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‘Justine would have paid your debt from her immense fortune. I did not want to see her increase her hold over you. Besides, even though you no longer care for me I still wanted to do something for you — and this was the least of sacrifices. I did not think that it would hurt you so much for me to sleep with him. Have you not done the same for me — I mean did you not borrow the money from Justine to send me away for the X-ray business? Though you lied about it I knew. I won’t lie, I never do. Here, take it and destroy it: but don’t gamble with him any more. He is not of your kind.’ And turning her head she made the Arab motion of spitting.

    Of Nessim’s outer life — those immense and boring receptions, at first devoted to business colleagues but later to become devoted to obscure political ends — I do not wish to write. As I slunk through the great hall and up the stairs to the studio I would pause to study the great leather shield on the mantelpiece with its plan of the table — to see who had been placed on Justine’s right and left. For a short while they made a kindly attempt to include me in these gatherings but I rapidly tired of them and pleaded illness, though I was glad to have the run of the studio and the immense library. And afterwards we would meet like conspirators and Justine would throw off the gay, bored, petulant affectations which she wore in her social life. They would kick off their shoes and play piquet by candle-light. Later, going to bed, she would catch sight of herself in the mirror on the first landing and say to her reflection: ‘Tiresome pretentious hysterical Jewess that you are!’

    Mnemjian’s Babylonian barber’s shop was on the corner of Fuad I and Nebi Daniel and here every morning Pombal lay down beside me in the mirrors. We were lifted simultaneously and swung smoothly down into the ground wrapped like dead Pharaohs, only to reappear at the same instant on the ceiling, spread out like specimens. White cloths had been spread over us by a small black boy while in a great Victorian moustache-cup the barber thwacked up his dense and sweet-smelling lather before applying it in direct considered brush-strokes to our cheeks. The first covering complete, he surrendered his task to an assistant while he went to the great strop hanging among the flypapers on the end wall of the shop and began to sweeten the edge of an English razor.
    Little Mnemjian is a dwarf with a violet eye that has never lost its childhood. He is the Memory man, the archives of the city. If you should wish to know the ancestry or income of the most casual passer-by you have only to ask him; he will recite the details in a sing-song voice as he strops his razor and tries it upon the coarse black hair of his forearm. What he does not know he can find out in a matter of moments. Moreover he is as well briefed in the living as in the dead; I mean this in the literal sense, for the Greek Hospital employs him to shave and lay out its victims before they are committed to the undertakers — a task which he performs with relish tinged by racial unction. His ancient trade embraces the two worlds, and some of his best observations begin with the phrase: ‘As so-and-so said to me with his last breath .’ He is rumoured to be fantastically attractive to women and he is said to have put away a small fortune earned for him by his admirers. But he also has several elderly Egyptian ladies, the wives and widows of pashas, as permanent clients upon whom he calls at regular intervals to set their hair. They have, as he says slyly, ‘got beyond everything’ — and reaching up over his back to touch the unsightly hump which crowns it he adds with pride: ‘This excites them.’ Among other things, he has a gold cigarette case given to him by one of these admirers in which he keeps a stock of loose cigarette-paper. His Greek is defective but adventurous