Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  So my sister and I began by thinking of the Indian as dirty, and a pest; the vendors whom I have described as annoying us on the beach at Durban were the prototype. Then we thought of him as romantic; our wanderings in the Indian market in Durban were, I suppose, part of a common youthful longing for the exotic. And finally, when we were old enough and clearheaded enough and had read enough to have an abstract, objective notion of man, as well as a lot of jumbled personal emotions about him, the Indian became a person like ourselves.

  I suppose it is a pity that as children we did not know what people like to talk of as ‘the real Africa’ – the Africa of proud black warriors and great jungle rivers and enormous silent nights, that anachronism of a country belonging to its own birds and beasts and savages which rouses such nostalgia in the citified, neighbour-jostled heart, and out of which a mystique has been created by writers and film directors. The fact of the matter is that this noble paradise of ‘the real Africa’ is, as far as the Union of South Africa is concerned, an anachronism. Bits of it continue to exist; if you live in Johannesburg, you can still go to the bushveld for solitude or shooting in a few hours. And bits of it have been carefully preserved, with as little of the taint of civilisation as is commensurate with the longing of the civilised for comfort, as in the Kruger Park. But the real South Africa was then, and is now, to be found in Johannesburg and in the brash, thriving towns of the Witwatersrand. Everything that is happening on the whole emergent continent can be found in microcosm here. Here are the Africans, in all the stages of an industrial and social revolution – the half-naked man fresh from the kraal, clutching his blanket as he stares gazelle-eyed at the traffic; the detribalised worker, living in a limbo between his discarded tribal mores and the mores of the white man’s world; the unhappy black intellectual with no outlet for his talents. And here, too, are the whites, in all the stages of understanding and misunderstanding of this inevitable historical process – some afraid and resentful, some pretending it is not happening, a few trying to help it along less painfully. A sad, confusing part of the world to grow up and live in. And yet exciting.

  1954

  Hassan in America

  We have a friend in Cairo who is a prefabricator of mosques. I do not offer this as an item from Ripley, or as an insinuation that our friend belongs under any exhibitionist heading of Unusual Occupations, along with sword-swallowers and bearded ladies. On the contrary. He is a thin, wiry aesthete of great charm, member of a famous continental banking family by birth, Arab by inclination, and the beauty of his profession (for me, at any rate) is that there is nothing intrinsically outlandish or freakish about it; it is simply a combination of two perfectly ordinary occupations which happen to belong, in time and space, worlds apart. Mosques have been going up in the East since the seventh century, the technique of prefabrication can safely be dated round about the second world war of this century. All that Wally (which is not his name) has done is combine East with West, past with present. He has managed a synthesis which is also a compromise with the world in which he finds himself; and that, any psychiatrist will tell you, is about the best any of us can hope to do.

  Wally is rather good at this sort of thing, it seems. He is all incompatibles. His blood is that much-punished mixture, half German Jew, half German Gentile. Within himself, there are no frontier incidents between the Jewish blood of his mother, and his affinity with Islam. He is a Jew who loves Arabs, a high-born Gentile German who is half Jew.

  My husband lived with him for four years during the war, but I had not met him until we visited Cairo in the spring of last year. We met for the first time at lunch, in his Cairo flat. He looked like Humphrey Bogart (how he will smile that jutting-toothed smile when he reads this, because although he is a prefabricator, he is not so wholly of the twentieth century that he regards film stars as prototypes) and he loped stiffly from the little mezzanine bedroom down to the living room, from the living room to the kitchen and back, bringing us the small treasures he has to show – pieces of woven Coptic cloth, an ancient ring from a tomb, a tiny stone Anubis, the sacred dog of ancient Egypt.

