Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The duck ran once or twice before us like someone hurrying against the stream on a crowded sidewalk. ‘Get,’ said Wally, or maybe it was some Arabic word that sounded the same. The duck dived out of the way.

  When Wally and I came back through the arched doorway, Hassan and my husband were talking in French beside the carpenter’s bench. Hassan wiped some small object in his hand with the palm of the other, and smiled at me with his head wrinkling his fat neck to one side, like one of those pictures of foreign children one is tempted to take on quaysides, recording an attitude at once shy and yet amusedly tolerant. Wally called out something to him in Arabic, and he disappeared for a moment behind a pile of planks and carved timber. From the wood powder that covered the bench I picked up the spool-shaped piece of wood, about an inch and a half long, that he had dropped there. I turned it over and saw that there was a slot cut across the back of it. My husband leaned over my shoulder and put into my hand a thin slat of wood, a little longer than the spool. It fitted smoothly into place.

  Hassan came back with a handful of such slats and little carved wooden shapes – some were spools, like the one I held, but most of them looked like segments cut from a narrow picture frame. Some were of black wood, some nut-coloured, some rosy mahogany. There were two or three very small diamond-shaped pieces which were made of yellowed ivory. Not quickly, but with the calm rhythm of fingers that are doing work to which they have long been accustomed, Hassan fitted together shapes, slats and ivory. The picture frame segments formed diamonds, the ivory diamond shapes fitted within the black wooden ones, and a spool united each of the four angles of each wooden diamond to an angle of another. Grooves in the pieces themselves, and the thin wooden slats that slid in behind, held the whole pattern rigidly and sweetly in place without a single nail. Later Wally was to show me huge screens made this way, and the balconies which, in old Arab houses, cover the windows and have a tiny peep-hole window out of which the veiled women are allowed to observe the street, and, most beautiful of all, a centuries-old mimbar in an ancient Cairo mosque, from which not the smallest fragment of wood had worked loose. Hassan went away again and brought back with him a cardboard box in which his wooden confetti lay thick.

  ‘So!’ he said, assembling another pattern.

  ‘That’s partly very old stuff.’ Wally interpreted for the carpenter, ‘I brought him a screen – beautiful, very fine work,’ he picked up a tiny triangle, ‘but in bad repair, half destroyed. Now he’s making new pieces to replace those which have been lost.’

  The jagged square mosaic Hassan handed to me had a uniform patina. ‘How is it that you can’t tell the old from the new?’ I asked.

  ‘He cleans and emery-papers the old pieces, and his replacements are identical with them,’ said Wally.

  ‘Patient work!’ I said.

  Wally shrugged. ‘He is the last,’ he said, ‘it’s a dying art. Even in Egypt, there is no time, any more.’

  Hassan went off with his easy, shambling walk and came back carrying a large section of wooden mosaic. He laid it before us on the bench, clearing a space for it with his forearm. It was part of the mimbar, the pulpit for the mosque in Washington.

  ‘There you are!’ said Wally.

  Hassan pulled a few segments free, fitted them on to the pattern again. He pressed two pieces into my hand, motioned me to try. It was harder than I thought, because the pieces were made to fit so snugly. Hassan watched me proudly, as if I were a pupil.

  ‘He’s making every piece for the Washington pulpit here, himself?’ I asked Wally.

  ‘His son helps,’ said Wally.

  I looked round at the ruined palace, open to the sky. ‘And when it’s finished,’ I said. ‘When it goes from here to – there. Will it be shipped complete? It’ll be such a huge thing.’

  ‘We’ll probably take it all to pieces for shipping,’ said Wally. ‘Hassan may go along to Washington to assemble it again, piece by piece. That’s prefabricating.’

  ‘Hassan in America,’ I said.

  Hassan heard the two names, guessed of what we were speaking and smiled, his plump man’s breasts lifting against his old shirt with a shrug. I noticed that the carpenter doodled, though leisurely, not nervously, with his little bits of wood: making and pulling apart patterns he did not even look at.

