Benchley, Peter - Novel 01

by Time (and a Ticket) (v2. 0)

  With Charles DuFort Ravenel, things might be different. When Charlie was a senior in high school in Charleston, South Carolina, he won a Newsboy Scholarship to Exeter, where he went for one postgraduate year before college. I met Charlie at Exeter and saw him in classes and exams and when we studied European history together. Our conversations seldom left the topic of study, and by the end of my senior year, I knew him only slightly.

  At Harvard, Charlie was the savior of what had for years been a mediocre football team. A thinking man's quarterback, he ran, passed, and tackled his way to the status of a household word among Harvard students and alumni. The aura of wonder and admiration was added to by the fact that he is not a large man, standing about five feet nine inches tall and weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty pounds. The Boston newspapers called him Riverboat, Gaylord, and The Gambler. At one point during his college career, Charlie held five jobs at once, and never did he hold less than two or three. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding and the A.D. Club. And through some feat of supernatural effort and cerebral application, he got good marks. In short, Charlie was a busy lad, and I saw him only rarely. I had dinner with him three or four times, and I saw him at a number of parties. We both lived in Eliot House, so I chatted with him now and then on the paths.

  By graduation, when we had tentatively arranged the trip, I knew him, at best, half as well as I knew Bob. We had neither common friends nor, to the best of my knowledge, common interests. I knew him as a friendly, congenial person, whose accomplishments at school showed him to be ambitious, conscientious, and hardworking. And that was all 1 knew. He could have been a liar, a cheat, a sadist, a back-stabber, a saint, a teetotaler, a bird-lover, or a counterspy for the FBI, and though I suspected he was none of them, I didn't know for sure. On the other hand, he had no way of knowing that / was none of the above. So between fits of panic at the incessant banking of the huge flying machine over Cairo airport, I decided that getting to know and learning to put up with one another would be a challenge to us both.

  I rode into town on the airport bus and peered out the window at the Egyptian night. As the houses passed by, my first reaction was of mild distaste at what instinct recorded as pseudo- or neo-Arabic architecture. Then suddenly, oh lo and behold, it occurred to me that this was neither pseudo nor neo, but honest-to-God Arabic. As we drew nearer Cairo, neon signs appeared, designed in the beautiful Arabic script. I began to realize that this was indeed a whole new world, and all worry about my association with Charlie vanished. Even if we had not up to now had common interests, they were going to be thrust upon us by our common adventure in a strange and fascinating world.

  Charlie was already at the Nile Hilton when I arrived. The hotel fits into the cityscape of Cairo about as well as Yankee Stadium would. It dominates a wide plaza with hundreds of feet of glass and concrete that spread in every direction. The side facing the square is painted with a colossal abstract mural, the modern wildness of which is incongruous with its oriental surroundings. The back of the hotel overlooks the Nile, and on a clear day you can see the pyramids at Giza from the top floor.

  Charlie had been in Jordan and Turkey while I was traveling with my parents, and from a friend in Jordan he had gotten the names of some people to look up in Cairo. He called a man early the next morning, and the man asked us to come see him. We crossed the square and started down the street toward the man's place of business. Most of the people on the streets wore white—white robes or white blouses and white slacks. Egyptian women, unchanged by years of European influence, still covered their faces with heavy veils.

  We hadn't gone fifty yards when the first shoeshine boy accosted us. He was young, perhaps ten or twelve. He wore no shoes, and his only clothing was a pair of tattered, filthy shorts and a sleeveless T shirt. He came at me from the side.

  "Good night, Mike!" he yelled, pulling at my jacket. "Good night, Mike!"

  "No, thank you," I said, and kept walking.

  "Good night, Mike!" He held up his shoeshine box. He tried to move in front of me and block my way. I stepped around him.

  "La! Mishaooz!" said Charlie. The boy looked at him uncertainly, then laughed.

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "It means 'No, I don't want any.' I learned it from a guy in Jordan."

