Moving the Palace

by Charif Majdalani

  “And what makes you think the English will want it?” he asks.

  “I say they will,” Samuel replies, “and I will buy it from you in their name right now.”

  “And what will you buy it with?”

  “Colonel Moore’s gold.”

  Shafik gives Samuel a good long stare to make sure he’s serious about his intentions.

  “That gold doesn’t belong to you,” he says at last. “You can’t just spend it like that.”

  “I’ve been entrusted with it, and I will do with it as I see fit,” Samuel replies. “If the government in Khartoum has anything to say about it later, well then, I shall keep the palace for myself. The English owe me five years’ back wages, an enormous sum in hazard pay, and quite a few bonuses. I’ll take my payment in the form of these goods.”

  As this is said in a way that brooks no reply, Abyad mutters something, then slowly starts to smile, till finally, with a laugh, the two men raise a toast and drink brackish water from wooden cups while all about them, cajoled by the flames, play shadows of acacias and broom.

  In the days that follow, Samuel leads twenty-some camels back toward the intersection of the paths to Tama and Qumqum, salvaging the pieces scattered across the savannah. The first day, a fearsome rain falls upon the land, after which the desert suddenly appears restored and glistening, like a gleaming sword drawn from its sheath, like a torrent of color after months of unbroken dusty whiteness. The shaggy acacias seem to exult beneath a cleansed sky, and on the horizon, carved out in immaculate light, archipelagoes of baobabs look like legions of unmoving women hitching up their robes. In the heart of this miraculous setting, while evanescent verdure carpets the savannah, Samuel collects fragments of the wall frescoed with birds and fountains, the doors whose wood has suffered in the rain, and sections of the fountain with gilded arabesques, which he must go looking for in thickets of broom. On the second day, he has to stop a Baggāra family with their cows and haggle to buy back a painted, woodworked window the nomads found in their path and refuse to sell without compensation. On the fifth day, not far from the intersection, Samuel’s troop comes to a halt, for the scouts report that right under the same acacia where the tall mirror still stands, a pair of lions have made their home. A few shots from a rifle might scare them off, but Samuel rejects this idea. As they are upwind, he approaches on foot, Gawad in tow, and then, lying in the sand in the shade of a small arbutus tree, he gazes upon the animals at length through his binoculars. He sees them lolling about, stretching, making silent conversation, their magisterial languor blending in with the formidable silence their presence creates. Far from being frightened by their reflections in the mirror, they seem from time to time to stare at their own images, patient and placid, the male even yawning wide, and the female often and openly turning her back on herself. After a few long hours of spying on them Samuel gives the order to fire a few shots, which is soon done. After rising ceremoniously and taking a long sniff of their surroundings, necks outstretched and muzzles in the air, the lions finally take their leave, and the mirror’s reclamation is the final episode in the first long odyssey of Shafik Abyad’s Arabian palace. Three days later, the caravan carrying it almost in its entirety sets out resolutely east again, exiting the western provinces and, after overtaking the Marrah Mountains and crossing northern Kurdufan with its infinitely chalk-white light, through twilights that lay shadows down like assegai, and mornings full of limpid gaiety, the caravan comes at the end of a fortnight’s travel within view of Khartoum and at last, enters Omdurman—slowly, with the somber, melancholy pride of a great ship returning to its home port.

  6

  FROM VAGUE ACCOUNTS, CROSS-CHECKING, AND THE conclusions that may be drawn from what happened next, Samuel Ayyad leaves western Sudan and resurfaces in Khartoum around the middle of 1914. He does not arrive impromptu, but has himself announced, and Colonel Moore comes to wait for him personally in a tilbury in the middle of the souq in Omdurman, the caravan’s final stop, whereupon he takes Samuel to Khartoum. For two days, Samuel does not set foot outside the house where he has been installed, which he shares with a captain from the intelligence service. Languorously, he rediscovers the pleasure of sleeping in a bed, of baths, of eau de toilette on his face, and also the voluptuous indulgence of lying on a soft mattress all day long, legs elevated and feet placed against the wrought-iron footboard, reading the forty or fifty letters he’s received over all these years from his parents and sisters in order, one after another. For two days, he does nothing else; then he writes a few letters in turn. On the third day, Moore rolls up and, heckling him, declares with an astonished, merry look in his eye that it’s high time he was debriefed. Samuel says he has nothing to wear but his old threadbare suits. Moore sends an army tailor over, and at this moment, as if the news he’s finally opened his doors has been announced, members of the newfound Lebanese community in Khartoum begin turning up to see him, all arrivals from the recent years, small shopkeepers, a broker by the name of Georges Khayyat who will later become one of the city’s major landlords, and also Elias Dagher, an agricultural engineer that Lebanese industrialists in Cairo have hired, who agreed to come to Khartoum under one and only one condition—that a piano be brought over for his wife. Which was done, on a small steamboat, before the clumsy Sudanese laborers, just as they were unloading it, got tangled up in their movements, and howling powerlessly, bickering furiously with one another, let the handsome instrument slip into the Nile, at the bottom of which it has rested ever since.

