Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘Oh God, Jedda!’ said Captain Roncallo, putting on an abandon-hope expression and raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Fifteen years ago, we had one hundred and eighty camels on the main deck. Other trips it was sheeps or cows. About six-a hundred. The heat. Terrible.’

  Captain Rashad poured us some white wine. He said, ‘In the 1960s Yemen War, I was shipping our troops to the Yemen, to Hodeida. One day I returned from Hodeida via Port Sudan, where I had to load a complete circus, including tigers, lions and elephants. And, before we reached Suez, one elephant – the biggest one, naturally – died, and at Suez we didn’t know how to lift out of the hold this huge terrible thing! The stink!’

  Rashad seemed determined to undermine my confidence in the Red Sea. ‘Next month,’ he warned, ‘there’s a wind, the haboub. It makes it impossible to see anything. Daytime becomes night-time. It’s full of dust; you can’t sail ahead. There are the reefs and islands, and the haze makes mirages and even hides the stars. There are no lighthouses in the Red Sea. And the heat! I remember in Massawa one time I asked for a steak. They took off the cover, and it was black immediately with one million flies. Impossible to live in the Red Sea.’

  By now I knew that Alexandria was not the place to get my ship through the canal, but at least I had three useful names in Port Said, Suez and Jedda, and it turned out that without at least one of those letters I would almost certainly have been obliged to cross from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea by the humiliating land route.

  But even at this moment I realized how lucky I was to know Rashad. As we said goodbye on the steps of the club, I took his hand in both of mine and gave it an extra-hard shake. ‘Tell about it,’ he said, laughing. ‘Maybe you come back and I’ll play you some records and you can hear me singing Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy”.’

  ‘Go to the Holiday Hotel in Port Said,’ said Captain Roncallo. ‘Say my name, or ask for Captain Mohsin.’

  But for the moment I couldn’t go anywhere. I had to wait for that Saudi visa.

  *

  It is easy to pass the time in Alexandria. There is plenty to see: a Graeco-Roman museum, the Amphitheatre, Cleopatra’s Beach and Pompey’s Column. There is also a racecourse. But, above all, there is the Alexandria built in imitation of the northern Mediterranean architecture of the last century or the early twentieth. It is full of façades from Marseilles and Athens, streets from Nice and Genoa.

  Behind the rigid back of Saad Zaghlul’s statue I wandered by chance into the Trianon Bar, a beautiful relic of pre-1914 that in any other city would be lovingly preserved and have become a famous place for rendezvous. A marble-topped long bar of carved solid wood, with a brass rail for the elbow and another for the feet, under decorated wooden pillars soaring up to a brownish lacquered ceiling with small inverted marble domes. The walls are high, and decorated with life-size paintings of ecstatic Turkish slave girls and bland eunuchs dancing in a swirl of baggy Oriental trousers, turned-up slippers, brandished tambourines, scarlet skirts and white legs: Eastern Isadora Duncans painted somewhat in the style of Arthur Rackham. They are signed ‘G. Tolleri – Pittore – Vetrate d’Arte, Firenze’, but, unfortunately, have no date.

  Ancient waiters shuffled about the tiled floor. I ordered a zebib, the Egyptian equivalent of the Turkish raki, and ice.

  An old gentleman at the bar saw me looking at the murals and said, ‘You should have seen the old tiles they had on the floor. Beautiful’

  A second elderly man in a dark blazer with naval buttons, stiff white collar, well-tied wide-knotted tie, light trousers and highly polished shoes laid a short malacca cane on the marble bar.

  ‘A nice cane,’ I said.

  ‘From Harrods, Brompton Road, SW1, 1926,’ he said promptly, with a gratified smile. ‘I was staying at the Hans Crescent Hotel.’ His English was clear, and allowing for the faint tremors of age his voice, like his appearance, was perfectly poised.

  ‘Only a horseman would have bought a cane that length.’

  ‘You’re right, sir.’ He whisked it smartly under his left armpit, straightened his old back, saluted briskly and laughed. ‘I’ve several horses still. I even have fifty acres near Alexandria. I was a merchant marine engineer – that’s why you see these buttons. I was a pilot, too. I flew in the Royal Egyptian Air Force – Farouk’s air force in the 1948 war that Nasser was in. Now I can’t wear those buttons because they’ve got crowns on them.’

