Benchley, Peter - Novel 01

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

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "What is happening to Cairo. And to Egypt. It is a shame."

  After he had looked around to make sure no one was listening, the Lithuanian began to talk about his life in Egypt. Ever since Nasser had begun his practice of nationalizing businesses in Egypt, all the small merchants had lived in fear and uncertainty. The government gave no warning. It decided, as if on a whim, that certain businesses would at a given moment become the property of the government, and a man who was making £300 ($650) a month from his own business suddenly found himself on the government payroll at perhaps £100 a month. The government avoided charges of thievery by "buying" the businesses with government bonds of twenty-year maturity, bonds that even the most patriotic Egyptians considered worthless.

  "I will give you an example of the ruthlessness of this man Nasser," said the Lithuanian. "Always Egypt has had to import its wine. Many Egyptians love wine, but it is impossible to find a good grape that will grow in the desert. So one man, a foreigner, set out to develop that certain grape. He bought a small piece of dry soil and labored for twenty years on his grape, and he succeeded. He developed a grape that would grow well in the desert, and he began to make wine. It is a fine wine, and the first Egyptian wine we have had. Since there were no duties, he sold his wine cheaper than the imported wines, and he sold a great deal of it. He became a very rich man, but he did it by helping the country. He started a new industry, saved the people money, and provided many jobs. Even under Farouk he was only admired, never disturbed. But when Nasser came in, he took the man's business away from him. He said the man was making money from Egyptians, and no foreigner can do that. The man lost everything. Nasser gave him nothing for all his years of work, not even the houses and money he had accumulated for himself. Nasser took it all."

  The Lithuanian's own business had not been nationalized —yet. But he had it on good authority that all businesses like his would be taken over within a year. He wasn't sure.

  He knew the axe was hanging, but he didn't know for certain when it would fall. And once his business was gone, he was sure that he would have work for at most one year, until he could train someone else. He was a Christian, and Christians are not welcome in Egypt. When a Christian loses one job, he is prohibited by the government from getting another. It is part of Nasser's policy of "Egypt for the Egyptians," and to the Arabs, Egyptian is synonymous with Moslem. The policy was started when Nasser took the jobs away from all Europeans and forced them to leave the country. Europeans had given Egypt most of her industry and had developed her potential wealth. Their work was not, to be sure, totally unselfish, but it resulted in community profit, like the winemaker's efforts.

  The Lithuanian was secretly planning to leave Egypt. The planning had to be done in secret because it was the only way he could hope to salvage any money or any belongings. The government would treat him exactly as it treated the Europeans—if he left, he would be allowed to take nothing but the clothes he wore, no foreign currency, no Egyptian pounds, no hard goods. Thus he had opened a bank account in the United States and was desperately trying to put money in it. And thus he was slowly smuggling his possessions out of Egypt. He had sent some jewelry with a friend to Jordan, some old gold coins with a friend to Canada, some precious Swiss francs, hidden for two years in the false bottom of a drawer, with a friend to France.

  "Did you lose any of it?" said Charlie.

  "I have no way of knowing," he said. "I am getting a visa to Canada, and from there I can get a visa to the United States. From here it is not a long wait to get into Canada. It takes more than ten years to obtain a resident visa in the United States from Egypt. When I reach the United States, I will see how much of what I sent arrived. In my situation I must trust people. I suppose it is a good thing, trusting people. It is always safer to trust a friend with a job than to pay a stranger to do it. Of all my friends who have left Egypt, only one lost a lot, and he was the only one who actually paid a man to take large sums of money out with him. The man ran off with everything. I think an act of trust based on friendship is better than any business agreement."

  "We'll take some stuff out for you," said Charlie.

  "No," said the Lithuanian. "I wouldn't put that burden on you. I have some friends who are taking short trips abroad, and they will take it for me. They have done it before, and they know all the ways to do it safely. Also, they know the full extent of the risks they are taking."

