Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  Blessed the one who, turning away from the world, without hate, holds a friend to his breast … The German didn’t allow for a woman friend, as the English word did. Freund was not the same as Freundin. She’d made this point to their German teacher, Miss Quilleashe. Q had replied with observations about the difference between inflected and uninflected languages. Ailsa remembered dear old Q bursting out on some occasion: Think of our Goethe! our Heine! when all things German had been brought into doubt and suspicion.

  ‘Hallo, darling, habiba, chérie, cariad.’

  Mona bent over Ailsa’s shoulder, resting her cheek against Ailsa’s hair. And still there was this strange shock of recognition from Brewers’ Green. For years Ailsa had forgotten the intense dark girl next door. Never given her a thought. And then the dark girl had sprung from the past, bringing with her the full repertoire of forgotten gestures, usurping a place in Ailsa’s life, as if spotlit, destined.

  Mona sat down next to her. ‘When we get to Ish, I’m going to beg, borrow or steal a decent piano. Do you think you might be able to come and play with me?’

  How could Ailsa say, If my husband lets me. Which he can’t and won’t …? She and Mona had been dreaming on the Empire Glory, a shared dream Mona had kindled and they’d both stoked, of equality in friendship. She’d think of Mona, Ailsa promised. Often. Always. They could at least keep in touch.

  ‘Don’t say that. Please. Don’t.’ Mona burst into tears. ‘How can you, Ailsa? Those are awful, searing words.’

  ‘They weren’t meant to be awful and searing,’ Ailsa said helplessly. She shrank before Mona’s histrionics. Better to end it now than have this emotional excess looming over her. And Mona read this as clearly as if Ailsa had said it aloud. ‘I’ll lose you. I know I will. I have lost you, haven’t I? Just like Julie.’

  It all came out then: those had been the last words Julie Brandt-Simon had said, frigidly, to hurt Mona when they parted, Let us keep in touch. Moody and headstrong, Mona Serafin in her mid-teens had thought she was God’s gift. No sooner was she in Brussels than she was correcting her teacher and laying down the law.

  ‘That’s how I was, Ailsa, I was an utter hooligan. I fought my teacher every step of the way. But somehow or other, she got me under control. Julie taught me everything, we worked together for eighteen months, the most amazing time of my life. But then I went off the rails, seriously off the rails – started denouncing her teaching methods, for God’s sake, and stole her wallet and ran off with a tram conductor for two days. I had to be fetched back by the police. She was beside herself.’

  Julie had got up from the piano and screamed at Mona: You ungrateful girl, I will send you packing, and Mona had yelled back at Julie, that she was nothing but a bloody Yid.

  She’d wept and apologised, but Julie had had enough: an elderly woman, she couldn’t cope with these hysterical scenes, Mona had gone over the line and there was no way back. Julie turned away with a gesture of disgust, saying words to the effect: they should keep in touch.

  Nothing but a bloody Yid.

  ‘But, Mona, why would you call her that? You’re a Jew yourself.’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not. How on earth could you think that? Surely you realised I’m an Arab?’

  There was a stunned pause. They both drew back. Mona was a Palestinian Arab who’d been a pupil of the greatest Jewish pianist in pre-war Europe.

  Hunter and prey were confounded in Ailsa’s mind. To her, pogroms meant Nazi crimes against Jews; to Mona, Jewish crimes against Arabs. Ailsa had emerged from the War seared by the suffering borne by the Jews: it was an obscenity, heinous, vile, what were the words for it? Their suffering was seared in her conscience also. A couple of years back the British Navy had violently boarded the Exodus, a ship full of Holocaust survivors, illegal immigrants trying to get into Palestine under our Mandate. They’d been turned back and forcibly disembarked in Germany; housed in the concentration camps they’d left. For weeks cinema audiences had viewed this obscenity on the newsreels, rising and shaking their fists: Shame! Shame on us! Rather than arriving at the Promised Land, the refugees had been roughed up by the British, those gentlemen fascists, as the Jews called them. Anti-Semitism was rife in Britain: Ailsa detested it; she’d always felt on firm ground detesting it and it was dismaying now to hear the hardness in Mona’s voice as she spoke of the Exodus as a propaganda coup. How could she say that? It made Ailsa sick to hear it. But she tried to understand the terrible, cloven logic of it all.

