by Ted Simon
No, that was not all. I went over the incident again in my mind, saw the Arab standing in that pool of light in the darkness, with his arm raised. Yes, but I had seen something else, before I had even known what I was looking at. I had seen him straightening up, that was it, straightening his
legs. He had been rising from the road surface and I had seen him do it but I had not wanted to know because I was too tired. No! Not too tired, too frightened. I was too frightened of that imperious wave of the hand, of that fierce glance, to face up to the fact that he had just found my wallet on the road.
The discovery was devastating. I had thought I was a man. I had taken risks and come through them in the way a man was supposed to, and yet here I was after all just a boy quailing before the first figure of authority that came my way. It went very deep in me, this fear of authority, and it sickened me to find myself as vulnerable as ever. I knew the robed figure would haunt me for a long time. It was the beginning of a long struggle.
Hard as it was to bear this moment of self-realization, I found some kind of strength in it. I piled up some stones to mark the place where I had been searching and rode on to the checkpoint at Matruh where I was given back my passport. I explained what I was doing, and went back to go on with the search, but with no more success than before.
Then I started thinking. If the Arab had taken the wallet, he would probably not keep it. He would take what was valuable and throw away the rest. Where. Before the checkpoint. I road up to the first checkpoint again, and worked back. The driver of a car going to Libya would throw something from his window across the road to the other side. But no. In Libya traffic drives on the right, in Egypt on the left. So it would be a left-hand drive car, driving on the left of the road. I followed the right hand verge going towards Matruh. Fifty yards along I saw a small bundle of paper against the root of a bush. The wallet had been broken in half. No money. No address section. No photographs. No credit card. But the vaccination certificates were there, and one international driving licence. I could find nothing more in the area. Partly relieved, and a little better pleased with myself, I returned to Matruh.
It was two in the morning. The police corporal received me with genuine pleasure. He was short and unprepossessing, his uniform crumpled and short in the leg, with some kind of blue and white band round one arm. He was in charge of a small platoon of even more ragged soldiers, but they were all excited by the arrival of a man on a motorcycle, and determined to look after me. They produced tea. Then a handful of dates much bigger than any I had seen, and some corned beef and flat bread. The corporal's face was a landscape devastated by pock-marks. He spoke a little English and was fiercely patriotic. He wanted me to know about the crushing defeat Egypt had inflicted on Israel. As I munched my dates, sitting on a rough bench near a charcoal fire, he stood over me repeating, fanatically, the same words.
'Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel Aviv. Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel Aviv. Israel finish. Is good?' And all of them stared at me looking for the truth in my eyes, but I wasn't going to let myself slip twice in a night, and I said there should be no war and that nobody wanted to fight on either side. By a charcoal fire in the Egyptian night the most banal remark can have the force of prophecy, and my words were received with wonder and agreement.
They built me a bedroom. Literally. While the corporal taught me Arabic, they made a soft-board roof over some heaps of brick, and a platform to lie on. At four o'clock I was allowed to sleep.
In the morning I went back for the third time to the police post on the Salloum road, and found pages of addresses and photographs spread over the desert. They were all there. Only cash and credit card were still gone. I thought I had been very lucky after all.
The road to Alexandria had military on it all the way. Immediately outside Matruh a very pukka officer with a dapper moustache sat behind a desk in an open tent. He asked for my permit to travel to Alex. I brought out all my papers. It was not among them, he said. I began to suspect that I might still not be in Egypt after all. Then, purely by chance I found the scrap of paper that had been filled in by the semi-illiterate police clerk, that my roly-poly guide had dismissed as unimportant. It was, in fact, the only piece of paper I really needed.
On the road, the new war and the old one blended together. War cemeteries, thirty-year-old tanks, routing instructions for Monty's armies still scrawled on semi-ruined walls, and El Alamein where I had a good lunch and a pint of beer for a dollar.
Matruh to Alex, one hundred and eighty-one miles, the hottest miles so far. An older, narrower, bumpier road than the Libyan highway. The coast was absurdly picturesque. On a postcard one would have said the printing was far too garish. Turquoise sea, radiant sand. Small homesteads by the roadside, donkeys and camels ploughing, turning over the top three inches of sandy soil with wooden ploughs. Graceful women in brilliantly coloured dress carrying water on their heads. Then, more and more houses, gardens, and just before the plunge into the city an extraordinary area of white stone, whipped and carved and flung into waves and troughs like a high sea suddenly turned to salt.
Then Alexandria, and in the twilight an endless scramble through miles of cobbled dockside streets, tram-lines, mad traffic and people in ever greater compression, nowhere to go, no friends of friends to telephone. The fate I escaped in Palermo caught up with me in Alexandria. I broke through the commercial areas at last into a garden square on the sea front, and parked opposite an expensive hotel called 'The Cecil'. As I nudged the front wheel against the kerb and looked behind me I saw black smoke round the exhaust pipes. I knew I was in trouble, but refused
to think about it. A thin man in a blue jellaba and head cloth appeared at my side.
