Their differences were over; the incident had had its bright side. It had brought them together again. Nigel had behaved beautifully, with such firmness and dignity. Beside him, the Iranian, chattering and expostulating angrily (and after all the police were only doing their duty), had seemed spineless, cowardly, contemptible.
Sarah was not very interested in the Thornes’ experiences. She thought it to be a trivial incident. Everyone knew that arms were being smuggled into Lebanon and that Beirut was full of trouble-makers; but after all the Thornes hadn’t ended up in jail and nobody had been killed, so what was all the fuss about? She had, moreover, taken a dislike to them. Margaret was hysterical and plain, and Nigel had no sense of humour. She had finished her lunch and longed to bathe and lie down; to be on her own. She wanted to review the events of the morning and looked to the time when she would be able to do so with a strange pleasure and excitement. Which was odd, because nothing very pleasant had happened to her: high explosives, blood, death—She was about to excuse herself on the grounds of weariness when Mr and Mrs Hanouche came into the room, which made it necessary to wait a little longer.
After having been introduced all round, the old couple sat down, a little apart from the others. Mr Hanouche, who was very old and rather deaf, took out his amber beads and, holding them between his knees, passed each bead slowly between his fingers. He said very little and his deafness gave him an air of remoteness so that he seemed to live in a private world with the amber beads as his only companions.
His wife was a tiny, bright–eyed woman with a quantity of thick, grey hair which she wore in a plait hanging over her shoulder. She called for her hookah, offered it to the visitors, and when it was refused, smoked it herself.
‘Nadea,’ she said, ‘is it true that Colonel Raschid Ahmed has been murdered?’
C H A P T E R 6
All Sarah’s weariness disappeared. Colonel Raschid Ahmed. Could this be the Syrian?
‘Be careful, Mrs Hanouche,’ cried Nadea, ‘or you’ll have Sarah down on you like a ton of bricks for spreading false rumours.’
‘A rumour, is it?’ said Mrs Hanouche. ‘I thought it probably was, coming from Cairo Radio!’ The Hanouches disliked Egyptians and despised the Cairo news commentaries, but nevertheless listened to them with appalled fascination. Like most Beirutes they had become used to, and even secretly enjoyed, the atmosphere of crisis which Radio Cairo could always be counted on to provide.
‘What did they say?’ asked Sarah.
‘They said that Colonel Ahmed had been murdered in Beirut by Lebanese government agents. It came over the eleven o’clock news.’
‘There!’ cried Nadea triumphantly.
‘How is it,’ cried Sarah, ‘that Cairo Radio can broadcast this an hour before it happens?’
Mrs Hanouche was the first to grasp the import of these words. Radio Cairo had taught her the language of invective, and she employed it freely. ‘So he has been killed, the murdering gangsters!’ she cried. ‘There’s your fine hero for you, Nadea! Our poor country, poor Lebanon! These ravaging wolves are tearing us to pieces. They come into our country and murder our friends, they send agents to spy upon us! We shall all be massacred by these criminal fanatics!’
‘I don’t expect it was the same man,’ said Nadea, her eyes flashing angrily.
‘Mrs Hanouche,’ said Sarah, ‘who is Colonel Ahmed?’
‘He is a Syrian Army officer,’ cried the old lady, and went on to tell them no less vehemently what she thought of Syria.
‘But what is his history?’ Sarah broke in. ‘What has he done? Why would he be shot?’
‘Why is anyone shot? Those assassins do not want reasons for shooting people. Murder is their business. Tell them about Colonel Ahmed!’ she shouted to her husband, who had sat throughout all this, staring at the carpet and caressing his beads. Everyone looked at him expectantly.
The old man’s fingers dropped one bead and closed upon the next. They were not prayer beads, for he was Maronite Christian, not Moslem, and the beads had no religious meaning for him. But they were a source of comfort and an aid to meditation; the feel of the smooth, warm amber was delight to his fingers. Jolted out of his reverie he blinked his eyes, looked around at the circle of interested faces and cleared this throat. Like all Lebanese he was keenly interested in politics, and although Colonel Ahmed was not one of the most prominent figures in the Syrian politician scene, he was able to give them most of the facts known about him.
