by Ted Simon
It was truly breathtaking to see one man seize upon an environment which belonged, theoretically, to his forty or so customers, and use it for the complete expression of his own selfish and domineering nature. Behind the bar, his seat of power, he granted or withheld his favours as capriciously as any despot. Europeans he served with a ghastly conspiratorial grin. Others he refused altogether, loudly, rudely, with vulgar gestures. When some newcomer dared to tamper with the TV he flew into terrible tantrums.
His strutting and posturing were unforgettable. He treated the lounge and its occupants as his private colony and, with great energy, found a thousand ways of showing his contempt (mildly reflected in other members of the crew) while the rest of us submitted in our various ways, resigned, resentful or merely numbed.
He represented in my eyes all that is brutal, greedy and corrupt in human behaviour, and he was a powerful influence in stimulating my sympathy for the Arabs. Short of violence it was obvious that the man could not be stopped.
The singer came in a little later, when it started to rain outside. He sat at the far end of the lounge still chanting and smiling as though at some Sufi vision. In the confined space the songs were much clearer. Hassen said they were nonsense about girls and love, and he was apparently making
them up as he went, but at least he offered an alternative kind of vitality to the terrible malignant power of the barman.
The Arabs nearest him began tapping and clapping along, and others drifted closer, but he continued for a while as though he were unaware of any of us, playing the fool for another audience that only he could see. The barman was noticeably annoyed and the tempo of his outrages increased, but although he still commanded two thirds of the saloon he did not meddle with the singer whose territory was growing. I sat for a while on the borderline of their two spheres of influence, and it was like looking out on two different worlds. To my left, shouting, hostility, the smashing of bottles and, from the TV, the gibbering howl of the ether. To my right, singing, laughter and a beat that was beginning to reach into me. Hassen and I moved across to the right.
The singer judged this the moment to come out of his private retreat, and began to respond to his followers. I could not imagine how I had ever thought him distasteful. At worst he was a simple clown, but his power now seemed to grow as the barman's dwindled. He interrupted his buffoonery with poetry, and Hassen told me it was original and good. The same thumb and forefinger placed the words in the air with a precision and meaning that I felt I could understand, though I spoke no Arabic. The songs also became longer, more lyrical. Slowly, over a period of several hours, the pitch of his performance built up. The barman by now was utterly effaced, the TV could no longer be heard. Everyone in the saloon was with the singer, his to a man, and yet he still seemed strangely detached from us, not feeding at all on our adulation in the manner of a Western 'star'. Nor was there ever an attempt by anyone to compete with him. He remained the focus of energy for the rest of the crossing.
Towards the end he moved from songs and poetry to oratory. It*was a long speech, and if the rhythms were anything to go by, it was in the Arab equivalent of blank verse. His voice now was very muscular and gritty. The harsh, hard-nosed syllables flew out in formation and beat on my ear. His audience replied with moans and cries of agreement. I imagined the voice amplified a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, from loudspeakers on all the minarets of Islam.
The sounds conjured up an atmosphere of great ferocity, yet the sense of the speech, it turned out, was moderate. It had to do with peace and war in the Middle East. It praised the moderate statesmanship of Bour-guiba, and poured scorn on the troublemakers who would fight, like Ghadaffi of Libya, to the last Egyptian. Hassen said it was good sense, realistic and very poetic.
I too thought at first he was just a fool, but now what he says is very impressive.'
It was well after dark when the ship arrived in Tunis. By then I had made another friend, Mohamad, a young Tunisian who was one of the singer's most enthusiastic accompanists. He was more stylishly dressed than most, with a jazzy peaked cap, which he never removed. His nickname, loosely translated from Arabic, meant 'The Swell'. He asked me where I was going to stay in Tunis, and I said I had no idea.
'Then you will stay with me. My family will be very honoured. You will have everything we can offer. We will be extremely proud to have such a famous man in our house and our friendship will last for ever. I have a dark skin but my soul is white as a lily. You will be safe and well in my house.'
