A Writer's World
Page 7
First went a truck flying the red flag of Muscat. Beside its driver sat our Beduin guide, a small withered man with an avaricious look about him. Next rode the Sultan, his big turban bobbing up and down with the bumps of the track. In the third truck sat an elderly functionary with a long white beard; in the fourth were two splendid desert sheikhs, crowded together over the gearbox, with their rifles protruding from the window; in the fifth was a very old qadi of saintly bearing; and the rest of us followed behind, at tremendous speed, jolting wildly over the plain like raiders hot on the heels of an enemy. The flag flapped bravely. The big slaves laughed at each other and clutched their weapons. The little goats huddled together for company. It was a gloriously exhilarating start.
‘Where are we going?’ inquired my driver.
We were going to the Sultan’s capital, Muscat on the Persian Gulf, and all went well. The Sultan humiliated various dissidents of the remote and mountainous interior, satisfied himself about oil rights and arrived at his capital in triumph (although fourteen years later he was to be deposed by his own son, and the country was renamed simply Oman). His slaves, by the way, seemed to me more like privileged servants than chattels, and the British, as semi-suzerains of the sultanate, tried to dissuade me from calling them slaves at all. ‘I have spoken to Morris,’ wrote one Foreign Office official to his superiors in London, ‘and have, I hope, convinced him of when a slave is not a slave.’ As to my book about the journey, it has remained banned in Oman from that day to this. I don’t know why.
The Suez Affair
In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the French-managed Suez Canal, and in response the Israelis, in collusion with the British and French, launched a lightning invasion of the Egyptian Sinai peninsula, brilliantly capturing it. Anglo-French forces then seized the canal itself, ostensibly to separate the Israelis from the Egyptians. This almost surreal enterprise in fact signalled the end of European colonial interference in the Middle East, and was a seminal moment in the collapse of British imperial confidence.
By then I had migrated from The Times to the Guardian, which sent me to Sinai to observe the Israeli Army in the field at the moment of its ambiguous victory – for nobody knew what was going to happen next, whether the Russians would intervene, or the Americans, or the United Nations, or whether a third world war was hatching.
A rainbow appeared this afternoon, though nobody seemed to notice it but me. All around me as I stood at the road junction the soldiers of the Israeli Army were hitch-hiking home from battle, and they hailed their passing lorries, swapped their war stories, compared their souvenirs, whistled their tunes without a glance at that poor pale phenomenon above them. Perhaps they were right. Great forces are swirling around Israel nowadays. In all its ten years of dangerous living Israel was perhaps never so precarious as this.
Still, it is always nice to see an army going home, especially when it is so young and confident and full of conviction as this. The Israeli Army still has some of the free-and-easiness of an irregular force, and the soldiers around me, from nearly every country under the sun, shared a peculiar defiant panache that I have never experienced before. They were not only fighting soldiers, but unwavering zealots.
Their views admitted no argument, their claims no query; and if ever I felt moved to remonstration there was always a young man with a clear eye to remind me that the Israelis, if ever they should lose a battle, have nowhere else in the world to go. How can you argue, however impartial you are, however divided your sympathies on Palestine, with a people whose only alternatives are victory or extinction?
Many and enthralling were those soldiers’ stories. They told of a blond German officer captured with the Egyptians who had the insignia of the SS tattooed on his arm; of Russian orders issued to Egyptian tank crews; of underground tunnels packed with weapons. They spoke of vast quantities of captured ammunition, and of Egyptian commandos wearing pyjamas over their uniforms. They spoke harshly, as soldiers have since the beginning of war, and they unanimously agreed that not on any account would Israel withdraw from Sinai just because Britain or Russia or the United Nations happened to say so. Such was their mood, and such was mine, that I preferred on the whole not to debate the point.
Trucks came and went, soldiers climbed aboard and waved goodbye. It rained, and I prepared to move on. Just then the rainbow came. ‘Look, a rainbow,’ I said to a bearded and taciturn sergeant not long from Romania, and added sentimentally, ‘An omen of peace!’ But that unusual NCO needed no handkerchief to disperse his emotions. ‘It is not a reasonable analogy to the present situation,’ he replied, shifting his Sten gun on his shoulder. ‘God showed Noah the rainbow as a promise of no more floods in the future. When He merely wished to signify that Noah could now leave the ark, He dispatched a small bird, carrying a piece of tree in its snout.’
