Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  On the ruined façade of a tall building across the waterfront one shoddy neon advertisement remained: SLEEP COMFORT. But true sleep and comfort have fled like refugees from the city that took itself for a ride in a home-made St Valentine’s Day Massacre a hundred thousand times bigger than the original.

  I remembered a horrifying crime of the sixties, an incident so relatively small that it failed to shock le tout Beirut. I told Mr Pavlides about it. ‘At midday one ordinary working day, a young British diplomat was driving his wife along Beirut’s seafront road, the Corniche. Behind him, a young Lebanese in a dashing car began hooting and swerving, making his tyres scream, changing gear with unnecessary revs – you know the sort of thing. Rich young Lebanese love to show off like that; it attracts attention and gives them exciting illusions of daring.’

  Pavlides sniffed. ‘Ha! Illusions! Cowboys!’

  ‘Well, this cowboy finally swept into the fast lane beside the Englishman’s car, drew a gun, aimed it through the window, shot the Englishman through the head and killed him.’

  Mr Pavlides closed his teeth with a snap.

  ‘Naturally there was a hubbub at the British embassy. It was discovered that it had nothing to do with politics. The Lebanese wasn’t even after the Englishman’s wife. There was no motive at all except impatience, petulance and the knowledge that the law wouldn’t touch him because he was rich and well connected. When the Lebanese was arrested, it soon came out that he was closely related to a minister – a nephew or something. At the trial someone testified that he was ‘sick’ and, although he was found guilty, he was soon spirited out of prison and into a hospital. From which, of course, he soon disappeared. After a discreet absence he returned to Beirut and his normal life. It was as if nothing had happened. But something had happened: a young woman had seen her husband shot dead for no reason on the way home for lunch.’

  Mr Pavlides tut-tutted loudly and shook his head. ‘So much badness in the world,’ he said. We turned from the dockside view and the line of mountains I had driven through so often over so many years since the fifties. I had come here then after five years of living among tribesmen in Iraq and in the Hejaz, and Beirut then had seemed like a gorgeous oasis in a desert. In the sixties and seventies as a journalist I had seen Lebanon engulfed in murder and religious madness. It was as if a monster had been revealed by the rolling over of a stone – a stone that could never be rolled back again.

  It was pleasanter to turn away from that poisonous shore and look instead at the other ships in port: René R from France, Dobrogea from Constanta, Kremnica from the sealess city of Prague. Even if there’d been time, I wouldn’t have wanted to go ashore in Beirut. I was glad when we sailed.

  *

  The captain asked, ‘Do you know who all these deck passengers are?’ He made circular motions with his hands to indicate the seething humanity belowdecks. We were in his cabin.

  ‘Refugees from Beirut? Migrant workers?’

  ‘No way. They travel on this ship all the time. It’s their livelihood. They are the unemployed riffraff of Alexandria, from the gutter – and I mean the gutter. Egyptian importers scrape them up from a slum and pay them a little money – about twenty Egyptian pounds a month – to travel to Limassol and Beirut and then back again to Alexandria. You know what for?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Look, there are two ways of importing goods into Egypt. One way, the usual way, is to import in bulk and pay regular import taxes, customs duties – quite high charges in Egypt today. The other way is to bring cargo in as accompanied baggage. There’s nothing like the same duties for that.’

  ‘Accompanied baggage?’

  ‘The importer hires these people to divide his twenty tons of goods into small parcels, each man carrying a parcel or two. At Alex, they bring their parcels ashore as accompanied baggage. Understand?’

  ‘And this is regular work?’

  ‘Week after week. Another thing: these importers have their bosses, rais is “boss” in Arabic. Six of them are on board at this minute. Sometimes the rais are themselves the importers – rich men themselves, and very tough, too. Each rais may hire forty or fifty unemployed riffraff to travel on Al Anoud to handle the cargo and divide it into parcels, which they will carry ashore at Alex.’

  Mohamed Ali, the captain’s steward in his snow-white shirt and trousers, came through the doorway and put cups of tea in front of us. When I thanked him, he said again, ‘Pleasure and a duty, sir.’

  ‘And let me tell you, they fight,’ the captain said.

