Benchley, Peter - Novel 01

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

  The guide ran his tongue over his parched lips and spat dryly onto the sand. "I cannot," he said, "but I thank you."

  "You can't?"

  "Not until the evening meal," said the guide. "In the month of Ramadan, we cannot eat or drink until the evening meal. We cannot even swallow our own spittle." The edges of his lips were coated with white foam where his spittle had dried.

  "No water?" said Charlie.

  "Nothing," said the guide. "That is why I asked you to rest here for a few moments. For a man of my age it is hard to fast all day in the desert without weakening." He paused and spat again. "But I will not keep you here long. Just a few moments."

  "Not on your life," said Charlie. "We'll stay here as long as you want, till you feel like moving. We're in no hurry."

  The old man smiled and said, "You are kind."

  We drank our Cokes in silence, enjoying the tingling coolness of the liquid as it wet our mouths, but swallowing quickly to avoid the sticky-sweet aftertaste that Coke leaves when it gets warm. When he had returned his empty bottle, Charlie said to the guide, ''Do you approve of Nasser?"

  The question took the guide by surprise. "Why, of course," he said. "He is a great man."

  "And what about Farouk?"

  "A bad boy, Farouk. A silly, stupid man. He should not have had a place of such importance. He was more concerned with women and drink than with his country. His self-indulgence paid him slight reward in the end."

  Charlie said, "Why is Nasser such a great man?"

  "You need only look to see the great things he has done," said the guide. "I am told that in Cairo he has built wonderful new houses for the people. There is evidence of his greatness even here. You have seen the roads that lead from the river to the monuments. They are fine roads, you will agree."

  We nodded, remembering the narrow, roughly tarred roads.

  "Those roads used to be all dust and dirt. A year ago, when the King of Morocco came to Egypt, Nasser ordered the roads improved, and within a month they were tarred! It has made life a great deal easier for us."

  "Would he have ordered the roads tarred if the King of Morocco hadn't come?" said Charlie.

  The old man looked at Charlie, then turned and spat into the sand. "Would you?" he said, and he leaned forward on the table and pushed himself up from his chair. "It is time to go."

  At the end of the day, the guide took us to some souvenir shops. Most of the shops sold junk, he said, but he would show us where there was good ivory. Charlie bought two or three ivory letter openers, and I bought an ivory cigarette holder. The next day, a jewelry dealer in Cairo told us that our "ivory" was polished buffalo bone.

  9

  At seven o'clock Saturday morning, we boarded a Middle East Airlines Viscount for Jerusalem, Jordan. The night before, we had dined with the Lithuanian and the Italian and their wives at a floating restaurant called Omar Khayyam, a lavishly decorated barge on the Nile. We settled our accounts with the Lithuanian, who gave us the name of his bank and the number of his account. We each owed him about ninety dollars. As we parted, he said, "I will see you again. Next time, in America."

  The plane had to fly a circular route, over the deserts of Egypt and northern Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to avoid violating Israeli air space. We flew low, and the ride was bumpy because of the currents of hot air rising from the desert. We saw no towns, no roads, and no people during the flight, only the dry, red desert and the empty shoreline of the northern end of the Red Sea.

  It had been ninety when we left Cairo early in the morning. When we landed in Jerusalem, it was forty-four.

  As a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jerusalem is a divided city—half lies in Israel, the other half in Jordan. Ironically, the birthplace of Christ, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Way of the Cross, and Calvary are all on the Jordanian side, in the Old City. It seemed to us strange that we should have to go to an Arab country to find the seat of Christian tradition.

  Charlie had passed through Jordan when I was in Rome, and he had met the head of a small tourist agency who had found him a cheap, clean hotel. Charlie called him from the airport, and he drove out and picked us up and took us to another cheap, clean hotel.

  The man was a stocky, olive-skinned Arab with a thick mustache, who wore American suits and had studied English in Chicago. During the next few days, we spent a great deal of time with him, because we were dealing with him about a complicated, only half legal way for us to purchase a multi-stop airline ticket through to New Delhi. At one point, when his negotiations nearly broke down, I confessed to him that I had long harbored a secret wish to drive across the Iranian and Afghan deserts to India. But as soon as I mentioned this to the man, he put a stop to my fantasy by saying, "Great idea! I'll arrange everything. Let's see, you'll need one Land Rover, a tent, provisions, a guide, two or three automatic rifles and two or three pistols—in case you run into one of the many bandit gangs—one or two thousand rounds of ammunition, a spare for every part of the engine, four extra tires, and innumerable gallons of gasoline. I'll get it all for you. The only thing I can't get for you is the course in how to completely dismantle an automobile engine. But somebody around here will know where to send you. As for price ..."

  Charlie leaned over and gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. "Brilliant thinking," he said. "Ill meet you there."

  When business was slow, the man and/or his helper guided us around the old city. One afternoon we were driving through the hills outside of town, and the man said, "By the way, I never asked you how you liked Egypt."

  "It was fascinating," said Charlie. "But now we're trying to figure out which word fits Nasser better, tyrant or malevolent dictator."

  "What do you mean?"

