Into Suez (6 page)

Restored to her mother, Nia sat in the crook of Ailsa’s arm, sucking her thumb, Golly in her lap and her cheek against the cosy pad of her sheet. She said nothing. Again I took my eye off her, and again she nearly got herself killed, Ailsa thought, with somersaulting heart. Her own
gallivantings
(for that’s what people would call them,
gallivantings
) on the
Empire Glory
came into question. Who had taught Nia to jump over the red rope? Her face burned. It had got to stop. What on earth had possessed her? Ailsa rested her hand on Nia’s head, and kept it there. Nia felt up and fondled the big hand with her small one. She wore Ailsa’s hand like a cap. It secured her. It held her down to the ground and kept her mind inside her head. Nobody told her off.

‘Why were they shooting the creatures, may one ask?’ Hedwig wanted to know.

The Lieutenant was courteous but his face said it all:
Bird-brained Kraut
. He explained. The troops must be kept at the peak of training: if the enemy attacked, we must be ready to defend our women and children at a moment’s notice. The men had left Britain crack shots and crack shots they must remain.

‘Well, I am disgusted.’ Hedwig’s face was brick-red. ‘The creatures are innocent and friendly. What have have they done to us, I would ask, to be used for target
practice? I for one cannot stand by and witness this
Barbarei, diese Brutalität
.’

And a tremendous row erupted, with the German woman attacked on all sides for her resistance.

‘If the kiddies are kept under control …’ the Lieutenant courteously suggested to Ailsa, and didn’t go on.

He meant well. Most folk did, when you came down to it, and yet somehow or other the sum of our actions could be arrogance and cruelty. The women savaged Hedwig, who was near to tears but held her own in deteriorating English. Like the scapehen in an overcrowded, squawking roost, Ailsa thought, the gang viciously gathering round to peck the runt to death. Out of the corner of her eye, soothing Nia, she was aware of the German woman faltering away, into a space of deeper isolation. In the war it had all been black and white. Now there was fog everywhere. The woman was outspoken and brave. Qualities that did not endear themselves to the nice, prevaricating English.
Nazi
, they thought automatically whenever they clapped eyes on Hedwig. She might as well have gone around with a label round her neck. And look at me, I’m just standing by.

Ailsa sat with her quiet daughter in her lap. She’d lose all these travelling companions once they docked at Port Said. Her mind seethed. Who was the enemy we were supposed to engage? The Soviets? Looking out to sea, she imagined a Communist warship bearing down on the
Empire Glory
. After Prague and the Berlin blockade last year, when they’d all thought,
War can come again, worse this time, we are weak, it will wipe us out
, such a warship – a whole fleet of them – was easy to imagine.

From East Germany, the Red Army could march to the
western seaboard just like that. What was to stop them? They only needed to pull on their boots and they’d be at Dunkirk, four million men. They needn’t even bother to march: one bomb could do for us, now that the Soviet Union was about to become an atomic power. War is normal for our generation, Ailsa thought. It will come back and we’ll not be surprised.

It will. There will be war, this year, next year.

She felt no dread: weariness rather. The nearer the
Empire Glory
sailed to Egypt, the nearer it came to Molotov and Stalin. The Soviet backside in the south where their oil and minerals were. The oilfields of Iran and Iraq. And that’s what we were doing at Suez, she thought, threatening the Russians’ backside to prevent them overrunning civilisation.

And that was why the porpoises had to die! Us and our pop-guns! No sense to it at all. If you asked a Russian woman what she wanted, she would say, as Ailsa did, a better life for our children, security. But the Russian woman was not asked, any more than the Egyptian woman was asked, or she, Ailsa Roberts, was asked, though she ranked as a voter and a citizen.

Ailsa’s eyes drifted to a capstan upon which an insect had alighted. A greenfly? Scooped up on a breeze, perhaps, from Italy or Greece.

