The Last Cut

by Michael Pearce

  ***

  When they emerged from the canal, just by the temporary earth dam which divided the canal from the river, and where the Cut was to be made, Owen found the scene very different from when he had last visited it. Everywhere, brightly-coloured pavilions had sprung up, many of them walled round by little carpeted fences to form enclosures within which patrons could sit. Sellers of sweets, pastries, peanuts and sugar cane were marking off their pitches. Boats hung with bunting were already crowding about the entrance to the canal on the river side of the dam. And there were people everywhere, some of them workmen, many of them vendors, most of them simply onlookers getting in the way.

  There was a great mass of people down in the bed of the canal pressing in round the foot of the giant earth cone. Over their heads Owen could see McPhee, large, pink, determined, and around him a ring of constables. He looked up and saw Owen.

  ‘Ah, Owen, pleased to see you. Very pleased.’

  Owen forced a way through the throng.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’

  McPhee pointed down to the foot of the cone.

  ‘This!’

  The earth had been scraped away in what looked like the start of a small burrow, the sort of thing a rabbit might have made, if, of course, there had been any rabbits.

  ‘I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘What made it?’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, Christ, I don’t know. A bone?’

  ‘Or several. They think another woman’s been buried here.’

  ‘It’s just a dog!’

  ‘They think it’s smelt it.’

  ‘Well, is that bloody likely?’

  ‘They think so. The first one was taken out, they say, so another one has been put there.’

  ‘It’s the Jews,’ said someone in the crowd.

  ‘We’re going to have to dig,’ said McPhee. ‘To show them.’

  Owen nodded.

  ‘Right.’ He raised his voice. ‘The Bimbashi and I are sure there is no one buried under here. But just to show you, and set your minds at rest, we are going to dig. Now, are any of you good at—?’

  A man shouldered forward.

  ‘Effendi, I am an expert!’

  Owen recognized one of the Muslim gravediggers.

  ‘Just the man! Any more like you?’

  Several fellahin eagerly came forward.

  ‘Spades?’

  The constables cleared some space, linked arms and then leaned back against the crowd. The crowd supported them happily, craning over their shoulders to get a better look.

  The gravedigger seized the first spade and began work enthusiastically.

  ‘Allah, what strength!’ said the crowd appreciatively.

  The gravedigger, preening, redoubled his efforts.

  ‘What need is there for more when we have men who can work like this?’ asked Owen rhetorically.

  ‘What need for Jews?’ said the gravedigger over his shoulder.

  ‘Is that the place where the other was found?’ asked Mahmoud, who had pushed his way through to join Owen.

  ‘The very place!’ chorused the crowd.

  ‘I thought it was round the other side,’ said one of the constables doubtfully.

  Mahmoud turned to him.

  ‘You were here?’

  ‘Yes, Effendi. I was at the station when they reported it. I came with the Mamur.’

  ‘And you think it was round the other side?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure, Effendi. And it wasn’t really under the mound. It was more beside it.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  The constable extended an arm and pointed.

  ‘Under their feet?’

  The crowd on that side moved back in consternation.

  ‘Yes, Effendi.’

  ‘Abdul, I don’t like standing here!’ said an alarmed voice. ‘Suppose the ground opens?’

  ‘Well, then, you’d bloody fall in!’ said the constable.

  ‘But then if there’s another body there—’

  ‘It’d be over here,’ said Owen, annoyed. ‘This damned dog is not a gold-miner.’

  ‘Just watch it!’ said McPhee. ‘We don’t want the whole cone coming down!’

  ‘Not on us, we don’t!’ said the constables, pressing back harder against the crowd, which had now grown to fill the whole bed. At the sides, men were climbing on to each others’ backs in order to see better. Above them, the bank of the Canal was lined yards-deep with people.

  The gravedigger’s spade struck something hard.

  ‘Bone!’ shouted the crowd.

  The gravedigger plunged his hand in before Mahmoud could stop him.

  ‘Stone!’ he said disgustedly, producing it.

  Disillusioned, he stood aside to let the others take over.

  ‘Guide them!’ said Owen. ‘We don’t want the cone falling in.’

  ‘It takes an expert,’ said the gravedigger modestly.

  ‘If the body was found beside the cone,’ Mahmoud asked the constable, ‘why were they digging there?’

  ‘It’s the way they dig,’ said the constable. ‘They dig around it and pile the earth on top.’

  ‘How was the body lying?’

  ‘I didn’t look too closely,’ said the constable. ‘It was all bulged up. Like a camel’s belly.’

  ‘Why was it swollen? Had it been lying in water?’

  ‘There had been water. Because they’re always digging out the bed at this place, the bed is deeper here than elsewhere and the water lies longer.’

  ‘So she could have been thrown into water?’

  ‘Yes, Effendi.’

  ‘Not buried at all?’

  The crowd had been hearing this.

  ‘Not buried at all?’

  ‘Just thrown there,’ said Mahmoud. ‘It could have been anywhere.’

  ‘Just like the Jews!’ said the gravedigger. ‘Couldn’t even make a good job of it!’

