V. (11 page)

Waldetar, a highly religious man, had heard the story from his father and was inclined to take the common-sense view. If there is no telling what a drunken human will do, so much less a herd of drunken elephants. Why put it down to God's intervention? There were enough instances of that in history, all regarded by Waldetar with terror and a sense of his own smallness: Noah's warning of the Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, Lot's escape from annihilated Sodom. Men, he felt, even perhaps Sephardim, are at the mercy of the earth and its seas. Whether a cataclysm is accident or design, they need a God to keep them from harm.

The storm and the earthquake have no mind. Soul cannot commend no-soul. Only God can.

But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all "soul" means. Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue. Fortune had saved the Jews in the Hippodrome.

Merely train's hardware for any casual onlooker, Waldetar in private life was exactly this mist of philosophy, imagination and continual worry over his several relationships - not only with God, but also with Nita, with their children, with his own history. There's no organized effort about it but here remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise.T his secret is as well kept as the others: that statues talk (though the vocal Memnon of Thebes, certain sunrises, been indiscreet), that some government buildings go mad and mosques make love.

Passengers and baggage aboard, the train overcame its inertia and started off only a quarter of an hour behind schedule toward the climbing sun. The railway from Alexandria to Cairo describes a rough arc whose chord points southeast. But the train must first angle north to skirt Lake Mareotis. While Waldetar made his way among the first-class compartments to gather tickets, the train passed rich villages and gardens alive with palms and orange trees. Abruptly these were left behind. Waldetar squeezed past a German with blue lenses for eyes and an Arab deep in conversation in time to enter a compartment and see from the window momentary death: desert. The site of the ancient Eleusis - a great mound, looking like the one spot on earth fertile Demeter had never seen, passed by to the south.

At Sidi Gaber the train swung at last toward the southeast, inching slow as the sun; zenith and Cairo would in fact be reached at the same time. Across the Mahmudiyeh Canal, into a slow bloom of green - the Delta - and clouds of ducks and pelicans rising from the shores of Mareotis, frightened by the noise. Beneath the lake were 150 villages, submerged by a man-made Flood in 1801, when the English cut through an isthmus of desert during the siege of Alexandria, to let the Mediterranean in. Waldetar liked to think that the waterfowl soaring thick in the air were ghosts of fellahin. What submarine wonders at the floor of Mareotis! Lost country: houses, hovels, farms, water wheels, all intact.

Did the narwhal pull their plows? Devilfish drive their water wheels?

Down the embankment a group of Arabs lazed about, evaporating water from the lake for salt. Far down the canal were barges, their sails brave white under this sun.

Under the same sun Nita would be moving now about their little yard growing heavy with what Waldetar hoped would be a boy. A boy could even it up, two and two. Women outnumber us now, he thought: why should I contribute further to the imbalance?

"Though I'm not against it," he'd once told her during their courtship (part way here - in Barcelona, when he was stevedoring at the docks); "God's will, is it not? Look at Solomon, at many great kings. One man, several wives."

"Great king," she yelled: "who?" They both started to laugh like children. "One peasant girl you can't even support." Which is no way to impress a young man you are bent on marrying. It was one of the reasons he fell in love with her shortly afterward and why they'd stayed in love for nearly seven years of monogamy.

Nita, Nita . . The mind's picture was always of her seated behind their house at dusk, where the cries of children were drowned in the whistle of a night train for Suez; where cinders came to lodge in pores beginning to widen under the stresses of some heart's geology ("Your complexion is going from bad to worse," he'd say: "I'll have to start paying more attention to the lovely young French girls who are always making eyes at me." "Fine," she'd retort, "I'll tell that to the baker when he comes to sleep with me tomorrow, it'll make him feel better"); where all the nostalgias of an Iberian littoral lost to them - the squid hung to dry, nets stretched across any skyglow morning or evening, singing or drunken cries of sailors and fishermen from behind only the next looming warehouse (find them, find them!

voices whose misery is all the world's night) - came unreal, in a symbolic way, as a racketing over points, a chuff-chuff of inanimate breath, and had only pretended to gather among the pumpkins, purslane and cucumbers, date palm, roses and poinsettias of their garden.

