A silence fell over the balcony.
'So what happened to your land?' I asked eventually.
'In 1949 they gave some of our fields to a new kibbutz, Kibbutz Bar'am,' said the teacher, consulting his precious list of facts and figures. 'The kibbutz was built on 350 dunums of our land. Then in 1963 they established Moshav Dovev, with another two thousand dunums.'
'The site of the village is now a National Park,' said Fr. Suleiman. 'At the entrance to it they have put up a sign saying that "Bar'am Antiquities" date from the Second Temple Period. It's true that there are the ruins of a Roman-period synagogue in the middle of our village, but the sign gives the impression that the remains of our houses are all Roman ruins. The schoolchildren who are taken around it think that our old buildings - our stables and schools and houses - are like the ones you see at Pompeii.'
'We've been edited out of history,' said the old teacher. 'They don't admit to our existence. Or to the existence of our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers.'
'I and my father dug a well,' said Wadeer. 'Now there is a sign there saying that it was built by someone called Yohanan of Bar'am at the time of the Romans.'
'Who is Yohanan of Bar'am?'
'Apparently a leader of the Jewish Revolt in 66 a.d.,' said the teacher. 'Though we in the village had never heard of him until the park was built.'
'They've made it as if my well is part of ancient Jewish history,' said Wadeer. 'But I dug that well with my own labour!'
'Another man, a friend of mine called Farah Laqzaly, made a sculpture of the Madonna,' said Elias. 'I remember seeing him making it. But now they say it is centuries old. They took it to Kibbutz Sasa and put it on display.'
'If the village is now a park, does that mean I could go and visit it?' I asked.
'Of course,' said Fr. Suleiman. 'And we will come too. No one from Bir'im misses a chance to return.'
Everyone rose. Wadeer and Fr. Suleiman's nephew John went in the priest's old station wagon, while Sami and I followed with Elias the schoolteacher. It was a short drive from Jish to Kafr Bir'im, less than ten minutes.
At the entrance to the park new Israeli flags were flying above a neat parking lot. In it sat two enormous tour buses. A large sign next to the ticket office did indeed read BAR'AM ANTIQUITIES, just as Fr. Suleiman had said. In English and Hebrew - though not in Arabic - it told the ancient Jewish history of the site. No mention was made of the medieval and modern Arab history of the ruins, and there was no reference to the bombing of the village in 1953. The brochure available at the ticket office was a little more forthcoming, remarking at the end of a long description of the synagogue that 'until 1948 Bar'am was a Maronite Christian village. During the War of Independence, the villagers were evacuated and the site is now under the auspices of the National Parks Authority.'
Fr. Suleiman shrugged when I showed him the leaflet. 'Of course they do not tell the truth of what really happened to us,' he said, adding proudly and without irony, 'But at least they don't make me pay to get in. It's because I'm a priest, you see.'
Meanwhile the two old men were already halfway across the ruins. Far from being depressed at seeing the flattened remains of their childhood village, they were almost skipping with excitement: 'It always makes us happy to breathe the air of Bir'im,' said Wadeer.
'The Daous' house stood over there,' said Elias, pointing to some foundations sticking out of the carefully manicured grass. 'The family of Ghattas lived beside them in that house, beside the pine trees. After 1948 two of their boys ended up in Brazil, where they became famous footballers. You haven't heard of Rai and Socrates? They played in the World Cup. Now, see over there, where those American tourists are standing? Yes, those two with the baseball caps. Those are the ruins of the old synagogue. And over here: that's our church. It was the one building the Israelis left standing when they flattened our homes.'
'And those gothic arches?' I asked. 'To the side of the church. Are they Crusader?'
'No, no,' said Elias, frowning. 'Those arches are all that remains of my school. This was my classroom.'
Elias stood in the middle of what was now a carefully tended patch of grass. 'For four years I taught in here, from 1944 to 1948. This was the door. The blackboard was here. But that was forty-five years ago now.'
Wadeer began rattling away in Arabic; this time it was Fr. Suleiman who translated.