  We told him of the oppression we had seen, the snatching of businesses and the prejudice against and treatment of Europeans, and we described the lack of progress and the police state atmosphere. We said that Nasser was violating a tenet that we, as Americans, considered inviolable: the right of every man to use his talents and his sweat to improve his lot, the principle of free enterprise. His attacks on the individual were, we felt, tyrannical. We added that we felt the only conceivable argument in favor of tyranny was that it is efficient, and Nasser's regime was hardly efficient. It had not as yet managed to justify its oppressive nature by sufficient concrete improvement.

  Though the man was reluctant to talk about his own government, since he didn't know us well and felt that loose talk about his government was unwise, he spoke openly of Nasser. He began by attributing our lack of understanding of the problem to the differences between the Oriental and Occidental minds, which made Charlie and me impatient. It seemed that he was going to explain away everything in abstract terms, and the nationalizing of people's businesses was not, to us, abstract. He also said that the Oriental mind was so completely alien to Westerners that we might never understand it. But his point was more concrete than we thought, and as he explained, we saw that he was not hedging at all.

  The Oriental mind and temperament are, he said, governed largely by emotion, almost never by reason—especially when they have not been guided by education. It is a dangerous mind, for once it has been seized by emotion, there is little that can change its course. Its mass instincts are very strong, and a mob led by a convincing orator with a cause, good or bad, is often unstoppable. Most of the people in Egypt are uneducated, and until the time when they can receive sufficient education, they must be held in by a tight rein. When Nasser came to power, he shouted about injustice. He is a good speaker, and he fired the people with words about tyrants, oppressors, and imperialism, and told them that he was their savior and would give them all that Farouk and his predecessors had withheld. He gave them some food as a token of his good faith and promised to effect miraculous changes in their lives.

  Once they had had even the slightest taste of a better life, there was no stopping them. They saw that the way to get food and clothes and the riches that had never been theirs was simply
to take them, for that was what Nasser himself was doing. Moreover, they had a cause. They were fighting injustice, Nasser told them so, and it was very convenient to have the fight against injustice benefit them. Whereas they had always been docile, accepting their fate and never challenging their masters, suddenly they saw that they could challenge, and that challenging brought results.

  To save Egypt from chaos, our guide went on, Nasser had to put the clamps on. He regulated the press, to keep the fanatics out of print, and he outlawed gatherings that might incite a crowd to thievery and murder—all in the name of his own fight against injustice. But even as he enforced his iron rule, he knew that he had no time to waste. The people would not sit idly by and wait for gradual reforms. They were through with being grateful and had become demanding instead. He had to move fast, had to enact his reforms as quickly as possible, and the only way to get the money to do that was to nationalize all profitable businesses. He needed every piaster he could get, and he did not have time to buy up businesses gradually. Besides, if he simply took businesses, he would receive more money than if he bought them and waited for them to show a profit. Ninety-five per cent of Egypt's wealth lay in the hands of five per cent of the people. Nasser himself had told the ninety-five per cent of the people that this was the case. He had to get at the wealth before the mobs did. His method would ruin five per cent of the people, but there was every reason to believe that it would give Egypt new life and, eventually, do a great deal of good for the people as a whole. It was, in a sense, a half-democracy: it believed in doing what is best for the majority, but it neglected the other side of the coin, individual freedom.

  The guide admitted that Nasser still had nothing impressive to show the people for all his nationalizing. And, he added, the people were getting restless. But Nasser did have some proof of his good works: he could show the people that their former masters, the "oppressors," no longer had the wealth and could not hold power over them. He was driving all the Europeans out, creating an "Egypt for the Egyptians." It was their country, and soon they would be reaping the great fruits of their years of rewardless labor. The state had the wealth, and the state, said Nasser, was the people.

  But when his reforms begin to take effect, said the guide, when he can redistribute the land and build good houses and start the long process of educating the people, he will relax his controls. He must hold the people down only so long as he has nothing concrete to show for all his talk, for the people do not realize that it takes time to create a whole new government and social system for a country. They want to be shown right now.

  Although the guide's explanation did not lighten the repugnance Charlie and I felt for any policy of thievery cloaked in terms like "nationalizing," and although neither of us could recall any dictatorship that had voluntarily evolved into a democracy, it did leave us with a very uncomfortable doubt. Is it possible that a certain end, if it is broad enough and worthwhile enough, can justify any means? Can you let ninety-five per cent of the citizens of a country live in abject poverty because it is wrong to take property from a man without paying for it? Can individual freedoms be held in highest importance when a country is trying to cleanse itself of the filth spread over it by a recently deposed dictator? In the United States, we have never lived under a dictator. Wealth has never been as unequally distributed as it was in Egypt—or, for that matter, as it was in czarist Russia. In the United States, the government can safeguard individual freedoms without condoning the oppression of anyone. Can we judge all peoples by our own standards?

  The guide took us to see the birthplace of Christ. It was raining, and a cold wind blew the rain almost horizontally-over the hills, so it stung our faces as we ran across the courtyard in front of the shrine. "Despite the weather, you are here at a good time," said the guide when we were inside. "In another month, you wouldn't be able to move in the streets. People come from all over the world to spend Easter here."