  Cultured, westernised, Christian and affluent, the Serafins had been driven out of Palestine long before the War. Most of her remaining relatives had now been expelled or had fled last year when the Zionists proclaimed the state of Israel. Some had been killed; some were missing; others were refugees making their way from the camps to Egypt, where Mona and Ben hoped to do something for them – perhaps find jobs with the British military in the Canal Zone. They’d lost everything.

  ‘So you can never go back?’

  ‘None of us can go back,’ Mona explained, as if to a child. ‘Palestine’s been abolished.’

  Had you not noticed? she implied. Can you be so blinkered and ignorant, yes, and prejudiced? Zionists she called fascists. ‘Zionists I mean, not Jews. Of course I didn’t mean all Jews, how could I? I’m married to one. Best chap in the world. He’s been disowned by his own family for his anti-Zionism and for marrying me.’

  For Habibi, as for his Arab wife, the newborn state of Israel was al-Naqba, the catastrophe.

  And yet you sinned against your teacher, Mona, your beloved Julie, Ailsa thought, in the same way you’d been sinned against. Out had spurted venom, nothing but a bloody Yid, from the fang you didn’t know you had. The music left your hands. And you thought, I can never go back.

  *

  It would be several hours before Port Said came into view. The queue for the last ration of duty-frees stretched right round the corridor. The Empire Glory fizzed with excitement, while the Tannoy broadcast non-stop practical instructions and bracing advice. Ailsa hoisted Nia in her arms, reminding her that she’d be seeing Daddy soon, what about that?

  She smiled at Irene and spoke to her two little blond boys, but Ailsa’s mind still laboured with Mona’s story, glimpsing the politics of hate that had exploded in Mona when she called her beloved mentor a Yid. It’s what we blurt out, thought Ailsa, that condemns us. It rushes up from underground. But given time, it could surely have been forgiven?

  It was impossible to abandon Mona. How could she?

  Hedwig came from the head of the queue, cradling half a bottle of brandy like a baby. ‘Now he’ll be pleased to see me,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll be pleased anyway, Hedwig. He’ll be over the moon.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful!’

  Expectation of happiness and homecoming made Hedwig shed years; she was a radiant girl again. She’ll be all right now, Ailsa thought. The queue melted away, allowing Ailsa to buy a large box of Woodies for Joe.

  The final packing complete, everyone crowded to the rails. Heat hammered down on the crowns of their heads as they neared land. The White boys, sweltering and dejected in their best shirts, bickered in a glum, halfhearted way. The elder, wearing a tie for his daddy, twisted it savagely to drag it off, nearly throttling himself. Nia stared mutely.

  The Empire Glory lay poised between the giant stone moles of Port Said and everybody sniffed, with varying degrees of disrelish. A hot smell, Nia thought, sticking one finger up her nose to touch the smell that was pink and lodged in your throat. It rolled out from the shore, which was clouded in a dusty lilac-coloured fog. Nia did not dislike the stink. It was better than the hangar where soldiers had been hung up in hammocks.

  Ailsa held tight to Nia’s hand. The sound of the city was like the roar of a distant football match. The luminous morning mist burned off all of a sudden, like a curtain not being raised but destroyed, and they all went Ooh! and Ah!
as the skyline of Port Said appeared. Minarets and cupolas, seedy warehouses and blocks of flats. Graceful white buildings with terraced balconies overflowing with greenery, Roman arches, roof gardens and dovecotes. Jewish and French names.

  Nia was in ecstasies. She’d spotted Woolworths, her favourite shop, looking out over the jetty.

  ‘Oh look! The Statue of Liberty!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There!’

  ‘The Statue of Liberty’s in New York harbour.’

  ‘Oh. What’s that then?’

  Ailsa gazed at the outsize statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, prophet, promoter and digger of the Canal, pointing at his waterway, a sheet of gleaming water that led into and through the city itself. A lighthouse stood at its mouth. With every moment, the world of the Empire Glory lost reality. As they navigated in to berth through a crush of shipping from all over the world, a mass of brilliantly painted bumboats nosed out, piled with exotic fruit and vegetables. There was uproar. They could see the faces of the vendors with their wares, shouting up for watches or fountain pens in return for their goods and reaching up little hemp bags on poles.

  ‘Effendi!’ they called ingratiatingly. ‘Effendi!’

