A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Others here?’

  ‘No, Effendi, they are in Cairo. And I do not know their names—truly, Effendi!—for they are friends of friends and—’ He hesitated. ‘Effendi, it is as a brotherhood. Only it is a large brotherhood, Effendi, in which not every man knows his brother’s name. Only this, that—’ his voice faltered but then became determined—‘we wish for a better Egypt.’

  He kept his eyes fixed on Owen’s face.

  ‘Does not every man wish for a better Egypt?’

  ‘The Egypt we wish for, Effendi, is one not ruled by Pashas. Nor by the British.’

  ‘I see. This brotherhood of yours: are you all soldiers?’

  ‘Yes, Effendi.’

  ‘And it is the brotherhood which asked you to obtain the guns?’

  The man hesitated.

  ‘Not quite, Effendi.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not this time. It was—it was one of the brotherhood.’

  ‘I don’t see the difference.’

  ‘He asked for himself, Effendi, not for the brotherhood.’

  ‘I see. So it was just a case of using the brotherhood connection?’

  ‘That is so, Effendi.’

  ‘Various things puzzle me, Rashid. The first is, why does he have to obtain guns in this way? If he is a soldier, surely there are easier ways?’

  ‘It is possible, Effendi, but it is not easy. The armouries are kept locked and guarded. It is easier to obtain guns through trade.’

  ‘I understand. The second thing that puzzles me is this: why, if, as I take it, he is a soldier in the garrison here, why should he want guns sent to Cairo?’

  ‘He is not in the garrison here. He was passing through.’

  ‘On his way to Cairo?’

  ‘Yes, Effendi.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A month ago. Perhaps six weeks.’

  ‘I see. And he knew that guns could be obtained here, but he also knew that he could not carry them with him.’

  ‘That is so, Effendi.’

  ‘Rashid, what you have told me is gold. And perhaps there could be gold in return if you could but tell me one thing.’

  ‘That is?’

  ‘The name of the man.’

  The soldier shook his head.

  ‘Not for gold nor for anything will I do that, Effendi. For he is one of the brotherhood, as I. I have told you much, perhaps too much, but this I will not tell you.’

  ***

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Owen said to Georgiades as they walked away, ‘for now that we know this much, we shall be able to find him. And we know, too, now, what organization it was that Shukri was talking about. Like a society but not a society. Like a club but not a club. Call it a brotherhood. And big and powerful. As big and powerful as the army. That,’ said Owen, ‘I don’t like. In fact, it’s worrying.’

  ‘It’s not the army that’s behind this,’ said Georgiades, ‘it’s just a one-man effort. Shukri said that as well.’

  ‘Let’s hope it stays like that,’ said Owen.

  But he knew that there was little he could do about it. Whether it stayed like that or not depended upon other things; not least upon Kitchener.

  ***

  There was one other thing he had learned, and this was important; that there were caravans carrying guns from east to west. This surprised him, for he would have thought that the route was too difficult. It would need good camel men. However, it seemed that the traffic along the coast might have been displaced southwards. He told Georgiades to stay for a while and look into it. Meanwhile, he himself caught the train back to Cairo.

  ***

  The railway from Assuan to Luxor was the older military line and narrow gauge, but at Luxor he transferred into the more comfortable coaches of the ordinary State Railway. From then on he had only to sit and sit and sit and sit.

  The line ran along the western bank of the Nile and he was hardly ever out of sight of the river for long. He could follow the graceful lateen sails of the feluccas, the occasional steamer, the more frequent dahabeahs, and this gave some interest to what was often a monotonous journey through featureless desert landscape.

  As they drew nearer to Cairo they began to run more and more through cultivated fields, with fellahin stooping among the plants, women going down to the river with pots on their heads, and the continuous creak of the water wheels along the river banks. Water buffalo browsed on the sandbanks in the shallows and, in almost every village, dilapidated pigeon towers nosed up among the palm trees.

  This was immemorial Egypt; and suddenly he could see why Kitchener so favoured the fellah. It wasn’t just that he had a soft spot for the fellahin, although he clearly did, but rather this very fact of immemoriality. What drew Kitchener was the stability of it all.

  But that, he realized abruptly, was where he himself differed from Kitchener. It was not what drew him. What he missed, what he needed, was movement, the physical movement of Cairo, with its carts and crowds and cafés, all the noise and bustle of the big city, and not just the physical movement but the intellectual movement, the talk in the coffee houses, the passion of the newspapers. That was why in the end he could not go along with Kitchener.

  And why, in the end, he would never be able to go along with Trudi’s sort of movement, either, those vast, austere rides. In the desert there was nothing.

  But Trudi was right in one thing and Kitchener was wrong: there was movement, movement of a different kind, in Egypt, and those who sought to govern her had to move too.

  ***

  However, it was not Kitchener who occupied his thoughts for most of the journey but Zeinab. In a way, that was Kitchener too for it was he who was driving Nuri to Constantinople, and with him Zeinab. But was it just that, or were things anyway, as she had said, too difficult? Was it in the end impossible for someone like him, a servant in the British Administration, to have a relationship with someone like Zeinab, an Egyptian?

