by P. H. Newby
“He doesn’t look decent,” said Christou to Amin. “The accused ought to be given time to shave. Looking like he does it’s a foregone conclusion.” He passed a finger across his throat and spat. “Never mind, they’ll name a street after him in Tel Aviv.”
Townrow climbed up into the back of the truck and sat where indicated, next to a Nubian soldier with scarred cheeks.
“Townrow isn’t a Jewish name,” he said.
“Townrow? Is that what you’re known as now? Be seeing you, then, Cohen.” He stood on the edge of his hole grinning and waving an arm. His shirt was open to his waist, revealing hair and tallow. “I don’t want you to be anxious on my behalf, Cohen. I know what a one you are for worrying. No need. I daresay Grivas is on the buzzer to Nasser at this very minute. ‘What a misunderstanding,’ Nasser is saying. ‘Mr Christou will be released at once. But as for Cohen, well his name counts against him, don’t it, Grivas old chap?’ They’re real buddies. So whatever you do,” Christou shouted as the truck moved off and the dust cloud rose around him, “don’t worry on my behalf, Cohen, and think how you’ll be immortalised.”
“Where’s Mrs Strauss?” Townrow turned to Amin. “What’s happened to her?”
“At a time like this,” he said when Amin did not reply, “I’d have thought you people would have something better to do than hold military tribunals.”
“It passes the time.” Amin shrugged. “It gives us the illusion we are doing something. What else?”
“Is it true the Jews have reached the Canal?”
West and south of the railway station was a plain dotted with huts, tents, piles of sandbags, a few Sherman tanks, armoured cars and all the other gear of a military camp. The truck paused at the guard room and then trundled over the sand. The light was so brilliant Townrow could at first see nothing when he was ushered through a door into a gloom heavy with cigarette fumes. He heard breathing, coughing and the creaking of chairs. Presently, shuttered windows floated towards him. Men in uniform were, he realised, sitting behind a table on a raised platform and he was standing in front of them. It was a bit like the experience at Cairo airport.
One of these men began speaking in Arabic and Townrow interrupted him.
“I don’t understand Arabic. Anyway, I want to see the British Consul.”
“Proceedings in language of country,” said one of the men on the platform. Townrow could make them out better. They were youngish officers in open shirts bearing a lot of medal ribbons. “In London would you give me proceedings in Arabic? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the——”
He could not remember.
“Gander,” said Townrow. “I must have an interpreter.”
“What is your religion?” Amin to Townrow’s surprise was standing at his side. “The President of the Court wants to know your religion.”
The President must have been the one in the middle with receding hair who was talking away, in Arabic, in the monotonous drone of one quoting some legal enactment. The other officers chatted, leaning back in their chairs so that they could get a sight of each other. There were a lot of other men in the hut, soldiers mainly, sitting on benches. Townrow’s eyes were sufficiently adjusted to the light he could even make out the exhausted expression of the old man in gallabieh and skullcap who was going round selling coffee. A long way away, perhaps on the other side of the Canal, an anti-aircraft gun started up. Thirty, forty miles away there was maybe a tank battle in progress.
“Christian.” Townrow was trying to remember. “And my next of kin is my mother, Mrs Eileen Townrow, Ely, England.”
“They do not want to know your next of kin. Say a Christian credo.”
“With or without commitment?”
“Please?”
“What do you want me to say the Creed for?”
“Or Paternoster. Our Father,” prompted Amin, encouragingly.
Townrow said the Lord’s Prayer and then asked which of the creeds was required.
“There is a credo of the Egyptian Church.’ I believe in one God and in the Logos of one substance with him,’ but you would not know this,” said Amin sadly. “Say the Apostle’s Creed.”
“No.”
“You mean you don’t know it?” Amin prompted, “I believe——”
“I know it but I won’t say it.”
