The Point in the Market

by Michael Pearce

  Owen went across and asked what they had found. They showed him two little black drops of congealed blood, black, dung-like specks almost concealed by the sand. Then, a few feet away, they showed him another. And then another, hard, with sand sticking on it, almost like an old sheep’s turd.

  The line led to that part of the Market where the camels were normally tethered, although there were no camels there now. The drops were bigger now, occasional little bitumen-like dark patches an inch or more across. One of the trackers told him that Sabri’s galabeah must have soaked up a lot of the blood.

  In the Camel Market proper they nosed about for some time. At last they stood up and beckoned to him. They said that Sabri had died here, among the camels. Perhaps he had come out from among the sleeping Bedawin to still them. He had stood here, beside this tethering stake, for here on the wood were dried brown splashes and, at the base of the stake, a dark pancake gritted with sand, indicating that the body had fallen just about here…

  ***

  The Australians were holding a Mess Night. At least, that is what it would have been called when the British had occupied the Barracks. The Australians called it a Party and there was something a great deal freer about the occasion than when the Army had entertained Owen before. For a start, women had been positively invited.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Owen. ‘It’s okay if I bring my wife?’

  ‘You’ll be very popular if you do bring your wife. A lot of us have only just landed and won’t have seen a woman since we left Australia.’

  ‘But, by God,’ said the Commander in Chief gloomily, as he stood next to Owen that evening, looking round on the jollity, ‘they’ll soon be making up for it. If they’re anything like the other Australians. Can’t you do something to get them out of the brothels, Bill?’ he said to a senior Australian officer standing nearby.’

  ‘No,’ said the Australian. ‘But don’t worry about it. We’ll prise them off when the time comes.’

  ‘Yes, but by that time they’ll all be down with V.D.’

  ‘That is a problem, I admit.’ The incidence of venereal disease was already almost a quarter in some units. ‘But they’ll be all right when we get them over to the Canal. It’s just here in the city that there’s a problem. A brothel on every corner and two drinking houses in between. They think it’s Paradise.’

  ‘Can’t you do something about that, Owen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said the Australian he’d met before: ‘they’re all owned by foreigners, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Owen.

  ‘And you can’t touch them?’

  ‘Only with difficulty.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to do something about it,’ said the Commander in Chief. ‘Couldn’t you just put them off limits for troops, Bill?’

  ‘You could,’ said the Australian doubtfully.

  ‘Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Owen. He told them about the visit he’d received from the emissaries of the Mufti and the Sultan. They talked about it for a moment or two but couldn’t see much that could be done about it.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the Australian, ‘we’ll be out of here soon. Either in Gallipoli or across the Canal.’

  Faruq, the Prince who had been at the High Commissioner’s reception, came into the room. He looked round and then went straight to Zeinab. She was surrounded by a ring of Australians. They opened up hospitably to let the Prince in. He obviously expected them to go away but they didn’t.

  ‘I can’t make that bloke out,’ said Maxwell, the Commander in Chief. ‘Is he for us or against us?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Paul Trevelyan, who had just joined the group. ‘But we’ve got to make sure. The Sultan’s getting on a bit and Faruq could be the next in line.’

  The Prince was trying to manoeuvre Zeinab out of the ring but, Owen was glad to see, she kept manoeuvring back.

  ‘You’re pretty busy at the hospital, I gather?’ Maxwell said to Cairns-Grant.

  ‘They keep coming in.’

  Everyone knew that the casualties at Gallipoli had been heavy.

  ‘You sort of feel,’ said the Australian, ‘that we ought to be over there, rather than sampling the flesh-pots here.’

  ‘We could be pretty busy here, too, soon,’ said Maxwell, ‘if things go the way we’re expecting.’

  Mrs Cunningham was on the other side of the room.

  There wasn’t a ring of Australians ’round her.

  She started coming across to them. Owen began to move away.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Maxwell, ‘don’t all of you abandon me!’

  The Prince, having failed to detach Zeinab, had moved elsewhere and was now talking to a group of senior British advisers from the various ministries. They knew, of course, who he was and treated him with the punctilious deference that was, in the British, so deceptive.

  At the end of the evening, as he was leaving, he glanced back at his hosts.

  ‘A strange people, don’t you think,’ he said to Owen. ‘Rather lacking in polish.’

  ‘Some rough edges, certainly,’ said Owen.

  ‘Raw,’ said the Prince, with satisfaction. ‘That’s what they are. Compared with us.’

  He went out into the night.

  Owen picked up Zeinab. She was glowing, and leaned back against him in the arabeah as they drove home.

  ‘Why is it,’ she said meditatively, ‘that the English and the Australians are so different? The English always place you when they meet you. In terms of what class you belong to, or what race, or what nationality. Whereas the Australians don’t seem to care anything about any of that.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ said Owen. ‘They see you very much as a woman. Isn’t that a kind of placing?’

  ‘Maybe,’ conceded Zeinab. ‘But I don’t mind that.’

  ‘What was Faruq saying to you?’

