Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘And Carmilla the vampire, do you remember her? All that panting and hugging. A Victorian lesbian nightmare.’

  ‘Heavens, I must read it again,’ Le Fanu said cheerfully, swinging right at the Chartered Bank.

  *

  I telephoned Alex and Mary Ephtyvoulou, and went to see them. The bunch of red carnations I bought for Mary from a mute street vendor outside the Cleopatra Hotel weren’t dead, but they had no life and no smell, like plastic flowers, and Mary said, ‘They’ve picked them in the cemetery!’

  I have known Alex and Mary for fifteen years, perhaps more. Alex is a Greek Cypriot by birth and has represented the Associated Press in innumerable hair-raising forays into the battling countries of the Middle East. I first bumped into him in one of them – perhaps in Amman during the shambles of the Six-Day War of 1967, or in Damascus, or in Jerusalem. Our paths had crossed a good deal since.

  There is no forgetting Alex once you’ve met him. He has shoulder-length hair that has nothing to do with – and long pre-dates – hippiedom, and a thick dark-brown beard that gives him a faint resemblance to Rasputin. This beard, surrounding a beautiful smile, can brighten one’s day in the direst conditions. I have been cheered by it in the squalor of Beirut’s sniper-dominated alleys and in the Street Called Straight as Israeli jets strafed the Syrian Ministry of Defence. But generally in my mind’s eye I see Alex and Mary sitting by the sea in the sun during that peaceful winter in Kyrenia before the Turkish assault changed everything.

  Mary has never reconciled herself to the Turkish occupation of the north of the island; I doubt if she ever will. Nor will Alex, but at least he has his work to think about. There are many like Mary who curse the roadblocks that keep Greek and Turkish Cypriots imprisoned in different parts of their country, and they all mourn the lost freedom. Mary is still a laughing, hospitable woman, but sometimes there is a melancholy in her that I don’t remember from the easy times before 1974.

  ‘I want to go to the UK,’ Mary said over dinner on their terrace behind its hedge of dusty oleanders. ‘Now that we can’t go to Kyrenia, I want to leave. There’s nowhere to go for the weekend except Limassol, and I hate it there. Limassol, with its neon lights and Wimpy bars, is hardly Limassol any more.’

  ‘All this emotion about Cyprus, Mary, and you from Samos.’ Teasing her usually prises her out of her gloom.

  The divided island has become like my carnations: not exactly dead, but without the spirit it once had.

  *

  In the Associated Press’s ground-floor office behind his house, Alex and I looked through shipping advertisements in the Cyprus Mail. Apparently an agent in Limassol called S. Ch. Jeropoulos might have a vessel bound for Jedda sometime soon. Alex knew Jeropoulos and telephoned him. But meanwhile we saw another advertisement: ‘The Red-Med Shipping Line: m.v. Atlantis loading Limassol 17/9/79; m.v. Mini Lake loading Limassol 30/9/79.’ Both heading into the Red Sea, the ad said, but it didn’t mention a specific port. Loading soon, it said, but it gave no sailing date.

  Shipping advertisements are heady things. They are also a snare for the over-optimistic man who believes that, because it is written down in black and white in a timetable or an advertisement, a cargo ship will leave on the date mentioned to the destination specified. Sometimes it will; often it will not. It may sail a month late. The weather, port congestion – sixty-three days at Latakia – accidents, the availability of cargoes and the tactics of moneymaking, all are factors.

  The next day I drove to Limassol. The town was full of holiday-makers, many of them from Britain or the two British bases in the south of the island, there for the annual wine festival. I was lucky to find a simple room on the waterfront. From its French windows opening onto a small balcony I could see a small fleet of freighters lying in the bay.

  The offices of S. Ch. Jeropoulos and Co. Ltd were conveniently close, only a few doors away. They had panelled walls, a high ceiling, and on one wall a picture of a clipper under full sail. A young man with a telephone to his ear waved me to a chair by his desk and excused himself. ‘A container deal, sir. So sorry, but it’s the weekend.’ I looked at a shipping order on his desk for twelve casks of Keo wine for Singapore, Messrs Kuang Guan, Wine Traders (on SS Mau Hing). In a few minutes he put down the telephone and we discussed the possibilities. The ship to Jedda seemed elusive, but he found another vessel eastbound to the Red Sea and even further.

