by Tom Remiger
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘A man can get them all confused, somehow. They’re all desirable, of course. In their place.’
By the time they reached Cape Town, Breen had made up his mind. People died for what they believed in; he could send a letter for what he believed in. Love for his own community could not outweigh universal charity. He watched the lights of the city as they came in—the first city he had seen lit up in a long time—and he decided that he owed something to Cousins as well as to the army.
He found the letter, added a covering note regretting the delay and explaining that Cousins’ allegations had been investigated fully, and sealed the envelope. When he came across a post office on his first afternoon ashore he bought stamps and posted the letter. He hoped that was the end of the matter. He had done his duty and now it was time to do no more than his duty.
He came once again to Sinclair’s cabin, the stars very bright and a half-moon hanging low in the sky.
‘Here I am,’ he said.
‘Daisy,’ came a sleepy voice. ‘Come over here, then.’
In the morning, they talked it over, leaning over a blue sea. ‘There’s no harm in it,’ said Sinclair. ‘While there’s no women about, what’s a man meant to do anyhow?’
‘We’ll be discreet,’ said Breen.
‘No need to make it awkward for anyone else.’
‘What would she think?’
‘Who?’
‘Your fiancée.’
‘She’ll never need to know now, will she?’
‘We can just go back to our lives.’
‘Like it never happened, eh?’
‘I didn’t even know it could be a thing,’ said Breen. ‘Not really. Buggered if I know why people joke about it.’
Then he blushed.
10
In March 1941, the battalion came up the Red Sea through a heat that thickened the air. At last they reached Egypt. They came ashore in lighters and were loaded onto a train. The gauge was wider than in New Zealand, so the carriages seemed more spacious. The wooden seats were hard, and the NCOs were placed at the door. There was a smell of fried potatoes. The men hung out the windows, trying to see what Egypt looked like. Breen imagined the romance of Cairo, a city of markets and beauties, soldiers and spies, where men in unfamiliar uniforms whispered strange languages in the Moorish gardens.
When the train pulled into Helwan, small boys ran up the station platform waving newspapers—‘Read about it! Declaration of war!’—but after the unfamiliar coins were handed over and the smudgy newspapers were hooked through the window, there was no declaration of war and the boys were gone.
They marched away to their camp: uncomfortable tents and one solitary wooden cookhouse. The grainy surface of the desert was firmer than Breen had anticipated: your feet hardly sank into it. He joined Morrie and Father Emmet for a cup of tea outside, around a fire. They sat on stones.
‘I always wanted to see Alexandria,’ said Father Emmet, ‘and now it’s so close and I won’t. Not this time, at least.’
They all knew that they wouldn’t be long in Egypt. There wasn’t much fight left in the desert war, or so it seemed. During their long voyage out from England, the Australians had surged across the desert and thrown the Italians back with an easy grace. Rumour was that the next stop would be Greece.
‘Why Alexandria?’
‘I should say because of the Desert Fathers, or because I want to buy some books. And a poet named Cavafy lived there until a few years ago. I want to see his city.’
‘I see. There’ll be other opportunities.’
‘Yes. In a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy.’
‘Is that Cavafy?’ asked Morrie.
‘No, that’s St Paul. But it’s what we’ll be doing some day.’
There were still Italians in Greece—or in Albania, by now. If they could be knocked out before the Germans came in—or if some gesture could be made to defend Greece before the Germans came in—that would be something. If the Germans made a go of it, there’d be no bloody chance, but at least the division would have shown their faces, as Christie the intelligence officer had said, before they showed their heels.
The division! They were finally seeing the first echelon, the soldiers who had enlisted first and left before them. Everywhere there were reunions. It was as if the whole of New Zealand had come together in a foreign place, leaving the good land behind. Waiting in a queue outside a scrim-walled lavatory you would meet someone you last saw on Dee Street in Invercargill in 1938. There was no room for surprise, only for a nod and a brushing past, or for a hasty arrangement to meet in a day or two. There would be time enough for all that sort of thing later. From the camp, the pyramids were visible. It was easy enough to find a way into Cairo.
