The Last Cut

by Michael Pearce

  ‘There’s always been bilharzia in the Delta,’ said Suleiman’s father.

  ‘Exactly. And it’s time something was done about it.’

  ‘I don’t know that anything can—’

  ‘Modern methods, Mr Hannam. Such as your son is using in a different, though related, sphere.’

  ‘Suleiman?’

  ‘A great help to me, Mr Hannam! An invaluable source of advice!’

  ‘He is?’ said Suleiman’s father, pleased.

  ‘I don’t mind saying to you, Mr Hannam, what I have said to so many others: that boy, I said, is this country’s future!’

  ‘He’s certainly come on a lot—’

  Mas’udi led them out onto the regulator embankment and began to explain, rather knowledgably, Owen thought, the extent of the damage to the gates.

  Suleiman’s father, evidently not ignorant himself, stepped across to the other side and then began to walk along the opposite bank to get a better view.

  Owen seized the opportunity to have a word with Mas’udi.

  ‘Have you had a chance to speak to the boy yet?’

  ‘Speak to the boy?’

  ‘I thought that Labiba Latifa was going to—?’

  ‘Oh yes. She did mention it to me. It was to do with a move, wasn’t it? I think the boy is quite happy where he is.’

  ‘That’s not the point. His life may be in danger. There’s a gang—’

  ‘Gang?’ said Mas’udi. ‘Life in danger? Surely you’re the one to see about that!’

  ***

  Some workmen had caught a chameleon. They had cleared a space for it on the canal bank, scuffing back the sand to make little surrounding walls and to leave the space inside as an arena. Into the space, along with the chameleon, they had put a grasshopper and were now crowding round to watch the contest.

  It was, clearly, going to be an unequal one. The grasshopper could do nothing to the chameleon but the chameleon could do plenty to the grasshopper. The issue was simply how long the grasshopper would survive.

  Its chances, however, were not negligible. The chameleon would shoot out its four to five inches of tongue to lasso its prey; but if the grasshopper turned its jumps adroitly enough, it could make the chameleon miss; and if it could go on doing this long enough the chameleon’s tongue muscles would tire, it would stop shooting and the grasshopper would be declared the winner.

  The contest was just beginning as Owen walked past and already, apparently, the grasshopper had done enough to attract some sizeable bets. Owen could see the coins set out in a dirty handkerchief.

  One of the workmen touched his arm as he went past.

  ‘He’s been here before,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of Mas’udi and Al-Sayyid Hannam.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The effendi.’

  Mas’udi. Owen nodded.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Before the regulator went.’

  Owen nodded again and slipped his hand in his pocket.

  ‘Did he talk to anyone?’

  ‘He had someone with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A boy. An effendi.’

  Owen jingled the coins in his pocket.

  ‘Did they talk to anyone else?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Babikr?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Owen brought his hand out.

  ‘What did they do, then?’

  ‘They just looked.’

  ‘At the regulator?’

  ‘At the regulator.’

  Owen dropped some coins into the man’s hand; which went on the chameleon.

  ***

  He took a felucca back to the city. At this time of day there were not many passengers, only a small group of fellahin who squatted on the deck with a hamper of chickens and chatted animatedly, and a donkey loaded up with berseem, clover for the cab horses of the city. Owen sat at the back on the raised steering platform, where the master sprawled with his hand on the tiller.

  On the Nile the prevailing wind is from the north while the current is from the south, a happy state of affairs which means that, with a little bit of luck, in either direction the crew has very little to do. Today the wind was just strong enough to offset the current and the felucca moved slowly upstream.

  Out on the river there was no protection from the sun and the glare from the water was hard on the eyes. Owen usually didn’t bother about sunglasses but today he wished that he had brought them.

  The steersman reached over the side and splashed water over his head. He asked Owen if he would like a drink. When Owen said he would, he dipped an empty beer bottle into the river, pulled it up and gave it to him.

  ‘Try this,’ he said. ‘You won’t get water like this in Cairo!’

  One of the fellahin looked up.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You know what they always say? The best water comes from the middle of the river!’

  He stretched out his hand for the bottle after Owen.

  ‘And the thing is,’ said the steersman, ‘it’s free.’

  ‘It’s free out here,’ said the fellah, ‘but it soon won’t be in the city.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They say the only way you’ll be able to get water in future will be through pipes. And it stands to reason you’re not going to get that for nothing.’

  The steersman shrugged.

  ‘The river will still be there, won’t it? And there will still be water-carriers.’

  ‘Ah, but will there?’ said the fellah.

  ***

  On an impulse Owen decided not to get off the boat at Bulak but to go on to the stop opposite Roda Island, where he would be able to see how preparations for the Cut were proceeding.

  Already the entrance to the Canal was jammed with boats. There was hardly enough room for the Kadi’s barge to get through. Owen could see it across the river, moored off Roda Island. Workmen were busy putting the finishing touches to its finery. Lanterns hung from the rigging, the ornamental chairs were already in position, and there, on a raised platform in the bows, were the cannon.

