The Mark of the Pasha

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Well, of course,’ said the boy.

  ‘But it is better to argue with the stranger and persuade him that what he seeks to do is wrong.’

  ‘The English do not listen.’

  ‘They do, if you talk long enough. In the City at the moment there is much talk among the great men, Egyptian as well as English. It may be that they will find a way forward. But if they do not, it is still a better way than striking blows.’

  ‘Our sheikh says that it may be necessary to strike blows first and then have the arguments.’

  There it was again. Back to the sheikh, always back to the sheikh. This was true, perhaps, less in the city than it was in the countryside, but the sheikhs, the religious ones, that was, had enormous power over the minds of people. And it started so young. The mind-set was formed so early, with its implications and its rigidities. It was no wonder that when they got to university or college they could so easily be brought out on the streets.

  The other side of it was that listening to their sheikhs they developed an early capacity for dialectics. Arabs liked argument. In what was still a largely oral culture the capacity to argue was valued. That was why it was worth trying.

  The trouble was that with the capacity for argument went all these rigidities!

  But that was why McPhee had the youngsters in to see him rather than give them a thrashing. He hoped he could win them over. He seldom did but Owen respected him for trying. He tried to do it himself, usually with older students. And probably with a similar lack of success.

  As was happening now. He wasn’t getting anywhere. He’d better put a stop to it. He’d spent enough time on this boy. He wondered why McPhee had asked him to see him.

  ‘The trouble with blows,’ he said, ‘is that they do not always fall on those who deserve them. So it was with your attempt to stop the cars. The innocent suffered.’

  ‘I know,’ said the boy, in a low voice. ‘It was terrible.’

  ‘Well, you see that now. And your sheikh has told you not to do it again.’

  ‘I will not do it again. Although I do not like the cars.’

  ‘Good.’

  Owen went to stand up, to signal that the interview was at an end.

  ‘But I will still strike a blow,’ said the boy defiantly.

  Owen sat down again.

  ‘I thought that your sheikh had told you not to?’

  ‘He told me not to go to the races again.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘But to strike my blow in another way.’

  Owen sighed. Perhaps this was why McPhee had sent the boy. He had thought the boy was going to cause trouble some time and that maybe he had better be put out of harm’s way.

  ‘What way?’

  The boy’s face lit up.

  ‘He told me to go to the City. There I would find others who thought as I did. And we would band together and raise a great shout. And walk through the streets demanding justice and God’s Law. And the walls of the City would come tumbling down. And the rotten tree would fall. And the stranger would be cast out of the gates. And the world would become clean.’

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘That is what my sheikh says.’

  And now Owen could see why McPhee had sent the boy to him. From time to time they came across this kind of apocalyptic talk. And when they did they would always take it seriously. At the back of every English administrator’s mind was what had happened not many years before in the Sudan, that vast country lying immediately to the south of Egypt and governed now, in Egypt’s name, by the British. There had been similar talk there and it had been discounted as crazy rubbish. But it had spread and suddenly the Government had found itself with an enormous revolutionary movement on its hands and had had to fight a war before it could be put down.

  Of course, the Sudan was not Egypt. Egypt was a much more developed country and far more sophisticated. It could never happen there.

  But if it did, it might happen something like this. A crazy sheikh in a village, a boy spreading the word. McPhee was right to alert him.

  There was something else, too.

  ‘The sheikh told you that you would find others in the City who thought as you did?’

  ‘That is so, yes.’

  ‘How would you find them?’

  But the boy realised he had said enough. He would say no more. Owen told him to forget about the people waiting in the City and go back to his village and stay there, or he would find himself in the caracol.

  The boy went out, still defiant. Well, Owen didn’t mind that. It didn’t pay to beat the young down. But he would have to keep an eye on the situation. Starting with that sheikh in the village. He would ask the local mamur for a report.

  But there was something closer to home. What was happening in the City? The boy had spoken as if there was some kind of movement there in the making. He would tell Nikos to get his men out and find out if there was. The last thing they wanted just at the moment was a religious insurrection as well. They had enough trouble on their hands already.

  ***

  Although Mahmoud and his wife were friends, Owen and Zeinab had not seen them for a while. This was important to Zeinab because since they had last met, Aisha’s status had changed dramatically. She had become a mother.

  Zeinab was quite interested in this. She knew, in theory, that this sort of thing was liable to happen. In practice, however, she had never had much to do with families and children. She had been brought up virtually alone in Nuri Pasha’s vast mansion. There had been a brother, by another mother, but he was older than she was and she had never known him well. Just when there might have developed some comradeship between them he had fallen foul of the British Administration, and of the Khedive, and, indeed, of just about everybody else, and Nuri had been obliged to ship him abroad, where for the last few years, he had been happily gambling away in Cannes such allowance as Nuri made him.

  Nuri, who had not known much parenthood himself, had tried to provide Zeinab with what companionship he could. He was actually a cultivated man but the cultivation he was steeped in was, as with most of the Egyptian ruling class, French not Egyptian, and Zeinab had grown up as a formidably intellectual French girl reading Proust with her father. This had not, however, equipped her to relate easily to other Egyptian girls of her age, nor for ordinary family life.

