'Boy!' I called out as I made my way carefully down the steps.
He turned his head towards me without moving his body. I went up to him and asked, 'What's your name?'
'Mahmoud.'
Was he mocking me or was that really his name?
'Are you the one who was with us last Friday?'
He smiled and said nothing. Naturally! He didn't understand much Arabic, or was pretending that he didn't, and I didn't understand his language, so what was the point of the question? All the children here look like one another, however, with their wheat-coloured faces, fine features and caps, from which peeks out just one lock of hair, from whose shape the family to which the child belongs may be known. Sometimes the colour of the cap is different too. But if his head was protected from the sun by the cap, what about his bare feet on the burning sand? How could such abject poverty exist? Would one of my old pairs of shoes be of use to him? The size could never be right. Slippers, then?
'Hey, you, boy. Do you want…?'
I pointed to my shoes and to his naked feet and made a show of putting on shoes, raising my foot. He continued to smile but understood, for he shook his head.
Why did he refuse? Well, it was his business!
Finally the voice came loudly from the top of the steps: 'One day someone's going to have his neck broken for him coming down these stairs!'
I responded, also in a loud voice, 'There's nobody living here but you and me, so which of our necks is it that's going to be broken?'
I'm always astonished by the way she uses the passive voice even when who is doing what is perfectly clear! Yet another disaster visited by the British, this time on the language of her people? They too are very fond of the passive.
She was descending the steps with twisting movements designed to avoid the broken places where the stones had crumbled beneath the weight of people's feet. I have heard that the yellow brick that they use to build the houses here is mixed with salt that dissolves in the heat, and that this is why the bricks crumble with time. Catherine was lifting the skirt of her long grey dress with a hand from whose wrist hung a bag made of palm fronds, while with the other she gripped a folded white parasol with whose tip she probed each step before putting her weight on it. The edges of her wide hat hid her face, and when she stood upright her blue eyes shone in the light.
To be honest, Catherine, you are the only beautiful thing in this place. Without you in this oasis I'd have forgotten the meaning of women.
She sighed as she stood next to me, her face flushing with a sudden redness on the prominent curved cheekbones the moment the sun struck her. I hoped she might change her mind and call off the visit but she said, 'There's nothing funny about it, Mahmoud. Something has to be done to repair the steps, or replace them. You're the superior officer around here.'
I laughed and said, 'Superior officer, indeed! A superior officer whose instructions come to him from Cairo every few weeks with the camel caravans and whose messages and requests no one answers! The steps at the station are even worse. Some of the soldiers have almost had their necks broken in earnest coming down them.'
Catherine sighed again and said, 'All the same, something has to be done.' Then she advanced on the boy, took hold of the donkey's neck with one hand, rested the other on its worn saddle and leapt on to its back, letting her legs dangle on the same side and saying to the boy gaily, 'Siga! Forwards!'
She knows a few words of a Libyan dialect and thinks they understand them here. Young Mahmoud didn't answer her, however, and kept looking at me till I mounted. Then he turned and went behind the donkeys and prodded them each with a thin stick. As they moved, he started jogging behind us.
'Can't we let the boy off, so that he doesn't have to run in the heat? We know the way,' said Catherine.
'We hired the donkeys and he's responsible for them, but if you know how to tell him to wait for us here, I've no objection.'
She waved at the boy a number of times to tell him to go back but he didn't halt and stopped looking at her. Then she turned her hat around on top of her head to protect her face from the sun and devoted her attention to the road.
* * *
The oasis was still free of movement and noise. The agwad hadn't yet appeared on their stone bench shaded by a palm-branch roof in front of the gate to the town, and the children hadn't come out to play in the large sandy space in front of my house. All the same, I was certain that many eyes were watching us from behind the dark windows, from one of which had come the bullet that killed my predecessor, inviting the arrival of the military expedition.
Cairo hadn't appointed a commissioner to succeed him. Everyone who had any influence or backing had managed to get out of the posting, until they lit on me.
The government had, however, done something new to inculcate a sense of its awe-inspiring power before the expedition troops withdrew. At the entrance of the police headquarters that had been set up on the property of the murdered mayor, it had left a large cannon. I doubt that it works or that any of my soldiers knows how to fire it, but however that may be, a show of power is important — though the cannon will not stop the bullet when the time comes. Now, though, I am thinking of Catherine. What if it's she whom the bullet strikes? What if she falls instead of me? But then who am I to tell Fate whom it should strike and whom let go?
If I can't understand myself, how can I understand Fate? So let happen what may.
Despite this, we have to be back before noon. I am always careful to pray with them on Friday at the great mosque, behind Shali's gate. I take a few of the soldiers with me but I understand only a little of the sermon, which is interspersed with Arabic phrases and verses from the Koran.
The soldiers too complained that they didn't understand anything, so I had a prayer space made for them at the police headquarters, where Sergeant Ibraheem leads them in prayer most of the time and where I sometimes pray. Still, I always go on Friday with two or three of the soldiers and we shake the hands of the agwad and the worshippers near us. They mumble indistinct prayers for our well-being, which we return in kind, and then all contact between us comes to an end until the next Friday.
None of them has visited me and none of them has invited me to visit his home or his garden, though from time to time they send some fruit or dishes of food to the headquarters, always taking care to mention the name of the family that sent the gift. I distribute these among the soldiers and send back a word of thanks.
Even if the truce continues in this uneasy fashion, there's no harm in it. But what of the taxes? What will happen when the critical moment comes?
We left the outskirts of Shali where the shade from the houses protected us and made our way eastward along a road that runs among the walls of the gardens, but the trees didn't soften the heat of the sun.
The sweat ran into my eyes until I could hardly see anything. Abdeen was now a distant dream, beautiful and inaccessible. The tiles of the main room, sprinkled with water, the breeze from the open north-facing window, the street vendors' cries, which would wake us in the morning and continue throughout the day, and the tuneful calls of the sellers of newspapers — el Mu'ayyad, which I was careful always to read, and el Muqattam, which I was careful always to curse, along with its writers, who defended the occupation — and, in the evening, the stroll along the banks of the river, crossing Qasr el Nil Bridge to the parties in the gardens of el Gezeera with those of my friends from the past who still keep the faith. Enough hypocrisy! Who still keeps the faith? Have I myself kept the faith?
Better not to think about that now. Let me get through my day without being pursued by those questions that will lead me I know very well where. Let me cling to the morning smile that Ni'ma bestowed on me, though I didn't deserve it.