  After lunch he slipped away, with my husband, and it was not until they returned that the rest of us, myself and Wally’s wife and the other guests, noticed that they had been absent. When his wife asked where he had dragged my husband off to before they’d even had their coffee, he answered vaguely, something about ‘showing him round’. But Wally was to drive us back to our hotel at four o’clock, and the door of the flat had scarcely closed behind us when he smiled that smile at me and whispered, ‘Now I’ll show you something.’ Squeezed into his 1928 two-seater. Dodge convertible, we retraced the small journey he had made earlier, alone with my husband, through the suburb of Bab al-Louq, to a wide street of what once had been handsome Arab houses. The car clattered to a standstill before a house that was being demolished. Two moustached Arabs wearing woollen caps grinned at us from the scaffolding like pirates from a mast. They were taking down the pinkish stone façade of the house, block by block. As each segment was freed, they hoicked it on to a donkey eart that stood by. Wally peered upwards beneath the tattered hood of his car, rapt, his tongue making a little click expressive of shrewdness. ‘What d’you think of it, Nadine?’ he murmured, in the tone of a man offering a privilege.

  ‘What, the house?’

  ‘My façade,’ said Wally.

  ‘He’s bought it,’ said my husband, proudly.

  I looked from one to the other.

  ‘Really,’ said my husband.

  ‘But what on earth for?’ I asked, ‘What’s he going to do with it?’

  It was then that Wally told me about what he called his prefabricated mosques.

  Wally has a reverent love for old Cairo. He has lived there, precariously, stateless, without papers or passport, since he landed at Port Said in a yacht twenty-five years ago. He was an adventurous boy, mad about sailing, and the despair of his parents in Hamburg. This was a pleasure cruise from which he never returned to Europe, for while he was away, Hitler’s persecution partly destroyed and entirely scattered his family. He lost his birthright of money, possessions and European culture.

  Wally has lived in Cairo twenty-five years in this life, does not belong to Egypt, yet perhaps once lived there before. When you catch a glimpse of him, turning down one of the cluttered Cairo streets on some mysterious errand of his own, looking up out of his deep preoccupation to shout suddenly, as Arabs do, at someone who has run across his path, you see something that cannot be only twenty-five years old. He may have been out of Cairo for a century or two, but he was there before and now he is back. He not only sees but feels in his bones that Cairo is one of the most marvellous cities in the world, and that it is crumbling away before him. He looks mutely at the shoddy white sugar-cube blocks going up where the palaces were left to become rubble beneath the feet of men and the hooves of goats; he catches his breath at the sight of a beautiful keyhole doorway, still standing, a little house with a cool courtyard, that might yet be saved. He wants to buy them all. Driving with him through the lanes of the old town, I saw that his black eyes were not on the yelling dawdling traffic – there was no hooter in his car, and, dangling one hand out of the window, he beat on the bodywork to give warning of his approach – but looked all the time at windows, doors, balconies and gateways, mosques fallen away like cliffs, houses like broken honeycomb. He wants to buy them all, to save what can never be built again. He is not appalled by dirt, by poverty, by the degeneration of the humans who shelter and breed in pace with this decay. That is Allah’s affair. He wants only to hold together a little longer the beauty that has held out so long.

  It was this passion of his that led him to quick fatalistic anger when he heard that someone whom he knew was building an ‘Arab style’ house, with modern steel doors beneath a traditionally shaped portal. He knew where he could find a magnificent carved door dating from the eighteenth century. He could buy it for five – no, less – three pounds.
It was there for the taking, almost. All it needed was sandpapering, and a new piece of wood where the bolt was fitted. And he knew someone who could do that properly, too.

  He was even more despairing when he saw a ‘modern’ mosque going up with a mimbar, or pulpit, made of lacquered plywood instead of the carved and inlaid panelling and meshrebiya work – a delicate, hand-made wooden lattice – which is traditional. He told the people who had perpetrated this offence that even if the microphone had replaced the muezzin, there was no need for the mimbar to be a vulgar travesty. He could have got them a mimbar made of centuries-old ivory and wood, and restored by the last man in Cairo who truly understood the technique of the work …

  They were not only chastened, but interested. Some short time later he received a call from two gentlemen from out of town.

  Would he contract to supply, ready-made, a traditional mimbar for a new mosque under construction in Alexandria?

  He was in the prefabricated mosque business.