  ‘It’s the Alexandria Mafia,’ I said.

  The captain laughed. ‘You’re right.’

  *

  I was hailed by one of the ‘Mafiosi’, an elderly former ship’s engineer – ex-Egyptian navy, he said – sitting propped against a bulkhead outside the locked first-class saloon with a ragged group in jeans or galabiehs. He was taller than the rest, distinguished in a raffish sort of way, and he regarded his riffraff with barely suppressed disgust. He reminded me of Long John Silver contemptuously surveying his pirate shipmates on the Hispaniola. He was drinking a Dutch lager and his hand around the beer can was shaking. He had been pensioned off, he said; a monthly pension of 270 Egyptian pounds from the navy. ‘This is my first trip on Al Anoud,’ he added, ‘and my last.’

  ‘Why the last?’

  ‘Too much clifti,’ he growled, using the slang Anglo-Arab word the British army in Egypt once employed to mean ‘stealing’. ‘Too much fight. No good. I have my money from the government. Why work more at bad work?’

  He picked up a piece of bread. ‘This bread, I eat it. Enough.’ He picked up another piece, curling at the edges. ‘I eat this too? Why? One is enough. I eat only one. Why work more hard for two?’ He was about to put down both pieces of bread but, on second thoughts, wrapped them in a torn newspaper and stowed them inside his shirt.

  He confirmed what the captain had said. ‘Yes, all bosses take men from street, all unemployed. Some bosses make money, start very poor, now very rich.’

  I asked him what was imported into Egypt, and he shrugged: ‘Machines, apples, anything.’ A youth in a cheap white and red sweater, khaki flared pants and clogs clumped unsteadily up to us and flopped down on the deck. I pointed to him and asked, ‘Look at him, is twenty pounds a month enough for him?’

  The engineer laid a finger against his nose and narrowed cunning eyes. He only needed a parrot and a crutch to play old Long John. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Ho, yes! For him very good. He will stay on ship; he young man. But for me too much clifti, too much fight. After this I stop in my house.’

  *

  It was the young man with the clogs who, sitting in this identical place next morning, disarmed a man who seemed to want to stab Mr Pavlides.

  The two of us had found part of a bench unoccupied on deck, an unusual stroke of luck. Several deck passengers were lolling about at our feet, dozing or smoking. Soon a dishevelled, twitching figure materialized in front of Mr Pavlides. Smiling murderously and flicking open the long blade of a knife, he began to flourish it very close to Mr Pavlides’s waistcoated stomach. He waved it nearer and nearer, smirking and sniggering as he did so. Motionless, Mr Pavlides kept an admirable calm. His eyes grew rounder and his teeth clicked sharply, but ‘Pooh, pooh!’ was all he actually said. The stiletto weaving before him was long, thin and very sharp.

  Luckily the young man with the clogs had seen all this. Looking on in some astonishment – his jaw had dropped open to reveal several missing teeth – he was even bestirring himself to rise to the rescue, if only at the speed of a drugged tortoise. I jerked my head towards the man with the knife and said quietly to the youth in Arabic, ‘Take the knife. Quick. Take it.’

  To my relief, the youth did so. He rose to his knees, which brought his head level with the hand that held the knife. Then he gently took the wrist and twisted it back and sideways so that the knife fell to the floor. Picking it up, he folded the blade back into the handle and dr
opped it into a trouser pocket, saying in soothing tones to the swaying figure above him, ‘I’ll keep it. Better. Afterwards….’ Then he winked at me, pulled the owner of the knife down beside him and offered him a cigarette. It was a striking exhibition of calmness and tact. The man had stopped grinning and seemed suddenly exhausted. He said nothing and didn’t look at Mr Pavlides again.

  ‘I’m not a drinking man, but I’d like a drink,’ said Mr Pavlides, wiping his forehead and walking with unusual stiffness to the rail.