  From here to there.

  Hassan walked with us, respectfully, out into the courtyard. He and Wally joked together in Arabic, conspiratorially. Hassan giggled deep in his chest. ‘Is that his car?’ my husband asked Wally, looking at the grey Peugeot. Hassan put an arm on it, leaning upon it as on an old wife. ‘How do you get it in here, for heaven’s sake?’ my husband said to him in English. I do not know whether or not the carpenter understood; he raised his big curved brows, laughing, in a kind of pantomime of one of Wally’s favourite answers: ‘We have our methods.’ As we left, waving to Hassan, I looked up round the courtyard once more, and noticed a shirt fluttering at a window. In what perhaps had once been the servants’ quarters of the palace, on the street side of the courtyard, a room was still standing, a room with a roof. Whatever inner communication to it there had been was no longer there; it was reached by a wooden ladder. It was in that room that Hassan lived, perhaps with his whole family. But he had his Peugeot. He merely camped out in the eighteenth century.

  I wonder if we ever really believed in the mosque in Washington.

  We were in New York in April and decided to spend the Easter weekend in Washington. ‘Ah, the cherry blossom,’ friends said, knowingly. ‘Well, the National Gallery, actually,’ said my husband. ‘And we must remember to ask about the mosque,’ I murmured, but nobody heard me.

  It was only late on our last afternoon in the capital that we remembered, or rather that we didn’t think of something else we must see, instead. We had been to the White House and the Lincoln Memorial, and out along the smooth parkway to Mount Vernon. I had had my picture taken against the wisteria in front of the National Gallery, and again before an espaliered pear tree in Washington’s delightful kitchen garden. (The cherry blossom had been out, it appeared, the week before, and was as bedraggled and stained as an old ball dress.) A gentle rain steamed the grass and trees of the public gardens and boulevards all day, and over all the lovely city there was the wan, soft atmosphere of a hothouse, the smell of warmth and water. We had to take a friend home to his house in a fairly distant suburb, and by the time we set out to find the mosque, it was near twilight.

  ‘I think we should get on straight back to New York,’ said my husband.

  ‘No, I’m going to see that mosque.’

  We found it, of course, on Massachusetts Avenue, along the wide way lined with foreign embassies. It is part of the new Islamic Centre, built by the countries belonging to the Arab League, and is contiguous with lecture and other public rooms. When we saw it, it was near completion, though the builder’s and architect’s boards were still up. We sat and looked at it, from the car on the other side of the road. Close to the sidewalk, five pillared archways lead to the courtyard of the mosque, flanked by arched keyhole windows repeating the pattern in the secular rooms to left and right. The building, of pale stone, is two storeys high and ends in a silhouetted balustrade of a delicate design, almost exactly like that of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Tiered above this, there is a broad square tower, with the same decoration, and from the front wall of the broad tower rises a slender square tower culminating in a kind of balcony from which the minaret points. Near its peak, the minaret has its own round balcony, above which it is nipped into a slender waist; from this the graceful onion-shaped peak curves out and then in again. The crescent of Islam balances on its tip. There in the misty twilight, with the street lights superimposing, like scratches on a picture, the trees and buds of spring on an American sidewalk, was Wally’s mosque.

  We scrambled out of the car and scuttled recklessly across the avenue over the shivering lanes of light from the great eyes of American cars. The earth between the sidewalk and th
e entrance to the Islamic Centre was uneven with rubble; new rubble, builder’s rubble, this time, adulterating the spring smell of wet soil with the cold odour of cement. We went through one of the five pillared archways into the courtyard. But it was not yet paved, and we had to skirt wide pools of rainwater in order to cross it. It was in the process of being decorated in a bright, light blue. The way into the mosque was barred with builder’s boards. We could not even see in.

