Free The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet by Michael Pearce Page A

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