by Gavin Young
‘Sometimes good, sometimes bad. As I thought.’ He shrugged. ‘I have good time. I found friends. Now I go back to Limassol in Al Anoud. Oh, yes! I paid my ticket for Al Anoud, so I go Al Anoud. I shall miss you, my friend.’ He snapped his teeth with emotion.
‘Give my best wishes to Captain Musa,’ I said, ‘and don’t get stabbed.’ We shook hands, and I followed the Nubian boys with my baggage into the street and found a taxi to Port Said.
Eight
Near the Port Said waterfront is a region of shops called, among other more Egyptian names, Boulangerie de Luxe, Queen Elizabeth, George Robey and Harry Lauder. Behind this area of merchants and touts, the city council’s lighting gives a flush of glamour to the distinctly northern Mediterranean façades of streets and squares, and they become like faded opera sets whose central spirit derives from Nice or Barcelona, not old Damascus or Baghdad. In winter the people of Port Said never have to endure the icy wind that sweeps into southern Europe from the Mediterranean, and the city has not been badly damaged by the bombardments and invasions of the last quarter of a century.
As I turned left off Shara Gumhuriyah I saw a splash of bright light from an open door and a neon sign saying RITZ BAR. I crossed over to it, looking down the street to where it dissolved in a string of lights and a yawn of blackness. If I had continued past the lights only a hundred and fifty yards, I would have fallen into the Suez Canal.
The Ritz is a simple place with a long bar under slowly turning fans and tables for those who want a meal as well. One wall was taken up with a gilt-framed picture of a Regency drawing room with ten or twelve pretty girls in crinolines playing Blind Man’s Buff with several young men in tailcoats. There were empty tables outside as well, under a wide arcade, and I took a cold Export beer out there.
An Egyptian on a bicycle pedalled up to the curb and said, ‘You are Holiday Hotel, waiting for ship?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘waiting.’
‘You want anything?’ He leaned closer over his handlebars. ‘Some joy?’
‘Not now.’
‘Okay, maybe later.’ He pedalled away. I was surprised by the politeness of it all.
I had reached Port Said from Alexandria about an hour before, after 7.00 p.m. It is a long drive, but a rewarding one and, when I told the driver not to hurry, it was not because of the wrecked cars at the side of the road. The delta of the Nile is a wide expanse of glimmering greenness, water, villages and animals. Everywhere men and women walk behind ploughs, or sit in groups under eucalyptus trees or the weeping willows that bow over scores of canals and rivulets – all the myriad waterways that make up the miracle that has nourished old Egypt since before the building of the pyramids. You drive through white-pink fields of cotton dotted with the larger blobs of pink, white, red and blue that are the robes, turbans and dresses of villagers working in the sun. Behind mud-coloured village walls, pencil outlines of minarets rise from screens of palm trees. Men and boys wash naked in streams by the roadsides, the silt-thickened water modestly encircling them as if they stood waist-high in a mudpack. One sees railway lines, factory chimneys and pylons carrying high-tension wires that connect the industrial towns of the delta with Alexandria or Cairo, but the great rich greenness flows away to the skyline, never interrupted for long. It is a landscape with moving figures of countless men and animals and a restless profusion of egrets, kites and waders.
As evening fell, on the straight coast road between Damietta and Port Said, the taxi ran full tilt into a rock no smaller than the foundation stone of an average-sized bank, shattering the front axle. The stone was difficult to see at dusk against the asphalt road. My driver waved down a private car, and its owner drove us, crying, ‘No problem, no problem. You do same for me,’ to the Holiday Hotel, the hotel recommended to me by Captain Roncallo. The taxi driver, who had friends who owned a garage in Port Said, didn’t seem worried about his front axle, and said goodbye in good spirits.
The hotel was quite modern. On a card in my room I read that television involved an additional charge but, when I turned it on, it showed nothing on seven of its eight channels and, on the eighth, a snowstorm from which came garbled American voices. After a shower I asked the receptionist if he would either remove the television charge from my bill or the set from my room.
He seemed astonished. ‘But TV is compulsory,’ he said.
‘But there is no TV reception in Port Said.’