  We came out of the courtyard and walked all round the Islamic Centre. All doors were locked. ‘Look,’ said my husband. He had noticed that the elaborate keyhole windows were filled in with modern steel, glass-paned frames. The steel was painted blue. Inside, I could picture lecture rooms, planned for acoustic perfection, washrooms with clean tiles and a machine that dries your hands with a stream of hygienic, warmed and disinfected air. We came out on the other side of the building and found ourselves at the right-hand entrance to the courtyard. I stepped into it once more, for a last look. Here, the builders must have settled themselves for their lunch – empty beer cans lay at the foot of one of the arches. ‘The beer that made Milwaukee famous,’ I read, kicking over one of the cans.

  As we drove away, I screwed my neck round to have a last look at the brand-new mosque to which Wally’s prefabricated pulpit was coming. In a few moments all I could see of it was the Islamic crescent, caught in the treetops of Washington like the moon itself.

  1955

  Egypt Revisited

  The friend who had come to meet me at the airport said with satisfaction, ‘It’s worse than ever here, it’s lovely.’ He was a foreigner, expressing in seven words a viewpoint doubly foreign: no citizen of the United Arab Republic would admit that graft is thriving in Egypt more rankly than ever, and no other member of the remnant of the foreign community whom I met would agree that life there is lovely. Yet the eccentric viewpoint given by my friend, who has spent the whole middle thirty years of his life in Egypt, is less than half a joke. Perhaps you have to come, as I do, from Africa and not from Europe, to pick the truth from the laugh. All over the Afro-Asian world there must be isolated Europeans who secretly rejoice in the bitterness of their own banishment, because they love the life and temperament of the country of their adoption so much and so tolerantly that they luxuriate even in the intensification of national failings that so often seems to follow on independence of foreign domination.

  I was last in Cairo nearly five years ago, in March 1954, during the week when Nasser deposed Neguib. There were machine guns snouting at you through the dusty leaves of the shrubs in the Ezbekieh Gardens, then, and military trucks delivered their loads of soldiers at the street corners every morning, where they sipped coffee on the alert, all day. Now the impromptu, trigger-happy atmosphere has gone. Suez hangs in the air, a confidence that inflates even the meanest street-urchin chest. Nasser has had the good sense and the imagination to do one or two things that show: a beautiful corniche has swept away the jumble of little villas that used to obscure the town bank of the Nile, there are new bridges, and new wide roads, and white blocks of newly built workers’ flats that, spaced on their cleared ground, look as much like institutions as all workers’ flats seem to everywhere in the world. One of the new roads, which leads up to the Mokattam hills, cuts a wide tarred swathe through the Dead City, and in another part of the city the great dunes of rubble that are ancient Cairo, crumbled to dust, are being bitten into and smoothed to a new level for the dwelling places of the latest wave of civilisation. (Watching the cranes and bulldozers, you can see an archaeological discovery of the future in the actual making.) All this, along with the colossus that has been raised from the sands of Memphis and put up outside the main railway station, and the boyishly-grinning pictures of Nasser that cover the faded squares where once Farouk’s picture hung on the walls of shops, is the maquillage on an old face that has known so many. But it’s an impressive job, and one which encourages one to believe that there’s been some bone-surgery too, some improvement of the structure beneath the paint.

  I soon discovered that there are two almost completely different versions of the range and effect of this surgery, and that while I should have full opportunity to hear one, I should have to gather the other, and most important, one chiefly by sharpening my own eyes and ears and the shiver of receptivity on my skin. As a white visitor without any Arabic, I naturally found myself socially stranded among the remnants of the European ‘foreign’ community; I could not expect to cross the very few old and personal bridges between European society and Egyptian society that have survived, successfully, the Palestine War, the Officers’ Revolution and Suez, and I could not expect, without a word of their language, to reach a confession of the hopes, fears and prides of the people of the streets. While I was in Cairo I did not let myself forget that the voice in my ear – a measured, intelligent and mostly unembittered voice – was not the voice of the people; that coarse and muffled note I should have to pick up for myself.