  For lack of diversion, but also because of the reputation that precedes him, everyone comes to see my grandfather. They’re proud of him, impressed by his weathered skin, and a gaze that seems to have taken on something like a depth equal to the vast spaces they have long surveyed. This confers upon him the aura of an adventurer, and they do not notice the mocking glint in his eye, which he tempers in their presence. On the other hand, he tempers it less with Moore. The colonel’s joy and volubility seems to kindle his own vivacity. For after the tenth day, he has two new suits—a bit military, perhaps, but they deprive him of an excuse to stay home any longer, so off he goes to his debriefing at government headquarters, where he spends long hours in Moore’s office, telling stories of tribal warfare, abolished chiefdoms, and restored sultanates, while in the anteroom captains, supplicants, and civil servants wait, now and again catching a burst of laughter from the colonel. For laugh he does, that Colonel Moore; he tells Samuel that according to one report from the French services intercepted two years ago, when Samuel was with the sultan of Safa, inhabitants of the western regions called him the White Sultan: “You were the White Sultan, and your friend’s name was Abyad,” Abyad meaning white in Arabic. “The French must not have known where they stood anymore.” And that makes Moore laugh, as do the stories about Shafik: “Now that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a turtle wanting to sell its own shell! That Abyad of yours is a character straight out of La Fontaine!” Samuel, familiar with British humor, laughs more at Moore’s laughter than at his schoolboy jokes. Then, in one of his abrupt reversals, the colonel turns serious again; through the door to the office, from which not a sound can now be heard, the supplicants and the captains outside can tell concentration has returned. At this moment, the colonel is telling Samuel that while, admittedly, his actions in Safa have driven the French to take Ouaddaï, they have also allowed both powers to settle the borders of their zones, which is very good for what will come next, after the war currently under way, and here the two men are, discussing the war in Europe.

  All this goes on for hours without the colonel alluding in any way to the gold in Samuel’s charge. And yet when he came in, Samuel set down the remaining bags of gold on the table before him. As Moore has paid them no mind, Samuel finally adopts a more solemn bearing and launches into the part of his report concerning such matters. Moore falls silent, listening almost reluctantly. His eyes soon begin to quiver, on the brink of distraction, until the moment Samuel
explains he bought Abyad’s palace in the name of the government in Khartoum. Moore keeps looking at him in that flighty way, and Samuel thinks that the colonel hasn’t been listening. But the colonel rises, and then, as if dismissing the question with a wave of his hand, he announces that Samuel can keep the palace, it’s all his, and the rest of the gold, too, that’s all been written off, an unrecoverable outlay that might’ve funded the campaign against Bellal or helped other princes against the French hegemony, or even, he adds with a sigh, to arrange for other grandiose spectacles of princely warfare. And with these words, he crosses to the office door and opens it to the captains, supplicants, and civil servants who instantly snap to attention when he appears.

  A few days later, Samuel receives, in addition, the balance due for his years of service. He begins going to headquarters again daily, where he drafts a few notes on affairs in the west, giving his written opinion on what position to take regarding the new, still-independent sultanates in light of the new war, and this allows him to become acquainted with the war, reading newspapers and conversing with intelligence officers. Now and again, he remembers he is rich; he dreams of the resin-scented pine woods of Souk el Gharb, the town where he was born, the summer winds over Beirut, and he is racked with violent nostalgia for his sisters’ laughter and the soft sheets in the bedrooms of his family’s house. One morning, he goes in to see Colonel Moore, and announces he is going home. Moore reminds him that leaving for Lebanon might be a tad difficult at the moment, for all intelligence and speculation leads one to believe that the Ottoman Empire will soon enter the war on Germany’s side. Since this hasn’t happened yet, Samuel replies that he’ll give it a try anyway, and leaves. But he doesn’t just leave like that, by boat, with two trunks and a new suit and hat, surrounded by respect from sailors and other travelers, like an immigrant who’s made it in the world, impatient to return home in triumph. No, for his baggage is far more cumbersome: Abyad’s palace, which he has decided to bring home with him. It takes him three days, in a worn-out uniform, to organize the thousand pieces of the seraglio, piled in an open-roofed warehouse, between four adobe walls, and perfunctorily draped in tarps. Then he supervises their loading onto two steamers he’s chartered and finally it is his turn to board, while Moore and his officers, and the full complement of the Lebanese community, wave from the dock.