At the end of the campaign I sat with an Israeli officer watching an apparently endless convoy of captured Egyptian armoured vehicles rumbling by on their way northwards into Israel. I asked him what they would do if the United Nations ordered the tanks to be returned to the Egyptians. ‘Tanks?’ he replied. ‘What tanks?’
I went on from Sinai to Port Said in Egypt, the northern outlet of the Suez Canal and a place I had known for years, to see how it was after the British had bombed and occupied it.
There is an air of berserk unreality to the Suez adventure, so it is not surprising to find Port Said bathed in a sense of fantasy. There is a nightmare feeling to the city today, a suggestion that we shall all wake up one welcome morning and wash the memory away with the morning tea.
War falls easily enough upon sprawling capitals among the darkling plains, where ideologies clash and there are statues of dictators to topple from their pedestals. Port Said used to feel infinitely distant from such affairs. It was something different and apart, a place with a single purpose in life, neatly deposited upon the map like a town on a model railway: and until a few weeks ago it had a certain pungent sparkle to it, so that it was fun to watch the tankers pounding by as you drank your coffee among the dowdy blue crêpe dresses of the Simon Artz department store.
It still looks familiar, when you fly into it from Cyprus on an RAF aircraft. Soon, you may feel, the touts will be at your heels as always, and the gharries will be clip-clopping down the faded boulevards, and among the back streets, in rambling tenements and houses of peeling flotsam, the purveyors of sin will be preparing their debaucheries. But no, even before your aircraft lands you can sense the heavy despondency that now pervades the town. The streets below are nearly empty. No impudent bum-boats hurry about the harbour. No teeming crowds wander through the Arab quarter. Offshore half a dozen warships lie watchfully brooding, and over the town there seems to hang an unhealthy hush. It is as though some blighting epidemic has fallen upon Port Said, chasing the householders behind their doors, and leaving only uneasy scavengers at large.
Soon, as in a daze, you are entering the town. A squadron of Centurion tanks sprawls among churned mud in its outskirts. The big buildings along the waterfront are spattered with shell-fire. Part of the Arab quarter lies devastated, and a faint smell of death lingers in the streets, but it is not the tragedy of war that strikes you most forcibly as your bus rolls towards the Canal. It is the dreamlike quality of the experience. Something has happened in Port Said that shatters any previously held conception of the laws of probability. The British Army has seized it by force.
There are Union Jacks everywhere, familiar uniforms, officers driving requisitioned Citroëns. Courteous British sailors stand sentry upon the quayside, and there are war correspondents, and pompous army captains, and splendid ample petty officers, and people you were at school with, and a bustling jumble of British jokes and epithets. For a time none of it seems real. You shake your brain about like a drunk trying to disperse his liquor, until you look out across the harbour entrance and see the cluttered masts and funnels of sunken ships. Alas, it is no hallucination.
The shopping stree
ts are dampened and depressed. The tourist stores are shuttered. Only a few merchants sit listlessly on kitchen chairs outside their premises. Here and there a shop has been mildly looted, and there is a litter of broken glass upon its floor and a few satin-padded boxes, empty of dubious emeralds or spurious antiques. In the Casino Palace Hotel, now a field hospital, you may search in vain for the courtly tarbooshed manager whose presence used to link that establishment indissolubly with the Edwardian era. Staff officers move importantly about the domed offices of the Suez Canal Company. Lounging soldiers lean from the windows of the shipping offices.
Here and there an Egyptian hawker accosts you. He peers around him before he offers you his wares, for somebody may accuse him of collaboration, and he brings his prices down far, far more easily than he used to. Outside the coffee shops a few men sit at empty tables, looking blank. They answer your inquiries with an air of moody resignation, with shruggings of shoulders and raised eyebrows, and manage to tell you very little. Port Said is scared, not of the British Army, still a homely force, but of the menacing powers of resentment and revenge that seethe behind the town’s façade.
