Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  In the Bitter Lakes we anchored while the northbound convoy already in its southern end – seventeen or eighteen freighters and two small American frigates – regrouped before proceeding up to Port Said. Two of the ships trailed black smoke across the great bowl of the lake, which is so wide that its rim is a mere smudge. I remembered poor Captain Musa of Al Anoud, blocked on his tanker here for six months in 1967 while Israeli shells flew overhead and now and again the Egyptian shrapnel rained down on the ship.

  At lunch Captain Visbecq said, ‘Have you ever been to St Malo? I am from near there, a Breton, like most French seamen.’

  We ate morue tongues, then pork and peas, and helped ourselves to French red wine, Spanish rosé, beer and Montjoie mineral water.

  The officers carried on what must be a daily game: Bretons versus Corsicans and Basques (the chief engineer was a jovial Basque from Biarritz). ‘Ouf!’ Captain Visbecq said with a laugh. ‘Let Corsica be independent. Who’d miss it? They produce nothing and they cost a lot. At least the African countries produce coffee and cocoa. But Corsica….’

  ‘They produce goats,’ the Breton first officer said.

  ‘Ha! Yes! Goats!’

  At the end of the meal a message came from the pilot; the convoy was on the move again.

  ‘Stand by, tous!’ Captain Visbecq said, swallowing his instant coffee.

  ‘Suez about five thirty,’ the pilot predicted. ‘Where you go after Suez, Captain?’

  ‘Aqaba … Jedda … Djibouti … Aden … Mombasa.’ He jerked his thumb northwards. ‘Then back to Europe. Holiday: the garden, the fishing, the ski.’

  In my mind’s eye I saw the pilot vacationing on a crowded beach at Alex but, when I asked him he said he’d spent a very happy holiday in Italy last year.

  *

  During the afternoon Captain Visbecq invited me to his dayroom for a beer. When I mentioned that the Patrick Vieljeux seemed a very solid ship, the captain raised a warning finger. ‘Yes, but la mer … vous savez!’ In his thirty years in the company no ship had been lost, but suddenly this year two of the company’s vessels had gone down. ‘One sank off Vigo, Spain, in a tempest, with only six survivors, including the captain. It was his last voyage. His wife was drowned. The second was the Emmanuel Delmas, carrying logs. It collided with a small Italian tanker and went boouff! The explosion and fire killed all except four men in the engine room. They came up and found everything black – all their colleagues burned to death. You have heard of the German ship the München, from Bremen to North America? Disappeared last winter without a trace. In a big storm, a twenty-thousand-or thirty-thousand-ton ship disappears. No one knows why. We all forget that the sea doesn’t change.’

  Later on the bridge the pilot, agitated, suddenly shouted, ‘That Liberian ship ahead of us keeps slowing down.’ It was certainly closer than before.

  ‘A mixed crew, that’s the problem,’ the chief officer said. ‘Some Far East mixture.’

  ‘The pilot on board her is radioing me that they have only one man who knows the front from the back. A Venezuelan,’ said the pilot disgustedly.

  ‘Oh, c’est pareil!’ groaned the chief officer.

  The canal curved to the east and immediately twisted back to the west.

  ‘Gauche senk!’ the pilot called.

  ‘Gauche, cinq!’ the helmsman repeated.

  ‘Zeero!’

  ‘Zéro!’

  The Patrick Vieljeux moved slowly ahead toward Suez. With unexpected suddenness the air darkened and the yellow disc of the sun sank toward a horizon already dissolving into a mauve and flame-flecked haze.

  *

  After sunset, Suez. In the darkness the Patrick Vieljeux moved on, evidently not going to slow down for my sake. I prepared my baggage at the head of the gangway, which was now lowered almost to water level. A pilot boat frothed out from the west bank, where buildings sprang up in irregular silhouette against the evening sky. A second launch was down there too, and a young man in its bows waved a passport. I pointed to my own chest: ‘Me?’ ‘Yes, you!’ I could hear his voice. He climbed aboard, introduced himself as the shipping agent’s representative, gave me my passport, and together we went to Captain Visbecq’s cabin. There papers were exchanged and signed: the formalities of shipping. Then Visbecq stooped, opened a cupboard in his desk, reappeared red-faced with two large bottles of eau de Cologne and a carton of cigarettes and handed them to the agent’s representative.