  Getting the palace down the Nile is naturally much easier than promenading it around on camelback across the savannah. For ten days, the two ships sail placidly on calm waters, and Samuel spends his hours on a rattan chaise lounge and dines at the captain’s table, discussing Pharaonic and Celtic civilizations with the Irishman, as well as the conflict in Europe. Then, hair ruffled, wearing a shirt the wind amusingly balloons, he remains on deck, leaning on the railing, watching the banks of the river, eyes misting over at the bright light bouncing from the sand, the rocks, the palm groves, trying to make out in the horizon’s mirages the pyramids of the blackskinned pharaohs of Meroë and the Temple of Soleb. One morning, off Dongola, they pass a wheezing, rattletrap steamer, overloaded with Sudanese in white robes, who wave from afar. In Wadi Halfa, where he sets foot on land, he is welcomed by Selim Atiyah, chief medical officer of the British Army hospital, a Lebanese man he has heard tell of in Khartoum. It is he who apprises Samuel that the Ottoman Empire has entered the war. Samuel converses with Atiyah and his wife on the terrace of their house where, at night, during dinner, the wind never stops playing the clown, always blowing out the lantern in the middle of the table. Atiyah is a stocky, mischievous man with an upward-curling mustache, who keeps in reach at all times a notebook where he jots down little zajals in Lebanese vernacular, inspired by the situation at hand, whether Turkey’s entrance into the war or the wedding of a Wadi Halfa dignitary, or a pimple growing under his pretty’s wife’s nose, which he finds only increases her charm. He tells Samuel that going to Beirut now amounts to a risk and suggests he stay with them. Samuel declares that he will go on to Cairo, and departs; from the landing stage, Selim Atiyah waves to him and then, on his way home, consigns to three amusing couplets his memories of an evening when the wind invited itself over for dinner, and of that singular fellow countryman navigating the Nile with, in lieu of luggage, a palace in pieces.

  So Samuel leaves once more, and it takes him another five days to reach Cairo. In Abu Simbel, standing on the shoulder of Rameses, he give the imposing pharaoh’s ear a friendly rub—it’s twice his size—while down below, three English ladies picnic beneath their broad hats. In Luxor, he spends a whole day strolling around the temples, among the living pillars, amidst the forest of symbols he studies dumbfounded, such that all that night and the next day, images of ibises and men with the heads of cats and falcons seem to be imprinted on his retinas, coming to life and commingling against the backdrop of his eyelids whenever he shuts them. Next to parade by are slow and verdant banks of Upper Egypt, with their norias, their donkeys, their fellahs, and their pyramids, and finally, with his two boatfuls of a palace he now wonders what he’s going to do with, he reaches Cairo.