  Cairo as seen by the few members of the old community who still manage to live there is a depressing place; an intimate whose sight is going and from whose mind the mobility of memory is fading. This is not entirely blimpish nostalgia for good old days. The ancient city that only a few years ago was one of the elegant centres of the modern world has forgotten its sophistication. Lack of foreign currency has emptied the Kasr-el-Nil shops of nearly everything imported; they are filled with decent cloth of uninspired design made in Egyptian textile mills, and unbeautiful shoes fairly well made by Egyptian factories. Even Groppi’s famous delicatessen exposition has shrunk; there are one or two delicacies you cannot buy there, now. In those smart restaurants which are still open, the head chef has gone (banished to that ‘home’ in France from which he came perhaps two generations ago?) and the second-in-command is following the recipes, but not the flair. The great artists and musicians of the world no longer come to Egypt, and there are few who come to hear them if they do. The only evidence I saw of the cultural life of the year in Cairo was the peeling remains of tremendous posters advertising a Soviet ballet and theatre company (a third-rate one, I was told) that had come and gone. The luxe of Europe has been banished, but what is left, of course, is the pandemic inanity of Hollywood. The entertainment life of Cairo has become that of a complex of villages, each with its ten-foot-high paper face of Marilyn Monroe.

  In the eloquent silence of a departed presence that Europe has left behind in Cairo – a silence that you are aware of beneath the unchanged racket and tinkle of the street – a sound forms. The hoarse scraping of the palms of deserted gardens in Maadi is the nervous clearing of the throat; the faint stir of air in the peacock’s tail of fallen leaves before the door of the British Embassy is the taking of a preparatory breath – and there, it is out. ‘Sequestrated’. Sibilant and fateful, this is the last word on the destiny of nearly every European you meet and every second shop or bank you pass. It is the excuse, the explanation and the apotheosis of city life.

  With the immediate past of the city under sequestration, the present seems to be passing into the hands of the army officers and their wives. They are the new elite; the officers’ wives are the women who spend hours and money at the beauty parlours, now, and (it is said with a touch of malice) picnic on the Gezirah Club golf course because they haven’t yet got so far as learning the game itself. There is a splendid new officers’ club, too, where the officers take the ease of top men. No doubt these are the people for whom the new suburb, dubbed Mokattam City, is intended. The development has the authentic, sad, nouveau riche stamp; bold, cocky, unsure in taste but sure of right – in this case the right to plan ugly villas on the moon-landscape of the Mokattam hills. This certainly is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live, if you feel you could stand the unearthliness of it. Withdrawn from the softening presence of the Nile, these austere heights have no geological memory of green or root or growth; as some mountains are above the tree belt, so these are, so to speak, above the life belt.
They drop sheerly from level to level, the higher ones carved into deep escarpments of rock and sand, and the lower ones pitted and cragged by the quarrying that has built Cairo for years. From the foot you see a landslide of hardened Demerara sugar, sliced here, scooped out there, gouged and layered. From the top, with the strange, coarse crumbs of a substance that does not seem to be the surface of the earth underfoot, you look, far below, on the peace of the Dead City, a place from which at this height only the soundtrack seems missing; and beyond it to the whole marvellous city, from the medieval minarets and domes to the cubist shapes of light and shade made by modern blocks; and, at last, to the desert itself. I went into a Fatimid tomb that has stood alone, up there, through the centuries; and I had lunch at the new casino, a vast grand piano of a building whose ‘free lines’ have begun to peel before it is quite completed.

  On another day I drove past deserted Mena House – open, I believe, but listless – and went to eat tahina and kebab at another new restaurant, this time at the foot, or rather under the nose, of the Sphinx. This one is called ‘Sahara City’ and it is run by a Sudanese who looks like Uncle Tom and as a small boy was a page at the court of Franz Joseph of Austria. Both the casino restaurant and ‘Sahara City’ were empty; ‘Nobody goes anywhere,’ said my friends. But that night, at a restaurant I had remembered from my last visit, the tables were full and people stood ten deep around the bar – avaricious-looking women, men who watched everyone who came in.