The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (36 page)

At the end, Clark turns on Jesse and betrays him. In order to save the children from the Conflagration, Clark “shot the false prophet twice.” Although Clark himself perishes, he dies a hero, who saved as many lives as he could from the false prophet whom he had, for no coherent reason, briefly served. Finally, world television validates Clark's life and end. Who could ask for anything more?

Stendhal's view that politics in a work of art is like a pistol shot at a concert is true, but what is one to do in the case of a political work that deals almost exclusively with true patriot versus nonpatriot who dares criticize the common patria? I quoted at length from Updike's
Self-Consciousness
in order to establish what human material this inhuman novel is based on. I have also tried to exercise empathy, tried to feel, as President Clinton likes to say, the author's pain. Actually, to find reactionary writing similar to Updike's, one must turn back to John Dos Passos's
Midcentury
, or to John Steinbeck's
The Winter of Our Discontent
. But Updike, unlike his predecessor Johns, has taken to heart every far-out far-right piety currently being fed us.

Also, despite what Updike must have thought of as a great leap up the social ladder from Shillington obscurity to “Eliotic” Harvard and then on to a glossy magazine, he has now, Antaeus-like, started to touch base with that immutable Dutch-German earth on which his ladder stood. Recent American wars and defeats have so demoralized our good child that he has now come to hate that Enlightenment which was all that, as a polity, we ever had. He is symptomatic, then, of a falling back, of a loss of nerve; indeed, a loss of honor. He invokes phantom political majorities, righteous masses. Time to turn to Herzen on the subject: “The masses are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are offended by those who stand alone…they want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter their heads.”

Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up. In this most delicate of times, Updike has “builded” his own small, crude altar in order to propitiate—or to invoke?—“the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

The Times Literary Supplement
April 26, 1996

PASSAGE TO EGYPT

“Are you German, sir?” A small, dark youth stepped from behind a palm tree into the full light of the setting sun which turned scarlet the white shirt and albino red the black eyes. He had been watching me watch the sun set across the Nile, now blood-red and still except for sailboats tacking in a hot, slow breeze. I told him that I was American but was used to being mistaken for a German: in this year of the mid-century, Germans are everywhere, and to Arab eyes we all look alike. He showed only a moment's disappointment.

“I have many German friends,” he said. “Two German friends.
West
German friends. Perhaps you know them?” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and read off two names. Then, not waiting for an answer, all in a rush, he told me that he was a teacher of Arabic grammar, that he was going to Germany,
West
Germany (he emphasized the
West
significantly), to write a book. What sort of book? A book about West Germany. The theme? He responded with some irritation: “A Book About West Germany.” That was what the book would be about. He was a poet. His name was Ahmed. “Welcome,” he said, “welcome!” His crooked face broke into a smile. “Welcome to Luxor!” He invited me to his house for mint tea.

As we turned from the bank of the Nile, a long, haunting cry sounded across the water. I had heard this same exotic cry for several evenings, and I was certain that it must be of ancient origin, a hymn perhaps to Ikhnaton's falling sun. I asked Ahmed what this lovely aria meant. He listened a moment and then said, “It's this man on the other side who says: will the ferryboat please pick him up?” So much for magic.

Ahmed led the way through narrow streets to the primary school where he taught. It was a handsome modern building, much like its counterparts in Scarsdale or Darien. He took me inside. “You must see what the children make themselves. Their beautiful arts.” On the entrance-hall table their beautiful arts were exhibited: clay figures, carved wood, needlework, all surrounding a foot-long enlargement in clay of the bilharzia, a parasite which is carried by snails in the irrigation ditches; once it invades the human bloodstream, lungs and liver are attacked and the victim wastes away; some ninety percent of the fellahin suffer from bilharzia. “Beautiful?” he asked. “Beautiful,” I said.

On the wall hung the exhibit's masterpiece, a larger than life-size portrait of Nasser, painted in colors recalling Lazarus on the fourth day. A somewhat more talented drawing next to it showed students marching with banners in a street. I asked Ahmed to translate the words on the banners. “Our heads for Nasser,” he said with satisfaction. I asked him if Nasser was popular with the young. He looked at me as though I had questioned the next day's sunrise. Of course Nasser was loved. Had I ever been in Egypt before? Yes, during the winter of 1948, in the time of the bad fat King. Had things improved? I told him honestly that they had indeed. Cairo had changed from a nineteenth-century French provincial capital surrounded by a casbah to a glittering modern city, only partially surrounded by a casbah. He asked me what I was doing in Egypt, and I told him I was a tourist, not mentioning that I had an appointment to interview Nasser the following week for an American magazine.

