Three blocks from Bab Idriss, traffic blended into a blocking and snarling of horn-honking cars. No one was moving. Scenting a new and unexpected turn to my News Review article, I parked the bug and went the rest of the way on foot.
It was a “trouble,” all right—a big trouble. The congestion was caused by an unbelievable number of smashed cars and traffic cops writing up violations faster than they could sharpen their pencils.
I nosed around the sidewalk area for a while, and bit by bit I pieced together a story of what had happened—and was still happening—from information passed along to me by other wide-eyed spectators. It was, of course, the lights.
ii
Some of the drivers, judging from their stories to the police, had slowed down to gape and wonder at the “pretty colored lights” so that they forgot about sounding their horns and went haplessly barreling into each other with a crisp sound of fender crunching.
Some had thought that they were supposed to stop when the lights blinked out altogether, and they were still sitting in their cars, waiting for the lights to go out.
Still others had taken the lights to be a form of advertising!
“I give up, what are they selling?” asked one curious Arab driver who had tooled his Fiat 1100 alongside a policeman standing in the shadow of one of the signals.
“What?”
“What are they selling? What’s the gimmick?” (Free translation.)
“You being funny?”
“What do you mean, ‘funny?’ This,” said the driver, pointing up at the signal—“What’s it for?”
“It’s a traffic light,” said the cop, and suspecting mockery, he began writing up a ticket.
“A traffic light?” repeated the driver.
“A traffic light,” repeated the cop.
“Well, I don’t want any,” said the driver. “I should have told you before you wrote up that receipt.” He beetled off in first gear.
Another befezzed driver, on the receiving end of a violation slip, thought the light was a crime against free society.
“How’s it supposed to work?” I overheard him asking the policeman.
“It’s mechanical. It’s operated electronically through a master control board.”
“You mean you don’t stand here and change the color of the lights personally?”
“No.”
“You mean on account of this machine we can’t work things out for ourselves anymore?”
“Right.”
“You mean we all have to do the same thing when this machine tells us?”
“Right.”
He snatched the violation slip from the policeman’s hands. “Where did Lebanon get this thing—from the Russians?”
“No,” said the cop.
“You lie!” shouted the driver, tearing the ticket into little bits. “When individualism dies and we cannot think or act for ourselves, but must all do exactly the same thing when a State machine tells us—THAT’S COMMUNISM!” he roared and threw the ticket bits into the policeman’s face. He drove off in a shower of carboned confetti and was quickly enveloped in the traffic snarl.
While I stood there, still watching from the sidewalk, a bearded old driver of dignity summed up the day’s doings in a few grave words.
“What is it?” he asked, looking up at the light.
“It means the end of Beirut’s traffic problems,” said the cop.
“Nay, my son,” said the oldster as he turned fearful, apocalyptic eyes on the mad scene in the intersection. “I fear it means the end of the world!” He may have had the right of it there, but if he did, I decided I wasn’t going to spend my last months of life choking on exhaust fumes. I wedged my way back to my car and started to take the long way home, brooding the while on the possibility of altering the title of my News Review article to “The Light That Failed.” The traffic lights were indeed finished, for they were destined to be turned off permanently that night.
iii
But I was not yet finished with Lebanese drivers. Six blocks from home, I nearly collided with a cab at an intersection, and after much squealing of brakes and screeching of tires, we wound up halted in a position perpendicular to each other. The driver leaned out of his cab, and in Arabic he shouted at me: “Thou miserable offspring of a ruptured gnat! Curse the day and the hour and the instant in which you were conceived!” I leaned my head out of the VW and smilingly thanked him. It was largely through the obligingness of Beirut’s cab drivers that I had been able to add immeasurably to my vocabulary of Arab curses and epithets!
