alike, but the girls showed it less.
The can-can took about fifteen minutes, and was something like the Hawaiian hula, but a great deal more so—as close an interpretation as possible of the Gippo idea of the sexual act, which is vigorous. Muscles knotted, head tilted back, eyes flashing. When the girls judged that the soldiers were that way, they sat on their knees and twined hot arms around their necks. After that the party as a rule split up and sought privacy, though not always.
There were, during the War years, thirty-four thousand licensed women in Cairo, from little girls twelve years old, to women of twenty-five, their cheeks raddled, their youth used up and done. Those who didn’t care what they took, lived in the balconied stucco houses of the Wazza. Three times a week the women were subject to medical inspection, and their health records were on view in little black books like rent-books.
As the soldiers’ gharries bowled down the narrow streets women, orange, blue, and scarlet shawls tossing back from their naked breasts, cried, ‘Very nice! Very sweet! Only half-piastre!’ They had a miraculous knowledge of the paydays in the different divisions of the thousands whose khaki river was stemmed and swirling at Zitoun. When the Australians, in their cocked hats, came in with their pockets great with piastres, a shout of ‘Come on, Australia, New Zealand no good!’, tossed like a laughing ribbon from one to another of the balconied houses. When the New Zealanders were paid, the impotency of the Australians was shrieked from the Wazza roof-tops. The place was old, old; built of money and dank stone and flesh, and it stank of the anima
lism which is Lilith’s challenge to love.
Paddy and Starkie kept sober in the Wazza. By and by they parted company. Starkie walked up to Rada’s sitting-room, which was less of a den than he had expected—a bare little place with cushions of silk, flaring orange like the chemise she wore, and which had caught his eye from the street. Rada was a Spanish girl her hair unbound and waved, her black eyes very big and soft, and a delicate red showing through the gold of her cheeks, as it shows in late summer through the skin of a peach. Her mother was there to watch her business interests, and a lean old hand reached out for five piastres. Starkie couldn’t speak Spanish, but he remembered a few broken words and phrases that his mother had taught him, and a Spanish song picked up in the long ago when she had moved so silently about the house preparing food for her Red Indian husband and her three children. It was a nearer link than many of the soldiers had with their girls. In the Wazza the women were Egyptian, Greek, Italian, Maltese, a few of them fine-eyed, deep-breasted and sombre Jewesses. The French girls, known to the troops as the Painted Dolls, had a café of their own and ran it on more reticent lines than the natives. But it all came down to the same gestures in the end.
With the dark drawn down, a silken sheath over the Wazza, the orange room and the orange chemise began the reign of the conjurer and the pigeon. You could see the conjurer, tall and white-robed, smirking behind the high, yellow houses. He puts the pigeon’s head into his mouth and bites it off. He shows you the bleeding stump of the neck. Nothing could last out through that. Same in the Wazza. No girl, no thing of flesh and blood, trembling and alive, could stand being swallowed up in the black gut of this street. If you stood still long enough you could see the trick, see where death really shows his claws and teeth. But the conjurer is very clever. Your pigeon, which should by rights be stone dead, comes to fluttering life under your hands. You can feel the beat and tremor of the smooth, silk-plumaged breast. When you draw down the silk, the beat is faster yet, as fast as the rhythm of the girls in their dances. Then the pigeon isn’t a pigeon any more, but a falcon or a sword, a narrow thing and dangerous, with flanks of fire. The darkness is damascened with half-lights, half-sounds, like the Arab sheaths that fitted swords carried long ago, the hoods drawn over falcons’ eyes. But it was in no good Court that these thing were known. They belong to the evil Court, to the conjurer’s palace which, when his silken smile is taken away from it, dwindles down to a rotting pile of fungus and disease, infecting the ancient stones.