‘You see here, sir, our card, it says – room service so-much, with breakfast compulsory so-much more. And then TV compulsory so-much more. And a fridge and radio and air-con, all so-much more. Tax extra, ten per cent.’
‘Have you a room without TV, please?’
‘Sir, all rooms have TV, fridge, and radio. No one ever said before what you say about not wanting.’
Another receptionist joined in. ‘TV is like breakfast. Breakfast is compulsory. So is TV.’
‘Yes, but breakfast is food – to eat, to live. TV actually doesn’t exist here. Breakfast exists; you eat it!’
But there was no comprehension. It was written on the card (‘What is written is written,’ Muslims say), so I paid for the nonexistent television. I didn’t begrudge it much. Egypt is a very poor country of great charm and spiritual resource, and it deserves better times and at least minimal riches. The receptionists had charm too – like most Egyptians – and deserved a richer country. In any case, I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long at the hotel. The following morning I would go to see Mr Karawia at the Aswan Shipping Company with my letter from Captain Rashad.
Like the other canal towns, Port Said is still convalescent. The Six-Day War of 1967 closed the canal, and until 1975 the port was paralysed, like a busy man felled by a stroke. It still had an empty look, despite the groups of tourists from the cruise ships that lay alongside the quay. These days the city is a free-trade zone, and you can buy luxury goods cheaper than at most other ports. This is why the tourists come ashore. Their ships – handsome white ships belonging to Cunard or Greek lines mostly – couldn’t help me. They were either going north to Naples or to Casablanca or across the Atlantic, or going south in long smooth strides to Mombasa or Cape Town. In any case, their captains seldom, if ever, pick up stray travellers like me. They like groups. All the world, those Patmos landladies had reminded me, loves a group.
The tourists wandered the streets, occasionally bending to peer at a window full of tape recorders or calculators. The women wore straw hats with small, coloured pompoms hanging from the wide brims. I could catch snatches of their chatter as they struggled after their guides in the north Mediterranean streets: ‘We did the Valley of the Kings last year. Wasn’t it adorable, Wilma?’
Port Said was also, I found, a surprisingly courteous city which had not been my recollection of it twenty years earlier. The Egyptian who had cycled up to me outside the Ritz Bar to offer joy had shown no irritation when I’d turned him down; I’d expected a stream of abuse. I was considering this phenomenon when a small boy put his head out of the door of the bar, hissed at me, grinned and stabbed his finger in the direction of a fat girl in a green shift and headscarf nearby who must have weighed about thirteen stone. When I shook my head politely, the girl smiled and said, ‘Never mind,’ with no hint of rancour for business lost, and waddled away.
Later I clambered up almost vertical stairs to the Star Cabaret, an establishment providing belly dancers in a large, dim, smoke-filled room with a spotlit dance floor and a small band where every face glistened with the heat. A lonely American engineer, a middle-aged Midwesterner, had asked me to accompany him there; we had met in the hotel lobby. ‘Just have one beer,’ he said. He had a small camera with a flash on it and wanted someone to take his picture as he danced with one of the girls. He introduced himself as Robert. He had spent two weeks in Port Said already, he said, and there were few foreigners he could talk to.
We sat a little way from the dance floor and drank beer. I looked at the spangled décor and the bead curtains
while the American told me how he was laying a cable under the canal, joining Port Said to Port Fuad in some way.
A hostess in heavy white make-up like a mask and a green pleated miniskirt sidled up. ‘Was friend nime?’ she asked me.
‘What’s she say?’ Robert said.
‘She’s asking what your name is.’
‘Tell her Chris.’
‘Chris,’ she said, ‘you buy whisky?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay, buy chips?’
‘Yeah, chips I buy. Also I buy beer.’
She drew up a chair beside him and sipped happily at the beer he’d ordered her. She held his hand and turned her white mask up to him, fluttering overthick eyelashes. I didn’t remember ever having seen a cabaret hostess accept beer before. Usually they drink a dash of darkish liquid in a small glass that is 98 per cent Coca-Cola and costs a fortune.