  "But that's just it," said Charlie. "With us, there would be no risk. Even if they caught me, they wouldn't do anything to us. I mean, nothing serious, anyway."

  "They could do a great deal, but they probably wouldn't. They would fine you and perhaps detain you for a day or two, and they would make mention of the incident to your embassy. It is not worth it, either to you or to me, for if you do get caught, look what I lose. No, my friend, I thank you for the offer, but I cannot accept. The people I will send my valuables with are very experienced in this field."

  "What would happen to you," I said, "if you were caught?"

  "I'm not sure," said the Lithuanian. "I think about it often. For the bank account alone, I could be put in prison for the rest of my life. I imagine that would be my punishment."

  "If they could get enough on him," said the Italian, "they might shoot him."

  The Lithuanian turned and looked at him coldly. "I am aware of that," he said.

  As we drove back into town, we passed through one of the new housing developments that have sprung up in Cairo's poorer sections. The buildings, six- and seven-story apartment houses, were built of concrete. They were new, but already cracks appeared in the walls. Broken windows were left broken, and jagged pieces of glass were all that was left in most of the frames. Tier upon tier of laundry hung drying between the buildings. It seemed that once having built these houses, the government had denied all responsibility for their upkeep and operation. They were left as a fait accompli, as if the government had wanted to prove to someone that it was doing something for the people. No one had told the people, who had spent their lives in mud huts and ramshackle lean-tos made from tin sheeting and cracked boards that they found in the street, how to live in a real house, how to keep clean, how to maintain a semblance of order. We got the impression that the people were simply picked up bodily and shoved into these houses, and that the whole package was immediately displayed to the world and then forgotten.

  Women still washed their clothes in the street, and children lay in the gutter below the washing and sailed paper boats in the swirl of water that flowed down the street into the drain. A bus careened around a corner, full of workers coming home at the end of the day. It was so crowded that people hung from the window ledges and the chrome stripping when there was no more room inside. The bus stopped in the middle of the street, and the people poured out, yelling and laughing and pushing.

  "These are the people that believe," said the Lithuanian. "These are the people who will follow Nasser through any war, through any hell on earth, because they believe in him." He blew his horn at the crowd, trying to make an opening for the car. A few people shuffled lazily to one side, but the crowd was still a solid wall in front of the car. They jeered at the Lithuanian and shook their fists at him. He leaned harder on the horn. A few more people moved, but the way was still blocked. The jeering grew louder.

  ''They know their day is coming," said the Lithuanian, "and they shout as if to say, 'wait and see, wait until it is our turn.' "

  Finally, the crowd broke, and the Lithuanian drove through, still leaning on the horn. The high-pitched, jeering shouts followed us down the street.

  "It's more difficult every day," said the Italian. "Today they moved out of the way just a little slower than they did yesterday. Tomorrow they will move a little slower than today."

  On the way back to the hotel, the Italian asked to be dropped at the American Embassy. He said he wanted to go over some business with his assistant. The Lithuanian did not drive int
o the embassy driveway, nor did he park on the street in front of the embassy, which was completely free of cars. Instead, he approached the building from the rear and left the Italian more than a block away from the entrance. I asked him why he hadn't driven up to the door.

  "I cannot afford to be seen too often around the American Embassy," he said. "Someone might notice me there and start talking."

  "What's wrong with being with Americans?" asked Charlie.

  "Nothing. Only it is not wise to make a habit of it. Someone might suspect something and start checking on me. Then by accident it might become known that I am planning to leave. I do not want that to happen."

  The following afternoon we boarded a train which would take us up the Nile to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. We allowed ourselves the luxury of berths for the overnight trip, and for thirteen hours we lay in the cramped compartment, digging sand and dust out of our ears and mouths, running our tongues over our gritty teeth trying to rid ourselves of the feeling that our mouths were full of chalk. We tried to seal the cracks around the window and door with pillows and raincoats, but the dust floated through anyway and settled in and on everything, even our eyelashes, so every time we blinked we dropped grains of the foul powder in our eyes. I awoke twice during the night, convinced that I was choking to death, and coughed and hacked over the edge of the berth until, exhausted, I fell back on the hard mattress and gasped myself to sleep.

