The Last Cut. Michael Pearce
way in front of the dam, in the dry bed of the canal, a tall cone of earth had been constructed. Its top had been sown with millet.
‘Obvious fertility associations,’ said McPhee.
When the Cut was made, and the dam breached, the water would pour through and demolish the cone, to the great satisfaction of onlookers. In the past, tradition had it, a young virgin had been sacrificed simultaneously, no doubt to their even greater satisfaction.
‘Although there is possibly some confusion here,’ said McPhee. ‘You see, the cone is also called “The Bride” – the Nile, as it were, impregnates it – and popular imagination may have distorted that into a real woman.’
Popular imagination was still alive and kicking in Cairo and one of the distortions it had threatened was the absorption of Mahmoud’s dead young woman into the traditional story. That had been stopped, fortunately, by the release of the autopsy findings. There was little purchase for the popular imagination in a woman who had died in so apparently ordinary a way.
McPhee, however, was reluctant to let the connection go.
‘You don’t think,’ he said wistfully, ‘that the woman who was found –’
‘No,’ said Owen firmly, ‘I don’t.’
He made the mistake, however, of telling Zeinab about it when they met for lunch at her father’s house later that morning. It was a mistake firstly because female circumcision was exactly the kind of topic likely to intrigue Nuri Pasha.
‘It is a barbaric practice,’ he said, ‘and I am totally opposed to it. They say it improves the woman’s beauty, that unless you do it, the labia minora dangles unbecomingly, but I have never been able to see that myself. I have always felt that the more a woman is developed in that area, the better. And then the cutting pares away the most interesting parts. It diminishes the woman’s capacity for pleasure. I am totally against that,’ said Nuri, shaking his head. ‘It diminishes mine.’
He looked tenderly at the latest painting he had acquired: a Renoir nude. Nuri was fond of things French; especially women.
‘It’s a lower class practice, of course. But, do you know, my dear, I was talking to Shukri Pasha this week – he’s just taken another wife, she’s only fourteen, but a beauty, I gather – and he told me that when Khadiya came to him – she is his second wife – or is it his third? – anyway, when she came to him he was astonished to find that she had been circumcised. “My dear Shukri,” I said, “that’s what you get if you marry out of your class.” Anyway –’
He continued happily for some time.
‘Anyway, my dear,’ he said suddenly to Zeinab, ‘that’s why I didn’t have you circumcised.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Zeinab. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on anything.’
Zeinab was the second reason why it was a mistake to raise the subject. She wasn’t very interested in circumcision but she was interested in Labiba Latifa. Modern in spirit, although not quite in the way that Mahmoud was, Nuri had raised his daughter to be independent. That was a very difficult position for women to be in in Egypt at that time and Zeinab was eager to hear about others in the same position.
‘Do you think she would like some help?’ she asked suddenly.
‘No,’ said Owen.
It was Greek day in the Gardens. There was a festival of some sort and they were doing their national dances. The women were in traditional costumes, in which a fine lawn chemisette seemed to play a great part, and danced in a group, with much spirited skipping and rhythmic stamping of feet. The men were dressed more drably, in shiny black clothes and black wideawake hats. They took off their coats and waistcoats to dance, but were less stripped down than the Levantines, some of whom came in singlets, as for the gymnasium. Their women, too, appeared to be feeling the heat, for they had removed their dresses and were sitting in their petticoats, retaining, however, the white wreaths round their heads.
A pretty young woman danced across to Owen.
‘He’s in the shade,’ she said, ‘with the beer.’
She took Owen in among the bamboos to where a rug had been spread for a picnic. There was a hamper but no beer. Rosa, who knew her husband’s habits, led Owen further into the shade. Georgiades was standing beside a gadwal talking to the gardener. He was embracing an armful of bottles.
‘I was asking him if he could let some water into the gadwal,’ he explained.
‘And I was telling him I couldn’t,’ said the gardener. ‘This isn’t the right day.’
‘I was just wondering if you could make an exception,’ said Georgiades, fishing in his pocket.
The gardener looked at the coins.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t. Look, there’s a stream just over there. Why don’t you put the bottles in that?’
‘It’s too far.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Rosa. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’
‘Yes,’ said Owen, eyeing the Greek’s bulk. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’
‘Besides,’ said Georgiades, ignoring all these remarks, ‘there are always thieves about in a place like this. I’ll bet you’ve had some trouble –’
‘Well,’ said the gardener, ‘as a matter of fact –’
Owen walked back with Rosa to the picnic place.
‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to dance?’
‘I’m not familiar with the Greek dances,’ Owen excused himself.
‘Perhaps there wouldn’t be much point,’ Rosa conceded.
She had always had a soft spot for Owen, especially since that business of the ransom. Indeed, if ever Zeinab should fall by the wayside, and if, by any unfortunate chance her husband, too, should be struck down, then – She brushed aside the possibility that Owen might have his own views. Rosa believed that whoever her mate was, she and he would be of one mind; hers.
She offered him some tsatsiki. While he was eating it, she squatted down beside him and asked about the regulator.
‘You know,’ she said, looking in her husband’s direction, ‘he’s not really the man for this. Water is not a liquid he’s had much to do with. And he knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about gardens. I’m the only flower he’s heard of.’
‘I know,’ said Owen, ‘but he’s a wonderful man at getting people to talk to him.’
Georgiades and the gardener were coming back through the bushes.
‘Yes, well, I could put them in the stream, I suppose,’ Georgiades was conceding, ‘but I’m not happy about it. Not with all these thieves about. Now if there was a ghaffir around –’
‘Him?’ said the gardener. ‘He’d be the first to take them!’
At the regulator all was calm. The water winked placidly in the sun. Some papyrus heads which had crept through the main barrage circled slowly up to the breach and then spun away again. The workmen were sitting up on the bank. Macrae and Ferguson stood on top of the regulator looking down into the breach and conferring.
‘We’ve stopped it up,’ said Macrae. ‘Now we’ve got to find a way of letting the water through again.’
‘But controlled,’ said Ferguson.
‘We’re thinking of using the undamaged gate. It’s the other one that’s the problem.’
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.
They took Owen back to their little office and produced coffee. Then Macrae sat back.
‘We’ve