  The soldiers bartered, taunting and insulting the vendors, sending down half crowns for fresh oranges, which were thrown up to the deck with change in worthless piastres stuck in their sides. A howzat! rang out every time an orange was fielded and a boo! for every one that fell wide and dropped into the water.

  ‘Very cheap … very great bargain!’

  Nia was still grizzling to go into Woolworths and buy mixed sweets in a white bag.

  ‘But, Nia, we’re going to see Daddy soon. Daddy’s down there, isn’t he?’

  The heat was stifling. There’d be no more sea breezes. How could she stand it? The glare beat up off the water and seemed one with the din as the natives fleeced the foreigners. Ailsa faltered back, treading on someone’s toe.

  Nia said she was going to take Daddy to Woolworths to buy pipe cleaners. So there.

  Ailsa, looking round at the hot, excited faces of the wives and hearing the soldiers singing, realised, with soaring rapture, that this was it! She’d arrived at her heart’s desire. Joe was here on the quay, somewhere in the hustle and bustle. To be seen and held and embraced. She pressed forward in the crush, elbowing a stout woman out of the way, and waved her hanky, in case he were down there and could single her out from all the other women.

  6

  This was the land of the dead, one of the passengers was complaining. It was all mummified corpses and madmen with bombs.

  The Terra Incognita had berthed at Safaga. Nia and Poppy shuffled down the gangway, hanging on tight to their passports. At last Nia was following Ailsa into the Middle East. Reaching dry land, they looked back at the liner, which towered above them, gleaming white, in contrast to the rusting hulks in the harbour, an opulent, floating island of Britishness. It wasn’t the way Nia had toured India and Swaziland in her time. She’d backpacked, working her way round, getting to know people. And the worst thing was, she was positively enjoying being cosseted like a colonist, gorged fat on lavish food.

  We are the ship’s babies, she thought as she and Poppy boarded the Egyptian agency bus. And this is our pram.

  ‘You are all Egyptians now, my good friends!’ said Zahrah, their smiling, headscarfed guide. ‘Please, be comfortable and make yourselves at home. Egypt is your country today!’

  This was the famous hospitality of the Middle East. It was extended even as we bombed their brothers and sisters in Iraq.

  ‘Yes, you are Egyptians now! We welcome you as our family.’

  Nia clapped in appreciation with the others. But she wouldn’t want to be an Egyptian, not if she also had to be a woman: no thanks. The headscarf and the veil; the leering, jeering males who mobbed Poppy and feasted on her bare arms.

  They were to join a convoy of a hundred coaches, for unfortunately although Egypt is your home, Zahrah confessed, there are bad people about who want to bomb our honoured visitors. Never in her life had Nia seen so many soldiers or armed policemen.

  ‘Today we travel to famous and lovely graves,’ Zahrah told them. ‘You will see the Valley of the Kings. Do not worry about Ahmed,’ she added. ‘Ahmed is a very nice policeman travelling with us in plain clothes to ensure our safety.’ The shyly handsome young man in a dark suit napped the four hours to Karnak. His hands lay slack in his lap; a holster bulged at his groin. Armed men were stationed at junctions and bridges, holding up donkey carts and women with bags, to ensure safe passage to the convoy of westerners.

  After the parched, dark desert of Safaga, the bus entered the deliquescence of the green country bordering the Nile. It was a sudden and excessive transition from drought to fertility. Village after village of mud brick houses in earth and sky colours, without running water and sanitation, lined the way. Nia’s heart ached for the pauperdom of people whose lot had hardly changed in millennia. What I am seeing, Ailsa saw, she thought. Families shared quarters with animals. From glassless windows multicoloured washing hung like flags. But villages clearly had electricity, for their roofs bristled with television dishes. How come Nasser, whose socialism had promised so much to the fellaheen, had delivered so little? Why hadn’t he succeeded in reforming the baksheesh economy, in which inadequate incomes had to be supplemented by tips and favours? Nia felt ashamed of her plenty; possessive of it too.

  This was hardly the way to see the Middle East, spying through glass panes under armed guard. But Poppy, exhausted from teaching, had said when she’d seen the last minute cut-price tickets, hey, let’s go for it. Crazy not to.

  Do we really fancy it though? What about the Awful People?

  Poppy had flinched: People are people.

