by P. H. Newby
Overhead there was brilliance and movement. The first wave of planes had gone. There was an impression of light pouring upwards from the hidden sun and racing out to remote space. On the way a few small clouds were touched into pinkish light. Townrow then saw they were not clouds. They were more parachutes. The sun must have been coming up faster than they came down because more and more of them seemed to catch the dawn light. They came down like blossom in a May wind.
“British,” said Amin.
Townrow knew the town well enough to guess they were after the twin bridges on the Suez Road. Another wave of planes swept over. By this time the first lot of paratroops were on the ground and in action. Away to the south a machine gun opened up. Townrow saw a big paratrooper in a green beret sling a grenade into a slit trench, lie down, and follow up the explosion by jumping into the trench.
Because the door of the compartment was locked Amin began to climb out of the window as more paratroopers followed grenades into the slit trenches. A certain amount of fire could be heard coming from farther along the train. Amin dropped to the sand and began running crazily out into the open. By now there was a lot of wild shooting. Bullets flew about. In addition to the Egyptian machine guns a heavier weapon seemed to have gone into action, firing small shells into this slit-trench area. Townrow watched as though it might be some game. To begin with he was no more involved than that.
Amin had stopped running. He was walking. Townrow fancied he could hear him shouting. Certainly he was letting fly with his revolver. Townrow was still catching up with his impressions since Amin first shouted “Parachutes” and he now realised that when the fellow had climbed out through the window he had been crying. Townrow knew he had seen his face wet with tears. So many tears so quickly? They must have simply welled out. His cheeks were wet and shining.
Townrow was so disgusted he felt he just had to run after the man and slap him down. The two guards in the compartment seemed stunned by the sight of enemy troops landing, so he was not interfered with when he climbed out of the window and dropped to the ground. He tried shouting after Amin but it had no effect. The fellow was about a hundred yards away and still moving, but more slowly. The paratroops were ignoring the train and clearing the trenches. There were hundreds of them, scattered, running into the rising sun, enfilading the trenches. Townrow could see their main worry was the machine gun fire. They were not interested in the train so Townrow told himself it was not so stupid to run after Amin. He would drop on him and hold him flat in the sand.
He thought he understood why Amin was crying and would have liked to talk to him about it. But just then one of the paratroops turned and gave Amin a burst with his sub machine gun. Townrow threw himself on the ground. This was as well because he was near enough in line with Amin and the soldier for the bullets to go whipping into the train behind him. He guessed Amin was not wrong about these troops being British. This chap with the sub machine gun had a blue beret.
Machine gun fire was now coming from the thickets on the far side of the road. As far as Townrow remembered this was where the waterworks lay. There were basins, wooden huts and a fair amount of cover from trees and bushes. Anyway, these paratroops began scrambling out of the trenches and moving off in that direction. They seemed to have berets of all colours and mottled, mainly brown, uniforms. They were tearing off now in the direction of the waterworks, raising scuffles of fawn dust.
Townrow reached Amin as more planes appeared and strafed the waterworks and bridges. They were slipping rockets into the anti-aircraft sites near the bridges. Townrow now realised the heavier guns were Bofors dipped to fire straight across the area. A lot of men were shouting and howling. Metal drummed in the air.
Amin was lying head well down in a hollow soaked with blood. Parts of his face lay around his skull. Townrow stripped off his shirt, covered the head, weighted it down with stones and walked steadily back towards the train. Nobody shot him.
The diesel engine was on fire. Townrow saw soldiers hopping out of the front part of the train like fleas; then, he crawled under the train. He was wearing those filthy slacks and a singlet. As he walked back towards Port Said planes continued to dive out of the north and plug rockets into the ground with a sound like great strips of canvas being torn. All the time the sun was climbing and warming his back.
He was so frightened he kept stopping to retch. He had never before been under fire without a weapon. So it took him a long time to come out from behind cover when he found any cover.
CHAPTER SIX
A Man should smell Sweet
Midmorning, Townrow was in Gianola’s among the plate glass, the mahogany show cases, the stacked boxes of Groppi chocolates, and the trays of French patisserie, drinking coffee and eating croissants. He reckoned he looked scruffy, with his stained shirt and twoday beard, but the management was not so particular that morning. Planes buzzed overhead. Whenever there was a respite he could hear remote, desultory machine-gun fire as though somebody was practising up on the front or down in Arab town. Townrow was the only customer. The streets were empty too. Half a dozen waiters talked excitedly in the gloom at the far end of the café.
Townrow phoned Abravanel from the kiosk under the stairs. “Is Leah there?”
“There is an attack. Can’t you hear there is an attack?” The old chap was so eaten up with terror for his own safety he had no thought for his daughter.
“They’ll leave the town alone. You’ll be all right. They’ll go for the airfield and the docks and the——”
“These phones are tapped, you know that?” Abravanel squeaked and Townrow thought he might slam the receiver down.
“Where’s Leah? Well, why don’t you phone the American Consul if you can’t get word of her? She’s an American citizen.”
