Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3)

by Edward Whittemore

  COTTUN AINT FAYROW,

  EYE EM.

  (S) ZIWAR UF DA DELTER.

  MI, ZATS ALL.

  10

  Ahmad

  BUT IT WAS ONLY one tiny part of old Menelik’s career that seemed to appeal to Ahmad, not his phenomenal life in general.

  Ahmad’s intense admiration for the old Egyptologist was focused entirely on that extremely brief period when the young Menelik had worked as a dragoman one winter in Cairo, in order to support himself while beginning his study of hieroglyphs. For it was during that long-ago winter that Menelik and Ahmad’s father had conceived the idea for the first dragomen’s benevolent society, a forerunner of twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism.

  Such vision, said Ahmad to Joe. And what heroic battles they had to fight to get the struggle out of the cafés and into the streets. In those days a dragoman could only find work during the winter tourist season. The rest of the year he had to do without, as did his neglected suffering children, the poor little waifs. For a dragoman in those days, it was rut or perish. During the winter, rich Europeans clamored for a dragoman’s services and were willing to pay almost any price to get their hands on him. And then?

  What did happen then? asked Joe.

  Spring, thundered Ahmad. The crudest season. And not only spring, but spring and summer and autumn. The tourists stopped coming to Cairo because it was too hot, and those same dragomen who had been the hottest items in town were suddenly rendered cold. Whereas before, a world-weary dragoman had hardly been able to set foot on the veranda of a tourist hotel without being pounced upon by wealthy Europeans in search of the rumored depravities of the Levant, now these same poor slaves to the lusts of foreign exploiters were summarily scorned. Jeered at. Made the butt of rude Italian gestures and abruptly tossed off hotel verandas as if they had become so much superfluous hanky-panky.

  But they changed all that, boomed Ahmad. And if you think Trotsky and Lenin set the world on its head, you should have seen what old Menelik and my father did right here in Cairo decades earlier. Fearlessly they went from café to café, convincing their fellow dragomen the time had come to stand up, to shriek, to speak out against these intolerable forced vacations that stretched on from spring through summer to autumn. Oh it was a time of fervor, all right. A time when there was electricity in the air.

  I’m beginning to feel it, said Joe. It sounds like a regular spring thundersquall bursting over Cairo, with intellectual lightning just everywhere.

  Ahmad whirled on him, his eyes afire, his voice crackling with emotion.

  Ram it, he thundered. Up until then dragomen had always been mere rams for hire during the winter season, while being scorned during all other seasons. But no longer. Not after old Menelik and my father launched the Movement. And how did the idea for this great revolutionary crusade begin? This secular jihad to free the toiling masses of dragomandom?

  Small, I bet, said Joe. That always seems to be the way.

  Ahmad was somber, thoughtful.

  Would you believe me if I told you it began in a small way? But always my father was passionately hammering away at the same inspiring theme…. You have to get out of the cafés and into the streets, he said. If you want your power to be felt, organize. If you want to make them listen to you, organize. There’s only one way to change history. Organize.

  Straight ahead through the centuries, said Joe. But was old Menelik really so interested in politics as a young man? I’d always heard he was only a dragoman for a winter or so, to make ends meet while he was getting his hieroglyphs together. Do I have it wrong?

  Abruptly Ahmad’s face darkened.

  Menelik went underground, that’s all. Down into tombs. But he continued the struggle there.

  Oh I see.

  And his heart was always aboveground with my father and the cause, said Ahmad, who then began offering up a host of elaborate excuses to explain Menelik’s speedy departure from the Movement, which made it clear Joe hadn’t been wrong at all.

  In fact although the idea for a dragomen’s benevolent society had originally been Menelik’s, the black scholar had lost interest in café agitation almost at once, due to his increasing fascination with buried graffiti and forgotten facts and subterranean reality in general, the everyday spadework of Egyptology. What Ahmad had been referring to when he admitted that the black scholar had gone underground.

