'Is the desert, is the desert. Wahyat abuk! God forbid.'
And the fig-hawker went off into the smoke to get more brandy.
Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here.
Back came the Englishman, with his gangrenous face. A fat friend followed him out of the hotel.
'Bide time,' the fare called mirthfully.
'Ha, ho. I'm taking Victoria to the opera tomorrow night.'
Back in the cab: 'There is a chemist's shop near the Credit Lyonnais.' Weary Gebrail gathered the reins.
Night was coming rapidly. This haze would make the stars invisible. Brandy, too, would help. Gebrail enjoyed starless nights. As if a great lie were finally to be exposed . . .
VI
Three in the morning, hardly a sound in the streets, and time for Girgis the mountebank to be about his nighttime avocation, burglary.
Breeze in the acacias: that was all. Girgis huddled in bushes, near the back of Shepheard's Hotel. While the sun was up he and a crew of Syrian acrobats and a trio from Port Said (dulcimer, Nubian drum, reed pipe) performed in a cleared space by the Ismailiyeh Canal out in the suburbs near the slaughterhouse of Abbasiyeh. A fair. There were swings and a fearsome steam-driven carousel for the children; serpent-charmers, and hawkers of all refreshment: toasted seeds of abdelawi, limes, fried treacle, water flavored with licorice or orange blossom, meat puddings. His customers were the children of Cairo and those aged children of Europe, the tourists.
Take from them by day, take from them by night. If only his bones weren't beginning so much to feel it. Performing the tricks - with silk kerchiefs, folding boxes, a mysteriously pocketed cloak decorated outside with hieroglyphic ploughs, scepters, feeding ibis, lily and sun - sleight-of-hand and burglary needed light hands, bones of rubber. But the clowning - that took it out of him. Hardened the bones: bones that should be alive, not rock rods under the flesh. Falling off the top of a motley pyramid of Syrians, making the dive look as near-fatal as it actually was; or else engaging the bottom man in a slapstick routine so violent that the whole construction tottered and swayed; mock-horror appearing on the faces of the others. While the children laughed, shrieked, closed their eyes or enjoyed the suspense. That was the only real compensation, he supposed - God knew it wasn't the pay - a response from the children; buffoon's treasure.
Enough, enough. Best get this over, he decided, and to bed as soon as possible. One of these days he'd climb up on that pyramid so exhausted, reflexes off enough, that the neckbreaking routine would be no sham. Girgis shivered in the same wind that cooled the acacias. Up, he told his body: That window.
And was halfway erect before he saw his competition. Another comic acrobat, climbing out a window some ten feet above the bushes Girgis crouched in.
Patience, then. Study his technique. We can always learn. The other's face, turned in profile, seemed wrong: but it was only the streetlight. Feet now on a narrow ledge, the man began to inch along crablike, toward the corner of the building. After a few steps, stopped; began to pick at his face. Something white fluttered down, tissue-thin, into the bushes.
Skin? Girgis shivered again. He had a way of repressing thoughts of disease.
Apparently the ledge narrowed toward the corner. The thief was hugging the wall closer. He reached the corner. As he stood with each foot on a different side and the edge of the building bisecting him from eyebrows to abdomen he lost his balance and fell. On the way down he yelled out an obscenity in English. Then hit the shrubbery with a crash, rolled and lay still for a while. A match flared and went out, leaving only the pulsing coal of a cigarette.
Girgis was all sympathy. He could see it happening to himself one day, in front of the children, old and young. If he'd believed in signs he would have given it up for tonight and gone back to the tent they all shared near the slaughterhouse. But how could he stay alive on the few milliemes tossed his way during the day? 'Mountebank is a dying profession,' he'd reckon in his lighter moments. 'All the good ones have moved into politics.'
The Englishman put out his cigarette, rose and began to climb a tree nearby. Girgis lay muttering old curses. He could hear the Englishman wheezing and talking to himself as he ascended, crawled out on a limb, straddled it and peered in a window.
After a lag of fifteen seconds, Girgis distinctly heard the words, 'A bit thick, you know,' from the tree. Another cigarette-coal appeared, then abruptly swung in a quick arc downward and hung a few feet below the limb. The Englishman was swinging by one arm from the limb.
This is ridiculous, Girgis thought.
Crash. The Englishman fell into the bushes again. Girgis got cautiously to his feet and went over to him.
'Bongo-Shaftsbury?' the Englishman said, hearing Girgis approach. He lay looking up at a starless zenith, picking absently at flakes of dead skin on his face. Girgis stopped a few feet away. 'Not yet,' the other continued, 'you haven't got me quite yet. They are up there, on my bed, Goodfellow and the girl. We've been together now for two years, and I can't begin, you know, to count all the girls he's done this to. As if every capital of Europe were Margate, and the promenade a continent long.' He began to sing.
It isn't the girl I saw you wiv in Brighton,
Who, who, who's your lady friend?
Mad, thought Girgis, pitying. The sun hadn't stopped with this poor fellow's face, it had gone on into the brain.
'She will be in 'love' with him, whatever the word means. He will leave her. Do you think I care? One accepts his partner as one does any tool, with all its idiosyncrasies. I had read Goodfellow's dossier, I knew what I was getting . . .
'But perhaps the sun, and what is happening down the Nile, and the knife-switch on your arm, which I did not expect; and the frightened child, and now -' he gestured up at the window he'd left 'have thrown me off. We all have a threshold. Put your revolver away, Bongo-Shaftsbury - there's a good fellow - and wait, only wait. She is still faceless, still expendable. God, who knows how many of us will have to be sacrificed this coming week? She is the least of my worries. She and Goodfellow.'