  ‘There’s a ship sailing from here to the Gulf, Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi on Tuesday. American. You might get on that.’

  ‘Stopping anywhere?’

  ‘Jedda, Saudi Arabia, I think.’

  ‘That’d do.’

  I thanked him and drove directly to the agent he had mentioned as being in charge of the ship. I found a short, bristling man, striding jerkily about a new office he had evidently just moved into; the furniture was modern, but there were hardly more than a couple of desks and three chairs.

  ‘We have a ship, yes,’ he said when I had explained my reason for being there. ‘Limassol to Dubai.’ My spirits rose. ‘Stopping at Alexandria. I’d have to ask the captain’s permission to take you, and the ship may not get here until Tuesday.’

  ‘It’s an American vessel, I understand.’

  ‘American? No, Lebanese. Egyptian captain, but he’s a very good man. When she arrives you could take a boat out to her. She’ll be anchored in the bay.’ It sounded just what I needed. After all my anxiety, had I conquered the Suez Canal so easily? I began to see myself on the deck of the Lebanese boat, her flag with the cedar tree stretching bravely in the Red Sea humidity, her sharp bows cutting through the waters, passing North Yemen, then Aden, abruptly turning up past Muscat and into the Gulf, which these days some call Persian and others Arabian.

  I returned to my hotel, sat at a table on the street opposite the sea and opened an envelope of mail that the Observer had sent to me care of Alex Efty. In this delayed correspondence, I came across a cry for help so unexpected that I asked the waiter to bring me a Cyprus brandy before I read it to myself a second time. I downed the brandy and wondered what to do. How on earth could I, at a distance of a thousand miles, rescue a Pakistani from sexual atrophy?

  The letter was from a Punjabi, the son of a friend I had known for several years in Pakistan. I had often visited the family in their home south of Rawalpindi. Walid, in his twenties, had worked in a hotel in Pakistan, but eighteen months ago he had decided – like hundreds of others – that he could do better for himself by emigrating and, by paying an employment agent in Lahore who specialized in sending Pakistanis to the Gulf area at exorbitant expense, he had found a job in a hotel in Dubai. He had really wanted to go to Europe – that’s where the good life can be found, according to Pakistani friends who had gone there and written to him. Still, though Dubai was not England, it was on the way there. His father did not object to his trying to make good abroad. He was one more tiny ripplet in a sea of Asian humanity struggling westwards like fish to a lamp.

  Walid had written to me from Dubai to say that it was a small, hot place; the hotel was grand, the pay adequate, but the social life very limited. He missed his girlfriend in Pakistan, a girl he had grown up with, and whom his parents wanted him to marry. His cri de coeur had the name and address of the grand hotel written on it, and it was dated more than a month before:

  I am waiting for you to say welcome to Dubai. [I had told him I was on my way.] But I have an urgent request. If you do not mind can you bring me a ‘Doll’ which people use for sex I think that it is better than hands. I came to know that its price is about 25 pounds so I will pay for that. I think in Dubai it is good to pass the night some time because it is too difficult to get the girl here. I come to know that it is openly available in ‘London’. So I will request to you to bring one ‘Doll’ for sex for me. That is rubber doll all the body is same like girl (please do not forget it)….

  With best wishes to you,

  Yours Walid

  No doubt such dolls are openly
available in London, but in Cyprus? What is more, I couldn’t see myself stuffing a collapsible rubber doll into my metal suitcase in Nicosia and risk having it exposed to Muslim inspectors in the crowded customs at Dubai Or at Alexandria, Beirut or Jedda – particularly Jedda. (I had a clear vision of the scene: ‘Open that one, please.’ ‘Oh, there’s nothing in that one. Only personal effects in that one.’ ‘Awdha b’Illah! Is this what you call a personal effect?’) It might be good for sixty lashes in Jedda.

  Poor Walid! He was suffering, but what could I do?

  *

  Next morning I heard from the bristling shipping agent in his new, meagrely furnished office that the Lebanese ship to Dubai was delayed – indefinitely, it seemed. ‘Oh, one week. Or maybe early next month. Too early to be sure.’

  I couldn’t wait indefinitely. I continued to rummage through the shipping advertisements. And meanwhile to kill time I drove back to Nicosia to see Alex and Mary, who were thrilled by the idea of Walid’s doll.