Ahmed's house is a large one, four stories high; here he lives with some twenty members of his family. The parlor is a square room with a high ceiling from which hangs a single unshaded light bulb. Two broken beds serve as sofas. I sat on one of the beds while Ahmed, somewhat nervously, ordered mint tea from a sister who never emerged from the dark hall. Then I learned that his father was also a teacher, and that an uncle worked in Nasser's office; obviously a prosperous family by Luxor standards.

I was offered the ceremonial cigarette. I refused; he lit up. He was sorry his father was not there to meet me. But then again, puffing his cigarette, he was glad, for it is disrespectful to smoke in front of one's father. Only recently the father had come unexpectedly into the parlor. “I was smoking a cigarette and when he came in, oh! I bit it hard, like this, and have to swallow it down! Oh, I was sick!” We chuckled at his memory.

When the mint tea arrived (passed to us on a tray from the dark hall, only bare arms visible), Ahmed suggested we sit outside where it was cool. Moonlight blazed through a wooden trellis covered with blossoming wisteria. We sat on stiff wooden chairs. He switched on a light momentarily to show me a photograph of the girl he was to marry. She was pretty and plump and could easily have been the editor of the yearbook in any American high school. He turned off the light. “We modern now. No more arranged marriages. Love is everything. Love is why we marry. Love is all.” He repeated this several times, with a sharp intake of breath after each statement. It was very contagious, and I soon found myself doing it. Then he said, “Welcome,” and I said, “Thank you.”

Ahmed apologized for the unseasonable heat. This was the hottest spring in years, as I had discovered that day in the Valley of the Kings where the temperature had been over a hundred and the blaze of sun on white limestone blinding. “After June, Luxor is
impossible
!” he said proudly. “We all go who can go. If I stay too long, I turn dark as a black in the sun.” Interestingly enough, there is racial discrimination in Egypt. “The blacks” are second-class citizens: laborers, servants, minor government functionaries. They are the lowest level of Egyptian society in every way except one: there are no Negro beggars. That is an Arab monopoly. Almsgivers are blessed by the Koran, if not by Nasser, who has tried to discourage the vast, well-organized hordes of beggars.

“To begin with, I had naturally a very light complexion,” said Ahmed, making a careful point, “like the rest of my family, but one day when I was small the nurse upset boiling milk on me and ever since that day I have been somewhat dark.” I commiserated briefly. Then I tried a new tack. I asked him about his military service. Had he been called up yet? A new decree proposed universal military service, and I thought a discussion of it might get us onto politics. He said that he had not been called up because of a
very interesting story
. My heart sank, but I leaned forward with an air of sympathetic interest. Suddenly, I realized I was impersonating someone. But who? Then when he began to talk and I to respond with small nods and intakes of breath, I realized that it was E. M. Forster. I was the Forster of
A Passage to India
and this was Dr. Aziz. Now that I had the range, my fingers imperceptibly lengthened into Forsterian claws; my eyes developed an uncharacteristic twinkle; my upper lip sprouted a ragged gray moustache, while all else turned to tweed.

“When the British attacked us at Suez, I and these boys from our school, we took guns and together we marched from Alexandria to Suez to help our country. We march for many days and nights in the desert. We have no food, no water. Then we find we are lost and we don't know where we are. Several die. Finally, half dead, we go back to Alexandria and we march in the street to the place where Nasser is. We ask to see him, to cheer him, half dead all of us. But they don't let us see him. Finally, my uncle hears I am there and he and Nasser come out and, ah, Nasser congratulates us, we are heroes! Then I collapse and am unconscious one month. That is why I have
not
to do military service.” I was impressed and said so, especially at their getting lost in the desert, which contributed to my developing theory that the Arabs are disaster-prone: they
would
get lost, or else arrive days late for the wrong battle.

Ahmed told me another story of military service, involving friends. “Each year in the army they have these…these…” We searched jointly—hopelessly—for the right word until E. M. Forster came up with “maneuvers,” which was correct. I could feel my eyes twinkling in the moonlight.

“So these friends of mine are in this maneuvers with guns in the desert and they have orders:
shoot to kill
. Now one of them was Ibrahim, my friend. Ibrahim goes to this outpost in the dark. They make him stop and ask him for the password and he…” Sharp intake of breath. “He has
forgotten
the password. So they say, ‘He must be the enemy.'” I asked if this took place in wartime. “No, no,
maneuvers
. My friend Ibrahim say, ‘Look, I forget. I
did
know but now I forget the password but you know me, anyway, you know it's Ibrahim.' And he's right. They do know it was Ibrahim. They recognize his voice but since he cannot say the password they shot him.”