The Lebanese were wonderful about their profanity. They reminded me a great deal of the flowering of the Elizabethan age when each man was a poet and his virility went hand in hand with his ability to conjure up a rhyme or meter out a verse. It was not unusual to see Lebanese men walking the streets at night, one of them chanting or singing an original verse while the other punctuated his efforts with ecstatic bravos. They were good at this. But by far their best efforts were plunged into their curses. Among the things that cab drivers had thus far said to me were:
“May your grandfather’s beard burn in hell!”
“May thy first child be a desert lizard!”
“The milk of thy mother was wasted!”
And like that.
Using words to question the legitimacy of one’s natal credentials aroused no ire in the Lebanese, and they freely used their equivalent for the four-letter Anglo-Saxon about each other and each other’s relatives without even provoking anger or the urge to spill blood. This was probably fortunate for most Americans in Beirut, for the Arab version of this word is pronounced “kiss.” I will not dwell on the possibilities latent here, except to concede that they are enormous and disquieting.
One of the worst curses in the language is “Yil on deennek!” It means, “Damn your religion!” And to call a man a “pigeon-flyer”—taayar hamat—is the same as calling him a “dirty, no-good Yankee liar.” The seriousness of the epithet, I believe, has to do with the days when pigeon-flyers, notorious for their habit of sending up decoys to attract pigeons from other broods, were considered the lowest kind of thief extant. Indeed, they were even barred for a time from presenting evidence in court.
iv
I mulled upon these and many other frivolous notions as I barreled along Rue Hamra, close to home, when I had my second encounter of the day with a Lebanese cabby. As I drove merrily along in the right hand lane, he suddenly swooped out of a parking space on the left side of the street and cut in front of me in an effort to occupy a hack stand paralleling me on the right hand side. I stopped. He stopped. I was blocking his way.
The cabby honked his horn. I honked mine. He put his hand on his horn and kept it there. I smiled.
Full of understanding and a desire to “play the game” according to Lebanese custom, I leapt out of my car, strode to the cab, and looking the cabby fully in the eye, said cheerfully: “You no good son of a bitch!” I thought it was all in the spirit of good clean Lebanese cursing, but I was about to learn that while it was all right to call a man a “son of sixty dogs,” it was not all right to call him a son of one measly little bitch. The cabby came flying out of his car!
“I am better than you!” he kept screaming in English, pressing his pudgy frame up close to mine. “I am better than you!” He was livid. “I am not a son of a beetch,” he screamed. “You are a son of a beetch!” It had been a long day, and when he shoved me, I shoved him back and he fell over. Before he could get up, someone grabbed him while Rafiq Malfoof, a gigantic Lebanese in the black uniform of our Embassy drivers, took hold of me and pulled me aside. I expected to be beaten to a mash.
“The cab driver is my brother,” he said quietly, and looking down at me with hurt, brown eyes, he inquired plaintively: “Mr. Blatty—why did you call my brother a son of a bitch?”
“I thought it was the custom,” I said. “And besides, that was an illegal maneuver.” A crowd had gathered and Ali was in it.
&n
bsp; “How long have you been driving in Lebanon?” Rafiq said rhetorically, and I had to admit he had a point. But he wouldn’t leave it alone.
“Mr. Blatty,” he repeated with that maddeningly wounded tone: “Why did you call my brother a son of a bitch?” I got back into the VW and fled.
The following morning Lenora Borealis telephoned. The Ambassador wanted to see me at eleven o’clock.
“Blatty,” said the Ambassador in an oddly muffled voice, “why did you call Rafiq’s brother a son of a bitch?”
Because he had it coming, I felt like saying to him, but I knew when I was well off.
“I thought he would be pleased,” I said truthfully, and the Ambassador delivered his next line from the ceiling. “You’ve done it again! You’ve done it again!” he screamed. He floated down silently, picked up his tennis racket and delivered an imaginary forehand smash. “I think you’d best get out of the country for a while, before the Lebanese decide to sever diplomatic relations,” he huffed grimly, and then returned a soft lob. “I’ve talked to Web. He’s sending you to Iraq on News Review business.” He arched up to serve. “That’s all—Blat-ty!”
But that wasn’t all. “Blatty,” added the Ambassador in a queerly-spoken afterthought, “are you an Israeli agent?”
Homeward I trudged, mired in the Slough of Despond, which is a literary allusion and deserves your applause, although I certainly wouldn’t have drawn any from the Ambassador. Pox on the cackling, yogurt-slurping Furies so desperately pursuing me! I’d been trying pretty hard to understand the Lebanese and win acceptance from them and/or the Ambassador. And I seemed to be making some progress. But all was destroyed, now, and with it the Agency’s test-case hopes, by one meek “son of a bitch.” I was back in no man’s land.
“What’s the weather report for today?” asked Peggy as I packed my bags.
“Shite!” I growled. That’s the Arabic word for “rain.”
20. Nineveh, Please, and Hurry!
BAGHDAD IS a name that usually conjures up visions of Sinbad and magic carpets, but the only vision it will ever conjure up for me concerns cow flop, and maybe that isn’t too romantic, but it’s a hell of a lot more authentic than a flying shag rug, I can assure you.
There I was, a brotherless Karamazov, exiled and cupped in the martini-stained hands of mine gracious host, Semproch Ness, Baghdad’s USIS Information Officer.
“Bill,” he said—I had given him permission to address me by my given name—“Bill, too many of the Arab nations are beginning to look to Egypt for leadership. But their real white hope is here in Iraq. That’s the message you’ve got to sell in News Review.”
“So,” I oozed, comfortably easy-chaired by the fire in his stucco, pink-pastel, Southern California-type ranch home in the Iraqi capital, “so Egypt is out, huh?”
“Check,” said Ness. “Nasser just isn’t the type.”
“Oh—you mean—Biblical?” I murmured absently, no longer really sure of my whereabouts, but the allusion was lost on Ness, who had never been interviewed by a Hollywood talent agent and now sat blinking at me uncertainly over his martini glass.
“I think you ought to start your snooping for story material in Basra,” he said.
“Oh? I thought maybe I could take in Babylon first.”
“Nah, Babylon’s got nothing but a stone lion.”
“So what’s Basra got?”
“Cows. They’re holding the first dairy show in their history.”
I scruted him apprehensively. “I’d rather go to Babylon.”
“Basra,” he firmed. “The Basra story means progress!”
As I stepped onto the fair grounds in the port city of Basra the following day, I was marvelous chagrined to find that the cows of Iraq had made no progress whatsoever over the cows of the Western world insofar as sanitary neatness was concerned. The stuff was everywhere. “Why didn’t you warn me to wear hip-boots!” I growled at Arshak, the thirty-year-old Iraqi photographer assigned to take pictures for my News Review story.
“Sah?” responded Arshak, and I dropped it, for nothing upsets me more than having someone call me “sah” at a dairy show in Basra.
Our surroundings were a far, throaty cry from the gleaming, golden spires and many-spangled silks of the glorious Abbassid era. Basra was drab, a monotone of dead brown hues, low brick buildings, and wide, dirty streets peopled by a brand of Arab no more like the Lebanese than I to Hercules Yabat. A miserably downtrodden penurious lot, dark sinister doings were no doubt brewing in their secret id of ids, which were amply cloaked in black or brown baggy pantaloons, gondola-shaped slippers and turbans, although some of them wore faded khakis and tattered old army coats.
Nessbound, I trudged dutifully through the fair grounds and their copious contents, thrusting impertinent questions at the ribbon-seeking Basra dairymen who were huddled in stalls with their four-footed entries, while Arshak lensed and focused to a fair-thee-well. It was a pastoral little drama, but one not without its villains. For one thing, our Iraqi photo subjects were spooking the camera.
“Don’t let the brutes stare into the camera,” Jeremiah Web had instructed me, for he was hopeful of obtaining some cover photos during my brief exile.
“Don’t let ’em stare into the camera,” I had relayed to Arshak.
