by Gavin Young
It is no exaggeration to say that the vessel swarmed with the most wretched of Mr Sadat’s subjects as bad meat swarms with maggots. There were scores of them, and they lined the stern rail five deep, wild of hair and scarred of face, to watch developments on the shore. They milled about, shouting inanely and obscenely, in the echoing steel belly of the ship. Some of them had carried crates and bales up the stern ramp, which were piled inefficiently around the four or five cars and two tractors already in the hold and threatened to topple onto the cars. In stained pyjamas or torn and befouled trousers they squatted on the decks raucously talking and smoking among countless bundles and dilapidated suitcases. Spitting and scratching, they sprawled in every chair and even on tables in the communal saloon and the cafeteria. They lay in coughing, cursing groups on every inch of deck space. Some had laid down strips of cardboard torn from packing cases to serve as mattresses; some lay on single blankets, propping their heads on a grimy towel or on lumpy plastic bags with bottles protruding from them. Some were drunk and lay muttering in a clanking nest of beer cans. Others were either congenitally moronic or drugged. On the fetid lower decks they lay in accumulations of fruit peel, cigarette butts, gobbets of phlegm, twists of foul paper, streams and puddles of dark, unidentifiable liquid and a stench of urine and bodies. Once the ship reached the sea and began to roll, they lay in their own vomit as well.
To find my cabin required fifteen minutes of sweat and struggle up steel companionways against a flood of these aimless Egyptians. I needed to find the purser’s office to show my ticket and be shown my bunk. But the corridors between me and the office were almost blocked by dim figures croaking ‘Welcome’ at me or lying inert and dejected. It was very hot. I could see air-conditioning outlets, but the system wasn’t working and sweat poured down my body like rain. I wondered how a married couple with children and a baby would cope with this situation (the shipping company advertised itself as if it might welcome family parties). I wondered still more when I finally reached the purser’s office.
The purser’s office – a counter with ‘Information’ written above it – was locked and in darkness. It was six o’clock and, according to the agent and the captain, we should be about to sail.
After ten minutes a young officer in a crumpled off-white uniform and a bad temper arrived, unlocked the office door and shouted harshly to summon his assistants. Nothing happened, but more shouts from the officer finally brought two ragged scullions, yawning, from dim bulkheads.
‘Wait in there,’ the information officer said abruptly to me. He pointed to a curtain, half opened to reveal a cabin large enough to contain a chair and a bunk whose sheets were grey and spotty. Thinking that to sit in there would undoubtedly give the information officer an opportunity to lock up his office and disappear once more, I said, ‘Look, I’d like to be able to put this baggage in my cabin. Here is my ticket voucher.’
He took the voucher, glared at it angrily and said, ‘Mister, you have no ticket. You must buy ticket.’
‘I paid ninety-two dollars for this voucher. It’s in place of a ticket. The agent has arranged all that with your company.’
‘This not ticket. You have no ticket, mister. You must buy.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m going to see the captain about this.’ It was too hot to go on arguing here, as well as to talk in a busy aisle where people barged past us. ‘Will you come?’
‘Okay, I come. Captain also tell you go buy ticket.’
We struggled up more companionways to the bridge. I had convinced the sullen information officer that he could, without risk, lock my metal suitcase in his office until we returned. He made it clear with much sighing that he didn’t like it, but he did it.
On the bridge I found the captain, a youngish version of Glenn Ford, amiable, competent-looking. He was actually smiling. It was a relief to see someone looking pleasant after half an hour on board Al Anoud.
He said, ‘Hi! Everything fine?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not entirely. This officer says this voucher I’ve paid for is no good, so I have no cabin. He says I must pay again for a ticket.’
The captain stopped smiling and turned to the information officer. ‘Didn’t you hear me tell you before?’ he said quietly in Arabic. ‘Vouchers are like tickets on this trip. This is okay. Give this gentleman the cabin he has paid for.’
From the look on the information officer’s face, the captain might have told him that the pyramids had crumbled into rubble that very afternoon. ‘Every voucher is acceptable?’ His voice reflected disbelief and resentment.
‘Every one,’ said the captain sharply. He turned to me and asked, ‘Which part of England are you from?’ Vouchers and tickets were forgotten; we might have been continuing a discussion about holidays in Britain. ‘I know England very well.’ He smiled. ‘I was two years on a Greek-owned ship between Liverpool and Antwerp. We must talk some more later.’
