A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore Read online

  “The house,” she said, aggrieved, “is full of ghosts. It is occupied by the spirit of his first wife, Lady Ethel. I’ll show you her room . . .”

  And she took Aisha to the room, which was always locked. They went in, entering an atmosphere laden with dust and the remnants of a musty scent. Dust motes hung in the air, the closets were full of old clothes and disintegrating furs, and there were empty glass bottles on the tables from which all vestiges of perfume had evaporated.

  Lady Katherine was haunted by the ghost of the other woman. Gasping for breath, she said, “She was an angel. She forgave my lord things even God could not have forgiven. I was nothing but the unfortunate woman who came after her.”

  The heavy curtains were drawn, and it seemed to Aisha that the smell of the dead wife was stored up here, that Lord Cromer had done everything in his power to preserve it. Pictures of her, in little ornate silver frames, were everywhere, her submissive features gazing out at them with her expression of readiness to accept everything.

  “He still calls me by her name in moments of intimacy,” said Lady Katherine.

  There was an invisible crack, Aisha now began to see, in the deceptive calm that lay over the house.

  “How I long to leave!” said Lady Katherine. “I want to give birth to my son far away from this place.”

  But she could not have her way. She gained more weight, and her movements grew more lethargic. The house filled with visitors and petitioners. Her Ladyship did put her foot down, however, when unexpected visitors came to the palace.

  Aisha awoke to the sound of some sort of commotion, and loud cries. The noises were not coming from within the palace, but from outside the walls. She crept from her room and went up to the roof of the servants’ quarters. Through the trees that surrounded the palace she saw them all: a group of young men wearing bright red tarbushes and blue uniforms, close in age and alike in appearance. They had come from one place, perhaps from a school, and they carried a sign bearing the words, “Down with Cromer, the Dinshaway murderer!” On their shoulders rode a youth who was their age, but much thinner, and with a louder voice. He was waving his fist in the air and shouting, “Down with the murderer of Dinshaway! Murderers, get out of our country!”

  Aisha was frightened, not understanding what was happening, or why they were so angry. Nor was the affair confined to those young effendis—others came as well: turbaned sheikhs and men in gallabiya. More signs were added to the demonstration—one depicting a soldier lashing a peasant with a whip, and another showing a gallows from which the dead body of a peasant hung.

  British soldiers began to pour in from somewhere. They surrounded the house, weapons at the ready. The tumult and the uproar intensified. Aisha hastily went back downstairs—doubtless by now the noise had woken Lady Katherine, who would need her to explain what was happening. She dashed across the garden, to be surprised by Lord Cromer himself, in the center of the reception hall. He was talking animatedly to a group of officers.

  “They’ll get tired of barking,” he declared, “and they’ll leave. But I don’t want a single one of them to get near the door of the house!”

  It was strange to hear this highborn man called a murderer, strange for those angry protesters to come to the palace instead of the usual sycophants. Aisha hurried up to Lady Katherine’s room. She found her awake and anxious. She would watch the crowd from her window for a little while, then hastily return to the balcony overlooking the Nile, to catch her breath.

  “Do you smell their stench?” she cried to Aisha. “They are polluting the air with their spittle. Why have they come here? Why don’t they go to their useless khedive and leave us alone?”

  Aisha stood silent, her heart beating rapidly. She could see the square in front of the house better now. The protesters had not tired or gone away. There were more of them, including many women who had joined, clad in black abayas, their faces covered with white veils. The shouting became a continuous roar, as dozens of signs were raised, demanding Lord Cromer’s departure or his trial. The mob crept into the vicinity of the house, and Lady Katherine could no longer bear to sit in her room. She went down to the reception hall, Aisha behind her. Lord Cromer was agitated; the household staff were mingling confusedly with the soldiers.

  “I don’t want our soldiers to get involved unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Lord Cromer spluttered. “No killings in front of the house. It’s quite enough, what the newspapers are doing to us already.”

