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 pearlgrey 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 which might have been puzzling in anyone who was not an Egyptian? This is where the quarrel with the pious Nur had arisen; for Memlik had established almost a court-form for the reception of bribes. His collection of Korans was a famous one. They were housed upstairs in a ramshackle gallery of the house. By now it was known far and wide that the polite form in which to approach him was to interleave a particularly cherished copy of the Holy Book with notes or other types of currency and (with an obeisance) to present him with a new addition to his great library. He would accept the gift and reply, with thanks that he must repair at once upstairs to see if he already had a copy. On his return, the petitioner knew that he had succeeded if Memlik thanked him once more and said that he had put the book in his library; but if Memlik claimed to possess a copy already and handed back the book (albeit the money had inevitably been extracted) the petitioner knew that his plea had failed. It was this little social formula which Nur had characterized as ‘bringing discredit upon the Prophet’ — and had so earned Memlik’s quiet hate.
The long-elbowed conservatory in which he held his private Divan was also something of a puzzle. The coloured fanlights in cheap cathedral glass transformed visitors into harlequins, squirting green and scarlet and blue upon their faces and clothes as they walked across the long room to greet their host. Outside the murky windows ran the cocoa-coloured river on whose further bank stood the British Embassy with its elegant gardens in which Mountolive wandered on the evenings when he found himself alone. The wall-length of Memlik’s great reception-room was almost covered by two enormous and incongruous Victorian paintings by some forgotten master which, being too large and heavy to hang, stood upon the floor and gave something of the illusion of framed tapestries. But the subject-matter! In one, the Israelites crossed the Red Sea which was gracefully piled up on either side to admit their fearful passage, in the other a hirsute Moses struck a stage rock with a shepherd’s crook. Somehow these attenuated Biblical subjects matched the rest of the furniture perfectly — the great Ottoman carpets and the stiff ugly-backed chairs covered in blue damask, the immense contorted brass chandelier with its circles of frosted electric light bulbs which shone night and day. On one side of the yellow divan stood a lifesize bust of Fouche which took the eye of the petitioner at once by its incongruity. Once Memlik had been flattered by a French diplomat who had said: ‘You are regarded as the best Minister of Interior in modern history — indeed, since Fouche there has been no-one to equal you.’ The remark may have been barbed, but nevertheless it struck Memlik’s fancy, and he at once ordered the bust from France. It looked faintly reproachful amidst all that Egyptian flummery, for the dust had settled thick upon it.
The same diplomat had once described Memlik’s reception-room as a cross between an abandoned geological museum and a corner of the old Crystal Palace — and this also was apt though cruel.
All this detail Nessim’s polite eye took in with many a hidden gleam of amusement as he stood in the doorway and heard his name announced. It appealed richly to him to be thus invited to share a prayer-meeting or Wird with the redoubtable Memlik.
Nor were these functions uncommon, strange though it seems to relate, for Memlik frequently enjoyed these so-called ‘Nights of God’ and his piety did not seem inconsistent with the rest of his mysterious character; he listened attentively, unwaveringly to the reciter, often until two or three in the morning, with the air of a hibernating snake. Sometimes he even joined in the conventional gasp ‘Allah’ with which the company expressed its joy in some particularly felicitous passage of the Gospel….
Nessim crossed the chamber with a light and lively walk, conventionally touching breast and lip, and seated himself before Memlik to express gratitude for an invitation which did him great honour. On the evening of his appearance there were nine or ten other guests only, and he felt certain that this was because Memlik wished to study him, if possible even to hold some private conversation with him. He carried the exquisite little Koran wrapped in soft tissue paper; he had carefully larded the pages with bank drafts negotiable in Switzerland. ‘O Pasha’ he said softly, ‘I have heard of your legendary library and ask only the pleasure of a book-lover in offering you an addition to it.’ He laid his present down on the little table and accepted the coffee and sweetmeats which were placed before him. Memlik neither answered nor moved his position on the divan for a long moment, allowing him to sip his coffee, and then said negligently: