NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  The great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria (and worked for the Ministry of Irrigation), told a different story. In his poems he had celebrated the richness, the history, the squalor, the eroticism of the place as something human. His sense of reality caused him to be labeled decadent. In “The City” and “The God Abandons Antony” he had emphasized that the city was something within us, sometimes as “black ruins” and sometimes representing human hope or failure. “The city is a cage … and no ship exists / To take you from yourself.” The English poet D. J. Enright wisely wrote, “It is not that Cavafy reminds us that we are merely human. He reminds us that we are human.”

  No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

  There were fleeting glimpses from certain books I had read, some aspects of dereliction, like a couple in tatters, and you think: That broken rag on her head was once a turban, and there were gaps on those shoes where there had once been jewels, and her shreds had once been silks. You could make out what it must have been from what it was, like the town auditorium in Crete that had once been a mosque, and the claustrophobic church in Siracusa that had been a Greek temple.

  The hookahs, the so-called hubble bubbles, are still in Alexandria, and so are the cafes where the men sit sucking on these waterpipes, while cripples and flunkies fill them and keep them alight; the tottering buildings, the Cecil Hotel, the Corniche and its cooling breeze, and the children fishing from the edge, swallows crisscrossing the heaps of garbage, the jetty of the Corniche ending in the fort that was built with the rubble of the Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the “clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins.” The stalls of watermelon, and fish, or almonds, the men with pushcarts doling out the mucky fava bean mixture they called foul. The air full of brick dust, “sweet smelling brick dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.” The city was physically recognizable; the way life is lived outdoors on its streets and pavements makes the city visible and tantalizing, too, for what else remains indoors and hidden? At the very least, with the well-turned phrase, “a thousand dust-tormented streets,” Durrell could be assured that in this respect his description of Alexandria would never be out of date.

  Alexandria was a broken old hag that had once (every other writer had said so) been a great beauty; she was not dead, but fallen.

  It was not quite true that no one had described the Alexandria that I saw. There was one man, Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote in Cairo, but his inspiration came from Alexandria, where he spent the summer months of each year. “Only twice in his life has he been abroad,” one of his translators wrote, “and after his second trip he vowed never to travel again.” He had won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the Arab world’s only Nobel laureate in literature. At the moment Mahfouz was in trouble.

  Two weeks before I arrived in Alexandria, while I was still on the Seabourne, visiting Taormina, Mahfouz had been stabbed by a Muslim fanatic in front of his apartment house on Sharia Nil in Cairo. He had been in intensive care since then. Mahfouz had been denounced by the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and just as he had inspired the bombers who had tried to bring down the World Trade Center, he had filled another poisonous little apostle in Cairo with the resolve to murder Mahfouz.

  It was a sudden stabbing on the street and had left a deep wound in Mahfouz’s neck. Mahfouz was an old man, eighty-three, a diabetic, and he had been seriously injured. Blood pouring from his wound, he had been taken to the hospital, which was fortunately only a block away. He was still in the intensive-care ward of the Cairo hospital.

  I decided to take the train to Cairo to see whether I could talk to him. It was either that or a visit to the pyramids with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan.

  Meanwhile, Alexandria was having an odd effect on me, plunging me into dream states, in which I was a sort of Prospero figure in a big rambling estate, among all sorts of Eskimos and Indians and old friends; and even odder unrepeatable sexual dreams. Was it the bright light of early dawn blazing through my porthole, the stillness of the ship at its berth in the Western Harbor, the mutters and bells and clangs? All that, and the city itself, everything I had read about Alexandria was feeding my imagination, provoking desires.

  The news was bad. Tourists were being shot by fundamentalists in Luxor and Giza. Some had died of their wounds. The body count was fifteen this year, two last week. Some of the victims had been on tourist buses, others on trains.

  “They shoot into First Class—they know where the tourists are on the trains,” Raymond Stock told me.

  Raymond, an American poet, essayist and teacher, was Mahfouz’s biographer. He was fluent in Arabic and had lived in Cairo for four years, keeping in daily contact with his subject, whose apartment was not far away. I called Raymond from a pay phone at the port of Alexandria soon after I arrived on the Akdeniz. He said that even though Mahfouz was in the hospital he had still been seeing the wounded man almost every day and that he was slightly improved.

  “Is there any chance of my seeing him?”

  “I’m just going to the hospital now,” he said. “They might move him out of intensive care and if they do we could visit him this afternoon.”

  On this very slender possibility I made plans to take the two-hour train trip from Alexandria to Cairo. But there was nothing else I wished to do; the pyramids, the Sphinx, the bazaar, the museums—they could wait. One of the aspects of the classical Grand Tour that I had always found attractive was the way the traveler sought the wisdom of great men. Naguib Mahfouz was certainly one of those.

  “I have been driving a taxi for twelve years, and this is the first time I have ever taken a tourist to the main railway station,” the taxi driver told me.

  “I’m not a tourist,” I said.

  “Why you take the train?”