  One result was, though, that she had grown up with a far greater degree of independence than most Egyptian women. Far greater, for example, than Miriam. She had been able, up to a point, to make her own life.

  After a while she had chosen to make it with Owen and the seal had been put on their relationship when they had married. But now she had suddenly discovered that there were lots of things she hadn’t picked up on the way. Sex was not one of them but family was. There were gaps, Zeinab decided, in her knowledge and it was time—she was, after all, now thirty—that she filled them.

  She was, therefore, quite keen to see Aisha and ascertain at least what a baby looked like. When Owen mentioned his renewed contact with Mahmoud she decided that she would invite Mahmoud and Aisha round to dinner.

  This was not quite as straightforward as it might seem. Egyptians never went out as husband-wife couples. Men went out with men. Women stayed at home. Mahmoud, however, considered himself a thoroughly modern man and believed this to be a practise of the past, one of many that needed reforming.

  Aisha, as it turned out, also felt this, even more strongly than Mahmoud, so the invitation was promptly accepted and for the very next evening.

  Here, though, there was another snag. Among the things that Zeinab hadn’t picked up was exactly how you went about cooking a meal. In her father’s house there had always been servants to do that. Owen, who like most bachelors, had usually eaten out at the Club or at the Officers Mess in the Barracks, was in no position to help her. Since they
had married, and for quite a time before, they had always eaten out.

  Zeinab, however, was no mushy new bride and knew exactly what to do. She commandeered her father’s cook. The result was a very splendid dinner, the centre-piece of which was caille en sarcophage, although not one quite perhaps in the style that Mahmoud and Aisha were used to.

  At some point in the evening the baby woke up and Aisha, with Zeinab in curious attendance, went off to feed it and change it. Seen naked, Zeinab thought, it looked very much like a puppy. Zeinab didn’t care for puppies. However, for the sake of friendship, she was prepared to make allowances. Besides, puppies did not put out a hand and feel your face.

  Owen and Mahmoud, meanwhile, were discussing politics. For Mahmoud the exiling of Zaghlul, the Wafd Party Leader, was a major mistake. It left a vacuum at the heart of legitimate politics into which all sorts of less legitimate groups might press. Owen rather agreed with him.

  Aisha and Zeinab returned at this point.

  ‘It may actually turn out an advantage to Zaghlul,’ Aisha said. ‘The British will realise they can’t make a solution without him.’

  Zeinab was surprised. She hadn’t realised that Aisha was interested in politics.

  ‘But has he the confidence of the Khedive?’ she asked.

  ‘Does that matter?’

  Zeinab was quite shocked at this. For her, as for her father, ‘politics’ meant essentially the kind of intriguing that went on around the Khedive at court. This was the kind of politics she had grown up hearing about from her father and she had thought that was all the politics there was.

  ‘But how can you do anything without the support of the Khedive?’ she asked.

  As soon as she had said it, she realised how naive she was. The fact was that even with the support of the Khedive, you couldn’t do anything unless you also had the support of the British Administration.

  ‘And the High Commissioner,’ she added quickly.

  ‘But he’s not legitimate politics either,’ said Mahmoud.

  Legitimate? Zeinab hadn’t thought much about legitimacy in politics before. For her politics was personal and all to do with the exercise of power. For almost the whole of her life she had been close to where power was exercised. She had heard her father talk of the latest manoeuvres at the Palace, she had heard Owen muttering about the latest foolishness of the British Government in London and what the Administration in Egypt might do about it. This was government in practice and legitimacy didn’t come into it.

  ‘Elections and all that sort of thing,’ explained Aisha.

  ‘There can be no legitimate Government without proper elections,’ said Mahmoud.

  Zeinab knew, of course, what elections were. She had often heard her father telling about how to fix them. But that didn’t seem to be quite what was at issue here.

  ‘It is surely what the Commission will be addressing,’ said Mahmoud.

  This new Commission! The one that was arriving the next day.

  ‘It is so important!’ said Aisha.

  Was it? Zeinab had dismissed it as window dressing.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Aisha stared at her.

  ‘Zeinab, surely you know? It will give us our independence.’

  It was what they all hoped, Owen knew. But—

  ‘Perhaps not immediately,’ he said swiftly.

  ‘I don’t think they can afford to delay,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘Surely you want independence, Zeinab?’ said Aisha.

  ‘Well, yes, of course, but…’

  Independence? she had always dismissed it as pie-in-the-sky. But here were Aisha and Mahmoud, two intelligent, informed people, talking as if it was imminent!

  ‘But what, Zeinab?’

  But what, exactly? Zeinab had a strongly practical turn of mind. She had always taken it for granted that things would go on much the same as they always had done. The British would rule, the politicians would deal, not much would change and she could get on with her life. But now here were Mahmoud and Aisha suggesting that in future things might be different!

