East of Suez

by Howard Engel

  “I guess a lot of history took place here over the centuries, things we know nothing about at home.”

  “Yes. Yes. We know so little about this part of the world. Did you know that three nuns were beheaded a century and a half ago not three blocks from here? Yes, yes! The incident was hushed up for the sake of trade. A major diplomatic coup! Over there, in that ratty place with the iron balcony, the writer Edward Lear once lived.”

  “Lear? Remind me. I can’t quite place him.”

  “Limericks, The Owl and the Pussycat, he invented the ‘runcible spoon’ …”

  “Oh, yes. ‘And a ring in the end of his nose, his nose!’ I remember now.” Yes, I could remember that bit of poetry from my school days, but I had already forgotten the name of my companion. “You’re a born teacher, Father.”

  “We’re all accursed with something. My mother said ‘Go out and teach.’ And so I did, although I think she meant within the neighborhood. They think I’m peculiar back home because I’m educating both sexes. Here they think I’m mad for teaching at all. The children here need facts, not more religion. They have more than enough of that already. Is there a more God-ridden piece of real estate on earth? Maybe it’s because we are sitting between two major religions here on the peninsula.” He was becoming wistful, thinking along those lines, so I turned the subject back to Lear. I found my memory had not erased all my notes on him.

  “He was an epileptic. I forget where I read that.” I stole a glance at my neglected notebook in which I had scrawled the priest’s name. While I was in transit, I had forgotten about the notebook. Perhaps I even had imagined that I could live without it. Now I concentrated on the name of my companion for several seconds, letting my eyes scan the letters until they spelled a name: O’Mahannay. I repeated it under my breath. My notebook was my memory. My memory book. I never left home without it.

  “You have an amazing memory, my friend. They’ve got a watercolor by Lear, a view of the harbor, at the National Museum. You should have a look at that one day.”

  “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “Didn’t I mention it? The sun must be getting to me. I’m from Chicago. Well, it’s not really Chicago, but that’s close enough at this distance. Do you know the area at all?” I told him that I had never had the pleasure. When I mentioned that I’d heard of two writers who came from Oak Park, Hemingway and Carol Shields, he began to berate me as a Protestant.

  “But, Father, I’m Jewish! Doesn’t that make me neutral?”

  “This far from the Lake Shore Drive, I suppose so. I didn’t catch your name?”

  I told him, added my Canadian nationality to my confession, and settled back to see what was going to happen next.

  “Across the street, there behind that wretched kiosk, that’s where Raffles stayed when he first came out to this part of the world. And there, there where that fellow looks like he is about to take his ease in the gutter, that’s where Somerset Maugham lived for six months, collecting local color. That’s what he called it. Local color. That’s what this town has, of course. Color and bad livers. You can see both and more on these streets. Chandler wrote about mean streets; these are not so much mean as streets in disorder and neglect, streets without memory, without conscience.”

  “You’re better than a professional guide, Father. You know the place very well.”

  “Like everywhere else this is a place of contrasts. The boy who fixes my computer wears an amulet against the evil eye. My doctor believes that smallpox can be cured by vomiting. My bishop has views about the parting of the Red Sea and the Flood that I wouldn’t share for a red hat. I’m better than a Baedeker or Michelin by a damned sight! And cheaper into the bargain, Mr Cooperman. I’ll tell you one thing—” He interrupted himself, put his head out the open window, and shouted. “Thomas! Thomas!” He was trying to catch the attention of a youngish man in a rickshaw crossing through the intersection. I couldn’t see the passenger clearly, though I did catch a cigarette and a cigarette-holder, held at an angle in his teeth, reminiscent of pictures of President Franklin Roosevelt. “He hasn’t seen me, worst luck! But that, Mr Cooperman, is just a reminder about places like this: we’re like ants crawling around a rotting melon. If you don’t meet a friend on one turn around, you’ll see him on the next. That was Thomas Lanier. Never, never call him Tom. Very interesting fellow. Sent me a card from Bergerac, of all places. I can remember when he owned both a tuxedo and tails but didn’t have a pair of socks to put with them. Remarkable fellow.”

