A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Another gang? Or political club?’

  ‘That’s right. One you’ve got a bit of influence with.’

  ‘OK, so what you’re saying is that your gang was asked by another gang, or club, to keep off the Morellis; but that what they were doing was asking on behalf of somebody else?’

  ‘Yes, Effendi.’

  ‘An individual?’

  ‘Effendi, I don’t—’

  ‘Someone small, anyway. Perhaps one or two people.’

  Shukri nodded.

  ‘That is what I have heard, Effendi.’

  ‘Have you heard anything else about this individual? Or individuals?’

  ‘Effendi, I am but a street man for my gang—’

  ‘Nevertheless, you may have heard something.’

  Shukri shook his head.

  ‘Effendi, I have heard nothing. It doesn’t affect others in the gang, you see. Only me. And it is not very important. Except that—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The request must be carried out. That is what they have told me. And the way they said it makes me think, Effendi, that those who asked them are not people to be trifled with.’

  ‘This other gang, you mean?’

  Shukri hesitated.

  ‘Effendi, it is not really a gang.’

  ‘Club, then.’

  ‘Effendi, it is not a club, either.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Effendi, I do not know. I am but a nobody. They do not tell me things. Only what I had to do.’

  ‘You know, however, that it was not a gang and not a club.’

  Shukri began to sweat. Owen could get nothing more out of him, however. All he would say was that the organization, whoever it was, that had approached his gang on behalf, probably, of one of its members, was big and powerful. The gang had had little alternative but to go along with its request. It wasn’t an organization you would turn down.

  ‘You just wouldn’t,’ said Shukri earnestly.

  ***

  Mahmoud listened intently.

  ‘There are other kinds of organization,’ he said. ‘Business associations, for example.’

  ‘Morelli was an auctioneer,’ said Owen. ‘That’s small business. And any association of auctioneers would be small too. Shukri spoke of the organization as being big.’

  ‘And powerful,’ said Mahmoud. ‘An association of auctioneers would hardly be powerful.’ He thought. ‘Maybe a business association that he was dealing with?’

  ‘Do auctioneers deal with big associations of any kind? I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  They sipped their coffee.

  ‘Maybe it was an association of a different kind. Political? A political party?’

  ‘A political party would hardly put in a request like that,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘And if it did,’ said Owen, ‘it would do it through one of its clubs.’

  Mahmoud grimaced. It was true, but he didn’t like to think that.

  There was a little silence.

  ‘Religious,’ they both said together, and then both laughed. It was hardly likely to be religious, either.

  They finished their coffees and stood up.

  ‘How’s Aisha?’ asked Owen as they walked away.

  ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Mahmoud answered him. ‘And she is getting on well with my mother.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘That is important,’ said Mahmoud.

  Well, yes, it would be, since it was going to be a permanent arrangement. It was where, he had the impression, Egyptian marriages often went wrong.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mahmoud diffidently, ‘there was something I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Zeinab has invited us to coffee.’

  ‘She has?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, it is very kind of her—’

  Hum. Owen hoped so.

  ‘But—’

  Mahmoud hesitated.

  ‘You don’t happen to know who else will be there, do you?’

  ‘Will it be Princess Fawzi, you mean? Or those dreadful Princes?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Actually, she can’t stand them. Look, I don’t know why she was so difficult the other evening, but—’

  ‘She wrote a nice note to Aisha afterwards.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yes. Saying she was sorry. And inviting her to coffee.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Aisha would like to go. Of course, she couldn’t go by herself.’

  ‘No, indeed.’

  ‘I would have to take her.’

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps.’

  ‘Unless, of course, no men were to be present.’

  ‘You want me to ask her?’

  Mahmoud looked relieved.

  ‘Please.’

  ***

  ‘Of course not!’ said Zeinab.

  ‘No men?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘What about Princess Fawzi?’

  ‘Not her, either. Actually,’ said Zeinab, ‘the only other person I have invited is Rosa.’

  ‘Rosa?’

  She knew Georgiades, of course, although only as one of Owen’s men, and she had met Rosa once or twice. They had got along quite reasonably; that is, as reasonably as Zeinab ever got along with women younger than herself. All the same, Rosa was not someone he would have expected to find in Zeinab’s social circle: which was not, in fact, as exalted as she had pretended to Mahmoud and Aisha, but drawn from the artistic fringes of Cairo society, where independent women were more acceptable.

  ‘Georgiades is away,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘I thought it would be nice if they got to know each other.’

  ‘It might well be.’ He hesitated. ‘You will—?’

  ‘Behave?’ said Zeinab.

  ***

  As soon as he got to the warehouse he knew that something had happened. The porters were standing around in deep misery. The foreman was sitting bowed on a packing case, his head in his hands. Beside him, like a judge, stood Mahmoud.

  ‘How can I look her in the face?’ the foreman was saying. ‘What will she think of me? What will the Nahhasin think of me? Is she not a lone woman? Am not I her protector?’

  ‘You are her servant,’ said Mahmoud, ‘and she knows that you are a good one.’