Sarah found him difficult to follow, for he spoke in bad French frequently interspersed with Arabic, and his discourse wandered into political labyrinths that were unfamiliar to her. But she gathered that Colonel Ahmed had once headed a political group in Damascus called The People’s Moderate Party, which had been opposed to the present Syrian leaders and had aroused a good deal of sympathy in Lebanon because of its policy towards that country of friendship, and live-and-let-live. He was not exactly moderate as this nomenclature might suggest. No one in Syria, according to Mr Hanouche, could truthfully be called moderate, but he was less immoderate than others.
Then, six years ago, he had been arrested and thrown into jail. A series of indiscreet letters arranging for the assassinations of half a dozen prominent politicians, and even a large cheque alleged to have been discovered in the possession of a hired assassin and bearing his signature, were produced to support the charge of treason brought against him. But for some reason the whole thing had fizzled out. There were agitations. He had been popular with his fellow officers and men. It was said that the evidence had been forged and, when some of the victims named in the letters were themselves arrested for plotting against the government, Colonel Ahmed was released with a cleared name. But he disappeared from the political scene for a time and went to Europe; no more was heard of him until twelve months ago when his name cropped up during a Syrian–Lebanese crisis concerning exports into Lebanon. The Syrians, trying to blackmail the Lebanese into submission on another issue, had prohibited their normal exports into Lebanon. There had been a severe meat shortage in Beirut, which, although it had caused very little real hardship, for the Lebanese are not great meat eaters, exasperated everyone and led to anti-Muslim riots in certain predominantly Christian areas.
Colonel Ahmed had come out strongly against the policy of his own government in this affair and the Lebanese had made something of a hero of him, which exasperated the Syrians. Everyone had expected him to end up in jail again, or worse, but the opposite happened. His popularity had increased, his army commission was restored to him. The meat crisis was over by now and quickly forgotten and the colonel seemed to be getting on well with his own government, even to the extent of supporting it in some of its less extreme policies. But it was Mr Hanouche’s opinion that Colonel Ahmed was simply adapting himself to a difficult situation and playing a waiting game.
‘But what was he doing in Beirut?’ asked Sarah. ‘And why should he be shot?’
Mr Hanouche shrugged his shoulders and passed on to the next bead. He could have been shot for a hundred reasons—by a political enemy, or for personal vendetta—he belonged to an old family and almost certainly had traditional enemies, quite apart from those he had made in his own lifetime. Or he could have been shot by those of his countrymen who wanted him out of the way and preferred to do it in Beirut so that they could blame the Lebanese, or by the Lebanese themselves for reasons not yet divulged. As for why he was visiting Beirut, he could have been spying, or negotiating with the government, or simply visiting his relatives. His elder brother, Tawfik, was settled in Beirut and conducted a prosperous business in the Avenue des Francais. In any case Sarah could read about him in yesterday’s L’Orient where—if Mr Hanouche remembered rightly—there had been a paragraph about his visit to Beirut.
Was there a copy of this paper in the house, Sarah asked, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice. A feeling of elation and anticipation took hold of her; she waited in suspense while Nadea rummaged on the divans
and pulled cushions about, looking for the paper. She felt herself to be on the brink of a stupendous discovery. And it was curious, but the feeling of grief and anger she had felt for the Syrian had gone. His death was over and finished with and something new was beginning.
At last the paper was found and there, on the middle page, was a photograph. It was rather blotchy and dark and very unflattering, but there was no mistaking it. The Syrian was Colonel Raschid Ahmed.
‘Colonel Raschid Ahmed, hero and martyr of the peace-loving Arab people was shot down today in cold blood in the streets of Beirut. Spies and traitors have attempted to implicate the freedom-loving Arab people in this cold-blooded murder of one of their beloved brothers. Lies are perpetrated by the Israeli stooges and their imperialist bosses. The traitors and Arab haters will be exposed for their crimes!’
Sarah leaned over and switched the radio off.
