Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

Owen groaned again; inaudibly, he hoped.

Mahmoud, however, became fierce.

‘Did you touch her?’ he demanded.

‘No! I would never show her any disrespect, never-’

Are you sure?’

‘Never! Never! I was honourable, she was honourable. She was always honourable. She-’

The boy dissolved in tears.

All right, all right. All right!’

‘Never!’ sobbed the boy.

All right! So what did you do?’

‘Do?’ The boy looked at him in surprise. ‘We didn’t do anything.’

‘You must have done something. What happened next?’

‘Nothing. Leila said we must stop seeing each other now that she was betrothed.’

‘So-?’

‘So we stopped seeing each other.’

‘Come on, you don’t expect me to believe that!’

‘Just the once. I said I had to see her, she owed it to me. And then-’

‘Yes?’

‘I pleaded with her. I pleaded with her for hours. But she said no, she was betrothed, it was different now, and we must stop seeing each other.’

And what about the next time?’

‘There was no next time.’

‘You just went away?’

‘No. Not at first. I–I hung around. But she wouldn’t see me. And in the end-yes, I went away. The fates were against us!’

‘And you never saw her again?’

‘Never. I wanted to, but-Then one day I heard.’

‘That-?’

‘That she was dead.’

‘How did you hear?’

‘My work brings me down in these parts sometimes. I went into a shop to buy some oranges and I heard the women talking.’

‘And then you went away again?’

‘What else was there to do?’ the boy said.

After the boy had gone, they talked to the woman.

No, she said, she hadn’t done it, although she knew who had. It had all been very difficult because there was no mother to act on Leila’s behalf. If there had been, all this wouldn’t have happened. Leila would have been circumcised years before.

‘But that fool of a father-’

The mother had died soon after they arrived in Cairo and the father had not married again.

‘That was a mistake; the girl needed a mother.’

They were, of course, desperately poor. The father had been a simple water-carrier. It was one of the humblest jobs in the city. All you needed was a water-skin. Then you would go down to the river, fill it and then walk through the streets offering it for a millieme or two to the thirsty.

From a very early age Leila had had to take on the duties of the woman in the house, cleaning, cooking, carrying-even the water had to be fetched. From an early age, too, each day she had taken her father’s lunch to him.

‘Too much for him to carry, I suppose,’ said Um Fattouha tartly. ‘Though you’d have thought he’d have got used to carrying.’

With no woman in the house, Leila had been almost indispensable to him.

‘That’s why he wouldn’t let her marry. It’s not that there weren’t inquiries. There’s plenty of mothers who wouldn’t mind their son marrying someone who worked hard and didn’t complain.’

But of course he had known that he would have to let her go at some time. You could always get a woman in to do the housework. A marriageable woman, though, was worth something more than just her labour. The trouble was that she was a depreciating asset and the longer you left it, the less she would fetch.

‘So when old Fayoum came along, he had to do some hard thinking. Well, it wasn’t that hard. Fayoum was worth a bit- well, to a water-carrier, anyway. There was a chance, too, they say, of a job on the cart itself, and when you’re getting old, that’s the kind of job you fancy. So he didn’t have to think too long.’

It was only when they began to think about the wedding- and there were plenty of women in the street who were ready to help him think about the wedding-that the problem was spotted.

It arose when they began to think about the wedding night itself and were making arrangements for the depilation.

‘Old Fayoum’s not going to like that,’ they said. ‘He’ll think there’s something wrong.’

So they went to see Leila’s father.

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘There’s still plenty of time. Just get on with it.’

It was here, though, that opinions had begun to diverge, for some of the women hadn’t liked it.

‘She’s too old,’ they said. ‘Since it’s got to this stage, it’s best left as it is.’

But Leila’s father had been adamant.

‘Now it had got so far, he didn’t want anything to go wrong. He was counting on that job on the cart, you see.’

A number of the women who had been approached had been unwilling to do it. Um Fattouha herself had refused.

‘I might have done it better than that old bitch,’ she said, ‘but even if it had gone right, there would still have been problems, wouldn’t there? At her age it would have taken time to heal. Just think of the wedding night if she wasn’t ready!’

In the end, though, someone had been found and the operation performed.

‘Well, it went wrong from the start. There was that much blood! Or so I hear.’

Leila had never recovered. She had lingered on for a few days and then died.

‘And that old bastard was too mean even to bury her properly!’ said Um Fattouha indignantly. ‘He just threw her into the Canal like a bit of old rubbish!’

(5Wk9

The swollen river lay uneasily within its banks. Even in the last day or two it had risen noticeably. Now as you walked along the embankment the water was lapping at your feet. The launch came right in to the bank. Owen hardly needed to step down. Along the banks the women were doing their washing, their silver anklets flashing in the sun. Further along, the buffaloes were lying in the water like hippopotami. The great stretch of the barrage rose up ahead of them.

Ferguson was waiting at the landing stage.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it’s full. And when it’s full, it’s never still. It’s straining, you see, straining to break out. And when it presses, it finds all the weak spots.’

They walked through the Gardens to the engineers’ office, built out of the same sun-baked clay as the houses of the workmen further down the canal. In the early days they had built it of wood but then had found that wood was much hotter than clay, particularly when the walls were thick and the windows small.

Macrae was sitting at a table bent over a drawing. Overhead a fan was whirring. He looked up and pushed the drawing away.

‘So you’ve come,’ he said.

‘I came as soon as I got your message,’ said Owen.

‘Aye,’ said Macrae. He seemed unenthusiastic; even cast down.

‘We’d better have some coffee,’ he said. ‘This is a bad one.’

He went to the door and called. A boy, who had clearly been waiting, promptly appeared with a tray. He set it down on the table with a beam of white teeth.

Neither Ferguson nor Macrae were beaming.

‘Well,’ said Macrae abruptly, ‘you were right. It was one of our own.’

Ferguson shook his head.

‘We told you we’d put it to them about the tools. “Someone must have had tools,” we said. “And if anyone brought a tool kit in with them one day, the chances are that one of you would have seen it. Now, we’re all in this together-it’s like the village back at home-and if you saw it, you must tell us. Otherwise it could happen again!” Well, that’s what we said, and then we left them with it. They like to talk these things over, you see, among themselves. One of them would never come to us on his own. They’re all part of the group, and it’s what the group decides. We just left it to them and, well, this morning they came back to us.’

‘With a name?’