  ‘It wasn’t the Jews,’ said Mahmoud. ‘It was some bad man.’

  The crowd was clearly disappointed. The diggers who had also heard, began to lose heart.

  ‘How about someone else having a go?’ said one over his shoulder. No one seemed very willing.

  Even the Muslim gravedigger was beginning to doubt.

  ‘How long are we going to go on doing this, then?’ he grumbled.

  ‘Until we have set people’s minds at rest,’ said Owen sternly.

  The gravedigger heaved out a few more half-hearted spadefuls.

  ‘I think their minds are pretty well at rest now,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Owen, ‘we must go on until all are satisfied. All night if necessary.’

  ‘All night?’ said the gravedigger. ‘Look—’

  ‘Unless,’ said Owen, looking around, ‘those knowledgable—?’

  The front ranks of the crowd, who had been standing there longest, decided that they were knowledgable enough and began to drift away.

  ‘No woman,’ said one of them as he left. ‘That’s a bit of a disappointment.’

  ‘Well, you can’t strike lucky all the time,’ said his neighbour.

  ‘We didn’t even strike lucky that first time,’ said the man, ‘if what that Effendi said was true.’

  ‘No,’ agreed the neighbour despondently.

  Owen, hearing, was very satisfied.

  Mahmoud turned to him.

  ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the Gamaliya. There’s someone I want to see.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The father. It was someone known to her, remember.’

  ***

  There was still a small knot of people around McPhee. As he was passing, Owen h
eard one of them say:

  ‘Well, then, if it wasn’t a woman, what was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything,’ said McPhee reassuringly. ‘Just some animal.’

  ‘Why would an animal want to dig holes in the “Bride”?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was probably just a dog.’

  ‘It didn’t look like a dog to me. They don’t dig burrows. What do you think, Ahmed?’

  ‘It looked more like the thing a lizard would dig.’

  ‘Too big. Except—’

  The thought struck them both at the same time.

  ‘A lizard man!’

  ***

  Owen took an arabeah up to the Ismailiya, where he was meeting Zeinab for lunch. Not in an Arab restaurant—they looked askance at women, even Pashas’ daughters—but in a French one. Zeinab liked to eat French as well as dress French. She even normally spoke French, and she and Owen drifted in and out of French and English as the occasion arose. The culture of the Egyptian upper class was heavily French and there was as great a gap between it and that of the ordinary Egyptian as there was between the massive dams the British were erecting and, well, the Lizard Man.

  Zeinab, however, was anti-French today. She had some intellectual periodicals under her arm, French, but different from the ones she usually took. She tapped one of them significantly.

  ‘Napoleon was against women,’ she said darkly. ‘I’ve been reading.’

  ‘Well, yes, but you’ve got to make allowances for the time.’

  Zeinab took no notice.

  ‘It’s in the Code Napoléon,’ she said.

  Which was still the basis of the Egyptian legal code. When the Khedive Ismail had wanted to reform and modernize the Egyptian legal system he had simply adopted the Code wholesale.

  ‘I don’t think you can blame him entirely,’ objected Owen. ‘Islamic law—’

  Zeinab brooded.

  ‘Islamic law is men’s law,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, when you turn to the alternative, what do you find? Men’s law.’

  ‘Law is the same for everyone,’ said Owen. ‘If you commit a murder, you get hanged for it. Never mind whether you’re a man or a woman.’

  ‘Yes, but some things affect women more than they do men.’

  ‘Have you been talking to Labiba Latifa?’ demanded Owen.

  ‘Circumcision, for instance,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘That’s social practice, not law. Why don’t you talk to Mahmoud?’

  ‘I will,’ said Zeinab.

  ***

  Owen had not intended to go back to the Gamaliya that day but when he returned to his office, he found Georgiades waiting for him. He had found out, he thought, the person whom Babikr had gone to see.

  ‘He’s a fiki,’ he said. ‘Several of the workmen go and see him. He used to live at their village but when he got old, he moved up here to be with his son. They still remember him in the village, and when the men come up here for the Inundation, they always take him something.’

  ‘A fiki?’ said Owen. ‘Then he might know of the oath, even if it wasn’t to him.’

  A fiki was a professional reader, or singer, of the Koran and as a person of (some) learning and (some) holiness was the sort of person you might go to if you wanted a witness of authority when you were swearing an oath.

  He lived in a small back street in the Gamaliya not far from the mosque. The son, slightly startled, showed them in.

  ‘It is,’ Owen explained, ‘to do with a man known to you, who used to listen to you in your village.’

  The fiki nodded.

  ‘The men come to you, I know, each year when they are up here for the Inundation, bringing greetings from the village.’

  The fiki nodded again.

  ‘Was Babikr among them?’

  ‘Babikr!’ said the fiki.

  ‘You know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Was he among those who came to you?’

  The fiki thought for a moment.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wondered if he had talked of an oath?’

  The fiki thought again.

  ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘It might have been one he had taken in the village. Do you recall such an oath?’