  *

  We had a drink in the bar that night. I managed to find the steward to open it at nine o’clock, and we talked about the ship. ‘Ship ta’ban – tired,’ the steward said across the bar. ‘Engine ta’ban. Can do only eight mile an hour.’ I wondered why a washing machine stood on one side of the saloon door and an electric cooker on the other side, like pieces of pop sculpture. More contraband, perhaps. Mr Pavlides was saying that after tonight’s dinner – rice and some sort of dubious stew – he was going to eat no meals except breakfast. I would have agreed with most of Mr Pavlides’s opinions and tastes, but I couldn’t give him my unqualified support on this because breakfast that morning had been ebony-hued tea and a kind of fried egg cake, quite hard and reinforced by a network of coarse black human hairs cooked into its fabric, as wire mesh is embedded in concrete to give it extra strength. I wasn’t sure that I could get enough of it down to last a whole day.

  On my way to my cabin I came across a knot of shouting people in the corridor and, in their midst, the sprawled, half-naked body of a man clearly in a bad way. He had blood around his head, neck, throat and chest, and his trousers seemed dark with blood too. The shouting group bore the body away, sagging like a waterlogged mattress, to the medical bunk (which was, I saw, the curtained cabin in which the information officer had ordered me to wait the afternoon I came aboard in Limassol). There the man, dirty, clothes awry, lay and bled. Eventually someone brought bandages for his head and apparatus for blood transfusion. Already he looked more dead than alive, a skinny desperado with a great slash around his skull.

  The whole ship seemed to be in an uproar. A shouting crowd had gathered around another man who was bleeding from a stab wound or a clout with an iron bar. Several other people had blood on them. The captain and his chief officer were pushing here and there in the confusion, looking purposeful, bringing order. I saw Mr Pavlides, wide-eyed with interest, peering over the crowd, jiggling his dentures up and down with his tongue. He caught my eye and pushed towards me, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘If I don’t see this I don’t believe it,’ he murmured.

  I went to bed. A locked cabin seemed as good a place to be as anywhere on a night like this.

  At breakfast next morning a hugely fat Egyptian woman – the only female rais on board, I learned later – leaped up and began to scream and struggle with a muscular waiter, who screamed and fought back, prudently grabbing a water carafe with one hand while seizing a fistful of bosom with the other. I was fleetingly reminded of the film Godzilla Meets King Kong. Mr Pavlides turned to me, his handsome face half horrified, half smiling. ‘Now we’ll have a fight, woman against man! Next, maybe woman against woman! You see!’

  In a little while the chief officer came up to us on deck and reassured us. ‘The man who threaten with knife is in calaboose, mister. Chains on foot and hands. Nobody see him again. No problem again.’ Curtains for one pirate, at least.

  After the stop at Beirut, Captain Musa had instructed the steward, Mohamed Ali, to set out two wicker chairs and a table on a small area of deck just behind the bridgewing, the one part of the ship the deck passengers and the rais’s men were not allowed to invade. With the saloon closed all day, these two chairs provided the only sitting place we had.

  Captain Musa was a pleasant man, still young, who had seen service in many parts of the world since he graduated from Egypt’s Naval Academy in 1962. Sitting with Mr Pavlides and myself on the small rectangle of space he had lent us, he talked about the time when the lightning Israeli advance to the Suez Canal had trapped him in mid-canal for six months in a big tanker. ‘It was dangerous. We were caught between the Israeli army on one side and our people on the other. The danger was from our side because in those days the Israelis had better weapons and could shoot over us, but our people sometimes fired short and hit the ship.’ He leaned back in his swivel chair and laughed briefly at the ceiling, pitying the inadequacy of the Egyptian army of those days, shrugging at the way things were. It struck me that Captain Musa was very Egyptian, not a bitter man at all; alert, humorous, he would go through life dutifully supporting his family, observing with fascinated equanimity each manifestation of Allah’s whim.

  ‘After that, a crooked shipowner gave me a ship – a bucket, really – and I had my wife on board when we were both nearly drowned in it. You see, before I took over, the ship had been grounded on reefs in the Red Sea, and the owner had had it pulled off those blasted reefs, not lifted off. So, unknown to me, there was no bottom to speak of to the ship, and suddenly one day I found the old bucket was going down fast. I had to beach her near the Sudan–Eritrean border, just inside Eritrea. We got ashore, thank God, my wife and I and ten crew – all black men, as it happened. I thought that it might be safer in Sudan, because there was that rebellion against the Ethiopians in Eritrea and things were quite unpredictable. So I got some camels from a village and we bumped away to the Sudan. From there we contacted the Ethiopian officials at the border and they allowed us to reach Asmara. They arrested us there and accused us of running guns to the Eritrean rebels. They sent a helicopter with some officers in it to examine the ship I’d beached, but they found nothing, so we were released and sent back to Egypt safely.

