The Levanter (8 page)

“Yes.” It was my sister Euridice. “What is the alternative to this agreement?”

“The alternative that Mama proposes. We do nothing. In my opinion this means that eventually we will have to cut our losses in Syria, write them off. The best we could hope for, I imagine, would be a counter-revolution there which would restore the status quo. I don’t see it happening myself, but ...” I shrugged.

“But you could be wrong!” Giulio the dentist was back in action, with bulging eyes and one forefinger tapping the side of his forehead - presumably to inform me that the question came from his brain and not his stomach.

“Yes, I could be wrong, Giulio. What I meant was that the sort of counterrevolution in which the radical right overthrows the radical left doesn’t usually restore a former status quo.”

“But surely action and reaction are always equal and opposite.” This was René the physicist. He had a maddening habit of quoting scientific laws in non-scientific contexts. Entanglement in one of his false analogies was a thing to be avoided at all costs.

“In the laboratory, yes.”

“And in life, Michael, and in life.”

“I am sure you’re right, René. However, the political future of Syria is not something that we can divine in this board room. I think that there has been enough discussion and that we should put the motion to a vote. You first, Giulio.”

At that point, I think, I had pretty well made up my mind to go against the agreement myself. The instant enthusiasm expressed by Giulio and René had engendered misgivings which my mother’s shrewd disparagement had deepened considerably. By abstaining from voting on the ground that, as the author of the agreement I was
parti pris,
I could have backed away from the issue without too much loss of face. If Giulio had chosen to repeat his idiotic dithyramb in praise of my sagacity, that, I think, is what I would have done.

Unfortunately, he decided to change his mind. ‘’My considered opinion is,” he said weightily, “that time is on our side. No agreement, however ably negotiated, can in the end serve our interests if the regime with which the agreement is made is essentially unstable. If time is on our side, and we may hope it is, then I say let time work for us.”

“You are against the motion, Giulio?”

“With deep regret, Michael, yes.”

René had a few words to say about game theory mathematics and the possibility of applying them to the solution of meta-political problems. Then he, too, voted against.

I looked at my mother. She would now decide the matter, whatever I wanted; my sisters would follow her lead.

I said: “I think, Mama, that even the silliest generalization, even one made in a little red book by the British War Office, may once in a while have its moment of truth. I believe that this is just such a moment and that to do now what you and Giulio and René want to do - that is, nothing - would be to do something definitely wrong.”

For a moment her lips twitched and she almost smiled, but not quite. Instead, she threw up her hands. “Very well,” she said. “Have your agreement. But I warn you. You are making a lot of trouble for yourself - trouble of all kinds.”

In that, of course, she was absolutely right.

The trouble was of all kinds, and I had no one to blame for it but myself.

For almost two years the only party to the Syrian agreement who profited from it in any substantial way was Dr. Hawa. Our company lost, and not only in terms of its unblocked assets. As my mother had predicted, the Syrian cooperatives took up far too much of my time. Inevitably, some managerial responsibility in the profitable areas of the company’s operations had to be delegated to senior employees. They, naturally, took advantage of the situation and had to be given salary increases.

In the early days, I must admit, the work itself was fairly rewarding. Pulling rabbits out of a hat can be fun when the magic works. The ceramics
pilot
, for instance, which I started up in a disused soap factory, went well from the beginning. That was partly luck. I found a man to put in as foreman, and later manager, who had worked for three years in a French pottery and knew something about coloured glazes. He also knew where to recruit the semiskilled labour we needed and how to handle it. Within four months we had a range of samples, realistic cost accountings, and a complete plan for volume production which I could submit to Dr. Hawa under the terms of the agreement. Within weeks, and after an incredibly brief period of haggling, the government funding had been authorized and the project went ahead. By the end of the year we had received our first export orders.

