The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [401]
course, the slips of cloth which women tear from their underclothes and hang up as offerings to a saint who, they believe, will cure sterility and enable them to conceive! The devil! Here was old Scobie’s bath-tub apparently being invoked to confer fertility upon the childless — and with success, too, if one could judge by the great number of the offerings.
‘El Scob was a holy one?’ I said in my halting Arabic. The tired, crooked bundle of humanity with its head encircled in a tattered shawl nodded and bowed as he croaked: ‘From far away in Syria he came. Here he found his rest. His name en-lightens the just. He was a student of harmlessness!’
I felt as if I were dreaming. I could almost hear Scobie’s voice say: ‘Yes, it’s a flourishing little shrine as shrines go. Mind you, I don’t make a fortune, but I do give service!’ The laughter began to pile up inside me as I felt the trigger of Clea’s fingers on my elbow. We exchanged delighted squeezes as we retired from that fuggy little hole into the dusky courtyard, while Abdul reverently replaced the cloth over the bath-tub, attended to the oil wick, and then joined us. Carefully he locked the iron grille, and accepting a tip from Clea with many hoarse gratitudes, shuffled away into the shadows, leaving us to sit down upon a heap of tumbled masonry.
‘I didn’t come right in’ she said. ‘I was afraid we’d start laughing and didn’t want to risk upsetting Abdu l.’
‘Clea! Scobie’s bath-tub! ’
‘I know.’
‘How the devil did this happen?’
Clea’s soft laughter!
‘You must tell me.’
‘It is a wonderful story. Balthazar unearthed it. Scobie is now officially El Yacoub. At least that is how the shrine is registered on the Coptic Church’s books. But as you have just heard he is really El Scob! You know how these saints’ maquams get forgotten, overlooked. They die, and in time people completely forget who the original saint was; sometimes a sand-dune buries the shrine. But they also spring alive again. Suddenly one day an epileptic is cured there, or a prophecy is given by the shrine to some mad woman — and presto! the saint wakes up, revives. Well, all the time our old pirate was living in this house El Yacoub was there,
at the end of the garden, though nobody knew it. He had been bricked in, surrounded by haphazard walls — you know how crazily they build here. He was utterly forgotten. Meanwhile Scobie, after his death, had become a figure of affectionate memory in the neighbourhood. Tales began to circulate about his great gifts. He was clever at magic potions (like Mock Whisky?). A cult began to blossom around him. They said he was a necro-mancer. Gamblers swore by his name. “El Scob spit on this card”
became quite a proverb in the quarter. They also said that he had been able to change himself into a woman at will (!) and by sleeping with impotent men regenerate their forces. He could also make the barren conceive. Some women even called their children after him. Well, in a little while he had already joined the legendary of Alexandrian saints, but of course he had no actual shrine —
because everyone knew with one half of his mind that Father Paul had stolen his body, wrapped it in a flag, and buried it in the Catholic cemetery. They knew because many of them had been there for the service and much enjoyed the dreadful music of the police band of which I believe Scobie had once been a member. I often wonder whether he played any instrument and if so what. A slide trombone? Anyway, it was during this time, while his sainthood was only, so to speak, awaiting a Sign, a Portent,