  Harry Buell was standing beside him, a great many telegrams in his hand, which he was rapidly leafing through. “It is Mustafa Kamil,” he announced decisively to Lord Cromer. “He is the one who is stirring up the world against us, with his articles—they’re being published not just here, but in Paris and London. It is he who brought the students from the law school out into the streets and led them here.”

  Lord Cromer’s face flushed still more deeply. Through clenched teeth he said, “He is an agent of the khedive and the Turkish sultan, damn them all! Summon the Egyptian police—let them deal with their own rabble.”

  The police did not come right away. In the meantime, Aisha repaired to an out-of-the-way corner, fearful that they would discover the color of her skin, her face drained of blood. They were all of them roused, their aspects dark; captive lions in their cages.

  Lady Katherine was helpless to find a breath of fresh air. She withdrew to a secluded room and sat down beside the wall, hugging her knees to her chest and trembling. Aisha searched until she found a window giving directly onto the seething mass of people. She listened to them carefully. They had been joined by peasants from Dinshaway—no one knew how they had got there, or who had informed them of the time and place. They were relatives of the victims and eyewitnesses to what had happened. Elements of the tragedy began to assemble in Aisha’s mind as she hid behind the window. Each person added a small piece, a bleak detail in a dark picture. The voices of the effendis subsided and that of the peasants rose, resonant with grief and sorrow, old wounds reopened once more by Dinshaway.

  A little while before, no one in the world had known that a little village called Dinshaway existed. It was an anonymous point surrounded by dozens of villages in the Nile Delta, dry and hot, and full of dovecotes. It was for this last that the British soldiers left their camp in the nearby village of Kamshish, and went to shoot the pigeons of Dinshaway. They thought the pigeons were wild, not anyone’s property—fair game, just like the land they occupied. They picked a bad day—a hot one in the month of June, and an hour that was even worse—precisely midday, and they chose the most impoverished of villages. They didn’t find any pigeons along the way, as they’d expected to, but they found them pecking grain from the threshing floors within the village. They fired repeatedly, the pigeons falling one after another, until their fire ignited tongues of flame in the dry stalks. And one of the village women fell, wounded. The villagers were enraged, and drove out the soldiers, one of whom shot yet another villager, this time killing him, before they ran off, back to their encampment. But the sun accomplished what the villagers had not been able to do, felling one of the Englishmen, who died.

  Then the soldiers, angered, emerged from their camp, and headed back toward the hapless village. They avenged themselves viciously on the villagers, as if it had been the villagers who were directly responsible for what their scorching sun had done. They imprisoned all the men in the village mosque, then dispatched more than fifty of them to prison. The aristocrat Lord Cromer considered the incident an insult to the British Army, and a show trial was organized, blind retaliation its object. Even the lawyer who was appointed to defend the farmers betrayed them, turning on them and inciting the court against them. Four of the farmers were put to death by hanging, thirty-six were whipped, and the rest sentenced to life in prison. All the sentences were carried out in front of the stunned inhabitants of the village. In the hearts of those who had been suffering from oppression and defeat, Dinshaway evoked feelings of implacable
fury.

  The Egyptian police arrived, and a hellish scene of violence and mayhem was enacted outside the house. The chants turned to screams. Up to this point, they had done no more than repeat their angry words—they had not cast a single stone at the house. They were nonviolent, just like the residents of Dinshaway before the hunters arrived, but when the demonstrators felt the viciousness of the truncheons they began to pick up stones from the street and hurl them at the palace. Stones bombarded the house, and some windows broke. Cudgels were brought down upon the heads of all and sundry, and a choking smell of blood rose up.

  Her Ladyship could not find a breath of air. The English guards prudently retreated indoors, leaving the Egyptians outside to take their fury and cruelty out upon one another. A fire engine came and directed its hoses upon the demonstrators, who by this time were surrounded, and even those who tried to retreat could find no way out.