'You want hottle' he said. I agreed, and followed him round behind the Cecil and into a high old Parisian-style building. He asked me for a coin and fed it into a slot in the lift. The lift digested it slowly and began to rumble upwards. The landings were open and Alexandrian life seemed to reveal itself by layers. On the top floor was the Pension Normandie.
I could not have asked for a better place. It was cheap, clean, authentic, owned by a cuddly French widow and run on her behalf with doting indulgence by an elderly employee called Georges. I noticed only two other guests and both were French. One was a bluff middle-aged man with a handsome, ruddy face and fair hair turning to white. He adored competitive conversation, in which the object is either to sap or cap the last speaker's story, a sort of verbal bridge. His anecdotes were planned and delivered more with the intention of frustrating the opposition and keeping the play than simply to amuse, but it amounted to much the same thing, for he was a skilful player and his stories about the Resistance were new to me. He taught French at a university in Cairo. The other guest, another French widow, had been married to a very wealthy Egyptian in King Farouk's time and was now retired on a small income. She also told languid tales of life in the days of sashes and cummerbunds and ten foot wedding cakes, all very reminiscent of St. Petersburg under the Czars, and could herself have been a Russian Duchess, angular, erect, always carefully groomed, and lightly varnished all over.
Madame Mellasse, the owner, would kick off her slippers and fold her plump stockinged legs on the sofa; the widow sat under a lamp stand examining her carmine nails and uttering her brittle remarks; the professor, in good voice, dominated the proceedings; and I, I suppose, brought news from the front rather like a young cavalry officer on leave. We made a quaintly period quartet.
I carried out my first ever major motorcycle overhaul in Alexandria. Both pistons, I found, were deformed by heat, and I had only one spare piston with me (a piece of nonsense which inspired more waves of telepathic profanity to burn the ears of Meriden). I found a cavernous garage near Ramillies Station and haggled bitterly over five piastres for the right to work there, and then received many times that amount back in tea, cigarettes, snacks and true friendship from the poor men who struggled to earn a livelihood in that place.
I took two day
s to do a job that might be done in two or three hours, but every move was fraught with danger. Already I knew that there would be no chance at all of getting spare parts into Egypt. I dared not make a mistake. The pistons had seized their rings, and I replaced the less distorted one after sculpting the slots with a razor blade. It seemed the only thing to do. I prayed that I was right. I had no real idea about what had caused the overheating after only four thousand miles, and felt rather gloomy about it.
There were many British motorcycles pumping round the streets and some shops still had stocks of parts for them, but they were single cylinder BSAs, Enfields, AJSs of ancient vintage. It was warming to see all these old British bikes plodding on after twenty years or more and obviously held in high esteem, but it was rather pathetic also. I knew that it was only economic policy that prevented them importing new machines, and that small Japanese bikes would be much better suited to them. If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become only a nostalgic memory. There was so much good will towards us that it seemed criminal to fritter it away, yet we had nothing to offer now in competition.
When the Triumph was all buttoned up again I tested it rather nervously. The first clouds of smoke frightened the life out of me but when the excess oil was burned away, it ran clean and sounded fine. Only then did I allow myself the luxury of looking at the city.
It took me an hour to clear the grease out of my fingernails in the Normandie's bathroom. I admired the tiles, the old-fashioned fittings and, as I stood by the sink next to the lavatory, a bowl of Western design, I noticed for the first time a brass valve wheel sticking out of the wall. Its function was obscure so I gave it a turn to see what would happen, and a jet of water hit me in the chest. Instinctively I turned it off, and looked for the source of the mischief, feeling like the victim of a practical joke. It took me some while to notice the slender copper pipe pointing straight at me out of the bowl of the lavatory. Once I had seen it I couldn't quite believe it, and had to play with it a while, watching it, but even this latest sophistication in oriental toiletry did not convert me, and I went on leaving my paper trail across the face of Africa.
The obvious place to walk to from the Normandie was the sea front, only a hundred yards away. In my linen jacket and white trousers I strolled along the promenade, cameras slung ostentatiously round my neck, and raised the telephoto lens experimentally to look at the lighthouse. One moment I had been looking for someone to photograph, next moment I was surrounded. A hand seized my shoulder, a voice shouted hysterically close to my ear. People came rushing towards me. It seemed to me that they appeared from nowhere, out of the cracks in the pavement. The man who had me in his grip was much smaller than me. He wore a dirty brown fez and a jumper over a T-shirt, something I have always considered a sure sign of bad taste. His face was distorted by hate, his veins and tendons stood out throbbing.
'From where you come?' he screamed, again and again, and when
I said England he went on screaming. 'No. No. From where you come?'
The truth is I had completely forgotten about the war.
Fortunately there was a naval barracks just along the road, and some naval police arrived before the mob grew big enough to lynch me. The sailors were all for treating me in a civilized way, but my captor insisted that they pin my arms behind my back and frog-march me off. He would have liked to see me blindfolded and led before a firing squad there and then.
As soon as we got into the navy yard, they let go of me and apologized profusely. The apologies were taken up more elaborately by captains, majors and finally a colonel who asked me to please not let this unfortunate incident colour my good opinion of Egypt. Eventually a blue jeep was arranged to take me to the General-in-Command of the defence of Alexandria.