With the furniture and metalworking projects it was a different story. In the case of the furniture some of the difficulties arose from the fact that, under pilot plant conditions, a lot of work which should have been done by machines had to be done by hand. That made much of our costing little better than guesswork. However, the biggest headache with that pilot was its dependence on the metalworking shop. The trouble there was shortage of skilled labour.

It was understandable. Why should a metalworker who had been his own master for years, and earned enough to support himself in the style that his father and grandfather before him had found acceptable, go to work in a government factory? Why should this craftsman be compelled to use unfamiliar tools; tools that didn’t even belong to him, to produce unfamiliar objects of, for him, questionable virtue? You could argue, and I did until I was purple in the face, that in the government factory he would work only a fifty hour week instead of the sixty-hour one he had been working on his own, and make more money in the bargain. You could talk about job security. You could promise him overtime and bonus rates for bringing in apprentices. You could plead, you could cajole. The answer in most cases was still a slow, ruminative, maddening shake of the head.

In the end I had to take the problem to Dr. Hawa. He solved it by putting through a regulation controlling the sale of nonferrous metals such as copper and brass. Each buyer was given a quota based on his previous year’s purchases. However, if he had kept no written records, no receipts, for instance, to prove his case, he was in difficulty. He was entitled to appeal, of course; but, even if he was literate, he would find that part of the regulation hard to understand. He would need a lawyer. As the hazards, uncertainties, and frustrations of self-employment thus became more evident, many of those who had previously shaken their heads eventually decided to reconsider.

That Dr. Hawa should have been in a position to legalize this Byzantine method of recruiting labour by coercion is not as remarkable as it may appear. I have said that he found our agreement profitable from the first. Perhaps “advantageous” would have been a better word. From the day we signed the final papers scarcely a week went by without some manifestation of what he called “our public relations and information program”. In practice this meant personal publicity for Dr. Hawa. I don’t know how he learned to perform his image-building tricks. Clearly, most of them had been collected during those postgraduate years in the United States, but he performed them all with impressive ease. Teresa believes that he has a natural talent for self-advertisement of which he is only dimly aware, and that he works almost entirely by instinct. She may be right.

It was quite fascinating to watch him in action. On the day we took possession of the disused soap factory, a decrepit and rat-infested structure then, Dr. Hawa suddenly appeared flourishing a large rolled-up blueprint - of what I never discovered - and, attended by photographers and journalists, proceeded to tour the premises. The photographs, which later appeared in the newspapers, of Dr. Hawa pointing dramatically at the blueprint, and the accompanying stories extolling the dynamic yet
modest personality of the Director of Industrial Development were most effective. He could make an occasion out of the most trivial happening. The arrival of a new piece of machinery, the rigging of a power line, the pouring of concrete for a workshop floor - if there was anything at all going on that could be photographed, Dr. Hawa was there; and, when the photographs appeared, not only was he always in the foreground, but also quite obviously in direct charge of the operations. He had a way of pointing at something whenever he asked a question, and of keeping his head well back as he did so, that made it look all the time as if he were issuing orders. And, of course, before long ours were not the only such fish he had to fry. All the extravagant publicity given to our pilot projects had led several of the former temporizers to conclude, mistakenly, that I had been coining money while they had slept, and to leap hastily onto the cooperative bandwagon. Some of these ventures, notably a glass works, a galvanized-wire mill, and a bottling plant producing an odd-tasting local imitation of Pepsi-Cola, were successful, and, of course, Dr. Hawa got the credit.

In 1968, when all industry in Syria was nationalized, occasions for self-advertisement became even easier for him to contrive. His official position as development expert enabled him to poke his nose into practically anything, and be photographed doing so. The only opposition to his methods came from the Russians, who had their own ideas about the way the publicity for Soviet aid projects should be handled. Deference, not direction, was what they expected from Dr. Hawa; they flourished their own blueprints. He conceded these defeats gracefully; he was as adaptable as he was ingenious. On the radio, and, later, on television he was astonishingly effective; very simple and very direct, an apolitical public servant, dedicated to the new, but respectful of the old, whose only thought was for the betterment of the people.