  Aisha felt as if the blows landed upon her own head. Meanwhile, Lord Cromer’s face was still dark, and Lady Katherine had fainted. The battle raged on until, at last, evening fell.

  When the fight was over, the house seemed changed. It was not just that the windows had broken, but that the splendor of the place had dissipated, its power neutralized. The furnishings and objets d’art had been removed from their regular places, and the rooms had acquired an air of randomness—the glossy paint dulled, spots of dirt on the white marble.

  Everyone was soundlessly busy with activity in the grand rooms of the house. Lord Cromer had shed his habitual coldness and become an exhausted old man. Lady Katherine had stopped moaning and pleading for air that was free of “the stench.” She didn’t try to elicit from Aisha any explanation of what had happened—there was no need for explanations. When Lord Cromer came to check on her, she said succinctly, “I want to go away. I do not want to give birth to my son amidst all this hysteria.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” said Lord Cromer.

  It was a long night. No one slept. A surprising strength pervaded Lady Katherine’s bloated body, and she forgot the day’s travails. She opened her closets, and servants brought cases of various sorts. Her Ladyship went to and fro, giving orders to all of them, as little by little the closets emptied of clothes, shoes, hats, and jewelry cases. She was taking almost everything that belonged to her, as if she did not intend to come back. This house was no longer hers—in any case, it belonged to Lady Ethel: it bore her imprint and the scent of her body. Lady Katherine had always felt that she was a transient guest.

  The following morning a great many sweepers came, and began to clean up the square in front of the palace, under police supervision. They removed what was left of the signs, washed away traces of blood, and replaced the stones that had been pulled up. When the horse-drawn carriages arrived, the English guards stepped forward, dismissed the Egyptian police, and began organizing the conveyance of the cases and their arrangement in the carriages. Aisha stood well out of the way, watching Lady Katherine descend the stairs, her face at last radiant with happiness. She was leaning on her husband’s arm, but she seemed unaware of his presence—of anyone’s presence. She made her way to the carriage at the front of the line. The train was waiting at the station, and would not dare move before her Ladyship’s arrival. It would take her to Alexandria, and from there she would board a steamer that would carry her to her distant homeland.

  Aisha found herself suddenly unemployed, since with Lady Katherine’s departure she had lost her rationale for being in the house. She went to her room to pack her case, and discovered that the clothes Lady Katherine had purchased for her seemed unsuitable beyond the confines of the house. She could not walk in the streets wearing them, or take them back to her village.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, overcome by the thought: where could she go, when there was no place for her? Everywhere she sought cover she was left exposed and naked. Should she go back to her village, to her helpless mother and her uncle who lay in ambush? How long would she be able to keep him off her? How long would she be able to bear life in that isolated village, now that the world had opened up before her? How would she ever be able to set down roots in the soil, and endure the wounds inflicted by its thorny brambles? But what alternative did she have?

  On the first day she did not leave her room. On the second day the servants looked at her pityingly, and no one asked her to leave. They were waiting for Lord Cromer to return from Alexandria, for he was the only one who could settle her affairs. She lingered diffidently in the servants’ quarters, not daring to cross the garden or go to the main house. They might forget about her, and she might stay forever inside this shell.

  But Lord Cromer returned once the mistress had set sail, and life in the household returned to normal. Visitors and petitioners began once more to flock to the house, and the square fronting the governor’s mansion was restored to cleanliness. Aisha began to wilt in her silence, contemplating her packed case and awaiting the order for her departure at any moment.

  The moment came during one of the evenings she spent in anxious apprehension, when Julia came to her and said coldly, “His Lordship wishes to see you. He is taking five-o’clock tea in the garden.”

