A Writer's World (8 page)

‘Where are we going?’ inquired my driver.

A rainbow appeared this afternoon, though nobody seemed to notice it but me. All around me as I stood at the road junction the soldiers of the Israeli Army were hitch-hiking home from battle, and they hailed their passing lorries, swapped their war stories, compared their souvenirs, whistled their tunes without a glance at that poor pale phenomenon above them. Perhaps they were right. Great forces are swirling around Israel nowadays. In all its ten years of dangerous living Israel was perhaps never so precarious as this.

Still, it is always nice to see an army going home, especially when it is so young and confident and full of conviction as this. The Israeli Army still has some of the free-and-easiness of an irregular force, and the soldiers around me, from nearly every country under the sun, shared a peculiar defiant panache that I have never experienced before. They were not only fighting soldiers, but unwavering zealots.

Their views admitted no argument, their claims no query; and if ever I felt moved to remonstration there was always a young man with a clear eye to remind me that the Israelis, if ever they
should
lose a battle, have nowhere else in the world to go. How can you argue, however impartial you are, however divided your sympathies on Palestine, with a people whose only alternatives are victory or extinction?

Many and enthralling were those soldiers’ stories. They told of a blond German officer captured with the Egyptians who had the insignia of the SS tattooed on his arm; of Russian orders issued to Egyptian tank crews; of underground tunnels packed with weapons. They spoke of vast quantities of captured ammunition, and of Egyptian commandos wearing pyjamas over their uniforms. They spoke harshly, as soldiers have since the beginning of war, and they unanimously agreed that not on any account would Israel withdraw from Sinai just because Britain or Russia or the United Nations happened to say so. Such was their mood, and such was mine, that I preferred on the whole not to debate the point.

Trucks came and went, soldiers climbed aboard and waved goodbye. It rained, and I prepared to move on. Just then the rainbow came. ‘Look, a rainbow,’ I said to a bearded and taciturn sergeant not long from Romania, and added sentimentally, ‘An omen of peace!’ But that unusual NCO needed no handkerchief to disperse his emotions. ‘It is not a reasonable analogy to the present situation,’ he replied, shifting his Sten gun on his shoulder. ‘God showed Noah the rainbow as a promise of no more floods in the future. When He merely wished to signify that Noah could now leave the ark, He dispatched a small bird, carrying a piece of tree in its snout.’

There is an air of berserk unreality to the Suez adventure, so it is not surprising to find Port Said bathed in a sense of fantasy. There is a nightmare feeling to the city today, a suggestion that we shall all wake up one welcome morning and wash the memory away with the morning tea.

War falls easily enough upon sprawling capitals among the darkling plains, where ideologies clash and there are statues of dictators to topple from their pedestals. Port Said used to feel infinitely distant from such affairs. It was something different and apart, a place with a single purpose in life, neatly deposited upon the map like a town on a model railway: and until a few weeks ago it had a certain pungent sparkle to it, so that it was fun to watch the tankers pounding by as you drank your coffee among the dowdy blue crêpe dresses of the Simon Artz department store.

It still looks familiar, when you fly into it from Cyprus on an RAF aircraft. Soon, you may feel, the touts will be at your heels as always, and the gharries will be clip-clopping down the faded boulevards, and among the back streets, in rambling tenements and houses of peeling flotsam, the purveyors of sin will be preparing their debaucheries. But no, even before your aircraft lands you can sense the heavy despondency that now pervades the town.
The streets below are nearly empty. No impudent bum-boats hurry about the harbour. No teeming crowds wander through the Arab quarter. Offshore half a dozen warships lie watchfully brooding, and over the town there seems to hang an unhealthy hush. It is as though some blighting epidemic has fallen upon Port Said, chasing the householders behind their doors, and leaving only uneasy scavengers at large.

Soon, as in a daze, you are entering the town. A squadron of Centurion tanks sprawls among churned mud in its outskirts. The big buildings along the waterfront are spattered with shell-fire. Part of the Arab quarter lies devastated, and a faint smell of death lingers in the streets, but it is not the tragedy of war that strikes you most forcibly as your bus rolls towards the Canal. It is the dreamlike quality of the experience. Something has happened in Port Said that shatters any previously held conception of the laws of probability. The British Army has seized it by force.

There are Union Jacks everywhere, familiar uniforms, officers driving requisitioned Citroëns. Courteous British sailors stand sentry upon the quayside, and there are war correspondents, and pompous army captains, and splendid ample petty officers, and people you were at school with, and a bustling jumble of British jokes and epithets. For a time none of it seems real. You shake your brain about like a drunk trying to disperse his liquor, until you look out across the harbour entrance and see the cluttered masts and funnels of sunken ships. Alas, it is no hallucination.