It was three o’clock, Nadea’s visitors had left for their hotel; Sarah, wearing one of Nadea’s housecoats (the maid was pressing her dress), was lying on Nadea’s bed, while Nadea completed her packing. The blinds were drawn. It was cool and quiet in the room; every now and again the blind moved and a wedge of light appeared, white-hot, on the wall, reminding them of the sunlight outside.
In this room, on the divan in the corner, Sarah had slept during her first weeks in Beirut. It was cluttered with heavy, ugly furniture, sentimental pictures, tasteless furnishings. Wherever the eye turned it was to encounter cushions embroidered with insipid pink roses, lace doilies, china shepherdesses—when Sarah first looked on all this she had been astonished that Nadea, who always dressed with impeccable taste, seemed not to realise how hideous it all was; but ugliness can often attach itself to our affections when beauty fails to move us, and she looked around her now with a fond eye.
What a comfortably, friendly room it was; and in spite of its hotch-potch of knick-knacks, wonderfully peaceful; perhaps, because it seemed to be permanent. As long as Nadea lived there, one could be sure, nothing would be moved or changed. Some primitive instinct impelled her to cling to her few possessions, to value a bedcover or curtain that she had had since she was a child high above any that she could buy today.
If I came back in twenty years time it would be just the same, thought Sarah; the old things would stay, though there would be more ornaments and more photographs. There was one already, a new arrival, hung on the wall alongside the dressing table.
‘I see you have a new boyfriend,’ she remarked.
Nadea said nothing, but folded a blouse, put it in the suitcase and shrugged her shoulders. She wished she had taken the photograph down before Sarah came into the room, for with Sarah she felt it was evidence of a secret vice.
‘Poor King Hussein! You’re more fickle than I am! At least I stuck to Marcel for six months. Why don’t you get married and stop worshipping public men?’
‘Why don’t you get married yourself?’ retorted Nadea, looking up under low, scowling brows.
‘I will—to the next one.’
‘Well I won’t—ever! How can you waste your life chasing around with worthless men like Marcel? There’s something horribly servile about you, Sarah. You seem actually to enjoy shelving all your ability so that some man can have the satisfaction of shoving you around.’
‘That’s all I’ve talent for,’ said Sarah smiling. She stretched her legs and was sharply aware of her own body—sleek and warm, and free again, uncommitted, expectant, recharging its energies. Nadea’s right, she thought, I’m undiscriminating, wasteful of my affections; well, I’ve finished with the Marcels of this world. Next time I meet an attractive man I shall bring a little intelligence to bear upon him. But in the very moment of making this resolve her thoughts had drifted away from it, borne, involuntarily, by a perverse and romantic streak in her nature.
‘And by the look on your face,’ said Nadea, ‘I can see you’ve someone else in mind already. Really Sarah, here are we Jordanian women struggling for some kind of status, and people like you—’ She broke off and ended, expostulating violently, ‘Marriage! There’s too much I want to do with my life.’
She spoke sincerely. She had no intention of marrying, although many men would have been glad to marry her. She was a patriot. She was not interested in men, only in heroes; she had never felt love for a man, only an impersonal adoration. Her first hero had been Glub Pasha, the English soldier and leader of the Arab Legion; then the young monarch of Jordan, King Hussein, had won her devotion. And now a picture of the Egyptian dictator, Gamel Abdul Nasser, hung from her wall.
Every time she listened to his broadcast speeches from Cairo her heart beat with anger and pride, as it was intended that it should—and her reason was submerged. In her more clear-sighted moments she knew this, but the charm of her new hero held her captive; he had brought drama and excitement into her life that she could not now bear to give up. He had attacked her insidiously where she was most vulnerable, demanding a new dedication to his cause where she was most eager to give it—in her hatred of Israel. Her brother had been killed by the Jews, her friends and family had lost their land, her country had suffered humiliation and misery, and the Egyptian dictator asked her only to hate; not to control her passions, to think, to be just, to be constructive, only to hate. Such an appeal was irresistible.
‘You don’t understand,’ she cried. ‘You’re not an Arab! He’s given us Arabs something. He’s made us feel proud.’