'He says he was taught in here. In his day it was a Jesuit school. The teacher afterwards became the Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Kreish. He was very strict. He would beat the children with a canvas shoe and sometimes also with a stick.'
Wadeer walked over to the corner of the plot, making whacking gestures with his wrist.
'He says the stick was kept here. Everyone in the class tasted the stick. No one dared to play tricks.'
Fr. Suleiman had got out his keys and was now opening the door into the churchtower. We all followed him up the winding stairs. Halfway up, Wadeer began to gesture excitedly at the wall of the staircase.
'Look! Look!' he said. 'Yes, here: here is my name. I was fifteen when I wrote that.'
At the top, a grille in the roof looked down into the nave below. Through it you could see two graves.
'That was the grave of the parish priest,' said Fr. Suleiman. 'They let us bury him here in 1956. It was the first time we had been allowed back into the village since the bombing. The military gave us authorisation, as long as we didn't take more than three hours.'
'Between 1948 and 1967 there were soldiers everywhere,' said Elias. 'We were not allowed to come here at all.'
'Once my goats escaped and came here,' said Wadeer. 'I came to get them back and was caught. They took me to the military tribunal in Nazareth. I spent a month in prison and had to pay a large fine.'
'Now it is much better,' said Fr. Suleiman. 'If we pay, we can come as often as we like. And they let us use the church for free on Easter, Christmas, Palm Sunday and Pentecost. Also for burials. They do not charge us for that.'
All six of us were now standing against the parapet looking out over the countryside around us.
'When we come here we are happy,' said Elias. 'All the old memories come back. We remember many things: the streets, the homes, the neighbours. Everything. My house was over there, at the end of the village to the right. But it was completely destroyed.'
'Over there,' said Wadeer, pointing to the horizon, 'that is the hill where we stood when they destroyed the village.'
'See through those trees?' said Fr. Suleiman, pointing into the distance. 'That is Kibbutz Bar'am. And over there, to the north? That's Moshav Dovev. They took two parts of our land, but this, to the south: that is free. Where the forest is now growing, that used to be our fig trees and our vineyards. There are ten thousand dunums which are not used. That is all we want.'
'It would be so easy,' said Elias. 'We don't even need ten thousand dunums. Five thousand dunums would do. We would accept anything.'
We began to file down the stairs. The priest closed and locked the door behind us.
'But, you see, they are worried it would be a precedent,' said Fr. Suleiman as we walked back to the carpark, past the American tourists who were now eating a picnic at a wooden table by the ticket office. 'They say that once you let one Arab back, you admit that the others have rights too. That is why, despite everything, they dare not give us back what is ours. Israel says it is a democracy, and it is true. But it seems that for us Palestinians there is no justice.'
'We've told the government that Kafr Bir'am is like a house of three rooms,' said Elias, looking back at his old village. 'One is now the kibbutz. One is the moshav. One is empty. We don't ask much. But that we must have.'
VI
Hotel Metropole, Alexandria, Egypt, i December 1994
I am sitting writing in the first-floor breakfast room of the Hotel Metropole. At the far side of the room waiters in white jackets and black bow ties hover at the edge of the parquet floor; a classical frieze of naiads an
d centaurs runs along the dado overhead. Pale warm winter sun streams in through the open shutters; outside you can hear the rattle and clang of the trams and the clip-clop of horse-drawn cabs passing up the Grand Corniche. The sky is clear, the wind is high, and beyond a shivering screen of palms the Mediterranean stretches out into the distance.
After the incessant tensions and hatreds of Israel, the glib self-righteousness of the settlers and the bleak despair of the Palestinians, Alexandria feels refreshingly detached from the troubles of the Middle East; indeed it feels detached from the Middle East altogether. The cafes with their baroque mirrors and gleaming tables have a vaguely French or Viennese air to them, while the facades of the townhouses with their stained tempera and shuttered windows are strikingly Italianate. But, if anything, the city feels Greek. Alexandria was, after all, founded by a Greek and remained a Greek-dominated town until the 1950s, when Nasser expropriated the Greeks' banks and businesses and expelled the families who owned them. The Jews, the French and the English were thrown out at the same time, leaving the city – always something of a European expatriate exiled on the coast of Africa - a cold cadaver, its magnificent art deco buildings still intact but emptied of the men and women who built and owned them, a city 'clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume on a sleeve: Alexandria the capital of Memory'.
