Effendi

CHAPTER 32 22nd October

Next morning, a couple of hours before dawn, Khartoum woke himself and went to fetch Raf. He waited in silence while the surprised bey sat on the edge of his bed and pulled on a pair of trousers, buttoned his shirt and slid into a black coat.

Sitting to dress was ordained. Something the bey had not understood until Khartoum explained this. Dressing in the pitch-dark was the bey’s own choice.

Khartoum had nodded to a Sudanese guard standing outside Raf’s room on his way in, and when he nodded again on his way out, the guard fell into step behind them. Two more soldiers fell into step at the front door. They were five minutes from the sleeping mansion before Khartoum saw Raf realize that not one of his escort carried a weapon.

South through the sodium of Rue Ptolomies, across Faud Premier’s hard neon and into a darkened alley little wider than a shop doorway, one city giving way to another as Khartoum knew it would. Some people thought it was the arrondissements that mattered, because those were what got shown on maps. It was a simple enough mistake to make. The same people divided their lives. This is my job, this is my wife, my friends from the market, my other friends, my family, this is the emptiness that should be occupied by my God.

Life didn’t work like that. It was layered, not separate. Woven together into a hidden script that few knew existed and fewer still ever got to read.

Woodsmoke drifted from mean doorways. There was a whining of sleepy children. A thrown-open wooden shutter swung so hard it bounced off the wall. Someone hawked and spat noisily in a room nearby. The further into the alley they walked, the sourer the air and the more battered the front doors. Until finally beaten-earth walls, stripped of their render by time or rain, framed doorways closed only by blankets.

Beneath Raf’s feet, shattered tarmac scabbed the damp earth like broken skin.

Khartoum was watching him in the near darkness.

“Where are we?” Raf asked.

“Undoubtedly almost here,” said Khartoum and kept walking.

There were others in the darkened alley. Figures slipping from the curtained doorways, their jellabas poor, their faces sunken with hunger. Scars went uncorrected and poor eyesight unimproved. They had the dark skin of those who had migrated from where the rivers met. They were the city’s incomers. The city’s invisibles.

Lacking shoes, history, a voice.

For most of those who joined Khartoum, Raf’s escort were invisible. Although at least one man did hesitate, seeing uniforms lit from an open door. And two or three slunk back into darkness and safety.

A few of the men smiled at Khartoum, most just nodded a simple marhaba. One or two, mainly the older ones, gave the salaam, right hands sweeping up to touch their heart and then that little finger-flick out from the head. To those alone Khartoum replied formally, wa ‘alaykum assalam.

One of the smallest boys reached out to touch Khartoum’s robe and was instantly yanked away by his father. Khartoum appeared not to hear the slap that followed or the muffled protests that followed that. In total there were no more than fifty people, all men and mostly young.

Occasionally, when light spilled out from a high window some of them would stare at Raf when they thought he wouldn’t notice. Mostly they just trudged in silence, until the narrow cut ended, opening onto a gloomy scar of scrubland and railway track.

Away to their right, arc lights bathed the vast neobaroque business that was Misr Station, its exuberance curtailed only by distance and intervening darkness. And somewhere nearby was a truck depot, where a diesel crunched its gears, but other than this, the only sound was of feet shuffling over gravel as the group left the tracks behind to slip through a hole cut in a link fence.

An unbroken line of blank-faced, five-storey tenements faced them across a deserted road, all that separated them from a small zawiya built in the courtyard of the tenement opposite. The zawiya ’s minaret was little more than a squat tower. And Khartoum’s voice, when it echoed from the top, was thin and quavering against the amplified magnificence coming from grander minarets across the waking city.

The small mosque looked out of place but that was just appearance, reality was the other way round. The mosque had been there first. Once, in fact, it had been a Coptic church, home to a famous Gnostic, but that was before the armies of God burst out of the desert, bringing blood, coffee, decent cooking and the truth.

“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate . . .”

The Fatiha gave way to other prayers, then a Bible story that Raf didn’t recognize from Sunday services at school. One in which Satan was cast out for refusing to bow down before Adam and in which Adam repented of eating the Apple.

Original sin did not exist.

Vicarious atonement was not required.

To find the law, logic had only to be systematically applied to situations not explicitly mentioned in the Holy Quran . . . Hadith and Ijma’. Raf pulled the terms from memory and meaning came tumbling after. Hadith was a database of oral law, second only to the Book and more important than Ijma ’ , agreed precedents. Together, with logic, they made up the four classical roots of jurisprudence, which all rulers must use . . .

Hunched on his heels at the back of the crowd, Raf understood instantly why he’d been brought. Why Khartoum was so insistent.

Raf dragged his eyes away from the cracked dome overhead with its constellation of tesserae broken by the tiny darkness of fallen stars. Stained glass filled with morning light at one end of the mosque and below the window was a wooden minbar, a kind of carved pulpit in which Khartoum now stood. To one side was a niche, richly decorated with polychrome marble and painted tiles. At the top of the niche were carved stones of alternate colours, dark red and pale sandstone. It was an ancient technique known as . . .

Ablaq, Raf said to himself.

Next to him, a middle-aged man frowned, suddenly recognized Raf as the new governor and looked hurriedly away.

“This is the truth.”

Now Khartoum sat facing the crowd, telling them the story of a famous mystic who challenged a Caliph and was crucified, his ashes thrown into the Tigris. Somehow the tale of al-Hallaj developed into one about a mullah who rode his donkey backward, waving a lighter and a mug of water. When asked why, he announced that it was to ignite heaven and put out the flames of hell.

After that the stories became lighter. The poor mullah and the rich beggar. The night the mullah fell down a well. The time he announced, when presented with a pregnant woman, whose husband had died falling off a cart five years before, that the fault lay with the lazy foetus who’d been sleeping, not the mother. And then, while the men were still thinking about that, the stories ended . . .

“They are the city,” Khartoum said to Raf later. “You forget this at your peril. And besides”—he smiled—“what’s that phrase nasranis have . . . ? Seeing is believing. . .”

“You wanted me to believe in them?”

Khartoum looked at Raf as if he was a complete idiot. “No,” he said heavily, “I want them to believe in you.”