This never happened when I went to buy. I made like I had won the “pig-wrasslin’” contest in the last Iowa State Fair, and when the merchant I was dealing with turned to his half brother and said in mellow Arabic, “Watch me schlom this guy for sixty leera for a twenty-leera carpet that I picked up from a one-eyed Kurd out by the ruins of Baalbek,” I would simply rivet the hassock with a piercing gaze, like Sherlock Holmes, and say, “This carpet was obviously made by a one-eyed Kurd somewhere near the ruins of Baalbek and I wouldn’t give you more than twenty leera for it!” Sometimes the merchant would lose consciousness, and we’d never get to complete the transaction, but it didn’t always happen that way. Do you think it was wrong to do that?
No doubt Moona would have thought it wrong. And she would have been pretty well frosted indeed had she realized that I knew all-all-all about her telephone conversations. I might have told her about my fluency in Arabic right from the start, except for that morning during the first week she was with us when she answered the telephone and I heard this:
(In English):
What?… Who?… What number, please?
(In Arabic):
They’re going out at eight o’clock. Bring up the gang and we’ll have a ball. (Free translation)
(In English):
No, this is not the Bank of Syria. This is 21439! (Hangs up irritably)
I won’t go into tedious detail about the subtle Oriental defenses that I subsequently rigged up to prevent our apartment from becoming a roof-top night club. The important thing was the accuracy of my intelligence, and that always came to me from an unimpeachable source.
iv
In September I played nine holes of golf at the Beirut Sporting Club because a terrible-tempered American friend of mine named Nammack wanted to find out once and for all what the teen-age Arab caddies were saying about his game. Ben Hogan once played the course and was reported to have angrily dubbed it a “nine-hole sand trap,” but I didn’t see why that should stop me from doing Nammack a favor, even though his motive was ulterior.
We both played miserable golf for eight holes, and Nammack was getting madder and madder. The caddies were getting quieter and quieter, as if they didn’t really believe what they were seeing. Then, on the ninth tee, Nammack pumped out a nice 220-yard drive that was making a beeline for the green before it finally dug into the sand. Nammack’s caddie said, “Allah raheem,” and all of a sudden the other boy turned his back to us, and I could see his shoulders shaking and it really didn’t look as though he were crying.
Nammack pushed his sunburned face up close to mine. “What did he say?”
I gave it to him straight. “He said, ‘Allah is merciful.’”
The few words of Arabic known to Nammack were milk-curdling profanities, and he let them pour in a brief, abusive shower on his caddie’s offending shoulders. The lad, the youngest of a family of Palestine refugees encamped in a wood within the course grounds, took it without flinching, but when it was all over, he turned to my caddie and calmly murmured something.
Nammack was on me instantly. “Well,” he whispered urgently, “what was it?”
“No,” I said, for Nammack was clearly at the brink.
“No? What do you mean, no? What did he say?”
“Forget it.”
“Blatty, I want to know what that boy said!”
I looked him dead in the eye. “He said you learned your Arabic from a parakeet.”
Well, he asked me, didn’t he?
v
“Uncle Sam’s” was an American-type sandwich shop across the street from the main entrance to the American University of Beirut, and Fred Royal, a British school teacher who used to be on the London stage, joined me there one early evening for a genuine U.S.-style banana split. Lebanese girls are usually extremely homely or ravishingly lovely, and two of the lovelies were sipping lemonade at a table right next to ours. I had just made a dedicated stab at my second scoop of ice-cream (black walnut) when I heard one of the girls say in clear and breezy Arabic, “No, the one is English, but the other talks like an American.” I gulped down a half-chewed walnut, sipped some water from a glass, and casually began picking at my third scoop (coffee). My antennae zoomed out.
“Are they from the University?” asked one of the girls, pushing a forefinger against the bridge of her sunglasses. (For some mysterious reason, about one out of every four Lebanese girls wears sunglasses indoors.)