I first came to Alexandria through the pages of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. A bound volume of the four novels has accompanied me all the way through this journey, and has formed a welcome counterpoint to the sometimes grim otherworldiness of the monasteries I have visited on the way. During long monastic mid-afternoons, when the sun beat down on the dust-dry guest rooms and nothing stirred, with no noise to break the slow intake and recoil of the cell's faded curtains, how reassuring it could be to set aside the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and sit reading instead of brothels and dancing girls, of corrupt merchants and voluptuous landowners, 'libertines who were prepared to founder in the senses as deeply as any Desert Father in the mind', as Balthazar puts it in Justine.
From my table I can see across Saad Zagloul Square to the Hotel Cecil, where Justine first makes her appearance 'amid the dusty palms, dressed in a sheath of silver drops, softly fanning her cheeks with a little reed fan'. The gilded birdcage lift is still there; potted palms still frame the great marble staircase in the lobby. But the cast is impossibly different from the bright thirties figures with whom Durrell peoples his novels. There are no beautiful Jewish women with dark gloves and skimpy cocktail dresses; no pashas or beys arriving for secret assignations in their great silver Rolls-Royces; no Armenian bankers discussing intrigues amid the potted palms. Instead Alexandria is now, for possibly the first time in its history, a truly Egyptian city, looking more towards the deserts of the south than to the wider Mediterranean world.
Deserted by its entrepreneurs - its Greeks and Jews and Armenians - impoverished by nationalisation and decades of corrupt state socialism, Alexandria is now full of Egyptian holidaymakers dressed in their village gelabiyas and turbans. Mukhtars from the delta - rough-skinned, unshaven - sit cross-legged on the esplanade nibbling nuts or watching through clouds of smoke as the barrow-vendors fry whitebait or grill their corncobs. The old art deco mansions of the seafront have been divided up into decrepit hotels and poky flats. There is laundry hung out to dry on each collapsing balcony, and brickwork showing through the leprous stucco. Below, under the flapping awnings of the cafes, fellahin women with tattoos on their faces sit nibbling at sticky pastries.
The shops and hotels may still recall the multinational Levant of the late Ottoman Empire - Epicerie Ghaffour, Cinema Metro, Hotel Windsor, Maison Paul, Bijoux Youssouffian - and some of the most famous names are still extant: the Trianon, even Pastroudis (where the fictional Nessim would drink coffee with Justine, and where, in reality, Cavafy would sip coffee with E.M. Forster). But, like everywhere else in the old Ottoman world, the multinational has given way to the mono-ethnic, the cosmopolitan to the narrowly national, and all these establishments are now Egyptian-owned and now have a specifically Egyptian - not an international - flavour.
You have to look quite hard to find any last remnants of the old order lurking in the backstreets of the town. At the synagogue, now heavily guarded by paramilitary Egyptian police, Joe Harari, the elderly custodian, opened the great double doors to reveal the echoing emptiness of the vast neo-classical prayer hall.
'Over a thousand people could fit in here,' said Joe. 'And this was just one of fifteen synagogues in Alexandria.'
Each of the one thousand seats had a nameplate on the back, but now only sixty Jews are left in Alexandria, a city that once, in the early centuries a.d., had the largest Jewish population in the world. Moreover, there is no rabbi, and as these last survivors are almost exclusively old women, there are not enough men left to form a minyan (quorum). So the synagogue remains unused, except by a family of pigeons roosting above the betna.
'Israel took all our young men,' said Joe as we sat drinking coffee in his office afterwards. Above his head, flanking the framed photographs of President Mubarak and the Lubavitch Rebbe, were wooden plaques recording the names of the synagogue's donors:
Mme Esther Hopasha, L.E.5,ooo; Jacques Riche, L.E.200; Emilio Levi, L.E.50 ...
'Now there is peace,' said Joe, 'maybe some of them will return.'
'Did you ever consider emigrating?' I asked.