The tribunal had listened with interest, even interrupting the conversation between themselves. The President spoke in Arabic at some length and Amin, having waited until he finished, spoke even more sadly than before. “His Excellency says there is much scepticism in this century and he understands your reservations but he would like to hear you speak the words about the Trinity of Christian Gods—please!” Amin broke off in anguish and addressed the tribunal on what were obviously points of theology.
“He wants to hear you say these words,” Amin continued after the President by nodding, frowning and smiling in turn seemed to have conveyed some apology, “purely evidentially. He does not expect a modern European actually to believe them.”
“Does he think a Jewish agent wouldn’t do a bit of homework? He’d know a creed. That isn’t the test. Look!” Townrow undid the belt of his trousers. He lifted his shirt. “A Jew would be circumcised, wouldn’t he?”
The President was about to light a cigarette. He extended the flaring lighter in Townrow’s direction, the better to see. The two other members of the tribunal stood up and leaned forward.
“It is never easy,” said Amin, helping Townrow to pull his trousers up after this inspection, “to persuade adherents of Islam that Christians are not polytheists and believe in three gods.”
“Let us come to the point,” said the President, dropping his rule about not speaking English. “It is known you are a British agent investigating the export of arms to Cyprus. The real question is whether under cover of being a secret agent you are, in reality, a spy.”
Townrow was confused. Who said he was a British agent? “What is the difference between an agent and a spy?”
“It is lucky for you,” said the President, “that the respected merchant Mr Elie Khoury died before you arrived in this country. Otherwise you would be under arrest on a charge of murdering him. There still remains the charge of attempting to murder Mr Christou. He has lodged a complaint. All this is trivial. The United Arab Republic is not interested by the British trying to stop arms going to Cyprus. This is not our quarrel. The Canal and Israel is our quarrel. Our information is that you are only pretending to be Townrow with the mission to stop arms smuggling to Cyprus. Your real name is——”
He searched in vain among the papers on the table and then raised his hands in despair. He and the other members of the tribunal went into conference. There was a pause in the proceedings. What sounded like an old-fashioned Bofors gun started up in the distance. Or it might even have been a steam locomotive. Townrow listened. No, it was some kind of anti-aircraft fire. He guessed the R.A.F. had a reconnaissance plane out. Amin touched Townrow on the shoulder. The coffee seller had arrived. Townrow gave the man a ten piastre note and took a cup.
“Why is it?” said Amin plaintively, “that Britain and the United States made this foreign country in our midst? It is an injustice.”
The tribunal had stopped talking between themselves and were listening to Amin with interest.
“Answer the question,” said the President sharply. “The answer is that England and France and the United States are all controlled by Jews. You cannot deny this. That is why they made this Jewish state.”
Townrow had been counting the military. In addition to the three officers on the platform, there were two majors, a captain and four lieutenants sitting on the first two benches. About a dozen N.C.O. s and men were posted about the hut. But for this absurd tribunal all these men would have been out in the desert. They did not look like men who had heard of the game of bowls, let alone Francis Drake. They were killing time. Why?
“Some Jews,” said Townrow, “believe the British could h
ave done more to stop the massacre of Jews in Europe during the war.”
“This is propaganda put about by the British. They think they will ingratiate themselves with the Arabs. All empty talk. All lies.”
“I’m not a liar. There was a Jew said he was in Hungary when the trains were taking Jews to the death camps and the B.B.C., he said, weren’t warning the Jews. That was in 1942.”
“Of course they were warning the Jews,” said the President in disgust. “Otherwise the British would have been anti-Jewish, like the Germans. No Arab believes that. He spits on the British.”
Amin surprised everyone by jumping to his feet and beginning to shout hysterically. “I protest. What the Europeans did to the Jews is a great crime. No Arab rejoices at it. It is infamous to imply Arabs approve what the Germans did. We spit on the Germans. We spit on the Europeans.”
The President was on his feet, shouting too, but in Arabic so that Townrow did not get the precise point. Amin, such a mild, sad, even frightened little Copt as Townrow had always thought him, now advanced on the President’s table and smacked it with the flat of his hand. One of the other judges was grinning and talking out of the side of his mouth to a clerk. The third judge was smoking and making notes furiously.
