Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

‘How about someone else having a go?’ said one over his shoulder. No one seemed very willing.

Even the Muslim gravedigger was beginning to doubt. ‘How long are we going to go on doing this, then?’ he grumbled.

‘Until we have set people’s minds at rest,’ said Owen sternly.

The gravedigger heaved out a few more half-hearted spadefuls.

‘I think their minds are pretty well at rest now,’ he said. ‘No,’ said Owen, ‘we must go on until all are satisfied. All night if necessary.’

All night?’ said the gravedigger. ‘Look-’

‘Unless,’ said Owen, looking around, ‘those knowledgable-?’ The front ranks of the crowd, who had been standing there longest, decided that they were knowledgable enough and began to drift away.

‘No woman,’ said one of them as he left. ‘That’s a bit of a disappointment.’

‘Well, you can’t strike lucky all the time,’ said his neighbour.

‘We didn’t even strike lucky that first time,’ said the man, ‘if what that Effendi said was true.’

‘No,’ agreed the neighbour despondently.

Owen, hearing, was very satisfied.

Mahmoud turned to him.

‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the Gamaliya. There’s someone I want to see.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The father. It was someone known to her, remember.’

There was still a small knot of people around McPhee. As he was passing, Owen heard one of them say:

‘Well, then, if it wasn’t a woman, what was it?’

‘It wasn’t anything,’ said McPhee reassuringly. ‘Just some animal.’

‘Why would an animal want to dig holes in the “Bride”?’

‘I don’t know. It was probably just a dog.’

‘It didn’t look like a dog to me. They don’t dig burrows. What do you think, AJhmed?’

‘It looked more like the thing a lizard would dig.’

‘Too big. Except-’

The thought struck them both at the same time.

A lizard man!’

Owen took an arabeah up to the Ismailiya, where he was meeting Zeinab for lunch. Not in an Arab restaurant-they looked askance at women, even Pashas’ daughters-but in a French one. Zeinab liked to eat French as well as dress French. She even normally spoke French, and she and Owen drifted in and out of French and English as the occasion arose. The culture of the Egyptian upper class was heavily French and there was as great a gap between it and that of the ordinary Egyptian as there was between the massive dams the British were erecting and, well, the Lizard Man.

Zeinab, however, was anti-French today. She had some intellectual periodicals under her arm, French, but different from the ones she usually took. She tapped one of them significantly.

‘Napoleon was against women,’ she said darkly. ‘I’ve been reading.’

‘Well, yes, but you’ve got to make allowances for the time.’ Zeinab took no notice.

‘It’s in the Code Napoleon,’ she said.

Which was still the basis of the Egyptian legal code. When the Khedive Ismail had wanted to reform and modernize the Egyptian legal system he had simply adopted the Code wholesale.

‘I don’t think you can blame him entirely,’ objected Owen. ‘Islamic law-’

Zeinab brooded.

‘Islamic law is men’s law,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, when you turn to the alternative, what do you find? Men’s law.’

‘Law is the same for everyone,’ said Owen. ‘If you commit a murder, you get hanged for it. Never mind whether you’re a man or a woman.’

‘Yes, but some things affect women more than they do men.’

‘Have you been talking to Labiba Latifa?’ demanded Owen. ‘Circumcision, for instance,’ said Zeinab.

‘That’s social practice, not law. Why don’t you talk to Mahmoud?’

‘I will,’ said Zeinab.

Owen had not intended to go back to the Gamaliya that day but when he returned to his office, he found Georgiades waiting for him. He had found out, he thought, the person whom Babikr had gone to see.

‘He’s a fiki,’ he said. ‘Several of the workmen go and see him. He used to live at their village but when he got old, he moved up here to be with his son. They still remember him in the village, and when the men come up here for the Inundation, they always take him something.’

‘A fiki?’ said Owen. ‘Then he might know of the oath, even if it wasn’t to him.’

A fiki was a professional reader, or singer, of the Koran and as a person of (some) learning and (some) holiness was the sort of person you might go to if you wanted a witness of authority when you were swearing an oath.

He lived in a small back street in the Gamaliya not far from the mosque. The son, slightly startled, showed them in.

‘It is,’ Owen explained, ‘to do with a man known to you, who used to listen to you in your village.’

The fiki nodded.

‘The men come to you, I know, each year when they are up here for the Inundation, bringing greetings from the village.’ The fiki nodded again.

‘Was Babikr among them?’

‘Babikr!’ said the fiki.

‘You know?’

‘I know.’

‘Was he among those who came to you?’

The fiki thought for a moment.

‘Yes.’

‘I wondered if he had talked of an oath?’

The fiki thought again.

‘I do not think so.’

‘It might have been one he had taken in the village. Do you recall such an oath?’

‘He took various oaths. All do.’

‘Do you remember the substance of the oaths?’

‘To do with wedding settlements. There was an ox once, I think. These were the usual foolish disputes.’

‘Do you recall them?’

‘They are not worth recalling.’

‘Yet Babikr, I think, was not a man to take them lightly.’

‘He was not,’ agreed the fiki. He warmed slightly. ‘He was ever true to his word.’

‘And would have kept to it,’ said Owen, ‘even if what he had committed himself to was not wise.’

‘Very probably.’ The fiki sat thinking for a moment. ‘Why do you ask these things?’ he said suddenly.

‘I think he committed himself to something that was not wise and then found he could not go back on it.’

‘You think the attack on the dam was not wise?’

‘Well, no,’ said Owen, startled. ‘It was an attack on all. It was a blow at the common good.’

‘I, on the contrary, think it was wise,’ said the fiki. ‘For what these new dams have brought us is not good but harm.’

‘But, surely-’

‘Harm!’ repeated the fiki emphatically. ‘They have brought us ill-being, not well-being. When I was young everyone in the village was strong and well. They needed to be, perhaps, because the Pashas bore down hard in those days. But they were not sick. Now they are sick from birth. The children grow up with red eyes. The men are listless in the fields. Is that good? Is that as it should be? That is what the dams have brought us. And you say that Babikr was not wise!’

‘The dams have brought abundance,’ said Owen.

‘But at a price,’ said the fiki.

‘It is not the abundance that is wrong,’ said Owen, ‘but how it is used.’

The fiki shrugged.

‘Certainly it never gets to us.’

‘It is not the dams that are bad but the people.’

‘You don’t see the people,’ said the fiki, ‘but you see the dams.’

And so you would strike at them?’

‘They have destroyed a balance. In the old days there was one crop a year and the people were healthy. Now there are three and the people are sick. I would restore the balance.’

Owen was silent.

‘Newness!’ said the fiki. ‘It is always newness! Why do we need these new dams? Were not the old good enough? Was not there water in the fields then as there is now? It is the same everywhere. They tell us this is the last year they are going to make the Cut. They are going to fill the canal in, people say, and put a tram-way on top of it. To what end? The canal brought water to the city, to us here in the Gamaliya. And now they are going to fill it in. You cannot drink tram-ways.’