The expectation of life in the Nile Delta is not much above forty.
The villagers are curious about my private life – or rather about my apparent absence of private life – but they are surprisingly incurious about my role amongst them. They seem to accept without query my intense interest in their lineage structures and give equable though incomprehensible answers to my barrage of questions about the number of their cousins and their relations with their maternal uncle. Of course, family is a favourite subject the world over. Here am I, willing and indeed eager to listen for hours on end to a breakdown of emotions, affiliations and resentments which is no doubt as therapeutic for them as it is rewarding for me.
Everyone in this community is related to everyone else, pretty well. There are three main families, though the dividing lines are blurred by inter-marriage. So in a community of around two hundred, all are known to each other and anyone over the age of ten would have a pretty clear idea in their head of who stood in what relationship to whom. The place is ruled by blood and genes. Everything that anyone does is determined by his or her position within this complex network with its inflexible set of obligations and taboos.
Certain people may walk unannounced into Saleh’s house. Others may not cross the threshold under any circumstances, on grounds of social inferiority or some ongoing feud. The class system flourishes, even within what is in effect an extended family. Some are more equal than others in the village. One of the most conspicuously unequal, a half-blind elderly widow, is Saleh’s uncle’s wife’s cousin, but this connection does not inhibit Saleh, Dina and everyone else in the household from treating this neighbour with lofty contempt. ‘She is a very poor sort of person,’ explains Saleh. ‘She is not important. There is no need for you to talk to her, ya sitt.’ Saleh considers that he has a duty to monitor my researches.
Trachoma, the eye complaint that frequently leads to blindness, is endemic in the Delta. In the village there are eighteen blind adults, a further group who are partially blind, and a whole raft of children who exhibit disturbing signs of incipient disease.
Dina’s third child, a two-year-old boy, has a dubious-looking eye. Dina has it in mind to take him to the eye clinic which comes once a month to the large village five miles away, of which ours is a sort of satellite. So far a convenient opportunity has not arisen – either Dina is too busy when the day comes, or the lorry which serves as a bus service between the villages is full up. In the meantime Dina is having Yussuf’s eye treated by the neighbour with the line in sorcery who attended to the matter of the donkey. This man’s treatment is known to be highly effective, she explains – probably just as good as the clinic and with the advantage that you know what you’re getting, no nonsense about new-fangled pills and creams that you don’t understand, let alone those needles in the arm.
Yes, I have made my opinion known. There is a point when professional detachment becomes inhuman. Strictly speaking, I should be here simply as a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, an interpretive mind. But I am stuck with the tiresome human tendency towards emotional response. And in any case all social anthropologists meddle. They meddle by the very fact of their presence. Better to meddle constructively when the opportunity offers.
Dina heard me out tolerantly. Maybe next month. If the cotton is harvested. If the sweet potatoes are planted. If there is room in the lorry.
My other frailty, in the eyes of the village, apart from my lack of a husband, is my poor Arabic. I improve, both in speech and comprehension, but I am still woefully deficient. This is hilarious to anyone under eighteen and a matter of faint solicitude to everyone else. Few people here have come across a foreigner at close quarters before. Some of the older generation remember the war years, when the Delta ran with foreign troops, but none of the army bases were nearby and there was little or no personal exchange. So I am their first experience of an otherwise normal adult who cannot talk properly. They correct me – kindly or impatiently according to temperament. And of course this crippling inadequacy has an ambivalent effect upon their perception of me – I am an educated person (though a woman), a doctor – but I talk like a child. They know well enough that I have my own language in which I am presumably competent, but all they hear is this fractured Arabic. They know who and what I am, but they cannot help feeling that I am also – well, a bit simple.
And within the context of this place, that is perfectly true. I am a simpleton, an ignoramus. Almost every subtlety of social exchange is lost upon me. Saleh and his family, who feel responsible for me, have to tell me how to behave correctly, as you would a child. They have to tell me how to address whom, how to come and go, what should or should not be said. My many expensive years of education have left me quite unequipped for life in this mud village with two transistor radios, one moped, one petrol-driven engine and two hundred people, many of whom cannot write their names. What it has given me is the urge and the ability to cast a cold eye upon them and their way of life.
Do I find this uncomfortable? Of course.
Yesterday I took my notebook out into the fields, which offers good opportunities for one-to-one interviews, if you can find someone taking a rest from field-work, or watering animals, or just sitting down for a gossip. Nobody labours flat-out in these parts. That is one great advantage of the revolution – with the overseers gone and their land to some extent their own, the fellahm can adjust to their natural pace, which is slow.
Ibrahim and his son Ali were comfortably installed in the shade of the fig tree by the water wheel, while their gamoose clumped round and round, blindfolded and harnessed to the wheel. There is something deeply soothing about the creak and groan of the wooden water wheels.
‘Sa’ida, ya sitt,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Sa’ida, ya Ibrahim,’ said I.
Greetings completed, I sat down beside them. I am never able to squat as the fellahin do – there seems to be some anatomical difficulty – and have to sit with legs outstretched or leaning upon one elbow like someone at a picnic. Naturally enough, this is thought eccentric and amusing.