The President picked up a glass of water and threw it violently, glass and all, into Amin’s face. In the silence that followed he said, with some formality, “This preliminary hearing is now closed. The gravity of the charges are such that the case is referred to the central tribunal in Cairo.”
He was about to walk out when Townrow said, “You mean you don’t believe the British Government kept quiet about those death camps?”
“It is lying British propaganda,” said the President and marched off towards the door, followed by his two fellow officers who seemed delighted the proceedings were over.
Amin was wiping his face with the backs of his hands. He looked as though he might cry. “Why did you bring that subject up?” he said to Townrow piteously, “even if you were trying to curry favour. Stay here. I must go and apologise to Colonel Masry.”
That night Townrow lay awake listening to the sound of battle in Sinai. One end of a Nissen hut had been fitted up as a cell. It was a cage, really. He lay on the sand floor listening to the distant thumping of the guns and watching occasional figures pass in front of the open door at the other end of the hut. He could see them outlined against the starlit stack of sandbags and the wall of another hut. If the Israelis were near enough for the fighting to be heard in Port Said they must have been doing pretty well. What had Leah said when they asked her about her religion? They probably hadn’t bothered. She was Jewish and Egyptian born so they could not have found anybody better to beat hell out of. Her American passport would not count for much. It would add a certain spice.
He woke up when the door of his cage was opened and a hurricane lamp swung in front of his face. He could have been asleep only a few minutes. Maybe they had even waited for his snores. He was dazed by sleep. His legs would not move properly. When the soldiers noticed this they helped him along with what felt like the sharp end of their guns, and he was out in the night, stumbling across the milky sand under clear stars, a slice of moon and an eastern sky that lit up and faded to light up and fade again. A lot of thumping was going on on the other side of the horizon. The concussions bounced up the Canal. Due south there was a steady glow, as it might be from some building on fire at Kantara. Surprisingly, Amin was walking with him.
“You’re being put on the train to Cairo.”
“You don’t mean you still think trains are getting through?”
Amin was very angry. “Traffic is flowing normally. There is no interruption to normal service,” he said, as the camp, the railway sidings, the docks, the moored ships, brightened. The fire to the south seemed to be taking hold. The ground underfoot was pinkish in its glow. “The 11 p.m. express for Ismailia and Cairo is leaving at three o’clock sharp.”
“Is Mrs Strauss being sent to Cairo?”
“Certainly not.”
A clock over the entrance to the platforms said ten past two. Sleeping soldiers sprawled all over the place, in front of the booking office. On the platform, in the carriages, they lay with heads on kitbags and haversacks. Amin had an argument with the clerk about whether Townrow was to travel First Class or Second. Military policemen walked about shouting. From the air it must have looked like a fairground: unshaded lights burned, a bell clanged, and a mad, sighing snarl came from a loaded camel being led between the tracks. Townrow was watching his chance to make a bolt for it. The first thing he did on being pushed into an empty first class compartment was to hop to the opposite door and try the handle. It was locked. He wondered whether Amin, who had a great pistol on his thigh, would have tried a pot shot. Probably, and missed. There were the four of them, two soldiers, Amin and himself, all sitting with the blinds drawn, smoking, a small blue light burning overhead.
“You know, sir,” Amin said, “I have never left Egypt. I was born in 1928 in Minuf. My work in Port Said is important but frankly I would accept a secondary appointment in Upper Egypt, in Assiut or Minyah. All this ——” he waved his hand, “trouble. My father, he is dead a long time. I never leave Egypt. Why is that? We are a poor country. Too many people. Either I live in Assiut or I go to Canada when my mother dies.”
“Married?”
“I do not care to answer personal questions. You will be better in Cairo. Your case will be properly investigated. Not like here in Port Said. These officers do not understand investigation.”
“But the officers run things in Cairo too.”