  The first day, we toured with a group from the hotel where we were staying. The monuments were magnificent, huge mausoleums carved out of the soft stone of the desert. Much of the decorative painting remains, and Charlie and I marveled at the bright, clear colors and the intricate details that had been laboriously set into the stone four thousand years ago. The entrances to most of the tombs are small openings that lead thirty or forty feet below the surface of the desert, for almost all the tombs are underground and show no trace of themselves aboveground. I wondered how anyone had found the tombs in this vast expanse of unmarked sand, and the guide said that they had been found as a result of some of the most fortunate thievery in history. Since the pharaohs were buried with their servants and with all the people who had worked on the tomb and who knew where it was, the only people who could locate the tomb after it had been sealed were the high priest and his followers. Very often, the high priest would wait a few years, then go back and loot the tomb of all the treasures of the pharaoh, not bothering to reseal it when he was through. Then he would blame the theft on some unsuspecting slave, have him murdered, and the case would be closed. Or if the high priest himself didn't loot the tomb, one of his descendants, to whom he had passed on the secret of the tomb's location, would sneak off into the desert and come back a rich man. Since they had first been opened, some of the tombs had been used for shelter by travelers and as temporary homes by nomads. Thus it is very rare, said the guide, to discover a tomb that has not been opened and looted, and thus museums treasure what little they have in the way of jewelry and tools and household goods of the pharaohs.

  There were two Harvard professors on the tour with us, and as soon as we got back to the hotel, the elder, a thin, balding man in a gray suit, rushed to the bar and gulped a double scotch-on-the-rocks. He asked us to join him, and we sat down as he ordered another drink.

  "Combats bilharzia," he said, lifting his glass. "Got to kill those worms." Bilharzia is a disease caused by parasites that inhabit the Nile, and it attacks many of the people who live on the river, slowly destroying their brains and eventually killing them. "Hang around that river all day, and the worms'll get you for sure," said the professor. "Barman! A scotch."

  When the sun was low in the sky and the temperature had dropped well below a hundred, Charlie and I walked out along the river. It was the month of Ramadan, the Moslem equivalent of Lent, and from the towers of the mosques came the high, wailing call to prayer. The river was quiet, and flecked with red and gold from the setting sun. Small sailing boats, their sharply triangular sails barely able to fill in the light breeze, cut back and forth across the water. Robed Arabs paddled and poled their flatboats along the still shore. Women were washing clothes on the bank opposite, squeezing water through them and beating them on flat rocks. Thin, dark-skinned children dangled their feet over the sides of the ramshackle riverboats moored to slanting wooden posts sunk in the mud.

  For the first time, I felt a deep sense of the exotic. To our left, up the river, was the Sudan, and after that, Uganda and Kenya and Lake Victoria and Tanganyika, names redolent of romance and storybook excitement. It mattered not at all that the romance and excitement most probably did not exist. Sitting under a palm tree, watching the sun sink beyond the desert and hearing the melodious cry from the mosque as it drifted across the water, I could have found glamour in the name Newark.

  I was awakened at six o'clock Wednesday morning by the sound of beating wings. I rolled over and wiped the sweat from my eyes and forehead, sat up in bed, and found myself staring face to face with what I was sure was the biggest kite in the world. The bird, a relative of the hawk, was perched on the edge of the balcony outside our window, and he was gazing at me over his hooked beak with his big, round, dark eyes. I waved an arm at him, to show him that I wasn't dead and wouldn't make a tender breakfast, but he simply shifted his feet under his hefty body and craned his neck forward.

  For no reason at all, it occurred to me that today was the 14th of February, Valentine's Day. I leaned across to Charlie's bed and thumped him on the shoulder. "Hey," I said. "Wake up. Someone's brought us a present."