  “So I can look out the window.”

  And, I thought, so that I can verify something I had read: “Alexandria Main Station … the noise of wheels cracking the slime slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows … the long pull of the train into the silver light … the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound … a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.”

  That was Justine, and the nice image of “the giant sniffing of the engine” had to mean a steam locomotive. That was the only difference. If I had known what the station was like I could have answered him: I want to go to the railway station because I want to enter a time warp.

  But this was true of many railway stations. The two main stations in Istanbul had hardly changed at all. Haydarpasa was a hundred years old but the only difference was that diesels had now replaced steam. The same had been true in Trieste and Split, even in Tirana and Messina and Palermo, in Valencia and Alicante and Marseilles. Railway stations are not timeless, but—too well-built to modernize, too large and dirty to purify; often elderly, sometimes venerable—they retain a sense of the past.

  The three classes of tickets, the confusion at the ticket windows, the pushing and shoving and the queue-jumping men cutting ahead, the texture of the cardboard tickets, the very smudges of the printing, made it seem an experience from a former time, from a paragraph in a book written long ago. The torn advertisements fraying from the wall, the “Women’s Waiting Room,” the filthy platforms, the beggars, the sweet-vendors and newsboys, and the shafts of dusty sunlight slanting onto the rails, the clopping of horses in the courtyard; these details, part of the present, might be found on the same old page.

  Assuming that the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist gunmen traveled Third, and their victims were in First, I decided to buy a Second Class ticket to Cairo on a later train. This presented a difficulty which illustrated one of the dilemmas of Alexandrian life. Outside the station I was amb
ushed by men screaming at me, hectoring me to buy melons, or nuts, crocodile-skin shoes. Inside, at the ticket window, I found myself begging a clerk to sell me a train ticket. It was perhaps an Egyptian paradox: The things you don’t want are pushed in your face; the thing you want seems unobtainable. After some perseverance, and luck, I found the right ticket window. It was outside the station—not many people knew where the First and Second Class ticket windows were, which was perhaps a comment on how hard-up Alexandria had become. I bought a round-trip ticket.

  Then, to kill time, and see the city, I took a tramcar ten stops, west, into the old Arab Quarter. Here and there I spotted Turks from the Akdeniz haggling with Egyptians over figs, or fruit, or candy; or tourist junk—plaster sphinxes, beads, brass plates, leather purses, stuffed toy camels, crocodile-skin belts. Turk and Arab, with no language in common, screamed at each other in broken English.

  “Fie dallah!” cried the Egyptian hawker.

  “Free dallah!” the Turk yelled.

  “Fuh dallah!”

  “Duh wanna.”

  “Meester—best prass for you.”

  “Free dallah!”

  On the way back to the railway station my returning tram became jammed in traffic so dense I had to walk or else risk missing my train.

  The problem was a dead cart-horse on the tracks a quarter of a mile away at the center of Alexandria. I chanced upon it after passing through the stopped traffic of honking cars and taxis, the trams, buggies, trucks, buses and motorbikes. At the head of all this traffic was the dead horse, still in its traces, its wagon overturned on the tramlines. It had been killed on the spot by being struck by the tramcar. One of the tram’s front panels was dented and smeared with blood. The horse was a gray nag, very skinny, tortured-looking eyes and wrung withers, with a big red gash on its hipbone and another on its leg. The death of this one miserable creature had brought the city of Alexandria to a halt.

  The train to Cairo passes through the heart of the Delta, through suburbs and Sidi Gaber, past the shantytown sprawl and the brick tenements hung with laundry, Arab boys kicking a football in a clearing between two vegetable patches, and then the railway line offers a panorama of the Delta’s agriculture—cotton fields, grape arbors, wheat fields, rice paddies, fields of leafy greens and bean stalks. Every foot of the Delta was cultivated, all the flatness demarcated into gardens and fields. The canals were so choked with hyacinths and papyrus that water traffic was unthinkable. Even in the heat of the day there were people in the cotton fields, picking the cotton, and hauling sacks. The animals sought shade, though. It was hot and dry, and goats were pressed against flat walls, their flanks against the brick, because that ribbon of shade offered the only relief against the sun overhead.

  Only two branches of the Nile pass through the Delta. The Cairo train crosses both of them, the Rashid Branch at Kafr el Zaiyat, and nearer Cairo, at Benha, the Domyat Branch. I had never seen the Nile before, but here there was not much of it. There are so many dams upriver that a relatively small flow of the Nile penetrates this far. And the most recent one, the Aswan High Dam of 1970, so reduced the flow of alluvial soil that the northwest edges of the delta towns that had always been gaining land (because of the easterly flow of the Mediterranean current here) were now being eroded by the sea. The Nile Delta was shrinking.

  Because they were so dusty and sunbaked and neglected, the towns of the Delta, even the larger ones like Tantra and Benha, were impossible to date. They seemed to exist in that Third World dimension of poverty and neglect that held them outside of time.

