Michael Pearce - The Bride Box

‘House?’

They had just, at Rosa’s insistence, moved into a yet bigger one. Georgiades had torn his hair.

‘But the cost!’ he had wailed. ‘How do I find the money?’

‘I’ll find the money,’ said Rosa.

‘But how?’

‘I’ll double the trade.’

Georgiades didn’t know what this meant but he didn’t like the sound of it.

‘Is there not risk?’ he had asked timidly.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Rosa. ‘But I’ll cover that with a reverse trade.’

Georgiades didn’t like the sound of this, either. In fact, it terrified him.

And the warehouse clerk, too. ‘May Allah preserve you!’ he gasped.

Georgiades hoped he would but rather doubted it. ‘I shall end up in prison!’ he had wailed.

‘You will, but I won’t,’ said Rosa cheerfully. ‘It’s all in your name, so I’ll still be able to look after the children.’

‘The wickedness of women!’ cried the warehouse clerk, his sympathies totally engaged.

‘The trouble is,’ said Georgiades, ‘she takes on riskier and riskier things! Arms, for instance …’

‘Ah, well,’ said the warehouse clerk, ‘that’s where the real money is.’

‘And even’ — Georgiades leaned forward and whispered — ‘slaves!’

‘That’s where the money is, too,’ said the clerk. ‘Or so people say,’ he added hurriedly.

He wouldn’t say any more, but Georgiades was satisfied for the time being. He went back to the Mamur Zapt’s office at the Bab-el-Khalk and told Nikos. Nikos thought it was coming along nicely.

During the long, increasingly painful ride back to Denderah, Mahmoud had had the time to do more thinking. At first the thinking had been to do with the case. He had built so much on what he had seen as the near certainty of the clerk being able to identify the men who had come to the railway station carrying the bride box. And now it had all fallen apart! He went over it in his mind. What had gone wrong? Had the clerk simply been mistaken? Or had the men not come from the Pasha’s estate as they claimed? Had it all been an attempt to mislead, to put an investigator on the wrong track? But from the clerk’s account of what they had said, that seemed unlikely. He was back to the clerk again and the question of his reliability.

He went over it again and again, getting nowhere. His thoughts just went round and round. Had they ganged up on him as an outsider? The city man who’d come to put the fellahin right? Was that how they had seen him? In a way, he could understand it if they had. But if they had, they were being unjust. He wanted to help them. He was bringing law into lives where the only law was that laid down by the Pasha. Backwardness. His thinking began, in the heat and his fatigue, to fall into familiar patterns. A man like Mustapha, for instance, selling his own children into slavery!

It was poverty, of course. Living in Cairo, Mahmoud was used to poverty. But what he was seeing in the south was something new. The complete poverty in the houses! The absolute lack of possessions — beds, even. Eating off the floor! The very water they drank had to be carried from the well or from the river. Even the smallest necessity cost labour.

And even though the men worked hard in the fields, back-breaking work under the sun, much of the work, the work that made everything run, was done by women. Not much scope for a life there, he thought.

He thought of Soraya seizing a few moments to put together the things for her bride box. Every single thing had had to be created in the few moments spared from the ordinary labour of the house and the village.

And then he thought of the way in which those few things had been tipped out on to the sand and scattered casually across the desert. Life, he thought, for people like Soraya, was pitiless. Cruel.

The thought revived the anger that burned within him when he thought of Egypt and what Egypt had come to. He was not, he thought, a bitter man but he felt bitter when he thought of how the ordinary people of his country struggled. Of the fellahin, who formed the great majority of the Egyptian population, struggling under the oppression of the Pashas. Of Egypt as a whole struggling under the rule of foreigners. Who were the British to rule his country?

As a young boy, still at school, he had vowed to right his country’s wrongs. And there were so many of them — and not just due to the British. Many were due to Egyptians themselves.

A lot of Egyptians, especially the young, thought like this. And so there was a revival of political activity, a growing feeling of the need for reform. Which is what Mahmoud, in a way, had decided to devote his life to.

Sometimes, as he never seemed to get anywhere, he felt discouraged. Why not do as others in the Parquet did and concentrate on getting rich? If you were a lawyer, there was every chance of doing that. His father would have wondered at Mahmoud. He had stinted himself to pay for his son’s education, scrimped and saved so that his son would be able to do better than he had. And now his son, just when he was getting there, was addressing himself to other things! Mahmoud would have liked to debate this with him but his father was dead. But in a way he did not need his father there. He knew what he would have said.

And then there was the question of what Mahmoud’s own children would say when they grew up. What would they say when all he could deliver to them was a country that could not even rule itself, that put up with the injustices and iniquities of life under the Pashas. Still! His heart burned with shame.

As he had ridden back to Denderah, his whole body aching from his long day in the saddle, his heart swimming from the sun, he had castigated himself more and more. The identification parades had been an utter failure. He had thought it would be easy. The clerk would identify the men and that would be that. But it had not turned out like that. Things weren’t so simple. He blamed himself for thinking that they should have been.

And the country, too, of course. He blamed Egypt for being as backward as it was. That was the root of all the problems.

But then he came back to himself again. What had he done about that? Where had his political commitment got him? All the work he had put into political activity, meetings, lobbying? The Pashas were still where they had been, the British still ruled, Egypt was still … well, Egypt!

He felt utterly drained. He had failed again. It was all failure. Everything was failure.

Owen could have told him he was always like this. When he started on a new case, he always hit it with enthusiasm, drive. But if things went wrong, or got stuck for some reason, his thoughts would go round and round. He would get more and more depressed, feel dragged down. It would happen when he felt tired, or felt that he should have succeeded and hadn’t. There was a pattern to it.

But there was another side to the pattern. At some point he would pull out of it, start to rise. He would feel buoyed up, anything would seem possible, and in no time at all he would be back to his best, driving away on top of things.

Owen had often talked about it with him. Everyone had their ups and downs, he would reassure him. It was just that he blamed himself while — said with a smile — everyone else blamed other people. This would often bring an answering, rueful smile out of Mahmoud, and would somehow start him on an upward path.

It didn’t seem to do so on this occasion but, as they went on sitting there, drinking tea, Mahmoud calmed down.

After a while he jumped to his feet and said he was going to take a walk around the midan to see how much had come in since he left. This, thought Owen, was a good sign. It was positive. The low this time was not as low as it sometimes could be. The other side of the pattern was activity, sometimes hyperactivity. That, at any rate, was preferable to the dreadful despondency of the low point.