  Both banks of the Canal were now a mass of stalls. There seemed hardly room for the spectators. Already, though, some forward souls were camping out, reserving their positions.

  Down in the canal bed little boys milled about, making a game of trying to break through the police cordon around the cone and climb to the top. Occasionally one or two nearly succeeded, only to be retrieved by chiding constables. Everything seemed very good-humoured.

  He caught sight of Selim on the other side of the cone, chatting to some heavily hennaed peanut sellers who were cackling loudly at his jokes. He abandoned them when he saw Owen and came across to him.

  ‘Effendi,’ he said, ‘they have been here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The gravediggers. They said they wanted to look the dam over. It was in case the Jews dropped out.’

  ‘Did you let them?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t let them get too close. I said—you’ll like this, Effendi, it’s a good one—I said, “my boss will bite your ass”. And they said: “Oh, yes; and who’s your boss, then?” And I said—this is it, Effendi—I said: “It’s the Lizard Man!” And they said: “What the hell’s he got to do with it?” And I said: “He’s been doing what you’ve just been doing: looking the job over.” Well, they didn’t like the sound of that. And then they asked, how did I know? And I said: “He was sniffing around the other night and left his mark.” And they didn’t like the sound of that, either. “So, my little petals,” I said, “you’d better watch your butts if he’s taking an interest in proceedings this time!” And they spoke big, and said he wasn’t the only one who was taking an interest in proceedings this time, and they
weren’t the ones who needed to watch out. But, Effendi, I could see that they were worried. And, besides, Effendi, the biggest of them is but a flea compared with me.’

  ***

  ‘Suppose,’ said Zeinab, ‘she had died as a consequence of the circumcision: what would you have done then?’

  Mahmoud shifted in his chair uneasily.

  ‘The issue doesn’t arise,’ he said.

  ‘But it must arise all the time,’ objected Zeinab. ‘Circumcision of women is common in the poor quarters; and in those conditions it must often go wrong.’

  ‘The practice is not against the law,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘So you would do nothing?’

  ‘I would look at the circumstances,’ said Mahmoud, ‘to see if a legal issue arose.’

  ‘Ah, so it could arise?’

  Owen could see that Mahmoud was in for a hard time of it. He had arranged the meeting at Zeinab’s request. Women did not ask for meetings with men and Mahmoud would have been paralysed if she had. He found talking to Zeinab difficult enough as it was. Not only was she a woman, she was the daughter of a Pasha; and not only was she the daughter of a Pasha, she was the daughter of a particularly free-thinking one, brought up to converse with a freedom that Mahmoud found shocking.

  This business of circumcision, for instance, was something a woman should never discuss with a man, not unless he was her husband. True, Owen was here, but then he wasn’t, strictly speaking, Zeinab’s husband. Tormented, he cast a despairing look at Owen.

  ‘Presumably, there could be issues of negligence,’ said Owen.

  Mahmoud seized on this with relief. On female circumcision he could think of nothing he could with propriety say; on legal issues he could talk forever. He launched into a highly technical, safely logical explanation.

  ‘You surely don’t expect a woman in the Gamaliya to understand all this?’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Well, no. She would have to consult a lawyer.’

  ‘You, for instance.’

  ‘Well—’

  The thought filled him with panic. On other occasions Zeinab would have enjoyed tormenting him. Today, however, she was concentrating on the law, not the lawyer.

  ‘I think trying to find a remedy that way is no good,’ she said. ‘It’s too complicated. It’s the practice itself that’s got to be attacked.’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘I think I’m coming to agree with you,’ said Mahmoud, surprisingly.

  ‘You are?’

  Zeinab looked at him with favour.

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Mahmoud, with a slight shrug. ‘I don’t see how it is to be done.’

  ‘Education,’ said Owen, ‘of women.’

  ‘Men,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Legislation would, of course, be the answer,’ said Mahmoud. He looked at Zeinab. ‘Perhaps your father—?’

  ‘Suicide,’ said Zeinab firmly. ‘Political suicide. That’s how he would see it. In any case, it’s no good hoping for anything from the old guard. But perhaps the Nationalists—?’

  She looked at Mahmoud.

  ‘Not on a thing like this,’ said Mahmoud unhappily. ‘Not yet, at any rate.’

  They both looked at Owen.

  ‘The Government?’

  ‘I don’t think the Khedive—’

  ‘The British,’ said Zeinab, whose knowledge of the political situation, though sketchy, was realistic.

  ‘I don’t think we would interfere with local practice on a thing like this,’ said Owen.

  ‘You interfere with the women,’ said Zeinab nastily.

  ***

  ‘But,’ said Mahmoud, ‘it wasn’t circumcision, it was garotting.’

  He and Owen were lingering over their coffee, Zeinab had departed for art galleries unknown, and Mahmoud was bringing Owen up to date with where he had got to on the Leila killing.

  The key information from his point of view was that, according to the stall-holder’s wife, Leila had left the souk with a man who appeared to be known to her. Now there were not many men she could have known, or should have known, added Mahmoud primly. It was the other side of the seclusion of Islamic women.

