The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (8 page)

Outside
in the corridor he heard the guards’ feet shuffling. It would take too long to
break the man, and before then he would have been interrupted.

He
had to find a way of getting the man to cooperate. He might be willing if he
thought there was something in it for him.

“You’ve
been reduced before,” said Owen.
“Three times.”

“Yes,
sir,” said the man equably.

“Gets harder.”

The
man gave a little shrug.

Used
to it, thought Owen.

“How
much longer have you got?” he asked.

The
man looked slightly surprised.

“To serve, sir?
Four years.” “Time
enough to get made up again,” said Owen. “It would be nice to go out with a bit
of money in your pocket.”

The
man looked at him cautiously, but his interest was aroused. “Help me,” said
Owen, “and I might help you.”

He
waited.

After
a moment, the man responded.

“Exactly
how could I help you, sir?”

“A name.
All I want is a
name.”

The
man rubbed his chin. There was a faint rasp. In the heat it was never possible
to shave closely.

“ ’Assan
is the only name I
can think of, sir.”

“Sure?”

The
blue eyes met his blandly.

“Yes, sir.
Afraid
so, sir.”

“I’m
not really interested in your case,” said Owen. “I’m interested in another. And
if I got a
name, that
could be really helpful.”

“I’d
like to help, sir,” said the man. “But ’Assan is the only name I can think of.”

“Go
on thinking,” said Owen, “and let me know if another name comes into your
head.”

He
turned through the papers in the file.

“After
all,” he said casually, without looking up, “it’s only a Gyppy.”

He
went on turning through the papers. No reply came. He had not really expected
one.

He
took a card from his pocket.

“If
you want to get in touch with me,” he said, “later—and, remember, one word will
do—that’s where you’ll find me.”

The
man took the card and fingered it gingerly.

“Mamur
Zapt,” he said, stumbling a little. He raised his head. “What’s that, sir?
Civilian?”

“No,”
said Owen. “Special.”

“Sorry, sir.
No offence.”

After
a moment he said:
“ ’Course
, it couldn’t be, you being
in uniform. It was just that ‘Mamur’ bit.”

Owen
closed the file and sat back. He had done what he could. Whether the seed he
had planted would bear fruit remained to be seen.

“A
mamur is just a district officer,” he said. “Not the same thing at all.”

“Of course not, sir.”

Judging that the interrogation was over he
became relaxed, even garrulous.

“I know, sir. I ran into one of them once,
at Ismailia. We’d gone off for the day, a few of us. Filled a boat with bottles
of beer and set out along the coast. We come to this place, and the bloody
boatman hops over the side. We thought he was just doing something to do with
the boat, but the bugger never came back. We just sat there, waiting and
drinking. We’d had a few already by this time. Anyway, after a bit we runs out
of bottles so we gets out of the boat to go looking for some more when we runs
into this mamur. One of my mates hits him, but we’re all so bloody pissed by
then we can’t really hit anyone, and suddenly they’re all around us and we’re
in the local caracol.”

Owen laughed.

The man nodded in acknowledgement and pulled
a face.

“Christ!” he said. “That was something, I
can tell you.
A real hole.
The place was stuffed full
of dirty Arabs, about twenty of them in a space that would do eight, and then
us as well. The pong! Jesus! Shit everywhere. You were standing in it. Pitch
black. No bloody windows, just a wooden grating for a door. No air. Hot as
hell. All
them
bodies packed together. Christ! I’ve
been in some rough places, but that scared the shit out of me. We were in there
for a day and half. Bloody Military didn’t get there till the next morning. And
then, do you know what they did? Those bastards just came and looked at us
through the grating and went away laughing!
Didn’t come back
till they’d had a drink.
“That’ll bloody teach you!” they said. It did
too, and all.
Wouldn’t want to go through that again.”

The
café stood at the corner of the Ataba el Khadra, just at the point where Muski
Street, coming up from the old quarter, emerged on the squares and gardens of
the European part of Cairo.

Owen had chosen a table out on the pavement,
from where he could see both down Muski Street, with its open-fronted shops and
goods spilling out into the road, and across the Ataba.

At this time in the evening the Ataba was
lit by scores of lamps, which hung from the trees, from the railings, from
shop-signs and from house-fronts, even, incongruously, from the street-lights
themselves. In their soft light, round the edges of the square, the donkey-boys
and cab-men gambled, drank tea and talked, forming little conversation groups
which drew in passers-by and drove pedestrians into the middle of the Place,
where they competed with the arabeahs and buses and trams and carts and camels
and donkeys and brought traffic to a standstill.

Everywhere, even out in the middle of the
thoroughfare, were street-stalls: stalls for nougat, for Turkish delight, for
Arab sugar, for small cucumbers and oranges, for spectacles, leather boots and
slippers, for cheap turquoises, for roses, for carnations, for Sudanese beads
made in England, for sandalwood workboxes and Smyrna figs, for tea, for coffee,
for the chestnuts being roasted around the foot of the trees.

And everywhere, too, were people. The women,
in the shapeless dark gowns and black veils, were going home. But the men were
appearing in all their finery to stroll around the streets and sit in the
cafés. Here and there were desert Arabs in beautiful robes of spotless white
and black, and a rather larger number of blue-gowned country Arabs from Der el
Bahari. But for the most part the men were dressed in European style, apart from
their handsome tarbooshes. All, however, had magnificent boots, which the
shoe-brown boys fought to shine whenever an owner sat down in a café.