  The buildings on this side of the wall looked like they had been made of some sort of dissolving plaster. The ornamental details along the rooflines had been attacked by acid or nibbled by giant rats. There wasn’t a line of plaster or stone that didn’t advertise having had a long, sunburnt, and abused life, as though every wall, every architectural feature had been beaten regularly with chains. Even the big hotels looked like crumbling marzipan.

  A turn around the back of one of these placed us at the vinecovered, but otherwise nondescript entrance to the “fathers’ fort,” as my new friend called it. The newest part of this distanced itself from the church proper by three earlier extensions to the original apse. He shrugged apologetically at his residence as he got out of the car, as though to say, “It isn’t much, but it’s home.” I shook hands with Father O’Mahannay when he got out. I helped him with his suitcase as the driver examined his own dirty fingernails.

  “Try the Alithia,” the priest said confidentially, pressing my arm as we said goodbye. “It’s run by some Greek friends of mine. Tell them I sent you.”

  By now I could feel the ant-like thread of sweat running down the inside of my shirtsleeves. The priest instructed the driver and again we were off through the maze of streets. For me it was like a travel film: ocher-and-white buildings, few sidewalks, busy people on both sides of the street. I was truly on my own now, without my guide. The noisy traffic ahead, the din of the streets, the ragged vendors, the hanging meat and baskets of fruit, the smell, the sweat, all hit me anew as we bumped our passage through the crowd. An old woman with a mattress roll on her back stopped and waved our taxi along. The driver nodded solemnly and revved past her. A bizarrely painted bus pulled in front of us. Decorated with saints and gurus, domes and dancing figures, it was a work of art on wheels; surely it should be in a museum before it was further blackened by its billowing exhaust.

  At last we arrived in a quieter neighborhood, where the scooters, tuk-tuks, and motorcycles didn’t follow us. And as the gas-driven wheels fell back, the green of the jungle crept into the empty spaces. There seemed to be a battle going on between the asphalt and the jungle; where one was winning, the other retreated. But I remembered from the plane, as we approached the landing field, that the jungle was the chief fact of life in this part of the country, not roads nor concrete buildings. The jungle could be held back for only so long. It had patience, it could wait.

  At length, the taxi pulled off the two-lane strip of pavement and drove up a semi-circular lane, passed a line of superannuated taxis, and stopped. “Hotel Alithia,” the driver announced, almost formally, still staring straight ahead of him through the windshield. I held out a fistful of strange-looking money toward the driver. He made a selection and only scowled when I asked for a receipt. It came on the back of a piece of cardboard, originally part of a shoebox.

  The hotel looked both old and French. The tile floors were old, the plumbing, when I encountered it, French. There were screened verandas along the front and large windows out of Bogart movies. The whole set-up looked ripe for that southern American writer whose main character is always shouting for “Stella!” The hotel was set in a moldering garden that looked more like a modest forest threatening to consume the hostelry. Green and all of its variations hung about canes and vines under the blast of the late-afternoon heat. A thin, gray-faced woman in white was scrubbing the stairs as if her life depended upon it. She was using a swab of rags, as though there were no mops available
. Another lean and hungry-looking figure was cleaning the windows with a squeegee.

  The landlord frowned and shook his head until I dropped the name of Father O’Mahannay, which I read from my notebook, sounding out the letters one at a time, like a backward seven-year-old. Suddenly there was a smile on his face. Two glasses and a large bottle of cold beer appeared on the counter. I wrote my name and joined him “just to cool off.”

  “The old father met me in Cyprus, mister, more than fifteen years ago. That’s him up there.” He indicated a bulletin board, crowded with dusty photographs and postcards. I couldn’t make out which one might be my traveling companion. “You know Cyprus, mister? Nicosia? Larnica? Verosia? Too much politics in Europe.” He was a rounded sort of man, not fat yet, but working up to it. The laugh lines near his eyes reassured me. He was happy to practice his English on me. “Here, life is simple. No politics. The father’s a good man if you don’t have sons growing. I don’t cast the first stone. He’s writing a book about this place. He knows who sleeps where. Back to Napoleon III. Can you manage the stairs, mister?” The manager was helpful, I’ll say that for him. I slowly got used to his “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” routine. At the same time, I was beginning to weaken; my body began to remember how long it had been since it had last been horizontal. I missed what the innkeeper said as we completed the formalities of my signing in. He warned me to hold on to my passport with my life.

