Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

Why had he done that? Owen could see why this time he had not wished to enlist his own aid. Apart from understandable pique, he, too, had principles. But why had he gone at it like that? He was no fool, he was wise in the games that Cairo played, he must have known he would get nowhere.

Unless, of course, that was where he had wanted to get. Unless that had been his deliberate intention. Unless he had been party to the Nationalists’ decision to exploit the issue for political ends and had seen this, with them, as a heaven-sent opportunity to set the Syndicate up.

Mahmoud was, like all the other Parquet lawyers, himself a Nationalist. Unlike most of them, however, he was also his own man. He made it a matter of principle not to get into politicians’ pockets. The law for him was clean and pure and should be above politics. Those who professed it should serve it with independence and austerity. Friends said of him-increasingly-that he was a born judge but too honest to be an advocate. Especially in Cairo.

Owen was surprised, then, to find that in this instance he seemed to have shifted; surprised, and disappointed. He and Mahmoud had always seen eye to eye, in so far as it was possible for a foreigner to see eye to eye with an Egyptian. But it was precisely that which was raising the difficulty in the present case. For it was surely only the fact that it was foreign that had led Mahmoud to make his extraordinary accusations against the Syndicate.

It was most unlike him. Certainly, like most Nationalists and, indeed, most Egyptians, he chafed at his country’s subservience to foreign interests and objected, in particular, to British rule; but up till now he had always been temperate and pragmatic about this, believing that Reason-Mahmoud was a great man for Reason-and the ordinary political processes would in the end deliver Egypt from its foreign yoke. The sanguinary rhetoric of the extremists was not for him.

And yet here he was supposing things about the Belgians which would not have been out of place sixty years before at the court of Muhammed Ali! Muhammed’s daughter, taking after her father, had been in the habit of having slave girls who had fallen asleep on duty disembowelled in her bedroom.

It was most unlike him. So unlike him that Owen began to wonder.

Salah-el-Din took Owen to a little square not far from the Pont de Limoun. There was a fountain in the square and a small crowd had gathered in front of it. Among them, Owen could see the railway workers. They stood in a group, huddled together sheepishly, occasionally casting a longing look over their shoulders at a small cafe on the other side of the square, as if they would rather have been there than here and as if they might have been tempted to make a bolt for it had they not been hemmed in.

It was a hot evening and most of the little houses in the square had their front doors open. From the yards at the back came drifting the smell of charcoal and burning cooking fat, and then a very pungent smell of fried onions.

One or two of the households had already finished their evening meal and had come out to sit on their doorsteps, trying to catch a breath of cooler air. They called across to the men sitting on the big stone bench, the mastaba, that ran along the front of the cafe. Other men were sitting on the ground in front of them. Mixed with the smell of charcoal and fat came now a strong smell of coffee.

Darkness fell quickly at this time of year. Already people in the crowd were lighting torches. On the side of the square opposite the cafe the dome of a mosque was beginning to show against the sky.

There was the sound of singing in one of the side streets and then a small procession came into the square carrying cresset torches, long staves with bits of burning wood attached to them, and chanting slogans.

They marched up to the fountain and pushed through the crowd. The men with torches gathered around the base of the fountain. Owen could see now that the water had been turned off. A man began to climb up on to the base.

It was dark now in the square. Only the cafe was lit up. The dome of the mosque was very clear against a deep-blue velvety sky. There was a little group of men standing in front of its doors, the local imam, probably, with some of his helpers.

The men at the fountain held their cressets up to illuminate the speaker on the plinth. He wore a dark suit and a tarboosh. Apart from one or two of the men who had come with him, no one else in the crowd wore a tarboosh. They were all in galabeahs, the long, dress-like costume of the ordinary Cairo working man, and skull caps.

That was how it was, thought Owen. The Nationalist Party drew almost all its strength from office workers and from the professional classes. They hardly touched ordinary working people. There was as big a gulf between them and the ordinary people of Egypt as there was between the ruling Pashas and most educated Egyptians. Egypt was a country divided among itself.

The man on the plinth began to speak. It was the usual Nationalist line. The rich were assailed, foreigners were attacked. But it was a man in a suit who was speaking and the crowd listened for the most part in silence.

Here, though, suddenly, was something different. The speaker began to talk about the railway. Railways were good, he said. It was through railways that a modern Egypt would be built. But why did they have to be built by foreigners? Were there no Egyptians who could build them?

But, pardon him, he had made a mistake. They were built by Egyptians, by people like those he could see before him in the crowd below. It was Egyptian hands that laid the tracks. But was it Egyptian people who got the money? Was it Egyptian mouths that got the bread? No, it was foreign mouths that got the bread. Only it wasn’t bread they wanted, it was cake! With icing on it! The Egyptians did the work but it was the foreigners who benefited.

And it was hard work! His friends down below him could testify to that. It was hard work, back-breaking work. And now they were about to heap more on weary shoulders! Had they not heard about the straw that broke the camel’s back? And this was no straw that they were piling on. No, indeed.

Their hearts went out to their weary brothers. They would not struggle alone. The country was with them. There was action they could take and if they took it, they would find they were not without friends. No, indeed.

But this time the foreigners had overreached themselves. Not content with oppressing their workers, they seemed determined now to offend everyone else. An insult to religion was an insult to all Egyptians. God’s Day was holy; and Egyptians, he said, raising his voice for the benefit of those gathered on the steps in front of the mosque, were determined to keep it holy!

He waited for the cheers, and indeed they came, but not exactly enthusiastically. The little group before the mosque did not join in. If there was a gap between the Nationalists and the ordinary Cairene, there was an even wider gap between the Nationalists and the Church. The Nationalist Party was predominantly secular. They were a modernizing party and modernizing, for many of them, meant sweeping away much of the influence of the Church.

Which the Church knew very well. The imam would have spotted this tactic a mile off. Even so, thought Owen, it might be worth keeping an eye on how successful the tactic was. Ordinary people might be less discriminating than the imam and if the Nationalists could add religious fervour to popular hostility then they could make a lot of trouble.

The orator, as was the way with Arab orators, continued for another hour or two before bringing his final peroration to a close. His friends helped him to climb down. In the light of the cresset torches Owen could see them clearly. As the party prepared to move off, one of the men talking to the speaker turned and Owen saw his face. It was Wahid. Not the Wahid of the railway line, in skull cap and galabeah, and begrimed with sweat, but a Wahid in the sharp, cheap suit and tasselled tarboosh of the smart, young, Nationalist effendi.