  Charlie lifted his head off the pillow and said, "Huh?"

  "Someone brought us a present."

  "For what?"

  “For Valentine's Day, of course. Look." I pointed to the bird, who had jumped to the window sill and sat with his head cocked curiously to one side.

  Charlie pushed himself into a sitting position and opened one eye. For a count of three, the one eye stayed half closed. Then suddenly both eyes popped open with an almost audible click as the thin lines of sleep were torn loose. "Omigod! A vulture!" The bird sat bolt upright, as if denying an unpleasant epithet. Slowly, Charlie reached behind him for his pillow. When he had the pillow firmly in his grasp, he flung his arm around and fired the pillow at the bird. "Duck!" he cried, diving under the covers. The pillow went wide and struck the side of the window. The bird watched it fall to the floor, then pecked at a mite under a wing. He blinked once at Charlie, once at me, and turned casually away and jumped off the windowsill, flapping his wings.

  We hired our own guide for that day. He was a man of at least seventy, tall and gaunt with a thick nose and a shaved head. Despite the heat, he wore a long black overcoat. We rode in horse-drawn carts to the ferry that shuttles people back and forth across the Nile. We could see the souvenir sellers on the opposite shore, already gathering by the cars that take tourists to and from the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

  Along the road, people slept in the shade of their mud huts, or sat with their backs to the dusty walls and covered their faces with their robes. Flies clustered on the sleeping people, drinking from the corners of their eyes and the sides of their mouths. Even those people who were awake didn't bother to brush away the flies, and when we stopped for a moment by the side of the road, we saw a mother with a nursing child permit flies to gather around the nipple and the sucking mouth and drink from the moisture. One fly drank at the outboard corner of each of the baby's eyes, and flies drank from the mother's eyes and pendulous lower lip. I turned to the guide, who was sitting next to me, and said, "Why don't they brush the flies away?"

  "It is useless," he said. "They always come back. We have long since stopped brushing them away." He turned full face to me, and I saw a large black fly sitting at the corner of his left eye. We drove on. "It is not bad," said the guide. "The flies only drink. They do not bite." A few yards farther on, we passed a little girl who was selling oranges at a stand made from an empty crate. The flies, bold
and persistent, clustered around the oranges, and the girl held her hands over her face and shook her shoulders. "Only for such as she are they bad," said the guide. "She has not yet learned to accept them. As she grows older, she will learn." The flies rested on every orange and on practically every inch of uncovered flesh on the girl. From time to time she shook her head violently and stamped her foot.

  A fly landed on my hand, and as I slapped at it, it made no attempt to fly away. It rolled dead to the floor of the cart. "They're spoiled," I said. "They have it too easy."

  We spent the morning looking at carvings on the walls of the temples. There were the stories of the lives of the phar-aohs and their queens, of wars and conquests, of gods and miracles. At one point, the guide lowered his raspy voice and whispered to us that he was going to show us something he had not been able to show for months, because there had always been ladies on his tours. This was something for men only. He took us to a remote corner of a large temple and showed us the story of the god of fertility, a strapping lad with endowments that could only have been a myth. Carved on another wall was the Egyptian version of the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth. The sun god, whose local name was Ammon, came to a woman and told her that she was to have the honor of bearing a child by him, and that the child would be the ruler of the two Egypts, upper and lower. Thus was born the first of the line of pharaohs, who were to the Egyptians the direct descendants of God, as Christ is to the Christians the son of God.

  We stopped at a resthouse, a hastily built structure of loose planking and tin sheets that sat in the open desert between two underground tombs. We had been willing to wait for food until we got back to the hotel, since resthouse food in Egypt is notably dull and often bad, but the guide said he would appreciate it if we would take shelter from the sun for a few minutes. Charlie and I ordered Cokes, and we offered one to the old man. He shook his head.

  ''Then can I get you a glass of water?" said Charlie.