  The Saudi owner wanted to hang me when he heard I was safe. He’d hoped the ship would sink – for the insurance – and he wanted me to drown with it. Well, he’s in jail now.’

  In his blue Ruritanian uniform, President Sadat looked severely down at us from the wall of the captain’s cabin. ‘It’s much better with Sadat in control,’ Captain Musa said, pointing to the portrait. ‘The bad thing is the new breed of Egyptian businessmen who take advantage of freedom to make money by buying cheap, rotten ships, and creating bad working conditions.

  ‘Take Al Anoud. I’m short of stewards, so the cabin-class saloon is closed all day. I have too many radio officers and six surplus hands whom the company – the Alexandria Shipping and Navigation Company – insists I take aboard, although they are useless and can’t learn. That’s how it is.

  ‘As well as sail the ship, I must control two hundred and fifty of this riffraff from God knows where. The lowest riffraff in Egypt. I only have a handful of men to control them, but I control them. I have to go down and arrest them myself, as you saw; after all, I can’t bring the engineers up on deck for riot control.’

  I said, ‘They look as if they might take over the ship.’

  Captain Musa looked shocked. ‘No way! No way! I make the rais responsible. If there’s trouble, the rais see to it that the injured man’s group is paid retribution money.’

  Blood money. The Arabs’ tribal way. And the Mafia’s.

  ‘I can get a rais banned from coming aboard, and he loses a fortune if I do. And they know me. They know I’ll run a villain up the mast and leave him there for twelve hours or more. You can’t play with these men, and I don’t. If the men who were stabbed last night die, the police will be waiting at the dockside.’

  When I told the captain about the creature who had threatened to stab poor Mr Pavlides, he laughed, as he probably had laughed when the chief engineer told him the bottom had fallen out of the engine room that day in the Red Sea off Eritrea. ‘I tell you, we dealt with him – thoroughly. We know him. He used to give karate displays in the cafeteria. He’s a fire swallower, too. Was. For him it’s all over.’

  I said I’d seen him pushing a beer-can top into the waistband of his pants under his vest to use as a knife.

  ‘We’ve all kinds,�
� said Captain Musa. ‘If you meet some of these men ashore, they’ll demand your money. If you don’t hand over, they’ll–’

  ‘Slash your throat?’

  ‘First slashing themselves and yelling that you’ve attacked them. They’ll claim self-defence and, though the police may not believe them, meantime you’re dead.’

  ‘In Alex, they kill sailors for money. Eh? You don’t believe me?’ A voice crept into my ear, the voice of the Greek barman from Kefallinia on the Alcheon, the man who liked screwdrivers.

  ‘I hope you’re not too angry,’ Captain Musa said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Not angry at all,’ I told him. ‘Just interested. But I’m glad I didn’t bring a wife and three small children with me.’

  *

  In the afternoon, like a good omen, a small plump, brownish bird with white cheeks flew in from the sea and clung to a stay near Al Anoud’s bows. It was only hitching a short lift because soon the long Mediterranean coastline of Egypt appeared to port like a thick smudge. We were off Abu Qir (or Aboukir) and its bay, famous for Nelson’s victory.

  Captain Musa regretted that he had no advice on how to find a ship through the Suez Canal. I was beginning to feel like an inadequately trained Grand National horse approaching the green cliff of Becher’s Brook. He did offer two suggestions, however. If you’re stuck, he said, go to the operations office in Port Said or Suez. ‘They know what vessels are expected, where and when they are going, all that. They regulate the convoys through the canal. There’s no point in trying to see the harbourmaster in Alex. He’s too busy. So many ships coming from every side, tours from Israel, important visitors. I know him well, and I can’t get to see him for weeks.’