When we found it, my cabin was two-berthed, hot and airless. The sheets had been used at least once; they had dark stains and some yellow ones, and one russet hair and several black ones lay on their off-white folds. ‘Wait,’ said the captain’s steward, who had carried my bag for me. He pushed it under a bunk, winked and went away. Soon he came back with newly washed but still-stained sheets, soap and a small towel. He himself, I noted, was dressed in white shirt and trousers as clean as a snowdrop. We pushed at the porthole for a minute or two, but failed to open it.
When I thanked him, he said, smiling, ‘It is my duty.’ Al Anoud sailed from Limassol in the dark. She moved in a slow arc toward a narrow gap in the harbour wall, dropped the pilot there by a winking red beacon, and picked up speed abreast of the Limassol seafront.
Once we reached open water Al Anoud’s strange passengers began to form long, untidy lines between decks up to the steamy entrance to the ship’s galley. There the kitchen staff, a brawny, sweating lot of overworked men, ladled rice, a pungent mess of steamed marrow and slabs of blackish meat onto metal trays. Sometimes a ragged figure would try to jump the immense queue and snatch a laden tray on the wing between a kitchen hand and the first in line. The staff cursed the interlopers and drove them off by bashing them on the head and shoulders with their soup ladles, and furious men in the queue kicked and punched them. The food was borne away to any available deck space and wolfed down among the cigarette stubs and the dirt. Soon the ship was full of men squatting like convicts, slurping food, belching, and wolfishly eyeing their neighbours’ trays.
The cabin passengers’ dining room was a long room with tables set one behind the other under a line of portholes, and led off the same steamy kitchen. By the time I found it, twenty or more Egyptian cabin passengers were already spooning up rice, the steamed marrow and pieces of dark meat. Between mouthfuls they fanned themselves with their hands. You could have absorbed the moisture in the air with a sponge.
Only one other diner sat at my table. He was an elderly gentleman, unusually dressed for this time of year in a tie and white cotton shirt with long sleeves and long cufflinks, braces and a waistcoat of thick cloth over matching trousers. His jacket hung over the back of his chair. The older generation of Cypriot Greeks dressed like this. I could see that a conflict between the fibrous slabs and his dentures had to be resolved before any conversation would be possible between us, so I affected an interest in my tepid marrow. When he had cleared his teeth, he said, ‘Good evening,’ cautiously with a quick bow of the head.
‘Not even serviettes in the dining room. Pah!’ Two things soon became obvious: he was a Greek Cypriot by birth and a fine old man. Between scoops of rice and marrow, he told me he lived now in Wakefield, Yorkshire, where his son kept a coffee shop. He was going to Alexandria because he had lived and worked there as a young man, after his family moved there from Larnaca in southern Cyprus.
As we peeled and ate the apples that a steward with a bristly chin put before us after the rice course, Mr Pavlides told me, as if we’d been talking at this table for day
s, about his taxi business in ‘Alex’ in the thirties, and how later as a British subject from Cyprus he’d been called up and served six years in the Royal Army Service Corps, not as a driver but as a cook. Month after month in the desert with the Eighth Army, indefatigably spooning sand out of the soup, he had served boiled cabbage and potatoes, and finally risen to the rank of corporal. Sidi Barrani, Marsa Matruh, Alamein – he had seen them all. Cooking his greens and spuds ‘under Rommel’s nose’, as he put it with a laugh, he refused higher promotion to stay ‘with the lads’. When he said he’d never missed a day’s duty in those six years, I believed him. He had a strong, square face, firm-jawed and handsome, and a square head well covered with neatly trimmed white hair; it was a face you believed in. He could remember the names of his wartime officers as if they were still close friends: Mr Reynolds, Captain Lyle, and a Major Harry Piper from New Zealand who had asked him to come and work as overseer on his sheep ranch when the war was over (but it had seemed too far to go, he said).
When Mr Pavlides took an envelope of photographs from his pocket and began to pass them to me, I recognized him at once, though they were pictures taken in the twenties and thirties. ‘That’s you!’ I pointed to the dark-haired, moustached figure in the twenties suit with high, stiff shirt-collar, small knotted tie and wide-brimmed felt hat, posing with other similarly dressed young friends, some of whom wore spats. His big eyes, square head and face even under the oiled black hair of fifty years ago was unmistakable.
