I had lived here. In the blazing light with the sweat bubbling already under my arms, there was no chance of denying it now.
On Kasr el Nil, moving the old European centre towards Soliman Pasha roundabout (he had been replaced by the hero Talaat Harb, bird-limed in his cocky tarbrush), things were more shabby and broken down than ever. The once pompous Haussmann-plan streets, the ornate French-Levantine-style apartments with their excessive curly stucco, decorative rue de Rivoli arches, balconies and roof balustrades, were all rubbing away, splitting, in the crackling hot-cupboard air. The pavements were an obstacle course of blistering, volcanic mounds; the traffic lights broken coloured spectacles winking a pale white light; a plate-glass window had gone in Au Salon Vert and sand blew in through every doorway.
True, it was May and the end of the Khamseen winds — that part of the year when the city, in the best of times, very nearly gave itself back to the desert — that scorching, gritty breath which now, without money and the foreign adventurers long gone, made it seem as if all the buildings had been detonated and were simply waiting to be pushed over, like trees standing firm as ever after the blade has passed, the moment before the fall.
“Ah,” El Khoury said, “Mr. Cherry has had — an accident? — no. A trouble? — yes.” Mr. Khoury’s English stumbled and doubled back in much the same way as the language did in his magazine. He led you on with it in sudden leaps through horrible misunderstandings only to dump you, equally ignorant, in the waste spaces among “abbreviations” and “recent additions” at the end of the dictionary. His office for Arab Focus was in a corridor of the Gazette building, at one end of it in fact, so that we sat opposite each other, pretty close to, with a few feet to spare on either side of our chairs, Mr. Khoury with something less than that for he was a large man with moist locks of dark hair round his ears, broken yellowish teeth and very bloodshot eyes — eyes which seemed to have looked long and without reward on some sunspot nirvana.
“An accident? Trouble?” I queried.
“A wife — his wife,” Mr. Khoury responded vigorously, suddenly hooking on to the right words with a huge smile. “She is not very well. In fact — ” he paused, massaged his stomach under his shirt, then wiped the sweat off his hand on a blotter, “—she is very bad. You will like to see her? Yes?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I remember her when I was last here. She’s French, isn’t she?”
“Franciowey. Aiowa.” He broke into Arabic. Then he glanced doubtfully down at his fly. Then the hand went under again.
“And you are here to do some stories,” he continued after the moment’s repairs. “The New Egypt. The new UAR as we call it. We can reprint them. The new High Dam, the new Arab summit, new pyramids from the World Bank — we are very keen. We will talk for a long time about it You will have food with us. I am very glad to see you. There will be much talk about it.”
“I’d thought really of doing a fairly simple colour piece — ‘Life in Cairo Today’‚ that sort of thing — ”
“Of course, of course,” Mr. Khoury interrupted. “We will do that. I will show you the new hotels — the El Borg, the Cairo Tower, the TV centre at Maspero, one of the very best — I think we have some English equipment — bathing, holidays, Nile cruisers. We will do everything. My wife will be very pleased to help.”
“And perhaps something on the antiquities, I’d thought. You’re doing something new at Sakkara, I understand. Looking for Imhotep’s tomb — ”
“Mr. Marlow, I tell you frankly, everything is new. With the antiquities we are doing many new and wonderful things. Very up to the minute. And I am doing a drama myself. In four acts and a prologue.”
Mr. Khoury shuffled among a crowd of typescripts and paper rubble on his desk. He produced a small booklet, a play in English by Taufiq Al-Hakim, a well-known Egyptian writer.
“There.” He handed me the play in triumph. “Mine is so much different. This man is talking about townspeople, Cairo people, talking and having their coffee in Groppi’s. I am writing a story of country folk — the world of the village. the man who comes to the city. The pressure — ” he raised both arms in hold-up fashion and then brought them together about his head, a cage of fingers over each ear “—the pressure of urban disturbances on the rural mind. The millennia of the past — ” he opened his arms out again “—faced with the millennia of the future!” He opened his arms wider still so that his fingers bumped the walls on either side of him. “These are the things of most importance. I am calling it Yesterday and Tomorrow. We will talk about it”
“It’s most kind of you — ”
“You say ten years before you were here — teaching at Maadi?” I nodded. “You know, three times I have been in London since then. Three times. The Strand Palace Hotel, I always stay there. You know Mr. El Bakri at Chesterfield Gardens? He has an apartment now near Kew Gardens. Very strange luck — no? You are knowing him, I expect. We were always eating at Lyons restaurant in Piccadilly — you are knowing that place too, I am sure. What good times we had in London — what a place! Well, we will be arranging things for you here, Mr. Marlow, I can assure you. You are at the Semiramis? At what time are you free tonight? You will meet my friends and we will talk seriously, most sensibly. And I will prepare a programme for you between time. Six o’clock at the hotel then. I will be waiting on you.”
Mr. Khoury stood up in a hurry.
“May I confirm that with you? — I have to see if I can find Mr. Cherry. Where do you think I might get him now?”
“Ah, of course, your friend Mr. Cherry. I have not seen him for some time. He writes English for us now and then. His wife is very — not well …”
“In hospital?”
“I am afraid yes.”
“Where?”
“The Anglo-American in Gezira. She’s French, you know,” he added regretfully. “Behind the Cairo Tower, you can’t miss it. A most unfortunate occurrence, I’m sure. A toudaleur then, Mr. Marlow — and I must say I can’t say how nice …”
A ragged porter, who insisted on carrying Khoury’s gift to me of the last twelve issues of Arab Focus, saw me down the dark circle of stairs smelling of machine oil, and, having had his five piastres in the hallway, ushered me out on to the boiling street.
I took a taxi back to the Semiramis and lay down at once. I’d felt very queasy in the cab and now, on the bed, the room started to tilt and veer around me; the ceiling moved. I must have had a temperature, it seemed too soon for a go of Gyppy tummy. There was a nineteenth-century Italian print on the walclass="underline" a ruined temple on a hill, with shepherds and flocks of assorted animals in the foreground. A classical landscape. It twisted slowly on its axis, goats walking up one side of the frame, the ruined temple sliding down the other. I was unable to take my eyes off it. Pain shot up the back of my neck and I realized I was twisting my head violently trying to steady the picture and get it level again. I gave up and left the frame to slide around as much as it wanted. It proceeded to spin and flutter like a wagon wheel in a Western.
The terrace doors were open and the remains of the Khamseen wind kept the muslin curtain steadily flapping against the glass. I seem to have been quite conscious of the noise it made — and of the cries drifting up distantly from the corniche outside, the water lapping against the embankment, the slowly circling ray of sunlight passing over the end of my bed — throughout the rest of the morning. All the same, during some of this time, I must have dropped off to sleep more than once. For the dream I had, in reconstructing it immediately afterwards, was half fact, half fiction — the first commenting on the second, as I fell in and out of consciousness.