“She has double nationality. She is also Egyptian. But I am not anxious for her.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You must not come to my apartment. I forbid you. It would be compromising. Leah is not here. She is staying with friends.”
This time he did put the receiver down so Townrow rang up Mrs K who was very happy at the turn events had taken. “I only hope they don’t just stop in the Canal zone. Well, the boys will be in Cairo. We shall never get peace and quiet until the Union Jack is flying over the Citadel. Everybody knows that, even the Egyptians. It’s what they really want themselves you know, once they get rid of this Nasser.” She seemed quite uninterested in his own experiences and did not know where Leah was. She took the view that now the British were invading all troubles were at an end. Leah would be quite safe. The Egyptians would be only too glad to ingratiate themselves by handing her back safe and sound; true, she was Jewish and it was not like handing back an English Christian. “We British will be able to hold our heads high again. It’s a great pity the French are mixed up in it. Much better if the British had done the job by themselves. Yes, of course I know the phone is tapped. I don’t see how they could listen to every phone in Port Said. Why do you keep on about Leah? She’ll look after herself. I’m going up on the roof to watch the planes.”
The main police station was down by the Commercial Basin. He did not believe this story, about staying with friends. The chances were that Leah was being held down there but the only result of going to find out would in all probability be to get taken in himself. Not being able to think of any better place to go he set off vaguely in that direction. The sun dazzled him as he came out of the café and headed south. Little Egyptian armoured cars were running about the streets like hens. There was a chance he might be picked off from one of these cars but he felt invulnerable or suicidal, he did not know which; he tried to avoid thinking about Amin; that question about the Zoological Gardens went on echoing between the flat white faces and the verandahs of this long street. He would have liked to convince Amin, even more than the Jew in Rome, that he was not such a bloody innocent. He was a bloody innocent though. Amin and that Jew, they’d be laughing. If he’d been a boy there m
ight have been some excuse. He was—well, what was he? Thirty-two? Forty-two? Honestly, he could not remember. If only he could find Leah he would explain, yes, he might have seemed bloody innocent but that was only because deep down he had the priggish and self-conscious virtue and rectitude and naivety of a newly enlisted Boy Scout and he had fallen into the mistake of assuming this was a piece of information about the British Government. Certainly he was a Boy Scout, a thwarted, green Jack. He was a crook at the same time. That was only out of cussedness. He hated himself. He wanted to get revenged on himself. Now and again other people suffered for what he did, but that was more or less accidental. He saw himself as the main enemy. And when he was explaining to Leah what a Boy Scout he was at heart he would explain Boy Scouts often made the mistake of assuming other people were Boy Scouts too.
Scarcely knowing what he was doing or where he was walking he must have been looking straight into the sun because he was so dazzled enormous patches of black shadow seemed to hang across the brilliant morning. They were so black there might have been annihilation behind what they covered. The city hung in strips and patches. That was how he saw his own life. The clearest strip was the moving picture of his father stepping out of the car, climbing the wall, and setting off across the field to the trees. And that girl, she was seventeen, saying, “I’ve got news for you, boy,” and laughing as though pregnancy was a joke, the foetus actually tickled. He tried to fix his mind on what his life had been. Ma talking on and on about Dublin and the Post Office and his saying, “Why did Uncle Rob hit Dad with a big stick?” Well, what else could an Irishman do when his sister married an English soldier? Photographs taken through some great astronomical telescope revealed gaps in the universe like the gaps he studied in the structure of Port Said, 11.25 hours, November 6; and the gaps in his mind. What seemed black emptiness in some remote part of the universe was a cloud of dust. It was settling on his face. He could feel it withering his skin. Behind the clouds were constellations and galaxies. He guessed.
The ferry to Port Fouad was still running. This part of the city went on functioning. The French must have taken the Raswa bridges so the whole city was now a head cut off from the body of Egypt. The eye winked, then, in the severed head. Two heavy tanks stood in front of the Police Station. Policemen stood on the pavement examining automatic weapons. It looked as though they had just been issued with them and were wondering how they worked. In the first floor windows were soldiers with machine guns. So when the real battle started here was one of the fortresses. On the ferry petty merchants up from Arab Town were lugging huge open baskets of fresh dates and oranges. Silvery fish with pink gills skidded on blocks of ice. A butcher boy carried half a sheep, skinned, dabbed with blue paint, on his head.
From Port Fouad Townrow could look back and see smoke rising to the west and south of Port Said. For about ten minutes there were no planes and no ack-ack. A group of Egyptian soldiers in steel hats sat inside a sandbag-protected emplacement in the middle of the rond-point. They smoked and took no notice of him, so he took the lane down to the Greek Sailing Club. He entered the great shed where the boats were stored and walked towards the lavatories. Through an open door he could see, under a palm tree, a table in the shade. It bore empty beer bottles and empty glasses. Chairs were pushed away from the table. It was as though a group of men had been sitting at this table and only just got to their feet and walked away.
Townrow remembered those Greeks in swimming trunks who had laughed and said, No, they hadn’t seen any woman.