Two of Breen’s corporals, Parkinson and Newman, hitched a lift with him. He had to use harsh words on Parkinson, who tried to swipe a tarboosh by reaching out from the side of the gharry they were sharing.
‘There’s something tempting about the red of it, sir,’ said Parkinson.
‘God knows, Parky, why I ever gave you your stripes,’ said Breen. ‘If it weren’t such a great trouble to get them off again, I reckon.’
‘Tell you what, sir,’ said Parkinson. ‘You give me permission to run off on a good boozeroo for the week, and then I’ll come back and you can have them off me for AWL.’
‘You can’t be bloody well given permission to be away without leave, you idiot,’ said Newman. ‘That’s what leave is. Me, when I go out, I’ll do it properly.’
‘Don’t do that,’ said Breen quickly. ‘I’ve your name up for officer-cadet training. Just a month or two and you can get away with bloody anything an officer and a gentleman can.’
‘You haven’t done the same for me?’ asked Parkinson.
‘I haven’t,’ said Breen.
‘Thank Christ for that. What would the boys say?’
‘Indeed,’ said Newman. He was quiet for a while. ‘I don’t think it’s for me, sir. Sorry and all that.’
‘Why ever not, man? You led a shearing gang well enough; it’s the same trick to it.’
‘What if I couldn’t do it? To be saying to the lads, “Follow me, boys, to death or bloody glory!” and then realise my legs weren’t working. I’d fuck the whole thing up.’
‘Look,’ said Breen, innocent cunning all over his face for Newman to read. ‘We’ll leave it till we’ve had a taste of the real thing. See how you feel about it then. None of us knows.’
‘You’ll be right,’ said Newman. ‘Even if—’ He stopped and looked out at the crowded sands. ‘What a mess of a country. I haven’t seen anything like it since Sunday school.’
The phrase was ambiguous, but his meaning was not. It was an Old Testament world of thin and ragged sheep, moving light-footed across the dust and the sand. And yet, behind the ridge they had crossed were silvery tents across the desert like the suburb of a great city: Australia and New Zealand, strangers in a strange land, camped ready for war.
11
Bluey went into Cairo too. He had heard the stories of the previous generation, and the itch was in him. He would take his pleasure while he lived, the hissing of his heart in his ears.
So he went down to the Café Liberté. At the next table were some men. One was tall, in the uniform of an Egyptian officer. The others wore no uniform. Their hair was long and there was no dust on their shoes. Bluey ordered a beer and sat alone at a table. Bottles had left stained rings in the wood. He raised his beer to the man in uniform.
The man waved him over. ‘Sit down with us. It is not right for a soldier to be alone and we soldiers must stay together.’
‘Thank you. It’s no fun on your pat.’ Bluey meant it. He was the sort of person who, if you asked him, would say that he didn’t care if a man was from England, China or Timbuctoo if he was a decent sort. Normally, though, there was some reason why you would have asked him that.
‘As you say,’ said
the uncomprehending officer. ‘Even soldiers from different nations must stay together. Like Egypt and England must stay together.’
His face was drunk. Bluey was in his grouse mocker. The Egyptian’s sober brown eyes moved to the loops of cloth on Bluey’s epaulettes: the proud blazon NEW ZEALAND. There had been great trouble at base about arranging those. Memos about whether they could be sewn on, how that would affect the issue of English uniforms. The Egyptian realised that Bluey was something different.
‘But you, you are English?’
‘No, I am a New Zealander.’
‘That is still English?’
‘In a way, but not really.’
‘But where did your father come from?’
‘Owaka.’
‘And this Owaka is in England?’
‘No, it’s in New Zealand.’ Scrubby grass and the sheep and cattle mingled in the home paddocks. The smell of woodsmoke and leaf mould.