  ‘Surely no one would worry now.’

  ‘You can’t be sure. This chap’s not bad.’ He meant Sadat. ‘And I suppose seventy-five per cent of the people would say the same. He wants peace – and who doesn’t?’

  A man in a galabieh drew up a little stool at my feet, gently lifted my foot onto a box and began to rub polish on my shoe.

  I asked the man with the blazer what he was drinking.

  ‘Rum. Egyptian rum. Jolly good stuff. Pure, you know. Does you no harm.’ He motioned to the barman, who poured me a zebib and another rum and water for himself. When the shoe cleaner rose to go, he gave him a few coins before I could stop him, then offered me a Gauloise filtre, which I refused. ‘When I’m not out planting potatoes on my little piece of land, I come here at midday to about a quarter to three. I never go out in the evening. My wife and I have a sixth-floor flat here, and at exactly six o’clock the electricity goes off. Well, at my age, six floors are too much to walk. My wife and I happen to be giving a party tonight. May I invite you?’

  I thanked him and said I was going to see the British consul. I told him my plan to leave for Port Said, and mentioned Captain Rashad.

  ‘Oh, Captain Ismail Rashad. He’s of a very good family. I think he married a princess. He’s a first-class fellow. I saw him the other day at the yacht club. Would you care to have lunch there one day with my wife and myself.’

  I would have liked to, but I had to say I might be leaving in a day or two. ‘But perhaps I’ll see you here at noon tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be in the country. Pity. It was a pleasure to meet you. I love England, you know, although I haven’t been there for many years.’ When I asked for my bill, the old man made a sign with his cane and the barman said, ‘All finished, sir. No pay. Fuad Bey pay.’

  I walked out through the towering caramel pillars into a tumultuous street where a motorcycle policeman was buying a flute from a street vendor, playing a few trills to test it.

  Next morning I looked into the Trianon Bar, but Fuad Bey was not there. Instead, I talked to a very fat Armenian who said, ‘Fuad Bey is a real gentleman, a cousin of King Farouk. But Farouk never liked him because Fuad Bey is a man who never says anything except the truth. Others leaned, you know, on Farouk’s arm, and smiled and flattered. But not Fuad Bey: he stood up, aloof. Under Nasser, he suffered too. Everything was seized. He hadn’t ten piastres, but he never asked for anything. Now things are better. But what about the twenty years of poverty, the best years of our lives?’

  Another man put on a mock-angry expression and said, ‘Nasser, the English favourite,’ and everybody laughed.

  I asked why the beautiful décor of the Trianon Bar was not cleaned and restored, and who owned it.

  ‘The owners don’t care a thing about this place. It’s beautiful, but they don’t care. They never come here. They’ve no values. Egyptians are like that.’

  ‘But the manager –’

  ‘There’s no manager. The waiters run the place. That’s why it’s dirty and falling down.’

  ‘It could be one of the great bars and restaurants of the world. Is there any point in writing to the Minister of Tourism?’

  Someone made a rude noise. ‘Fuck the Minister of Tourism. No, Egyptians don’t care about this kind of thing, sir.’

  I looked at Signor Tolleri’s dancing girls, the Isadora Duncans in slave trousers with their bangles and tambourines, the spangles on their costumes standing out in glistening relief. It seemed a terrible pity, but then I remembered the Egyptian saying, ‘God has given earrings to those who ha
ve no ears.’

  During all this conversation a large carton had perched on the bar between the Armenian and me. Just before I left, something made it fall and it burst open. Immediately the floor was alive with small flapping birds escaping in all directions. Laughing, the patrons dispersed on hands and knees, trying to catch them as they scuttled under tables and glass cases full of bottles. Feathers flew about. ‘Quails,’ said the Armenian, who was far too fat to scramble after them. ‘Delicious, cooked on a skewer. Very expensive these days. And see how small they are.’