  The "inn" is now a small room in a church. The floor is of rough stone, and around the walls are altars and candles and displays belonging to nearly every Christian sect. "No one is sure exactly where in this room Christ was born," said the guide, "so every religion picks a spot and tells its followers to worship that spot as the actual one. The Catholics are over there, the Greeks there, and different Protestant groups are all around the room."

  The guide's helper was a young Jordanian student who was working to put himself through school. He was about our age, and because he had few opportunities to talk to Americans other than those middle-aged ladies and retired gentlemen whom he escorted during the Easter season, he was eager to spend time with us. He walked us through the old city and along the Way of the Cross, and every ten minutes or so he asked if we would like to stop for a cup of tea and "a little chat." By the end of the day, we were bloated with fifteen or twenty cups of the tepid, milky tea. Though we couldn't know it then, our tea-drinking bouts with him were good training for our forthcoming socializing with tea-crazy Indians.

  The young man had the same fear of the police and of informers as the Lithuanian in Egypt. He always took us to dark, quiet restaurants and sat in the shadows in the back of the room. He told us it was safe to assume that one out of three Jordanians over the age of eighteen was in the police, the secret police, or in some respect on the government payroll as an informer. He was violently anti-Israel, but not, as is common, violently pro-Arab. He was more concerned with affairs in his own country than with any pan-Arab movement. And his anti-Israel feeling was more personal than political. His family owned a farm in Palestine and had been forced to flee during the terrible years of chaos and massacre after World War II. Though the farm was still standing, and though he maintained a fierce, driving desire to reclaim his land, he had no real hope of ever seeing it again.

  The more we talked to him, the more I was impressed with his intelligence, his alertness, and his broad range of knowledge. He could talk intelligently and thoughtfully about France and Algeria, about Russia, about America, about India and Pakistan and Malaya, while the best we could do was trip lightly over the surface of most of these countries. And his knowledge was not only political: he had read Moliere, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Confucius, had studied Tocqueville's Democracy In America, and was an ardent devotee of dixieland jazz. I was sure that a lot of his education had been acquired secretly, and the difficulties he had overcome to get this education made his knowledge even more impressive. His desire to learn, to know, to understand, must have been great indeed, but at the same time I felt that his life must have been sadly lacking in the idle pleasures and silly amusements and leisurely, hedonistic joys that we had known in school and college.

  Had the young man been unique in our experience, he would not have bothered us. We would have been able to consider him extraordinary and let it go at that. But as we met more and more students in the Middle and Far East, we saw that his drive and his knowledge, though strange to us, were the rule rather than the exception among students. Charlie and I talked often about the difference between students in the East and students in America, and we tried to fathom what it was that gave students from Egypt to Japan this burning, single-minded drive toward knowledge. Or, on the other hand, what it was that made American students (and, to a certain extent, all students in the West) comparatively so lethargic and disinterested. When we were in college, most of our friends knew something about politics, and most read a paper every day, or at least glanced at the headlines on their way to the sports section. But very few had a deep interest in the nation's affairs, to say nothing of the world's, and still fewer had an all-consuming cause or even a strong belief. Half the students in most colleges couldn't locate Burma on a map and couldn't tell you the name of the King of Jordan. More than half had no idea of the arguments on either side of the India-Pakistan dispute. The attitude of American students has traditionally been a sort of le m'en foil attitude—it doesn't concern me, and the hell with it.

  It was not until we had talked
to students all over the world that we were able to discern any reasons at all why foreign students were so much more alert than those in America.

  The difference between the West and the rest of the world is partly a difference between old and new. It is not, as the Russians would have the world believe, a difference between decadence and vitality. Although China and Japan and India had civilizations which were thriving when people in the West were still wearing blue paint, of all the systems of government in the world today, the West's are the oldest. America's dates from 1783, Russia's from 1917. England's is three hundred years old, Communist China's is fifteen. France's is about to have its ninety-fourth birthday, Egypt's has yet to have its twelfth.

  When our government was created, there were no exact precedents and few established ideas or methods or beliefs. There was a national purpose, the establishment of a good, viable system of government, and all men were challenged to carry out that purpose. Everything was new, everything was exciting, and in everything there was a sense of discovery and achievement.

  Today, our government and the other governments of the West are secure in their traditions. Our beliefs are no longer new and exciting; they are cherished and respected. Our government has worked well for almost two hundred years. Nothing has shaken it, no one has effectively challenged it. As much as people may argue with certain acts or administrative policies, they will seldom question or try to alter the basic system of government. Certain people may try to reinterpret the freedoms and rights of Americans, as in the segregation question, but that is as far as anyone will go.

  So American students do not feel they must search for and get excited by new ideas. They know their traditional beliefs are right for them and for their country, and they have no quarrel with them. Until recently, there has never appeared a serious threat to these beliefs, and they have had no cause for worry. They feel that a successful past is a guarantee of a successful future. What does it matter to them if the Imam of Yemen is overthrown? Such changes have never affected them before, and they find no reason to assume that they will now. Who cares who the president of Pakistan is, as long as he doesn't try to interfere in our lives?