  ‘Oh, Captain, please,’ the young man importuned, showing no embarrassment. ‘One more carton of cigarettes, please, for my friend at home who is so sick. He asked me specially….’

  Captain Visbecq stooped again, groaning. More eau de Cologne and a second carton. ‘That’s enough! That’s all!’ He shut the cupboard door with a slam. ‘No more!’

  ‘Follow me,’ the young man from the agency said to me, and headed for the lift, clutching his bottles and cartons. I said, ‘I’ll be along in two minutes.’

  Captain Visbecq looked at me, smiling over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Donnez-moi! Donnez-moi! Eau de Cologne for the agent! Brandy, cigarettes for each pilot. You could understand it from bumboat men, but pilots! The only place as bad is Kuwait, and there it is also a kind of blackmail. It’s forbidden by their religion, but the customs can be very annoying if you don’t give them that brandy. You give one bottle – “Two,” he says, “I have a friend.” So many ships, so many bottles. Brandy from the French, Scotch from the British, vodka from the Russians. Good business, eh?’ He held out his hand, ‘Bonne chance, bon voyage.’ I said, ‘Same to you. Many thanks.’

  ‘See you maybe in Jedda. If not, you have my home telephone near St Malo.’

  ‘Next year, I hope.’

  I went down the ramp and into the agent’s launch. My bags were already on board. The boatman cast off, and we swung away from the throbbing, moving hull of the ship toward a ramshackle huddle of wharves and tugs and, warehouses. When I looked back at the fast-receding stern and soaring superstructure of the Patrick Vieljeux, our combined speeds had already drawn her so far away that my thumbs-up sign must have been invisible to the officers waving from the wing of the bridge.

  I had spent only a night and a day on the Patrick Vieljeux, yet not for the last time on this long journey I was struck by a sudden sense of abandonment.

  Ten

  The friendly net of the Aswan Shipping Company was waiting to catch me in Suez – luckily, because I stepped ashore into pitch darkness, where black shapes shouted rudely with onion-scented breath for my passport. There had been a power failure in the dockside part of the city.

  A long delay followed in the coal-mine atmosphere of an unlit customs shed, but at last a courteous, trim-looking Egyptian drove up, introduced himself as Mohamed al-Hattab, the manager of the company in Suez, and loaded me, my baggage and his assistant into his car. ‘It’s the security people,’ he said, explaining the delay in the inky customs hall. ‘They’re looking for European terrorists. So many Arab countries are against us now that Sadat is trying to make peace with Israel, and they recruit Europeans to do their sabotage for them. They think Europeans won’t be suspected, so our people must be very vigilant.’

  Out of the area of the power cut, we dropped off the young assistant with his bottles of Captain Visbecq’s eau de Cologne, and Mohamed al-Hattab drove me to the Bel Air Hotel in the centre of the city. I had stayed in this old hotel in 1968, when most of the buildings around it had been reduced to rubble by Israeli shellfire. I put my bags in a room at the top of marble stairs that had seen better days, and then we walked across the road to a second hotel called the Misr Palace, where it was evident from the welcome that the waiters and other clients gave him that Mr al-Hattab was a popular visitor. ‘This is a good place for company,’ he said. A table with a bottle of Red Label, a bowl of ice and a jug of water waited for him on a closed corner terrace.

  From here we overlooked one of the city’s principal traffic intersections, and probably its most lively one.
It was a bedlam of cars, trucks and donkey carts, and, because it was a level crossing as well, with much hooting, clanking and blowing of steam the passenger and goods trains on the main line from Cairo passed almost through the lobby.

  ‘First things first,’ said Mohamed al-Hattab, briskly hospitable, and poured me a whisky two fingers deep. Then, with a broad smile: ‘I’ve found a ship for you, sailing tomorrow afternoon for Aqaba and Jedda. A good captain, a friend of mine. Not a big ship, but not too small, taking pilgrims to Mecca and Egyptian workers to Jordan. No luxury, I must warn you. Called Al Wid.’

  Luxury was not one of my worries, I assured him. I was delighted to be able to move on so soon. ‘Ahmed Bey asked me to help,’ he said. ‘And so you are welcome.’ Captain Rashad, Ahmed Bey Karawia, Mohamed al-Hattab: may Allah bless them.

