The Levant Trilogy (11 page)

Once an old man,
white bearded, of noble appearance, had stopped her and held out his hand. He
was wearing priestly robes and a green fez. They talked for a while about life
and her reasons for being in Egypt, then he asked her to marry him, saying he
had had many wives in a long life but never one who would go out in the heat of
mid-day without a covering on her head. She asked how it was his fez was green
while all others were red and he said he had had it specially made for him to
indicate to the world that he was a descendant of the prophet. He was a jocular
old man and they parted with a lot of laughter.

Now, reaching
Suleiman Pasha where the shop blinds were pulled down but doors were ajar in
case custom should come, unlikely though it was, Harriet saw ahead of her a
single living creature. It was a man in khaki shirt and shorts, a lost
British soldier, hung over with baggage. When he reached the Midan
he sank down on the steps of an office block and began pulling the straps off
his shoulders. Beneath the straps, under his armpits, in every crevice of his
clothing the cloth was black with sweat. He was wiping his face when Harriet
approached him.

The large
buildings of the Midan threw one side of the square into shadow so deep it gave
an illusion of darkness. Although the sky was a pure cerulean blue, the eye,
reacting against excess of light, covered it with a dark film. The banks and
office blocks, ponderously imitating western buildings, seemed as flimsy as
theatre flats. The whole Midan might have been made of cardboard, not painted
but blotted over and bloated with grey, black or umber dye, uneven and dimmed
by dust.

Seeing Harriet,
the soldier called out, 'Excuse me, miss. You English? I thought so. Strange
how you can tell.' He plashed his hand over his pink brow, drew it down his
cheeks and shook the sweat from his fingers. 'I missed the transport, went to
the barracks and they say I got to wait till seventeen hundred hours. Thought
I'd look around but what a place! I was just saying to m'self, "Where do
you go now, chum? What's to see and do around here?'"

Harriet, looking
about her, wondered what there was to see and do in the wide, empty streets of
Cairo at this hour. She told him: There's the Rivoli cinema not far from here.
It's air-conditioned and so chilly, you might catch a cold. I've caught cold
myself there.'

'Can't be too
chilly for me.' The soldier rose and looking her over said with jaunty fervour,
''Spose you wouldn't come with me?'

She smiled,
knowing to these lost men an Englishwoman, any Englishwoman, was not an
individual but a point of contact with desirable life. 'I'm sorry. I have to go
back to work, but I
'll
walk part of
the way.'

'Right-e-o.' He
put the straps back and with all his belongings lurching around him, went with
her towards Fuad al Awal. Eyeing her with some curiosity, he said, 'Funny meeting
someone from England, just like that! What you doing here, then?'

'Egypt's full of
English people. My husband has a job here.'

'Oh, yes?' At the
mention of a husband the soldier retreated into respectful silence and Harriet,
to start him talking again, asked how he had come to miss his transport.

'It was like
this, see. Me and my mates went down into one of those bars and had a few beers
and I passed out. Not in the bar, mind you. I went in - well, if you'll excuse
me mentioning it - I went in the toilet. They didn't know I'd passed out, did
they? I mean, I could've gone after a bint, couldn't I? Can't blame them, can
you?'

'No, it could
happen to anyone.'

'T
hat's right.'

She could see how
pained he had been at finding himself deserted and how much he needed company,
but she was late already. Pointing to the cinema, she said regretfully, 'I have
to go the other way.' Before she turned the next corner, she looked back and saw
him standing like an eager dog, staring after her, hoping she would change her
mind.

At the Embassy
the only sign of life was the hopping of the hoopoes in and out of the garden
sprays. Mr Buschman always played golf in the middle of the day and, coming rather
late to the office, would put salt tablets into a large glass of water and
drink it with a grimace. Lined up on his desk in different coloured boxes were
pills and capsules which he called vitamins. Harriet had never heard of salt
tablets or vitamins and Mr Buschman, amused by her innocence, said, 'They're
sent out to us through the bag. They look after us, you see.' The vitamins were
distributed among the American staff but not, of course, the aliens.

