by John Fowles
‘Mr Martin? I am very pleased to meet you. I am Jimmy Assad.’
Dan already knew of his existence. David Malevich had met him and meant to use him for the Egyptian side of the production.
They shook hands, and Dan introduced Jane, whose hand Assad rather formally bowed over; but the old-fashioned courtesy disappeared when it came to dismissing the touts and taxi-men who still clamoured round them. He drove them away with one or two sharply guttural Arabic phrases, then smiled at his guests, as if to tell them European civility cut no ice here. He had a car and driver waiting. Dan had a suspicion that for once Jane did not regret leading a privileged life.
They set off for Cairo, and found out more about Assad. He was a Copt, it seemed, not a Muslim. He had been in the local film industry most of his life, but had also worked briefly in England, where he had picked up his inappropriate first name, just after the Second World War. He didn’t speak the language very idiomatically, but fluently enough, and he seemed well informed as to what was going on in the rest of the movie world. They took to him: he showed at once a nice dryness both about himself and the faults of the United Arab Republic—like the airport, Cairo was overcrowded, it was because of the war situation, so many refugees from the banks of the Suez. Jane asked if a resumption of hostilities was likely.
‘You will see. In the newspapers. Every day it is going to happen tomorrow.’ The eyelids drooped. ‘You think Mr Churchill made great speeches of war? You have not heard Sadat. Here we call him Victory Tomorrow, Dirt Today.’ He slipped a look at Jane, twisted round from the front seat where he sat. ‘I say dirt for your sake, madame. Arabic is a frank language.’
‘Merde?’
‘Ah, très bien. Vous parlez francais?’
They established that they spoke French to each other’s satisfaction; and Dan had to come rather hastily in. His own spoken French was very limited.
‘Can one talk about the President like that in public?’
Assad raised his hand in regretful negation, but there was a glint in his hooded eyes.
‘But we are very lucky here in Egypt. All our secret police wear a uniform.’ He glanced towards the driver, then one of the eyelids flickered, as if with a tic. ‘Une stupidite stupefiante.’
One sensed at once with him membership of what is one of the most distinctive clubs in the world, and mercifully without frontiers: that of the political cynic. Dan decided he was probably a corrupt man, not above budget-fiddling, but an agreeable one.
It was dusk when they came into the city, with its unique mixture of the medieval and the modern: shabby boulevards, khaki and tired white facades, dust everywhere, the blend of European clothes and the flowing galabiyas, barefooted urchins, stalls, harrows, donkeys with vivid green bundles of fodder, the only fresh colour to be seen, tied to their sides. Wafts of strange smells, dung, something acrid—according to Assad fumes from the Helwan industrial complex up-Nile (‘We have to prove how western we are, so naturally we start by giving ourselves the big pollution problem’); but other richer, more spicy scents came through the windows of the car on the mild subtropical air.
At last they came out beside the Nile, too late to see the Ghiza pyramids in the distance, but the great river was a pearly grey, serene in the fast-dying light; then they were drawing up outside the hotel. Assad came in to see their reservations were all right, and they had a drink in the lounge. He was supposed to take Dan to meet a ministry high-up the next morning, but it was apparently a mere formality, and could be skipped unless Dan insisted. He did not. Then they would spend the day driving round likely locations, the ones Malevich had already inspected and wanted the writer to look at. Dan had already suggested to Jane that she do the major tourist sites while this was going on. Assad offered his wife’s services but Jane declined them; so they went to the desk and fixed a set day-tour for her: the antiquities museum and the city in the morning, the Pyramids in the afternoon. The eyelid showed its tic again.
‘Extremely boring, madame, but I think you must see them once.’
Having assured himself that they really wanted an early night, and no entertaining, he withdrew. But the following night, he insisted, they should have dinner with his wife and himself and some friends.