“Never seen them before.”
“The American’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
“Well, he’s no Rock Hudson.”
“He’s got a broad nose, but he’s nice.”
“If you like that type.”
“He’d probably look a lot better with a shave.”
“I doubt it.”
“Are they looking at us?”
“No.”
“What is it they’re eating?”
“Banana split.”
“Awful goop.”
“Look at that nose. It’s a wonder he can drink out of a glass.”
“Who?”
“The American.”
“Oh, really now, Suad, what’s the matter with you? He’s nice.”
“I think you’d better take off your sunglasses and look again.”
“Are they looking at us?”
“No.”
“Maybe if they knew we speak English they’d talk to us.”
“Maybe.”
“Here, Samira, take fifty piastres and play the jukebox. Something sentimental. Something American. Maybe that will get their attention.” After an interval: “The British one is very nice.”
“Okay. So I like the American. Now what?”
“Act casual. Let them make the first move.”
At that moment, the waiter came to our table, and in very audible Arabic I asked him if he could make up four of those banana splits to take home to my wife and children. All at once the jukebox came to life and the horrible gurgling noises at the next table were almost drowned out by Rosemary Clooney singing “Hey, There!” I think one of the girls knocked over her lemonade glass, and that may have made some noise too, but I didn’t stay to find out, I just got the hell out of there. Poor Fred.
It’s odd, though. Even with all this uninhibited chatter pecking around my ears, I never overheard anything political. Those may have been months of flap and ferment in the Middle East, but my linguistic wire-tapping gear never picked up any signs of international tension. Well, hardly ever. There was that time, I guess, when, along with Peggy and the kids, a few other Embassy people, two Arab students from the American University and a local guide, I visited Krak de Chevalier, most formidable of the many still-standing Crusader castles in the area. Perched high on a mountaintop in northern Syria, this twelfth-century, multi-turreted relic had a massive entry gate that bore an Arabic inscription across its arch. When the thing that happened happened, the guide was reading the inscription aloud in rolling, sonorous tones, savoring the full flavor of the classical Arabic words. I mean, you could see it meant a lot to him. He paused for dramatic emphasis, and, speaking to the Americans, said, with great feeling in his voice: “Do you know—can you possibly imagine what these beautiful lines mean?”
“Yes,” murmured one of the University students in Arabic; “Crusader, go home!”
vi
The khamseen was a temper-aggravating wind that blew into Beirut from off the deserts during the summer months, and under the Ottoman Empire law it was even taken into account in the judgment of murder cases. The khamseen hung over us oppressively during the few weeks following our arrival in Beirut, and it seemed to make me want to do something. Usually I did something like this: I walk into a leather-goods store and ask to see a hassock. The shop is run by a father-and-son combination and I am glad when the father starts advising the son in Arabic how to make a sale to an American, because then I can do what it is I have to do in this weather.
The merchant says to his son, “Delight
of my heart, show him the one with the cedars-of-Lebanon design on it: this is what he is looking for.”
And the son says to the merchant, “But, O, my father, the camel design is much better.”
And the father says, “Not in vain have I sold hassocks to Americans all these years. The American is different and you must learn what pleases him. I know. The cedars.”
And then I say, “I would especially like to see one with a camel motif, if possible. Do you have them?” I never looked them in the eye when I did this, so I can’t tell you what expression was on their faces.
Then the father would say, “Bring to him one of the white and one of the green.”
And the son says, “But, O, my father, the red one is the most popular.”
And the father says, “Popular for Lebanese, but not for Americans.”
And the son says, “But you also thought he would like the cedars design, and it was the camels that he liked.”
And the father says, “Pride of my house, a single hair does not make a beard. A slight error. But trust me. Am I not your father? I know these Americans.”
And then, as the boy reached up to a shelf, first for the green, and then for the white, I would say, “But don’t you have any in red? I much prefer the red.”
