‘I needed a bit of help to get home.’
‘I told you you would,’ said Katarina, annoyed. ‘But you wouldn’t listen.’
‘There was work to be done. Work for men.’
‘You leave it to the men, then. You’ve had your turn. Just help me a moment, would you?’ she said to Owen.
Together they got Sorgos to a divan. Katarina lifted his legs up and gently pushed him back. He fell asleep immediately.
‘He’s going to overdo it one of these days,’ she said.
‘He’s overdone it tonight,’ said Owen.
‘What’s he been saying?’
‘It isn’t the saying,’ said Owen. ‘It’s what might follow on from the saying.’
‘It’s only words now,’ said Katarina reassuringly. ‘He won’t be able to do anything.’
‘Only words?’ said Owen. ‘In a situation like this, words are enough.’
‘What is the situation?’
Owen told her.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘He shouldn’t come.’
‘Duke Nicholas?’
‘Duke Nicholas or any other Russian. He’s only doing it to provoke us.’
‘The Mingrelians? For God’s sake, he’s probably never heard of the Mingrelians.’
‘That may well be true. It’s easier to crush a people if you’ve never heard of them. He ought to have heard of us. We were a people. We had lives.’
‘Look, I’m not exactly in favour of him coming-’
‘Tell me,’ she said; ‘suppose you are right, and suppose he has never heard of the Mingrelians; and now suppose you tell him they are here, in Cairo, these people whom he crushed. What do you think he will say? Do you think he will be ashamed, do you think he will postpone his visit? I don’t think so. I think he will say, let the visit go on. What do we care for these Mingrelians? If they cause trouble, put them down! That is what he will say, won’t he?’
‘Something like it,’ said Owen, remembering the Charge.
‘Very well, then. In that case I am with my grandfather. I think we should stand up. To show that we cannot be put down. We can be knocked down but we will never stay down.’
‘Well, I have some sympathy with that,’ said Owen. ‘But standing up is one thing and throwing a bomb is another.’
‘The Russians should have thought of that,’ said Katarina, ‘when they threw the first bomb.’
‘That is all in the past.’
‘The past is never all in the past. You always carry some of it with you.’
‘You can’t do it forever. Where do you think we’d have been in Wales if we’d gone on thinking like that?’
Sorgos stirred in his sleep.
‘The Welsh,’ he said drowsily. ‘A mountain people.’
‘That’s right,’ said Owen. ‘We’d still be in the bloody hills, that’s where!’
‘-and so the dog dropped the sack and ran away,’ said the storyteller, ‘and all the names were just left lying there in the street. Now, the trouble was that in all the confusion, and what with all the shaking and jolting they had received, they had got mixed up. There were bits of men’s names mixed with bits of women’s names. Well, they all began crying out. One would shout, “Who am I?” and the other bit would shout, “you’re not you, you’re me!” So then they all began fighting each other. Well, then the blind man came running along the road and he tripped on the sack and fell right in on top of them-’
‘Ho, ho!’ said the big man standing in the doorway. ‘Very good!’
‘Selim!’ came a shout from inside.
‘Coming!’ called the big man. ‘You old bastard!’ he added sotto voce.
Owen followed him in.
‘Not you again!’ said the cafe owner, aghast.
‘Me again,’ said Owen cheerfully. ‘How are things going?’
‘Terribly,’ said the cafe owner. ‘Your man is useless. He’s big, all right, but he’s got something missing up top. The trouble is, that’s the sort my wife goes for. They’ve only got to be simpletons for her to feel all soft about them.’
‘She’d better not feel too soft about this bloke,’ said Owen uneasily.
‘That’s just what I’ve told her! Kick the bugger up the backside, I say. That’ll get him moving! Only that’s what I say about all of them and she doesn’t take a blind bit of notice. Here, you idle sod! Fetch some coffee for the effendi! He’s your boss, isn’t he?’ he added more quietly.
Selim came out of the kitchen looking daggers. He put the coffee before Owen, however, with a flourish.
‘Brilliant!’ whispered Owen. ‘You’re doing brilliantly.’
‘The next time they beat him up,’ Selim whispered back. ‘I’ll join in and help them!’
‘Meanwhile, just put up with him. You’re doing very well, and this is important.’
‘He just sits there all day giving orders,’ said Selim. ‘He’s worse than a sergeant.’
‘Yes, well, don’t mind him. It won’t be for long. It’s just a question of waiting.’
‘I don’t mind waiting,’ said Selim. ‘Not if I’ve got my feet up and a pot of coffee in front of me. But this is not like that. The moment I sit down he’s on to me.’
‘There are worse things. Just keep it up, that’s all. Now listen: there’s something you can be doing. Try and find out the name of the gang. Talk to the woman.’
Selim gave a broad smile.
‘I’ll talk to the woman, all right,’ he said.
Owen and Zeinab had been to the opera; in fact, were still at the opera, only, as this was the interval, and intervals were somewhat protracted in Egypt, they were going for a walk round the nearby Ezbekiyeh Gardens. ‘Gardens’ was perhaps a misnomer. In a country where, given water, anything will grow, and gardens were usually a riot of lush tropical vegetation, the Ezbekiyeh remained barren. There were various explanations for this. The most popular was that it was a British plot; or, conversely, testimony to Egyptian incapacity. Whatever the reason, the fact was that it consisted of only a few scrubby trees and some equally scrubby grass, tempting only for fornicating in, which was the reason, no doubt, why the gardens were fenced off with high iron railings and closed after dark.
What made the gardens fun to walk round was not their inside but their outside. As in the English tabloid newspapers, all human life was there: from the chestnut sellers roasting their chestnuts on the gratings which covered the roots of the young trees which surrounded the gardens-and perhaps that’s why the trees were scrubby-to the fortunetellers, usually Nubian women, telling fortunes by reading sand spread on a cloth. There were pavement stalls (rags and sweets in promiscuous proximity), pavement restaurants (consisting of large trays with stew in the middle and hunks of bread stuck on nails around the edge), barber shops (the barbers sat on the railings while their customers stood patiently in front of them), hat stands (on the railings), whip stands (ditto), oleographs of Levantine saints (ditto), indecent postcards (ditto and adjacent) and many other treasures. At intervals along the railings were Cleopatra’s Needle-like columns, only they consisted either of tarbooshes piled one on top of the other to an implausible height, or of congealed candy densely spotted with flies.
At night, however, such detail was lost. Lamps on the railings threw a mysterious, hazy glow and the flames of the chestnut-sellers’ fires created little pockets of moving light and shadow. Owen, impressionable at the best of times and made more so by the music he had just been listening to, loved it.
They came round on to the Sharia el Genaina, where there was music of a different kind: honky-tonk from the questionable cafes which looked across the street to the houses opposite, where the ladies of the night paraded their charms. In one of the cafes some men were singing mournfully.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Owen.
‘What language is it?’ asked Zeinab, puzzled.
‘Welsh!’
They could see the singers more clearly now. It was, as Owen had already suspected, his friends, the Welsh Fusiliers.
‘Why don’t they keep those stupid bastards back in barracks?’
‘But why?’ demanded Zeinab. ‘They sing so beautifully!’