“Yes, but——” Amin hesitated. “It will be better in Cairo. Cairo is a nice city. Do you know the Zoological Gardens?”
But mostly they sat in silence as the train filled up with troops and peasants with enormous hampers. Townrow supposed it was something that he had not been handcuffed. What corresponded, in his own life, to Amin’s notion of settling in Assiut or emigrating to Canada? Nothing. Maybe going to Elie’s island for a few days and cutting his throat there, right out in the lake where nobody would know. The very futility of the idea made him laugh with pain.
“What’ll happen to Mrs Strauss?” he said, but Amin was asleep. Townrow wondered whether he could prise that pistol out of that holster. Even if he succeeded, what then? You had to be prepared to follow through. Would he have been ready to plug Amin? And what about these other two? They were certainly not asleep. They were talking to each other.
He was reduced to the thought of finding Leah and taking her across the lake to Elie’s island. It was crazy but the idea of running away with Leah was the only one he could fix on. He could just see them in that little boat with the outboard motor puttering across the brown water. Once they were there, what then?
He put a hand on Amin’s knee and shook it. “Did they believe I wasn’t a Jew?”
Amin woke with a snort and put his hand on his pistol. “What?”
“Did they believe I was a Christian? The tribunal?”
Amin yawned and stretched himself. “Excuse me, I slept.”
“I was going in for the ministry but I got thrown out of college,” said Townrow. “I thought, what the hell after that. If I can’t be a minister I’ll go to the other extreme and be a bad ’un. But I wasn’t really. Hadn’t the drive.”
“You can be a priest and marry,” said Amin sympathetically, when Townrow explained why he had been expelled from that college.
“They like you to qualify before you start getting women pregnant. The irony was, this little girl wasn’t. It was a false alarm. That’s my life. It’s been falsely alarmed. I alarmed myself. I don’t alarm myself any more. I disgust myself.”
“The reason I want to live in Assiut,” said Amin, “is it is more of a Christian town. I am at home there. Jesus takes our sins upon himself.”
“He couldn’t take Judas’s, could he? Judas went out and hanged himself. I don’t think I could have done tha
t. I couldn’t have hanged myself, I couldn’t.” Townrow was silent. “Maybe it was a good thing I was thrown out of college.”
The train was moving. It moved laboriously, as though the track was just that bit too narrow and the wheels had to take off slivers of steel as they went. The points chinked like dud coins. Townrow had not the slightest doubt they would be shot up from the air before they travelled much farther south. He was going to lie on the floor and pull one of these big soldiers on top of him.
He wanted to see Leah. That was what he was reduced to. Finding Leah and whistling her out of Port Said was the only plan he was capable of formulating, and that was impractical. The Israelis were attacking. O.K. that was their problem. They could always argue it was a fight to exist. The French were an unscrupulous lot. He’d never liked them. Unless he had been childishly ignorant the British, though, did not go in for beating up the wogs any more. Maybe he was childishly ignorant. Maybe that Jew on Rome airport was right.
When the first bombs came there probably would not be time or light to see if there were any Union Jacks painted on their sides. If Amin said there were he’d believe him. From now on he would believe any Egyptian, whatever he said.
The train stopped. Another train seemed to be trundling along the roofs of the carriages. Amin flipped up the blind, opened the window and looked out. The sound of aircraft overhead pressed down like a thumb.
“Parachutes,” he said.
Townrow stood up and looked out too. It was dawn. Probably the rim of the sun was not quite showing; there were no shadows. Mud huts, trees, a strip of road, and a truck lying on its side, waited in the grey light. Certainly they were waiting. The blank and colourless landscape was as obviously waiting as an old and sightless man on his knees with hands stretched out. Townrow even thought he actually saw such a figure. Nobody on the ground. Nothing moved. Suddenly firing crackled from the ground and he saw that the ground running down to the Raswa bridges was cut up by slit trenches. Infantry were dug in and firing at the paratroops as they swung down.