Beguiled, Nia reached out and caught the creature on her fingertip; held it close to her eyes and announced that it was her pet. She did not smile. What knowledge now rode behind Nia’s eyes? Blood boiling in water, porpoises turned to meat. On purpose. And when the conscript went yelling up to the soldier and grabbed his gun … what did she see and fear? Nia would forget but the knowledge
would still be there. The greenfly blew away. Ailsa searched in the glazed green eyes for a comfort the subdued child could not extend. She kissed Nia’s forehead and freckled nose and cheeks repeatedly and begged her never to run off again and leave Mami. Nia hummed. She wouldn’t go near the railings or look out over the sea with its treacheries. Malta was coming into view but Nia would not so much as glance at it. Malta for all Nia knew might be bad. Or, if it were a good and beautiful island, Malta might be butchered in front of her eyes.

Ailsa would have to withdraw from Mona, delicately, gently detach. No option. She herself had taught her daughter contempt for boundaries and Nia had suffered for it.

Happily the child was safely down in their cabin taking a nap when the ship put in at Malta and sacks of rotten potatoes were distributed to the cheering troops, together with orders to pelt the wogs in bum boats selling their wares, to keep them away from the hull of the
Empire Glory
. For their own safety’s sake, as Babs observed to Ailsa.

A day out from Port Said, the blazing heat intensified. The time of farewells was nearly upon the women of the
Empire Glory
. A row of prams stood in the shade of an awning, empty of babies, who were being fed below. Babes of the Empire: tomorrow’s soldiers and mothers. Mrs Grey said,
Mark my words, the jolly old stork will be paying a visit to your Married Quarters, ladies, nine months from tomorrow night! Oh you may giggle and shake your heads but we can look forward to the patter of little feet in
– let’s see
– and she’d counted on her fingers, with a chuckle –
end of March!

And soon Ailsa would be in Joe’s arms. She felt as shy as a bride at the prospect.

She made her way down to the library: it was goodbye to Mona and that was for the best. Costly leather-bound books with gilt titles on their spines rose to the ceiling, inherited from the German Navy. A volume of Goethe’s
Early Poems
lay on the table, open at ‘
An den Mond
’. She’d
studied a selection at school and knew some pretty well by heart. Ailsa’s eyes negotiated its thorny Gothic script. The young Goethe lingering by the moonlit river knew that jests and kisses were things of the past. Some unstated act of betrayal had taken place that had changed everything forever.

Blessed the one who, turning away from the world, without hate, holds a friend to his breast
… The German didn’t allow for a woman friend, as the English word did.
Freund
was not the same as
Freundin
. She’d made this point to their German teacher, Miss Quilleashe. Q had replied with observations about the difference between inflected and uninflected languages. Ailsa remembered dear old Q bursting out on some occasion:
Think of our Goethe! our Heine!
when all things German had been brought into doubt and suspicion.

‘Hallo, darling,
habiba, chérie, cariad
.’

Mona bent over Ailsa’s shoulder, resting her cheek against Ailsa’s hair. And still there was this strange shock of recognition from Brewers’ Green. For years Ailsa had forgotten the intense dark girl next door. Never given her a thought. And then the dark girl had sprung from the past, bringing with her the full repertoire of forgotten gestures, usurping a place in Ailsa’s life, as if spotlit, destined.

Mona sat down next to her. ‘When we get to Ish, I’m going to beg, borrow or steal a decent piano. Do you think you might be able to come and play with me?’

How could Ailsa say,
If my husband lets me. Which he can’t and won’t
…? She and Mona had been dreaming on the
Empire Glory
, a shared dream Mona had kindled and they’d both stoked, of equality in friendship. She’d think
of Mona, Ailsa promised. Often. Always. They could at least
keep in touch
.

‘Don’t say that. Please. Don’t.’ Mona burst into tears. ‘How can you, Ailsa? Those are awful, searing words.’

‘They weren’t meant to be awful and searing,’ Ailsa said helplessly. She shrank before Mona’s histrionics. Better to end it now than have this emotional excess looming over her. And Mona read this as clearly as if Ailsa had said it aloud. ‘I’ll lose you. I know I will. I have lost you, haven’t I? Just like Julie.’