  But it was also apparent that Ahmad didn’t like to dwell on this subterranean aspect of Menelik’s life. And the reason Ahmad couldn’t accept these underground truths, refusing even to acknowledge their existence beneath the shifting sands of Egypt, was because he wanted so desperately to believe the founding of a dragomen’s benevolent society in Cairo had been the most dramatic event of the nineteenth century, and therefore the most significant cause that anyone could have taken part in then.

  And all because that was what his father had done.

  Democracy in action, boomed Ahmad, all his old enthusiasm returning. My father and his fellow dragomen discussed everything under the sun as they lounged away the hours in cafés, and there were superb speeches and vivid manifestos, not to mention all the poignant true-life stories that were constantly being retold and retold. The times were alive then, and there was even talk of founding a new nation or a new world-order dedicated to pure dragomanly ideals.

  And so we had verandaism, thundered Ahmad. And we had radical nocturnalism and revolutionary hotel-lobby restructuralism, and a revisionist humanist wing with no furniture, and the inevitable backroom lobby filled with cigar smoke, for the disabled…. Oh it was all there. And each faction had its hour of shrill ascendency as the final truth took shape, and then finally the enraged shouts erupted and the fighting slogans were unwound, and the downtrodden dragomen of Cairo rose up as one angry man and marched out of the cafés and into the streets. They just weren’t going to take it anymore, and thus was born the International Brotherhood of Dragomen and Touts. Or simply the Brotherhood, as they were known to their supporters. Or the DTs, as their detractors so viciously referred to them.

  There’s never been any respect for minorities, said Joe.

  Ahmad’s massive nose flared. He sighed, gripping his powerful fists together.

  I have to tell you things didn’t turn out well for my father, he said in a quiet voice. In his later years my father became increasingly bitter and eventually refused to see anyone at all, even Cohen and the Sisters, and that’s shocking when you think of it. For hadn’t their midnight sails on the Nile once been the very talk of Cairo? Those bawdy tender nights when the four of them had dressed up in costumes and drifted riotously on the currents of the great river, drinking champagne from alabaster cups of pure moonlight? Singing their songs to the stars and caressing the night with sensual laughter?

  Oh yes, the four of them had been famous friends once, yet there came a time when my father stopped going out and refused to see even them….

  Ahmad lowered his eyes.

  Underwear had always been my father’s trademark in his professional life, the finest erotic underwear imported from Europe. But when he stopped leaving his rooms, he also stopped wearing underwear. At home, with just me around, he refused to wear any at all. The fantasy’s gone, he used to say. My illusions have departed like an ancient scroll rolled up.

  Ahmad hung his head.

  And it was all because he felt the Movement had betrayed him. It’s grown fat, he used to say. It’s just not the same anymore, it’s not what it used to be. And in his bitterness he began smoking more and more hemp, which increased his appetite so that he ate more and more, which made him fat.

  Ahmad glowered.

  Bloat. Revolting. The dragoman’s anathema.

  Ahmad’s scowl deepened.

  My father had worn a beard all his life, ever since he was a sleek young man. But when he rashly decided to shave it off thirty years later, what did he find lurking beneath his beard, time’s cruel reward for his decades of selfless sacrifice on beh
alf of the Movement?

  My God, said Joe, what did he find?

  Wattles, thundered Ahmad. Deplorable. I have wattles, he confided to me one evening, his face all bandaged up to hide the fact, so heavily bandaged he looked like a mummy. In those later years people got into the habit of referring to him as Ahmad the Fat, and quite naturally they called me Ahmad the Thin. And since everyone else was using those names, we picked up the habit ourselves.

  How is the fat one today? I would ask. Bitter and lonely, he would answer, and how is the thin one?… Meaning me.

  Ahmad shook his head sadly.

  Sometimes when you feel defeated the world just seems to bear down on you, insulting you and humiliating you. I saw that happen to my father and it was terrible. He became a recluse and there was nothing I could do to make it any better for him. He played solitaire and read old newspapers and kept his face bandaged like a mummy, and he smoked hemp and never wore underwear and never stirred from his rooms. At least a game of solitaire can’t betray me, he used to say. At least thirty-year-old newspapers can’t lie.

