In an Antique Land (45 page)

‘Hamdu'lillah al-salâma.' Isma‘il was at the door, laughing, his hand extended.

‘Why didn't you come?' he said, once the greetings were over. ‘You remember that day you called from America? Nabeel telephoned me soon after he'd spoken to you. He just picked up the phone and called me where I was working. He told me that you'd said that you were going to visit us. We expected you, for a long time. We made place in our room, and thought of all the places we'd show you. But you know, Nabeel's boss, the shop-owner? He got really upset—he didn't like it a bit that Nabeel had got a long-distance call from America.'

‘Why didn't Nabeel come back with you? What news of him?'

‘He wanted to come back. In fact he thought that he would. But then he decided to stay for a few more months, make a little more money, so that they could finish building this house. You see how it's still half-finished—all the money was used up. Prices have gone up this last year, everything costs more.'

‘And besides,' said Fawzia, ‘what would Nabeel do back here? Look at Isma‘il—just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do …'

Isma‘il shrugged. ‘But still, he wanted to come back. He's been there three years. It's more than most, and it's aged him. You'd see what I mean if you saw him. He looks much older. Life's not easy out there.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The Iraqis, you know,' he pulled a face. ‘They're wild … they come back from the army for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night: if some drunken Iraqis came across you they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they'd throw away your papers. It's happened, happens all the time. They blame us, you see, they say: “You've taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we're fighting and dying.” '

‘What about Saddam Hussein?'

‘Saddam Hussein!' he rolled his eyes. ‘You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there—there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you're gone, dead.'

Later Isma‘il told me a story. Earlier in the year Egypt had played a football match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the two or three million Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets—they had exploded out of their rooms and into the streets in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette-recorders and television sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at
pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms—well-trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant, unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers.

‘You can't imagine what it was like,' said Isma‘il. He had tears in his eyes. ‘It was then that I decided to leave. Nabeel decided to leave as well, but of course he always needed to think a long time about everything. But then at the last minute he thought he'd stay just a little bit longer.

My mind went back to that evening when I first met Nabeel and Isma‘il; how Nabeel had said: ‘It must make you think of all the people you left at home when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.' It was hard to think of Nabeel alone, in a city headed for destruction.

A little later we went to Isma‘il's house to watch the news on the colour TV he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case, in the centre of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage of the epic exodus: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their TV sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.

There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.

1
The slave's first appearance
: E. Strauss (now Ashtor), ‘Documents for the Economic and Social History of the Near East' (
Zion
, n.s. VII, Jerusalem, 1942).

2
Khalif ibn I
aq:
The
and the
in the name I
aq are distinct consonants. The system of notation used here for transcriptions from Arabic is broadly similar to that of the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
. In general, I have tried to keep transcriptions to a minimum, usually indicating the spelling of a word or name only upon its first occurrence. As a rule I have included the symbol for the Arabic consonant
‘ain
(‘) wherever it occurs, except in place names, where I have kept to standard usage. Specialists ought to be forewarned that if, in these pages, they seek consistency in the matter of transcription, they shall find only confusion—a result in part of the many different registers of Arabic that are invoked here. On the whole where the alternative presented itself, I have favoured the dialectical usage over the literary or the classical, a preference which may seem misleading to some since the rural dialects of the Delta differ markedly in certain respects from the urban dialect that is generally taken to represent colloquial Egyptian Arabic.

3
A German army had arrived:
Ibn al-Qalânisî,
The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades
, pp. 280, (ed. and trans. H. A. R. Gibb, Luzac & Co. Ltd., London, 1967).

4
‘That year the German Franks':
The historian was the famous Ibn al-Athîr (quoted by Amin Maalouf in
The Crusades through Arab Eyes
, tr. Jon Rothschild, Al Saqi Books, London, 1984).

5
Among the nobles:
See Steven Runciman,
History of the Crusades
, Vol. II, pp. 279–80, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1952).

6
‘There was a divergence':
Ibn al-Qalanisi,
Damascus Chronicle
, p. 282.

7
‘the German Franks returned':
Ibn al-Athir, quoted by Amin Maalouf in
The Crusades through Arab Eyes
. Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote a vivid description of this engagement in
The Damascus Chronicle
, pp. 281–4. See also Steven Runciman,
History of the Crusades
, Vol II, pp. 281–4; and Virginia G. Berry, ‘The Second Crusade', in
A History of the Crusades
, Vol. I, pp. 508–10 (ed. K. M. Setton, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969). Hans Eberhard Mayer discusses the Crusaders' decision to attack Damascus in
The Crusades
, p. 103, (tr. John Gillingham, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1988).