  ‘Alex, you could get one here, I bet you could! You’ve probably got one hidden around the house, you monster!’ Mary laughed so much that the children stopped watching television to come see what it was all about.

  ‘Not in Nicosia. No dolls!’ Alex said. ‘In London, of course. Strong rubber, inflatable, washable, lasts for years. But not here.’

  ‘Oh, listen to him!’

  ‘What do you mean, Daddy?’ their daughter said scornfully from the doorway. ‘Of course you can buy dolls in Nicosia.’

  ‘Out you go now,’ said Mary, hurrying her out of the room and making a face at Alex.

  There would be no relief for Walid in Dubai.

  *

  I found the advertisement for Al Anoud in next morning’s Cyprus Mail: ‘F. B. Al Anoud. Alexandria–Beirut–Limassol–Beirut–Alexandria. At Limassol every Tuesday as from 18th September.’

  ‘That’s it,’ I said to Alex. ‘A ferry carrying cargo and passengers, so it’ll be more or less on time, I expect.’ I telephoned the agents and booked a cabin from Limassol to Beirut to Alexandria. Better to push on, even if only to Alexandria; at least it was in the same country as the Suez Canal. I went round to a heavily guarded Egyptian embassy, where armed guards, expecting attacks from Palestinians, pushed my passport through a hole in the garden wall. In a quarter of an hour it was pushed back with a visa stamped on it.

  I said goodbye to Alex and Mary and drove once more to Limassol. The Anoud was due in two days. In my hotel I wrote to Walid saying that I was still on my way, but didn’t mention the doll.

  Every night the public gardens near the waterfront of Limassol were full of coloured lights and avenues of stalls for its wine festival. Each stall had a covered counter with wine barrels on shelves behind it and Greek Cypriot volunteer barmen in traditional baggy trousers. The barrels were all labelled, but a red Afames 1962, which came only in bottles, was probably best of all. Crowds of local people and tourists surged about under the trees clutching long-necked flasks of red or white wine, which the barmen filled and refilled from the casks. The flasks of white wine looked like urine-specimen bottles. Nobody sprawled about on the grass or in the pathways, but most people were quite drunk. The wine was cheap and strong.

  A snub-nosed British marine from one of the military bases, his face flushed the colour of the red wine, swayed over to me. ‘The wine takesh the lining clean out of your sh-shtomach,’ he confided. ‘Tha’sh wha’ they shay.’

  Greek mothers and fathers sat in the blue smoke of kebab stalls, watching the dancing among the trees. Big moths flew into the floodlights where crowds of younger Greeks howled with glee at clowns and a vaudeville act. ‘Don’t worry about young George,’ I heard an Englishwoman say. ‘We’ll find him at t’gate soon enoof.’ Police dived on pickpockets and hurried them away and, now and again, people stuck their heads into the shrubbery like ostriches and were sick.

  A youngish Cypriot with a spotty face and a drooping moustache came up to me as I was leaving in my small rented car. I needed an early night before the next day’s sailing on Al Anoud. He wanted a lift to the port area, not far from the hotel, and I told him to get in.

  It was a mistake. When we reached the waterfront road with its bright overhead light I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. At first I thought the fellow had brought a wine flask from the gardens and was holding it between his thighs. When I realized my mistake, I said, ‘I’d keep that for later. It might be useful for your girlfriend. A sort of wine-festival present.’

  ‘Wine make too strong,’ he explained. His eyes glimmered off and on, like a mechanical doll’s, as we passed under the intermittent lights. He sat there like an actor nursing a newly won Oscar. ‘We go find a girl?’ he said.

  ‘Too late. Look, I’ll drop you here on the waterfront.’

  He sighed as I drew into the curb. I thought that when I stopped the car he might become truculent; instead, he got out, closed the door and said plaintively, ‘No girl?’

  ‘Not tonight.’ I waved and drove away, leaving him under the light with the wine dying inside him. In the driving mirror I saw him wrestling with his clothing under the lights. Well, the festival had another night to run. I remembered as I turned into the hotel that Cyprus is the island of Aphrodite.