Before leaving the ship I happened to notice the barman. He seemed a rather insignificant person, cleaning up after us, hardly worth bothering with.
Arriving in Africa was, after all, pretty much like arriving anywhere. You used your imagination to make it different. There was a harbour, a passenger terminal, offices and officials, the usual formalities and indignities. Everyone spoke heavily pointed French against a background of murmuring Arabic.
The ferry was a drive-on, drive-off ship and there was no delay in unloading. I took the bike outside the dock gates and waited for Mohamad. I had explained that there was no room for him on the bike and he had swallowed his disappointment and said he would find a taxi. I wondered whether he had invited me so that he could get a lift home on the bike. It seemed important to expose all these ignoble possibilities, to get a true measure of his hospitality. After all I was going to write about it. I wouldn't want to say that a pure flame of generosity burned in his noble; breast if all along he only asked me home for the ride. I mean, let's get it right, shall we?
However, Mohamad and the taxi duly appeared and we wound round the streets of Tunis and out into the dark countryside for a while, to arrive at the Cite Nouvelle de Kabaria. It was difficult to grasp it at night. Most of it was in shadow, but it appeared to have been recently built beside a main highway. I saw a maze of ten foot walls plastered white. No visible! windows or roofs. Not like houses at all. Eerie. We plunged down a dirt; alley and stopped by a door.
The door opened not, as I expected, into the house but into a small cemented yard. Mohamad went first and then asked me to bring the bike inside. I barely squeezed through. The father was standing there in a fez, loose shirt, trousers and sandals. He greeted me very formally and! politely, with few French words. The yard was maybe ten feet square, and the rooms opened off it on three sides, so that the whole house was,
in effect, a tiny walled fortress, with one door leading out. I could see already that the rooms were very small. I was ushered into a room opposite the street door, which was like a little cave. It was about seven feet wide, and half of it was filled with a brass bed, covered sumptuously by a shiny cotton pile rug. There was a bit of floor space and a chest cluttered with ornaments, like a shrine, with an oil lamp burning.
I was left to sit there for a while as whispered conferences took place outside, and I began to feel nervous about what was going on, so I went out to look. Mohamad's mother and two small children were there with him, moving about in deep shadow. The five of us and the motorcycle filled the yard.
Some hint of suspicion must have shown in my movement or expression.
'If you wish to watch over your motorcycle, please do, but I assure you it is safe,' said Mohamad. He spoke gently and quietly, not at all the brash boy on the ship. I felt ashamed and went back to the room (three steps away, everything was so close) to find that a supper had been laid out on the chest. Two small lamb chops in heavily spiced hot sauce with peas and pimentos, and some bread. No cutlery.
I ate the bread with the chops, and then made a mess having to scoop up the peas and sauce with my fingers. The sauce burned my mouth terribly and I could not finish it, and that made me feel bad too. I turned to the door and asked for water. The mother came in with a jug and a metal cup and I saw her face in the light, small and worn, but very calm and tender. This is definitely not a 'B' movie, I told myself, and from then on felt absolutely secure.
The bed was Mohamad's but I wa
s to sleep on it. I protested, but in vain.
'Whether you sleep on it or I, it's the same thing. If you sleep on it, it is as if I were sleeping on it,' he said, offering it as a pleasure rather than a sacrifice, and though it was a traditional formula of hospitality, maybe, it came alive on his lips.
I lay down on it like a visiting emperor, with a small boy lying on the floor by my bedside, and prepared to fall immediately into a deep sleep, but sleep would not come for a long time, and my skin, which had been itching nervously for some weeks, tingled even more than usual. Sometime in the night I came half out of sleep again to hear muffled drum beats and what seemed in my dreamy state to be a procession of phantoms moving through the darkness.
I awoke with numb lumps all over my wrists and neck and half my face. Bugs, I told myself. Not nervousness, not heat rash. Bed bugs. But I refused to believe it. That beautiful bed, infested? Never.