But they had seen her. And as Townrow stood outside the swing-door leading to the showers and lavatories, looking out of the building at the abandoned chairs and tables, he remembered very well how Leah had in fact come suddenly face to face with him and said, “Well, where do you think I was?”
“I’ve been looking everywhere. I just couldn’t——”
“Where do you think I’d be?”
And so far from disappearing into the shadows and brilliance of that particular day she had led him to some other table, far away from the Greeks. She had changed out of her swim suit. She was wearing a dress and had a white silky wrap over her shoulders. She must have been a member and kept a change of clothing in the club. They drank the beer the waiter brought out. There had never been any question of her disappearing. Why should he have thought there was? He remembered perfectly well how they went and sat in a remote part of the garden and talked about her husband. He himself wore nothing but his bathing trunks. He had not known she was changing or he would have changed too. He was just a bit stupefied she should bring up the subject of her husband, just when they were enjoying themselves. She said the reason he had these fits of depression was the way she treated him.
“I thought you said he was sick.”
“I treat him badly,” she said.
“How do you mean, badly?”
“You know! He’s the jealous type.”
How could he possibly have so forgotten this talk, right smack against a curtain of banana leaves? He could see them shining in the sun, with lines of fire along the edges. If he now walked out of the boat house and took that path on the other side of the big palm, the banana grove, the table and the two chairs would still be there. Leah too, he reckoned. It was not impossible. He thought she had just disappeared. The bloody vanishing trick was a mystery he’d never got round to clearing up. All he had to do now was walk through the garden, push back a lot of leaves and there she would be. It was worth trying.
“You mean to say,” he had asked, “you deliberately work on this jealousy?”
“No, not deliberately,” she had said. “I can’t help it.”
“You make me feel,” he had said, “that I’ve pushed him below the shitty surface of some pond with my big foot.”
“When a man is as jealous as that you just can’t help it,” she said. “I wouldn’t say I was too promiscuous. God, he takes it hard. Now why? I suppose he has this natural melancholy and what I do tips the scale.”
“A man doesn’t get delusions if his wife sleeps around. You said he heard these voices. He felt persecuted.”
“Sure he was sick, but I didn’t help.”
Townrow decided that if he stopped hesitating and walked out of the boat house, past the table with the empty glasses and bottles, and walked down that sandy path he would come on Leah again and be able to take up the conversation at the point it broke off. “I’ve pushed him below the surface. You know, if I was in his position I wouldn’t go gloomy and persecuted. I’d kill you first and then the other man after. I wouldn’t accept living on the same planet as either you or me.”
“You wouldn’t accept living on the same planet as——?”
“It would be very natural if he came and shot me down one day.”
“I see.” She smiled. He saw her lips turn up at the end and the little hollows appear in her cheeks. He knew this trick she had of looking straight ahead with her eyes half closed and then turning her head so that when she fully opened them they blazed in his face. That was the effect. The very calculating way she did it excited him.
“We haven’t really given him cause yet, have we?” She half closed her eyes again and stretched a hand in his direction. Why the hell should he forget all this? He had taken that hand.
So he walked past the table and down the sandy path. It was now about noon. The planes were coming in again. They seemed to release their rockets dead overhead to go screaming away south. Somebody might take it into his head to blow up the ferry in which case the Greek Sailing Club would probably stop a few rockets. Townrow turned this possibility over but he continued down the path. He came to a pergola with loofahs hanging down, some of them dead ripe and ready for the bath. Now, that pergola really was something he had forgotten. On the other side of the banana leaves there was a clicking noise. He paused. Perhaps some sort of weapon was being set up. Or it might have been rifle fire from a long way off. Through the leaves he could see hands moving. That must have
been the very spot.
A man wearing a brown suit and an open neck shirt was sitting at a table—the very same table at which Leah had talked about her husband—typing on a huge, old-fashioned machine with two fingers. Hearing Townrow’s approach he looked up and turned his long nose and worried eyes into the sun. His hair was out of hand. The dirty sideburns were hanging to his face like Spanish moss. He took the cigarette from his mouth and inhaled. A rocket was released about five hundred feet overhead and when words could be heard again, he said, “I thought I gave you twenty four hours to leave.”
Townrow was too amazed he was not Leah to say anything at all. He watched Aristides reach under his arm, produce an automatic and slip the safety catch. Until that moment Townrow had not been sure the fellow who was responsible for the note in that café and the man reading the newspaper at a neighbouring table were one and the same.
“Turn round.” Aristides gestured with his gun. “I do not like to see the expression on a man’s face when I shoot him.”
Townrow went and sat down at the table and looked at Aristides across his typewriter. He knew the kind. An Oliver, made in Croydon in the twenties, British army issue. It was comforting to see one again. “You seen a woman about here? Mrs Strauss, you know her? I was expecting to see her.”
Aristides looked very annoyed Townrow had not turned round. He stood up. He tried to walk round behind Townrow but Townrow got to his feet and kept facing him. Aristides was so exasperated that he said, “The British and the French are invading Port Said and you look for a woman?”