Daniel Martin (64 page)

Dan began to wish Jane were there to hear all this; and he took a chance, when he and Sabry wandered over to get more food, to join them to Jane’s group. Sabry sat beside her, and then realized she could speak French. He slipped into it himself, and seemed much more at home there. Then he said something that made Jane and Mrs Assad laugh. He was sitting on a small wall sofa beside Jane. Assad came up and winked at Dan; a little circle began to form, then Sabry said something in Arabic, which again made those who understood laugh. Assad translated. Those who thought two and two made five must leave the room—a first crack, it was to be the first of many, against the naivety of the political police.

Slowly Sabry began to perform, though with a lugubrious reluctance; then a stream of stories and one-liners, in a mixture of French and Arabic, began to pour out of him. He had the born comic’s mastery of the deadpan face and there was now an increasing touch of Mort Sahl about him, as if the more his audience laughed, the more he gave up hope for the human condition. Some of the jokes in Arabic were apparently too broad for European ears, but he took to using Jane beside him as a combined interpreter and feed, making her translate the less scandalous gibes into English. Here are one or two that Dan recalls.

They find a stone statue of a pharaoh at Luxor. The inscriptions are indecipherable, the archaeologists at a loss as to who it is. The statue is brought to Cairo and cleaned, but still the experts are baffled. At last a secret policeman asks if he can see it. He is taken to the room, he goes in and locks the door. An hour later he comes out pulling his coat on and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘He confessed.’

A well-known political suspect is recaptured after an escape, not his first. The chief of police racks his brains to think where to put him. A young inspector speaks up.

‘I’ve got it, sir. One of those old prisons outside the city. I’ve never seen thicker walls.’

‘Which prisons?’

‘You know, sir. The ones at Ghiza. Foreigners call them the Pyramids.’

There was a joke for Assad. Sadat rings up the Coptic Patriarch.

‘Your grace, we must stop using these words Muslim and Copt. We are all Egyptians. That is enough.’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

‘And by the way, I’ve decided to appoint Ibrahim Shafir as your bishop in Alexandria.’

‘But he’s a Muslim, Mr President!’

‘There you are—using that word again!’

Some of the jokes must have been as old as Egypt herself. Nasser is reviewing troops. He comes on a soldier with exactly his own face. He smiles.

‘I know where you come from, my lad.’

‘Same village as yourself, Mr President.’

‘Ah. So your mother was a servant in our house.’

‘No, Mr President. My father.’

Then there was a seditious and vitriolic group about the ignorance and ineffectiveness of the Egyptian army. One soldier came back from the Sinai front.

‘Allah, how those Germans can fight!’

Or this: an army truck drives towards the Israeli lines. The officer beside the driver feverishly eats pistachio nuts and throws the shells out of the window. The driver looks at him.

‘Why are you doing that, sir?’

‘So I can find my way back, you fool!’

Sabry was obviously in the Ustinov class as a raconteur. Dan enjoyed this impromptu cabaret act, and guessed that they were privileged to hear it. He thought he detected, at least in the faces of one or two of the wives, a certain shock at the more violent digs against Nasser and Sadat; which seemed an added reason to admire this rancorous, mocking, sardonic tongue. He felt his own mind being opened, since just as Sabry’s appearance and delivery recalled Matthau and Sahl, the bitter self-denigration of his jokes sharply echoed so much Jewish humour. Dan imagined his Hollywood friend Abe beside him, and thought of countless other acid-tongued scathers of pretention he knew or had known in his years in the Jewish-dominated world of the cinema. It seemed insane that two such identical senses of humour could think of each other only in terms of hatred and destruction. He suddenly saw the political establishments of the world as a conspiracy of the humourless against laughter, a tyranny of stupidity over intelligence; man as a product of history, not of his true inner, personal, nature. He might, if he had browsed further in the book he had picked up in Jane’s drawing-room at Oxford, have seen that Gramsci had once said almost exactly the same thing, though he had derived his proof of it from the failure of mankind to make socialism universal. Dan saw it much more in existential terms, a universal failure of personal authenticity, faith in one’s own inner feelings.