What a queer, contorted, significant mess has overcome the activities of this poor town! Motives have become hazily confused, moralities are topsy-turvy. The liberal finds himself allied with autocracy, the reactionary with the forces of progress. The decline of empires, the rise of the new Asia, the clash of east and west – all these portentous movements are suddenly illustrated with a peculiar clarity among these shabby urban streets. One can imagine such things easily enough in some war-scarred cockpit of Europe, but how anomalous they seem in Port Said, of all places, where the boatmen used to cheat you over the Turkish delight, and the young seamen tried to look experienced as they lounged towards the brothels, and pale colonial children on liner decks sat cross-legged and enthralled around the gully-gully men!
‘Elephant and Castle!’ say the soldiers, as the bus pulls in, but there is a false ring to the witticism. It has no heart in it, and springs from no roots of cheerful certainty: just as there feels no depth of truth or purpose to the present predicament of Port Said.
All three powers were soon obliged by international disapproval to withdraw from Egyptian territory. The Suez Canal has remained under Egyptian administration ever since, and all its European pilots were withdrawn. I asked a Royal Navy captain if this would create problems. Not at all, he said. All one had to do anyway was order one’s helmsman: ‘Steer down the middle’.
Baghdad
In 1958 a revolution put an end to the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, for forty years a client state of the British Empire. The young King Feisal II and his uncle the Crown Prince Abdulillah were both murdered, and so was Nuri es-Said Pasha, the strong man of the regime and the best-known statesman of the Arab world. I had met all three in easier times, and I got to Baghdad a couple of days after their deaths.
In the broiling sun I walked through an open gateway and said goodbye to the old Iraq. ‘Nuri es-Said is dead,’ my driver informed me, performing some gestures of disembowelment. ‘Now we will look at his house, which was also his fortress.’ It is an ugly brick building with a garden running down to the Tigris, and its façade is chipped with machine-gun bullets. By the time the crowd reached the house on the day of the revolution Nuri had slipped away across the river, and now the place is a desolation, a charnel heap, littered with papers and broken furniture and dirt. A small boy sells soft drinks outside the front door, and a constant bustling curious crowd churns through its corridors, picking at the wreckage or peering into the broken shower-baths.
Relics of hideous poignancy lie everywhere about the house, and the crowd pokes its way into everything, breaking bits of wood off the wardrobes and ripping the last locks from the bedroom doors. Here is a packet of ‘denture fixature’. Here is a race card. Half of an old helmet, such as the Turkish Army used to wear, is squashed beneath a box. Scraps of books swirl around the floors: a page on Allenby’s strategy, a thesis on Roman law, an article on railway engines, a fragment of a thriller – ‘Bellay bent forward and looked at the instruments. Sir James leaned across him and asked ‘Did we send an emergency signal, captain?’
A safe has been broken open, and a small crowd is shaking it backwards and forwards in the hope that a few treasures may have been left behind by early comers. A couple of young men are examining a broken cupboard with a commercial air, like rag and bone men inspecting an old suit. A sentry with a rifle stands guard at the back door, and as you approach he gives you a smile that is almost domestic: ‘Welcome,’ he says, bowing slightly, as if to give you the run of the garden.
So strong is the lingering presence of old Nuri, so all-powerful has he been through decades of Iraq’s history, that it is hard to imagine his remains dismembered in ignominy across the Tigris. His house is wrecked and filthy and stripped of its grandeurs, and when he was dead, so I am told, they drove a car backwards and forwards across his body, ‘for he was a man of great corruption’. But as you stand at the top of the garden it feels oddly as though the house has merely been thrown open to the public in aid of some charitable fund; as though the old grandee himself, to avoid the pressure of the mechanic crowds, has locked himself upstairs with a cigar and a pile of papers.
So I looked suddenly back into the hall of the house, as I passed the boy selling soft drinks, half-expecting to see his stocky figure lumbering down the staircase, or catch a glimpse of his cynical, leathery face high in some garret window; but only a happy family party came laughing and chattering into the hall, and from upstairs there came a noise of thudding and thumping, and a shouting of small boys and scampering footsteps, and all the sounds of holiday.