“Don’t look in camera!” Arshak had screamed at our photo subjects. And screamed and screamed and screamed! But it was more hopeless than playing golf in the Red Sea, although I warrant there may be times when this can be done, all right, but let’s not argue religion. Let’s click our gums about Arshak.
“What is it with your fellow Iraqis?” I asked him finally.
“They think maybe if they not look at camera, they not be in picture.” The flies so numerous they did swarm around us, and I brushed one off and looked Arshak dead in the eye. “Do you believe this?”
“It is a common belief,” he answered enigmatically, and I began to feel faint but mustered sufficient strength to swat at a fly. We dropped the subject. Meanwhile, Arshak devised a subtle camera con, wherein he would focus away from the true subject of his pictures until the very last instant, when he would quickly whip the camera around and depress the shutter release before the photo subjects knew what was happening. It worked pretty well—except for the Iraqi soldier.
We had snapped through several photo situations when I suddenly became conscious of a mysterious face, the face of a young private in the King’s khaki, that had popped up again and again in each of the crowd scenes we had photographed. The private apparently had OSP, Oriental Sensory Perception, for despite Arshak’s subterfuge, he always knew where the photographer would be focusing and each time would be staring directly into the lens of the camera!
As we approached a tractor exhibit, I saw the private again, and as Arshak prepared to snap one for old Araby, I sidled over to the spook and, in Arabic, asked him, begged him not stare into the camera. He gave me an inscrutable look and nodded agreement.
“All right, Arshak!” I called. The soldier was looking down at the tractor treads. Arshak whipped the camera around, and in the split-second before he depressed the shutter release, the soldier looked up quickly, stared directly into the lens, smiled triumphantly and then melted into the milling throng.
“Did you see it?” I shrieked at Arshak. “Did you see it!”
“Well,” said Arshak quietly, advancing the film one frame, “at least he is in picture.” He immediately realized his mistake and looked quickly up at me, and in that instant I wished that I were the Medusa. But this was not possible, and I settled for the next train out of Basra.
ii
Back in Baghdad, I lifted another glass with mine host Semproch Ness and received my next assignment. “Baghdad College on the Tigris should provide your readers with a pretty good idea of the kind of prep school education available to these Iraqis,” he said.
“I thought you said it was a college,” I questioned, for I’m a very careful listener and not to be gulled
.
“The word college here equates with high school,” Ness explained.
Then he silently contemplated the olive in his martini. “After the College,” he said finally, “I want you to take a train up north to Kirkuk, where the USIS library officer will provide you with a jeep. From there you can drive into the northern farm area and talk to some of the farmers getting Point Four assistance.”
“Has it got a very good clutch?”
“What?”
“The jeep. I do things to clutches,” I said, recalling my testimonial from the Bidwill Brewing Company of Washington, D.C.
“No, no, don’t worry,” said Ness, staring into the fireplace uneasily, “the jeep has an—adequate—clutch.”
“I see.” The conversation had taken a disquieting turn, and we didn’t have much more to say to each other anyway, so I got up to leave.
“I’ll call you a cab,” said Ness, and “Never mind,” said I, opening the door and stepping outside. “I think I’ll walk back to the hotel.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Ness quietly, as a sound of distant howling went up in the distance. “The streets are filled with savage dog packs. They’re liable to tear you apart.” I stepped quickly back inside.
“How did you like the Basra trip?” asked Ness as we waited for the cab.
“A bit of a flop,” I replied, and let my remark hang there like a gas.
“Looked over the photos this morning,” said Ness. “When you go to Kirkuk—one thing: try not to have people looking straight into the camera, huh?”
The cab arrived, or he would have died horribly.
Baghdad College was Anycampus, U.S.A, with date palms, and the following day, I toured it with the Dean, an elderly Jesuit who appeared to be living a life of quiet desperation among his charges. “They’re good boys, good boys,” he was saying as we strolled along a corridor of one of the classroom buildings. “And very bright, yes, very bright.”
Which Way to Mecca, Jack? Page 16