  Ahmad sagged heavily against the counter, his voice sinking.

  Toward the end, the only thing that gave him any pleasure was listening to donkey bells. There were donkeys everywhere in Cairo in those days and he loved listening to the gay tinkling sounds of their bells. Nothing else could ease his terrible loneliness.

  Ahmad looked away.

  The end came in the autumn. The Nile was still red with the topsoil of the Ethiopian highlands, and the nights were cool and no longer filled with desert grit. But the great river was ebbing swiftly and with it my father, a lonely beaten man with the life going out of him. He’d had an operation on his throat by then and he couldn’t speak, so he penciled notes for me on a pad of paper he kept by his hand.

  Raise me up off the pillows, he wrote that last evening. Let me hear the lovely bells one final time….

  And that was the end. He died in my arms.

  Slowly Ahmad raised his eyes and looked at Joe, his huge boyish face tormented, his voice a whisper.

  Don’t you see? I only pretend the Movement was important in order to honor my father’s memory, even though in my heart I know it was nothing more than a farcical oddity once used by someone to justify his life…. Every life has its Movement, of course it does. But what does it matter in the end? Who cares?… But what I really can’t understand is why my father didn’t spend his life with donkey bells? Why didn’t he make them or sell them or do anything while riding around on a donkey, when he loved those gay tinkling sounds more than anything in the world?

  Ahmad’s lips quivered. Pain creased his massive face.

  Why don’t people do what would make them happy? Why do they let themselves get trapped into things? Why don’t they just?…

  But Ahmad was unable to go on. His whole body sagged and he covered his face with his hands, softly beginning to weep.

  Noisily, Ahmad blew his nose.

  Please forgive me that outburst of realism, he muttered. I try to keep them down to a minimum, given the way things are.

  Ahmad blew his nose again and drew himself up on his high stool. His face brightened.

  But see here, may I offer you an aperitif in some interesting attractive place, by way of apology?

  You must be able to read minds, said Joe. Are you going off-duty then?

  No, not exactly. But my town house is so conveniently situated, duty is no problem at all, said Ahmad, slipping off his high stool and disappearing down behind the counter. Joe thought Ahmad was retrieving his sandals, so he raised his voice.

  A town house, you say? Does that mean there’s a country house too?

  Not now, Ahmad called up. But before the war I had a little cottage on the edge of the desert. The last war, that is, not this one. My war. The cottage was a delightful little hideaway where I could replenish my soul on weekends. In those days I not only wrote poetry and played tennis, I was also a champion cross-country tricyclist. I owned one of the first racing tricycles in Cairo, one of those swift machines you don’t see anymore, the front wheel almost as tall as a man. And there I would be in my sleek racing goggles tearing down some road by the river at all hours of the day and night, the two white discs of my goggles reflecting the sun or the moon as I sped along laughing, a regular Sphinx on three wheels, just flying…. Oh yes, I was speed itself in those days. Hold on to your hats, they used to say, here comes Ahmad.

  Is that what they used to say? Joe called out.

  Always. Down by the river. But you have to picture the holiday crowds eating their grilled pigeons and their tehina salads in those cafés you find in limp gardens along the Nile, where clumsy birds of blue and gray hop along the red earth in front of you, taking flight at the very last moment with angry cries. Where kites and crows wheel black and slowly in the polished skies, the scarlet flamboyants in bloom and the sacred white herons dead still on the branches of the sagging trees. A holiday race, in other words, from the pyramids to the Nile. And picture the excitement rippling through the crowds by the river, and every head in every café turning, and a triumphant cry going up as the first tricycle came looming out of the desert. And screams and more cries as the thundering chant was taken up by one and all.

  Hold on to your hats … here comes Ahmad.

  I can see it, said Joe.

  Speed, muttered Ahmad. Power. More and more speed and more and more power, I could never get enough of it.

  He paused.