Israel
Nearly a decade after its foundation the Republic of Israel was at once a marvel, an affront and a perpetual anxiety – surrounded by Arab states formally dedicated to its extinction and surviving by a combination of guts, arrogance, charitable contributions and plain chutzpah.
Civis occidentalis sum, and so I do not feel altogether abroad in Tel Aviv. The air is Asian, the sun oriental, the buildings are white and the trees tropical, the beer of the sidewalk cafés possesses a curiously chemical quality, far removed from the vegetable grandeurs of European ale: but if you feel yourself to be a Western man, you will always be half at home in this, the principal city of the Jewish State.
Jerusalem is the official capital of Israel, and Haifa up the coast is a more serene and elegant city, but in the streets of Tel Aviv are enshrined, once and for all, the formidable efforts of the Zionists to achieve a homeland of their own. Here, better than anywhere else in the world, you may consider what it means to be a Jew, ponder the tragic significance of this astonishing people, and wonder whether this smallish seaside town, half resort, half business centre, will ever be a great city in a great nation, or whether the heart of Jewry lies elsewhere still. There was to the energies of Zionism, before the Israeli State became a fact, a mystical, biblical, tribal force, like the shifting of a season or some enormous celestial truth: but Tel Aviv is one of the deflations of history, for today it feels an essentially provincial, hopefully prosaic town, where the nice young women promenade down Allenby Road with their babies, and the conversation at the next table is generally concerned not with dark fundamentals of truth and cruelty, but only the cost of cucumbers or why little Moshe can’t spell.
*
Tel Aviv, indeed, wants to be an ordinary town, and to any Western visitor nowadays it seems half familiar from the start. The climate is a dream, and all along the city’s waterfront run heavenly golden sands, with the long slow swell of the Mediterranean curling up to the esplanades: but though the setting is exotic, this is almost a European city, inhabited by people who, though handsomely bronzed by the perpetual sun, are almost Europeans. You hear English, German, Polish or Yiddish almost as often as you hear Hebrew, and time and again you will see someone walking down the street who seems at first sight to be somebody you know,
a publisher in Paris or a musician in London, but who turns out to be familiar only because he is a Jew and a man of the West. Just as America was once called, by the poet Philip Bailey, the ‘half-brother of the world’, so Tel Aviv is distantly related, through the blood-brotherhood of Jewry, to all the greater cities of the West.
It still feels a city of the thirties, as do those London suburbs where the refugees from Hitler’s Europe chiefly settled. There is little to show of the British who were its rulers between the wars – a street name here, a police station somewhere else: but its architecture smacks heavily of watered Bauhaus, its undistinguished squares, trim and symmetrical, look like town-planning designs in architectural reviews before the Second World War, and even its sea-front, though it has its glittering new hotels and raucous coffee bars, mostly retains a demure but determined period flavour. Tel Aviv was founded in 1910, but it was really born after Hitler came to power: the refugees who came then stamped it with the mark of their times, and beneath its housewifely exterior you may still detect, if you think long and hard enough about it, some of the art or sadness of fugitives, and the nostalgia of exiles.
Tel Aviv wants to be an everyday city, but can never quite achieve it, for Israel is not an everyday state. It has mellowed since its most defiant days of resentment, lost some of the chips upon its shoulders, but it still lives by the slogan of Ein Brera – ‘No Alternative’ – and is still precariously isolated among a ring of enemies. Moreover, every now and then the Israelis are halted in their tracks by a declamation out of the past, a reminder from State or history that they are no ordinary people, but a nation still apart, a nation of awful suffering genius, beyond the normal processes of the time. They are still confronted by a unique dilemma, apparent sure enough to the thoughtful stranger in the country: either they can abandon their Jewishness, their separateness, and become ordinary healthy citizens of a second Lebanon, or they can deliberately preserve their sense of persecution, superiority and detachment, and attach their new State to the dark and splendid centuries of the Jewish past. They can contract out of genius, if they please, and live as a small but gifted Levantine republic: or they can remain within the prison-palace of their magnificent heritage, and make this place not simply a city of the Israelis, but a city of the Jews.