The general, like all the other officers, had a bed made up in his office. His desk was burdened with a great quantity of patent medicines and tonics as well as paperwork, and he looked dyspeptic, myopic and tired, but he received me with much grace, devoted ten minutes to discussing my journey, the merits of Pentax cameras and the publicity that Triumph would undoubtedly get. By now I had learned always to produce the Sunday Times cutting with my picture. It opened more doors than my passport did.
The general took the film from the camera, a new roll with nothing on it, wished me luck and returned reluctantly to his war. A brigadier next door gave me tea and talked fondly of the years he had spent living in London next to Harrods. I was returned to the promenade and turned loose.
I went back to the Normandie, dumped the cameras, changed my swank jacket for a disreputable sweater, and went out again determined to see something of Alexandria. Not far away, I found the sort of area I had been looking for, a poor working neighbourhood crammed with tiny lock-up shops, people caning chairs, plucking chickens, bundling firewood, counting empty bottles, scooping grain out of sacks into small cones of thick grey paper, beating donkeys, dragging trolleys, recuperating scraps of everything under the sun. A small boy in rags, no, in one rag, had his capital spread on the kerbstone in aluminium coins and was counting it solemnly as though about to make an important investment. A number of delicate gilt chairs stood tip toe on the pavement, like refugees from a revolution, having their seats stuffed.
I was standing fascinated in front of a display of dried beans swarming with weevil, when a hand fell on my shoulder. I turned to face a man in a grubby blue suit with a mourning band on his arm. He made the sign for papers' and I had to swallow my irritation, because I had left my papers in my jacket. He handed me to another man, similarly dressed but less shaven and more villainous. They had the same hard edge to their expressions that I had seen on the police in Tunis. They sat me on a chair outside a cafe. A crowd of people began to gather, murmuring 'Yehudi'. The proprietor came out with a bucket of water and threw it over them. They scattered and reformed, pressing closer. The 'chief decided to take me to his headquarters, a hutch buried under the staircase of a building across the road, eight foot square, windowless, and lined with 'wanted' pictures. It was the sort of place where 'B' movie heroes are usually beaten up, and for the first time I began to squirm a little. During both arrests, I had surprised myself by remaining very cool and detached, and I was interested to see how disarming my behaviour had been in the face of possible violence. Now, as I sat against a wall, facing the door, where privileged onlookers were allowed to peer in at a genuine Israeli spy, I began to reconsider my tactics. I watched a fire hose being dragged along the corridor to the street, where the crowd had evidently become a mob, and thought how helpless I was and how much I preferred being with the navy. Then the chief brought a cup of coffee, and the time for a beating had evidently passed.
The episode dragged on, however, for the rest of the afternoon. I was driven to police headquarters, then to the Normandie for my papers, then back to the police, and at last let go. There was a lot of waiting, but no attempt at ugliness. I got to know a number of police and their relations, but to be arrested twice in one hour was enough to convince me that my third attempt might be unlucky. I got my bike out and rode to King Farouk's old summer palace, the Montasah, to sneer at the vulgarity of it, to admire the cool light inside, and to be won over, finally, by the bathroom showers which operated somewhat like a modern dishwashing machine, and were no doubt supplied by Harrods.
The war news was not good. Tension was rising at Kilometre 101 where the opposing sides were discussing an armistice. I decided to hurry on to Cairo and the Sudan. Already I guessed that I would be refused permission to ride the road to Aswan. Big troop concentrations, radar installations and airfields were said to lie along the road. If the train was my only way south, then the sooner I got on it the better.
I had a last lunch at the Normandie, stranded on the shores of time with my three exiles from better days. Speaking French, which was the hotel language, the professor entertained the ladies with an account of my escapades.
'It would be apparent to a babe-in-arms that our
friend set out yesterday morning determined to provoke an incident. When his cameras and his obviously sinister wardrobe failed to do the trick, he climbed on a
pedestal and pointed his telephoto lens at a Russian submarine in the harbour. However, his "arrest" by the Navy was disappointingly civilized and apologetic. He therefore exchanged his jacket for an Israeli sweater, deliberately abandoned his papers, and sauntered off to the roughest neighbourhood available to behave as much like a spy as possible. And in case that was insufficient, he made sure of popular hostility by drawing attention to a merchant's infested beans, saying "In Tel Aviv, we have laws against this kind of thing." '
There was much laughter, and perhaps a grain of truth.
At the end of the lunch, just as I was about to leave, a telegram arrived for the Frenchman. He opened it, drew a sharp breath, and stared at it.
'My son is dead,' he said. T knew it.'
He was petrified by grief. He was inconsolable, and immovable. None of us could find anything to say. I murmured goodbye, and left. On my way to Cairo I reflected, uneasily, that a lot of things were happening to me and around me. Every day, it seemed, added its quota of significant encounters, events and revelations. Were they already there, waiting to happen, or did I bring them with me? Could turbulence and change be 'carried' and transmitted like a disease? I knew I had brought excitement into those three lives, but the news from the front was not always good. I wondered, unhappily, whether I was destined to leave a trail of grief and misery behind me too. 'What colossal arrogance,' I thought, but could not quite brush the idea aside.