  Independence? An Egypt independent of the British, perhaps even of the Khedive? How did she feel? She hadn’t really thought about it seriously before. If asked about it in a general way she would have replied, in a general way, that she was in favour of it. All Egyptians were. But in the same way as everyone was in favour of virtue, motherhood, and apple pie, as her husband sometimes said. (But what was apple pie?) But was she really in favour of it, on a down-to-earth basis?

  What would it mean for her? How would it affect her and Owen? He would surely go along with what she felt. Wouldn’t he? But could he?

  She would have to think about this.

  And meanwhile she would put the baby into the back of her mind.

  ***

  The Commission arrived and the High Commissioner held a Reception for them.

  So much was obvious and so much was simple. But what followed afterwards would not be quite so simple.

  The Reception was held on the Residency lawn, a beautiful spot for such an event, with fine English roses, beautiful Egyptian shrubs, and herbaceous borders to remind all decent expatriates of home. Turbaned suffragis in wide, scarlet kummberbunds brought round silver trays of small crustless sandwiches and other goodies, and in the late afternoon sunlight the champagne shone golden.

  Owen, in his newly cleaned best suit, fresh from the front, circled among the guests. Paul was everywhere, introducing here, smoothing there, seeing that no one was omitted or neglected. The High Commissioner moved benignly from group to group, and the soldiers were all out of sight.

  Except the Sirdar, the Commander of the Egyptian Army, or rather, of the British Army in Egypt, an important difference. He was in uniform and weighed down with medals and was talking to another figure with military bearing, only this one was not in the army but had come with the Commission, a man with military experience in India, which was, of course, seen as immediately transferable to Egypt.

  He was saying something about the strategic significance of the Suez Canal.

  ‘Absolutely!’ barked the Sirdar.

  ‘Vital to Britian’s interest.’

  ‘Damn right!’

  ‘Oil.’

  ‘Must never forget that.’

  ‘Affects our position with respect to Egypt.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said the Sirdar.

  ‘What about all this unrest?’

  ‘A little local difficulty.’

  ‘You can handle it?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘The press is making too much of it. I expect. They always do. Hallo!’

  ‘This is Owen. The Mamur Zapt.’

  ‘Ma—?’

  ‘Secret Service.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The Khedive’s Secret Service,’ said the Sirdar meaningfully.

  ‘Oh.’ Distinctly coolly.

  ‘And ours, of course.’

  ‘Oh, really? That’s all right then.’ Much warmer.

  ‘Owen was in India,’ said the Sirdar, who, despite his grave suspicions of Owen, felt he had to give the devil his due.

  ‘Oh, really? Where?’

  ‘On the Frontier,’ said Owen. ‘A while ago.’

  ‘The Frontier, eh? Well…never was there myself. Always regretted that. Wanted to be where the real action was, but never quite managed it. Bound to a desk in Rawalpindi.’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it, sir,’ said the Sirdar.

  ‘That’s what I told myself. I may be a desk wallah, I said, but deep down I am a soldier, and I want to be where the shooting is!’

  Owen had heard that one before.

  He moved away and ran into a large, rather four-square lady.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘I’m the token woman on t
he Commission. And the token woman here generally, by the look of it,’ she said.

  ‘Not so, Mrs. Oliphant,’ said Paul Trevelyan, appearing beside them at that point. ‘Over on the other side of the lawn I can see Mrs. Owen. I will take you across and introduce you to her.’

  ‘An Army wife? I’m not sure that counts. Aren’t there any Egyptian women here?’

  ‘Mrs. Owen is an Egyptian.’

  He led her across.

  ‘Hello!’ said Mrs. Oliphant. ‘I’m the token woman. Are you a token woman too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Now, come on, Zeinab, you’re here because I love you,’ said Paul. ‘And there are many other women here, too, Mrs. Willoughby,—’

  ‘So how do you find it, being married to an Englishman?’

  ‘Dreadful!’ said Zeinab. ‘But I’m bringing him round.’

  ‘Captain Owen isn’t really in the army,’ said Paul. ‘He’s in the service of the Khedive.’

  ‘I thought you all were?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Paul. ‘Only Gareth is more genuinely in the services of the Khedive than the rest of us. He’s the Mamur Zapt.’

  ‘Responsible for keeping us alive?’

  ‘You could say that. But other things, too.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t allow his attention to wander!’

  ‘Mrs. Owen works in a hospital,’ said Paul. ‘I thought you might be interested to meet her. Knowing your own work in hospitals.’

  Mrs. Oliphant raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You’ve certainly been doing your homework.’

  ‘Your fame has reached even the Residency, Mrs. Oliphant.’

  ‘What do you do?’ asked Mrs. Oliphant, turning to Zeinab. ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘A manager.’

  Mrs. Oliphant took her by the arm.

  ‘Oh, really, my dear? That’s most interesting. I should like to hear about it. I’ve just been having such a battle to get a woman appointed in one of my hospitals. A man’s job, one idiot dared to say. Before I decapitated him. But that was in London. And now to come out here—’

  ‘—to these benighted spots,’ said Zeinab, who was beginning to rethink the advantages of independence.