The Women of the Souk

by Michael Pearce

  ‘No, he won’t!’ said Layla. ‘Just shut up, will you?’

  ‘Minya,’ said Owen, ‘do you think you could show me the shop where you were trying out the perfumes?’

  Minya lifted her face hopefully.

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I could.’

  The Scentmakers’ Bazaar was actually not far from Owen’s office in the Bab-el-Khalk, tucked just inside the Bab-es-Zuweyla, one of the old gates of the city. Here were the Tentmakers’ Bazaar, the Silk Bazaar, the Tunis Bazaar and the Scentmakers’ Bazaar. There were other bazaars, of course, but these were the ones that hit you as you went in by the gate. The Tunis Bazaar, which was roofed over against the sun, was by far the most picturesque, with its embroidered saddlebags and tasselled praying carpets. The main thing that set it apart, however, were its shoes: the bright yellow shoes of Tunis. Its sellers wore the shoes around their neck and strolled around dangling them invitingly.

  Beside all this brightness, the Scentmakers’s Bazaar came almost as a shock. Here each shop was little more than a cupboard where the owner sat on the counter with his feet up and large bulbous bottles peeping out from under his gown like giant eggs. Spread along the surface of the counter were stoppered ivory balls with cavities for the perfumes. As people passed, the shopkeeper would lean out from his counter, pull out a stopper and dab a sample of the contents on the sleeve of passers-by.

  Layla brushed all aside.

  ‘Cheap!’ she declared disdainfully.

  Minya shrank back.

  ‘Not cheap,’ protested the store holder indignantly. ‘The very best! Otto of roses, jasmine, amber, bananas—’

  ‘Bananas?’ said Layla. ‘Who wants to go around smelling of bananas?’

  ‘Wear in the souk,’ said the shopkeeper, unruffled, ‘and all the men come running!’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ said Layla.

  The shopkeeper caught at Owen’s sleeve.

  ‘You like amber? Put in coffee.’

  ‘In coffee?’ said Owen.

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘I don’t think so, thanks.’

  Minya was watching wide-eyed.

  The shopkeeper reached behind him and pulled out a large jar of what looked like aniseed balls. He offered them to Minya.

  ‘Sweetie?’ he said. ‘You like?’

  Minya wavered.

  ‘Tastes good,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘You try.’

  Minya looked at Owen.

  ‘Let me try first,’ said Owen.

  The shopkeeper held out the jar. Owen took one and put it into his mouth.

  He nodded to Minya.

  She took one with alacrity.

  ‘See?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘She not die!’

  Just along the counter was a stack of small ivory boxes.

  The shopkeeper saw him looking at them.

  ‘For English lady,’ he said. ‘To keep pills in. English ladies take lots of pills. Malaria, dysentery, headache. Phenacetin, quinine. But quinine tastes bitter.’ He pulled a face. ‘Keep pills in box, you smell the perfume, forget the taste!’

  ‘Seems a good idea!’ said Owen. He took up one of the boxes and smelled inside, then he put the box back.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  As they went to move on, their path was blocked by a woman with a tambourine.

  The shopkeeper waved her away.

  ‘Gipsy!’ he said contemptuously.

  They moved on through the bazaar along the line of closed in boxes, each with a man sitting inside it like a great big spider.

  ‘You’re sure it was that one?’ said Owen.

  Minya nodded and sucked her aniseed ball.

  Layla was disappointed that nothing more happened, but that afternoon a fat Greek with apparently nothing much to do wandered through the bazaar and came to a stop outside the shop. He spent a long time looking at the perfumed soap.

  ‘Can I help?’ said the shopkeeper.

  ‘I’m looking for something for my wife,’ said the Greek. ‘A little present. She thinks I am neglecting her.’

  ‘A nice soap would put that right.’

  ‘I’ve given her that before. Too many times.’

  ‘Ah! You need something different then. One of these little boxes perhaps?’

  ‘They look very nice but what would you do with them?’

  ‘Keep pills in them.’