  I also took great care with my clothes in those days. My appearance was important because I was not only an interior decorator but a leader of café society, which meant all kinds of people were always coming to me for advice and counsel. There used to be a saying in Cairo in those days. When in doubt, ask Ahmad.

  Ahmad was still down behind the counter, apparently having trouble finding his sandals. While Joe listened he watched a large scruffy cat which had taken up a position just outside the front door on the cobblestones. The reddish cat was licking its paws and sunning itself. Suddenly it stopped and stared directly at Joe.

  Your desert retreat must have been lovely, Joe called down.

  Oh yes, Ahmad called up, his voice muffled. Cool nights and hot days, just like that song Liffy sings. But then a freak sandstorm came along and blew everything away, and I arrived at my hideaway one weekend to find there was no there there.

  You decided not to rebuild?

  I wasn’t given the choice. It happened during the war, the last one, and tastes were changing and everything was changing and my interior decorating business was going from bad to worse. In fact I could no longer earn a penny. New people were coming along and I was out of fashion.

  Joe jumped.

  Ahmad’s head, just his head, had appeared above the counter. He gazed solemnly at Joe for a moment from beneath his battered flat straw hat, then sank out of sight again, his voice drifting up from behind the counter.

  I know it must be difficult to imagine when you look at me today, he called up, but I was quite fashionable before my troubles began. For a while I managed to keep up appearances with the help of friends, but life was changing drastically for them too, as it was for everybody. Some of them took up something new while others just wandered away and were never heard from again. While a few, like myself, could be seen still haunting the old spots, hoping to see a familiar face…. It’s like that in wartime, even when the battles are thousands of miles away. Suddenly the world you knew is no longer there and you find yourself off in some little corner where nothing is quite right, not quite what it used to be, and a sad loneliness steals over your heart…. Sad, because you always thought your little world would go on forever. Because you never really understood how fragile it was…. how fragile anything important is, because so much of it always exists only in your own imagination. But then all at once the dream is shattered and you’re left with little bits and pieces in your hand, and an emptiness as vast as the night creeps into your soul….

>   A sigh rose from down behind the counter.

  I used to have long talks about it with a friend named Stern…. Quite simply, I’d failed in life and I didn’t know what to do. A lonely time and long ago….

  Silence for a moment down behind the counter, then Ahmad began again, a lighter tone to his voice.

  And what did I do? Well briefly I tried my hand at no-nonsense capitalism. Loot was my goal, nothing else mattered. Orphans and starving widows be damned. Let those whining misfits grub for their keep like the rest of us. If Carnegie could choke the poor and make ten million a year while throwing dimes to the mobs and being revered for it, why couldn’t I?…

  Instinctively, Joe jerked away from the counter. All at once the top of Ahmad’s head had loomed up into view and was just sitting there, his enormous nose resting on the edge of the counter. He had removed his straw hat and was holding it aloft in some kind of salute, only the upper part of his head showing.

  Fish and chips was the business, said Ahmad. Greasy fish and Levantine chips. Have you ever seen that old van Liffy drives sometimes?

  Of course, said Joe. The Ahmadmobile.

  Exactly. Well that van belonged to me before it was acquired by an unnamed secret service. Originally it had been an ambulance in the First World War, cheap to buy because it was war surplus, as I was myself. Well I had the van cleverly fitted out with a vat for deep-frying and an icebox for fish, and my goal was to be a self-made success. Strictly one man alone oozing his way to the top, the Carnegie of greasy fish and greasier chips. And when all was ready, off I drove through the rutted back streets of greater Cairo, merrily clanging my ambulance bell, ready to relieve the housewife’s dinnertime burdens with tasty orders cooked on the spot. I was the originator, you see, of the modern fast-food business in the Middle East.

  That’s amazing, said Joe.

  And I was also the instigator, from a religious point of view, of what might be called the Moslem movable feast of the contemporary era.

  That’s even more amazing, said Joe.

  Well it seemed so to me, and for a time I thought the Ahmadmobile might become a household word in the back streets of greater Cairo. But what’s that famous Latin expression for the inevitable changes of fate? Sic semper Ahmadus?