The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [322]
he would have shown a half-circumference of nigger whiteness under nostrils flattened and expanded like rubber. His skin was full of dark beauty-spots, and of a colour much admired in Egypt
— that of cigar-leaf. Depilatories such as halawa kept his body free from hair, even his hands and forearms. But his eyes were small and set in puckers, like twin cloves. They transmitted their uneasiness by an expression of perpetual drowsiness — the dis-coloured whites conveying a glaucous absence of mind — as if the soul inhabiting that great body were perpetually away on a private holiday. His lips too were very red, the underlip partic-ularly so; and their contused-looking ripeness suggested: epilepsy?
How had he risen so swiftly? Stage by stage, through slow and arduous clerkships in the Commission (which had taught him his contempt for his masters) and lastly by nepotism. His methods were choice and studied. When Egypt became free, he surprised even his sponsors by gaining the Ministry of the Interior at a single bound. Only then did he tear off the disguise of mediocrity which he had been wearing all these years. He knew very well how to strike out echoes around his name with the whip — for he was now wielding it. The timorous soul of the Egyptian cries always for the whip. ‘O want easily supplied by one who has trained himself to see men and women as flies.’ So says the proverb. Within a matter of a year his name had become a dreaded one; it was rumoured that even the old King feared to cross him openly. And with his country’s new-found freedom he himself was also magni-ficently free — at least with Egyptian Moslems. Europeans had still the right, by treaty, to submit their judicial problems or answer charges against them at Les Tribunaux Mixtes, European courts with European lawyers to prosecute or defend. But the Egyptian judicial system (if one could dare to call it that) was run directly by men of Memlik’s stamp, the anachronistic survivals of a feudalism as terrible as it was meaningless. The age of the Cadi was far from over for them and Memlik acted with all the authority of someone with a Sultan’s firman or dispensation in his hands. There was, in truth, nobody to gainsay him. He punished hard and often, without asking questions and often purely upon hearsay or the most remote suspicion. People disappeared silently, leaving no trace, and there was no court of appeal to heed their appeals —
if they made any — or else they reappeared in civil life elegant ly
maimed or deftly blinded — and somehow curiously unwilling to discuss their misfortunes in public. (‘Shall we see if he can sing?’ Memlik was reputed to say; the reference was to the putting out of a canary’s eyes with a red-hot wire — an operation much resorted to and alleged to make the bird sing more sweetly.) An indolent yet clever man, he depended for his staff work upon Greeks and Armenians for the most part. He hardly ever visited his office in the Ministry but left its running to his minions, ex-plaining and complaining that he was always besieged there by time-wasting petitioners. (In fact he feared that one day he might be assassinated there — for it was a vulnerable sort of place. It would have been easy, for example, to place a bomb in one of the unswept cupboards where the mice frolicked among the yellowing files. Hakim Effendi had put the idea into his head so that he himself could have a free play in the Ministry. Memlik knew this, but did not care.)
Instead he had set aside the old rambling house by the Nile for his audiences. It was surrounded by a dense grove of palms and orange-trees. The sacred river flowed outside his windows, there was always something to see, to watch: feluccas plying up or down-river, pleasure parties passing, an occasional motor-boat…. Also it was too far for petitioners to come and bother him about imprisoned relations. (Hakim shared the office bribes anyway.) Here Memlik would only see people who were relatively too important to dismiss: struggling upright into a seated position on the yellow divan and placing his neat shoes (with their pearl-grey spats) upon a damask footstool before him, his right hand in his breast pocket, his left holding the common market fly-whisk as if to confer an absolution with it. The staff attending to his daily business transactions here consisted of an Armenian secretary (Cyril) and the little doll-like Italian Rafael (by profession a barber and procurer) who kept him company and sweetened the dullness of official work by suggesting pleasures whose perversity might ignite a man who appeared to have worn away every mental appetite save that for money. I say that Memlik never smiled, but sometimes when he was in good humour, he stroked Rafael