It all came out then: those had been the last words Julie Brandt-Simon had said, frigidly, to hurt Mona when they parted,
Let us keep in touch
. Moody and headstrong, Mona Serafin in her mid-teens had thought she was God’s gift. No sooner was she in Brussels than she was correcting her teacher and laying down the law.

‘That’s how I was, Ailsa, I was an utter hooligan. I fought my teacher every step of the way. But somehow or other, she got me under control. Julie taught me everything, we worked together for eighteen months, the most amazing time of my life. But then I went off the rails, seriously off the rails – started denouncing her teaching methods, for God’s sake, and stole her wallet and ran off with a tram conductor for two days. I had to be fetched back by the police. She was beside herself.’

Julie had got up from the piano and screamed at Mona:
You ungrateful girl, I will send you packing
, and Mona had yelled back at Julie, that she was
nothing but a bloody Yid
.

She’d wept and apologised, but Julie had had enough: an elderly woman, she couldn’t cope with these hysterical scenes, Mona had gone over the line and there was no way back. Julie turned away with a gesture of disgust,
saying words to the effect: they should keep in touch.

Nothing but a bloody Yid
.

‘But, Mona, why would you call her that? You’re a Jew yourself.’

‘Of course not!’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. No, I’m not. How on earth could you think that? Surely you realised I’m an
Arab
?’

There was a stunned pause. They both drew back. Mona was a Palestinian Arab who’d been a pupil of the greatest Jewish pianist in pre-war Europe.

Hunter and prey were confounded in Ailsa’s mind. To her, pogroms meant Nazi crimes against Jews; to Mona, Jewish crimes against Arabs. Ailsa had emerged from the War seared by the suffering borne by the Jews: it was an obscenity, heinous, vile, what were the words for it? Their suffering was seared in her conscience also. A couple of years back the British Navy had violently boarded the
Exodus
, a ship full of Holocaust survivors, illegal immigrants trying to get into Palestine under our Mandate. They’d been turned back and forcibly disembarked in Germany; housed in the concentration camps they’d left. For weeks cinema audiences had viewed this obscenity on the newsreels, rising and shaking their fists:
Shame! Shame on us!
Rather than arriving at the Promised Land, the refugees had been roughed up by the British, those
gentlemen fascists
, as the Jews called them. Anti-Semitism was rife in Britain: Ailsa detested it; she’d always felt on firm ground detesting it and it was dismaying now to hear the hardness in Mona’s voice as she spoke of the
Exodus
as a propaganda coup. How could she say that? It made Ailsa sick to hear it. But she tried to understand the terrible, cloven logic of it all.

Cultured, westernised, Christian and affluent, the Serafins had been driven out of Palestine long before the War. Most of her remaining relatives had now been expelled or had fled last year when the Zionists proclaimed the state of Israel. Some had been killed; some were missing; others were refugees making their way from the camps to Egypt, where Mona and Ben hoped to do something for them – perhaps find jobs with the British military in the Canal Zone. They’d lost everything.

‘So you can never go back?’

‘None of us can go back,’ Mona explained, as if to a child. ‘Palestine’s been abolished.’

Had you not noticed?
she implied.
Can you be so blinkered and ignorant, yes, and prejudiced?
Zionists she called fascists. ‘
Zionists
I mean, not Jews. Of course I didn’t mean all Jews, how could I? I’m married to one. Best chap in the world. He’s been disowned by his own family for his anti-Zionism and for marrying me.’

For
Habibi
, as for his Arab wife, the newborn state of Israel was
al-Naqba
, the catastrophe.

And yet you sinned against your teacher, Mona, your beloved Julie, Ailsa thought, in the same way you’d been sinned against. Out had spurted venom,
nothing but a bloody Yid
, from the fang you didn’t know you had. The music left your hands. And you thought,
I can never go back
.

It would be several hours before Port Said came into view. The queue for the last ration of duty-frees stretched right round the corridor. The
Empire Glory
fizzed with excitement, while the Tannoy broadcast non-stop practical instructions and bracing advice. Ailsa hoisted Nia in her
arms, reminding her that she’d be seeing Daddy soon, what about that?