  But it wasn’t that really. They could have a relationship and no one would mind. It was the next step: marriage. Could someone like him marry someone like her?

  But he knew that, deep down, it wasn’t even that either. They were both, he and Zeinab, sheltering behind the difficulties. Neither of them was quite sure, quite sure enough, that it was what they wanted. And so they had been content to leave the issue dangling. That, he realized, had been the basis of their relationship: a tacit agreement to leave the issue dangling.

  But now Zeinab was beginning to feel that she could not go on like this. He sensed that she was wanting some kind of resolution. Things were closing in on her, time was closing in. She was no longer satisfied to leave things dangling.

  And he?

  ***

  He found Paul, as he had expected, in the bar at the Sporting Club and pulled him aside.

  ‘Paul, how would Kitchener feel if I got married?’

  Paul looked doubtful.

  ‘He doesn’t like people close to him getting married.’

  ‘I’m not close to him.’

  ‘No.’

  Paul examined his glass.

  ‘Zeinab?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that create difficulties?’

  ‘Not any more than at present, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. People wouldn’t know whose side you were on. At the moment they do: our side, the British. But if you were married to an Egyptian, they might not be sure. And with a job like Mamur Zapt, it’s best that they are sure.’

  ‘Paul, I really don’t think—’

  ‘And then you’ve got to consider it from our side. British interests are not quite the same as Egyptian interests and each one of us out here has to balance the two. If you were married to an Egyptian, people might have doubts about your ability to maintain
that kind of balance.’

  ‘Too close to the Egyptians?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why don’t they have doubts about that now? Or perhaps they do,’ said Owen bitterly.

  ‘I don’t think they feel bothered if the woman’s just a girlfriend,’ said Paul. ‘Illogical and unreasonable of them, I know, and reflecting a strangely exalted view of the influence of Administration wives.’ He hesitated. ‘You don’t think you could just leave things as they are?’

  ‘Zeinab’s not happy.’

  ‘That’s what all this is about, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I can understand that.’

  Owen was silent for a moment. Then he said:

  ‘There’s nothing in the regulations that actually stops me, is there?’

  ‘From getting married?’

  ‘From getting married to an Egyptian.’

  ‘I think that’s beside the point. The point is that a job like Mamur Zapt is sustainable only if you have the confidence of the key players.’

  ‘On both sides, Paul, on both sides. And just at the moment that’s a bit difficult.’

  ‘Or on the side that’s got the power.’

  ‘And you think I wouldn’t have Kitchener’s confidence if I went ahead and married?’

  ‘I think that would just about put the lid on it,’ said Paul.

  ***

  ‘Currant salesman. Aleppo. Fluent Arabic required.’

  ‘Inspector of Police, Burma.’

  ‘Customs Officer, Abu Dhabi. Good arithmetic.’

  ‘Commander of the Royal Guard, Zanzibar.’

  Hum. Owen put the newspaper down. Not exactly promising. The Royal Guard, perhaps? It was an Arab country, after all. But would Zeinab agree to go there? Almost before he had finished framing the question, he could hear the answer. Paris, possibly, Zanzibar, never.

  Nikos stuck his head in at the door.

  ‘There was that message from Lord Kitchener—’ he began cautiously.

  ‘It can wait.’

  ‘Yes. Well. And then the Khedive—’

  Owen jumped up.

  ‘He can wait, too.’ He searched for his tarboosh. ‘I’ve got more important things to do.’

  ‘More important—?’

  Nikos looked after him bewilderedly as he hurried off along the corridor.

  At the other end of the corridor, an agitated knot of orderlies.

  ‘Effendi, Effendi! There’s a snake in the lavatory!’

  ‘Another time,’ said Owen, pushing his way through.

  As he passed through the orderly room, the clerk at the desk looked up.

  ‘Effendi, a message from the Minister of Finance—’

  ‘Sod him!’

  ‘Sod—?’

  Owen strode on, leaving behind him an impressed Bab-el-Khalk.

  The consensus among the orderlies was that this must be serious. Another war, perhaps? Or maybe the same war, only a new development? Yes, that was probably it. And soon the nature of the development was taking on a precise form. The British were coming in! And then, even more precisely, and, unfortunately, even less probably: the British were coming in on our side!

  Bearers entering with messages picked up the news and spread it excitedly through the city. The British were coming in on the Egyptian side. The Mamur Zapt had said so.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was almost as if Zeinab had been expecting him. When he went in, there she lay, posed on a pile of great leather cushions, eyes looking tragically up at him, as if she was playing a part in one of the operas she loved so passionately, whose stories Owen always found bizarre but which Zeinab took completely seriously, finding in them a perfect vehicle to express her own heights and depths of feeling.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said now, sombrely.

