The Camel of Destruction

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Yes, indeed. What do you suggest?’

  ‘There is a ruined house nearby—’

  ‘Is it decent enough for Miss Fingari?’

  Places like that were used as lavatories.

  ‘No, but there is a doorway where you would not be seen. It is not very comfortable for your purpose—’

  ‘My purpose is only conversation.’

  ‘Well, of course, it’s early days yet—’

  The boy led him to the spot. It was a place where two or three tenement buildings had crumbled down together. This was not unusual in Cairo. Houses were often made of sun-dried mud brick and in the rains sometimes dissolved.

  The boy picked a way through the rubble, squeezed through a gap between two crumbling walls and brought Owen to an archway set deep below ground level in what remained of the side of a building. It had, perhaps, once led into a cellar.

  ‘Wait there!’ he said.

  A few moments later, Aisha’s veiled form appeared in the gap and stood before the archway uncertainly.

  ‘Miss Fingari—’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here like this. Ali is horrible. Go away, Ali! Mind you go right away! It’s not what you think.’

  She came forward determinedly and stepped into the archway.

  ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. But I had to see you.’

  ‘It is about Osman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Under the archway it was dark. Instinctively, she retreated deeper into the shadow. He could not see her eyes but he could tell from the position of her body that she was looking up at him.

  ‘You hurt me,’ she said, a little shakily, ‘when you said he felt alone.’

  ‘I don’t know that. It was just—’

  ‘It was true. Oh, it was true. It must have been true. I tried! But—’

  ‘You must not blame yourself, Miss Fingari. It is not always possible to break through.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I should have tried harder. I became impatient. When he came home—’ She broke off.

  ‘When he came home—?’

  ‘Sometimes he had been drinking. Oh, it’s not such a great fault, I see that now; but it was so different, so—so unexpected. He had always been—he had always behaved properly—’

  ‘He was a strict Moslem?’

  ‘Not strict, but—but he did what he should. Until—’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw a change in him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of change, Miss Fingari?’

  ‘He became—not disorderly, but not so ordered. He would come home late. He never used to do that. Now he did it often. He wouldn’t say where he had been—’

  ‘You asked him?’

  ‘Yes. We were close. We had been close. He would talk to me when he wouldn’t—He didn’t always feel he could—talk to my parents.’

  ‘What did he talk about, Miss Fingari?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. This goes back a long time. To when he was at school. If something had gone wrong during the day, if someone had been unkind to him, he would run home and pour it all out to me. I was his big sister and—and I remained so even after he started work.’

  ‘He still talked to you?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps even more so. Our parents were growing older. They did not always understand the sort of things he was doing at work—’

  ‘But you did?’

  ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘How could I? A woman? Shut up in the house all day. All I knew was the family and the souk. But I had friends, other girls, and they talked about their brothers and I—I learned something, I suppose. Anyway, he felt he could talk to me.’

  ‘And then he stopped talking to you? When was this?’

  ‘It was not—not suddenly, not like that. It just—built up over time.’

  ‘But when did it start? When did you first become aware that you could not talk to him as you used to?’

  ‘I—I don’t know. Recently. The last few months.’

  ‘Since he joined the Board?’

  ‘No. Yes, I suppose,’ she said, surprised. ‘But, effendi, he was not like that. It was not because he became proud. Oh, he was proud of being appointed to the Board, he was very proud of it—and so were we all—but it wasn’t—that wasn’t the reason.’

  ‘He did change, though?’

  ‘Not because of that.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘Because I know him. And—and because he did talk to me about that, about the people he met—they were very famous people, effendi, even I had heard of them—about the places he used to go to. No, it was not that, it was—afterwards.’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘About the time he started coming home later.’

  ‘That was some time after he had joined the Board?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you any idea, Miss Fingari, why that was? Why did he start coming home late?’

  ‘He—he was meeting someone. I—I thought it was a woman and teased him. But it wasn’t. He said it wasn’t. And then—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That was when he started to come home smelling of drink. I knew then that it was not a woman, that it was someone who was bad for him. I was angry with him, I told him he must not see them, but he said—he said he had to see them—’

  ‘Had to?’

  ‘Yes. He said it was business and I said what sort of business was it if it was in the evening and he came home smelling of drink after it and he became angry and said I did not understand. And after that he would not speak with me.’

  She began to sob.

  ‘If I had not been so fierce, perhaps he would have spoken to me. Perhaps I would have been able to help him, save him—’

  ‘You must not blame yourself, Miss Fingari.’

  ‘But I do blame myself!’ she said, sobbing. ‘I do blame myself. You were right when you spoke of him being alone. He was alone, and he would not have been if I—’

  ‘You did what you could, Miss Fingari.’

  ‘No, not what I could!’

  There was a little spasm of sobbing in the shadows. He moved towards her uncertainly, intending to comfort her, but then she stepped forward herself and seized him by the arms.

  ‘But if I am to blame,’ she hissed, ‘so are they! They brought him to this! You said there was something outside himself. Someone. There was!’