  "Lot of good it did," I said, pushing the boy out of my way.

  The boy bent down and daubed his finger on my right shoe, streaking it with black polish. "Good night, Mike!" he shouted.

  "Well, God damn you!" I said. I raised a hand to hit him and he moved away, laughing.

  "Don't hit him," said Charlie. "I tried it in Turkey, and the punk pulled a knife on me."

  The boy came back. He ran in front of me, bent down, and spat on my shoe. "Good night, Mike!" While he was bent over, I bumped him with my hip, and he lost his balance and sat down on the pavement with a thud.

  "Keep walking," said Charlie. "We could get knifed." We kept going. When the boy didn't follow us, I looked back. He was chasing a pair of middle-aged European women.

  The man we had been sent to see was not an Arab. He had been born in Egypt, although his ancestry was Lithuanian. He was a merchant, as were most of the Lithuanians in

  Cairo, and he spoke excellent English, fluent French, flawless Arabic, and some Lithuanian. He used French in the conduct of his business, and so, he said, did almost all Egyptians of European descent. A dark, pudgy man, he had a broad grin that crinkled his eyes and made his glasses slide down his nose.

  When we had introduced ourselves, he presented a friend of his to us, an Italian who had married an American girl and was working for the American Embassy while waiting for papers that would permit him to go to the United States.

  We talked of our trip for a few minutes, and then the Lithuanian interrupted and said, "Do you take notes on your travels?"

  "Yes," said Charlie.

  "Please never put my name in your notes."

  "All right. Any reason?"

  "It is not a good idea. You will see why as we talk."

  "He thinks everything is wired and censored and tapped," said the Italian. "He thinks there are spies for the government in the Hilton."

  "You can laugh," said the Lithuanian. "You are going to America. You are already as good as a citizen. They can't touch you. With me, it is different."

  The Italian shrugged his shoulders. "Enough," he said. "We should have lunch." He turned to Charlie and me. "Would you honor us by joining us for lunch?"

  We thanked him and said we would be glad to.

  "Wait a moment," said the Lithuanian. "I received a letter from your friend in Jordan. He asked me to do anything I could for you. Do you need anything now?"

  "Not that I know of," said Charlie.

  "Money?"

  "We'll have to change some money sometime, but I think we're all right at the moment."

  "When you change your money," said the Lithuanian, "change it with me. At a regular tourist bureau you get a bad exchange, what they call a tourist exchange. I will give you a realistic amount."

  "But then how can you get the same amount for the travelers checks?" I said.

  He smiled. "Now you will see why I don't want my name in your notes. For all the time you are in Egypt, you come to me and I will give you any money you need. You give me nothing. Then when you get back to America, you will be kind enough to deposit the dollars in a bank account for me. It is the only way I can get dollars, and the only way I can get any money at all out of the country."

  "I don't mean to be nosy," said Charlie, "but why do you need to get money out of the country?"

  "I will explain it all to you later," said the Lithuanian. "Now let us go eat."

  We stood up and moved toward the door. "Oh, I forgot," said the Lithuanian. "You must swear never to mention my bank account to anyone. If you are going to talk about me, disguise me so no one will know who it is. The penalty for anyone caught with a bank account outside Egypt is life imprisonment."
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  At lunch, Charlie and I tried to talk about Egypt, but the Lithuanian refused. "Not here," he said.

  "There you go again," said the Italian. "He thinks all the waiters are spies."

  "You never know," said the Lithuanian. "Remember your friend. He didn't say very much, and look at him. No business."

  "His business was going anyway. It was a fluke. Besides, it wasn't a waiter, it was the owner of the restaurant. They'd been friends for a long time. My friend thought he could trust him."

  "A fine friend! Regardless, it never hurts to be cautious."