Nobody, then, was surprised when, with the announcement that the Department of Industrial Development was to be upgraded and to become a Ministry, came the news that the newly created ministerial portfolio had been offered to and accepted by Dr. Hawa. That he succeeded in retaining it for so long, even through the turmoils and upheavals of the late sixties, was due to a combination of circumstances.

As an appendage of the more potent ministries of Finance and Commerce and with little political or financial muscle of its own, Dr. Hawa’s Ministry could never provide the kind of operational base camp sought after by senior dissidents and would be coup-makers. It controlled no deployable forces, armed or unarmed, and was outside the inner power sector of government. Its function had been defined by Hawa himself as essentially catalytic - a phrase of which he became increasingly fond as time went by - and the image which he projected of himself was that of the super-efficient specialist quietly doing his own job as only he knew how, and with eyes
for nobody else’s.

Never once did he attempt to display himself as a potential leader. He must have been tempted at times. Men with his vanity, ambition, and peculiar abilities are rarely able to set limits to their aspirations, but he was one of the exceptions. A threat to no one with the power to destroy him, he had accordingly survived.

Although I would have preferred someone lazier and less alert to deal with, I could have had worse taskmasters than Dr. Hawa. It was clear, from the moment of his promotion, that ministerial office agreed with him. He seemed to smoke fewer cigarettes and was often quite relaxed and amiable. On occasion, over a game of backgammon and with a glass or two of my best brandy inside him, he would even make jokes that were not also gibes. Of course, he could still be unpleasant. When, for the first time, it became evident that the Howell companies abroad were beginning to make worthwhile profits out of the exclusive agencies granted to us under the agreement, I had to listen to bitter sarcasms and veiled threats. Naturally, I had figures to prove that on balance we were still well in the red, but he was invariably difficult about figures. His were always unassailably accurate and complete; everyone else’s were either irrelevant or cooked.

He had other quirks that made him hard to handle. For instance, you had to be careful with ideas for new projects. It was most dangerous to discuss a possible development with him unless you had already made up your mind that it was something you really wanted. If he liked a new idea he would seize upon it, and after that there was no escape. Almost before you were back in your office there would be a Ministry press release going out announcing the new wonder. From then on, whether you liked it or not, you were committed.

That, in fact, was how this whole miserable business over the dry batteries started. Dr. Hawa forced me into it.

It was the same with the electronics project. Under an arrangement made by Dr. Hawa’s Ministry with a trade mission from the GDR, we had to set up a plant to assemble electronic components manufactured in East Germany. We produced telecommunications equipment of various kinds, including highly specialized stuff for the army, as well as small radio and television sets. They gave me an Iraqi manager who had received special training in East Germany to run the plant, but the whole setup was wrong from our point of view. Being labour intensive it was economically unsound anyway, and the military contracts, on which I had thought we might possibly have made money, were dished out to us on a cost-plus basis which was ruinous. With the electronics it was all we could do to break even.

But the dry-battery project was much worse. That cost me more than money; that became a nightmare.

Don’t misunderstand, please. I am
not
blaming Dr. Hawa for everything that happened; I should have been quicker on my feet. What I
am
saying is that, far from having cunningly planned the battery operation, as some of those scavengers who call themselves reporters have hinted, I tried hard to stop it going forward, not only before it began but afterwards, too.

The thing started purely by accident. It was the year after the Six-Day War with Israel.

All government ministries everywhere have to send out lots of pieces of paper; it is in the nature of the beasts. One of the pieces regularly sent out by the Ministry of Industrial Development was a list of bulk commodities held in government warehouses and available for purchase. Normally, the list was of no immediate business interest to me, but I used to glance at it sometimes, for old times’ sake, to see what they were asking for tobacco. That was how I came to see this rather unusual item. In one of the Latakia warehouses there were sixty metric tons of manganese dioxide.