  *

  For form’s sake, I waited for the call I knew would not come from the Saudi consulate general. Two or three days, he’d said. Next morning I waited until eleven o’clock. I bought a Journal d’Egypte to pass the time with my morning coffee at the Cecil, and on its front page the political world partly caught up with me: ‘Quatre avions syriens et deux israéliens abattus au-dessus de Beirut’. This sort of futile mayhem had been going on for years, and it seemed pleasantly far away from Alex. But, after combing the rest of the paper for an hour, there was still no message from the Saudis, so I called. The consul general’s secretary assured me that there would be a reply the next day: ‘We are sending another telex now.’

  ‘Please, can you send it “urgent”?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She had a lovely voice on the telephone. Don’t worry, it seemed to say; everything will be fine. But I knew better: we wouldn’t get a squeak out of those supercilious bureaucrats – not in under three weeks or a month, and then the answer might easily be no. I’d give it one more day and then try to prise a visa out of the consul general himself. At any rate, I intended to try my luck from Port Said as soon as possible, trusting to Captain Rashad’s friend.

  For the moment I wanted to visit the house of Alexandria’s celebrated Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, the poet of the ‘decadent’ city, of strange gods and strange loves, of barbarians, Christians, Jews and Greeks; of ambitious Antony and Cleopatra and of dull, noble Ptolemies; of spoiled heroes and of the ‘very handsome boy, assistant at a tailor’s’ whom he saw one day straightening his tie in a mirror, ‘making the mirror proud’.

  There was a Cavafy museum, I knew, in the Greek consulate. On earlier visits, lack of time had prevented me from seeing it: a meeting, for instance, between Henry Kissinger and Sadat at the Montazah Palace in 1975, and serious riots in 1977 in which official buildings went up in smoke, and the seaside villa of Sadat’s vice-president was sacked by people protesting at the price of bread and oil. They claimed to have dragged out seven television sets – or was it seventeen? Too many, at any rate, for one man: that was the opinion of the impoverished mob.

  The Greek consul was a lady with charm and a brisk manner. She talked of old Alex, before Nasser, when the Greek population was a hundred thousand (today, it was three thousand): the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, Pursewarden and Mountolive, and the even older Alexandria of Ε. Μ. Forster, and of Cavafy. ‘But things haven’t changed very much, you’d be surprised.’ She laughed. ‘The telephones: they steal the lines for the copper. They stole four hundred metres of cable between my house and my office – imagine that. Siemens, the famous German firm, went to Cairo to make a new system, and they had to give up! The lines were all rotten and everything was stolen. Now I can’t even get through to your consul here, and never to Cairo or Port Said in less than two or three days.’ Nevertheless she had succumbed to Alexandria’s ramshackle charm: ‘The winter’s best. There’s no dust in the air. You can smell the iodine in the sea.’

  Cavafy’s museum was in an upstairs room, shuttered against the heat. An Egyptian factotum led me in in darkness and opened the shutters. As I prowled about the sad, piously arranged room, he moved ahead of me with a cloth, dusting cases of manuscripts and relics of Cavafy’s simple life in this great Mediterranean city. Sketches of Cavafy, busts, photographs, the dates of his life: 1863–1933. An open book: Κ.Π ΚΑΒΑΦΗ, ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΑ. And one open at a poem: ‘A ΕΧΑΝΔΡΙΝΟ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΣ’. Strong handwriting on pages of letters. The furniture was predictable: dark wood, inlaid mother-of-pearl, folding chairs with curving legs and red seats. Through the windows, palm trees and cooing pigeons:

  Ο how familiar it is, this room.

  Near the door just here was the sofa,

  And in front of it a Turkish carpet;

  Close by the shelf with two yellow vases.

  On the right; no, opposite, a wardrobe with a mirror.

  In the middle a table where he used to write;

  And the three big wicker chairs.

  At the side of the window was the bed

  Where we made love so many times….

  The afternoon sun fell on it half-way up.

  … One afternoon at four o’clock, we parted

  Only for a week … Alas,

  That week became perpetual.

  In the hallway a secretary rose behind an ancient upright typewriter. ‘The consul says will you please make use of her car. The driver can take you to the place of Mr Cavafy. If you would send the car back in not too long time….’ It was generous of her. Cavafy’s street, Shara Sharm el Sheikh, is not smart or picturesque; on the contrary, it is almost a slum. I walked up the narrow street through puddles and refuse. A sign outside his old building announced that it was now Pension Amir. The entrance looked dark, grimy and unwelcoming. Next door a garish sign advertised HAPPY HOME, a small shop selling hair dryers, lemon squeezers and cheap shaving brushes. An elderly doorman appeared on Cavafy’s steps and said, ‘Give me baksheesh. You want see Cavafy house?’