'I was born in Alex,' replied the old man. 'My mother is from Alex. All my life I have lived in Alex. I was married here. I've seen Israel for one week only, when I was taken there by Sadat. Why should I go?' The old man gestured at the streets behind him: 'This is my home,' he said.
'What do you miss most of the old days?' I asked.
'Family,' he replied. 'Sisters, cousins, friends. When they had to leave, everyone cried. My sister had to sell her house in one week. She was alone - her husband was away - so she had to manage by herself, with two small children. Of course she got a very bad price. She left with just two suitcases. Almost everything was left behind. Now one of her sons in the States is Vice President of ... of ... something beginning with tri. Trident? Tristar?' Joe beamed proudly.
'Israel was necessary, maybe,' he added. 'But because of it Alexandria can never be as before.'
'You should have seen it,' agreed Olga Rabinovitch, who had just walked into the office and had overheard Joe's last remark. Olga was a thin, elegant old lady with brightly rouged lips. She must once have been very beautiful. This, I thought, was what Justine would look like now if she had stayed on in Alexandria.
'Ahh,' she sighed, sitting down. 'When I was young - sixteen, seventeen, eighteen - the operas came from France. The theatre, the ballet
'Edith Piaf visited once,' said Joe.
'And the streets!' said Olga. Her right hand caressed the thin string of seed pearls hung around her neck. 'You should have seen the shops. You should have seen Sharif Street in the thirties!'
'The beautiful women
'The most lovely women in the world.'
'... with beautiful dresses and jewellery .. .'
'What luxury there was!'
'There used to be so much work. So much prosperity...'
'Of course, it's changed completely.'
'For a start, in the old days the Egyptians were not much in evidence here.'
'The kind of people you see on the Corniche. They would not have been there.'
'They were living in the suburbs. This area was like a European colony.'
'Now anyone who is not an Egyptian is like a fly in the milk.' 'It's a complete change.'
'All the beautiful old villas with trees and flowers - they've destroyed everything to build these. .. awful, awful, ugly buildings.' 'When I go around now, I get lost.'
'To live here now you have to stay at home,' said Joe, toying with his coffee cup. 'Just to look at the streets makes me sad.'
'Some of the Egyptians are very nice,' said Olga. 'But they are the old ones. Brou
ght up with Europeans.'
'And they don't go out much.'
'You know I live in a home for old ladies now?' said Olga. She sounded bewildered by the information, as if she had just woken up there for the first time that morning. 'It is called the Casa di Riposo - run by the Italian sisters. I left my apartment: it was too big and my servant got sick. The home is very nice, very clean. But I have nothing to do.' She crossed her legs: 'I sold everything. Except a portrait of myself when I was young.'
'She was so beautiful,' said Joe. 'You cannot imagine.'
'Everyone looks at it and says, "Oh, how beautiful!" But look at me. You wouldn't know now, would you?
Olga looked at me. Again she asked, this time almost surprised: 'Would you?'
Five minutes' walk from the synagogue, opposite the Metro Cinema, lies the Elite Cafe. Its octogenarian owner, Miss Christina - all kaftan and coloured beads - is one of Alexandria's few remaining Greeks.
'Alexandria was a Greek town,' she said, sitting down at a table near the window. 'But few of us are left. Every year, little by little, we get smaller. In twenty years no one will be left.'
Miss Christina gestured to the dance floor at the back of the cafe: 'See over there?' she said. 'When I was young we used to have a Greek dance-band at the back here. We were dancing until two, three o'clock in the morning. Going out, eating breakfast at the Cecil, then off somewhere else.'
'But no longer.'
'No!' Miss Christina laughed. 'Things are very calm now. The Egyptians don't dance. They are very polite. They like their families. They go to bed early. And the Greeks who are left are not much better.'
'No?'
'No. The Greeks here are not so rich or so interesting. They are neither industrialists nor poets. They're just shopkeepers. None have ... you know, pictures by Picasso or Cezanne or anything nice like that. All the old families - the Dositsas, the Antoniadis, the Sakalaritas - they've all gone.'
From The Holy Mountain Page 41