He chuckled with pleasure, moving his dental plate up and down with his tongue. ‘How do you recognize me? Eh? How?’ But I think he’d known I would.
Pictures of old Alex: ‘That’s where we used to catch the tram to work.’ And: ‘He’s in Australia now. He’s in America, or was. This one is dead. Maybe that one is still in Alex; I may see him.’ Stocky, dark-eyed young Greeks in black and white ‘co-respondent’ shoes, swelling with pride, elbows and toes well turned out, beside a 1926 Fiat, his first taxi, against the seafront at Alex. A little plumper, they posed again beside a 1928 Chevrolet.
Last he showed me colour photographs of a red-tiled Cypriot village near Larnaca, where his life had begun long before the Alex days, and one of a Yorkshire suburban garden under snow, where I suppose it will end.
Mr Pavlides visited his relatives in Cyprus every year, he told me, and now, for the first time in twenty-five years, he was going back to Alex. Well, there’d be changes, no doubt of that, some good, some definitely bad. But he had to go back for one last look. So much of his life, most of his youth, had been spent in that soft Mediterranean city, and then the six unforgettable war years with not a day’s duty shirked, which had led to security in sunless Yorkshire.
*
We had to push our way through the hot, overpopulated corridors to the upper deck. There, too, the mob seethed even more strangely in the eerie light of strings of red and blue painted bulbs, several of which were missing. Groups of men were bent over games of dominoes, slapping the pieces on the deck with the noise of pistol shots. Some played cards, throwing them down with shouts like war cries. A huge, swollen figure in cherry-coloured pyjamas swayed on its haunches, moaning quietly and rhythmically. Sleeping figures flung out arms and legs, their heads wrapped in filthy towels. Solitary men put their heads back and laughed inanely to themselves. It was like a scene from Midnight Express, the film set in a Turkish prison. My new Greek Cypriot friend edged gamely between men wrestling or exchanging screams of abuse, or men picking their feet or their noses. Egyptian music roared from several transistors. Empty cans of Dutch Oranjeboom pilsner de luxe clattered in the scuppers.
A light wind was lifting the sea and Al Anoud began to roll gently. Soon vomit lay on the deck like splashes of ratatouille.
I followed Mr Pavlides to the rail and we leaned over it with relief, breathing in the fresh air. ‘Nice to look at the clean sea,’ he said. He looked uneasily around before putting his moustache close to my ear to whisper, ‘We must be careful not to catch louses!’
We must be careful not to be stabbed, I thought.
*
Most of the time there was nowhere to sit. The first-class saloon was locked until 9.00 p.m., partly, I found on inquiry, because the surly steward responsible for opening it seemed to be eating his dinner most of the evening and, partly, he said, because it would be invaded by the crowd and immediately transformed into an overfilled dormitory-cum-grogshop and toilet.
One of the cabin-class passengers was an American Seventh-Day Adventist – ‘a very strong Adventist,’ he explained earnestly – from Fresno, California. He was a biology teacher who had once taught in Beirut, and was now returning there for the sole purpose of selling his car before evacuating his family to Nicosia. Beirut now was a place of permanent and indiscriminate violence. It had undergone a horrific civil war with Christian and Muslim Lebanese showing the degree of unbridled ferocity toward one another that one would expect if the gates of two zoos were simultaneously opened and the wild animals released to battle in the streets. The shooting was not going to end there, and Beirut had become a good place to avoid. It was a sensible place in which to sell one’s car and leave.
The Seventh-Day Adventist told me he was two decks down, actually below the level where the cars and tractors were parked. His tiny cabin had no portholes, no ventilation that worked, and he and an Egyptian lay on their respective bunks in pools of sweat, trying to breathe. I offered him the second bunk in my cabin, and he accepted immediately.
The second first-class passenger to materialize after dinner was a French-speaking Lebanese Christian, a businessman, obviously well-to-do, fingers ringed with heavy bands of what looked like gold, and heavy cufflinks on his sleeves. ‘How terrible thees sheep,’ he said. ‘I’ll never use it again.’