Some preliminary chat. Then, with Ibrahim’s consent, I embarked on routine kinship questions. Ali, a cheeky fourteen-year-old, interrupted with embellishments and elaborations, mostly libellous. His father slapped him down half-heartedly.
‘In your country, ya sitt,’ said Ali, ‘who are the people who ask many things and write in notebooks?’
An unsettling question. An illuminating question, furthermore. Ali is on to something. Ali has looked over my shoulder and beyond my notebook and perceived that this set-up has implications. His question nicely nails the problem.
Everyone in the village is aware of the reason for my presence, that I have no official status and that co-operation with my enquiries is entirely voluntary. In the event, virtually everyone has volunteered – to be left out is seen as social annihilation.
And now here is Ali with his beady fourteen-year-old eye upon the matter.
I try to explain. I say that such questioning does indeed go on in my country and that I myself could be one of the questioners. But all this stretches my Arabic to its utmost and beyond. Not surprisingly, both Ali and his father lose interest. I give up and seize the opportunity offered by a pair of pye-dogs who are lurking just beyond our oasis of shade. I put the pye-dog question. Why are they tolerated? Do they serve some purpose?
Reminded, Ali lobs a stone at the dogs. Unlike me, he aims to hit. The foremost dog departs, squealing.
‘They are created by Allah,’ says Ibrahim, nicely begging the question.
Occasionally Stella comes across this battered testament among her papers. If she glances into it she views its author with benign curiosity – this is herself, it would seem, but a self she finds it hard to recognize. Some of the experience cited she remembers; she reads of the rest with faint surprise. The place itself surges back, conjured up by those handwritten pages: the smell of dust and dung, the sound of carts and donkey hoofs and crowing cocks and raised voices
, the blinding sun. She rather approves of this young woman who was reflecting so keenly upon the problems of being an anthropologist, but is bemused by other sections. The exchange in the fields is entirely unfamiliar. Did this really happen thus? The narrative detachment gives the episode a fictional flavour. When did I write this? she wonders. The same day? Or weeks later, grooming the raw material into this considered anecdote? And for whom was that young woman writing? Well, for this alter ego, as it turns out, in the quirky way of diarists. And if the pye-dog query is apocryphal or manicured, there is no question but that a lifelong ambivalence towards dogs stems from those months in the Delta.
This dog, then – this almost-spaniel – would serve to tame Stella. He would extinguish finally her atavistic dog-stoning inclinations. He would confer respectability and give her a conversational entry with those she met on her local walks.
How things would be between them became clear within the first few days.
Stella liked the dog. She found him vaguely companionable, the touch of his silky fur against her leg or hand was pleasant. But the dog did not like Stella – he adored her, he worshipped her, she was the pivot of his existence. Thrust into a position of unwilling exploitation, she felt an irritable guilt. There was an appalling imbalance of feeling. It was like associations in the past with men who had fallen for her but for whom she could feel nothing more positive than a mild affection. The dog watched her every move with liquid, fearful eyes lest she might be proposing to go out and leave him. Each time she approached the front door he would scrabble imploringly at her knees. If she did go out without him, she could hear his desperate howling as she got into the car, and when she returned he greeted her with an enthusiasm of welcome and forgiveness that left him too breathless to bark. Each time she passed him in the cottage he wagged his tail in propitiation. When she patted him he collapsed in ecstasy. Did all dog-owners spend their time subjected to this relentless emotional pressure, she wondered?
‘I’m not sure that this is working,’ she told him sternly, at the end of the first week. But by then there was no going back.
Chapter Six
‘If you’ve had your fill of writing articles, try something more punchy,’ says Judith. ‘A memoir. Do a fin-de-siècle Malinowski.’
Stella pulls a face.
‘No material?’ This is guile.
‘Oh, I’ve got diaries and stuff like that stacked up somewhere. Photos, even. Cuttings …’ Stella’s voice trails away.
‘I didn’t mean that sort of material. I meant, surely it was interesting enough.’ The guile now is transparent.
‘Of course it was interesting,’ says Stella hotly. ‘Good grief, one hasn’t spent half one’s life pigging it in disagreeable climates for no good reason.’
Judith smiles complacently.
‘Oh, you,’ says Stella. ‘Winding me up … All right, yes, I suppose I could write a memoir. But I haven’t the slightest inclination. And that’s not false modesty, either.’
Judith shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’
‘Come to that, what about you?’
For Judith too has served her time in disagreeable climates. She is an archaeologist. When Stella first set eyes on her, she was squatting in a trench somewhere in Malta, so caked in dust and sweat as to be apparently wearing camouflage. She had squinted up into the sun from under the brim of a grubby bush hat and told Stella kindly to push oft, they weren’t taking on any more labour. Thus began an abiding friendship.
‘No way,’ says Judith. ‘Though I grant you that I may be in need of occupation. I have it in mind to cash in on the tourism boom in these parts – up-market archaeological tours. A kind of West Country Swan Hellenic, in a luxury minibus. Trouble is, where do I get the cash for the minibus?’