  ‘Pills?’

  ‘Yes. Women are always taking pills.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. Headaches, for instance. At least, that’s what she says. But I think she uses them as an excuse. No one gets headaches like my lady!’

  ‘And not always at the most convenient times!’ said the shopkeeper, laughing.

  ‘You’re dead right. She’s got some pills, of course, but she keeps losing them.’

  ‘Ah! Well, I’ve got something that will put that right. One of these little boxes. They’re just right for keeping pills in and they’re scented too. Your wife will like that.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘The scent will take her mind off the headaches.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing too,’ said the shopkeeper with a wink, ‘each box has a nice perfume in it. There are lots of different ones so you can find one she likes. You’ll know what puts her in the mood.’ He gave another wink. ‘It’ll help things along.’

  ‘What an excellent idea!’

  ‘It works every time!’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘It’s the scent you see. It relaxes them. You’ve got a lot of choice. Try out a few until you find the right one.’

  ‘I will!’

  The Greek sniffed at the different boxes.

  ‘You’ve got to keep them separate,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘That’s why I put them in boxes.’

  ‘I’ll try three, for a start. I can always come back for more if they don’t work.’

  ‘It’ll work all right. One of them.’

  ‘But which one? That’s the question, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. But you can afford to experiment. They don’t cost much.’

  ‘I’ll take these.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll wrap them up for you. You don’t want her to see, do you? Keep it as a bit of a surprise.’

  ‘I will, yes.’

  The shopkeeper put them in a bag and then stopped.

  ‘You said you were a bit tense?’

  ‘Did I? Well, I am a bit occasionally, I suppose.’

  ‘Try this one out for yourself. It’s on the house. If you like it, you can come back.’

  ‘It looks like paste.’

  ‘It is paste. Sort of.’

  ‘I expected it to be a liquid, like the others.’

  ‘I can find you one in liquid form. But try the paste.’

  ‘It doesn’t smell much.’

  ‘Oh, it will. When you get used to it. It will, and it will give you lovely dreams. You can smoke it. In fact, it’s best if you do. It will ease the nerves very quickly.’

  ‘It certainly would,’ said Owen. ‘It’s pure opium!’

  The Greek, who was one of Owen’s agents, and whose name was Georgiades, licked his finger and touched the paste, then put his finger in his mouth.

  ‘Strong!’ he said. ‘I hope he wasn’t putting this among the aniseed balls.’

  ‘No. I tested them before letting her have one. He keeps this for special customers.’

  ‘Like schoolgirls?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Layla. ‘She never talked about it, if she did. Of course, we’ve all tried it a bit. Hashish, usually, and only in very small doses, and among people you know. So that they could look after you if things went wrong. But no one, as far as I know, took it regularly. It’s a thing you do when you go into the seniors, you know, to show you’re big. But you only do it once or twice, and then you stop. You’ve got other things to do, but it is a phase you go through.’

  ‘You yo
urself?’

  ‘Once or twice. Once to see what it was like, and then again to see if it was always like that. I didn’t like it much. It made my head spin, and I don’t like my head doing that. I want to be, well, in control, I suppose. But other people did it more. There was a bit of a craze for it at one time, but then it sort of dropped away. It was at about that time that we became seriously interested in the New Woman. At first it was mostly a question of what you were wearing, outside school of course, of how you talked, that sort of thing, and, of course, we read magazines feverishly to know what we should be doing.’

  ‘And that didn’t include taking opium?’

  ‘Oh, no. Cocaine, perhaps. But that’s in Paris. Actually, I don’t know much about Paris. It always seems very glamorous. We talk about it a lot. I would certainly like to go there but I don’t expect to find the streets paved with hashish.

  ‘Clothes, mostly, that was what we’re interested in. The great French fashion houses. The latest fashions. They’re so different from what we have to put up with. School uniform! I don’t think it’s a good idea for a school to insist on uniform. It just makes people rebellious. I sometimes think that’s why they keep uniforms, it’s something innocuous to rebel against. To keep our minds off other things.