  There was an elevator with a lattice of scrolled metalwork near the front desk, but I gathered this was not part of the practical side of the operation. The manager waved me to the ascending stairs, where a dark-skinned boy carrying my luggage took the steps two at a time. The staircase wrapped itself around the elevator shaft for three flights. The boy ran upward until he was beyond the manager’s eye. My room, when we made it through changing intensities of heat, was large and bright. It was fully served by the prevailing weather. An electric fan, which the lad induced to spin, emitted an electronic hiccough, like a plucked string. The manager now entered with his friendly face, chasing the boy out of sight before I could give him a tip. I sat on the edge of my bed listening to tales of the priest that might have interested me had I known him better. I supposed, drawing on my limited experience of the place, that in a backwater like this, I’d be running into him every day. I was tiring of the hotel keeper’s monologue. I wanted him gone. I had patience now for nothing but a long nap.

  My windows seemed to be looking down on a thriving tropical forest. The bed was big and square and inviting. After my long journey, I was tired. My discovery of Miranam could wait until I’d had a bath and a rest. Let the jungle wrap me up in its fronds and bamboo canes for an hour or two; then, I was sure, I could once again face the irrationality of the world. The proprietor said the shower was down the hall at the end of the corridor. I wondered when he was going to leave. Does one tip the owner? When he finally went, I decided the shower could wait a little longer. I headed toward the bed.

  FOUR

  I SLEPT LONGER than I had intended. I’d thought in terms of a catnap: this had been more like a full night. Still, I couldn’t tell from my watch whether it was early morning or late at night. My unhelpful watch reported the time in Grantham. It could have been 6:00 A.M. or 6:00 P.M. And would that be Grantham time or local time? At least I was fairly certain it was Monday. What did it matter, anyway? I needed a shower more than I needed food, whether it was breakfast or dinner.

  So far, I had kept the moral question at bay. It had been nibbling on my conscience since Vicky What’s-her-name left my office. She’d hired me to wade in very murky waters. She and her husband had been involved in things that might end up in court back home. As their agent, I might share in their guilt. But this wasn’t home. Out the window, even the trees were different. What standing did Grantham morality have in this place? From what I’d heard, Vicky and Jake were dealing for high stakes. Maybe my sort of scruples were for lowercourt offenses. This was the big time, where “Never Indicted” may be the best thing to put on the tombstone of a successful businessman. Maybe the world back home and here on the other side of the planet is divided into wise guys and suckers. I don’t know. It had me worried. Of that much I was sure.

  The shower, which I found down the hall, turned out to be a one-room all-purpose convenience center: a white-and-blue tiled stall with a tap in the wall just a few inches above floor level and a hole in the floor for the rest of the bathroom’s functions. That was it! There was no flushing mechanism, just a bright plastic pail, with the face of Donald Duck on it. This stood ready to swab out the latrine when required. The fact that the whole of the stall would be involved in purging the vent in the floor, with its two ceramic footprints, I could tell, was not worth mentioning to the management. There was a Japanese-looking wooden stool for sitting on in one corner. A duckboard of white wood offered a means to stay above water. I wasn’t going to become attached to the plumbing.

  Dried off and with fresh clothes laid out on the bed, I looked out my window to see how much closer the forest had grown while I was asleep. It had the cunning to look disheveled and benign. For a few minutes I watched the birds flitting about from frond to frond, making a great racket. They were, of course, tropical birds, not like the ones at home. I couldn’t warm to them, and they seemed indifferent to the towel-wrapped figure staring at them through the slats in the blind.