  ‘I am a bad one!’ said the foreman vehemently. ‘That I should let this happen!’

  ‘How were you to know?’

  ‘But I should have known!’ cried the foreman. ‘I should know everything that happens in the warehouse! Dirt has been poured on my head. How can I look people in the face?’

  One of the porters gave a sympathetic sob.

  ‘Abdul, the fault is not yours alone,’ said another porter, an older man, evidently of some seniority. ‘We share in your shame!’

  ‘No, no,’ said the foreman brokenly. ‘I have let down the Signora.’

  Used as he was to the ready emotionalism of Egyptian street life, Owen could see that this was serious.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Mahmoud led him up a ladder to a kind of loft where some large cans were stacked in a corner. Mahmoud prised the lid off one of the cans.

  ‘Paint,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t see—?’

  ‘It was what was used to paint the words on the door.’

  ‘Someone here—?’

  ‘Supplied the paint. They didn’t do the actual painting. But they supplied the paint. That is shame enough.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘No, not yet. But in a group like this, it’s bound to come out.’

  They went
back down the ladder.

  ‘We shall leave you,’ said Mahmoud severely, ‘to listen to your own hearts.’

  ‘How do you know none of them did the actual painting?’ Owen asked, as they walked away.

  ‘Because none of them can write,’ said Mahmoud.

  ***

  That was, exactly, what had led Mahmoud to the paint: the fact that it had been writing on the warehouse door; that, and Aisha.

  Not everyone in the Nahhasin—it was a source of shame to Mahmoud—could write, so the number of people who could have done the painting was to some extent restricted. And not just the number, but the type of people, since literacy was largely confined to the educated and well-to-do.

  Mahmoud had been discussing this with his wife (Owen had the feeling that there was not a wide range of conversational subject matter in the Mahmoud household) and Aisha had come up with the suggestion that possibly a school child had written it. School children were the ones who could actually write, she pointed out. Not only that; they were the ones, in the upper forms at least, who were taking an interest in politics. The Sanieh, she said, was a hotbed of political discussion, and much the same went for the boys’ school. And this was especially true, she said, at the moment, when feeling was running so high over the war.

  Mahmoud, slightly astonished but always logical in argument, had to concede the theoretical possibility of this. He pointed out, though, that the writing on the warehouse door had been something of an illiterate scrawl, not at all the handwriting you would expect from a properly taught schoolboy or schoolgirl.

  Aisha said that could be accounted for by the difficulty of writing on the equivalent of a wall. She had once tried it herself and had found it surprisingly hard, especially if, as was usual in such cases, you wanted to write big. If you were small, you found it hard to reach at the top.

  Mahmoud asked when it was that she had tried it.

  The previous year, said Aisha, when the war had just started. She had been so angry that one night she had gone back to school and daubed slogans all over the playground wall.

  Mahmoud, who was finding marriage delightful but rather more disturbing than he had expected, was obliged again to concede the theoretical justice of her remarks. That was as far as he was prepared to go, however, and he was confining them to the realm of theory when she offered to make inquiries among her former school friends. Mahmoud had not been able to think of an objection in time and so she had gone out and done it.

  The next day she had returned triumphant with the news that the culprit had indeed been a school child, a pupil at the boys’ school, Fatima’s brother. The schools were full of it.

  Mahmoud, somewhat taken aback, had deliberated whether it was proper to make use of information acquired in such a way. He decided that responsibility required him at least to have a word with the boy and so he had visited him in the evening at his home.

  The boy had confessed everything readily; indeed, with a certain pride. For weeks, he said, the senior boys had talked of little other than the war and of how they themselves might contribute to the fight against imperialist aggression. They had greeted the news of Morelli’s death with satisfaction; but then they had heard that his widow proposed to carry on the business as if nothing had happened. It was at this point that they had decided to take action. They had wanted, he said, to send her a message that Italians were no longer welcome in Egypt, and had chosen him to write something to that effect on the doors of her warehouse.

  It was then that he had encountered the problem of finding paint, not to mention a brush. The brush he was able to obtain from a friend; paint was more difficult. But then he had had—according to himself—the brilliant idea of using paint from the Signora’s own warehouse to do the daubing. He knew that they kept some paint always in stock and he was a friend of one of the porters—

  Which one? asked Mahmoud. The boy had pulled himself up short at this point. He was not prepared to say. Schoolboys’ honour; although he did not put it like that. ‘We people’ engaged in the battle against imperialism, he said, know how to keep secrets. Mahmoud, doubting that the secret was likely to remain a secret for long, did not press him.

  What he did do, however, was say to the boy that Signor Morelli had lived in the Nahhasin for a long time and that many there looked upon him as a friend, not as an enemy.

  ‘He was Italian,’ said the boy implacably.

  ‘He had become one of us,’ said Mahmoud quietly.

  The boy had screwed up his face scornfully.

  ‘And even if he hadn’t,’ said Mahmoud, stung, ‘there are many in the Nahhasin who would think it cruel to insult his widow.’