Later, as requested, I took two photographs of Robert on the dance floor. For the first, he seized the white-masked girl in a violent Valentino tango hold; for the second, he posed behind her right hand, holding an imaginary castanet awkwardly above his left ear like a first-term flamenco student. After they sat down again, a danseuse went by waggling huge buttocks, and the American’s eyes followed them like a bull’s horns following a matador’s cape. ‘Hey,’ he said, rising a little from his chair. I could see that, if he invited another girl for a beer, White Mask was going to start raving. ‘That’s Stanley,’ I said quickly. ‘He’s taken on Tuesdays.’
Robert sat down again. ‘You’ve been here before!’ But he liked the joke and peace was restored.
Between dancing and drinking Robert confessed he was not greatly taken with Port Said; there wasn’t much to do. But he confirmed my impression that the people were helpful and friendly, even the officials, which he hadn’t expected. He’d heard a lot about xenophobic Arabs before he’d left the United States. ‘I think the government is trying to encourage tourists. If a guy comes up to you offering, you know, girls or something like that, often, I’ve noticed, some other guy comes up and asks him for his identification card and what he’s doing. Police. It’s creepy in a way, but their aim, I think, is to look after people like us. To encourage foreigners and tourists, attract hard currency, that kind of thing. I like them.’
I left Robert holding White Mask’s hand. ‘See you at breakfast,’ he called.
Near the hotel a voice at my elbow rasped, ‘Jock Macgrrr-egorrorr, sirr. You like to buy a camel, sirr?’ I turned to find a smiling Egyptian with white-stubbled jowls and a mendicant manner. He was holding four or five fluffy toy camels under one arm, and with his other he held his hand to his forehead in a military salute.
‘No camel, thank you.’
‘Yοu want to play girl, sirr? Egyptian girl, not Scottish, but verm nice girl.’
I gave Jock a twenty-five piastre note simply for the pleasure of hearing his name. He was a man in a long, if not necessarily distinguished, tradition. In the old days of King Farouk and the British, Port Said and Suez had several tourist touts calling themselves Harry Lauder, Wee Jamie Macdonald or Bonnie Prince Charlie. In Suez, one of them, known professionally as Will Fyfe, had achieved worldwide fame conducting lascivious tourists or tipsy British soldiers to witness bizarre spectacles involving large Egyptian ladies and smallish donkeys. Nasser had cleaned all that up a long time ago and for ever.
I exchanged good-night salutes with Jock Macgregor outside the hotel. ‘It’s a bright moonlicht nicht,’ he called roguishly over his shoulder. In my room, I turned on the bedside radio and an Israeli announcer in Tel Aviv introduced me to a piano piece by Ravel.
*
Ahmed Bey Karawia said, ‘To get a ship to Djibouti from Port Said is difficult, very difficult.’ He sat at his big desk staring thoughtfully out of the French windows of his office at the canal tugs and launches moving restlessly on the water.
The telephone rang and he said, ‘Subhi Bey, yes … yes…. Good. Thank you.’ He rang off. ‘The port police say you can leave on a ship from here only if you are the owner’s representative or if you have work on board.’
I had found Ahmed Karawia in a three-storey building on the edge of the canal, an attractive architectural throwback to the days of Lord Kitchener and General Gordon. The offices of the Aswan Shipping Company were built in 1894, twenty-five years after the opening of the canal. They are painted a faded green, and surrounded on each floor by wide covered balconies linked by wrought-iron balustrades. The offices within are tall and open onto the balconies, so that you can step through the windows and stroll about looking down on the river. One can imagine Victorians in solar topees and white linen suits lolling on those balconies in low chairs, sipping long cold drinks.
Mr Karawia was a plump, middle-aged Egyptian who spoke perfect English, and was the sort of Egyptian official who has long been in the same line of business, is well educated, has travelled, and who will do his best to be helpful. A man too who knows all the people worth knowing connected with the life of Port Said. It took me only a few minutes to explain what I was trying to do, to give an outline of the story so far, and of my conversation with Captain Rashad in Alexandria. Ahmed Bey grasped the situation at once, ordered tea, and began to be helpful.
‘We must make sure you are not obliged to take a car or a bus to Suez from here. Now, we have a Greek ship arriving this afternoon, maybe not alongside but in the roads…. We’ll ask about a passage to Suez, eh? Just Suez, because other things are not going to be easy, and Suez is essential. And even if it’s just a chair on the deck….’