  At first, he looks around for a warehouse to store his cumbersome baggage, and finds one near the port’s customshouse. For two days, he stays on board the steamer, overseeing the unloading. Once it is done, he has himself driven directly to Shepheard’s Hotel. Upon stepping inside and walking through the vast salons, beneath the domes and colonnades, amidst clientele that gives off an impression of being on villeggiatura somewhere in Normandy, he feels a moment’s hesitation, then remembers he is rich—very rich. At the front desk, his Western suit and billionaire adventurer’s air impress the staff, whose stiffness relents a bit when Samuel speaks a few words of Arabic—Lebanese Arabic, admittedly, but it’s enough to establish a respectful, less distant sympathy between them, taken up in turn by the servile attentiveness of a legion of bellhops in operetta outfits who lead him, from stairway to elevator, all the way to his room. He still has two whole days to lounge about in his massive bed, his marble bathroom, and the hotel’s salons, in which he sometimes feels like an intruder at a very exclusive English club where reading London newspapers and savoring cigars constitute the liturgy. He, too, reads papers, eavesdropping discreetly, from deep within armchairs, on the conversations of the gentlemen around him about the war and the Ottoman Empire’s entrance into the conflict. The guests, for their part, examine him indiscreetly, which he finds amusing. An Englishwoman in a flowered hat spreads the notion that he may be a secret agent. A Belgian cannon dealer with a lively imagination, or else up on the latest gossip, whispers that he may be Slatin Pasha, the Austrian general who recently left the Sudan, but has remained in Egypt incognito by the grace of the British generals’ friendship for him. Finally, a Russian colonel, the Tsar’s envoy to the Egyptian government, has a chat with Samuel one morning at breakfast. Between marmalade toast and a sip of tea, Samuel sums himself up in a nutshell, but the story of a Protestant Lebanese man who served the British Army in nameless sultanates leaves the Russian perplexed, while it only rekindles the imaginations of the prestigious hotel’s guests.

  *

  Meanwhile, Samuel embarks on several inquiries, trying to find a way to Beirut despite news of the French and British navies’ recent blockade off the Lebanese coast. At first, he tries in vain to send a few telegrams, then goes to the Egyptian Ministry of War and above all the Savoy Hotel, where the general headquarters of the British Army is to be found, and where marble walls, rugs, and chandeliers serve as the backdrop to the officers’ hushed comings-and-goings. His name and Moore’s are enough of an Open, Sesame to give him access to captains in the know and even a colonel in intelligence. But the end result of all he hears is that it is no longer possible to go to Beirut. While waiting to find a solution, he visits a few old friends of his father’s, such as Khalil Tabet, one of the pioneers of the Arab cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, who runs the famous newspaper al-Mokattam, for which Nassib Ayyad once wrote articles on the Arab poetry revival. Then
he goes to see Khalil Courbane, a poet of unbridled lyrical impulses and master of the postromantics in the Oriental literary renaissance. Courbane receives him in a luxurious villa in Maadi that Farid Pasha, the king’s brother, has placed at his disposal. Samuel waits patiently in a salon with European furniture until a door opens and out comes Courbane, arms flung wide, murmuring words of welcome. He is thin and very lavishly attired, with an ascot and gold cuff links, and starts out with small, fond comments, which Samuel finds excessive, about his old friendship with Nassib Ayyad. Then he moves on to Samuel himself, whom he has heard about, whom he questions and listens to, an elbow on the arm of his chair, leaning toward the young man like a bishop in audience. But quite soon he stops listening, distracted by a butler who seems from his mysterious cycle of comings and goings to be reporting something of capital importance to him, no doubt that his calash is waiting, for the poet indeed seems dressed for an outing. Samuel immediately excuses himself, rising, and Courbane, without insisting, likely for fear of missing his morning programming, begs him to come back, we can discuss it another time, and I’ll show you my latest work. But Samuel leaves with no intention of ever returning.

  What Samuel cannot suspect is that Khalil Courbane immediately embarks on spreading word of his presence in Cairo to every club and society salon of the Lebanese community where he spends his days and evenings. This community has in fact heard tell of Samuel already, and his nickname the “White Sultan” sets them dreaming. We might for instance imagine that, during a dinner hosted by Alfred Soussa, building contractor and assistant to the Khedive, after someone (most likely a young woman, one of those girls of sixteen or seventeen, who in Cairo are said never to be at a loss for words) has asked what this Samuel Ayyad is like, and Courbane has declared that he is very young and highly cultured, Yvonne Soussa tells “the great poet” that they must invite him someday, it would be the least they could do, before adding, “Tell him to come next Thursday, Khalil, for the dinner with Rida Pasha.” And the great poet replies—in French, of course, a language he must have had to learn in order to communicate in the fiercely Francophile Lebanese salons of Cairo, but which he continues to speak with an affected accent, immoderately rolling his Rs, as if on purpose—“But my dearrrr Yvonne, that’s none of my business, inviting him is entirrrely up to you.” And so it is that three days later, an envelope addressed to Samuel Ayyad arrives at Shepheard’s, inside of which a splendid scalloped invitation card from Monsieur and Madame Soussa requests the pleasure of his company (all in French, of course) at a dinner in honor of the Minister of War at the Villa Soussa on the eighteenth of March.