She smiled at Irene and spoke to her two little blond boys, but Ailsa’s mind still laboured with Mona’s story, glimpsing the politics of hate that had exploded in Mona when she called her beloved mentor a Yid. It’s what we blurt out, thought Ailsa, that condemns us. It rushes up from underground. But given time, it could surely have been forgiven?

It was impossible to abandon Mona. How could she?

Hedwig came from the head of the queue, cradling half a bottle of brandy like a baby. ‘Now he’ll be pleased to see me,’ she said.

‘He’ll be pleased anyway, Hedwig. He’ll be over the moon.’

‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful!’

Expectation of happiness and homecoming made Hedwig shed years; she was a radiant girl again. She’ll be all right now, Ailsa thought. The queue melted away, allowing Ailsa to buy a large box of Woodies for Joe.

The final packing complete, everyone crowded to the rails. Heat hammered down on the crowns of their heads as they neared land. The White boys, sweltering and dejected in their best shirts, bickered in a glum,
halfhearted
way. The elder, wearing a tie for his daddy, twisted it savagely to drag it off, nearly throttling himself. Nia stared mutely.

The
Empire Glory
lay poised between the giant stone moles of Port Said and everybody sniffed, with varying degrees of disrelish. A hot smell, Nia thought, sticking one finger up her nose to touch the smell that was pink and lodged in your throat. It rolled out from the shore, which
was clouded in a dusty lilac-coloured fog. Nia did not dislike the stink. It was better than the hangar where soldiers had been hung up in hammocks.

Ailsa held tight to Nia’s hand. The sound of the city was like the roar of a distant football match. The luminous morning mist burned off all of a sudden, like a curtain not being raised but destroyed, and they all went
Ooh!
and
Ah!
as the skyline of Port Said appeared. Minarets and cupolas, seedy warehouses and blocks of flats. Graceful white buildings with terraced balconies overflowing with greenery, Roman arches, roof gardens and dovecotes. Jewish and French names.

Nia was in ecstasies. She’d spotted Woolworths, her favourite shop, looking out over the jetty.

‘Oh look! The Statue of Liberty!’

‘What?’

‘There!’

‘The Statue of Liberty’s in New York harbour.’

‘Oh. What’s that then?’

Ailsa gazed at the outsize statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, prophet, promoter and digger of the Canal, pointing at his waterway, a sheet of gleaming water that led into and through the city itself. A lighthouse stood at its mouth. With every moment, the world of the
Empire Glory
lost reality. As they navigated in to berth through a crush of shipping from all over the world, a mass of brilliantly painted bumboats nosed out, piled with exotic fruit and vegetables. There was uproar. They could see the faces of the vendors with their wares, shouting up for watches or fountain pens in return for their goods and reaching up little hemp bags on poles.

‘
Effendi!
’ they called ingratiatingly. ‘
Effendi!
’

The soldiers bartered, taunting and insulting the vendors, sending down half crowns for fresh oranges, which were thrown up to the deck with change in worthless piastres stuck in their sides. A
howzat!
rang out every time an orange was fielded and a boo! for every one that fell wide and dropped into the water.

‘Very cheap … very great bargain!’

Nia was still grizzling to go into Woolworths and buy mixed sweets in a white bag.

‘But, Nia, we’re going to see Daddy soon. Daddy’s down there, isn’t he?’

The heat was stifling. There’d be no more sea breezes. How could she stand it? The glare beat up off the water and seemed one with the din as the natives fleeced the foreigners. Ailsa faltered back, treading on someone’s toe.

Nia said she was going to take Daddy to Woolworths to buy pipe cleaners. So there.

Ailsa, looking round at the hot, excited faces of the wives and hearing the soldiers singing, realised, with soaring rapture, that this was it! She’d arrived at her heart’s desire. Joe was here on the quay, somewhere in the hustle and bustle. To be seen and held and embraced. She pressed forward in the crush, elbowing a stout woman out of the way, and waved her hanky, in case he were down there and could single her out from all the other women.