Arms for Adonis

by Charlotte Jay

  Sarah paused for thought. ‘Well—’ she began.

  But the Iranian had already burst out angrily. ‘You see! You see that!’ He pointed to fallen columns and broken capitables, a yellow butterfly hovered on the carved eyelid of a stone lion, palpitating its wings. ‘That is the fate of all colonialists! Even the butterflies fly higher.’

  Sudden and oppressive, like a wave of pain, boredom came down upon Sarah. She yawned and looked hopefully toward the Temple of Mercury.

  ‘Why do we come here, Madame?’ demanded the Iranian excitedly. ‘Look! Look over there!’ He pointed. Behind the Temple of Mercury the houses of the town showed clustered on the slopes of the anti-Lebanon. Here and there a green belt of trees, the minaret of a mosque, stuck up above the flat roofs and mud-coloured walls. ‘There are the people. It is a plot. These travel agencies, they are all in league! You know, they are all under the thumb of the Americans. Do they take us into the town and show us the aspirations of the people? No! No, never! It is Roman temples everywhere!’

  He paused, breathing deeply. ‘I shall go!’ he declared suddenly, and standing up snapped together the expanding seat of the shooting stick.

  ‘Good idea,’ Sarah encouraged him. ‘You know there’s a most interesting mosque in there. You shouldn’t miss it. It’s on the pound note. Or is it the five pound?’ She opened her bag and took out her wallet, but the Iranian was impatient to be away, bowed swiftly and hurried off.

  She watched him go without regret. He had unnerved her a little by sounding a particular note just when she had been feeling thankful for its absence. For it had come to her mind some moments before that one of the remarkable things about Baalbek was that no picture of Gamal Abdel Nasser or the Virgin Mary had been stuck up on it.

  As Sarah herself had remarked that morning, Baalbek belonged to no one, if not to Jupiter himself. Like all ancient monuments, it was in a sense immutable, beyond the reach of conquest and political ferment. Here, politics did not matter. A few hundred yards off in the streets of the town the mosques might resound to the cries of angry imams, the pulpits tremble to the eloquent priest, but the ruins had passed beyond all this contemporary fuss and persisted, serene, in the rarefied atmosphere of their long history.

  With the Iranian gone, this atmosphere once more reasserted itself. The sunlight palpitated on the golden court; the yellow flowers hung over their inky shadows; the lizards lay rigid or flicked like lightning into their holes. And Sarah waited, bemused by the sunshine and forgetful for the moment of Ishmael, of Alan, even of Colonel Ahmed.

  A faint cry called her to herself. She looked up to see the party trailing out from the Temple of Mercury.

  They had lunch by a café set in a grove of walnut trees just outside the town, a cool green spot watered by the spring to which Baalbek owed its existence. When everyone had rested, the Frenchmen said they would like to look at a shop that was reputed to sell coins and other antiquities.

  This was situated in the centre of the town and looked out on the main street with its incessant parade of camels, donkeys, sheep, goats, assorted pedestrians and lurching, travel-stained buses; a haze of dust and smoke hung in the air, dulling the sunlight; from a café across the street a loud- speaker poured political speeches and Arab film music into the ears of the populace.

  Inside, the shop was small and dingy and offered to the eye an oppressive confusion of modern ‘arts and crafts’—brass hookahs, wooden camels crudely carved and varnished, leather slippers and bags painted with pyramids and sphinxes. A few pieces of broken pottery and pearly Roman glass, some Greek coins, nearly all suspiciously identical, and Phoenician beads comprised its stock of antiquities.

  ‘How much do you want for this?’ asked Nigel, holding up a chipped Roman lamp.

  The dealer, who was fat and dark-skinned, and seemed, like a Rembrandt portrait, to melt indistinctly into the gloom around him, stood miserably torn between two conflicting desires—to do business and to insult an imperialist warmonger. For the crisis in Beirut had had the usual effect upon the emotional temperature of Baalbek. The town seethed with angry rumours, and passions ran high. He stared at Nigel sullenly. ‘Fifty pounds,’ he replied at length.