They found they had adjoining rooms, overlooking the Nile, and that someone, perhaps Assad, had jumped to wrong conclusions. There was an interconnecting door. Dan did not try it to see if it was open. There was no key on his side, and he hoped it had been left on hers. Jane was going to have a bath, and he could hear the water running, occasional movements, as with tomorrow in mind he read through the Cairo scenes in the draft script copy he had brought with him. After a while he felt like opening the duty-free whisky he had bought at Heathrow and wondered whether Jane would like to join him; but he could bring himself neither to tap on the door between their rooms nor to use the telephone, which would somehow underline the awkwardness he felt. In the end he rang down and had Pellegrini and ice brought up; then, glass in hand, went to the window and stared down at the now dark river, with the lights of Gezira opposite tranquilly reflected in the water. There was far more traffic in this central part of Cairo than he recalled from his previous visit, an almost Californian stream of crawling headlights over a bridge to his right; and a continual blaring and hooting of horns. The whole city reminded him faintly of Los Angeles; perhaps it was the air and the temperature, the teem of it, the same stress, behind all the human and architectural differences. All cities grew one. Cairo was simply denser, older, more human. The medieval injustices and inequalities still existed, and everywhere; in the West they had simply been pushed out of sight. Here they remained open.
There were two taps behind him on the interconnecting door. He heard Jane call.
‘Dan? I’m ready, if you want to go down.’
‘Fine, Jane. Does this thing open?’
‘Yes, there’s a key.’
He heard her turn it, and she appeared. She had changed into the dark brown cottagey dress she had worn for the funeral, and made up her eyes a little.
‘I’m already beginning to feel I should have brought something dressier.’
‘Don’t be absurd. That dress is charming. Really.’ She gave a little mock bow of her head. Dan smiled. ‘Sorry about the door. I suspect it’s Assad trying to be sophisticated.’
‘I think it’s rather charmingly old-fashioned. He reminds me of one of the Arabists at home. I always thought he was trying to be more Oxford than Oxford, but perhaps it’s universal.’
‘How about a drink? Or shall we go to the bar?’
They elected for the bar. There were American voices, some French; and three men who Jane said were speaking Russian. Dan asked for first impressions. She thought time—layers of time, so many stages of history still coexisting here. The airport had shocked her; and the more crowded, working-class streets they had passed through. One forgot what real borderline poverty meant.
During dinner Dan suggested they could cry off Assad’s invitation for the next evening if she’d rather; but no, she looked forward to it, unless Dan himself…
‘Your treat, Jane. Your choice.’
‘I’d love to meet some real Egyptians. If they’re being offered.’
‘I’m not sure they’ll be very real. But let’s find out.’
‘Not if you… ‘ she smiled, she was insisting too much. ‘It’s all so new to me. But I don’t want you to be bored for my sake.’
‘The other guests will probably be people Assad wants us to hire for the film. And I’m not the one who has that sort of baksheesh to hand out. But don’t worry. Let’s go. We can always pull out early.’
The hotel dinner then and there was rather pretentiously French, especially in its menu, though they decided they liked the unleavened pancake bread. But Jane did not appear to mind the gastronomic disappointments; all these things, the people around them, came fresher to her than to Dan, and not just because he had been, though not in this hotel, in Egypt befo
re. He had the amused impression that she was now being her age, her Oxford and staid self for his sake. Just as a slip can show momentarily beneath a skirt, he glimpsed a ghost of the girl he had known at Oxford. He could remember what she was like in those days before new experiences and new faces: a kind of impulsive intensity of interest, almost a concentration, that wasn’t factitious (as it usually was in Nell, who had shared something of the same trait), but could be misleading, especially to men who didn’t know her well… a directness, an absorption: this interests me, or you interest me, more than anything else at the moment.