  A knock at the door rescued me from this unprofitable reverie. It was a little brown man in white carrying a tray, which he put down on the small table beside my bed. Like St Nicholas in the Christmas poem, he spoke not a word and left me with steaming coffee and a crescent-shaped bun. A croissant, of course, although I’d never had one. The coffee came in a large grandfather cup. The milk was hot. All of this, along with a bit of jam, went down very well. It gave me a lift. I was relaxed and ready to meet the challenges of the day.

  When I came downstairs, there was a new man on the desk, but he smiled and called me by name as he first helped me adjust my watch, then handed me a note I wasn’t expecting. My watch didn’t convince me that the setting was serious. The numbers seemed to isolate me more than ever. I didn’t believe in Takot time. It didn’t feel right. At least, it didn’t worry me. The note was different. Who could be sending me notes? In fact, if it was known that I was here, I might as well catch the next plane home. My coming here was a secret. If the secret was common knowledge, my cover was well and truly blown.

  It proved to be from my recent fellow passenger and guide, Father O’Mahannay. My cover was still intact. Slowly I worked out what the words said. My nose didn’t quite touch the paper.

  Dear Mr Cooperman,

  I hope my old friend Costas hasn’t shocked you with lurid stories about my private life. He is a good man, if a bit of a gossip.

  I generally have a drink across from the Royal Botanical Gardens, near the palace, beginning around 4:30. Ask for Ex-Berlioz Square. If you would care to join me today, or, indeed, any day, please do. The bun-shop is called—you must excuse the naiveté of these colonials—Les Trois Magots.

  Until our next meeting, I am yours

  James O’Mahannay, SJ

  P.S. I hope to catch up with my friend in the rickshaw later today, although, frankly, it would be better for my poor head and liver if I had never met Thomas Lanier.

  J. O’M

  It was still some hours until the priest would be at the Trois Magots, and I felt restless to begin my inquiries, as the British television policemen say. The more I learned about this place, the more I could quiz the good father about.

  I asked the man on the desk where I might rent scubadiving gear and catch a boat to the coral reefs. He had enough English so that I was encouraged to abandon my high school French. It took a bit of mime from both of us to reach a full understanding. I got the idea that the harbor was some distance below this part of town. In the end, he wrote something on the back of a book of matches, which he passed to me.

  Poseidon Outfitters

/>   Quay de la Reine Blanche, 24

  The name tallied with the one my client back home had given me. It seemed like a good omen. I keep probing reality with my thumb, hoping for what? That it would save my hide one day, I suppose. Maybe I’d been hoping that the name and address wouldn’t match. Then I could go home.

  The room clerk phoned for a taxi and I sat down to wait, passing the time with a selection of postcards of the neighborhood. To my surprise, I was able to write to several members of my family without thinking of my difficulty in reading what I had written. Reading and writing are related skills, but not the same, as I had been learning these past months. I had just licked the last stamp when a scooter-like thing screeched to a stop in front of the hotel’s large front door. When the room clerk called my name, I got up to see how lethal this contraption was. I showed the driver the name of the outfitter and he showed me how to get inside the plastic-wrapped parcel on wheels. The buckle of the seat belt was in good working order, but the strap was attached on one side only, six safety pins having given their all in the service of health and welfare. I had two wheels, the driver only one, but our fates were the same. Quickly I began to overlook the safety factor once the noise factor intervened. The din was like a boilerworks in the middle of a war zone. The driver wore a World War I leather helmet with dangling side straps. When he had given a brave grin, we were off.

  The driver took the flattened intersections with a bounce whenever the steeply descending road crossed a side street. Occasionally, he readjusted the dark goggles that gave him the look of a robot. He treated all of the mechanical stop signs as though they were only suggestions, but obeyed the whiteuniformed traffic wardens with an impatient courtesy. As soon as we were out of their sight, we were off again on this reckless ride through streets sometimes crowded and sometimes deserted. I noticed the smell of garbage only when we stopped for another vehicle. We must have been traveling faster than the speed of smell. I tried to recall the name I’d heard for the three-wheel taxis: Yuk-yuks? Ton-tons? Luk-luks? What did it matter? I was a newcomer; relax and enjoy it.