  *

  Next morning in the office of the agent for Al Anoud I was given a first-class voucher for the voyage to Alexandria. The agent explained that Al Anoud’s regular service between Egypt and Cyprus had been interrupted some time ago by political differences between President Sadat and the Greek president of Cyprus. Now it was resuming, he said, but the new tickets had not so far been received, and the Egyptians had agreed to accept vouchers instead.

  ‘Also,’ said the agent, ‘please report to the ship at four o’clock this afternoon, not six o’clock as advertised. We hope Al Anoud will leave early.’ That suited me. I was eager to return to sea as soon as possible.

  I went back to the hotel, carried my bags down to the little reception desk with the helpful girl behind it and paid my bill. Cyprus is friendly. On the Greek side they overcharge tourists, no doubt, but, while Turkish attitudes are often surly or take-it-or-leave-it, Greek Cypriots usually smile and are usually helpful. A shopkeeper had photocopied some papers for me at no charge in his private office near the hotel. Truck drivers stopped and actually waved you across the street, and returned the thumb’s-up sign you gave them to say thanks.

  Over lunch I read the front-page story in the Cyprus Mail: ‘Diplomat Quits over Antiques Scandal’. The Austrian-born prince in charge of UN Aid for Refugees, appointed to look after two hundred thousand people who had lost all they possessed because of the Turkish invasion, had resigned, the paper said. ‘Three lorry-loads were removed from his house by police – thirty Byzantine Church ikons, much ancient pottery believed to have been looted [from the Greeks] by the Turkish Army….’ Trading in antiques, the newspaper said, is banned by the Cyprus government.

  In the afternoon an old newspaper friend, Arthur Chesworth, formerly the Daily Express’s lively and hospitable correspondent in Beirut, now retired in a house in southern Cyprus, drove up to the hotel with his wife, Mickie. When I explained about the sailing of Al Anoud, they offered to drive me and my luggage to the dockside. I asked them if they’d been to the wine festival. Arthur has always felt at home in a taverna. ‘We’ve stopped going to local weddings and wine festivals,’ he said. ‘So much cheap wine.’ He pointed to his liver and sadly shook his head. We talked about the day’s scandal. ‘Does everyone come to Cyprus to loot and profit from this beautiful and unfortunate island?’ Arthur asked rhetorically into a glass of beer. I could answer in a word: ‘Yes.’

  *

  At the dockside we stopped by a customs’ shed in time to see men leaping with cries of alarm from Al Anoud’s ramp to the quay as a small and rusty tub swerving too fast into a berth alongside seemed about to ram her.

  ‘You’ve got a weird and wonderful lot with you on that ship,’ Arthu
r remarked, gazing at her. ‘What about that load of scalliwags?’ Al Anoud’s upper rails were lined, it was true, with a raggle-taggle crowd, several deep, of dark-skinned men in galabiehs, turbans, T-shirts and the odd fez. They did look a remarkably wild bunch.

  I wondered where they had boarded and where they were going. ‘Does Cyprus employ cheap foreign labour from Egypt?’

  ‘Never seen any, have you, Ches?’ Mickie said. She prophesied, ‘You’ll have fun with that lot.’

  By now it was four thirty, but the customs and immigration shed showed no sign of life. It was as big as an abandoned warehouse, empty except for a few passengers, who, like me, had obeyed the agent’s plea to arrive early, and one bored off-duty customs officer. ‘Customs and immigration will open at six o’clock,’ he said when I approached him.

  ‘But we sail at six.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said, strolling away.

  Six

  ‘Ships? … Ships are all right. It’s the men in them!’

  Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus

  The Egyptian ferryboat Al Anoud of Alexandria was a compact 2000-ton vessel, built a quarter of a century ago in Denmark, which accounted for the cool, irrelevant portrait of its Queen Margrethe in the captain’s cabin. Because of some Saudi involvement in the ownership of Al Anoud, the Danish queen and Saudi Arabia’s assassinated King Faisal were obliged to face each other across the narrow cabin, while from a third wall President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, in a blue Ruritanian-style uniform, all sashes and gold with striped breeches and a large gold-braided cap, stared with a curling lip down the length of the cabin. His slight frown seemed to challenge anyone present to smile at his extraordinary get-up (which, I’d heard it said in Cairo, he had designed himself).

  Al Anoud was small but not beautiful. To reach the captain’s cabin was like a journey through a Fellini film set, or through a mob of extras from Les Misérables.