  ‘Miss Fingari, these may just have been friends—’

  ‘No. He was different after he had been with them. He began to be different all the time. There was a change, oh yes, there was a change!’

  ‘You said he was more lax in his behaviour—’

  ‘No, not lax. Not just lax. Different. They were bad men, Owen effendi. They changed him. He had always been a good man, a good son, a good brother…’

  She began to weep steadily.

  ‘Effendi, you are too rough with her,’ said a voice from outside the archway. ‘Didn’t I tell you she doesn’t know about this sort of thing?’

  The sobbing stopped abruptly. There was a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Ali, you are disgusting!’ said Aisha, and stalked out into the sunlight.

  ***

  ‘First, it was the kuttub. Then it was the hospital. Then it was the Place for Old People. I tell you, they’re determined to get you one way or another. Next thing, it will be the cemetery!’

  ‘Next thing it will be the mosque. That comes before the cemetery.’

  ‘It already is the mosque. Have you talked to Sayid ben Ali Abd’al Shaward lately?’

  ‘Not him too! I tell you, they’re determined to get us one way or another. The little we’ve got, they want to take away! That’s how it always is for the poor man.’

>   A general mutter of agreement ran round the circle squatting round the barber’s chair.

  ‘Abd el-Rahim is not a poor man!’ someone objected.

  ‘I’m not talking about Abd el-Rahim,’ said the barber, flourishing his scissors. ‘I’m talking about us!’

  ‘Watch it!’ said the man in the chair, flinching as the blades flashed past his ear.

  The barber ignored him and turned to address the assembly.

  ‘Don’t you see? We’re the ones who are going to lose out. They’ll take the kuttub away. Well, you’ll say, I don’t mind that; my children are grown up. But then, what about the hospital? What about the Place for Old People? You will mind that one day!’

  ‘What about the mosque?’ muttered someone.

  ‘You can always go to another one,’ said someone else.

  ‘Yes, but that’s my point,’ said the barber. ‘You can always go to another one. Your children can go to another kuttub, you can drag your aching bones to another hospital or your old bones to another Place for Old People, but they’ll be somewhere else!’

  ‘Are you going to cut my hair or not?’ asked the man in the chair.

  The barber turned back to him hurriedly.

  ‘What will become of the neighbourhood,’ he asked over his shoulder, ‘if they take all our amenities away?’

  ‘It’s going downhill anyway,’ said someone. ‘It’s been going downhill ever since those Sudanis moved in.’

  ‘It will go downhill a lot faster if there isn’t a kuttub and a hospital,’ said the barber, declining to be diverted. The Sudanis were customers of his.

  ‘The Shawquats have always had that kuttub,’ said someone ruminatively.

  ‘And done very well out of it,’ said someone else sceptically.

  ‘Yes, but it’s terrible to take it away just when they need it, now that the old man’s died.’

  ‘They’ve still got a piastre or two, I’ll bet. I shan’t be shedding any tears for them.’

  ‘It still doesn’t seem right. They’ve always had it.’

  The barber swung round excitedly.

  ‘We’ve always had it. The waqfs were set up to benefit us. And now they’re being taken away. All right, the Shawquats have done well out of it, and so has Sayid ben Ali Abd’al Shawad; but we’re the ones who are going to lose!’

  ‘He’s cut me!’ shouted the man in the chair.

  ‘It’s nothing! Just a scratch!’

  ‘I’m bleeding!’

  ‘He moved! Didn’t he move?’ the barber appealed to the crowd.

  ‘I didn’t move! I haven’t moved at all!’

  ‘My God, he’s dead!’ said a caustic voice from the back of the crowd.

  Owen eased himself out of the circle. With his dark Welsh colouring and in a tarboosh he looked like any other Levantine effendi: a clerk, perhaps, in the Ministry of Agriculture.

  ***

  ‘It’s a bit of the Camels, old boy,’ said Barclay, of Public Works, that evening at the club.

  ‘Camels?’ said Owen, bewildered. So far as he had been aware, they had been talking about the destructiveness of road development in an urban environment.

  ‘Well, Camel at least. Have you heard of the Camel of Destruction? No? It’s a figure from legend, a sort of Apocalyptic Beast. At the beginning of the world, or soon thereafter, it ran amok and threatened to destroy everything. And if you’ve ever seen a camel going wild among a lot of tents you’ll know that that means everything, but everything!’

  ‘We’ve got past the tent stage now, Barclay,’ said someone superciliously.

  ‘Yes, but we haven’t done away with the Camel of Destruction,’ said Barclay. ‘Oh no, my goodness we haven’t. Just look around you! Beautiful buildings being pulled down, monsters being put up.’

  ‘I’d assumed that was all your doing, Barclay,’ said the supercilious one. ‘You’re responsible for planning, aren’t you?’

  ‘I may be responsible,’ said Barclay, ‘but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘In Cairo,’ said someone else, ‘money is the only thing that talks.’

  ‘Well, of course, it’s a complete racket,’ said Barclay. ‘They have to submit plans but then if we turn them down, they can proceed all the same. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘Don’t you have to give planning permission?’