  Zeinab cackled with laughter.

  ‘He said: “What is a pretty Turkish girl like you doing, getting married to an Englishman?”’

  ‘Turkish?’ said Owen.

  ***

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Zeinab. ‘I am Turkish. Sort of.’

  Many Egyptians were ‘sort of.’ There were sort of Greek Egyptians, Italian Egyptians, Albanian Egyptians, Montenegrin Egyptians, and Levantine Egyptians of all origins and persuasions. But Zeinab was more ‘sort of’ than most.

  Her mother had been a Circassian slave. And therefore fair. Zeinab, however, was dark; not only dark but definitely Arab. Her father, Nuri Pasha, attributed this to his own ancestry. ‘A touch of the Bedawin somewhere,’ he said to Owen. Nuri put this down to his grandmother. ‘Wanton, dear boy, wanton!’ he said admiringly. ‘But then, shut up in the harem, on my grandfather’s estate in the country, while he was away in Cairo for long spells, what can one expect?’

  He himself was of Turkish descent. As were most of the Pashas, as was the Sultan himself. The whole ruling class of Egypt had come to the country originally as officers in the Ottoman army and had carved out a position and property for themselves in the service of Khedives who over the years had become more and more detached from their Ottoman origins and allegiances.

  It was allegiance that counted now, thought Owen. In the end the Khedives had become so detached from their Ottoman overlords that they had become virtually independent. Their allegiance these days was to themselves. Which way would they jump if Turkey invaded? He knew what Zeinab’s father would say: towards whichever side looked like winning, dear boy.

  ‘Do you feel Turkish?’ he asked Zeinab.

  ‘No. But I don’t feel British, either.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I feel Egyptian,’ said Zeinab. She sighed. ‘And the funny thing is that these days I feel more Egyptian than I’ve ever done b
efore.’

  ‘Is it the war?’

  ‘No. A bit, perhaps,’ she amended. ‘But only a bit.’

  ‘Me? Marrying me?’

  ‘I don’t feel that you’ve taken me over, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ said Zeinab. ‘In fact, the other way: I feel that I’ve taken you over.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad about that.’

  ‘No,’ said Zeinab, musing, as the arabeah pottered gently through streets that were white in the moonlight. ‘No. It’s perhaps that I’m just beginning to understand what I’ve left behind me.’

  ‘What have you left behind you?’

  Zeinab thought.

  ‘Closeness,’ she pronounced eventually. ‘The closeness of a hugger-mugger little world of cousins and second cousins and honorary aunts and friends you chat to at the hairdresser’s who might be related to you or might not but it doesn’t matter, they’re all part of the same tight little society which knows everything you do and has done ever since you were a little girl in harem.’

  ‘Well, look, you don’t have to give that world up. You don’t have to leave it behind you just because you’ve married me.’

  Zeinab thought some more.

  ‘It’s not so much,’ she said, ‘that I’ve given it up as that it’s given up me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Zeinab shrugged.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it makes a difference, you know, if you marry an Englishman.’

  They had always known that it would be harder for her than for him. He would always have his work, and although the Administration might not like it, they were unlikely, certainly at the moment, to want to dispense with someone capable. Life, for Owen, would go on pretty much as it had done before.

  But for a woman it was more difficult. It was difficult anyway for a woman who wished to move outside the usual patterns of Egyptian society. ‘Cupboards,’ Zeinab described them as. ‘As you grow up, you find that you’re in a cupboard. And then when you marry, you find that you’ve been put in another cupboard. And stowed away in a back room.’

  She had always fought, even when she was a child, against the fate she could see coming. Her father’s indulgence, and the fact that he was a Pasha had given her a leeway unusual for Egyptian women and she had made the most of it. But she had felt the weight of the expectations always there, even when she was defying them, and had feared that in the end the walls of the cupboard would close in on her. It was partly, perhaps, in a last, desperate attempt to resist that that she had married Owen; knowing that once she had done that, she would never be able to go back. Knowing, too, or thinking that she knew, the kinds of exclusions, shuttings down, and cutting off that she would face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Owen.

  She shrugged.

  ‘I knew what I was doing. I wanted to escape. I wanted to put that world behind me. I never thought I’d miss it. But, do you know,’ she said, almost in surprise, ‘lately I’ve been finding that I do.’

  ‘It’s not so surprising.’

  ‘So when they shut me out,’ she said, ‘it hurts. I never thought I’d mind. But I do,’ she said. ‘I do.’

  Chapter Six

  The Camel Market was not really even on the edge of the city but further out. It was out beyond Mena House, near where a line of palm trees marked the limit of the Inundation. Owen was thinking about this as he strolled among the little pyramids of onions and hillocks of grain, and along the line of squatting figures with gaudy cottons spread out around them.

  The people who came here were not city people but fellahin from the village up the road or else Arabs in from the desert. It was Bedawin women, with gold coins and coral chains dangling from their headbands, who were sauntering up and down and peering at the scarlet, coral-seeming celluloid beads, and Arish tribesmen, hawk-faced and sun-blackened, who were squatting round the tray of the market eating place and leaning across to dip their bread into the gravy.