Looking over the
news sheets, Mr Buschman laughed aloud. '"Defend their honour" -
that's rich!'

Harriet had tried
to ring Guy from the pension and had been told that all the lines to Alexandria
were engaged. She decided that if she could not reach him by telephone, she
must go to him, and she said to Mr Buschman, 'I've been trying to get in touch
with my husband but can't get hold of him. He ought to leave Alexandria...'

'Don't worry,
mem. He'll leave when he's ordered to leave.'

'There's no one
to order him. The director's gone to Palestine, the office is shut - but he
doesn't know this. He's alone
up there. He'll
just wait expecting to receive orders that won't come, and he'll be trapped.'

Harriet gulped
and Mr Buschman, putting a hand on her shoulder, said, 'Hey, hey, mem, don't
cry. Give the girls his number and tell them to ring it every five minutes till
they
do
get through.'

'But, Mr
Buschman, if they can't get him, I
'll
have to take a day off and go up to Alex and tell him how things are.'

'You do just
that, mem,' Mr Buschman gave her shoulder a squeeze and his kindness, his
concern, his ready willingness to help her, rayed from his face like love. Much
moved, Harriet asked him to come over and look at the wall map. She pointed to
the two sets of pins, one in the desert, the other in the Ukraine, converging
on the Middle East like two black claws. 'You see what it is, Mr Buschman: it's
a giant pincer movement'

Mr Buschman
stared at the map and slowly shook his head. 'Looks like it But don't forget,
mem, that's only a map. There's a mighty big bit of territory between those
pincers.'

'Yes, they've a
long way to come but the Germans move quickly.' Harriet had seen the German
news films in Bucharest She had seen the golden-haired boys standing up in
their tanks, singing, 'What does it matter if we destroy the world? When it is
ours, we'll build it up again,' as they drove with all speed on to Paris. She
thought how quickly they could eat up that almost unguarded territory between
the pincers. 'If the Ukraine collapses, what's to stop them? We can't even keep
them out of Egypt.'

Nonplussed, Mr
Buschman stared, rubbing his hand across the back of his neck, then went back
to his desk leaving Harriet unassured. She saw the Middle East cracking between
the pincers like a broken walnut and asked herself: what would happen then?
She tried to work out on the map the strategy of defeat. The British troops,
she supposed, would retreat into Iraq and make a last stand in defence of the
Persian Gulf. But suppose there were no troops? Supposing the whole 8th Army was
caught between the converging pincers and not one man remained to retreat and
defend what was left? What would they do then? There was almost relief at the
thought of it.
Responsibility would cease.
They would not have to run away again.

The exchange
girls, unable to reach Guy, told Harriet: 'It's the business men. They ring all
the time because they are nervous. And they're already talking to each other in
German.'

Harriet decided
to appeal to Dobson. When she left her work, other people were returning to
theirs. It was the rush hour and the most oppressive time of the day. Heat,
compacted between the buildings, stuck to the skin like cotton wool. The roads
were noisy with traffic and the workers, unwillingly roused out of their
siestas, were rough and irritable. Bunches of men hung like swarming bees at
the tram-car doors, clinging to rails and to each other. When a car swerved
round a corner, several were thrown off but falling lightly, they picked themselves
up and waited to get a handhold on the next. The richer men, to avoid this
rabble, fought for taxis and Harriet, knowing she could not compete, decided
to walk down to the river.

The pavements
were more crowded than usual. Some of the men were so new to commerce that they
still wore the gala-biah but most
of
them had managed to fit themselves
out with trousers and jackets. Some had even taken to wearing the fez. Many
were pock-marked or had only one seeing eye, the other being white and
sightless from trachoma; many were enervated by bilharzia, but they were all
rising in the world, leaving behind the peasants and the back street balani
from whom they derived.

