The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Baḥḥ

  WHEN IBRAHIM SALEH first saw the little apartment block outlined against the mauve dusk rapidly deepening above Tripoli he was relieved. In his experience his fellow teachers tended to live in warren-like flats in the Old City: hot, crowded apartments where children seeped like cockroaches through holes in sprung doorframes and walls. This building on the outskirts seemed at first sight a more secure place. Indeed, from the crossroads on, the road had reminded him of his own home near Abu Qir outside Alexandria: a strip of threadbare asphalt bordered by low white houses with stalls set up in front. Pressure lamps flared above sticky piles of dates, gleamed off vegetables and cooking pots. Here the palm trees easily outnumbered the telegraph poles which some colonial regime or other had planted the better to administer and oppress the people whose land they had shamelessly annexed; in this case presumably the Italians or the British. On the far side of the crossroads was the suburb of luxury villas where, in streets with names like via Verdone or sciara Mazzini, the foreigners lived. On this side, though, lay the southeastern area of town which was still more rural than urban, more sha‘bi than bourgeois. Keep going along this road, Ibrahim knew, and one reached an extended oasis interspersed with orange groves, vineyards and olive plantations. This fertile but arid belt stretched out behind Tajura, inland from the Americans’ vast air force base, Wheelus Field, and on for miles.

  The headlamps of the modest Fiat he had borrowed – for who on a teacher’s salary could afford to run a car? – flashed over crumbling drystone walls topped with prickly pear. Having left the asphalt he found himself on sand. Inexpertly he spun the wheels and sent the little car lurching around the building, narrowly missing a date palm with a tethered goat dozing at its foot. The creature’s eyes winked bright yellow as he surged by. Ibrahim had some vague idea that by driving past the apartment block he would mislead any spies or police informers, then realised too late there was nowhere else to go. Worse, he caught the glow of oil lamps in hovels among the palms. It was hardly likely that his presence would have gone unnoticed. Irritated at having been forced by caution to draw attention to himself he kept the car going and drove entirely around the building, noting that at the back a sheer ten-foot wall surrounded the ground floor flat’s garden. He came out at the front again and reluctantly parked.

  Muntasser himself opened the door and reached for the crate of Mirinda orangeade which Ibrahim was cradling. He led the way up three flights of stairs to the roof, the Egyptian following with the precious radio. The others were already there, sitting on mats with a tin tray of empty glasses. After the greetings Ibrahim asked ‘Fi talj?’

  ‘I’ve sent Yunus for some,’ Muntasser said. ‘The butcher down the road sells it as a sideline. It’s better value than his meat. When does the Colonel speak?’

  ‘Seven o’clock,’ said Ibrahim, slanting the tanned face of his ancient watch to catch the day’s last (or the stars’ earliest) light and failing. He knelt beneath the parapet and clicked his lighter. ‘Ten minutes to go.’ Within moments his son arrived, an eight-year-old carrying a heavy newspaper-wrapped package containing a block of ice rolled in yellow chaff. By the time several bottles of orangeade had been decanted into a brass ewer and mixed with lumps of ice Ibrahim had found Cairo on his radio and the martial music which heralded one of the President’s thrilling speeches.

  The group of teachers had recently taken to meeting each week in a succession of houses in order to listen to the Colonel as, indeed, his fervent admirers and hopeful nationalists listened all over the Arab world. ‘He alone is a man,’ as Ibrahim had said simply – had kept on saying, actually, to Muntasser’s faint irritation which he dared not express. Ibrahim was, after all, the only Egyptian among them. Was there maybe the slightest suggestion that he mystically partook of his heroic compatriot’s manhood whereas the rest of them (four Libyans and an Algerian French teacher) didn’t? This was, after all, 1966. While it was true that a whole decade had elapsed since Colonel Nasser had made total fools of the British, the French and the Israelis and had liberated both his country and the Suez Canal from their tyrannical grasp, it was also true that Algeria had thrown off the French yoke four years ago after a protracted and far crueller struggle. Ben Bella and the others were surely just as much men as Gamal Abdel Nasser; though one had to admit that if the Arab world had a spokesman and a focal point it was definitely Nasser and Cairo rather than Boumédienne and Algiers.