  She was surrounded by books; in fact, too many books for her to have been reading them, unless she had been dipping into them, as she sometimes did, to reread favourite passages. They were all in French. On the floor, not far away, big headlines proclaiming the iniquity of the British, was a newspaper, Egyptian but also in French; and, scattered around the room, almost too casually, were other things French: the latest journals from Paris, some French catalogues, pieces of French music. It was as if today it was important to her to assert her distance from anything English.

  He had a suspicion that it was also intended to assert her Egyptianness. If so, something had gone wrong, for she was doing so in a language that was not Egyptian and using symbols—if that’s what the books were—to make the statements that were not those of her own culture but those of another. Perhaps, though, this was Egyptian: doubly dispossessed as a country both of culture—at least so far as its governing class was concerned—and power.

  But going to Turkey would not help. She would feel just as dispossessed there. She did not speak Turkish. French might be a foreign language, but it was the language she had been brought up to, the one in which she felt most at home. The Turks, too, were not Arabs. The Cairenes always regarded them as puddings, a bit too solid and stolid; reliable and efficient, no doubt, but, oh, so boring! And she would find the social and religious structures there as oppressive as those she objected to in Egypt, with, perhaps, less opportunity of slipping out from underneath them.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Owen. ‘It’s no good.’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘No good,’ he explained, ‘going to Constantinople.’

  ‘At least the British aren’t there!’ she said bitterly.

  ‘There are a lot of other things that aren’t there, either,’ said Owen, ‘and they’re all things that matter to you.’

  ‘I don’t know that anything matters to me much,’ said Zeinab listlessly, ‘just at the moment.’

  He was used to her troughs, but this was a deep one.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘come on! This isn’t like you.’

  ‘I don’t know what is like me any more,’ she said despairingly, ‘and that’s part of the trouble. I don’t know who I am any longer or who I want to be. I thought I did, but that’s all gone now, closed off. There’s nothing left for me here. So,’ she shrugged, ‘I might as well go to Constantinople.’

  ‘There is something left for you here. I’m here.’

  She regarded him expressionlessly.

  ‘You’re what’s closed off,’ she said.

  ‘No, no, no—’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Can’t you see it? They let us play, but the moment it looked like getting serious, they stepped in to end it.’

  ‘No one has stepped in to end it.’

  ‘They’ve opened up a gap, which has become a great divide. I always knew it was there but I thought I would bridge it. I thought you could bridge it. But we couldn’t, could we? I’m not blaming you, I’m just blaming…things. Actually,’ said Zeinab, with a flash of her old form, ‘I blame the British.’

  ‘Let’s leave the British out of it. In the end it comes down to you and me, and we’re individuals and can do what we like.’

  ‘Oh, no, we can’t.’

  ‘We can. And must.’

  ‘We can’t. You’re British and have got to do what the British tell you. And I’m Egyptian, and—’

  ‘And no one is telling you what to do. Come on, now.’

  ‘Oh, but they are! Can’t you see it? I can’t have a job of my own, I can’t go out on my own in public, I can’t live on my own—or, at least, I can, but only because my father is rich enough and powerful enough to bend the rules, I can’t even choose the clothes I wear. That’s what Egypt is telling me. All the time. And all the time it’s telling me there’s only one thing you can do if you’re a woman, and that is to marry. And even that, now, is cut off from me. Can’t you see? I’m trapped!’

>   ‘If you’re trapped,’ said Owen, ‘then so am I.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘not like I am. You’ve got a job. You’ve got a life.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Owen, ‘the thing I came to tell you is that I am giving up my job.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For you. And me.’

  She sat silent for some time, fingering the stitching on one of the cushions.

  Then she said suddenly:

  ‘I can’t let you do it.’

  ‘The decision’s made. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while. Up till recently, though, I’ve always had a vague hope that when it actually came to it, perhaps they’d go along with it. Now I know they won’t. Not while Kitchener’s here, at any rate. So I’ve made up my mind.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He leaned across and kissed her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zeinab, after a moment, dreamily. This was how she had always imagined it. He would come along (ride up?) and lay himself, his wealth, his lands at her feet. And she would—

  But hold on a minute. Himself was one thing but wealth and lands, unfortunately, another; and although Zeinab in one vein was passionately romantic, in another she was severely realistic. She pushed him off.

  ‘What would we live on?’ she said.

  ‘I’d get a job.’

  ‘What sort of job?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There are lots of them in the newspapers.’

  ‘You’ve said you’d get a job before.’

  ‘Yes, well now I really mean it.’

  ‘You’ve said that before, too.’

  ‘This time I’ve actually been looking.’

  ‘And what have you found?’

  ‘Well, Chief of Police, that sort of thing. Commander of the Royal Guard.’

  ‘Commander of the Royal Guard?’ said Zeinab incredulously. ‘Where?’

  ‘Zanzibar—’

  ‘Zanzibar!’

  Zeinab fell about laughing.

  At least, he reflected afterwards, it had had the effect of snapping her out of her gloom.