The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘Don’t make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you. You’ll turn it into a croak.’

  ‘Clea, why didn’t you come and meet me?’

  She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were drying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes. ‘Light me a cigarette’ she said pleadingly.

  ‘Nessim said you turned tail at the last moment.’

  ‘Yes, I did, my dear.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I suddenly felt it might be inopportune. It might have been a complication somehow. You had old accounts to render, old scores to settle, new relationships to explore. I really felt powerless to do anything about you until … well, until you had seen Justine. I don’t know why. Yes I do, though. I wasn’t sure that the cycle would really change, I didn’t know how much you had or hadn’t changed yourself. You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn’t any way of judging about your inside state of mind. Such a long time since you wrote, isn’t it? And then the child and all that. After all, people sometimes get stuck like an old disc and can’t move out of a groove. That might have been your fate with Justine. So it wasn’t for me to intrude, since my side of you.… Do you see? I had to give you air.’

  ‘And supposing I have stuck like some old disc?’

  ‘No it hasn’t turned out like that.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘From your face, Darley. I could tell in a flash!’

  ‘I don’t know quite how to explain.…’

  ‘You don’t need to’ her voice curved upwards with elation and her bright eyes smiled. ‘We have such totally different claims upon each other. We are free to forget! You men are the strangest creatures. Listen, I have arranged this first day together like a tableau, like a charade. Come first and see the queer immortality one of us has gained. Will you put yourself in my hands? I have been so looking forward to acting as dragoman on … but no, I won’t tell you. Just let me pay for this coffee.’

  ‘What does your fortune say in the grounds?’

  ‘Chance meetings!’

  ‘I think you invent.’

  The afternoon had been overcast and dusk fell early. Already the sunset violets had begun to tamper with the perspectives of the streets along the seafront. We took an old horse-drawn gharry which was standing forlornly in a taxi rank by Ramleh Station. The ancient jarvey with his badly cicatriced face asked hopefully if we wished for a ‘carriage of love’ or an ‘ordinary carriage’, and Clea, giggling, selected the latter variety of the same carriage as being cheaper. ‘O son of truth!’ she said. ‘What woman would take a lusty husband in such a thing when she has a good bed at home which costs nothing.’

  ‘Merciful is God’ said the old man with sublime resignation.

  So we set off down the white curving Esplanade with its fluttering awnings, the quiet sea spreading away to the right of us to a blank horizon. In the past we had so often come this way to visit the old pirate in his shabby rooms in Tatwig Street.

  ‘Clea, where the devil are we going?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  I could see him so clearly, the old man. I wondered for a moment if his shabby ghost still wandered about those dismal rooms, whisding to the green parrot and reciting: ‘Taisez-vous, petit babouin.’ I felt Clea’s arm squeeze mine as we sheered off left and entered the smoking ant-heap of the Arab town, the streets choked with smoke from the burning refuse-heaps, or richly spiced with cooking meat and whiffs of baking bread from the bakeries.

  ‘Why on earth are you taking me to Scobie’s rooms?’ I said again as we started to clip-clop down the length of the familiar street. Her eyes shone with a mischievous delight as putting her lips to my ear she whispered: ‘Patience. You shall see.’

  It was the same house all right. We entered the tall gloomy archway as we had so often in the past. In the deepening dusk it looked like some old faded daguerreotype, the little courtyard, and I could see that it had been much enlarged. Several supporting walls of neighbouring tenements had been razed or had fallen down and increased its mean size by about two hundred square feet. It was just a shattered and pock-marked no-man’s-land of red earth littered with refuse. In one corner stood a small shrine which I did not remember having remarked before. It was surrounded by a huge ugly modern grille of steel. It boasted a small white dome and a withered tree, both very much the worse for wear. I recognized in it one of the many maquams with which Egypt is studded, spots made sacred by the death of a hermit or holy man and where the faithful repair to pray or solicit his help by leaving ex-votos. This little shrine looked as so many do, utterly shabby and forlorn, as if its existence had been overlooked and forgotten for centuries. I stood looking around me, and heard Clea’s clear voice call: ‘Ya Abdul!’ There was a note in it which suggested suppressed amusement but I could not for the life of me tell why. A man advanced towards us through the shadows peering. ‘He is almost blind. I doubt if he’ll recognize you.’