He wondered if Jane felt the same-probably not, she would regard it as elitist to dismiss the great bulk of mankind, both rulers and ruled, as stupid and brainwashed. But Dan, with his usual fatalism, from his favourite stance of outside observer, saw privilege as something evolutionary and pre-ordained. One was condemned without choice to enjoying such experiences, to having knowledge of the world, to valuing wit and use of language because one was genetically, and by hazard of birth and career, endowed with the faculties to appreciate them. He felt he understood the bitterness and blankness of the Keaton-like masks Sabry kept assuming; they were not merely a part of his act, but a knowledge that it was fundamentally futile, a selling to the already sold. The real clowns of the world, he seemed to be saying, were those in power-and who would remain in power.

Another of Sabry’s jokes concerned Nasser’s funeral cortege. A woman wails and wails until she is allowed to stand over the coffin and see the dead leader one last time. She stares down a long moment, then looks up with a beaming smile.

‘So he really is!’

If not the funniest, it was perhaps the profoundest of Sabry’s stories. He had preceded the punch-line with a beautifully exact mime of a stupid old woman’s smile of joy; beautiful in its glistening idiocy, its happy blindness to reality. Actors very rarely impressed Dan, and perhaps comic actors least of all; but this one touched some deep affinity, an angry despair that he rarely admitted was also inside him.

Through all this he was also watching Jane, who had become a secondary centre of attention for those who didn’t speak French. At first she translated the jokes into English a shade hesitantly, mainly towards Dan; but then gradually something of her old theatrical sense of timing, of the right turn of phrase, began to come out. There was an animation about her, a sudden willingness to perform a little as well. When Sabry finally declared himself exhausted, he turned and kissed her hand—he would never again tell an unkind joke against an Englishwoman.

They split off once more into separate groups. Dan turned away and talked with the history professor. Jane remained sitting for some time with Sabry, talking more seriously. He used his hands a lot. Occasionally she nodded, as if in sympathy with what he was saying. After a while Assad and the novelist joined them, and then she was talking more. She was plainly making a sort of hit. It both pleased and in some odd way offended Dan, who was beginning to get rather bored and would normally have been thinking of leaving. But he didn’t want to tear her away when she was enjoying herself; and did want to suppress his slight resentment that she seemed more at ease with these strangers around her than she was with him. The other wives had gathered in a corner, and some sort of women’s klatsch, in a softer, more lisping Arabic than the men’s, was in progress; perhaps unintentionally, they seemed to imply that they could not rival this foreign woman and her western ways with men.

Another Dan was rather proud that she had this power to attract still. She must have been the oldest woman in the room, but the black dress with its open neckline suited her, lost her a few years; was rather striking beside the somewhat conventional evening dresses of the others. Assad’s wife eventually came with more cinnamon tea to where Dan and the American were sitting, and smiled down at him. His ‘friend’ was putting them to shame. It wasn’t like this in the Lebanon; but always at parties in Egypt, she complained, the women, however emancipated they tried to be, ended in a conversational harem. The little Texan beside him tried to defend the custom, he had come to Cairo to escape women trying to out-talk every man in sight. But Dan was finally led into the harem, and became for a few minutes a centre of attraction himself. They questioned him on the film; then on his previous trip to Egypt, when he confessed to that. It was provincial chat, and at last he could face no more of it. He managed to catch Jane’s eyes across the room, and she raised her eyebrows in quick interrogation. He nodded and stood.

Once they were in the taxi, he looked at her.

‘Survived?’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m so glad we went.’

‘I think you made a hit with Sabry.

‘Extraordinary man. He gave me all his life story afterwards. He’s completely self-educated. His father was just a peasant.’

‘I wonder what his plays are like.’

‘One sounds rather interesting. It seems to be a sort of Arab version of The Entertainer. He’s never heard of Osborne.’ She let out a little sigh. ‘He’s half inveigled me into trying to write an English version. Apparently it was done in Paris last year.’