I slept on the bed three nights. The second night was just as bad. The third night I got out my nylon tent and wrapped it round me and that was better. The pleasure was Mohamad's, the sacrifice was mine.
So on that first morning I squinted through my swellings at an African day. Everybody was up and about early. They had nibbled at something before dawn because it was Ramadan, and for that month no Muslim may eat while the sun is in the sky. The drum was to tell people it was breakfast time, but as a nominal Christian I was exempt and had a peppery fried egg-In daylight the place seemed even smaller. There were two other rooms the size of mine. The rest of the family, mother, father, Mohamad and little daughter, slept in one of the other rooms, which was also a tobacco shop. The father had been a prison warder, and as a retired civil servant he qualified for a licence to sell tobacco. It was not a roaring trade.
How they all fitted together in that tiny space, why they weren't constantly colliding in the doorways was a matter for wonder. There was never a harsh word, no hint of impatience or frustration, the children kept to their own little world, seemingly content, looking up from a modest mud pie with big eyes full of liquid love.
They designed their lives around each other with the intricate harmony of an oriental carpet. Obviously it required much submission, mostly on the part of the women. Was it submission or repression? Or a different view of space? I could not tell.
Just how uncrowded they felt became clear when I asked about their third room. They said that since their eldest children had moved out, they had so much space that they had offered their spare room to a couple of elderly poor relations who were still sleeping. So now we were eight.
There was one other door through which I passed after breakfast. Behind it was a square metre of cement with a hole in the middle, and a jug with a slender spout. I went to get some paper, and then returned and squatted down, rather puzzled, because it was obvious that nobody else used paper. I had been told many times of course, that you should never greet an Arab with your left hand. It was serious insult, because that was the hand they used to wipe their behinds, and I had grinned and said, Yes, I know, and somehow I had never really thought what it meant because everyone has paper. Don't they?
No, they don't. They have a jug of water and a left hand, and the thought of having to touch my shit with my own hand disgusted me. God, it was bad enough having to stick your fingers in your food. So I ignored the whole problem and choked up their lavatory with paper.
There was no running water in the house and no electricity. The houses were as small as they could be, and built of the cheapest materials. The roads between them were dirt. Kabaria was a slum: a new, still uncompleted slum. Or it would have been but for the people who lived in it. A slum, I came to realize, is the people and not the place.
I only came to realize how mean a place it was when Mohamad's brother-in-law took me to visit his father in the country. We rode off down the highway and up into some low hills, softly curved like the breasts of mother earth, nourishing big shade trees and peaceful olive groves. I saw a brown cow suckling its calf, and a compound of thorn and cactus, and we turned in there to a couple of huts set at right angles. They were made of mud plastered over wattle and you could see where the hands had shaped them at the corners. The door frames revealed how thick and satisfying the walls were, like gingerbread maybe, topped with thatch, and at their base sat two colour-matched orange marmalade cats.
Inside, the spaces were about the same size as the rooms at Kabaria, but this was real space, under the rafters, with room for the imagination to grow. The old man sat down opposite me across a rough coffee table while his wife busied herself behind me with a charcoal stove, always behind me so that I never really saw her. Behind her and filling the width of the hut was a wicker-work bed stretched on a wooden frame.
The old man talked crazy nonsense to me about the world beyond his cactus fence, and he had a perfect right because it was a crazy world. I ate his bread and honey - his own wheat, his own hives - and heard about the Jews.
'These Jews,' he said, 'they have a strong smell. I can smell one a mile away.' We were face to face, and half of me is Jewish. Maybe it's the rear half.
T have heard of a Jewish tribe,' he went on, 'which was conquered, and the invaders slew all the men, but the women allowed themselves to have children by their conquerors. "Beshwaya, beshzvaya", they murmured; "in time, in time". Secretly they taught the children to hate, and when they grew up they murdered their fathers.
'As long as there is one left alive they will never give up.'