  ‘But who is it?’ I said, almost with exasperation at all this mystery. ‘Scobie’s Abdul’ she whispered briefly and turned away to say: ‘Abdul, have you the key of the Maquam of El Scob?’

  He greeted her in recognition making elaborate passes over his breast, and produced a clutch of tall keys saying in a deep voice: ‘At once O lady’ rattling the keys together as all guardians of shrines must do to scare the djinns which hang about the entrances to holy places.

  ‘Abdul!’ I exclaimed with amazement in a whisper. ‘But he was a youth.’ It was quite impossible to identify him with this crooked and hunched anatomy with its stooping centenarian’s gait and cracked voice. ‘Come’ said Clea hurriedly, ‘explanations later. Just come and look at the shrine.’ Still bemused I followed in the guardian’s footsteps. After a very thorough rattling and banging to scare the djinns he unlocked the rusty portals and led the way inside. It was suffocatingly hot in that little airless tomb. A single wick somewhere in a recess had been lighted and gave a wan and trembling yellow light. In the centre lay what I presumed must be the tomb of the saint. It was covered with a green cloth with an elaborate design in gold. This Abdul reverently removed for my inspection, revealing an object under it which was so surprising that I uttered an involuntary exclamation. It was a galvanized iron bath-tub on one leg of which was engraved in high relief the words: ‘“The Dinky Tub” Crabbe’s. Luton.’ It had been filled with clean sand and its four hideous crocodile-feet heavily painted with the customary anti-djinn blue colour. It was an astonishing object of reverence to stumble upon in such surroundings, and it was with a mixture of amusement and dismay that I heard the now completely unrecognizable Abdul, who was the object’s janitor, muttering the conventional prayers in the name of El Scob, touching as he did so the ex-votos which hung down from every corner of the wall like little white tassels. These were, of course, the slips of cloth which women tear from their underclothes and hang up as offerings to a saint who, they believe, will cure sterility and enable them to conceive! The devil! Here was old Scobie’s bath-tub apparently being invoked to confer fertility upon the childless — and with success, too, if one could judge by the great number of the offerings.

  ‘El Scob was a holy one?’ I said in my halting Arabic.

  The tired, crooked bundle of humanity with its head encircled in a tattered shawl nodded and bowed as he croaked: ‘From far away in Syria he came. Here he found his rest. His name enlightens the just. He was a student of harmlessness!’

  I felt as if I were dreaming. I could almost hear Scobie’s voice say: ‘Yes, it’s a flourishing little shrine as shrines go. Mind you, I don’t make a fortune, but I do give service!’ The laughter began to pile up inside me as I felt the trigger of Clea’s fingers on my elbow. We exchanged delighted squeezes as we retired from that fuggy little hole into the dusky courtyard, while Abdul reverently replaced the cloth over the bath-tub, attended to the oil wick, and then joined us. Carefully he locked t
he iron grille, and accepting a tip from Clea with many hoarse gratitudes, shuffled away into the shadows, leaving us to sit down upon a heap of tumbled masonry.

  ‘I didn’t come right in’ she said. ‘I was afraid we’d start laughing and didn’t want to risk upsetting Abdul.’

  ‘Clea! Scobie’s bath-tub!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How the devil did this happen?’

  Clea’s soft laughter!

  ‘You must tell me.’