Harriet stopped
to look in the windows of a closed-down tourist agency. She saw, dusty and
cracking with heat, the posters that used to draw the rich to Egypt: the face
of the Sphinx, the lotus columns of Karnac, the beautiful and tranquil Nile
with the feluccas dipping in the wind. She sadly thought, 'Good-bye, Egypt,'
but at that moment a familiar sensation came into her middle and she knew she
was in for another attack of "Gyppy tummy". The sensation, that was
not altogether pain, appeared in her mind as a large pin - not an ordinary pin
but, for some reason, an open safety pin - which turned slowly and jabbed her
at intervals. She thought over what she had had for luncheon. In this country
one ate sickness. She could not blame Madame Wilk who was always
telling the cook to wash his hands. The cook would reply, 'Sa-ida,
we wash our hands all the time. It is our religion to wash our hands.' And so
it was. Harriet had seen the men at the mosque putting a finger or two into the
pool and giving a token splash inside their galabiahs. Madame Wilk said, 'What
am I to do? I can't follow them when they go places.' Nor could she. So Egypt
was not only the Sphinx, the lotus columns, the soft flow of the Nile, it was
also the deadening discomfort and sickness that blurred these sights so, in
the end, one cared for none of them.

Harriet reached
the Embassy's wrought-iron gates as the sun was dropping behind Gezira and a
mist like smoke hung over the river. Passing into the mist, she realized it
really was smoke. The atmosphere was heavy with burning. Inside the Embassy
gardens, she saw a bonfire and the Embassy men and women, Dobson and Edwina
among them, bringing out trays and bags of papers. Servants were feeding the
papers to the fire and the gardeners were poking them about with rakes to keep
them alight. This activity was solemn, yet not quite solemn. Edwina was making
some remark and everyone laughed. They had their immunity, after all. Whatever
happened, they would get away alive.

Dobson looked
towards her and she waved to him. He crossed to the gate with a smiling
amiability as though the paper burning was a social ceremony and Harriet might
be welcomed in. Instead, as she was about to speak, he came out to join her
and suggested they stroll along the embankment 'My eyes are watering from the
smoke. Let's get out of it.'

Dobson's air was,
as it always was, insouciant and she said, 'Just now I was thinking of the
pre-war tourists who seemed to be immune to bacillary dysentery. And you,
you're immune to the enemy.'

Dobson laughed.
'One of the perks of the profession.'

'Well, I want
your help. Guy's not immune, as you know, and he's on the outskirts of
Alexandria where he'll have little idea of what's going on. I can't get through
to him on the phone. What are we supposed to do?'

Dobson came to a
stop and stood with his back to the embankment wall. At this end of the river
walk a group of
banyans had grown from the
path and, dropping their branches down, had rooted themselves on all sides.
There was a whole complicated cage of banyans, their silvery, tuberous trunks
looking immensely old. The intertwining of branches to roots and roots to
branches had left a central cage and Dobson stepped into it, looking up at the
knotted roof as though seeing the banyans for the first time. While he stood
there, apparently reflecting on Guy's position, a rain of charred paper
fragments came floating down and with half his attention on the paper, he said,
'I suppose Gracey's in touch with him?'

'No,' Harriet
spoke sharply to regain Dobson's whole attention. 'Gracey's gone, probably to
Palestine. Anyway, we've no means of contacting him. The office is shut.'

'Oh!'

Smoke darkened
the sunset but the smoky air was rich with the rose colours of evening and
through it, wavering like a child's kite, a half sheet of headed paper sank and
settled, just out of reach, in the banyan branches. Peering up at it, Dobson
said, 'Oh, dear!'

'Is it a fact
that Rommel is only one day's drive from Alex?'

'So it seems, but
there's no immediate cause for anxiety. If Alex is evacuated, the military will
bring the English civilians out, I'm pretty sure.'

'But there may
not be time to evacuate the civilians. And if the town is cut off, no one will
get away.'

Dobson smiled.
'We've got a navy, you know.'