Halfway to Damanhur he heard a child crying from a compartment nearby. Curious, Waldetar looked inside. The was English, eleven or so, nearsighted: her watering eyes swam distorted behind thick eyeglasses. Across from her a man, thirty or so, harangued. Another looked on, perhaps angry, his burning face at least giving the illusion. The girl held a rock to her flat bosom.

"But have you never played with a clockwork doll?" the man insisted, the voice muffled through the door. "A doll which does everything perfectly, because of the machinery inside. Walks, sings, jumps rope. Real little boys and girls, you know, cry: act sullen, won't behave." His hands lay perfectly still, long and starved-nervous, one on each knee.

"Bongo-Shaftsbury," the other began. Bongo-Shaftsbury waved him off, irritated.

"Come. May I show you a mechanical doll. An electro-mechanical doll."

"Have you one -" she was frightened, Waldetar thought with an onrush of sympathy, seeing his own girls. Damn some of these English - "have you one with you?"

"I am one," Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. And pushed back the sleeve of his coat to remove a cufflink. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was a miniature electric switch. Single-pole, double-throw. Waldetar recoiled and stood blinking. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve.

"You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is thrown the other -"

"Papa!" the girl cried.

"Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean."

"Stop it," said the other Englishman.

"Why, Porpentine." Vicious. "Why. For her? Touched by her fright, are you. Or is it for yourself."

Porpentine seemed to retreat bashfully. "One doesn't frighten a child, sir."

"Hurrah. General principles again." Corpse fingers jabbed in the air. "But someday, Porpentine, I, or another, will catch you off guard. Loving, hating, even showing some absent-minded sympathy. I'll watch you. The moment you forget yourself enough to admit another's humanity, see him as a person and not a symbol - then perhaps-"

"What is humanity."

"You ask the obvious, ha, ha. Humanity is something to destroy."

There was noise from the rear car, behind Waldetar. Porpentine came dashing out and they collided. Mildred had fled, clutching her rock, to the adjoining compartment.

The door to the rear platform was open: in front of it a fat florid Englishman wrestled with the Arab Waldetar had seen earlier talking to the German. The Arab had a pistol. Porpentine moved toward them, closing cautiously, choosing his point. Waldetar, recovering at last, hurried in to break up the fight. Before he could reach them Porpentine had let loose a kick at the Arab's throat, catching him across the windpipe. The Arab collapsed rattling.

"Now," Porpentine pondered. The fat Englishman had taken the pistol.

"What is the trouble," Waldetar demanded, in his best public-servant's voice.

"Nothing." Porpentine held out a sovereign. "Nothing that cannot be healed by this sovereign cure."

Waldetar shrugged. Between them they got the Arab to a third-class compartment, instructed the attendant there to look after him - he was sick - and to put him off at Damanhur. A blue mark was appearing on the Arab's throat. He tried to talk several times. He looked sick enough.

When the Englishmen had at last returned to their compartments Waldetar fell into reverie which continued on past Damanhur (where he saw the Arab and blue-lensed German again conversing), through a narrowing Delta, the sun rose toward noon and the train crawled toward Cairo's Principal Station; as dozens of small children ran alongside the train calling for baksheesh; as girls in blue cotton skirts and veils, with breasts made sleek brown by the sun, traipsed down to the Nile to fill their water jars; as water wheels spun and irrigation canals glittered and interlaced away to the horizon; as fellahin lounged under the palms; as buffalo paced their every day's tracks round and round the sakiehs. The point of the green triangle is Cairo. It means that relatively speaking, assuming your train stands still and the land moves past, that the twin wastes of the Libyan and Arabian deserts to right and left creep in inexorably to narrow the fertile and quick part of your world until you are left with hardly more than a right-of-way, and before you a great city. So there crept in on the gentle Waldetar a suspicion cheerless as the desert.

If they are what I think; what sort of world is it when they must let children suffer?