  ‘It is a wonderful story. Balthazar unearthed it. Scobie is now officially El Yacoub. At least that is how the shrine is registered on the Coptic Church’s books. But as you have just heard he is really El Scob! You know how these saints’ maquams get forgotten, overlooked. They die, and in time people completely forget who the original saint was; sometimes a sand-dune buries the shrine. But they also spring alive again. Suddenly one day an epileptic is cured there, or a prophecy is given by the shrine to some mad woman — and presto! the saint wakes up, revives. Well, all the time our old pirate was living in this house El Yacoub was there, at the end of the garden, though nobody knew it. He had been bricked in, surrounded by haphazard walls — you know how crazily they build here. He was utterly forgotten. Meanwhile Scobie, after his death, had become a figure of affectionate memory in the neighbourhood. Tales began to circulate about his great gifts. He was clever at magic potions (like Mock Whisky?). A cult began to blossom around him. They said he was a necromancer. Gamblers swore by his name. “El Scob spit on this card” became quite a proverb in the quarter. They also said that he had been able to change himself into a woman at will (!) and by sleeping with impotent men regenerate their forces. He could also make the barren conceive. Some women even called their children after him. Well, in a little while he had already joined the legendary of Alexandrian saints, but of course he had no actual shrine — because everyone knew with one half of his mind that Father Paul had stolen his body, wrapped it in a flag, and buried it in the Catholic cemetery. They knew because many of them had been there for the service and much enjoyed the dreadful music of the police band of which I believe Scobie had once been a member. I often wonder whether he played any instrument and if so what. A slide trombone? Anyway, it was during this time, while his sainthood was only, so to speak, awaiting a Sign, a Portent, a Confirmation, that that wall obligingly fell down and revealed the (perhaps indignant?) Yacoub. Yes, but there was no tomb in the shrine. Even the Coptic Church which has at last relurtantly taken Yacoub on their books knows nothing of him except that he came from Syria. They are not even sure whether he was a Moslem or not! He sounds distinctly Jewish to me. However they diligently questioned the oldest inhabitants of the quarter and at least established his name. But nothing more. And so one fine day the neighbourhood found that it had an empty shrine free for Scobie. He must have a local habitation to match the power of his name. A spontaneous festival broke out at which his bath-tub which had been responsible for so many deaths (great is Allah!) was solemnly enshrined and consecrated after being carefully filled with holy sand from the Jordan. Officially the Copts could not concede Scob and insisted on sticking to Yacoub for official purposes; but Scob he remained to the faithful. It might have been something of a dilemma, but being magnificent diplomatists, the clergy turned a blind eye to El Scob’s reincarnation; they behave as if they thought it was really El Yacoub in a local pronunciation. So everyone’s face is saved. They have, in fact, even — and here is that marvellous tolerance which exists nowhere else on earth — formally registered Scobie’s birthday, I suppose because they do not know Yacoub’s. Do you know that he is even to have a yearly mulid in his honour on St George’s Day? Abdul must have remembered his birthday because Scobie always hung up from each corner of his bed a string of coloured flags-of-all-nations which he borrowed from the newsagent. And he used to get rather drunk, you told me once, and sing sea-chanties and recite “The Old Red Duster” until the tears flowed! What a marvellous immortality to enjoy.’

  ‘How happy the old pirate must be.’

  ‘How happy! To be the patron saint of his own quartier! Oh, Darley, I knew you’d enjoy it. I often come here at this time in the dusk and sit on a stone and laugh inwardly, rejoicing for the old man.’

  So we sat together for a long time as the shadows grew up around the shrine, quietly laughing and talking as people should at the shrine of a saint! Reviving the memory of the old pirate with the glass eye whose shade still walked about those mouldering rooms on the second floor. Vaguely glimmered the lights of Tatwig Street. They shone, not with their old accustomed brilliance, but darkly — for the whole harbour quarter had been placed under blackout and one sector of it included the famous street. My thoughts were wandering.

  ‘And Abdul’ I said suddenly. ‘What of him?’

  ‘Yes, I promised to tell you; Scobie set him up in a barber’s shop, you remember. Well, he was warned for not keeping his razors clean, and for spreading syphilis. He didn’t heed the warnings perhaps because he believed that Scobie would never report him officially. But the old man did, with terrible results. Abdul was nearly beaten to death by the police, lost an eye. Amaril spent nearly a year trying to tidy him up. Then he got some wasting disease on top of it and had to abandon his shop. Poor man. But I’m not sure that he isn’t the appropriate guardian for the shrine of his master.’

  ‘El Scob! Poor Abdul!’

  ‘But he has taken consolation in religion and does some mild preaching and reciting of the Suras as well as this job. Do you know I believe that he has forgotten the real Scobie. I asked him one evening if he remembered the old gentleman on the upper floor and he looked at me vaguely and muttered something; as if he were reaching far back in his memory for something too remote to grasp. The real Scobie had disappeared just like Yacoub, and El Scob had taken his place.’