  When we were in Egypt in March last year, the work for the mosque in Alexandria was completed. Wally had taken a little trip there, to see his contract honoured, his beautiful mimbar delivered and set up against the wall to the right of the niche – the mihrab – which indicates the direction of Mecca. ‘But now I’m on something big, something much bigger,’ he murmured, when we congratulated him on the success of this first venture. His black eyes, mournful and gay at the same time, invited questions. But he couldn’t wait to be asked. He went on: ‘A mosque, oh yes. But not here. Far away You’ll laugh … A mosque in Washington.’

  ‘Wally, we’re going to Washington,’ warned my husband.

  ‘No, it’s true. You can go and see it. I want you to go and see it for me.’

  I was not so sceptical as my husband. I had never travelled before. If Cairo existed at one end of a continent on which Johannesburg, where I live, is at the other. I was ready to believe that I might find a mosque as well as a White House in Washington.

  ‘I am making – at least my man Hassan is making – a mimbar for a mosque that’s going up in Washington. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see the work he’s doing. It’s beautiful.’ English is a little-used fourth language for Wally, whose real fluency belongs to French, German and Arabic, and in his mouth the adjective is still an incomparable superlative.

  We pestered him with questions, in which he wasn’t really interested. Who was building a mosque in Washington! And what for? Who would worship there! His answers were vague. Diplomatic personnel, he supposed. What did it matter, anyway? The important thing was that this mosque, whether in Washington or Timbuctoo, would have a beautiful mimbar, made by Hassan in exactly the same way as it had been made for centuries. Old Hassan and his son were, so far as he knew, the last men in Cairo who still practised this ancient craft. We would see for ourselves tomorrow how perfect the mimbar was going to be.

  Wally came to our hotel to fetch us after a late breakfast next morning. It was a week of riot and crisis in Egypt, when Nasser deposed Neguib and then Neguib deposed Nasser, and we got into the old Dodge under the eyes of a bored Egyptian soldier who crouched, half hidden by dusty shrubs, over one of the Bren guns that pointed at the steel from the Ezbekieh Gardens. We went, I suppose, the long way round to the workshop of Hassan the carpenter, because, as I quickly discovered, Wally never could resist making detours to take in places he loved, or another look at some old house with windows that he admired and hoped to buy or borrow. On this day he drove us via the site of the summer villa, on the Nile bank opposite the Nilometer, where my husband had lived while he worked for British Intelligence during the war. I had seen this little house on many photographs, knew exactly the disposition of its rooms, and its relation to the three great palm trees in the courtyard. Now only the three palm trees remained, on a piece of cleared sand overlooking the river. Wally had built that little house himself – without permission, on a piece of land belonging to someone else.

  My husband paced out the familiar steps from one palm to another, looking lost. But Wally did not seem to mind the disappearance of the little house, its confiscation and demolition. ‘It’s a pity, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve got a place in mind,’ his voice had dropped to its confidential low, ‘further along the Nile, out of town entirely. I’ll show you, soon. That façade I showed you on Sunday, you liked it? If I don’t need it for one of my prefabrication jobs, I want to use it for myself.’

  Before we reached Hassan’s workshop we made another stop, this time at the Ibn Tulun mosque. Wally would not let us go into the famous mosque at the Citadel, nearby. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Impure style. This,’ ushering us into the Ibn Tulun, ‘this is, I think, my favourite mosque. Twelfth century.’ Inside the great mosque, in the sunlit square open to the sky, we did not talk at all. We crossed it and then walked slowly round all four sides beneath the repetitive vista of the colonnades, falling away behind us with the beautiful monotony of ripples in water. It was dark under the high roof, after the bright sun: the dark was repeated, out in the sun of the square, in the dark bodies of the kites which, when we looked out, passed between our eyes and the light like those proverbial clouds no bigger than a man’s hand. The mosque was deserted except for two old men who slept peacefully on straw mats.