‘I should make sure someone will put it on first.’

‘He’s going to send the French translation to me.’

‘Well. Perhaps you’ve found your metier at last.’ She said nothing, as if he were now being the spoilsport.

‘Did you like Assad’s wife?’

‘Yes, I wished I’d talked longer with her.’

‘I must send her some flowers in the morning.’

She leant forward, quickly, turned to him. ‘Oh you must let me send them, Dan. Please. I’d like to.’

‘You’re in the wicked film world. Neither of us pays for flowers. The production does.’ She looked down. ‘In due course it will also pay for tonight. So don’t feel conscience-stricken.’

She hesitated, then leant back, but the concession was reluctant.

He said, ‘All right. But we’ll go Dutch on them.’

‘Thank you.’

Her eyes had a momentary glint of an old knowledge of him behind their amusement, and he smiled away.

‘I keep forgetting I’m with a philosopher’s widow.’

‘I think there is a case for paying for one’s own gratitude.’

‘Of course. And have patience. I’ve lived too long in a corrupt world.’

‘I begin to see its temptations.’

‘I was rather hoping you’d help me see through them.’

She shook her head.

‘Too fresh from the cloister for that.’

He smiled again, and there was silence between them. He slid one very brief covert glance towards her corner, a mere flick of the eyes as she stared out of the side-window of the taxi; perhaps it was the dim light, or the transience of his look, but he retained a ghostlike image of a much younger profile. Something in it, or in their silence, his sense that she did not want to talk about the evening, was disturbing. He had of course accepted the presence of a residual attraction, one couldn’t reject all memory. Some kind of analogy to what he had felt about Sabry crossed his mind as like her, he stared at the passing streets and embankments: the tyranny of the stupid. It was not at all a moment of physical lust, a phenomenon he associated with the imperative mood (seduce this girl, get her clothes off, bed her). Such moments were always spiced with ignorance and risk; had a sense of adventure, devil-may-care, some affective equivalent in the mind of erection at the loins. He did not feel that; not a trace of an imperative: much more a sudden tenderness, a wish to be intimate in a way she was establishing that they could not be. It was absurd, in the way that the reciprocal hatred of Jew and Arab was absurd, that he couldn’t even reach out and touch her hand, that they so scrupulously avoided even the most innocent physical contact.

If he did speculate a little beyond that, it was coldly, idly, purely—almost in both senses—as he so often hypothesized imaginary futures from trivial presents; and only very briefly. Jenny scolded in his mind; and Jane herself, or her moral values, in some way not unlike those of the far more famous Jane she had already reminded him of that evening, equally rebuked the very idea of such multiple betrayals. It was merely his imagination mutinying against the pre-ordained, as children will sometimes test their parents’ indulgence… and secretly want to fail, to be duly disciplined; merely and haphazardly triggered by that drily meant remark about leaving the cloister, by a momentary impression, in the line of a cheek above a furred collar, of a loneliness in her, of someone too finely poised to be as secure as she seemed.

This time, back at the hotel, they did not even shake hands. The metaphorical formality of the previous evening had been only to set the correct key. She had thanked him genuinely enough—it had been a fascinating day, a fascinating evening.

Alone, he had not undressed for a while. He poured himself a whisky he didn’t really need. The small sounds from Jane’s side of the door soon ceased. It was one o’clock, she had gone straight to bed.

Dan went to the window and stared down at the dark silence of the Nile; endless, indifferent, like time itself. He felt obscurely trapped, not master of his own destiny at all, at a nadir from his moments of happiness at Thorncombe. Strangely his mind slipped away from the nocturnal view to his father; to a wondering, not the first of his life, whether he hadn’t… in depths beyond his conscious reach, and therefore perhaps qualifying for the passive tense—whether he hadn’t been formed in his father’s image and in a sense not too far removed from that father’s God and his son; almost, that is, for a secret paternal purpose, though in Dan’s case it would be more accurately called a paternal defect. He thought of the old man’s flight into stasis, unchangingness, immemorial ritual and safe tradition.