  The second course arrived. It was chunks of lamb on a skewer, resting on a bed of saffron rice. "You know," said the Italian as he brushed a piece of rice off his shirt, "I am in a kind of dilemma. For one who is almost an American citizen, I have a badly unpatriotic attitude."

  "How so?" I said.

  "I'm not sure. I admire America and respect her, and even from this distance I suppose I love her, though I can't be certain. But America does so many things wrong."

  "America makes mistakes, if that's what you mean. I don't see how that should make you unpatriotic. I don't know too many countries that never make mistakes."

  "It's not mistakes. It's that I think I'm disappointed with America, even before I get there. I've been taught all the things she stands for, and all I ever see is hypocrisy. America seems to have a double standard almost as bad as Russia's. You say you believe in one thing, then you go and do something which contradicts it."

  "Do you mean going back on our word?" said Charlie.

  "No. It has nothing to do with promises," said the Italian. "It's in your whole policy. It's what you claim to believe. Look, you say you are against tyranny, right? You say you will not support any government that suppresses its people, that denies them freedom of choice, correct? You say you are fighting for democracy."

  "Right," I said. "And look what we're fighting: Russia, China, Cuba—"

  "Cuba! You're against Cuba now, in this time of oppression. What about the time before, with Batista? What did you do when he was in power? You maintained diplomatic relations and gave him aid. Near the end you realized he was on the way out, and your newspapers started writing articles against him, but that was all."

  "Oh. Well—"

  "Look at your allies. Not the neutrals, but your allies. In Europe alone, you have two allies that are unabashed dictators, Franco's regime and Salazar's. You wish to see some oppression? Go to Spain."

  "I know about Franco, but do you know what would happen if we didn't support him? There'd be uprisings, because there would be no food, no supplies of anything. And the Communists would probably be in there in a flash. If they didn't support Franco himself, they'd have him overthrown by supporting all the rival groups. Then wouldn't that be nice, having a Communist country boxing in southern Europe?"

  The Italian said, "So you think Communist oppression is, by its very nature, worse than Franco's oppression?"

  "Yes. Communism will spread. Franco's regime at least has no designs on anything outside Spain."

  "I will accept that, although it seems to indicate that you feel Spain can only have an extreme government, extreme right or extreme left. You preach democracy to these countries without believing it can work for them."

  "But—"

  "No, wait. I've thought about this before, and I've made a mental list of all the dictators you support. Some call themselves presidents, some kings. Spain and Portugal we've mentioned. Then there is the Shah of Iran. He is certainly not as bad as some, but he does not by any means allow a representative government. In Pakistan you support Ayub, who runs an unpopular, tight-fisted, tyrannical regime. Not only do you support him, you arm him with jet fighters. And look at the whole Middle East, run by a string of dictators who accept your aid and then, with few exceptions, stash a lot of it away in Switzerland for themselves. But you keep pouring it in, even though the people are still as poor and all the money's doing is larding up a few petty tyrants against the day when they'll be overthrown. Of the neutrals, you support Nasser, because you know if you don't he'll go directly to the Communists."

  “For God's sake, keep it down!" said the Lithuanian.

  "Then there is Sukarno, the absurd little hysteric who knows how to make both you and the Russians pay. You don't want to lose Ghana, so you pour money into Nkruma's dictatorship so some fool can buy himself a gold bed. On the list so far we have six dictatorships, three kingdoms, and a sheikdom. Shall I go on?"

  "No. You've made your point."

  "I'm not trying to be unreasonable," said the Italian, "and I do see your point about certain dictatorships being preferable to Communism. The unfortunate thing is the appearance your policy creates. Even if someone has never heard Americans speak about making the world safe for democracy, he must judge on what he sees. And what he sees is America being very cautious, not daring to overthrow tyrannies, and the Russians being progressive, revolutionary. They do overthrow governments, and the common man never hears of the Russian brand of oppression. Our government won't print it in the papers, and where it is printed, most of the people can't read. All they hear is that such-and-such a government—well, take Batista's, for example—has been overthrown and that that is good. Yet those that hate their own government, like the Spanish and the Jordanians, see the tyrants reinforced by planes and guns and boxes of supplies from America."