  ‘She is Italian, too,’ said the boy, unconvinced: a little shaken, however.

  Mahmoud had left him, too, to listen to his own heart.

  He had, though, been a little shaken himself by the encounter.

  ‘He seemed so—so unreachable,’ he said to Owen, when he was telling him how he had come to find out about the paint.

  ‘I was at that school, too, a long time ago, and when I was there we were always talking about politics. And I daresay we were just as passionate about the occupation of our country by foreigners. But I don’t remember us being so—so hard.’

  Mahmoud belonged to if not the first generation of Egyptian Nationalists, at least the one that followed soon after. He had been active in student politics at the Law School and, when the Nationalist Party had been formed, soon after he graduated, had been one of the first of its members. He had continued to support it after he had joined the Parquet and remained totally committed to the Nationalist cause. He saw himself, indeed, as did most young lawyers, as at its leading edge.

  And now suddenly he became aware of another wave to come, as dedicated as his own but somehow less compromising.

  Perhaps he was reading too much into a single encounter, he told himself. In another year the boy might have forgotten about politics altogether. And how representative was he, anyway?

  He was still sufficiently in touch with the young of the Nahhasin, however, to know that there were many others who felt as the boy did. And for the first time he sensed the possibility of another generation coming along which did not think quite as he did, would be more extreme, harder; yes, harder.

  Owen, too, was left thoughtful by Mahmoud’s account. If even girls like Aisha were daubing walls a year ago, what were they doing now? Schoolgirls, like women, were a kind of invisible presence in Egypt. Behind those long, black, shapeless gowns and dark veils and headdresses you never saw them. And because you never saw their faces, you thought that nothing was going in inside their heads. But that, from what Aisha said, was far from the truth. From what she said, the schools, both girls’ schools and boys’ schools, were in ferment. In a way it was no surprise, at least to him. But it might well be to Kitchener.

  ***

  By mutual tacit consent they turned into the coffee house at the corner of Mahmoud’s street. The usual people, many of whom he had already learned to recognize, were sitting there. Several of them rose to embrace Mahmoud and then, by natural extension, embraced Owen. Sidi Morelli’s domino-playing friends were sitting at their usual table. They rose courteously and made space for Mahmoud and Owen. Was it Owen’s fancy, having just come from the warehouse, that everyone here, too, seemed woebegone?

  ‘Mahmoud, is this true? About the paint?’

  Word had evidently spread with the speed of a bazaar whisper.

  Mahmoud nodded.

  ‘This is terrible,’ said Abd al Jawad. ‘It touches all of us.’

  ‘I shall go and speak to Abdul,’ said Hamdan.

  ‘He needs no chiding,’ said Mahmoud.

  Hamdan looked at him in surprise.

  ‘I go not to chide but to give sympathy.’

  Mahmoud made a gesture of apology.

  ‘Her
own people!’ said Abd al Jawad, distressed. ‘What is the world coming to?’

  ‘It is probably only one man among them,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Let us not call the whole world black when it contains many colours.’

  There were general nods at this. The three friends seemed to find it comforting. And Owen, unused to finding himself on the inside of a community where old sayings, and the wisdom they contained, gave important reassurance, felt oddly comforted too.

  ‘The Signora will take this as a sign of hate,’ said Fahmy, ‘when it is but a sign of foolishness.’

  ‘Certainly the painting was an act of foolishness,’ said Hamdan.

  ‘But the giving of the paint! Her own man!’ said Abd al Jawad, still unable to get over it.

  ‘Could he have known,’ asked Fahmy, he too almost disbelieving, ‘that it was to be used for that?’

  ‘If he did,’ said Hamdan, ‘then shame upon him!’

  The other two nodded their heads, and at the neighbouring tables other heads nodded in agreement.

  ‘It touches us all,’ said Abd al Jawad again.

  Again the heads nodded; and suddenly Owen realized that he was seeing the psychological and social dynamics of the Nahhasin in action. Cairo was still, underneath, not far removed from a tribal society, one in which the honour code had played a crucial part. And where honour was important, so, too, was shame, in some ways the ultimate social sanction of such a society.

  It was this pressure that Mahmoud had been content to leave working among the porters, confident that in the end it would tell. He had done the same with the boy; but could he be as confident that it would work there too?

  ***

  Another small pile of missives from the Box was waiting on his desk when he got back to his office. He glanced through it. They were much the same as usual: a complaint that a certain baker was using disgusting substances to make his bread; another that an oil seller was adulterating his cooking oil. There was the usual letter from a poor old lady claiming that her daughter-in-law was trying to poison her (Owen had checked on this previously; she wasn’t, but she thought it was a good idea). And here was something new: a woman enlisting his aid in an attempt to get her son into a certain school. The letter was in a bazaar letter-writer’s hand (not the same one) so the woman herself was obviously unable to write. She would have had to have paid for the letter but clearly thought it worth it. Education was moving up the ordinary Egyptian’s agenda.