Owen enjoyed it. He lived alone, and in the
evening, when he was not at the club or at the opera, he would often sit in a
café. When he had first come to Egypt he had done it deliberately, often going
to a café with his Arabic teacher after a lesson to drink coffee and to talk.
His teacher, the Aalim Aziz, had instructed him in far more than the language
during those civilized discussions of all aspects of the Arab past and present,
discussions which continued late into the night and usually finished with
everyone in the café involved.

In his first six months in Egypt Owen had
gone to Aziz for instruction every day; and afterwards, when by usual European
standards he spoke the language well, he would still meet him at least twice a
week, not so much now for formal instruction as to continue discussion with one
who had become a friend. Even now, when his work tended to isolate him, he
still met Aziz regularly.

Having acquired the taste for café society,
Owen kept it. Indeed, it was one of the things that made him prefer Egypt to
India. Unlike many English Arabists, he was a man of the city rather than the
desert. It was common among the British in Egypt to regard the urban Egyptian
as a corrupted, degenerate version of the more sympathetic traditional Bedouin.
Owen, on the other hand, was more at home with the young, educated, urban
Egyptian, with people like Mahmoud.

He was waiting for Mahmoud now. After their
experience that morning at the barracks, he had been anxious to contact Mahmoud
at once to apologize. But when he had rung up Mahmoud to suggest a meeting he
had found him off-hand, unwilling. Owen had pressed, however, and in the end,
reluctantly, the Egyptian had agreed.

They had arranged to meet in the café that
evening. Instinctively Owen felt that to be better. If they had met at the Bab
el Khalk or at the Parquet he had a feeling that Mahmoud would have retreated
into his shell. In the more natural atmosphere of the café they might do
better.

But when Mahmoud arrived, the strategy did
not seem to work. Owen apologized for the morning. Mahmoud brushed it aside. It
was nothing, he said. How had the interview with the sergeant gone? When Owen
told him, he brushed that aside, too. He hadn’t really expected anything
different. Owen had done what he could, and he, Mahmoud, was grateful. The man
was coming out on Thursday and couldn’t really be expected to talk. It was not
Owen’s fault.

Which was all very well, but Owen knew that
things weren’t right. When they had first met, and throughout the whole of the
day they had spent together, they had got on unusually well. Owen had taken an
immediate liking to the Egyptian and he felt that Mahmoud had taken a liking to
him. He had found himself responding sympathetically to the Egyptian and
understanding what he was after without it needing to be spelt out, and he had
felt that Mahmoud was reading him in the same way. This evening, though, there
was none of that. Mahmoud was unfailingly courteous, but something was missing.
The outgoing friendliness that had characterized him previously seemed to have
gone.

In the time that he had been in Egypt Owen
had got used to the way in which Arab relationships varied in intensity. Arabs
seemed to blow hot and blow cold. They invested their relationships with more
emotion than did the stolid English and so their relationships were more
volatile. Owen could understand this; perhaps, he told himself wryly, because
the Welsh were not altogether dissimilar. Perhaps, more particularly, his own
intuitive nature made him especially sensitive to such things.

In an effort to put Mahmoud more at ease, he
switched into Arabic. Mahmoud switched back into English.

The conversation was at the level of
exchanging commonplaces. Owen knew that when Mahmoud had finished his coffee he
would go.

Some shoe-boys were larking about near
their table. One of them threw a brush at another. The brush missed and fell under
the table. The boy scurried to retrieve it and almost upset their coffee. They grabbed at the table together and cursed simultaneously. The boy fled laughing, chased by a furious waiter. Owen smiled, and thought he saw an answering flicker on Mahmoud’s face.

Deliberately
he moved his chair round so that he sat beside Mahmoud, closer to him. Arab
conventions of personal territory were different from European ones. What to an
Englishman seemed keeping a proper distance, to an Arab seemed cold and unfriendly.

“Your
day has been hard?” he asked sympathetically.

At
last he got a real response.

Mahmoud
looked round at him.

“Not
as hard as yours yesterday,” he said bitterly.
“Although
perhaps you did not find it so.”

Owen
knew that Mahmoud was referring to the students.

The
remark surprised him. He knew, of course, that this kind of political policing
was resented by Egyptians, but had thought that as a member of the Parquet
Mahmoud must have come to terms with it. He wondered suddenly what Mahmoud’s
own political position was. A bright young Parquet lawyer on the rise might
well have political ambitions; and if he did, they might well be on the
Nationalist side.

“I
was not involved directly,” he said slowly, “although of course I knew of it.”

“Perhaps
I should not have spoken,” said Mahmoud.

“No,
that’s all right,” said Owen. He smiled. “It’s just that I am trying to think
of an answer.”

He
pondered for a moment and then decided to go for honesty.

“The
answer is,” he said, “that I did not find it hard. It was regrettable,
certainly, but a necessity.
Given the situation in Egypt.
Of course, you may not want to grant the situation. I would understand that.”

A
little to his surprise, Mahmoud seemed to find the answer satisfactory. He
relaxed visibly and waved to the waiter for more coffee.

“I
appreciate your answer,” he said. “And in case you’re wondering, let me tell
you I personally am not a revolutionary.
Nationalist, yes,
reforming, even radical, yes; but not a revolutionary.
I would like the
British out. But meanwhile …” He sighed. “Meanwhile, for you and for me,
there are necessities.”

He
paused while the waiter filled their cups.

“However,”
he said, “I must tell you I would not want to grant the situation.”

“That,”
said Owen, “I can quite understand.”

He
brooded a little.

“I can
understand,” he said presently, ‘‘a bit at any rate, because I myself am not
English.”