  "Are you going to eat your food?" said the Lithuanian. "If you sit here and argue like this, someone will think something is strange. It is not wise."

  "Oh, Lord," said the Italian. "He's off again." We arranged to meet the two of them the next day. They had said they would take us on a sightseeing tour, to the pyramids, the bazaars, and the mosques. We thanked them for lunch, and walked to a museum next to the hotel.

  "The Lithuanian may sound silly," said Charlie as we walked along, "and it's easy for the Italian to laugh. He's safe. But I think the Lithuanian is scared, really scared. I'd be interested to know just why he's so scared." "Well, he said he's got that bank account." "It's more than that," said Charlie. "I'm sure of it."

  The next day, the Lithuanian and the Italian picked us up at the hotel and drove us to Giza. We stood for a few minutes at the fence enclosing the Sphinx, which has been made by photographs to appear three times its actual size, and we thought of climbing one of the pyramids, then decided against it when we stood at the base of one of them and saw how many steps it would take to get to the top.

  Near the Sphinx were men who offered camel rides for fifty cents. A portly American woman paid one of the men and struggled aboard his camel as her friend stood to one side with a camera. The beast heaved itself to its feet, and the woman clutched the pommel of the saddle. When her friend had taken some pictures, she said, "Let me down now."

  The camel's owner, who was holding the rope, smiled. "You give me dollar," he said.

  "I've already paid you," said the woman. "Now let me down."

  "You give me dollar," said the man.

  "I will not," said the woman. "Get me off this beast!"

  The man jerked the bridle, and the camel threw its head back, bouncing the woman in the saddle. She gave a short yelp and grasped the pommel tighter with both hands.

  "Elizabeth!" she screamed. "Do something!"

  Her friend strode over to the man, the ripple soles of her walking shoes crunching on the gravel. "Listen here," she said, "either you let her down this minute, or—"

  "You give me dollar?" said the man.

  "Most certainly not," she said. She raised the camera over her head. "I'll strike you with this camera if you don't let her down." She waved the camera by the strap.

  The man laughed and jerked the bridle again. This time the camel reared slightly, barely lifting its two front feet off the ground.

  "Elizabeth, give him the dollar!" screamed the woman in the saddle. "Give him anything, but get me off here!"

  "I most certainly will not," said Elizabeth. "This is outrageous.
I'll stand right here until the savage lets you down."

  "You can stand right there, but I'm the one who's up here! Give the man his dollar."

  "It is not his dollar. It's—"

  The camel threw his head back. "Elizabeth, please!" screamed the woman.

  "Oh, all right," said Elizabeth, reaching in her purse.

  "But I think this is shocking." She held some coins out to the man. "I don't have an American dollar," she said. "Will you take piasters?"

  The man took the coins and clucked to the camel, which dropped to its knees. The woman scrambled out of the saddle and slid down the camel's back. The man directed a mocking bow to them as they fled toward the tourist rest-house a hundred yards away.

  "Why didn't you do something?" I said to the Lithuanian. "You speak Arabic."

  "And get mobbed by all this filth?" He pointed to the groups of sleepy Arabs who were selling postcards and souvenirs by the Sphinx. "No, thank you very much."

  We had a Coca-Cola at the resthouse, and then drove to the Mohammed Ali mosque, the massive memorial and place of worship that sits on a high hill overlooking all of Cairo. Below us the city shimmered in the hot sun, and the white and gold spires of the mosques dotted the landscape like jewels on a bed of velvet. In the distance, all the way across the city and the river, we could see Giza and the three tiny specks that were the pyramids.

  "The city is beautiful," said the Lithuanian.

  "It sure is," said Charlie.

  The Lithuanian paused for a moment, then shook his head. "But it is also a great shame."