  Up there on the roof much of the city’s ambient glow was cut off by the low parapet. The men sat and sipped orangeade while listening to the tinny, hectoring voice, their eyes fixed unseeingly on a star, the spout of the ewer, the radio’s grille. Now and again they would chorus assent or individually breathe a soft ‘Y’Allah!’ Everything Nasser said about Israel, America and the international oil companies’ client regimes struck the Libyans especially as having particular relevance. From the direction of Wheelus AFB down the coast came the intermittent faint thunder of Phantom F4s taking off for night bombing practice on the desert ranges, their pilots destined for an escalating war half the world away in a country called Vietnam. Every Libyan knew that King Idris – their own first-ever monarch – had been elevated with British backing from heading the Senussi clan to the throne of the newly independent state. Among students and the young professionals who looked to Cairo for hope there was a growing conviction that this puppet monarchy couldn’t last. Idris was old; it was known that he was ailing. He was sometimes glimpsed in a limousine being whisked towards Wheelus Field – for a weekly checkup at the Base hospital, said the students. Some said he was already dead and being impersonated by an actor while the British and Americans worked out what to do; others that the figure they saw, its right hand feebly raised in salute behind tinted glass, was indeed that of the King, but stuffed. Oh, these were heady times. Any day now, nobody doubted, Colonel Nasser would lead a vast army of the massed Arab nations to victory over Israel and liberate the Palestinian people. Nobody listening to him up on the roof in Tripoli doubted that they themselves, like millions of other Maghribi volunteers, would be whisked magically to the distant battlefield to shed their ounce of blood and partake in the triumph.

  In the middle of all this a large car chugged to a halt down below and doors slammed. Muntasser stood quietly up and peeped over the parapet. The others glanced at him but lost interest again as with a shake of his head he returned to his seat on the mat. Since he lived here he must have recognised the car. One couldn’t be too careful. These days, with the regime getting jittery and student leaders disappearing, it was safer to pretend the security police were smarter than they actually were. Ten minutes went by in which the slight interruption was forgotten. Other than Nasser’s unflagging voice (which had been known to go on for over three hours at a stretch, unrivalled except by Fidel Castro) there was little noise. So the intrusive sound, when it started, jarred the listeners’ state of being both uplifted and lulled by oratory. The men came out of their trance and looked at Muntasser.

  ‘That’s the foreigner on the ground floor,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Great God. Does he do this every night?’

  ‘Most nights, yes. It’s a piano. He hired it from Frugoni’s.’

  They tried to retrieve their concentration but the Colonel’s exhortations had done their work. The sheer immediacy of this alien intrusion was all the more piquing for its extraordinary punctuality. What was this if not the cultural outreach of neocolonialism? The music meandered loudly on, full of disagreeable harmonic clashes. It rose pungently from below like the odour of foreign cooking, its obtrusiveness amplified the building’s design. The instrument was evidently in the back room and being played with the doors wide open. The sound was collected by the garden’s high cement walls and thrown upwards.

  ‘Who is this person? Have you complained?’

  ‘Not really,’ Muntasser admitted, but immediately realised this sounded feeble. ‘I mean, I’ve told him how audible it is. I was hoping he mig
ht take the hint. He’s a Briton. He works for the British Council.’

  ‘Does he just.’ Ibrahim was stern. He looked over the parapet, both palms firmly planted. ‘Is he married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he has two girls down there in the garden walking around in shameless dresses. Two.’

  ‘Yunus sells him eggs,’ Muntasser offered. ‘We keep hens. I cleared them out for our meeting here tonight but normally they live up here. Yunus says the man’s taught him to write “Yunus” on a typewriter.’

  ‘Has he. Next thing you know he’ll be teaching the boy the Bible. Or the piano, which would be almost as bad. What a racket! Imagine listening to this for pleasure when you could be listening to Umm Kulsum! I don’t mind these foreigners being corrupt or infidel,’ said Ibrahim with a show of Egyptian good-humoured sophistication which he knew would slightly annoy his companions, ‘that’s their business. But they’re so different you can’t really get to grips with them. They might as well be from Mars. Look at Jackson.’