  Nigel put the lamp down in disgust. ‘This fellow doesn’t want to sell,’ he said to Sarah, who stood beside him, fingering a length of Damascus brocade.

  ‘Offer him a price,’ said Alan. He felt a little uneasy and was anxious to get his party away from the town. He had parked the car in a side street behind the shop and wondered now if this had been wise. There wasn’t much they could take, apart from the windscreen wipers and hubcaps, but they could always puncture the tyres. He brushed the thought away. They know me here, he told himself. I’ve brought them plenty of business. But the atmosphere was too tense for comfort; some unsavoury remarks shouted by street urchins had followed them into the shop.

  He leaned over the counter and spoke to the shopkeeper in Arabic. ‘Ibrahim, send your boy round to keep an eye on the car.’

  Ibrahim nodded and turned to shout an order over his shoulder into a dark room behind him.

  They had always been friendly. Alan had known him for two years; had brought him many customers and never given the show away on the fake Alexanders. After all, if people were silly enough to buy fake coins, that was their affair. Once Ibrahim had invited him into the room behind the shop and given him some arak. But today his manner was sullen and he kept his eyes averted.

  ‘Mr Crawe.’ Ishmael touched his arm. ‘Did you lock the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure? I don’t think you did, you know. Can you hear that broadcast? It’s just as well to be on the safe side. People were saying some pretty nasty things when we went past.’ He lowered his voice. ‘There was one chap who called me an imperialist stooge. Did you hear? If I hadn’t had these people with me, I would have walloped him. Give me the car keys. I’ll just slip round and make sure.’

  Alan, his attention divided between the broadcast, Ishmael and the unsmiling eyes of Ibrahim, absently handed over the keys.

  At the other end of the counter the Frenchmen were inspecting the Alexanders, going over each one with a magnifying glass. Having had some experience of French thoroughness, Alan suspected they would be there half the afternoon and then would buy nothing. He wondered whether he should tell them to hurry up but decided against it.

  He was not in the least worried for himself. It was these others, these innocents abroad, you never knew what they would do. Frenchmen, he had learned from experience, were as passionate in argument as the Arabs, and Nigel belonged to that class of Englishmen who looked insolent by the simple accident of his countenance. The only one of the group whom he felt he could count on to behave herself in a ticklish moment was Sarah. She would not, he felt sure, precipitate an incident. He looked around the unsuspecting party, watchfully.

  Margaret had moved to the door and stood looking out into the street. In the café opposite a group of men in white kaffiyehs and brown robes were sitting around tables, drinking coffee and smoking hookahs. They were beautiful, she decided, their features strong and proud, their eyes flashing under jutting brows. The white head-dresses formed a perfect frame for their swarthy features and even the ugly ones suggested a nobility of thought, so that one credited them with great endurance and courage. They argued together, their faces vivid with feeling, heir hands tracing the theme of their talk with swift, expressive gestures.

  Yes, they were beautiful. They were worth coming to see. But as for the rest of the place—

  Dirt, dust, noise, chaos—somehow, she thought, you could tell it was a Muslim town. The flies, the sullen black-eyed youths, the shabby shops, the squalling wireless sets—and a sense of anger and profitless resentment brooding like an undercurrent to the confusion and noise.

  It is for this, she thought, that we back down and make way? Dirt and anger, beggars hanging around for baksheesh, people always wanting something for nothing, whining child
ren giving you flowers you don’t want and then asking to be paid for them, tormenting you into charity. She thought of Jupiter’s temple, the dignity and calm within the spacious court and it seemed the antithesis, and her own inheritance.

  She was aware that she was committing some large fault in understanding. Nigel could have told her all about it. She did not care; she did not want to understand. She had taken sides now in a conflict as old as Baalbek itself, and prayed that the heirs of Hellas might triumph over the Orient.

  When Nigel, relinquishing his lamp in disgust, came to her side, she did not turn to smile or look at him. She felt intensely irritated—with Baalbek, with Ishmael for having persuaded them to come, with the whole excursion, Nigel included. She could have wept with disappointment, for the day had started so well. They had awoken that morning in the same bed, really in love for the first time. What had happened? What had gone wrong?