  Once we had left the mosque, the old car plunged and bucked into streets scarcely wide enough for a loaded donkey. We reinforced Wally’s thumping of the bodywork with yells and cries. Bare-bottomed brats pressed out of our way against filthy walls. At last we left the car and walked up a steep, humped and winding street, stale with age, strong with poverty. The children had their life in public, coming out the way rats emerge to play quietly next to their refuse heap. The girls especially did not look much like children; with their painted eyes, they were more like frail women, shrunken through long illness. One was beautiful, under the grotesquerie of kohl, an actress who had forgotten to take off her make-up – until you saw that only her head looked young and alive; the rest of her was shrivelled before it had grown, like an anemone plant I once transplanted when it was already in bud. This child was being nursemaid to the baby of the family, one of those appalling Egyptian babies which made me shudder, and then feel ashamed of my horror. When they are six or eight months old they are no bigger than a newborn, but their pocket-watch-sized heads, covered with straight black hair, are veteran with survival of the dirt in which they feebly lie, and which would have killed the fat, pink-cheeked kind within days of birth. Past the baby, the street ended at the entrance to a kind of courtyard. Once, I suppose, it had been a garden. Now grass or flowers or paving were replaced by a surface of rubble from the crumbling building to which the courtyard belonged. In the middle stood a well-used grey Peugeot car.

  Wally was smiling. ‘Come,’ he said, and took my arm, ‘This is Hassan’s place. He is here.’

  * * *

  There was no door. We stepped, in the calm sunlight – the courtyard preserved still its old function of creating a space of quiet between the dwelling and the street – over fallen stone and wood. A stairway led nowhere; it seemed terribly light inside; a fat, pleasant-faced, middle-aged Arab in shirt and trousers called out a greeting to Wally and came over to us. We were introduced to Hassan, and I saw one or two fine feathers of wood-shaving, curled on his clothes and hair. Slightly awkwardly, with an air, if no words of apology (he spoke little English) he drew Wally away to consult with him in Arabic. They argued, considered, explained in the manner of men who are in business together. My husband and I saw that we were in a great, floorless room – perhaps two or three rooms from which the intervening walls had been taken or had fallen down. Planks of new wood rested crazily against the old walls, sawdust was mixed with rubble underfoot, and, at the far end, there was a workman’s bench, a lathe and other carpenter’s tools. The walls were very high. Higher still, there was the sky. There was no roof.

  Picking my way, I went through a beautiful arched doorway and found myself in another room.
Where the floor had been there were piles of what at first glance appeared to be litter and rubbish, but which, when I looked again, I guessed must be Wally’s stores. Four broken Greco-Roman columns were stacked next to a porcelain toilet pan bearing the name of a firm of English plumbers. A huge carved door, half-destroyed by dry rot, lay on its side. A neat pile of pinkish stone blocks, numbered in chalk, stood near where I had entered. While I looked, there was a stir behind the columns, and a white duck came flatly towards me, blinking her quick eyes and shaking at a piece of rotting vegetable peel that she held in her beak.

  This shell was a place of elegant proportion; even now, with the strange assortment of objects, and the duck, scavenger of the mud, in possession, it was the sort of place in which you must stand still a moment, as you enter, and feel how pleasingly you are enclosed. Half the ceiling remained intact above the ruin; the walls curved in to meet it, and this curved cornice and the ceiling itself were painted in a close, delicate, formal design of red and blue and gold. The colours were still perfectly clear but the ceiling ended jaggedly, halfway across the span of the room. In the gaping space of sky, kites wheeled slowly, as they did over the Ibn Tulun mosque. It was splendid.

  Wally came in behind me, saying ‘shoo’ to the duck, who knew him and took no notice.

  ‘What was this?’ I said. My face must have shown my astonishment, awe, almost, the strain of the impact of a world that had flourished and rotted before I had come, alien and impudent as the duck, to look upon it.

  ‘Early eighteenth-century palace. Must have belonged to some prince. This was the salon.’ He stood with his hands on his skinny hips, admiring the ceiling.

  ‘But to whom does it belong?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘How nobody?’

  ‘These palaces were family seats. Passed from father to son. But they lost power, money. Years ago, the descendants got too poor to keep up such places. Three or four or five families lived in them together. They fell to bits. Nobody ever restores anything, here. Everything decays, is lost. In the end the inheritance is divided among so many, nobody owns it. Nobody can live in it, nobody can afford to keep it – what is the word – habitable. But come on, you haven’t seen what I brought you here for. Don’t you want to see the mimbar for Washington?’