The Greek-ship plan fell through; she was delayed. Undismayed, Ahmed Bey made other telephone calls and sent young clerks off in launches to talk to captains about their destinations and their timetables. From the balcony I looked at the jumble of vessels nuzzling the piers of the great Canal Authority Building. It stood a little to the left of the Aswan Shipping Company Building and on the lip of the water: blue and green cupolas, Oriental arches and windows, dominating the head of the canal. Its exotic grandeur matched other relics of British Raj architecture around the Middle East: the railway station at Mosul, for example, and the Basra Port Building in Iraq.
Mr Karawia talked about the ups and downs of life on the canal. First, there’d been the Anglo-French invasion of 1956. The people of Port Said had pulled down the statue of De Lesseps, the French engineer who designed the canal. The plinth could still be seen on the waterfront; the statue was tucked away in a warehouse.
‘We are going to have a new memorial to the hundred and fifty thousand fellahin who died building the canal, and to commemorate the 1973 crossing of the canal by the Egyptian army.
‘Port Said was relatively lucky. During the bombardments of 1967 and after, Port Taufiq at the southern end of the canal was really seriously damaged; Suez, eighty-eight per cent damaged; Ismailiya, thirty-five or forty per cent; lucky Port Said, perhaps seventeen per cent. Still, Suez has industry and agriculture; here we have only the canal to live off. Many of our people had to evacuate – not to Cairo, but to small delta towns. There was no work here for eight years, until Sadat announced the canal open again in June 1975. About one third of our company’s experienced people went off to Iraq or Libya or Australia – at least one third.’
We looked across the roofs at the Mediterranean housefronts. ‘Port Said was full of French, Maltese, Italians, Greeks and Cypriots at one time,’ said Ahmed Bey. ‘Now our population is half a million, with no foreigners, but business is almost as usual. Three convoys a day: one north to south, two the other way. We deal with six to seven hundred ships a month. Things are moving.’
Ahmed Bey failed to find a ship that day or the next. ‘Well, tomorrow let’s see,’ he said, more cheerful than I. One trouble was that shipping people were wary of chance passengers, fearing saboteurs. ‘Suppose someone bombed a ship in mid-canal?’
I returned in the evenings to the Ritz Bar and sat under the street arcade reading Under Western Eyes. In an upper
room opposite, a man in an undershirt played snooker under a naked neon light. Once I saw a pair of ghosts from the Egypt of the pashas shuffling out of the Ritz Bar: two old men carefully dressed in snuff-coloured suits with brown and white shoes. They wore bow ties and hats, and one of them held a cigarette in a long holder and carried a cane hooked over his arm. There was something rakish about them, but they were skeletally thin. They hailed a victoria, climbed stiffly into it and sat back, talking like courtiers with flourishes of the cigarette holder, cane and long bony fingers, as if they were off to the races or an opera. The driver adjusted the scarf wrapped around his head like a turban and flicked his whip; the two lean-thighed horses clip-clopped stiffly away through the shadows.
There was no suitable or willing ship even on the third day. I began to think seriously of the canal road to Suez. Ahmed Bey was apologetic, but still hopeful.
I walked down the cement breakwater to where the canal slops its tideless waters into the Mediterranean. ‘A dismal but profitable ditch,’ Joseph Conrad had called the canal. Under the blazing sun I inspected the plinth that for almost a hundred years had supported the statue of M. de Lesseps. ‘He points to the Suez Canal,’ Ε. Μ. Forster wrote, ‘with one hand and waves in the other a heavy bunch of large stone sausages. “Me voici!” he gesticulates…. Voilà Egypt and Africa to the right, Syria and Asia to the left.’ Now only a bare plinth remains.
That evening I had a dispiriting encounter with a British couple, both teachers, who had been trying for over a week to find a ship for India, plodding around the shipping offices without success. ‘The days are over for ship-hopping, we’ve decided,’ the wife said flatly, rubbing her feet. ‘We’re giving up. It’s not possible.’ My spirit faded as I listened to them. ‘We’ve one more agent to try,’ the husband said. We shook our heads and arranged to meet next day to compare our dismal notes and perhaps share a taxi to Suez.