  Jackson was one of the four British teachers in their government school, paid to teach English by direct method. Jackson was tall, bald, cavernous and from Newcastle. Nobody, not even his fellow countrymen, understood a word he said. There was a rumour that he’d induced two of his students to perform unnatural acts with him in return for a good examination result; but one had failed while the other passed and besides, nobody could quite believe it of him. Jackson seemed about as erotically motivated as a date palm, which had to be mated by hand. An enigma, in short.

  ‘The others aren’t so bad.’

  ‘Well no, they’re not,’ Ibrahim agreed. ‘So far as you can make them out, they’re nice enough as individuals.’ A fresh jangle of notes rushed upwards. ‘But the Colonel’s right. It’s what they stand for which threatens us all. What’s the British Council if not a propaganda wing of the British Government? That piano’s its Trojan Horse, if you ask me.’

  This made everyone laugh a little uneasily.

  ‘He says it’s Baḥḥ,’ Muntasser volunteered after a pause.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said “There’s nothing like a bit of Baḥḥ in the evenings.”’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. The thought that there might be anything else like this is chilling indeed.’ More laughter. ‘Those women. I suppose they’re Sicilian hussies?’

  By now the others had joined him at the parapet. They looked down into the enclosed area three floors below. The inside of the garden walls had been rendered and painted cream. Although nobody was actually standing outside on the arid patch of soil two indistinct shadows were cast against the end wall by the lights from the downstairs room. The shadows came together, maybe a hand reached out – one of the blurs grew a sudden limb like an elephant’s trunk up by its head – the bodies merged. The conspirators up there among the stars watched the wall as if it were a cinema screen, the relentless drone of notes the accompanying soundtrack to a foreign film which at any moment might become terrifyingly licentious. They couldn’t tear their eyes away. Behind them on the low table Colonel Nasser earnestly harangued a bottle opener and a heap of wet newsprint covered in chaff.

  ‘Was one of the girls blonde?’ enquired Muntasser at length.

  ‘Both,’ said Ibrahim tersely.

  ‘Then I know who they are. Nurses. They’ve been here before.’

  ‘For a spot of Baḥḥ? One day I’m going to receive a telegram informing me that my father wasn’t actually a melon grower at all but a Saudi prince. The mistake has been acknowledged and can only be rectified by my leading a life of total erotic indulgence. In fact, non-stop Baḥḥ. Only thus will I be able to forget foreigners half my age who have girls and cars and four times my salary.’

  It was not easy to judge Ibrahim, his colleagues were thinking. In his way he, too, was a foreigner. He had this black Egyptian humour. One was never quite sure where laughter turned into anger, if indeed it did. It might just be that mock anger was part of his humorous mode. There were other areas of uncertainty, too. He made no secret of his socialist leanings and seemed to know outright Marxists back home. But Marx had very pronounced views on religion; and whereas a man’s private relationship with God was nobody else’s business, the suspicion about Ibrahim was that he was probably rather secular. He had a habit of saying shocking things, as when he mentioned the cars parked at night off the coast road, their noses pointing seawards, their windows wound up except now and then when a crack would open to let an empty beer or whisky bottle thump on to the sand. The Libyans were conservative; there were things one didn’t mention. They didn’t need an Egyptian to point out that these were not foreigners indulging in secret drinking, parked at safe twenty-yard intervals so no-one could recognise anybody else. It wasn’t foreigners who dared not drink at home, any more than it was foreigners who sent away their maids before midday during Ramadan so nobody would see them when they came back from the office at two to raid the fridge. It was Ibrahim who now and then made bitter references to hypocrisy, only retrieving things by adding that it was all part of the corrupting influence of the West which would be swept away when Nasserism embraced and liberated the Arab peoples.

  The noise down below had stopped. Once more they peered over the edge and were just in time to see the man emerge with the two girls. Each carried a glass. Voices began to float up with awesome clarity so that even the Algerian teacher could more or less follow their English.

  ‘I love your lawn.’