He was a fine old man and his nonsense did not disturb me. Any Jew could come into his house and be as safe there as in his own home, as long as he came as a person and not a label. I watched him, listened to his voice rather than his words, and drank in the scene. Everything fitted, everything was right; shape, size, colour, texture, all the parts had grown together, into something that would shape the instincts of the people who made it and lived in it. Whatever messages of hate he picked up and repeated, his personal dealings guided by those instincts would surely be alright. But in Kabaria what was there to inspire the inhabitants of those shabby, cramped boxes, fighting for work on the edge of an overcrowded city? Perhaps the old man led a tougher life, perhaps at times he ate less or felt the cold. If so it had only done him good. But the kids couldn't see it. How could they? They had to get into that mess on the edge of the city so that one day some of them might appreciate what they had left behind. Did they choose or were they driven? Either way, I thought, they were the stuff that wars are made of.
In Tunis I worked the embassies. The Libyans gave me my visa, and took out one heavy anxiety, which the Egyptians replaced with another. There would be no possibility, they said, of crossing the border from Libya into Egypt.
I stared at the map. There was THE road, no other. North of the road was the sea. South of the road, the desert. Here and there tracks trailed into the desert. . . and disappeared, punctuated full stop by an oasis, or dwindling into nothing. There was no other way. A fourteen hundred mile cul-de-sac to Salloum on the Egyptian border. I had to go down it, just in case . . .
On the third morning I was ready. The bike was packed. Mohamad had his gang around him, and they were going to escort me to the highway, and take ritual pictures on my cameras. Each time the bike had gone out into the street more people had seen it. By the third day every kid in town knew about it. As I rolled it along in first gear, over-heated and dressed up to kill, the parade swelled to fantastic proportions. The Pied Piper or the Wizard of Oz could not have had a greater success, but I had nowhere to take this crusade and I began to get nervous wondering where it would take me. It was immodest, out of all proportion; I couldn't stop it, but I knew it had to go wrong.
As my army turned the last corner, in sight of the main road, the police came in and wound it up. They grabbed Mohamad, who was carrying my cameras, and told me to follow. The rest they sent scattering. There were only a couple of them, in dark and dingy suits, but they looked awkward and angry. When I got into their office on th
e highway one of them had already managed to find the release to open the camera, but didn't know what to do then, so I grabbed it, and closed it and rolled the film back into its cassette and then opened it for him.
Mohamad was looking quite defeated, and they were shouting at him. Then one of them turned on me, and accused me of being a sensation-mongering journalist trying to get pictures of Arabs stabbing each other in drunken brawls, exploiting their poverty and ignorance to sell my dirty rag. It was a good story. Maybe it fitted somebody else. Then they turned to accusing Mohamad of being out to rob me, and said I had been taking my life in my hands, and I said all the best things I could as convincingly as possible and tried to get the temperature down. So they took us out in the street and told Mohamad to go home and told me to piss off.
I tried to make it alright with Mohamad before I went, but he was very chastened and didn't want to talk. I didn't like to go but I was a provocation just being there, and so I said a sad goodbye and rode off into my cul-de-sac.
Tunisia rolls by. The first marvel comes in right after Kabaria, a huge Roman aqueduct swings alongside me for a few miles, crumbling but unconquered like a monster from the depths of time. The rains are early and I see the water hanging in the sky ready to fall on me. The land needs it but I don't, and I hurry past wheat fields and over hills to beat it. Halfway to Sousse I know it's going to get me (it's a personal thing between the rain and me) and I stop to pull on the waterproofs. The land is very quiet, just a bunch of horses about a mile away. I wish I shared that calm.
As I ride along I'm thinking about Kabaria. Why did it end like that? It would have been prudent to leave the day before.
Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go their own way, or why be here at all.
Still, I am uneasy. I have to find a way to be with people in a less spectacular fashion. I didn't see why Mohamad thirsted for prestige. He got drunk on it, and how can I blame him? It's all very well for me to go around feeling humble, but I must also be aware of the effect I am having on others. It could be potent.