‘But his father was English?’
‘He came over from Queensland. In Australia. I don’t know much about before that. He said it was a blackfella’s place out there, not for people like us, so I don’t think he can have been born there. Maybe he was a pongo, but he didn’t sound it. I’d guess he was from somewhere in Australia.’
‘But somewhere someone’s father was English? That is why you are here.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose so.’
‘That is why I am Italian,’ said his questioner. ‘My family came from Italy a long way back. For the cotton trade.’
‘Do you feel Italian?’
‘I have a passport.’
‘Oughtn’t you to be interned?’
‘I do not feel that Italian.’
‘You speak very good English.’
‘So do you.’
This was mockery. They seemed to have concluded that Bluey was only an Englishman’s country cousin. He must have seemed more brutal, less cunning, possessing only an inflexible provincial mind dosed on cricket and beer.
Bluey had his orders to condescend. And there was a confidence about him. He knew who he was, and he found comfort in the bulk of his body when he compared it to their slender forms. He was stronger, brought up on lamb and butterfat; he was not English but a New Zealander. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Theirs was the famine, the knowledge of having had and lost. So he tried to be fine and courtly, appreciative of the broken city by the sluggish river, with its citizens who just hadn’t had the advantages he’d had.
‘Do you speak Italian?’ Bluey asked.
‘And French.’
‘Egyptian?’
‘Arabic? We spoke French at home, but I am a soldier now and so I must give orders in another language.’
‘I wish I could speak Egyptian,’ said Bluey. ‘What sort of soldier are you?’
‘This badge here means that I am in the cavalry. My friend here is in the artillery, even though he does not wear a uniform…Have another beer.’ The beer was Stella, brewed in the city. It was weak and tasted of onions. ‘Why do you wish this? To speak a language that is not your own.’
‘It makes things easier to get on with. Have a drink, find a girl, that sort of thing.’
‘You wish to find a girl?’
‘I suppose I do.’
‘The only word of Arabic you need for a bint is talahena.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means “come here”.’
‘In one of the languages of my country you would say haere mai.’
‘I was a boy the last time I saw a New Zealand soldier,’ said another of the men. His English was better; he looked the most Egyptian of the three. ‘This was in the first war. Your people did not have a good reputation.’
‘My uncle was an Anzac.’
There was a questioning look.
‘A soldier in the first war.’
‘They burned down the street where you could have found girls. They were not kind. Especially to the girls.’
There were some words in a language Bluey didn’t understand. ‘Rioting,’ said the Egyptian-looking one. ‘The word he wishes to use is riot.’
‘There are still many places where you can find a girl,’ said the officer in uniform. ‘Special houses where they are checked. Imagine if we were patronising the brothels of your country, dear friend. Imagine that. Doubtless you would prefer that such things were checked.’
‘I don’t want to find a girl,’ said Bluey.
The officer smiled. His teeth were misshapen. ‘I too am a soldier.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Bluey. He was beginning to be angry at this needling; the dark eyes that looked at his and then slid away.
‘We are men before we are citizens, maybe, but we are still citizens.’
‘I thought Egyptians were supposed to be civilised. Your sort, at least,’ said Bluey.
‘There is more to the civilisation than Wisden.’ The officer paused for the laughter. It seemed remarkable that they had heard of Wisden; but, on the other hand, there was something very officers’ mess about Wisden. Bluey had never seen copies of it anywhere else.
‘We don’t have that in New Zealand. That’s an English game. And we are an educated country. Not that there’s anything wrong with cricket.’
‘Do you cheer for the English?’
‘In cricket? No, of course not.’
‘How very interesting. Do you play cricket?’
Bluey was not impressed by the way they were treating him. ‘I play rugby. It’s a man’s game.’
The one who spoke no English reached over and knocked Bluey’s cap off. He looked at him with glittering triumph. ‘How does that feel?’ asked the officer.