They strolled through the traffic and beside the Nile for a few minutes after they had eaten. There were not many people on foot, just the passing cars; a little way along they leant over a parapet and watched down to where three large feluccas were moored side by side. In one of them three men, perhaps watchmen, sat round a hurricane lamp; an older man in a white burnoose, with a black overcoat hiding his galabiya, and two crouched younger ones, one more small enclave from a much older world. Beyond, the lights of Gezira and Dokki glistened in the smooth water. Now and again one would break into lines as some minor ripple broke the reflection. He glanced at Jane staring down at the dim circle of light in the central felucca. She had put on a coat for the stroll, the rather Russian-looking one he had first seen her in when she had met him at the station three weeks previously. And she wore the silver comb again. He thought of second-class tickets; thrift, simplicity.
‘What are you thinking?’
She smiled. ‘Nothing, Dan. just looking.’
‘It’s a marvellous river. Day and night. You’ll see.’
‘It reminds me of the Loire, I don’t know why.’
‘The feluccas are a dream in full sail. They’re the Nile’s chateaux, in a way.’ Those below had their masts lowered, to navigate the city bridges. ‘Not the boring old temples.’
‘I’m looking forward to them as well.’
Once again he had that muffled, but unmistakable, feeling of being obliquely rebuffed: he was not to prejudge her impressions or try to reform her scale of values. What she had really answered was, Yes, but I am waiting to judge for myself. They said nothing for a while, leaning on the parapet, and he thought of Jenny—how perhaps what attracted him in her was also this same always incipient contrariness, this refusal to accept his rules; although of course she was greener, less conditioned, far less sure of herself… which was equally attractive, in its way. He had spoken twice more to her since the Saturday of her third contribution’s arrival; most latterly only early that same morning in London. Her call, agreed on, had woken him at half past seven. It was really only to say goodbye, to tell him he was a rat, she hated him, but in the kind of voice that declared the opposite. She had rather noticeably said nothing about Jane. They had lost the spontaneity of the earlier calls; both knew it, and knew it could not be restored until they met again face to face. Instead, she had demanded, and he had granted: he would write, he’d try to telephone from Luxor or Aswan, he’d think of her all the time… women who always went head-on against, like a felucca going upstream, or smoothly with the current; and women who always proceeded at a tangent from the male. Jane stood back and pulled her fur collar closer.
‘Cold?’
‘It must be the river. It does seem colder here.’
They wandered the few hundred yards back to the hotel. Was she sure she didn’t want to go out on the town? Perhaps some belly-dancing? He hadn’t proposed it seriously, but it precipitated yet one last conflict of politenesses… perhaps he wanted to go somewhere? It even continued in the lift, when he thought they had firmly established that neither of them had a secret desire to do anything but go to bed. Was he absolutely sure…?
‘I should have gone to the bar and sulked if I felt thwarted.’
She smiled, and he felt inclined to tell her to stop being so English. But they came to their floor and to another potentially awkward moment, which he let her negotiate. In the corridor outside their rooms, she held out her hand.
‘Good night, Dan. You have a very grateful acolyte.’
‘Early days yet.’
She shook her head.
‘I was thinking when we were looking at the feluccas. That it was worth coming just for that.’
‘We’ll see much better.’
She hesitated, then gave him another smile and shook her head, almost like a small girl not to be deprived of a choice of toy, however illogical some adult tried to suggest it was. Then she turned away and they went into their rooms.
Dan had very little time to think of Jane that next day. Assad had arrived to take him on his tour before they finished breakfast, and a few minutes later Jane left to get ready for hers. Dan was complimented as she walked away, a charming lady… and took the opportunity to explain the real situation before some Egyptian equivalent of male elbow-nudging appeared. The mention of Anthony’s recent death took care of that. Assad made an Indian prayer-sign, as if he would have been even more courteous if he had known.
Dan discovered a good deal more about him in the course of the day. He seemed to have done everything in the industry; lighting, camera, production, directing, even on occasion acting small parts. He had lost count of the Arabic films he had helped make. The local industry was very fluid, most people in it had become jacks-of-all-trades, like Assad himself. He was very dismissive of the quality of the countless films he had been involved with; he would be ashamed to show them to Dan. There was not only no art cinema to speak of, there was not even a place for an intelligent commercial cinema. It was all rubbish, for the masses, traditional themes and treatments were inescapable; plus the now obligatory political propaganda, with the Muslim priesthood forming a powerful kind of Hays Office on another front. Assad himself had given up hope of a serious Egyptian cinema, which was one reason he was excited by the prospect of Kitchener. He seemed to feel that it might with any luck rub his own national industry’s nose ‘in the sand’—he meant in the dirt, but that was the phrase he used.