  He hadn’t forgotten about her, then. She considered taking her case with her when she went to him, so as to proceed in one direction only, and not be forced to retrace her steps under everyone’s gaze, but she went to him empty-handed. She crossed the garden, trembling. He was sitting beneath a little pavilion illuminated by electric lamps. Flowers grew around it, and tendrils of hyacinth bean climbed its posts. She stood before him. He was dressed all in white, as was his habit, and in front of him were cups of tea and biscuits, as always. She stood there silently with her head bowed.

  She heard him murmur in a low voice, “I didn’t reckon that I would have any need of you—I never thought I would need anyone—and indeed Mr. Harry Buell had arranged what was owing to you on termination of your service. But I wish to know what these people are saying about me.” He gestured toward the folded newspapers piled in front of him on the table beside the tea service. Aisha didn’t understand exactly what he wanted, nor did she believe her eyes when he indicated that she should sit in the chair opposite him. She hesitated, but he gestured again, insistently. She sat, holding her breath. He pushed the pile of papers toward her, and resumed speaking. “Master Nicola, the official translator for the palace, has gone to Lebanon, and may not return. I didn’t care for those bloody dry translations of his, anyway. I want you to tell me what these newspapers are saying about me—don’t omit a single letter, and don’t try to appease me, the way Nicola did. Translate every damned word for me!”

  Hearing for the first time such words of revilement coming from his mouth, Aisha knew that the demonstration and subsequent defection of her Ladyship had rattled him.

  She swallowed, then reached out and picked up the first newspaper, entitled al-Liwa. Doubtless whoever had arranged the newspapers had put that one on top. Its first headline read, “Get out, murderer of Dinshaway!” This was printed in small letters, and beneath it in slightly larger letters was “Mustafa Kamil,” the same name that had been repeated throughout the demonstration. She read it silently to begin with—the words were savage and accusatory. He watched her shifting expressions with a piercing and steady eye. When she hesitated for too long, he scolded her, “I’m not a little child. I can bear it.”

  She began to translate the words in stumbling phrases, but she gained a little courage when she saw how calm he was. She translated the harshest lines without his commenting or becoming upset, although occasionally he would break his silence with a sarcastic laugh, or he would shake his head in perplexity. When she read him a piece in one of the papers about how Khedive Abbas had issued a decision that all those incarcerated in connection with the Dinshaway incident were to be released, Lord Cromer waved his hand in dismissal, saying, “That damned Turk—he wants to be a hero at my expense.”

  This was her first day in her new position. D
ays of work followed after that, as the newspapers piled up. There were newspapers that owed their continued existence to him, and these praised his works in Egypt, but he pushed them aside, as if he sought only what would cause him pain. He directed her to pause before an article bearing the headline “Abominations of British Justice.” He attended for a little while, and then when he learned the name of the author he sat upright in his chair and picked up his teacup with trembling fingers. When it was empty, he cried in a hoarse voice, “Wilfrid Blunt. I thought he was my friend.”

  Seeing that he was distressed, Aisha stopped reading, but he composed himself and indicated that she should continue. The writer was openly calling for the British authorities to recall him, on the grounds that he was no longer fit to govern Egypt, that he had obstructed justice and the law, replacing them with the rule of barbarism and revenge. Aisha paused for breath. She didn’t see how he could endure all of this. He made no effort to urge her to read more, but sat lost in silence, except that he was breathing hard. She didn’t dare move or try to get up.

  After a little while he spoke. “Are there other articles taken from the British newspapers?”

  She quickly turned over the yellowish pages. There was indeed one more article, and oddly enough she knew the name of the author. She had seen his name on the cover of a number of books in the library at her old school in Asyout. He was a great writer—she would not have imagined he might take an interest in a faraway event in a distant land. She was afraid to mention it to him after what had happened with the first article.

  She said lamely, “There is another article, but the name of the author isn’t clearly legible.”

  He snorted. “Girl,” he told her, “I’m stronger than you suppose. What is his name?”

  Directly she said, “George Bernard Shaw. It’s not actually an article. It’s the introduction to a play called John Bull’s Other Island.”