  ‘The seniors are pretty divided on it. Some won’t have the uniform at any price. Others, and I am one, say better the school uniform than the burka. Fortunately, our mothers tend to agree with us. Of course, dress is important in Egypt. For women, I mean. It’s a sort of indication of where you stand. The hideous burka, for example. It makes you look as if you’ve come in straight from the country! And it hides you. It denies you. Suppose you were on the beach at Alexandria and tried wearing a burka!

  ‘So what can you do? Wear Western, I suppose. Like your mother. The trouble is, mothers don’t like that. Frightened of the competition, I suppose. So it’s back to the burka, or school uniform. If I was going on the beach at Alexandria, I think I’d wear the uniform. It would be a bit of a gesture. But our fathers wouldn’t like that. They don’t want us going on the beach at all. Helene says wear uniform but just lift the hem a bit. The men would go crazy. But in a way that’s the point of it.

  ‘So there it is: even uniform is not safe. So instead we concentrate on the veil. That’s what fashionable women in Cairo do anyway. “But it’s just a veil,” we say, when a dirty old man protests, “and you wouldn’t want me to go out without a veil, would you?” Of course, it’s a bit of a tease when you’re a senior. You don’t need a veil when you’re a junior, because you’re just a little girl. But when you’re senior, it’s a bit different. You’d be amazed at how much scope there is in the veil. Long, short, but the main thing is what it’s made of. Does the material suggest rather than conceal? My mother spends hours trying to work that out. What does Zeinab do, Mamur Zapt? I bet you have never noticed. Well, most men do and all women certainly do. It is tricky when you get to the seniors. You don’t want to go too far, but you certainly want to go as far as you can go. I would like to talk to Zeinab about this. Mothers are pretty useless when it comes to this sort of thing. You can’t go out in something your mother was wearing ninety years ago!

  ‘Marie? She goes for things which are pretty stylish. Her mother’s not bad in that respect. Marie—’

  She pulled her veil over her face and her shoulders began to shake. Sometimes the veil had its uses.

  Minya’s parents came to see Owen and said that something had to be done about her now that Marie had disappeared, indeed, had been kidnapped, for everyone now knew that Marie had been kidnapped. There was no chance of keeping something like that secret in a place like Cairo. At once parents begin to worry that their child might be next. In particular they worried that she might be seized on her way to school, as Marie had been. Extra policing was demanded.

  There was, however, a more urgent need in Minya’s case. Now that Marie had been abstracted from the scene, it was hoped temporarily, an escort was needed to take her place to and from school. Minya’s father, who was a high-up in the Parquet, sought Owen’s advice.

  ‘Minya is too small to go on her own. Her mother wants you to assign a policeman to take her. I wouldn’t quite go as far as that, but some senior girl perhaps? Of course, a policeman too.’

  Owen had already been thinking along those lines. After a while, he had hit on Layla. She seemed a pretty capable girl, exuding responsibility, or so it seemed to Owen, at every pore. He consulted the Khedivial Headmistress.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the Headmistress had said, ‘she would do very nicely. She is a good, responsible girl. In fact, we have her in mind for our next Head Girl, and Minya likes her. She stands rather in awe of her, which is not a bad thing, girls being what they are.’

  So Owen then asked Layla if she would be willing to take on this responsibility and Layla, who was one of those girls who never turned a responsibility down, had said that she would be willing.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Minya’s father, ‘that a policeman is hardly needed now.’

  Owen had been thinking about this too. He did not, though, wish to be too ostentatious otherwise everyone would want one. He asked McPhee to give out that for a time there would be extra patrols, and then quietly went to have a word with one of the likely patrollers. This was Selim, a giant Nubian, who would certainly be a match for any five or six ordinary kidnappers, and whom he had worked with before.

  He summoned Selim.