Thinking, of course, of Manoel, Antonia and Maria: his own.

V

The desert creeps in on a man's land. Not a fellah, but he does own some land. Did own. From a boy, he has repaired the wall, mortared, carried stone heavy as he, lifted, set in place. Still the desert comes. Is the wall a traitor, letting it in? Is the boy possessed by a djinn who makes his hands do the work wrong? Is the desert's attack too powerful for any boy, or wall, or dead father and mother?

No. The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. No djinn in the boy, no treachery in the wall, no hostility in the desert. Nothing.

Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert. The two goats must choke on sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover. He, never to taste their soured milk again. The melons die beneath the sand. Never more can you give comfort in the summer, cool abdelawi, shaped like the Angel's trumpet! The maize dies and there is no bread. The wife, the children grow sick and short-tempered. The man, he, runs one night out to where the wall was, begins to lift and toss imaginary rocks about, curses Allah, then begs forgiveness from the Prophet, then urinates on the desert, hoping to insult what cannot be insulted.

They find him in the morning a mile from the house, skin blued, shivering in a sleep which is almost death, tears turned to frost on the sand.

And now the house begins to fill with desert, like the lower half of an hourglass which will never be inverted again.

What does a man do? Gebrail shot a quick look back at his fare. Even here, in the Ezbekiyeh Garden at high noon, these horse's hooves sounded hollow. You jolly damn right Inglizi; a man comes to the City and drives for you and every other Frank with land to return to. His family lives all together in a room no bigger than your W.C., out in Arabian Cairo where you never go because it's too dirty, and not "curious." Where the street is so narrow hardly a man's shadow can pass; a street, like many not on any guidebook's map. Where the houses pile up in steps; so high that the windows of two buildings may touch across the street; and hide the sun. Where goldsmiths live in filth and tend tiny flames to make adornment far your traveling English ladies.

Five years Gebrail had hated them. Hated the stone buildings and metaled roads, the iron bridges and glass windows of Shepheard's Hotel which it seemed were only different forms of the same dead sand that had taken his home. "The City," Gebrail often told his wife, just after admitting he'd come home drunk and just before beginning to yell at his children - the five of them curled blind in the windowless room above the barber like so many puppy-bodies - "the city is only the desert in disguise."

The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice. If the Koran were nothing, then Islam was nothing. Then Allah was a story, and his Paradise wishful thinking.

"Fine." The fare leaned over his shoulder, smelling of garlic, like an Italian. "Wait here." But dressed like an Inglizi. How horrible the face looked: dead skin peeling off the burned face in white rags. They were in front of Shepheard's Hotel.

Since noon they'd been all over the fashionable part of the city . From Hotel Victoria (where, oddly, his fare had emerged from the servants' entrance) they had driven first to the Quarter Rossetti, then a few stops along the Muski; then uphill to the Rond-Point, where Gebrail waited while the Englishman disappeared for half an hour into the Bazaars' pungent labyrinth. Visiting, perhaps. Now he'd seen the girl before, surely. The girl in the Quarter Rossetti: Coptic, probably. Eyes made impossibly huge with mascara, pose slightly hooked and bowed, two vertical dimples on either side of the mouth, crocheted shawl covering hair and back, high cheekbones, warm-brown skin.

Of course she'd been a fare. He remembered the face. She was mistress to some clerk or other in the British Consulate. Gebrail had picked the boy up for her in front of the Hotel Victoria, across the street. Another time they'd gone to her rooms. It helped Gebrail to remember faces. Brought in more baksheesh if you bade them good-day any second time. How could you say they were people: they were money. What did he care about the love affairs of the English? Charity - selfless or erotic - was as much a lie as the Koran. Did not exist.

One merchant in the Muski too he had seen. A jewel merchant who had lent money to the Mahdists and was afraid his sympathies would become known now that the movement was crushed. What did the Englishman want there? He had brought no jewels away from the shop; though he'd remained inside for nearly an hour. Gebrail shrugged. They were both fools. The only Mahdi is the desert.