Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

‘Gosh, how difficult for you! And so you have to compromise? Instead of sleeping with all the women, you just sleep with the one who doesn’t have a husband?’

‘That’s it! Exactly! Of course, I know that many will be disappointed, but-’

‘I understand. But, my dear Malik, let me not add to the numbers of the disappointed by detaining you when you have pressing duties elsewhere-’

The car disappeared round the corner. The men circled round the chair watched it go.

‘He thinks he owns us,’ said someone bitterly.

‘There’ll come a time when all those Pashas are swept away,’ said the barber.

‘Not them! They’ll hang on somehow or other. First, they’ll sell themselves to the foreigners. Then they’ll sell us.’

Owen, however, was wondering about his tidy separation of the village from the city.

As he was walking back to the station, Owen saw a woman working in the fields. She straightened up as he went past.

‘It’s no good, Effendi,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, it is not going to bring him back.’

He stopped, surprised at being spoken to, although he knew that the women in the villages were much freer than those in the town. He guessed at once, though, who she was.

‘You must be Leila,’ he said. ‘Ibrahim’s wife.’

She nodded.

‘I saw you,’ she said, ‘when you were talking to my father-in-law. And then you came again. You keep coming, don’t you?’

‘I keep coming,’ Owen said. ‘But really it is my colleague’s concern, not mine.’

‘Still you come, though. Well, I will tell my children and they will not forget. They are only daughters but they will tell their sons.’

‘Thank you.’ Owen looked around. ‘They are not with you?’

‘They are too small. Later-soon-they will come. When the man dies, the women have to work.’

‘It is hard when the man goes.’

‘And when he leaves no sons. We had hoped for sons but after Mariam’s birth-well, I had a hard time that time and afterwards things were never quite the same. I was not right inside. Ibrahim paid for me to go to the hakim but he could do nothing. That is why,’ she said, looking him in the face, ‘he went to Jalila.’

Owen muttered something.

‘It does not matter. Except that it angered my brothers. You have put my brothers in the caracol,’ she said, not in accusation but as a matter of fact.

‘Yes. Lest Ibrahim’s family kill them in anger.’

‘I do not think they would kill them. My brothers are strong men, stronger than they.’

‘It is not that. It is that one has to stop the killing. One killing leads to another. One has to break the chain.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘It is the first step that is wrong.’

‘Yes, but what is the first step? The killing or what led to it?’

‘Both are wrong. But when wrong is done, there are better remedies than killing.’

‘Well, maybe.’

‘ Did your brothers look for revenge?’

‘They looked.’

‘But did they take it?’

She gave no sign of having heard. Instead, she said, almost wistfully:

‘He was not a bad man. Foolish, yes, but not bad. His head was too hot and his tongue was too quick.’

‘Was it too quick for your brothers?’

‘For them?’ She seemed startled. ‘No. I do not think so. Ibrahim and Ali were friends,’ she added, after a moment.

‘Friends?’ said Owen, surprised.

‘Yes. That was how I came to wed. They met at the ostrich farm.’

‘When Ibrahim was working there?’

‘Ali worked there too. But only for a short time. He had worked for Zaghlul before, when Zaghlul was supplying the pilgrims. He used to manage the mules. But then when Zaghlul stopped, there was no work for him. Zaghlul offered him a job at the ostrich farm but Ali did not like it. He said, “This is no work for a man like me.” “Very well, then,” said Zaghlul, “you find your own work.” Then Ali worked in the fields, but he did not like that either. He was always going off to the city. We would have spoken to him about it but he usually brought back money. Good money,’ she said, considering.

‘So he no longer works in the fields?’

‘Oh, he does sometimes. At harvest time, of course. But also other times. And he still brings back money.’

‘It was before he went to the city, then, that he was friends with Ibrahim?’

‘No, they stayed friends after he’d left the ostrich farm. Ibrahim sometimes used to go with him into the city.’

‘To the races?’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘That is where Ali goes, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but that is not where they went. They used to go to meetings.’

‘Meetings?’

‘Yes, big ones. Once,’ she said with pride, ‘they went to hear Mustapha Kamil.’

In a way it was no surprise. Thousands had gone to hear Mustapha Kamil, the charismatic young leader of the Nationalist Party, before he had died suddenly at a tragically early age. All the same, Owen hadn’t expected it. Ali, the tough nut, the one who, if Mahmoud was right, consorted with racetrack gangs, and Ibrahim, the humble villager, going to political meetings?

And Nationalist ones? Well, they wouldn’t have gone to any other, that was for sure. Politics was not for the likes of Ibrahim and Ali. Even the Nationalists drew their strength from office workers and the professional classes. They recognized that themselves. That, in a way, had been the point of the meeting that Owen had attended down by the Pont de Limoun. They had been trying to draw up support from the railway workers, without a lot of success.

But now here were two ordinary fellahs from the sticks turning up to listen to Mustapha Kamil! Unlikely ones, too, not exactly the sort you would see as avid readers of the Nationalist press, not the sort, actually, who could probably read at all. What was going on?

‘Mustapha Kamil!’ he said. ‘There was a man!’

‘There was a man indeed!’ agreed Leila proudly.

‘And Ali talked to you all about such things?’

‘Oh, yes.’

He had underestimated Ali, only too evidently. He had seen only the rough, hard villager. What was it that she had said? Head too hot and tongue too quick?

But she had said that about Ibrahim, not about Ali.

‘And Ibrahim, too, did he used to talk to you about such things?’

‘At first, yes, but then his father would not let him. He said such talk was bad, that the Pasha would hear of it and be down on us. I think Fazal would have talked.’

‘Fazal?’

‘Ibrahim’s brother.’

The difficult one. The one that Owen had thought might have looked for revenge for his brother’s killing.

He still didn’t think he was wrong. Only he had seen it all too simply. He had seen just the enmity, just the possible revenge relationship. He had not seen the relationships between the families. But relationships there were, of which the marriage between Leila and Ibrahim had been just one.

‘And were they all still going to such meetings, Ali and Ibrahim?’

She was silent. Then she said:

‘Mustapha Kamil is dead.’

‘But there are others. Others now speak in his place.’

‘There has been no time for meetings,’ she said, ‘not since Ibrahim began working for the Belgians.’

‘They did not meet?’

‘Only occasionally. Sometimes they would walk back to the village together.’

Suddenly she seemed to be far away. Perhaps she was remembering the past. Perhaps it was the first time since Ibrahim’s death that she had allowed herself to.

‘He was a good man,’ Owen prompted gently.

‘Yes.’

‘But a hot-headed one, you said?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed, remembering.