  The mob at Cairo Station, people struggling to leave, people struggling to secure a taxi or board a bus, hustling, haggling, picking pockets, or simply standing and looking desperate, was the worst, most frenetic, I had seen anywhere in the Mediterranean. The taxi drivers were the most rapacious by far. It is no surprise to learn that a great proportion of New York’s taxi drivers began their careers here in Cairo, and many of these same men would soon be joining them. It was not that they were rapacious—rapacity becomes instinctual among the urban poor in the Third World, as a survival skill—but that the simplest transactions always turned into a tiresome bidding war, in which you were always cheated.

  “Fifteen dollars,” a cabbie told me when I said where I wanted to go. This was nine times the normal fare. Just being quoted a fare in dollars in this far-off country irritated me.

  But my efforts were rewarded. I met Raymond Stock at the Semiramis Hotel and he greeted me by saying “Mahfouz is expecting you.”

  He explained the stabbing while we had coffee. Sheik Omar had issued the fatwa on Mahfouz in 1989 from his seedy little mosque in New Jersey. It resembled the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, and coming so soon after that well-publicized one, it seemed as though Sheik Omar was trying to upstage the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mahfouz, too, was being accused of writing a blasphemous book. Sheik Omar called him “an infidel.” The book was Children of the Alley (Aulad Haratina). In one reading it was just a neighborhood tale of life in Cairo, but it was poetic too, and much could be read into it. That was the problem—its allusiveness. It seemed to contain echoes of the Koran, and the Bible, too. This was not as strange as it seemed. Time had done very little to change the Arabic language or the structure of Egyptian life. The character Qasim was a familiar figure in Cairo, but he had certain qualities in common with the Prophet Mohammed (and his chapter abounded with Koranic parallels). Rifa’a somewhat resembled Jesus, as the character Gebel resembled Moses. It was the story of a delightful family, said its most recent translator (my brother, Peter Theroux), but within this was a deeper story, of the spiritual history of mankind. The novel has 114 chapters; the Koran has the same number. “It is not a history of God,” Mahfouz had said, “but rather a history of God the way Man has insisted on imagining Him.”

  The stabbing came about in this way. Mahfouz had an informal weekly meeting with his pals in Cairo. They were mainly old men and called themselves “the vagabonds” (harafish). But a few weeks before, there had been a quarrel—a trifling matter but it kept Mahfouz at home the following week. When the dispute was patched up, Mahfouz was with his pals again—and that was the night the assassin came for him. He said he was an admirer. He was a member of Sheik Omar’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya, the fundamentalist Islamic Group.

  “If you come here tomorrow at five, you will find him,” Mrs. Mahfouz told them.

  No one, not even she, suspected that someone would try to kill Mahfouz. In any case, Mahfouz made no concessions. He was fearless. He walked every day in the open air. Everyone who knew him, knew his movements. He was a familiar figure in Cairo, he walked all over the city, and he lived without a bodyguard. There was a feckless doorman at his apartment house but that man was half-asleep at the time of the attack.

  The attacker approached Mahfouz the following day, just before five o’clock, as Mahfouz was getting into a car. Seeing him, Mahfouz in a reflex of courtesy turned to greet him. The man drew out a knife with a seven-inch blade and thrust down, stabbing Mahfouz at the base of his neck on the right side, cutting the carotid artery and slicing the radial nerve.

  In his haste, the attacker forgot to cry out “Allah-u-akhbar!” and this omission (so he told police afterwards) explained why he had failed in his mission to murder Mahfouz. For this lapse, Allah delayed the death. He remembered to say it afterwards. “That is why I got away.” Other people said the man was simply unprofessional, since he had used a lowly kitchen knife for this important deed.

  “I am being chased by a thief,” the man said to the taxi driver, who, unsuspecting, bore him away.

  Meanwhile, Mahfouz had fallen and blood was pumping out of his severed artery and onto Sharia Nil. The man who had come to give Mahfouz a ride compressed the wound, stanching the flow, and the wounded man was hurried to the Military Hospital, just a few minutes away.

  Bleeding profusely but still standing, Mahfouz said to the doctor, “There’s some blood here. I thin
k you should look at it.”

  He was immediately given two pints of blood, and during surgery another eight pints.

  In another part of Cairo, the attacker was caught and held by some people whose suspicions were aroused by his strange behavior. The man did not deny what he had tried to do.

  He said, “If I am released I will try again to kill him.”

  In the newspaper Al-Ahram, Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front, said, “The Egyptian fundamentalists’ use of force is a legal and honorable action, as were the attacks in Tel Aviv [the recent bus bomb] by Hamas.”

  The most enlightened view—and it underlined the paradoxes of the issue—was that of Professor Edward Said, who wrote in Al-Ahram, “Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of real politics.”

  But the blame had to be shared: “It is hypocritical now to say to Mahfouz’s assailants only that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectuals or artistic expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work has already been officially banned in the Arab world. One cannot have it both ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or against it. There is little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just because he seems to be an offense to their religion.”