  A city man would be a fish out of water here: especially at night and among the animals. Owen just couldn’t see it, see any of the toughs that he knew, the ones who usually did the killings, coming out here at night and making their way through the Market in the darkness and in among the camels to lie in wait for Sabri. Not even if they had been paid for it. They were uncomfortable out of their territories. The Camel Market would have seemed like the other side of the moon.

  Even if it had been some individual with a grievance, Owen still couldn’t see it. Why go to the trouble of coming out here? Why make things difficult for yourself?

  But if not a city killer, then who? Someone familiar with the Market? One of the camel herdsmen, perhaps? He had to come back to them. They had denied it, but were they to be believed? There were Englishmen who accorded the Bedawin a blind romantic trust and took their word for binding. But Owen was not one of them. Nevertheless, on this occasion, he felt inclined to accept their word.

  One of the other Bedawin, the Arish, maybe? He had spoken to some of them during the morning. They inhabited a different part of the desert from the one that Sabri had frequented and appeared to know nothing of him. That did not rule them out. One of them might have been hired for the job. But it seemed unlikely.

  One of the villagers, then, who brought their produce to the market? He had been speaking to them, too. Sabri was unknown, both in the village and in the Market. He had always left for home the day he had arrived, the moment he had been paid. Again it seemed unlikely.

  The villagers returned to their village every evening. But there were some Market people who stayed in the Market overnight, sleeping on the ground: the sellers of cottons and of the celluloid beads, for example. One of these was the fiki.

  No, he told Owen, he had not heard anything during the night and certainly not at the back of his booth. He had been sleeping the sleep of the devout: would that others could say the same!

  Owen took him to be referring to Sabri’s killer but he was not. He was talking about the small boys of the Market.

  Mention of the small boys suggested a new avenue of enquiry for Owen and he spoke to them later. Yes, they said eagerly, they had heard noises; and from the fiki’s booth, too! It emerged, however, that they were only the usual noises that occurred when Marryam was there. As one avenue closed, another possible one opened: might Marryam have heard something? Well, no, said the small boys sadly. She had left with them and they had walked back to the village together.

  There appeared to be something of a feud between the fiki and the small boys. The fiki said they were lacking in respect. And he seemed more than half inclined to blame them for the body having been put where it had been. If not them, then the ‘vile Bedawin.’ And if not them, then Ali Saqi. Ali Saqi? Ali Saqi, it appeared, was a rival who sometimes encroached on the fiki’s territory.

  One thing was clear, said the fiki, whoever was to blame: there had been a lack of respect. It showed a lack of respect to put the body there in the first place. But what had followed was even worse.

  ‘They took the body away,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The man from the Parquet. He took the body away. He shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘But, surely—?’

  ‘He ought to have left it. For the family.’

  ‘Well, I daresay, but in the heat—’

  ‘No one minds a bit of a smell. And they would have come soon enough.’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘If they’d left the body here, instead of taking it away, the family would have had to come here, wouldn’t they? And then they would have seen me. Right on the spot. They would certainly have asked me.’

  ‘Asked you—?’

  ‘To speak the Holy Words of the funeral.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  He understood it now. The fiki relied for his income not just on the contributi
ons of passers-by but also, and much more significantly, on what he could earn from reciting the scriptures at weddings and funerals.

  ‘Now some other bastard will get the money,’ said the fiki gloomily. ‘I call it thoughtless. Really lacking in respect.’

  Owen left him and walked back through the Market. The Bedawin, like the last of the camels they had brought, and the Levantine’s donkeys, had departed the day before, leaving behind them only the charred embers of their fires and, where the camels had been, heaps of dung drying rapidly in the sun, snatches of camel wool caught to the tethering posts, and, over in one corner, clippings from where the donkey-barber had been plying his trade.

  ***

  ‘Busy?’ said Curtis. ‘I’m rushed off my feet! It’s this big build-up on the Canal. They want everything: tents, latrines, blocks for the gun emplacements—you try finding concrete blocks in the desert, old chap! All got to be fetched, and that means, at this short notice, buying them in from outside. These chaps—’ he nodded towards the crowded tables—‘are having a field day. Wood, paraffin, flour, you name it. It’s all got to be supplied. People forget about that sort of thing, you know, but an army depends upon it. Well, you won’t find me letting them down.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ said Owen, scanning the tables for Georgiades.

  ‘It’s a huge effort. You won’t believe how big it is. Vast. But, of course, we in Supplies are well placed to know. We know what’s going up and what’s gone up. So we’ve got a pretty good idea of what will be there on the day.’

  ‘Day?’ said Owen vaguely. Where the hell was Georgiades?

  ‘The day the Turks come over.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘They’ll get an almighty shock, I can tell you. When they find out what’s facing them.’

  The dummy camps flashed into Owen’s mind.

  ‘I think that’s very likely, yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, got to go. I expect you’re just as busy as I am. How is it going?’

  ‘How is it going?’