It was too much. These Egyptians were wriggling insects, marinated in old sin. The one in the artillery caught at Bluey’s arm as he began to swing, then released it almost immediately as Bluey remembered his position.
‘Easy,’ he said, as if he were talking to a horse. ‘Easy, old boy.’ His accent was stronger than the others.
Bluey made an attempt at apology after the proprietor, sensing trouble, had shuffled them out of the café. It would be better to part on friendly terms. The silent one had gone off down the street, his shoulders forward like he was going into a scrum.
‘At least you aren’t an Australian,’ one said.
‘At least I’m not a bloody Australian.’ Bluey had been given a copy of Wavell’s speech to the arriving Australians to inspire his platoon: he had underlined the passage, discussing the Egyptians, which read, ‘I look to you to show them that their notions of Australians as rough, wild undisciplined people given to strong drink are incorrect’, and decided not to use the speech.
‘We are sorry about our friend. It is harder as a civilian.’
‘You blokes need something to calm you down. So do I. I’ll buy you—’
‘Do you suggest whisky, or are you still fixated upon women?’
‘You’re quite serious?’
‘I know a—a little place that provides both, if you like.’
Was this, Bluey wondered, the way to end an evening among the elite here? Perhaps they were trying to appease him in his vulgar tastes, and if he had not caused trouble they would have been reading poetry in quiet rooms, the curtains moving in an invisible breeze. It didn’t matter. He would desire all joy in that city, find what was not permitted, and take it.
‘If we go this way, there is a place where the girls are clean.’
‘It is a discreet place.’
‘It’ll need to be bloody discreet.’
‘Unfortunately, it is out of bounds.’
‘I don’t mind that,’ said Bluey.
‘We’ll have to disguise you, you know. Keep you from being seen.’ The tall officer’s voice still held something mocking, and they turned it into a joke. Bluey thought it would be easiest if he too seemed to appreciate the broad humour of it, like a scene from a comic opera. He had a nasty suspicion that they were degrading their good English to see
what he made of it. Perhaps that was only imagination.
‘To disguise you as a girl would be most desirable, but perhaps not most convincing,’ said one.
‘It would also,’ said Bluey, ‘be difficult to manage. I would be quite a large girl.’
‘So you would.’
‘I favour a tarboosh,’ said another. ‘It will be an interesting experience for our valued friend. Perhaps some of his other friends will attempt to knock it off. Or perhaps we can try. I am curious to see what the experience will be like.’
‘And he can have my coat.’
‘A coat and a tarboosh. I do feel that we could have done better. Still, he is brown enough.’
‘Whatever you think best,’ said Bluey. ‘I trust you implicitly.’
‘Implicitly is a good word. It has illicit in it, does it not?’
They shook hands before making the attempt. There was a policeman at the gate, but they paid him off. He was small and ingratiating, and he laughed up at Bluey as if they were great friends sharing a marvellous joke.
The girl picked out for him was young and her skin was not dark. She wore white, and it draped about her. She would not speak to him. When he tried to speak, she shrank away. She had been informed of the joke, or the disguise was as deliberately poor as Bluey suspected, because she said ‘Englishman’, rolling the word about, trying to make the harsh foreign syllables sound seductive.
There was a room, but he waited in the doorway. She pointed at his uniform when he took off the coat. There was a torrent of talk from her; not to him but to her escort, an older woman with very dark full eyelashes. They gave Bluey the impression that he was being watched through a blind.
‘You are a New Zealander,’ the older woman said. There were many rings on her fingers.
‘I am a New Zealander.’
‘No New Zealand,’ said the girl.
The older one made a superfluous comment: ‘She does not want a New Zealander.’
‘We are richer than the English.’
‘That, captain, is not the problem.’
‘I am not a captain.’ That was obvious to anyone who looked at his uniform. He saw the uses of flattery some of the time, but there didn’t seem any point to it just now. Maybe he would never understand these people.