Judith and Stella have dropped in and out of each other’s lives according to circumstance for the last thirty years. Their friendship is elastic. It has withstood long periods when they have not set eyes on one another, and weathered also spontaneous holidays with shared rooms in spartan hotels.
Judith Cromer lives in Bristol with her partner Mary Binns. She has sporadic work with an archaeology unit, work which may well run out due to shortage of funds. Archaeology is not a growth area these days, tourism or no tourism. Mary Binns is better placed, as a radio producer. Stella is not all that keen on Mary Binns, who has green eyes and is convinced that there is something going on between Stella and Judith, which is far from the truth and ever has been.
Years ago Judith said to Stella, ‘Have you honestly never ever fancied another woman? Not even a frisson?’
Stella reflected, trawling through a lifetime of sexual responses of varying degrees of fervour, and had eventually been able to come up only with the head girl at school on whose account she had felt weak at the knees for the whole of one term. ‘What about you and men?’ she retaliated. To which Judith replied that she tried one once and never again, thank you very much.
Mary Binns is mistaken, but to this day she hovers suspiciously on the outskirts of the friendship, greeting Stella with exaggerated warmth when they meet, treating Judith to pained silences when she has been with Stella. Judith makes light of this and says simply that Mary has her difficult side, don’t we all? She sounds like the archetypal spouse stoically making allowances, and Stella is sometimes surprised that it is Judith and not she who has ended up in a state of tetchy domesticity. Judith is not the homely type. She is restless, maverick and enquiring. What she likes best is to be scratching in the dirt with a trowel somewhere hot and ancient. But here she is, now in her mid-fifties, living with Mary Binns in a flat in Bristol, doing the occasional hurried survey when excavations for a new motorway or hypermarket turn up inconvenient material of archaeological interest.
‘Grounded,’ says Judith suddenly. ‘I suppose that could be said of both of us. And one should resist. Your dog seems to have some problem with its foot.’
They are heading back to Stella’s cottage after a walk along the wide grassy track which marks the course of the old railway line that once carried iron ore from the mines on the hills down to the coast. The mineral line. This physical relic of a forgotten industry cuts through the fields and becomes on the flanks of the hills a thickly wooded track which climbs to the ruins of the old winding-sheds. The mineral line can be reached on foot from Stella’s cottage by following a bridlepath leading from the field beside the Hiscox place. It is a good place to exercise the dog.
But the dog, today, is behaving like a recalcitrant child. Too far, he is apparently saying. Too hot. Now he is limping. He plods reproachfully at Stella’s heels. ‘He comes from a broken home,’ she explains to Judith in extenuation. ‘He’s used to a suburban back garden.’
‘I can’t think what’s come over you,’ says Judith. ‘You avoid commitments for forty years and then land yourself with this.’
‘He confers respectability. Everyone has a dog in these parts.’
‘Most people in inner cities have dogs, as far as I can see. Preferably the kind that are just a set of fangs on legs. At least this creature isn’t that.’
They have left the mineral line and are now crossing the field. The dog has perked up, home within reach, and veers off in skittish pursuit of a pigeon. The Hiscox boys come rattling in off the lane on their bikes, narrowly missing him as he runs across the track. One of them yells, ‘Sod off!’
‘Hmm …’ says Judith. ‘Is this local form?’
‘By no means. These lads are just disaffected adolescents, I take it.’
‘What we’ve been spared … Do you ever wish you’d had children?’
‘No. You?’
‘Well, no. Does this make us freaks? And truth to tell, I get on a storm with the young. But I’d rather they were someone else’s.’
‘My sentiments entirely. But it’s aberrant behaviour. Distinctly freakish. The norm is to stake out your claim in the kinship network, establish your credentials by way of offspring. Get yourself into the gene pool.’<
br />
‘Not at all,’ says Judith. ‘It’s simply a system to ensure a controllable labour supply. Children are useful disposable goods – barter their services for essential commodities, if the opportunity offers, stick them out on a hillside at birth if needs must.’
‘Extreme behaviour,’ objects Stella. ‘The product or complete social breakdown.’
‘Not at all. Common practices in antiquity.’
And thus, by the time they reach the cottage, the Hiscox boys are quite forgotten, subsumed into one of those pleasurable arguments that have always been a feature of their friendship.
‘The trouble with us,’ says Judith over a lunch of bread and cheese, ‘is that our trades have put us out of touch with the real world. The one we have to live in. I think in terms of funeral practices, weaponry and ubiquitous bloodshed, and you see people as components of kinship networks and lineage patterns.’
‘That sounds precisely like the world as I know it. I only have to switch on the telly or read a newspaper.’
‘Oh, well, the royal family are doing you proud.’ Judith laughs. ‘And global violence is nicely up to standard. Point taken.’
‘But you’re right in another sense. We don’t conform to social expectations. Unmarried, no children. We’re the sort that would have been burned as witches, in other times and places.’
‘Or consulted as oracles,’ says Judith. ‘You have to pick your moment, if you’re inclined to nonconformity. As it is, I’d say we don’t do too badly.’