I was awfully glad the khamseen lasted only fifty days.
vii
There actually was a time—it was during the first two weeks of our arrival—when I spoke only Arabic to the Arabs of Lebanon, but they would never look at me while I was talking. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if they stared at their mosque shoes or mosaics in the ceiling or something, but they would always look behind me and roll their eyes all around, and I was made faintly aware that they were looking for the ventriloquist. Arabic is a difficult language and all that, but, I mean, what the hell!”
For the brief time that I did it, speaking Arabic got me into nothing but trouble. One August morning, for instance, I parked my car in a no-parking zone in front of a brocade shop in Beirut’s downtown shopping district. The shop proprietor was lounging in the shop doorway, his fez slightly askew, and I asked him—in Arabic—if he would kindly inform any interested policeman who came along not to ticket me because I would be back in half a minute.
When I did get back, a black-capped Beirut cop was writing up a parking violation. “Officer, what seems to be the trouble?” I said to him in my best American English—it was my policy even then always to speak English to policemen. Especially when they observed me in no-parking zones or making U-turns in the market place. That way they usually accepted me as an ignorant foreigner and, being good-natured lads, smiled indulgently and gestured for me to move on. This cop gave me a blank stare and then went back to writing up the ticket.
“But officer,” I said to him, “I asked this man here to tell you I would be back in just a minute!”
The cop looked up at me and said—in Arabic—that I was in a no-parking area. Excellent, I thought, he doesn’t understand English, an unusual but fortunate circumstance. Soon he will grow exasperated with trying to explain to me what I’ve done wrong, and will signal me to move on, like they always do. So I turned on a relentless barrage of English until I noticed that the cop wasn’t saying anything, and he wasn’t writing anything, either. He was just staring at me wondrously strange, and looking very inscrutable. Then he turned to the shopkeeper and said in Arabic, “How come this guy speaks Arabic to you, but speaks only English to me? How come, huh—how come?” Yeah—how come?…
viii
Naturally, on our first weekend in Lebanon, the family and I just had to go barreling up into the mountains to see Zahle, birthplace of my father. As we reached the center of the tiny village, I could clearly hear my mother’s voice thundering in my ears: “My God, it’s a regular Venice!” And it was. There was water, all right, and it ran through the streets, even though there was only one street. I scored one for the mother of the Blatti.
We sat at one of the cafe tables that lined the rushing waters of Zahle, and dined on the village’s specialties: kibbeh—raw ground lamb mixed with wheat grain, garnished with raw onion and submerged in olive oil—and arak, a clear liquor whose potency seemed to expand exponentially with each arithmetic sip, and which, when mixed with water, clouded up like ammonia water. The Arabs called it “Lion’s milk,” so the kids got coke—“Kuka Kula.”
Vendors of many-splendored, assorted goodies and wares would drift by our table, like seaweed afloat on the tide, and Christine got interested in a pink, gummy and apparently rather talented glup that came in tubes and could be blown up into bubbles of colossal circumference. After several minutes of bargaining, Peggy began to exhibit the classic symptoms of combat fatigue, for she several times indicated an unseemly willingness to accept the merchants’ first quotation—two leera—while I held out, in a reckless torrent of Arabic, for one leera, fifty piastres. With no agreement in sight, I abruptly terminated the session and Peggy and I turned back to our kibbeh. The bubble merchants walked off a slight distance, and then one of them—gingerly balancing an enormous blob of pink on the fingertips of both hands—turned and shouted to me in derisive Arabic: “Your lady is a fine American! But you—you are the miserable son of an Ethopian camel trader!” That pretty much cooled me, I can tell you. And that’s also when I stopped speaking Arabic to the Arabs. But I was yet to reap the wild whirlwind.
You see, I decided that my linguistic Frankenstein act might prove rather titillating, if you’ll pardon the expression, to the old folks in Hometown, U.S.A. Dashing off an article on the subject, at the rate of about three words an hour, I sent it, in a furlined folder, to The Saturday Evening Post. They printed it. And they might just as well have printed my obituary.