  Soon we were joined by a young captain from the Canal Company, and a few minutes later two large men with bullnecks rolled up and were introduced by Mohamed al-Hattab as marine contractors. They were enormously fat; their double chins quivered when they sat down.

  When I told Mohamed al-Hattab I’d been here not long after the Six-Day War of 1967, he said, ‘Suez really suffered then. It had a population of a hundred and thirty thousand. After the bombardments destroyed so much of it, only about three or four thousand people stayed. I was one of them, but I had nothing to do. The place was empty, so there was no work. Suez was dead.’

  ‘You say Suez was dead,’ I said, ‘but I have a story for you. I came here on a brief visit from Cairo in 1968 with a friend, Nick Herbert of The Times of London. We had lunch in the Bel Air, the only place left standing. Just for fun we wrote a postcard to my foreign news editor in London and posted it in a postbox half buried in rubble. We thought it might be found a few years later when the war ended. But the card reached London before us, only ten days later. Some postman must have carried on through the shelling, like people in the London blitz. He deserved a medal.’

  Now Suez was certainly alive again. Below us through the glass two elderly policemen in baggy white uniform with sergeant’s chevrons on their sleeves cursed the traffic and blew piercing, angry whistles without effect.

  Mohamed al-Hattab and the contractors talked about the laziness of Egyptian youth (we could see groups of young Egyptians in tight trousers or ankle-length robes hanging listlessly about in the street below). ‘You can’t fire the slackers,’ one of the contractors complained. ‘It’s illegal. You can only dock their salary for a very few days.’ The other contractor agreed. ‘Only ten per cent of our people really work,’ he said. They shook their heads and chins disapprovingly over the whisky.

  The young captain from the Canal Company said, ‘Sadat’s ideas for peace are very good, but prices are the danger in Egypt. Food prices are too high for the millions of ordinary people. America and Europe should give Sadat money to keep food prices down in the local markets.’

  ‘Subsidies.’

  ‘Exactly. Ordinary Egyptians want to see their lives improving now. If they don’t see that – phwee! – there’ll be a big bang!’

  Riots against the price of food in every major city of Egypt had shaken Sadat in 1977 – the year the demonstrators in Alex had pulled all those television sets out of the vice-president’s villa. The mobs had cursed Sadat’s mollycoddling of the ‘new aristocracy’: the rich businessmen, the owners of gaudy boutiques and the patrons of the smart nightclubs on the Giza road. ‘Sadat Bey, Sadat Bey, you were born in a cabaret!’ Egypt’s sans-culottes had shouted through the streets.

  Mohamed al-Hattab said good night, promising to reappear next day to introduce me to the master of the Al Wid.

  Taking a turn before bed in the street that boasted the Greek consulate and the Ciné Chantecleer as well as the Hotel Bel Air, I thought of the Patrick Vieljeux pushing impatiently down through the Red Sea at that very moment. Outside the consulate, three grinning youths held up a magazine to show me the centrefold picture of a nude with an abundance of carroty pubic hair. ‘Look, sirrr!’ When I passed them again on my way back to the Bel Air, they were pushing the picture through the consul’s letterbox.

  Next morning I had coffee on the terrace of the Bel Air among elderly Egyptians and families in wicker chairs speaking Greek and Italian. A waiter in a tarboosh brought me a newspaper, and I read about a concert Frank Sinatra had given the night before outside Cairo. An article described the jewel-spangled gathering under the pyramids organized by a jet-set princess and a Paris fashion designer. I wondered how the ghosts of the pharaohs had taken to songs like ‘My Way’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’.

  Below the peeling balustrade of the terrace, men in galabiehs and sandals slip-slopped by and foolhardy ragamuffins diced with death on the running boards of the trains clanking down the street. A shoeshine boy in a stained nightshirt importuned for custom by clicking a brush against his wooden box of polish. Old men in high old-fashioned collars and fraying ties waved horsehair fly-swatters at a servant in a turban who was flicking a duster at the brass wall-plate that said, BEL AIR HOTEL DIR. PROP: J. JAHIER, and ignoring them.

  That afternoon the Saudi vessel Al Wid, built in Sweden in 1967 – the word ‘Styrhus’ was still there over the wheelhouse door – sailed for Aqaba and Jedda. At 3.50 p.m. the tug Omar eased us out of Suez dock. All around us small ships were ingesting long lines of poor Egyptians carrying baskets, boxes and crates. They had queued passively, if clamorously, since dawn, and the heat was their punishment.