  ‘You see this little girl? I want you to take her to school in the morning and then pick her up after school in the afternoon and see she gets home safely. You will be assigned to patrols in the area, which you should carry out for the rest of the day, so that everyone will get used to seeing you about. That will reassure people. I want you, though, to keep a particular eye on that little girl as someone has kidnapped the friend she goes to school with and she may still be rather shaken.’

  ‘Effendi, I will keep two eyes open and if I see a kidnapper I will knock his block off.’

  ‘That will do nicely.’

  Selim was introduced to Minya.

  ‘Why,’ said Selim, ‘it is a little pigeon! Hello, little pigeon, just come with me and you’ll be all right.’

  ‘There is a lot of you,’ said Minya critically.

  ‘All the better to look after you with,’ said Selim. He had no children of his own, and this was a great disappointment to him and his wife. They still lived in hope, but the years were going by. Fatima, his wife, who was nearly as large as Selim, came out and inspected Minya.

  ‘Keep him in order for me,’ she said to Minya. ‘He is all right if you tell him what to do.’

  ‘I will,’ Minya promised gravely, and they went off hand in hand.

  Owen was going out that night with an Egyptian friend of his, Mahmoud el Zaki. Mahmoud was in the Parquet, the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Egyptian legal system was not like the English. It was based more on the French system. When a crime was reported in Egypt it was at once taken over not by the police but by the Parquet, who then took the case and saw it through to prosecution in court. The Parquet was full of bright young Egyptians intensely ambitious not just for a successful legal career but usually also for a political one. They were, therefore, continually at loggerheads with the British administration, which liked to keep the governance of the country to itself. Owen and Mahmoud disagreed violently about this, Mahmoud tending to the view that governing Egypt was a thing for Egyptians and not for the British. Nevertheless, politics aside, the two of them got on very well. And their concord had recently been reinforced by Mahmoud’s wife, Aisha, having a third baby. Till now, Owen and Zeinab had none. It was too complicated, they felt. He was British and she was Egyptian; he was a senior member of the British Administration and she the daughter of a Pasha still active in politics. Nevertheless, a baby had thrust itself on to the international stage, albeit at a humble level, and both Mahmoud and Aisha were killing themselves with laughte
r at the way in which their friends’ lives had been turned upside down.

  Aisha and Mahmoud had not yet seen the new baby and, as babies were more readily transportable than three small children, they were on this occasion the hosts. They went outside at once into Mahmoud’s small garden, beneath the orange trees and banana trees. Egyptian gardens were built for shade rather than flowers.

  The meal was a mixture of Egyptian and English, although mostly Egyptian: peanut soup, which Aisha knew Owen particularly liked, stuffed aubergines, roast pigeons, a salad of tomatoes, onions and nasturtium flowers, and finally apricots and rice pudding. They drank iced lemonade rather than wine, since Mahmoud and Aisha were both Muslim, and then there was Turkish coffee.

  After that they all went to review the babies.

  After agreeing that the babies were each as lovely as the other, Owen and Mahmoud went outside as there was something they particularly wanted to discuss.

  ‘This Kewfik girl,’ said Mahmoud, ‘you know about her?’

  ‘The one who has been kidnapped?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ He looked at Owen curiously. ‘How do you come to know about her? They have been trying to keep it quiet, while negotiations are proceeding.’

  ‘Not much hope of that. But, in answer to your question, I was approached and asked about it. I was approached by a friend of the Kewfik girl. Apparently her friends in the Khedivial had been putting two and two together and not getting, in their view, very satisfactory answers. Not from the school, nor from the police, nor from the family.’

  ‘The father has had a stroke and is in hospital.’

  ‘And an uncle is handling it. Not very skilfully.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to handle a cup of coffee skilfully.’

  ‘It has been officially reported, I take it? No? Then how?’

  ‘The girl’s mother is the sister of one of the Khedive’s wives. So the back stairs have been positively humming. Especially as they don’t care for the uncle much. They don’t think he is up to the job.’

  ‘Of negotiating with the kidnappers? That is my information too.’

  ‘And your information comes from …?’

  ‘The senior girls at the Khedivial. Marie’s friends.’