However, he was more optimistic with the other arts. There were some good writers—he mentioned one or two novelists, though Dan had to confess that he had never heard of them—and one very interesting new dramatist, whom he hoped Dan was to meet that night. He wrote satirical comedies and had lived a highly dangerous life under the Nasser regime, and a still precarious one under that of Sadat. They were talking about this over lunch, in a Lebanese restaurant Assad had taken him to—much more interesting food than at the hotel, and Dan rather wished Jane had been there to enjoy it. The playwright’s name was Ahmed Sabry, he was a famous Cairo character, a great clown, it was a pity Dan could not see him in a cabaret-cum-music-hall act he occasionally did. Assad was obviously anxious that they shouldn’t despise Sabry for not being very daring by British standards. He glanced round the crowded restaurant, then smiled at Dan with his lazily ironic eyes.
‘Ahmed says nothing you would not hear at any table here. But to say it publicly—in this country, that is… ‘ he opened his hands.
‘It takes courage.’
‘Or a little madness.’
On the practical side of things Dan very soon knew that Malevich had picked a good man. Assad came out quickly with cost estimates for the most likely locations they saw; every so often he would stop, and make a director’s frame-finder with his hands, to be sure Dan saw the visual possibilities. The kind of disruption problems that bedevil location work in other cities, the clearing of long shots, the traffic handling and all the rest, were not going to be allowed to hinder matters here. Dollars mattered more; the minister had decreed. Dan took a few photographs of various old khans and Mameluke town houses, though all this wasn’t really his province, and he didn’t intend to rewrite scenes just to fit likely locations. He did see one thing he was looking for, a corner of the great souk of Mouski that might do for a small incident (to show Kitchener’s almost Goering-like mania for collecting antiques) he had yet to write. But that was about
all.
Every so often they glimpsed the insubstantial papier mache of the Pyramids outside the city, the ochre Mokattam hills, and Dan wondered how Jane was getting on. But he enjoyed the day, and ended it with a better feel for Cairo… tired, unwashed, seemingly full of aimless soldiers and burst sandbags, a sad little emblem of the nation’s military pretensions—but a great city, for all that. He also culled from Assad a list of the Arabic phrases he needed to pepper some of his dialogue with.
Assad dropped him at the hotel just after six, and offered to come back to pick them up for the dinner at eight. But his flat was only half a mile away, and Dan insisted that they could do it by taxi. He I knocked on Jane’s door, but there was no answer; which was explained by a note that had been pushed under his own. She had had a ‘fascinating’ day, she was having her hair washed. He had a shower and changed into a suit; then sat down to write some notes. A minute or two later he heard Jane enter her room, and called through to tell her he was back; and how about a drink before she changed? She came through at once, still in her clothes of that morning.
‘Good day?’
‘Incredible. It’s been so interesting.’
He poured her a whisky, and she sat in an armchair near the writing-table. She smiled.
‘And I don’t agree at all with you. They took us round one of the mastabas at Saqqara. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. So delicate. It’s like the Renaissance three thousand years before it happened. All those lovely birds and animals.’
‘And the Sphinx?’
She tilted her head. ‘A shade déclassé, perhaps? But the museum, I could have spent hours there.’
He asked her what else she’d seen: the souk, El Azhar with its Muslim ‘dons’ (‘I could just see Maurice Bowra and David Cecil)… sat by their columns with their classes squatted around them, what thirteenth-century Oxford must have been like; some Coptic church, Sultan Mohammed Ali’s mausoleum… and what on earth were the huge brown birds that floated along the Nile?