Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

“And yet you would have slept with me.”

“Because I love him.”

“That is not the way,” Owen reproved her; and he felt he sounded oddly like Garvin.

Selim was disappointed.

“I was just getting ready to come in,” he said.

“It wasn’t necessary.”

Selim fell in step beside him.

“They say she’s a beautiful woman,” he said enviously.

“Who?”

“Mustapha Mir’s woman.”

“Not just Mustapha Mir’s,” said Owen.

As they were walking back to the Bab-el-Khalk, Owen fancied he heard the sound of bagpipes. One of the Scottish regiments, he presumed; but, no, as he drew nearer he realized that it was the Egyptian sort. They turned a corner and saw a small crowd in front of them. The music was coming from the other side of the crowd. He could just see the pipes sticking up above the heads of the people before him. There was a sudden roll of a drum and a man began speaking.

“It is the Mohabazin,” said Selim delightedly.

They stopped to look. Cairo was a great place for street entertainment. There were dancers, jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, of course, poets and singers. There were also the Mohabazin. These were small groups of actors who played in the streets and specialized in scurrilous farce. They were a kind of living Punch and Judy, often taking family life as their subject but also, not infrequently, offering a political commentary on the state of the nation and the ways of the great which was usually ribald and sometimes true.

There were, he could now see, two actors apart from the bagpipes player. One, whom he had not seen at first, was sitting on a chair. The actor, who was standing and doing most of the talking, was flourishing a big stick.

“Oh ho!” said Selim, “it’s the police this time, is it?”

The man with the stick strutted round and banged a few people with it. He was evidently a Selim sort of policeman. The crowd responded with repartee and jibes and some lively exchanges developed. Selim was splitting his sides some time before Owen got the hang of what they were saying. The ‘policeman’ was affecting to be a great hero; the crowd, egged on by the facial expressions of the man sitting on the chair, voiced doubts.

The policeman took their remarks as aspersions on his virility and responded indignantly, using the stick now to indicate his physical capacity. Female members of the audience were invited to put the matter to the test. They replied with derision, one lady producing a matchstick which was compared delightedly with the policeman’s big stick. The policeman, hurt, announced that he was going home.

As he went, heroism and virility oozed away with every step until, after much hesitation, he brought himself to knock timidly on his front door, whereupon his wife came out in true Judy fashion and belaboured him thoroughly with his stick. “Very good!” said Selim. “Oh, very good!”

The man with the bagpipes made a collection while the actors prepared for the next piece by putting on different garb. It mostly concerned the man on the chair and did not amount to much: a tarboosh on his head, a red jacket with yellow pipes, which might have belonged to a bandsman, and a rag round his neck which conceivably represented a tie.

The bagpiper gave a skirl on his pipes and the next skit began. It had a different theme and centred this time on the man in the chair. He began turning round on his chair and pretending to peep at something over his shoulder. The peeps became longer and his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head. Affecting shock, horror-and delight-he covered his eyes with his hand and turned hastily away; only, a second or two later, for his head to swivel round once more and his eyes to pop again.

After the process had been repeated several times, the figure began to show signs of mounting sexual excitement. When he spun round now, he rose halfway up the chair and made exaggerated pelvic thrusts. He pantomimed heat, mopping his brow, loosening his tie and undoing his jacket.

It was not enough. He called for drink. The bagpipes player proffered him a bowl and he drank from it greedily. Evidently, it was alcoholic liquor, for he began, very funnily, to suggest growing intoxication. The crowd was in stitches as he swayed about, nearly falling off the chair, getting into a tangle with his tie and missing his buttons. Finally, highly excited by whatever it was that was behind him, he tried to take off his trousers-Selim liked this bit especially-tripped himself up over the legs, collapsed in a heap on the chair and promptly fell asleep.

The other actor and the bagpipes player seized the chair and held him aloft; and it was only then that Owen realized whom the figure on the chair was intended to represent: McPhee.

The next morning, Owen sat in his office thinking about it. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have bothered him. People were entitled to their bit of fun, after all, and the Cairo poor didn’t get much of it. A little ridicule was healthy; not so nice, perhaps, when it was you that was being ridiculed but basically something that anyone in office ought to be tough enough to put up with. He was pretty sure that the Mamur Zapt figured in the Mohabazin’s repertoire.

It meant, however, that his efforts to contain the episode through his control of the press had failed. Perhaps they were bound to. Owen had no illusions about the limits to his power in that respect. Things would always get out in the end. The most you could hope to do was to delay them.

That was what he had tried to do; that, and put a spoke in their wheel if there genuinely was somebody who was running a campaign against McPhee. Was that the case? Did the fact that the McPhee story was now being played on the streets mean there was somebody deliberately trying to put it about?

He wasn’t sure. There was a gap between the culture of the written word, written though it might be in popular newspapers, and the life of the streets. Many people, perhaps most people, in Cairo could not read. The people who were inflamed by what they read in the newspapers were mostly students. It was they who came out on demonstrations. The ordinary Cairene-in-the-street went along to see the fun but unless religion came into it was not much involved.

Religion did come into it here, or could come into it if they weren’t careful. But no one was going to get a fit of religion from watching one of the Mohabazin’s plays. So even if someone was putting it about, was it worth bothering with? A little ridicule didn’t hurt anyone and McPhee had bloody asked for it.

However, there was Garvin’s point. There were, all told, only a handful of British in Egypt. The country was ruled, in effect, by a very tiny group of men. It was in a way a bluff; and it worked only as long as the bluff wasn’t called. All right, there was an army offstage, but it was the fervent intention of every member of the Administration that that was exactly where it should stay. Bluff was the thing on which the Administration really depended; the kind of bluff that allowed three foreigners to run the Police Force and maintain order in a country the size of Egypt.

But one of the men was McPhee. And was McPhee the sort of man who could maintain the bluff convincingly? Not on present form. Garvin was right. Credibility was all.

Or was it? Hell, what did it matter if McPhee had become a bit of a joke? He was in danger of taking it all too seriously. It was this damned heat. You lost perspective. He decided he would go out for a coffee in an attempt to regain it.

He took the papers with him. As he went out, Nikos clapped another one on top of the pile.

“What’s this?”

“ Al-Lewa. ”

“I’ve got it already.”

“You haven’t got this one. This one is the one that actually came out this morning.”