Copies of the issue containing my article got back to Beirut, and as I walked past Ali on the way to the VW one morning, I happened to glance at the cover of an Arabic magazine he was reading. It had an interesting cover photo, which caused a rather interesting wiggling of my ears: a picture of me! And even more horribly compelling was the black-bannered caption: AMERICAN SPY IN LEBANON!… I didn’t wait for Lenora Borealis to call me. I went to the Embassy and gave myself up.
ix
The Ambassador wouldn’t even look at me. He didn’t say anything, either, but I heard a funny grinding noise, like teeth, and it sounded a lot like the title song from Death of a Test Case. The Ambassador’s mouth and nose were pressed up tight against the face of his tennis racket, and when he finally turned to me, he was staring wildly through the strings, like a Wimbledon version of the prisoner of Zenda. “Blat-ty!” he croaked, “BLAT-TY!” Then he flung his head and arms down on the desk and lay still. I looked the other way. I can’t stand to see a grown man cry.
Abruptly he sat up and looked out the window, finding some solace in the secretarial traffic in the Embassy garden. “I’m going to give you another chance,” he said in a forced, choked tone. “I’m going to give you a chance to use your Arabic for your country. But you’ll have to go to Egypt.”
“For good?” I quavered, and his head turned slowly until his eyes met mine. “Blatty,” he said quietly, “you’re one of the most extraordinary beings I have ever met in my lifetime,” and you can be sure I wondered about that one for a long time to come. But meanwhile, what of Egypt? And Little Egypt? And Pharaoh and the Tattooed Man?
“What I’m about to divulge,” resumed the Ambassador slowly, “is highly classified information. I trust you know what that means.” Well, you just bet I did, Buster, but if you think I was going to tell him about my little scene in the NERSC men’s room, you’re out of your head, so to speak. I just nodded my dome and listened. “To be direct with you, Blatty, some rather vital data gathered from an Eastern power by one of our agents is now gathering mildew in a curio shop in Cairo. It’s on microfilm, in the hollow of a blue scarab. The shop owner is a mercenary in our employ, but the ‘other agency’ doesn’t dare send in one of its men. We never know who might be known, might be recogn
ized or followed, and the political climate of Egypt is much too frisky and incendiary these days to risk a serious international embarrassment. So we need a ‘straight man’—someone totally unconnected with this sort of operation, but with ample resourcefulness and intelligence to go in and make the pick-up without detection.” I basked. “So we’re sending Miss Epstein,” finished the Ambassador. I de-basked.
“Miss Epstein,” continued the lion of Beirut, “is rather well known for her interest in Egyptian scarabs. She’s made many such purchases in Cairo. No one would suspect her, especially if she were sent to Egypt for the ostensible purpose of gathering News Review material. She’s absolutely perfect!”
“Yes, sir, she’s absolutely perfect,” I echoed. “I didn’t ask you, Blatty,” said the Ambassador, pinning me to the warm-beige wall with a cold glance. “But you can be extremely useful,” he added, shifting his gaze to the window again. “Your knowledge of Arabic could prove invaluable in the event of some unforeseen difficulty, and should further divert suspicion. Moreover, I hardly think anyone would suspect you of being an intelligence agent.”
Now what in hell did that mean?
The Ambassador looked me in the eye again. “Miss Epstein has volunteered for this unusual assignment. And I should like to remind you, Blatty, that this mission by no means falls within the scope of your obligations to your Agency or to this Embassy.” And here he leaned across his desk rather ominously: “But I’m sure you’re more than anxious to make up for some of your—heh heh!—misdemeanors?”
“I’m anxious,” I said feverishly. “Boy, am I anxious!”
“That’s good of you, Blatty. Good of you.” He turned to the window. “You’ll leave day after tomorrow. You’ll be briefed. Be careful.”
Which Way to Mecca, Jack? Page 12