  Al Wid sailed leaving at least a hundred people on the quay. In a last look through my glasses, I saw them tramping dejectedly away, miserably humping Adidas and Alitalia bags: ochre-skinned men like those who had come aboard, with towels twisted around their heads like turbans, or in woollen caps, and wearing shoes that didn’t fit their wide, thick-soled peasant feet.

  We bore south-west, through an anchorage of vessels that included a French warship. On the right-hand shore appeared the Suez refinery and a line of new housing in front of a dark escarpment.

  I found a small cabin with two bunks in it, which the steward said I had to myself. It was hot, but not unbearable with the air conditioning on and the porthole closed. On the stairs I had seen portraits of King Faisal and King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, and an illuminated page or two from the Koran. Saudi Arabia is a dry state, but I had my Port Said Scotch in my bag. Al Wid was not another Al Anoud. The first-class dining room had middle-aged Egyptian waiters in white jackets, and there was a saloon where, my steward told me, videotaped television films would be shown at night. As it turned out, the films were Egyptian comedies with one exception: an American film about white mercenaries wiping out black men in Africa. The Egyptian audience sided unmistakably with the white mercenaries.

  It was all certainly better than Al Anoud, even though a plaque informed me that the Swedes had licensed Al Wid for only four hundred and fifty passengers but she was carrying eight hundred to Aqaba and I don’t know how many more to Jedda. I felt no anxiety; there wouldn’t be much elbow room, but it was not far to Aqaba. I stifled the thought of what the effect of a collision at sea might have on a thousand Egyptians temperamentally alien to the concept of a boat drill. Oddly enough, I was more concerned by the discovery that the toilets were temperamental, although at least they were not permanently awash with urine and vomit as those of Al Anoud had been. On that ship the ultimate catastrophe would have been a loose bowel.

  I am not particularly fussy about the absence of working toilets on small boats, for you can almost always find a convenient place to ease yourself over the side in reasonable safety and privacy. But on big ships you have nowhere to go. Their sides are too high for acrobatics and, in any case, the rail areas are too public. (Incidentally, if you fall from a big ship – or even from a relatively small big one – your chances of survival are virtually nil. Sea, wind and engines would overwhelm your cries, and you could wave until you were blue in the face but a ship’s wake or a swell would hide you. Once overboard, ten to one you’re a g
oner.)

  Al Wid’s toilet facilities would do, but it would be wise, I decided, to use them early, before rush hour.

  *

  Ships headed north, converging on the narrow funnel of the canal. To the west, land disappeared; to the east a grey-white line hardened into cliffs of treeless, fissured rock. There were no fishing craft to be seen on the blue waters off the coast of Sinai.

  During the night, Al Wid wove craftily through the reefs and islands south of Suez, which appear as an angry black rash on the charts. Next day the immigrant workers sat up on the decks where they had spent the night lying huddled together for comfort on benches or bare planking. Now they looked around and pointed to the coast, the terrible peninsula where in three wars – 1948, 1967, 1973 – fathers, brothers and cousins had died in their thousands of thirst, sunstroke, bullet wounds, burns, or even of sheer bewilderment and fear. El Arish, the Mitla Pass, Sharm el Sheikh are names on every Nile boy’s mental map of Egypt. Those places lay behind the shore we were now passing, and not a soul aboard could have been unaware of the fact. They peered over the rail in that unusual silence as the first rays lit the terrible shore of Sinai. Dreaming of a certainty of peace? Grieving for dead generations? Or forgetful of the past, not looking back at all, simply invoking the blessing of the One God on the new life that Al Wid was bringing nearer by the second?

  The mood seemed to pass. Soon they pulled themselves back to the normal, vociferous world, and resumed their animated chatter – which, for peasant voices born and bred to carry long distances across villages and fields, meant something more like raucous shouting. Excited hands rummaged in the Adidas and Alitalia overnight bags and found country-made rusk-like sweet cakes (like English shortbread), fruit and flat bread, bits of processed cheese and stringy carrots bought a day or two before at a friendly stall in the delta. These rations might have to sustain them until Baghdad. They even had bottles of water. After the food they brought out photographs of relatives stiffly posed by village photographers, passed them around and then carefully reburied them, a shade more creased, under the spare shirt, towel and bathing wear in their overnight bags.