  The tram ride, those two men fighting in the street, the horrible children by the temple … How could Nigel pretend to like these things when he hated them as much as she did? All his love and tolerance was only theoretical, a mere attitude of mind. This compassion for something large and unspecified, something you never had to face—what was it but a substitute for true affection, and the only way out for those with little heart?

  Margaret deeply regretted having come to the conclusion that the English were the only acceptable people in the world and England the only place to live. She knew well how unattractive this view would appear to their friends at home. But there she was, and that was her conclusion. At least I’m not fooling myself, she thought, and despised Nigel, who, it seemed to her, was.

  At that moment, during this fresh crisis in Margaret’s relationship with her husband, the Iranian appeared, walking down the street towards them.

  The sunlight gleamed on his satin black head and sparkled on the brass buttons of his uniform; the white lanyards swung to the rhythm of his stride. People, impressed by his military appearance, stood back to let him pass; dogs and children trailed at his heels as though part of a retinue.

  Nigel recognised him first. ‘Look! Isn’t that the Iranian journalist?’

  The Iranian advanced jauntily. Jabbing the point of his shooting stick into a piece of melon rind that happened to be in his path, he flicked it dexterously over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, my God, no!’ cried Margaret.

  The Iranian burst into ecstatic greetings. ‘Hello! Hello, Mr Thorne! Hello, Mrs Thorne! So we meet again. You have been visiting Baalbek? And where is your friend, Mr Green?’

  ‘He didn’t come,’ said Nigel.

  ‘And what do you think of Baalbek, Mrs Thorne? It is not so remarkable. We have better things in Iran.’

  Margaret, taut with dislike and determined not to answer, turned away from him. Yet when it came to the point she was not quite able to be entirely rude but sought instinctively for some way of cloaking the snub. The café across the street caught her eye; the men she had admired were still there, drinking coffee, smoking and talking. Remembering dimly something she had wanted to do a moment before, but for some reason had refrained, she took a step out into the street and fumbled for her camera. Raising it to eye level, she snapped the shutter.

  The whole street erupted as the men from the café, with cries of rage, rose up and hurled themselves upon her. She saw, as in a nightmare, the tall menacing bodies, their robes billowing like sails around them. Someone snatched the camera from her hand and dashed it to the ground, stamping it into the dust and kicking it in fury. Others closed around her. She felt their hands, hot and greasy with sweat, fumbling on her body, dragging her arms. They shouted at her, so close she could feel their breath on her face, gesturing with their hands at her very lips as though to pluck contrition from her tongue.

  It had all happened too quickly for her to feel afraid; but she felt sick and revolted. Not so much for the contact of these strange male bodies against her own, but for the scene’s ugliness, the shouting and cursing, the stumbling about in the dust. She could hear dogs, roused to excitement, barking in the street. She heard herself shouting too. ‘Take your hands off me. Leave me alone! Nigel!’

  ‘Here!’ cried Nigel, who had rushed forward and was struggling toward her. She saw his white, strained face, his long arms flung out to catch her hand. Their fingers touched, but were plucked apart. ‘Leave her alone … She didn’t mean anything! It’s all a mistake!’ he shouted.

  Ishmael, who had just come back from the car, Alan, Sarah and the two Frenchmen rushed out of the shop.

  ‘Keep back!’ cried Alan to the younger Frenchman, who was eagerly hurrying to save the lady from distress. ‘Don’t be a fool! You’ll only make it worse. Ishmael, keep them back in there. Get back!’ he ordered Sarah and pushed them into the shop.

  ‘No! No!’ cried Ibrahim, whose family—a fat wife, five children and an old grandmother—now filled the shop to overflowing. ‘You cannot stay here! They will pull down my shop! They will take my things! You must get out and not come back.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ said Alan and, thrusting twenty pounds into Ibrahim’s hand, hurried out before the man had time to think.

  He had half expected to see Margaret and Nigel torn to pieces, but the ardour of the attack had abated a little. The crowd was larger, children had come running from all directions and people from the nearby shops pressed forward to see what was happening, but they now seemed less interested in the Thornes than in the Iranian, who was yelling at them at the top of his voice and flinging his arms about in declamatory gestures.