  I looked up at the stone balcony of the apartment and the few pieces of poor linen hanging on a sagging line. A child, its face covered with snot, playing in the grime on the bottom step fell off the step and screamed. I gave the bouab some money and walked back down the lane through the puddles to the car.

  The driver took me to Pastroudis, which, like the Trianon, was one of Cavafy’s favourite cafés. Pastroudis is in better shape than the Trianon, and cosier; it has no caramel pillars or spangled dancing girls cavorting on its walls. It is more like a good Paris café of the turn of the century, with wooden panelling and tiles, battered brass rails on a solid wooden bar and wooden stools with wicker seats. Nubian waiters in yellow galabiehs and turbans hover around small tables with green cloths. A long terrace is shaded from the sun by an awning and illuminated overhead by a row of globe-shaped lamps, which give it a Parisian air – or rather, the Parisian air of Pastroudis at the time of Cavafy. Several old Greeks or Italians sipping Turkish coffee on the terrace looked old enough to have known him.

  The bar was enlivened by luxury: shelves of Russian vodka, Black and White whisky, Evian and Vichy water. The Trianon is neglected, but someone is looking after Pastroudis; perhaps it’s the shade of Cavafy. I sat down at a table and opened the volume of poems. By the time my coffee came I had come to this one:

  Yesterday, walking in a quarter

  Rather remote, I passed under the house

  I used to enter when I was very young.

  There on my body Love had taken hold

  With his marvellous strength.

  And yesterday

  When I passed along the old street

  Immediately beautified by the magic of love,

  The shops, the pavements and the stones,

  And walls, and balconies, and windows,

  Nothing left there was ugly….

  I thought of the Pension Amir and Happy Home, the grimy steps and the snotty child.

  I ordered a sandwich, some olives and a beer, and watched the peaceful old men in wide-brimmed hats under the long green awning. Younger men began to come in from their offices. It was well after midday.

  Half past twelve. How the hours have passed.

  Half past twelve. How the years have passed.

  These words are the last in a poem called ‘Since Nine O’clock’,

  *

  The following morning, which I
had decided must be my last in Alexandria, I turned my mind to the important matter of that Saudi visa. I telephoned the Saudi Arabian consulate general and was told by the secretary that nothing had been heard. ‘Well, I must go,’ I said. ‘At this rate I may have to wait a month.’

  ‘You might try for a visa at our consulate in Suez,’ she said. ‘We cannot give you one here.’

  ‘Why should I get a visa in Suez easier than from your consulate general here?’

  ‘Well, they can give visas in Suez.’

  I knew a Saudi evasion when I heard one. It was obvious that she was suggesting Suez merely as a means of avoiding responsibility for giving me a visa in Alexandria. The cowardice of officials is usually obvious. I said, ‘No. I’m coming round now. I have to leave for Port Said this afternoon. I expect the consul general to be kind enough to provide me with a transit visa, giving me just time enough to change from one ship to another. I can’t believe he is not empowered to do that much.’

  Once more I sat at the desk of the smiling man with the silver-grey imperial and the silver watch strap under the picture of King Faisal praying. ‘I can give you only three days, Mr Young. A transit visa.’

  ‘That is all I need. It would be better to have a week, but it’s also better than having nothing.’

  I waited in the mock-baronial hall until a clerk brought my passport with a three-day visa in it. It also had two pages obliterated by ineffectual attempts to stamp the visa into them – the visa officer’s rehearsals, as it were, for the final successful one. Those damaged pages, it turned out, would oblige me to leave Jedda in a hurry. On the other hand, if I’d arrived with no visa, I might still be there.

  I paid my bill at the Cecil while the Nubian boys brought my bags down in the wrought-iron birdcage. As I collected my change, a voice said, ‘Oh, ho! Going?’ Mr Pavlides was wearing his thick suit, waistcoat and a grey felt hat. ‘How did you find Alex?’ I asked him.