‘Regard it as a unique adventure,’ I advised him.
He began to talk of London, querulously and in French. ‘I never want to put my foot there again. It’s full of Arabs. It’s no more London. Even my valuables were stolen from my hotel room in Kensington. Stolen by Arabs, that I’m sure.’
We moved into the first-class saloon as soon as the steward had unlocked it and beckoned us in. It had been unaired and uncooled all day and was stifling.
‘Ah, my cabin is so hot,’ the Lebanese panted in a mixture of English and French, thrown into linguistic confusion by the heat. ‘No wind, and the draps are so sales.’
Later he abandoned his cabin completely. I saw him sleeping in a chair in the saloon, near a porthole that scooped in the sea breeze. Even so, his lolling head was glistening with sweat. Opposite him my old Greek friend sat upright, his eyes closed, dozing. Earlier he had told me that his cabin had no window, water or air. He was baffled by this, shaking his handsome old head and saying. ‘How could I know the ship is like this? If the captain says he will give me one hundred pounds sterling, I am no more coming on this ship. Never!’ I realized I was lucky to have running water and a porthole.
*
The Seventh-Day Adventist from Fresno and the Lebanese businessman disembarked at Beirut. Al Anoud went alongside stern first and lowered her stern ramp; then the shouting began. Customs officers marched up the ramp like big-bellied kings among their corrupt subjects, shouting for documents; Lebanese policemen shouted for something else; the ship’s officers and the mob on Al Anoud’s decks shouted back. Shouting men ran up and down companionways carrying cartons of cigarettes, presumably contraband. In the vehicle hold they dragged crates to the ramp and dragged other bundles of cargo inboard, and men stood behind steel pillars counting banknotes into other men’s palms.
The Lebanese businessman was slipping a handful of notes to a customs officer with one arm across his uniformed shoulder, and in no time, despite the seemingly impenetrable tangle of men and vehicles, he was soon driving his 1979 BMW 320 down the ramp with the customs officer clearing the way for him. At the top of the ramp the Lebanese looked straight at me through his window but gave no sign of recognition wh
en I said goodbye. On the quay below, a taxi driver was kissing the hand of a policeman – obeisance, I suppose, to a ‘godfather’.
Beyond the bedlam of the quay and docks that had a temporary, wartime look, high-rise buildings stood like shell-pocked abandoned lookouts. I was surprised we didn’t hear rockets exploding or artillery; a day earlier or a few hours later we might have. Year after year I had watched Beirutis destroy themselves and their city, but it had always been much easier to feel sorry for, say, Phnom Penh. Beirut’s pretensions to being the most civilized city of the region have always been skin-deep. It is truly a capital of unbridled intrigue, treachery, vulgarity and violence. It has always been a brutal city in a self-pleasuring, swaggering way – and in all sorts of hole-in-corner cowardly ways too. It has been a city of drugs, spies and gunmen, and, outside the novels of the late Ian Fleming, these ingredients add up to the antithesis of romance.
The Lebanese businessman on Al Anoud had talked about Arabs as if they were a different race, as though he were not an Arab. Yet Lebanon is a member of the Arab League, and he was not Armenian, Turkish or Kurdish. I wondered what he thought he was, but in an age of destitution and refugee camps, the Lebanese rich are generally irrelevant. They seem largely absorbed in increasing their fortunes in London, Paris or New York, in sunburning their bodies in beach clubs with names like the Elite, or being photographed for the glossy pages of Beirut’s magazines. To them the refugee camps are unreal, but, of course, it is the camps that are the reality. Sprawling settlements as big as townships straddle the road to Beirut’s international airport – one of your last memories of Lebanon is the sight of snotty-nosed urchins peering out through barbed wire, or out of nauseous lean-to shelters – and there are many more such camps disfiguring the body of this beautiful country like sores alive with human maggots. Mainly they house destitute refugees from the West Bank of the Jordan, fugitives from villages laid waste by war or set out of bounds to their own inhabitants by politicians drawing new lines on old maps. These Palestinian refugees share their misery with Lebanese fleeing the shelling and sniping of their own people, the gangsterism that flourishes in the name of religion and ideology. To the mindless brutality that fanatical followers of the Cross or the Crescent have practised on one another since the Crusades has now been added the brutality of nationalists, rightists and leftists.