disregard. But does one visualize a man
Yes, it would be easy if he were legless, armless, blind, to visualize him; but a particular deficit of a glandular secretion, a missing portion of soul, that would make him rather a target for wonder, perhaps even commiseration. (Memlik). There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray — became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them — ‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value — the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that — men walking inside a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them. Was this also Memlik? Nessim felt all the passionate curiosity about the man which an entomologist might have for an unclassified specimen.
Light a cigarette. Get up and walk about the room, pausing from time to time to read the invitation and laugh again silently. The relief kept displacing anxiety, the anxiety relief. He lifted the telephone and spoke to Justine quietly, with a smiling voice: ‘The Mountain has been to Mahomet.’ (Code for Mountolive and Nur.) ‘Yes, my dear. It is a relief to know for certain. All my toxicology and pistol-practice! It looks silly now, I know. This is the way I would have wanted it to happen; but of course, one had to take precautions. Well, pressure is being put upon Mahomet, and he has delivered a small mouse in the form of an invitation to a
Today in the sixties the house of Memlik Pasha has become famous in the remotest capitals of the world chiefly because of the distinctive architecture of the Banks which bear their founder’s name; and indeed their style has all the curious marks of this mysterious man’s taste — for they are all built to the same grotesque pattern, a sort of travesty of an Egyptian tomb, adapted by a pupil of Corbusier! Irresistibly one is forced to stop short and wonder at their grim facades, whether one is walking in Rome or Rio. The squat pillars suggest a mammoth stricken by sudden elephantiasis, the grotesque survival, or perhaps revival, of something inherently macabre — a sort of Ottoman-Egyptian-Gothic? For all the world as if Euston Station had multiplied by binary fission! But by now the power of the man has gone out through these strange funnels into the world at large — all that power condensed and deployed from the small inlaid coffee-table upon which (if ever) he wrote, from the tattered yellow divan to which his lethargy held him tethered day by day. (For interviews of particular importance, he wore his tarbush and yellow suede gloves. In his hand he held a common market fly-whisk which his jeweller had embellished with a design in seed-pearls.) He never smiled. A Greek photographer who had once implored him in the name of art to do so had been unceremoniously carted out into the garden under the clicking palms and dealt twelve lashes to atone for his insult.
Perhaps the strange mixture of heredities had something to do with it; for his blood was haunted by an Albanian father and a Nubian mother, whose dreadful quarrels tormented his childhood sleep. He was an only son. This was perhaps how simple ferocity contrived to be matched against an apparent apathy, a whispering voice raised sometimes to a woman’s pitch but employed without the use of gesture. Physically too, the long silky head- hair with its suggestion of kink, the nose and mouth carved flatly in dark Nubian sandstone and set in bas-relief upon a completely round Alpine head — they gave the show away. If indeed he had smiled 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
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 magnificently 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
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, explaining 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 motorboat…. 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’s hair thoughtfully and placed his fingers over his mouth to silence his laughter. This was when he was thinking deeply before lifting the receiver of the old-fashioned goose-necked telephone to have a conversation with someone in that low voice, or to ring the Central Prison for the pleasure of hearing the operator’s obvious alarm when he uttered his name. At this, Rafael particularly would break into sycophantic giggles, laughing until the tears ran down his face, stuffing a handkerchief into his mouth. But Memlik did not smile. He depressed his cheeks slightly and said: ‘Allah! you laugh.’ Such occasions were few and far between.
Was he indeed as terrible as his reputation made him? The truth will never be known. Legends collect easily around such a personage because he belongs more to legend than to life. (‘Once when he was threatened by impotence he went down to the prison and ordered two girls to be flogged to death before his eyes while a third was obliged’ — how picturesque are the poetical figures of the Prophet’s tongue — ‘to refresh his lagging spirits.’ It was said that he personally witnessed every official execution, and that he trembled and spat continuously. Afterwards he called for a siphon of soda-water to quench his thirst…. But who shall ever know the truth of these legends?)
He was morbidly superstitious and incurably venal — and indeed was building an immense fortune upon bribery; yet how shall we add to the sum of this the fact of his inordinate religiosity — a fanatical zeal of observance