I let E. M. Forster slip to the floor. “Shot him? Dead?”

“Dead,” said my host with melancholy satisfaction. “Oh, they were very sorry because they knew it was Ibrahim, but, you see,
he did not know the password
, and while he was dying in the tent they took him to, he said it was all right. They were right to kill him.”

I found this story hard to interpret. Did Ahmed approve or disapprove of what was done? He was inscrutable. There was silence. Then he said, “Welcome,” and I said, “Thank you.” And we drank more mint tea in the moonlight.

I tried again to get the subject around to politics. But beyond high praise for everything Nasser has done, he would volunteer nothing. He did point to certain tangible results of the new regime. For one thing, Luxor was now a center of education. There were many new schools. All the children were being educated. In fact he had something interesting to show me. He turned on the lamp and opened a large scrapbook conveniently at hand. It contained photographs of boys and girls, with a scholastic history for each. Money had to be raised to educate them further. It
could
be done. Each teacher was obliged to solicit funds. “Look what my West German friends have given,” he said, indicating amounts and names. Thus I was had, in a good cause. I paid and walked back to the hotel.

On the way back, I took a shortcut down a residential street. I had walked no more than a few feet when an old man came rushing after me. “Bad street!” he kept repeating. I agreed politely, but continued on my way. After all, the street was well lit. There were few people abroad. A shout from an upstairs window indicated that I should halt. I looked up. The man in the window indicated I was to wait until he came downstairs. I did. He was suspicious. He was from the police.
Why
was I in that street? I said that I was taking a walk. This made no sense to him. He pointed toward my hotel, which was in a slightly different direction. That was where I was supposed to go. I said yes, but I wanted to continue in
this
street, I liked to walk. He frowned. Since arrest was imminent, I turned back. At the hotel I asked the concierge why what appeared to be a main street should be forbidden to foreigners. “Oh, ‘they' might be rude,” he said vaguely. “You know….” I did not know.

In the diner on the train south to Aswan I had breakfast with a young government official from the Sudan. He was on his way home to Khartoum. He had a fine smile and blue-black skin. On each cheek there were three deep scars, the ritual mark of his tribe—which I recognized, for I had seen his face only the day before on the wall of the Temple of Luxor. Amenhotep III had captured one of his ancestors in Nubia; five thousand years ago the ritual scars were the same as they are now. In matters of religion Africans are profound conservatives. But otherwise he was a man of our time and world. He was dressed in the latest French fashion. He had been for two years on an economic mission in France. He spoke English, learned at the British school in Khartoum.

We breakfasted on musty-tasting dwarfish eggs as dust filtered slowly in through closed windows, covering table, plates, eggs with a film of grit. A fan stirred the dusty air. Parched, I drank three Coca-Colas—the national drink—and sweated. The heat outside was already 110 degrees, and rising. For a while we watched the depressing countryside and spoke very little. At some points the irrigated land was less than a mile wide on our side of the river: a thin ribbon of dusty green ending abruptly in a blaze of desert where nothing at all grew, a world of gray sand as far as the eye could see. Villages of dried-mud houses were built at the desert's edge so as not to use up precious land. The fellahin in their ragged clothes moved slowly about their tasks, quite unaware of the extent of their slow but continual decline. In the fifth century
B.C
., Herodotus was able to write: “As things are at present these people get their harvest with less labor than anyone else in the world; they have no need to work with plow or hoe, or to use any other of the ordinary methods of cultivating their land; they merely wait for the river of its own accord to flood the fields.” But all that has changed. Nearly thirty million people now live in a country whose agriculture cannot support half that number.

“I used to think,” said the Sudanese at last, “that Egypt was a fine place, much better than the Sudan. A big country. Rich. But now I know how lucky we are. There is no one at home poor like this.” He pointed to several ragged men in a field. Two lay listlessly in the sun. The others worked slowly in the field, narcotized by the heat; the diet of the fellahin is bread and stewed tea and not much of that. I asked him what he thought of Nasser's attacks on his government (recently there had been a disagreement over Nile water rights and Nasser had attacked the Sudanese president with characteristic fury). “Oh, we just laugh at him. We just laugh at him,” he repeated as though to convince himself. I asked him why Nasser was continuously on the offensive not only against the West but against the rest of the Arab world. He shrugged. “To impress his own people, I suppose. We don't like it, of course. But perhaps it makes him feel big. Makes them…” He pointed to a group of villagers drawing water from a canal. “Makes them forget.”