  Nia was ashamed. How Poppy could put up with her, she had no idea. In her own twenties, Nia wouldn’t have been seen dead on a cruise with her own mother, so stuffy and po-faced. They’d have brought their own frost to the East. Poppy was so laid-back that they’d never quarrelled, even in her teens: her soft robustness issued in a tactful going of her own way. And Nia, child of the Sixties, had been a parent so compulsively liberal that Poppy would have found little to rebel against except permissiveness itself.

  Awful People, Nia continued secretly to think. Some of her fellow cruise-guests expressed a surly sense of entitlement, bullying the crew. Retirement had brought an unexpected magic to their first cruises, hard perhaps to recapture as one entered the compromised health and hope of deeper old age. Others were cheerful and adventurous. Poppy chatted to a lovely guy across the aisle who’d been stationed at Tel-el-Kabir after the War. He spoke warmly of Egypt.

  Nia kept quiet. It’s my father I fear, she thought: he’s out there somewhere. With every moment she moved nearer to the time when, on its passage through the Suez Canal, the Terra Incognita would draw level with Fayid Cemetery and all that was left of Joseph Elwyn Roberts. His scrawl in the diaries was all over the place, with a child’s misspellings and odd abbreviations. Several times she’d opened his book and tried to reconstruct his meaning. A tongue-scramble of impressions that could only be made sense of by weaving in Ailsa’s clearer account. Nia had been so painfully moved that, after skimming a page and hearing his voice, she’d put it away for a braver time, leaving him down there on the quay at Port Said eternally waiting for his wife and daughter to join him.

  The veteran from Tel-el-Kebir offered them a mint, which Nia accepted with a smile. His lively eyes were pale blue, almost bleached. He might easily have known Sergeant Joe Roberts, and even remember him. These folk were the last of her parents’ generation, on pilgrimage to the places of their early lives as National Servicemen. For Nia too this was a pilgrimage. The little she remembered was nonsensical: hail stones big as ping pong balls and screaming her head off between a camel’s twin humps. And – this seemed to be her first memory – bleeding creatures in the sea. Perhaps it was some corrupted memory of Mami’s hands gutting
fish. But the creatures that bled all over her memory were enormous beings with intelligent, expressive eyes. Some film perhaps. She blinked it away and listened to the veteran from Tel-el-Kebir. This was the last such voyage the veterans were likely to make, now that the Middle East was well nigh closing down. Nowhere was safe, he said, after our assault on Iraq.

  Luxor and Karnak passed like dreams. They trooped through the monumental temple in smiting heat; then after a picnic lunch ventured underground into the tombs of Tutankhamun and those of various Ramses. All in eight hours flat. The sun was sinking and Poppy’s face, arms and neck were gilded by the glorious light. Her child’s goldenness was one with the yellow hills of the Valley of the Kings in the dying sun, the splendour imparted to tawny mud villages on rust-red hillsides, the rich patina of sand gilding the mortuary landscape in this vast necropolis on the Nile’s west bank.

  Poppy remained asleep while Nia disembarked at Memnon, where they were to have a ‘photo stop’. The twin colossi were all that remained of a vast temple. Now they sat as sentinels of a portal to – well, nothing. Emptiness. Absence. Faces smashed away, chests weathered, the seated figures preserved in their ruin an intact majesty. They reminded Nia of Henry Moore’s statues of father, mother and child, in a Yorkshire landscape. The relationship of triangles and spheres to the rolling land had made sacred space of landscape and figures. But here the statues sat hieratically apart. And of course there was no child. Nothing to link them. The sun gilded and warmed the colossi’s intact knees and lower legs. Behind them a rust-red mountain rose with a village on its foothills. New busloads of tourists arrived looking for something to photograph and Zahrah beckoned to her Terra Incognita charges.

  Perhaps it would be the magnificent temple at Karnak that Nia took away with her. But more likely, Nia thought, climbing back into the bus, it will be the memory of that dog slinking through the ruins, an image of destitution. A ginger bitch with swollen teats, head low, consumed by hunger and exhaustion, had curled up at the dead centre of a vast aisle behind twin pylons, completely exposed. Many feet, in sandals, trainers, flip-flops, lace-ups, moved past her, not so much aiming kicks as shoving at the bitch in passing. She did not stir. Nia later saw the scapebitch, as she called it to herself, like the biblical scapegoat – in the coach park, nosing its way into the stink of hot rubber and oil beneath a parked van.