  ‘He took various oaths. All do.’

  ‘Do you remember the substance of the oaths?’

  ‘To do with wedding settlements. There was an ox once, I think. These were the usual foolish disputes.’

  ‘Do you recall them?’

  ‘They are not worth recalling.’

  ‘Yet Babikr, I think, was not a man to take them lightly.’

  ‘He was not,’ agreed the fiki. He warmed slightly. ‘He was ever true to his word.’

  ‘And would have kept to it,’ said Owen, ‘even if what he had committed himself to was not wise.’

  ‘Very probably.’ The fiki sat thinking for a moment. ‘Why do you ask these things?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘I think he committed himself to something that was not wise and then found he could not go back on it.’

  ‘You think the attack on the dam was not wise?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Owen, startled. ‘It was an attack on all. It was a blow at the common good.’

  ‘I, on the contrary, think it was wise,’ said the fiki. ‘For what these new dams have brought us is not good but harm.’

  ‘But, surely—’

  ‘Harm!’ repeated the fiki emphatically. ‘They have brought us ill-being, not well-being. When I was young everyone in the village was strong and well. They needed to be, perhaps, because the Pashas bore down hard in those days. But they were not sick. Now they are sick from birth. The children grow up with red eyes. The men are listless in the fields. Is that good? Is that as it should be? That is what the dams have brought us. And you say that Babikr was not wise!’

  ‘The dams have brought abundance,’ said Owen.

  ‘But at a price,’ said the fiki.

  ‘It is not the abundance that is wrong,’ said Owen, ‘but how it is used.’

  The fiki shrugged.

  ‘Certainly it never gets to us.’

  ‘It is not the dams that are bad but the people.’

  ‘You don’t see the people,’ said the fiki, ‘but you see the dams.’

  ‘And so you would strike at them?’

  ‘They have destroyed a balance. In the old days there was one crop a year and the people were healthy. Now there are three and the people are sick. I would restore the balance.’

  Owen was silent.

  ‘Newness!’ said the fiki. ‘It is always newness! Why do we need these new dams? Were not the old good enough? Was not there water in the fields then as there is now? It is the same everywhere. They tell us this is the last year they are going to make the Cut. They are going to fill the canal in, people say, and put a tram-way on top of it. To what end? The canal brought water to the city, to us here in the Gamaliya. And now they are going to fill it in. You cannot drink tram-ways.’

  ‘There will still be water, indeed, better water. They are building pipes—’

  ‘Pipes!’ said the old man contemptuously. ‘Where once there was the canal itself, which all could see! It is not the Cut that they should be ending but all these new dams!’

  ‘All do not think as you do,’ said Owen quietly.

  He got to his feet.

  ‘I had hoped that you would help me to ease Babikr’s load,’ he said, ‘for I do not think that his alone was the hand that broke the dam.’

  The fiki looked troubled.

  ‘I would help Babikr if I could,’ he said. ‘But I do not know to whom he swore the oath.’

  As Owen was going out of the door he turned back to the old man.

  ‘Did Babikr bring you flowers?’ he asked. />
  ‘Flowers?’ said the fiki incredulously, looking at Owen as if he had gone out of his mind.

  ***

  As Owen was crossing the Place Bab-el-Khalk, a Parquet bearer came running up to him.

  ‘Effendi! A message. For you. Urgent!’

  It was from Mahmoud. It said:

  ‘Ali Khedri arrested by local police. Involved in fracas. Now at Gamaliya police station. Shall wait there for you.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘I don’t want to see him!’ shouted Ali Khedri. ‘I don’t ever want to see him. Why does he come to see me?’

  ‘He came to offer you the hand of friendship,’ said Owen reprovingly.

  ‘I spit in his hand! He kills my wife, he kills my daughter, he takes my land! And then he talks of friendship!’

  ‘Come, this is wild talk,’ said Owen. ‘If he has done you injury, he wished to make amends.’

  ‘What amends can there be after what he has done?’

  ‘All that is in the past.’

  ‘You have seen my house. You know how I live. Is that in the past?’

  ‘All is not the fault of the past.’

  ‘I tried to put the past behind me and then he sent his son!’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘He sent his boy.’

  ‘Suleiman?’

  ‘Is that his name? I know the Devil has many names but did not know that was one!’

  ‘This is wild talk. What has the boy done?’

  ‘He took my daughter. Was it not enough to take my land? Did he have to take my daughter too?’

  ‘If the land was taken, it is nothing to do with the boy.’

  ‘And the boy is nothing to do with the father?’

  ‘Not in this. The father did not know. He was afraid to tell his father. As Leila was afraid to tell you.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that? That the Devil does not know his works?’

  ‘This talk of the Devil is foolish. The boy’s love was innocent. He did but look upon her.’

  ‘And she looked back. Is that innocent, too?’

  ‘She did but look.’

  ‘And smile. Is that innocent also?’

  ‘With a pure heart, yes. And hers was pure.’

  ‘And talk. That, too, is innocent?’

  ‘It was but talk. They meant nothing by it.’