  ‘They are not all like Zeinab,’ said Mahmoud, getting, perhaps, his own back.

  Leila came from a poor household and did the shopping herself so she was known to such people as the stall-holders in the souk, although that did not mean that they had ever seen her face. Figure, they knew, and voice, and some of their wives had been to her house where they might have seen her unveiled; and some of the older people remembered seeing her face when she was a little girl and played with the children on the rubble heaps among the derelict houses.

  ‘She had a sweet nature,’ they said.

  And that was the general opinion of the quarter. Timid and retiring she might have been, invisible she might have thought herself behind the long black veil, but everyone seemed to have known her. And the one thing they were all agreed on was that she was certainly not a loose woman.

  ‘Her?’ scoffed one of the women. ‘She was that proper she never even looked at a man.’

  And yet she had been seen with one, appeared to have gone off with one.

  ‘Well, if she did, you can be sure there was nothing wrong with it!’ declared a woman, one of a group assembled by Um Fattouha.

  ‘She went with the boy,’ Mahmoud had pointed out.

  Smiles all round. Apparently that did not count. The Gamaliya ladies were romantics at heart.

  ‘They were like babes!’ they said.

  ‘I doubt if they ever got as far as holding hands.’

  ‘You all knew about it?’ said Mahmoud, surprised.

  ‘We weren’t born yesterday!’

  ‘You could see it in his face!’

  ‘They used to wait for each other.’

  ‘She was that put out one day when he didn’t come. And then when he arrived all huffing and puffing, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Made him walk behind her.’

  Which was not the way it usually was.

  ‘Ah, but then she felt sorry for him, didn’t she?’

  ‘Within about two yards!’

  They all burst out laughing. And they dismissed out of hand any possibility that Suleiman could have been the attacker.

  ‘It’s not in him!’

  Mahmoud was not so sure.

  Or, at any rate, he was not ruling it out. Because if it was not Suleiman, who else could it have been?

  ‘However unlikely,’ he said, ‘you have to look at all the men she knew.’

  And so he had come to her father.

  First, though, he had scrupulously checked for others. Had she uncles? Cousins?

  ‘Not up here,’ they said. ‘Back in the village, maybe. But they never come up here.’

  ‘Sometimes they do,’ someone objected, ‘I remember a cousin once.’

  ‘Ah, but he was up here to do his corvée. He didn’t come up to see them especially.’

  Men from the village did drop in from time to time if they happened to be in Cairo. Usually it was when they came up to do their annual duties maintaining the Nile banks and dams. It wasn’t usually the same person, however, just whoever happened to be up that year from the village, bringing the villagers’ greetings and a few presents.

  ‘There were no regular visitors?’

  Not that they remembered.

  Friends? What about other friends?

  ‘Friends?’ said one of the women. ‘That old bastard never had any!’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Owen, sipping his coffee. ‘What about Fatima’s husband? He and Ali Khedri seem to hang around together.’

  ‘I asked about him,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Fatima said that in fact they weren’t very close.’

  ‘Close
enough for them to take Leila in when her father threw her out,’ said Owen.

  ‘That was her doing, not his. She had known Leila since she was a child. But the two men hadn’t been very close. It was only in the past year that they’d been getting together. She rather agreed with the others: Ali Khedri didn’t have friends.

  ‘Not even among the water-carriers?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘They’re a tight-knit group over in the Gamaliya,’ said Owen.

  ‘Yes, but the others don’t like him. They say he’s too bitter.’

  ‘A surely devil,’ one of the women had called him.

  ‘He was better before his wife died.’

  ‘She was a saint; and Leila took after her.’

  ‘Never a cross word!’

  ‘He could have done with a few. Particularly after his wife died. The way he treated that girl!’

  ‘Yes, but he treated everyone like that.’

  ‘It got so that people didn’t like going to his house.’

  ‘What about when people did go to his house?’ asked Mahmoud. ‘Did they see Leila?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have done. He was very strict. He always used to send her out. They only had the one room so she used to have to go out into the yard.’

  ‘There was no one, then, who might have had his eye on her?’

  ‘They didn’t get the chance.’

  ‘Omar Fayoum?’

  The women looked at each other.

  ‘I don’t know how he came to light on her. Maybe he’d seen her about in the streets. Bringing her father’s food. I’ll bet he liked that! Thought that was the kind of girl he wanted!’

  Patiently Mahmoud had worked through all the men she might have known. And in the end he was left with the father.

  ‘He had just quarrelled with her,’ Mahmoud pointed out. ‘Badly enough to throw her out of his house. He had built a lot on her. And then it had all collapsed. He blamed her.’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘I know. But most murders occur within the family. And this wasn’t a particularly good family. Anyway, I checked his movements that night. Fatima had gone to see him when Leila had not come back, and she had found him in. We know that because there are independent witnesses. They heard them quarrelling. But that was probably after the assault. What about earlier in the evening?’