“We had to let Lacau send one of his men along,” Macauley explains, buttering his bread.
“Is that the chemist?” Serge asks.
“No: that’s Pacorie,” Macauley answers.
“That cad?” the colonel snorts, spraying his soup. “Méfie-toi!”
“French are being sneaky as hell of late,” a red-faced HumInt officer adds, pouring wine for himself and the others. “They’re setting up semiautonomous local states within Syria.”
“Why?” asks Serge.
“They’re tied in with Amir al-Husayn,” the HumInt officer says.
“You think so?” asks Macauley.
“Without doubt,” the other answers. “They’ve been undermining us right from the off by siding with the Arabs.”
“We’ve sided with the Arabs too at times,” Macauley reminds him. “Fomenting unrest and all that.”
“Yes, but for other reasons than the French,” HumInt responds.
“Half the Wafd have spent a good long stretch in Paris,” says the colonel, whether by way of agreeing or disagreeing with his colleague Serge can’t quite work out. “They were liaising there with Comintern envoys. Bolsheviks are the real villains of this piece.”
“Oh, let’s not forget Constantinople,” cautions HumInt. “They’ve got their finger on the button as far as Mecca ’s concerned. They could summon up an armed conspiracy at any moment-one that would spread like wildfire through the entire Muslim world.”
“So in stirring up the Arabs, we’ve been doing the Turk’s work for him?” Macauley asks.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On the role of the Muslim Soviets in Jeddah.”
“Exactly!” the colonel sputters excitedly, pushing his bowl away. “It always comes back to the Soviets. Arabia’s becoming Bolshevised: the Zionist immigration to Palestine is seeing to that.”
“But I thought,” Serge chips in meekly, “that the Jews and the Arabs hated one another.”
“Maybe they do,” says the colonel. “But Moscow ’s perfectly capable of playing them both.”
The main course comes. More wine is poured.
“There’s little evidence,” the HumInt officer continues after they’ve all taken a few mouthfuls of lamb chops, “that the Russian residency’s actually doing much at present.”
“All the more reason to conclude they are,” replies the colonel. “Time of study, period of observation and all that. When somebody goes quiet, they’re usually cooking something up. Take the Swiss.”
“Yes: you’ve been paying them quite a bit of interest these last few months,” Macauley says. “I was wondering why.”
“Back door to Germany, and hence outpost of Soviet Marxism. They have their own paper here: read by bankers, watchmakers and the like. Least obvious of all channels, and for that very reason the most dangerous…”
“I sometimes think,” says HumInt, “that we need to look closer to home: Sinn Féin, the Labour Party…”
“Precisely!” snaps the colonel. “And where do those two take their orders from? You want to see what links Sinn Féin, the CUP, Young Persia, Labour, Spartacus and who knows what else: follow the Cyrillic script…”
“And Sarikat al Islam?” Macauley asks.
“That’s harder to track,” the colonel concedes. “India Office back home are uncooperative. We listen in on them too.”
“Sarikat al Islam?”
“No: the India Office, for the Foreign Office-who, quite possibly, are having them spy on us…”
“Then there’s Churchill’s old bugbear, the Egyptian Vengeance Society,” HumInt adds.
“Does that one exist, or not?” Macauley asks.
“It does now.”
“I seem to recall Standard Oil using them to stir up trouble,” says the colonel, squinting a little.
“Me too,” says HumInt, also staring vaguely in front of him, as though trying to discern some kind of outline. “Them or the Kemalists: that one was never entirely clear to me…”
The discussion continues while they ride in a car towards Abu Zabal. As they pass the city limits it winds down, and the four men stare in silence at the desert. The colonel dozes; once, as the road’s surface jolts them, he mumbles the word “Comintern” into his moustache, only it sounds more like “coming turn” or, perhaps, “coming term.” They pass through groves of date palms, then, just beyond the old Ismailia Canal, a village at whose edge a slaughterhouse stands. Heads and entrails have been thrown over its wall for dogs to pick at; their muzzles, purple with clotted blood caked by the sun, briefly emerge from their carrion nosebags to follow the car’s progress before burying themselves in cartilage and membrane again. The station’s beyond this. Its four masts, each about two hundred and fifty feet tall, are woven together by a net of wires.
“Like in the Chilean archipelago,” Serge says.
“What’s that?” Macauley asks.
“It must be powerful,” Serge answers.
“You bet it is!” Macauley exclaims proudly. “Got to reach all the way to Leafield in Oxfordshire.”
The colonel and HumInt wander off towards a table from which a large urn is doling coffee out to engineers and workers, all European, some of whom wear boiler suits with “British Arc Welding Company of Egypt ” printed on the lapels. Further away, scantily clad Egyptian Qufti pass homrah slabs down a long chain that runs from the spot where the Mataria railway line ends towards the radio station’s compound.
“Before the track came out here,” says Macauley, noticing Serge watching them, “we had camels carry it all in: whole caravans of them crossing the sand. Looked like a scene from pharaonic times: building the Pyramids or something…”
Serge, looking across his shoulder, sees an arc welder perched halfway up one of the masts’ steel frames, soldering a cable into place.
“Look at the terrain,” Macauley continues, walking Serge away from the pylons. “Flat, unencumbered, plain. That’s the type of landscape our parallel erection needs.”
They pause at the compound’s edge. Serge stares out at the desert. In the distance, a caravan, or perhaps a line of joined-up, sleepwalking schoolchildren, seems to glide across a shimmering, reflective lake.
“Mirages are real,” he says to Macauley, suddenly remembering his conversation with the optician on the Alexandria-to-Cairo train. “They’re caused by the light’s gradient as it…”
But Macauley’s gone, headed towards the urn. Serge watches his figure shrink beneath the station’s geometric mesh, then turns away from this to face once more the utterly ungeometric desert. A squeal carries towards the compound from the slaughterhouse-and makes him think, again, of Abigail, her high-pitched, squeaky voice. He recalls what she told him about feeling sick at Gizah, her impression of watching what she called an “obscene spectacle.” Perhaps she wasn’t wrong. What if the whole of Egypt were one big, endlessly repeating pornographic film, Love’s Madness on a loop? The camel-schoolchildren turn into dancing girls with flailing limbs, then flowers or umbrellas opening, or perhaps bodies being torn apart: tricks of the light casting a flickering pageant of agony and remorse across a dense and endless sheet of matter.
12
i
He’s to travel upriver on a steel-hulled dahabia, departing from quay 29 at Boulaq. He arrives to find the boat already being towed out into the river.
“Not again!” he moans to the docker repositioning the fenders hanging from the berth’s edge.
“What’s the problem?” the man asks.
“I was meant to be on that,” Serge tells him.
The docker stares at him for a few moments, then breaks out in laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Serge asks.
“It’s not leaving yet,” the man says. “They’re only sinking it.”
“Only sinking it?”
“They sink it to get rid of all the rats. Then they refloat it and kit it out with clean stuff; then you board it, it’s towed out again, they hoist the sails and set off properly. Understand?”