  As the crowd grew quiet it became possible to hear a little of what he was saying. ‘Do not be hasty,’ he begged them. ‘You have been insulted, it is true, but do not forget the laws of hospitality. These strangers are standing upon the threshold of your homes. They have been rude and stupid, but that is not their fault. They cannot help themselves. Is it not better that you should forgive them?’

  A few of the older men murmured angrily. The Iranian flung out his arms. ‘Remember!’ he cried, ‘America has atom bombs. They can drop them on your town and blow you into little pieces. You are weak and unprepared.’

  ‘We will not give them any more oil.’

  ‘We will cut the pipelines!’ shouted a fanatic here and there. But the majority seemed impressed, not so much by the Iranian’s argument as by his eloquent delivery and frequent use of striking metaphor. He now began to quote appropriate passages from his books and they nodded and murmured appreciatively at some particularly felicitous phrase. It was evident that a poet had come among them—they forgot Margaret and Nigel and were prepared to listen to him for the rest of the afternoon.

  Seeing them attentive and comparatively quiet, Alan gently elbowed his way to where Margaret stood, trembling and dazed, wiping the dust from her lips.

  He knew he ought to feel sorry for her; he wanted to say something gentle and reassuring. Instead he burst out, ‘You bloody little fool! Didn’t you hear me tell you not to take photographs?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said pathetically. ‘I didn’t think. It was on the spur of the moment. I had no idea.’ She shook the hair back from her eyes and seemed to recover a little. ‘How childish! How ridiculous! Grown men! Just because I took a photograph! They’ve absolutely ruined my camera! Where is it?’ Her voice shook with anger. ‘It’s brand new. We bought it in Germany when we came through. They ought to be made to pay for it!’

  ‘Madame!’ cried the Iranian, who had heard this. ‘Please be calm! You are a stranger here. These men could break you in two like this—crack! crunch! And feed you to the pariah dogs! Here is your camera!’ Someone handed it to him. He blew at it and rubbed the lens energetically on his sleeve.

  Nigel limped towards them, brushing dust from his trousers. ‘Well, it is childish,’ he said in his high voice. ‘We haven’t done anything. They ought to be made to understand how foolish that kind of behaviour is. Why, all over the world …’

  ‘Oh, for
God’s sake!’ said Alan and, taking Margaret firmly by the arm, led her to the café and made her sit in a chair. She sank limply into it and was suddenly sick.

  ‘I’ll get you a glass of arak,’ said Alan gently. ‘It’ll buck you up.’ But he was more worried about Nigel, who was still arguing with the Iranian. ‘Mr Thorne,’ he called out. ‘Don’t be a fool! Keep your voice down, smile and if necessary apologise.’

  ‘That is it,’ cried the Iranian, who seemed to have changed sides and now argued the Arab point of view excitedly. ‘You are continually insulting them! First you take ­pictures of them and then you will not apologise.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ said Nigel. ‘I’d apologise gladly, but there’s nothing to apologise for. We haven’t done anything to offend anyone. We’re perfectly friendly. We have absolute good will for everyone.’ He had a logical mind; the whole situation was ludicrous and he simply had to explain this. ‘Look, make them understand. It isn’t an insult to take photograph. It’s a compliment. My wife wouldn’t have photo­graphed them if she hadn’t been interested in them. In London people photograph the Queen. She doesn’t mind. She likes it.’

  ‘Your Queen is beautiful,’ said the Iranian. ‘She wears ­diamonds. These men are not beautiful. It is an insult.’

  ‘Mrs Thorne,’ said Alan, ‘will you tell your husband not to be a fool.’

  ‘Nigel!’

  ‘Just a moment, Margaret,’ said Nigel. ‘But that’s absurd,’ he continued to the Iranian. ‘We photograph them because they—well in a way they are beautiful. And they interest us.’

  ‘Why? They are none of your business.’

  ‘Qu’est–ce qui se passe?’ called out one of the Frenchmen from the doorway of the shop.