Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

‘He never cared two milliemes about his daughter! All he cared about was getting a job in that cart!’

‘Well, that’s gone, hasn’t it? Omar Fayoum won’t be interested in him now. Now that he’s not going to marry the girl.’

‘She’s well out of it, that’s what I say. Or would be if she wasn’t dead.’

‘She may well be. Do you know what Marriam said to me? She said, I’d rather be dead than marry that dirty old bastard!’

‘Ah, well, it’s one thing saying that-’

The two men shouldered their skins and walked away. Owen hesitated for a moment and then ran after them. ‘Your pardon, friends,’ he said. ‘I fear that I may have brought that on you!’

‘No pardon needed,’ they said courteously. ‘We brought it on ourselves. Though quite why-’

‘They did not like it when you spoke of where Omar Fayoum gets his water from.’

‘Up to some fiddle, I expect!’

‘Where does he get it from?’

‘He doesn’t always go to the river for it, that’s for certain. What do you think, Selim?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes into the es-Zakir and gets it out of the pond.’

The other man laughed.

‘He’d have to have something worked out with the gardeners.’

‘I wouldn’t put that past him.’

He looked at Owen.

‘You’re not supposed to take it out of the ponds,’ he explained. ‘Nor any other place where there’s stagnant water. Not these days. They say it’s not clean enough. Not for drinking. Though what Omar Fayoum is supposed to do and what he does are two different things.’

Owen was, as it happens, on his way to the Gamaliya. He wanted to make another attempt at a peaceful resolution of the dispute between the Muslim gravediggers and the Jews. The adjourned meeting had not resumed; but Paul and Owen, happening to meet up with McPhee in the bar of the Sporting Club, had agreed to try something out on the two sides.

McPhee was going to tell the Jews sternly that they could do the Cut, as it was their turn, but for no extra money. If the fact that it was the Sabbath ruled it out for them, then the Muslims would do it.

Owen, meanwhile, was going to talk to the Muslims, equally sternly, and tell them that it had been decided to return to the traditional arrangements for the Cut, that the Jews would do the cutting as it was their turn, but for no extra pay, and that if they didn’t like it, then the task would be offered to the Muslims. If there was any difficulty from them then British soldiers would do it.

The theory was that the prospect of the Jews declining would keep the Muslims happy, while the agonizing that the Jews would have to do over their decision would keep them, if not exactly happy, then at least preoccupied. With any luck both sides would dangle until the very last moment, until, in fact, it was too late for either of them to cause much trouble.

Thus the theory; not quite, at once, as simple in practice.

‘Suppose they don’t refuse?’ the Muslim gravediggers objected. ‘Suppose the buggers agree to do it after all?’

‘Well, then, they have to do it. It’s their turn.’

‘I don’t agree with this turn business,’ said one of the gravediggers. ‘Why have they got to have a turn at all?’

‘Because it’s always been like that’-normally a clinching argument in Cairo-‘and because it’s too late to change now.’

‘We can do it as well as they can!’

‘I’m sure you can. That is why we do it in turn. One year it’s you, the next year it’s them. This year it’s them.’

‘Yes, but this is the last year. We’re going to lose out.’

‘You don’t lose out. This is when it happens to stop.’

‘Yes, but if it stopped next year, then they’d be the ones to lose out!’

‘No one’s losing out. You’ve-’ a sudden moment of inspiration-‘you’ve both done it an equal number of times!’

They looked at each other, thunder-struck.

‘That so?’

‘Absolutely!’

No one was in a position to contradict. They subsided, grumbling.

But then returned.

‘Yes, but it wouldn’t have stopped if it hadn’t been for them, would it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Putting that girl there. That made it all wrong.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it. Nor have the Jews, either. It was the Government that decided to end the Cut. For very good reasons, too. That land is a health hazard.’

Help arrived from an unexpected quarter.

‘I don’t think putting the girl there would have made it wrong, Mustapha,’ said one of the gravediggers diffidently. ‘It would have made it sweet, surely?’

‘Well, it would have if it had been one of their girls. But it was one of ours. I mean, you can’t have that, can you?’

‘The girl has got nothing to do with it!’ said Owen with emphasis. ‘Her death has got nothing whatsoever to do with the Cut. And she was not killed by the Jews!’

‘Who was she killed by, then?’ asked one of the men.

‘We don’t quite know that yet,’ Owen had to admit. ‘But we do know that she was not killed by the Jews.’

‘If we could be sure of that,’ said one of the more thoughtful gravediggers.

On his way back to the Ezbekiya, where he was meeting Zeinab, Owen cut across the Quartier Rosetti, and in doing so crossed the line of the Khalig Canal. To his surprise, down among the rubbish he saw Mahmoud.

‘Hello,’ he called. ‘What’s all this?’

Mahmoud looked up, saw him, and, with a certain amount of relief, climbed out and came towards him.

‘I’m retracing the line that must have been taken with her body,’ he said. ‘It’s a hell of a long way. She couldn’t have run there, as I had thought.’

‘It’s a long way to carry that sort of weight,’ said Owen, looking up the length of the Canal. ‘Not to mention the risk of being seen.’

‘That’s why he would have gone along the Canal,’ said Mahmoud. ‘It was dark, too.’

‘He’d have had to have known what he was doing to walk along the Canal in the dark.’

The bed was choked with rubbish.

‘That is what I am finding,’ said Mahmoud drily.

Owen offered to walk with him. He wasn’t meeting Zeinab till seven o’clock.

Their way led at first past the backs of some old Mameluke mansions with entrances on the Sharia Es-Sureni. Seeing them from the rear like this was a revelation because while from the front they looked solid and austere, from the back they were a riot of sixteenth century fantasy. Beautiful staircases dropped down to the canal, where, presumably, there would once have been boats, while above them rose meshrebiya oriels and pergola’ed terraces, feathery with palms and green with creepers.

They were once the most prized of houses and this the most prized of aspects. He thought of Venice but it was a Venice of the desert, where water was treasured and the stuff of paradise; almost literally so, for paradise was the old Arabic word for garden, a vision of shade and green and fertility among the heat and sand, oasis in the desert.

Now, though, the houses were decaying and crumbling, the staircases slippery with slime. The heavy, box-like windows overhanging the water let mosquitoes in through their fretwork and the stench alone was enough to drive their occupants into the rooms at the front of the houses.

Below the staircases, along the side of the canal, heavy, metal, distinctly unmedieval pipes ran for part of the way, themselves often covered by fallen masonry or rotten vegetation.

They were picking their way along the bed of the canal, past falls of rubble, slides of earth and sand, drifts of kitchen leavings and the occasional carcass, when they suddenly saw someone ahead of them. He turned to greet them as they came up. It was young Suleiman.