  ‘No. Take the Hotel Vista, for instance. You’ve seen that big block on the corner of the Sharia El Mustaquat? They sent us the plans. Anyone with half an eye could see they wouldn’t do. The foundations were unstable, the retaining walls—well! We condemned it on grounds of public safety. The next thing we heard, it was going straight ahead.’

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  ‘Mud for mortar. No wonder they come down as fast as they go up!’

  ‘And there are still plenty going up!’

  ‘Not as many as there were.’

  In the boom of recent years a frenzy of building had overtaken the city. Rows of houses were pulled down; great blocks were run up. And then, when they were only half way up, and neither up nor down, the money had run out. With the general tightening of credit, projects were abandoned all over Cairo, leaving the city looking like one huge derelict building site.

  ‘There are a few still going ahead,’ said Barclay. ‘One or two of the bigger projects where they’ve borrowed a lot of money and the banks are pressing them and unless they get something back quick they’re sunk.’

  ‘Anyone buying up land for the next round yet?’ asked Owen. ‘When it all starts up again?’

  ‘No need to do that,’ said Barclay. ‘There’s land aplenty. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wondering,’ said Owen.

  Later in the evening he found himself standing next to Barclay at the bar.

  ‘Heard anything about any development in the Derb Aiah area?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Barclay, ‘and I wouldn’t want to. It’s a nice old part—do you know it? Lots of nice old houses. Rabas, not Mameluke—it’s not rich enough for that. Really old, sixteenth-century, I would say, some of them. Some fine public buildings, too, only they’re very small and tucked away among the houses so it’s easy to miss them. A mediæval hospital, tiny, but, well, I’d say unique. Take you over there, if you like, and show you.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Owen. ‘Next week perhaps?’

  ‘Friday? Fine! It’d be a pleasure.’

  Passing Barclay’s table later in the evening, he caught Barclay looking up at him meditatively.

  ‘I say, old chap, you’ve got me worried. There isn’t anything going on in the Derb Aiah area, is there? I’d hate that part to be spoiled.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘The only thing I can think of,’ said Barclay, ‘is that someone might be being very smart and thinking a long way ahead.’

  ‘What might they be thinking?’

  ‘They might be thinking about the new road there’s talk of on the east side of the city.’

  ‘What new road is this?’

  ‘It’s no more than a gleam in the eye, really. But it’s the Khedive’s eye.’

  ‘There are lots of gleams in his eye,’ said Owen dismissively.

  The Khedive’s ambition to emulate the great predecessors who had done so much to modernize Egypt was well known.

  ‘But the money always runs out. Yes, I know,’ said Barclay.

  ‘It’ll never happen,’ said Owen confidently.

  ‘Perhaps someone thinks that this time it will.’

  ‘Yes, but even if it does…I mean, that would be over on the east side of the city, or so you said. It wouldn’t affect the Derb Aiah.’

  ‘It might. That’s why I said it might be someone who was looking ahead. They might be thinking that the next road after that woul
d be one thrown across the north of the city to join the Clot Bey. Right through the Derb Aiah.’

  ‘But that—that’s so speculative!’

  ‘That’s how speculators make their money. By speculating.’

  ‘It’s— It’s—’

  ‘It’s unlikely. Yes, I know. It’ll probably never happen. But you did ask.’

  ‘Yes, I did. And thanks for telling me. Though I don’t think, in fact—’

  ‘I hope I’m wrong. Let’s drink to me being wrong. I wouldn’t want to see the Derb Aiah turned into a building site.’

  ‘Cheers!’

  A thought struck him as he put down his glass.

  ‘That other road, the one on the east side of the city: what line would it take?’

  ‘It would drop south from the Bab el Futuh and come out in the Rumeleh, roughly at the Bab el Azab.’

  ‘But that would go straight through the Old City!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would cause a riot!’

  Barclay looked into his beer.

  ‘Ah yes, I dare say. But that would be something for you, old boy, wouldn’t it?’

  ***

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Paul soothingly. ‘It will never happen. The money won’t be there. It never has been, it never will be, and it certainly isn’t there at the moment. And, talking of money—’ he glanced at his watch—‘I’ve got to go to another of these blessed meetings. You wouldn’t like to come along, would you?’

  ‘No,’ said Owen.

  ‘You could sit at the back. It would be good preparation.’

  ‘Preparation? What for?’

  ‘Sitting at the front. That’s the first item on the agenda for today, you see.’

  ***

  ‘The Mamur Zapt? About time too!’ said Abdul Aziz Filmi.

  The meeting was being held at the Consulate-General, an indication of its importance, as were the people present. Apart from Abdul Aziz, who was the sole representative of the Opposition, there were half a dozen prominent politicians. Owen realized later that they were the senior mentors of the Assembly’s Finance Committee.

  There was the Minister there, his Adviser, British, so it must be important, the Governor of the Bank of Egypt, British, one or two foreign bankers and Paul, representing the Consul-General.