Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

‘Why, then, was it done?’ asked Mahmoud.

‘She was going to get married. Late, yes, but she was the only woman in the household-her mother died some years ago-and I fancy her father did not want to lose her services about the house. However, the opportunity of a profitable marriage came up and he couldn’t afford to miss it. Now, the bridegroom was very much older than she was and very traditional in his thinking. He would certainly expect her to be circumcised. Indeed, the marriage might well have been off if she wasn’t. So-’

‘Why hadn’t she been circumcised before?’

‘Her mother had died. These things are usually seen as women’s matters and there was no woman to see they were done.’

‘No one else in the family?’

‘They had moved from the country. The father is a water-carrier, poor, and’-Labiba sniffed-Very ignorant. Do you know what is the greatest cause of crime in the country, Mr el Zaki? Ignorance. Not even poverty, for we can be poor without being ignorant. Admittedly, the two usually go together.’

Mahmoud bowed his head gravely. He had expected a lecture at some point.

‘So he knew no better. That is why, Mr el Zaki, I am in some difficulty. On the one hand the case is in the public eye, and an issue of principle is involved, an issue which we can make narrow enough-the age, not the fact, of circumcision-to enlist public support. On the other, the person in the dock should be ignorance, not some poor, lowly, uneducated man. Nor the poor, lowly, uneducated woman who performed the circumcision.’

‘You know the woman?’

‘I do.’

‘And the girl?’

‘I know of her.’

‘So,’ said Mahmoud, putting down his coffee and looking at Owen, ‘the issue of principle is very close.’

Which way Mahmoud would go on the issue when the moment of decision came, Owen did not know. No one could rise as far and as fast in the Parquet as Mahmoud had done without being worldly wise. Yet there was at the same time an odd streak of naivete in Mahmoud which took the form of an obstinacy about principle. He remained, thought Owen, as he walked down to the river the next morning, an idealist at heart.

He was on his way to see how preparations for the Cut were getting on. As he neared the point where the Khalig Canal came out into the river and where the Cut would be made, there were increasing signs of the coming festivities. Banners had appeared on some of the houses and brightly-coloured strings of bunting hung across the streets.

He had arranged to meet McPhee and when he turned a corner he saw him ahead of him. Along with a group of small boys and half the neighbourhood he was watching the public crier crying the height of the river.

‘Fifteen digits today and still rising!’ the crier intoned sonorously.

A hand was pushed through the lattice-work of one of the harem windows above and some coins thrown down. The crier scooped them up swiftly before the small boys got to them and bowed to the window.

‘Blessed be the mistress of this house!’ he called.

‘Digits?’ asked Owen.

‘On the Nilometer,’ said McPhee.

It stood at the end of Roda Island, just opposite them.

‘It’s very important, you know,’ said McPhee. ‘In the old days it used to relate to tax. There was a law which said that you couldn’t levy land-tax until the river had reached a height of sixteen cubits. Very sensible, really, because people’s capacity to pay depended on the irrigation of their land. Of course, the Government used to fake it.’

The dam, a simple earth one, ran across the canal just at the point of its entrance into the river opposite Roda Island. Its top was now only some six feet above the level of the water but its builders had been in this business for a thousand years and knew what they were doing.

Some way in front of the dam, in the dry bed of the canal, a tall cone of earth had been constructed. Its top had been sown with millet.

‘Obvious fertility associations,’ said McPhee.

When the Cut was made, and the dam breached, the water would pour through and demolish the cone, to the great satisfaction of onlookers. In the past, tradition had it, a young virgin had been sacrificed simultaneously, no doubt to their even greater satisfaction.

‘Although there is possibly some confusion here,’ said McPhee. ‘You see, the cone is also called “The Bride”-the Nile, as it were, impregnates it-and popular imagination may have distorted that into a real woman.’

Popular imagination was still alive and kicking in Cairo and one of the distortions it had threatened was the absorption of Mahmoud’s dead young woman into the traditional story. That had been stopped, fortunately, by the release of the autopsy findings. There was little purchase for the popular imagination in a woman who had died in so apparently ordinary a way.

McPhee, however, was reluctant to let the connection go. ‘You don’t think,’ he said wistfully, ‘that the woman who was found-’

‘No,’ said Owen firmly, ‘I don’t.’

He made the mistake, however, of telling Zeinab about it when they met for lunch at her father’s house later that morning. It was a mistake firstly because female circumcision was exactly the kind of topic likely to intrigue Nuri Pasha.

‘It is a barbaric practice,’ he said, ‘and I am totally opposed to it. They say it improves the woman’s beauty, that unless you do it, the labia minora dangles unbecomingly, but I have never been able to see that myself. I have always felt that the more a woman is developed in that area, the better. And then the cutting pares away the most interesting parts. It diminishes the woman’s capacity for pleasure. I am totally against that,’ said Nuri, shaking his head. ‘It diminishes mine.’

He looked tenderly at the latest painting he had acquired: a Renoir nude. Nuri was fond of things French; especially women.

‘It’s a lower class practice, of course. But, do you know, my dear, I was talking to Shukri Pasha this week-he’s just taken another wife, she’s only fourteen, but a beauty, I gather-and he told me that when Khadiya came to him-she is his second wife-or is it his third? — anyway, when she came to him he was astonished to find that she had been circumcised. “My dear Shukri,” I said, “that’s what you get if you marry out of your class.” Anyway-’

He continued happily for some time.

‘Anyway, my dear,’ he said suddenly to Zeinab, ‘that’s why I didn’t have you circumcised.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Zeinab. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on anything.’

Zeinab was the second reason why it was a mistake to raise the subject. She wasn’t very interested in circumcision but she was interested in Labiba Latifa. Modern in spirit, although not quite in the way that Mahmoud was, Nuri had raised his daughter to be independent. That was a very difficult position for women to be in in Egypt at that time and Zeinab was eager to hear about others in the same position.

‘Do you think she would like some help?’ she asked suddenly.

‘No,’ said Owen.

It was Greek day in the Gardens. There was a festival of some sort and they were doing their national dances. The women were in traditional costumes, in which a fine lawn chemisette seemed to play a great part, and danced in a group, with much spirited skipping and rhythmic stamping of feet. The men were dressed more drably, in shiny black clothes and black wideawake hats. They took off their coats and waistcoats to dance, but were less stripped down than the Levantines, some of whom came in singlets, as for the gymnasium. Their women, too, appeared to be feeling the heat, for they had removed their dresses and were sitting in their petticoats, retaining, however, the white wreaths round their heads.