  ‘Thanks; I have this terrible problem with clover. But you must admit the rhodies are looking fairly splendid this year.’

  ‘And your peonies …’

  ‘Masses and masses of blooms.’

  There was laughter as the three wandered the bald square of compacted earth.

  ‘These nights!’ one of the girls said. ‘They’re so sultry. Lovely smell. Sort of scented.’

  ‘It’s the orange trees on the remaining Italian estates which haven’t gone back to desert. You can smell them for miles at night.’

  ‘Not a bit like Letchworth, is it, Chrissie? It makes me want to do something. That’s the trouble with Trippers. There’s buggerall to do here in the evenings.’

  ‘Except Baḥḥ,’ fiercely murmured Ibrahim overhead.

  ‘You know I was in Cairo last year?’

  ‘Wasn’t that dangerous, Tim? We Brits are hardly popular with the good Colonel, I should think.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t there as a Council officer, obviously. Just as a private citizen, a visitor. In any case the Egyptians’re the sweetest people.’

  ‘Nasser’s a sweet person?’ asked one of the girls.

  ‘He’s the biggest pussy-cat of them all. He just gets a bit carried away if he’s given a microphone. I spent an evening with a close friend of his, a newspaper editor called Mohamed Heikal. We went to this splendid run-down hotel full of potted palms and old servants in galabeyas which had a nightclub. At least, that’s what it was called. It was quite the most wonderful place I’ve ever been in. Terrifically gloomy, just a scattering of little tables each with a candle, and some stout middle-aged women with split skirts. But the pièce de résistance was the band, a sort of thé dansant quintet which couldn’t have changed since the Thirties. I’m not kidding – they wore red fezzes and played tangos while some piggy Russians shuffled about on the floor with the ladies in split skirts. I fell in love with that hotel. The man behind the reception desk had once shaken hands with Winston Churchill and there was a dusty photograph on the wall to prove it. In his youth he’d been Egypt’s fastest Pyramid-runner. They used to do it for the tourists – run up and down the Great Pyramid. Not an easy way to earn a living if you think about it. Not just the awful height, plus the steepness and the heat, but there’s so much casing missing. You have to scramble up huge blocks of stone here and there. Anyway, this fellow nipped up and down for Churchill in a record time that was never beaten. Probably never will be, now,
since you’re no longer allowed to do it. Anyway, when I first came to Tripoli I looked high and low for an equivalent of that hotel but I’m afraid it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘There’s a nightclub in the Waddan, someone said.’

  ‘It’s not in the same league. They play “Stupid Cupid” and “Che sarà, sarà” and it’s full of Yugoslav whores and oil men with crew-cuts and beer bellies. Completely uncivilised. The essential thing is that mournful atmosphere of decayed gentility, of being in a time-warp. The Waddan’s nothing but oil-money-meets-frontier-town. It’s brash and expensive and completely without echoes of any kind. No, I should like to spend the rest of my life in Cairo. I could never go back to England now, but I think I could easily live in Groppi’s.’

  Of the eavesdroppers on the roof, most had got the gist; Ibrahim had understood everything. His head trembled in the starlight. What was he to think? It was disarming to hear his country described in such affectionate terms. At the same time, to hear Colonel Nasser called a pussy-cat was insulting and condescending beyond measure. Yet if he were to be believed, this cocky young Briton had apparently sat in a nightclub with Heikal himself, one of the Revolution’s most illustrious intellectuals … Nothing added up. Probably it was all lies. On the other hand …

  ‘Just thank your lucky stars we’re not in Riyadh,’ Tim was saying down below. ‘At least here we can all have another glass of wine and take our clothes off if we feel like it.’

  ‘Not a bad idea.’

  ‘Still, it would be better done indoors. Discretion and all that. It’s one of those countries where you have to fall back on your own resources. Unless you’re inventive you find yourself spending hours just wandering around Mitchell Cotts’ supermarket picking conversations about Ovaltine and Marmite with oil wives. Or waiting for Scottish Country Dancing night to come round at the Elizabethan. It’s not on. So – more wine. And more Baḥḥ. No, better still, let’s try some Noël Coward.’