The shopping streets are dampened and depressed. The tourist stores are shuttered. Only a few merchants sit listlessly on kitchen chairs outside their premises. Here and there a shop has been mildly looted, and there is a litter of broken glass upon its floor and a few satin-padded boxes, empty of dubious emeralds or spurious antiques. In the Casino Palace Hotel, now a field hospital, you may search in vain for the courtly tarbooshed manager whose presence used to link that establishment indissolubly with the Edwardian era. Staff officers move importantly about the domed offices of the Suez Canal Company. Lounging soldiers lean from the windows of the shipping offices.

Here and there an Egyptian hawker accosts you. He peers around him before he offers you his wares, for somebody may accuse him of collaboration, and he brings his prices down far, far more easily than he used to. Outside the coffee shops a few men sit at empty tables, looking blank. They answer your inquiries with an air of moody resignation, with shruggings of shoulders and raised eyebrows, and manage to tell you very little. Port Said is scared, not of the British Army, still a homely
force, but of the menacing powers of resentment and revenge that seethe behind the town’s façade.

What a queer, contorted, significant mess has overcome the activities of this poor town! Motives have become hazily confused, moralities are topsy-turvy. The liberal finds himself allied with autocracy, the reactionary with the forces of progress. The decline of empires, the rise of the new Asia, the clash of east and west – all these portentous movements are suddenly illustrated with a peculiar clarity among these shabby urban streets. One can imagine such things easily enough in some war-scarred cockpit of Europe, but how anomalous they seem in Port Said, of all places, where the boatmen used to cheat you over the Turkish delight, and the young seamen tried to look experienced as they lounged towards the brothels, and pale colonial children on liner decks sat cross-legged and enthralled around the gully-gully men!

‘Elephant and Castle!’ say the soldiers, as the bus pulls in, but there is a false ring to the witticism. It has no heart in it, and springs from no roots of cheerful certainty: just as there feels no depth of truth or purpose to the present predicament of Port Said.

In the broiling sun I walked through an open gateway and said goodbye to the old Iraq. ‘Nuri es-Said is dead,’ my driver informed me, performing some gestures of disembowelment. ‘Now we will look at his house, which
was also his fortress.’ It is an ugly brick building with a garden running down to the Tigris, and its façade is chipped with machine-gun bullets. By the time the crowd reached the house on the day of the revolution Nuri had slipped away across the river, and now the place is a desolation, a charnel heap, littered with papers and broken furniture and dirt. A small boy sells soft drinks outside the front door, and a constant bustling curious crowd churns through its corridors, picking at the wreckage or peering into the broken shower-baths.

Relics of hideous poignancy lie everywhere about the house, and the crowd pokes its way into everything, breaking bits of wood off the wardrobes and ripping the last locks from the bedroom doors. Here is a packet of ‘denture fixature’. Here is a race card. Half of an old helmet, such as the Turkish Army used to wear, is squashed beneath a box. Scraps of books swirl around the floors: a page on Allenby’s strategy, a thesis on Roman law, an article on railway engines, a fragment of a thriller –
‘Bellay
bent forward and looked at the instruments. Sir James leaned across him
and asked ‘Did we send an emergency signal, captain?’

A safe has been broken open, and a small crowd is shaking it backwards and forwards in the hope that a few treasures may have been left behind by early comers. A couple of young men are examining a broken cupboard with a commercial air, like rag and bone men inspecting an old suit. A sentry with a rifle stands guard at the back door, and as you approach he gives you a smile that is almost domestic: ‘Welcome,’ he says, bowing slightly, as if to give you the run of the garden.

So strong is the lingering presence of old Nuri, so all-powerful has he been through decades of Iraq’s history, that it is hard to imagine his remains dismembered in ignominy across the Tigris. His house is wrecked and filthy and stripped of its grandeurs, and when he was dead, so I am told, they drove a car backwards and forwards across his body, ‘for he was a man of great corruption’. But as you stand at the top of the garden it feels oddly as though the house has merely been thrown open to the public in aid of some charitable fund; as though the old grandee himself, to avoid the pressure of the mechanic crowds, has locked himself upstairs with a cigar and a pile of papers.

So I looked suddenly back into the hall of the house, as I passed the boy selling soft drinks, half-expecting to see his stocky figure lumbering down the staircase, or catch a glimpse of his cynical, leathery face high in some garret window; but only a happy family party came laughing and chattering into the hall, and from upstairs there came a noise of thudding and
thumping, and a shouting of small boys and scampering footsteps, and all the sounds of holiday.