‘What do you mean, “us Arabs”? You Jordanians are Arabs, the Egyptians aren’t. How did they get on this Arab bandwagon, anyway? They’re only making capital out of your misfortunes.’
Nadea was silent. Her position was hard to defend because in her heart she despised the Egyptians as she despised the Lebanese, who were a soft, money-loving people, corrupted by a long association with the French; and the Egyptians were what they had always been, a mongrel lot—Negro, Berber, Somali, Nubian—with none of the Bedouins’ toughness, generosity and courage.
‘Now if you and the Israelis would only get tougher,’ said Sarah, yawning.
‘We’ll never get together! We’d rather die first!’
‘And in the meantime you play into the hands of any bandit who likes to shout out, “Down with the Jews!” One of these days, Nadea, one of your self–appointed champions of Arab nationalism will go too far and destroy the lot of you.’
‘Perhaps we don’t care,’ cried Nadea excitedly. ‘If we go up in smoke you’ll go up with us. We shall have had our day. That’s something you damn British never allowed us.’
‘Well, if all you want is to blow up the world, any fool can do that.’
‘That’s not the point! Suppose we are impossible. Why don’t you leave us alone to make our own mess?’
‘If we’d left you alone you’d still be being shoved around by those adorable Turks. You shout and scream at us and conveniently forget all that.’
‘What if we do shout and scream?’ shouted Nadea. ‘That’s our way of doing things. We like shouting. We know what we want and don’t want you damn efficient snooty British telling us how we should live our lives!’
‘Darling, don’t you know the British are a dead duck? You’re so busy kicking that poor old corpse around you don’t even know you’re being fattened up for someone else’s stew.’
‘Well, the Americans then, they’re worse. They don’t even understand us, and they expect us to be grateful when they do things for us that suit themselves.’
‘All right, I admit everything. We’re all impossible except you angelic Arabs, and don’t delude yourselves into thinking we’re interested in you. I only wish all your oil would dry up and we could clear out and leave you to stew in your own juice.’
Suddenly Nadea laughed. ‘Sarah, I’m so glad you’re back!’ She shut the lid of her suitcase and fastened the catches. ‘Now while I’m gone, you won’t go back to Marcel?’
Sarah smiled at her lovingly. She put out her hand and their fingers touched. ‘Nadea, when
I make up my mind, do I ever?’
‘No, but you’re such a fool about men. I only wish I could get you interested in my village work. Sarah, why do you have to be so frivolous?’
‘I don’t believe in charity—your sort, I mean.’
‘You say that. You don’t mean it. You’re just selfish and lazy.’ She leaned over and kissed Sarah’s cheek, her dark hair swinging forward over her face. ‘I’ve told Alexa to get your suitcase from Dobbies. There’s money in your bag. Now, must rush.’
When Nadea had gone Sarah felt lonely. It was not that she was troubled about the future. After all, Nadea had left her with plenty of money, and she was only going to Amman for four days. The feeling was more complicated than that. She had known before this restlessness and sense of loss when she had been separated from someone she had loved. Nothing was urgent or important. Time had stopped for her, although it was still going on for others.
She lay, unable to sleep, although she was tired, distracted by the sounds coming from the street outside. She realised after a moment that she was listening to these sounds—the honking of horns, the jabber of a badly tuned wireless set, the cry of street vendors—and identifying them, as though she were expecting one of them to contain a special message for her. She was waiting for something to happen; perhaps she was even expecting the door to open and someone to come into the room.
But who? Could it be Marcel? She considered the possibility carefully. But no, she felt quite different towards Marcel; she did not want to see him again and was not even curious to know how he had reacted to her departure. The past few hours had made it impossible for her to love Marcel or anyone like him again. Yet the feeling of being in love remained—the sadness, loneliness and exhilaration.
At length, she got up and picked up the paper containing the Syrian’s photograph. For the third time she read the caption beneath it. ‘Colonel Raschid Ahmed, who arrived in Beirut today as the Syrian government delegate in the forthcoming negotiations for a revision of the trade agreement with Lebanon.’
Arms for Adonis Page 7