  ‘I feel rather as one of the apostles must have — I mean to be in on the birth of a saint, a legend; think, we actually knew the real El Scob! We heard his voice.…’

  To my delight Clea now began to mimic the old man quite admirably, copying the desultory scattered manner of his conversation to the life; perhaps she was only repeating the words from memory?

  ‘Yes, mind you, on St George’s Day I always get a bit carried away for England’s sake as well as my own. Always have a sip or two of the blushful, as Toby would say, even bubbly if it comes my way. But, bless you, I’m no horse-drawn conveyance — always stay on my two pins. It’s the cup that cheers and not in … in … inebriates for me. Another of Toby’s expressions. He was full of literary illustrations. As well he might be — for why? Because he was never without a book under his arm. In the Navy he was considered quite queer, and several times had rows. “What yer got there?” they used to shout, and Toby who could be pert at times used to huff up and answer quite spontaneous. “What d’yer think, Puffy? Why me marriages lines of course.” But it was always some heavy book which made my head swim though I love reading. One year it was Stringbag’s Plays, a Swedish author as I understand it. Another year it was Goitre’s “Frowst”. Toby said it was a liberal education. My education just wasn’t up to his. The school of life, as you might say. But then my mum and dad were killed off early on and we were left, three perishing little orphans. They had destined us for high things, my father had; one for the church, one for the army, one for the navy. Quite shortly after this my two brothers were run over by the Prince Regent’s private train near Sidcup. That was the end of them. But it was all in the papers and the Prince sent a wreath. But there I was left quite alone. I had to make my own way without influence — otherwise I should have been an Admiral I expect by now.…’

  The fidelity of her rendering was absolutely impeccable. The little old man stepped straight out of his tomb and began to stalk about in front of us with his lopsided walk, now toying with his telescope on the cake-stand, now opening and shutting his battered Bible, or getting down on one creaking knee to blow up his fire with the tiny pair of bellows. His bi
rthday! I recalled finding him one birthday evening rather the worse for brandy, but dancing around completely naked to music of his own manufacture on a comb and paper.

  Recalling this celebration of his Name Day I began, as it were, to mimic him back to Clea, in order to hear once more this thrilling new laugh she had acquired. ‘Oh! it’s you, Darley! You gave me quite a turn with your knock. Come in, I’m just having a bit of a dance in my tou tou to recall old times. It’s my birthday, yes. I always dwell a bit on the past. In my youth I was a proper spark, I don’t mind admitting. I was a real dab at the Velouta. Want to watch me? Don’t laugh, just bercorse I’m in puris. Sit on the chair over there and watch. Now, advance, take your partners, shimmy, bow, reverse! It looks easy but it isn’t. The smoothness is deceptive. I could do them all once, my boy, Lancers, Caledonians, Circassian Circle. Never seen a demi-chaine Anglais, I suppose? Before your time I think. Mind you, I loved dancing and for years I kept up to date. I got as far as the Hootchi-Kootchi — have you ever seen that? Yes, the haitch is haspirated as in ’otel. It’s some fetching little movements they call oriental allurements. Undulations, like. You take off one veil after another until all is revealed. The suspense is terrific, but you have to waggle as you glide, see?’ Here he took up a posture of quite preposterous oriental allurement and began to revolve slowly, wagging his behind and humming a suitable air which quite faithfully copied the lag and fall of Arab quartertones. Round and round the room he went until he began to feel dizzy and flopped back triumphantly on his bed, chuckling and nodding with self-approval and self-congratulation, and reaching out for a swig of arak, the manufacture of which was also among his secrets. He must have found the recipe in the pages of Postlethwaite’s Vade Mecum For Travellers in Foreign Lands, a book which he kept under lock and key in his trunk and by which he absolutely swore. It contained, he said, everything that a man in Robinson Crusoe’s position ought to know — even how to make fire by rubbing sticks together; it was a mine of marvellous information. (‘To achieve Bombay arrack dissolve two scruples of flowers of benjamin in a quart of good rum and it will impart to the spirit the fragrance of arrack.’) That was the sort of thing. ‘Yes’ he would add gravely, ‘old Postlethwaite can’t be bettered. There’s something in him for every sort of mind and every sort of situation. He’s a genius I might say.’