At last we were ready to take the road to al-Khufra, leaving the mountains behind and crossing a plain which glittered with cornelian, flint, mica, agate and obsidian worn by the hooves and sandals of all the animals and men who had passed this way for three thousand years or more. The splintered peaks were below the horizon and the desert widening under the evening sky before Kolya grew at once more light-hearted and more cautious. ‘Soon, Dimka, you will understand the real temptations of the desert.’ But he refused to expand on this.
Each caravan has its own rhythm, pace and character. Our party now consisted of a miscellaneous collection of Bedouin merchants, Tebu camel-breeders, Sudanese slavers, pilgrims returning from the Haj, and the camp-followers who served us in various ways. Kolya assured me it was nothing compared to the great oasis at Khufra.
In those days, before the half-track conquered all, a caravan was exactly like a train, with connections at various oases for other caravans following a variety of fixed routes. You waited for the next party going in the direction you desired. It was Stavisky’s people, he eventually admitted, who were supposed to meet Kolya at al-Khufra, near the Toom road. He would turn over our pack camels to them in exchange for cash. Then, he hoped, we could head for Tripoli. I remarked gloomily that the camels couldn’t be worth very much but this only amused him. ‘Enough to get us a room and breakfast at Bagnold’s, never fear!’
At night our trail across the golden dunes turned to gleaming silver and remained easy to follow. We were rarely far from water. With a good caravan it was a route as uneventful to travel as the railway from Delhi to Bombay. Gradually the desert became what the Bedouin called sarira, hard sand, flat, all but featureless and spread with a thin layer of gravel. Later I would come to know the gruelling boredom of caravan life which would teach me the habit of patience. But then my head was filled with an understanding my body still refused to accept. I was free! I had escaped God’s punishment. God, Kolya assured me, was slain. It was as if I had passed every test I had tried to learn from my book. I had answered all the questions, made the proper statements of repentance, all the time believing I would still at any moment be struck down, further humiliated and weakened. But I had gone safely through the First Gate and Anubis was my friend. Why should I still be afraid? No rationality would release me from the fear that at any moment God might stand again before me, telling me that I had merely drifted for a short while into a dream. Yet if I dreamed, then I experienced a nightmare within the dream. I was yet to be blinded. I remained terrified of a future which could only be horrific, grotesque and disgusting. I had seen the boy turning in circles with his own living eyes clutched in his bloody fists while al-Habashiya had chuckled softly. I had seen the mutilated girls. So still I capered and giggled, the compliant object of all their foul-mouthed speculation. I even suffered their gross sexual advances. (I have often thought that the reason the British and the Arabs have such a love affair is because each race is as sexually repressed as the other.) Sex, my enemy, continued her tyranny.
I was conditioned to please them. I had earned my life through pleasing them. I had very little capacity for logic at that time. I was at any fellaheen’s mercy whenever I was caught alone relieving myself behind a rock or running to fetch a wandering goat on the far side of a dune. But then some of them took to calling me casually, for their own perverse amusement, al Yehudi, and I began intellectually, as well as instinctively, to fear for my life again. Then Kolya issued some subtle decree to my tormentors (which I do not think was an appeal to their better natures, but a suggestion they discontinue handling his property). I was grateful for Kolya’s intercession, but might have hoped for a more dignified appeal. He did his best, he said. He had, after all, to behave thoroughly like a desert Arab. Anything else would arouse suspicion. I assured myself that I need have no more rational fear of them. Anubis was my friend. If, by God’s command, I was already dead, I had nothing at all to lose. Any sensation of life would be a gain. There remained, however, the knowledge that anyone whom the Arab intended to murder was always first cursed with the name of ‘Jew’ and so the crime became legitimate. It was the same, of course, in parts of Germany, as I discovered to my cost.
God continued to haunt me; her smothering flesh, her organs still threatened my soul. My bowels would knot in agony for the loss of Esmé, my muse; the little goddess who had betrayed me so badly. I had not wanted any of this. I had done everything I could for her.
Within caravans, disputes and quarrels are rarely allowed to blossom into full-blown affairs. A people whose law is the blood feud and who are in constant conflict with the elements cannot afford extra antagonisms. Kolya’s words were heeded. My days became happier. What if I had gone from being a Cossack’s pet Jew to an Arab’s pet Nazrini? I now stood every chance of reclaiming all I had lost. I still had a small fortune in my California bank. In the fullness of time, Kolya would get us to a town with civilised conveniences and I would wire Goldfish with a brief account of the truth. Calling upon our funds, I could return to Los Angeles before the year’s end and start my career again without encumbrances. I would look back on these months of inhaling sand and living off brackish water and miscellaneous beans and, no doubt, even I would romanticise it, softening the details, embroidering certain facts until it was suitably similar to The Desert Song for the civilised world’s demanding sensibilities.
Even the most persistent of my persecutors lost interest in me as we neared al-Khufra which, we were warned, now had a large Italian garrison on the look-out for slavers and gun-runners. The Wormeater’s incapacity to distinguish a gunrunner from a blind mule was a source of wild amusement amongst those Arabs who had already experienced Italian occupation. They of course were equally unable to tell an Italian musketeer from a Norwegian matron. One fierce rumour had it that the soldiers had been ordered to erect a Christian church on the site of the oasis’s chief mosque. In the mythology of these people Christians were forever hatching complicated (usually extremely petty) plots and spending considerable resources merely to bring insult to the Moslems. It had reminded me of Kentucky, whose people credited the Pope with similar ambitions against their dissenting congregations. As I said to Kolya: Considering the army of crazed zealots which between them the Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Bishop of Constantinople can rally, it’s surprising they have not thought of combining resources before now!
Such racialist paranoia is disgusting. It only clouds the issues and makes us lose sight of the real enemy. ‘These Moslems are bound to be touchy,’ said Kolya, lapsing into Russian as the bulk of the caravan fell away to our left. ‘What would you think if you suddenly realised, in your heart of hearts, that you and your ancestors had backed the wrong religious horse - and were still insisting the useless nag could win the Petersburg Straight? Yet when you listen, in Cairo for instance, to their political ideas, you wonder which came first, the self-destructive religion or the average Arab, who would always rather shoot himself in the foot than not shoot at all!’
It seemed to me that his understanding of Islam was limited, but I said nothing, for I was as anxious to agree with Kolya as I was with the Arabs.
He had by now been accepted as a rebel, a sharif (minor noble) and a scholar, while I was identified as his idiot kinsman, employed from the goodness of his heart. This story was thin, but perfectly acceptable to our confederates who rarely demanded the truth of anyone, but felt it a matter of good form for someone to present a lie with grace, wit and dignity.
In the main the Arabs are a tolerant people prepared to take any man at his own value until he proves himself an antagonist. My Arabic being specific and limited, I had no other choice but to accept the idiot rôle.
I was, for those first weeks, incapable of speaking anything but the Arabic God had trained me to speak. Since we had joined the moving sprawl of burdened camels and trudging drivers, following the old trading road from oasis to oasis, up and down dunes as high and steep as the English Pennines, deep into the Western
Desert, I dreamed of nothing but God’s penis and every night relived my terror, my mouth now bound at my own request for fear that the Bedouin in their nearby tents might discover that a Nazrini had insinuated himself into their company. If they suspected me, I would have been betrayed by a double blasphemy, for which I have since been redeemed, but Kolya quieted me with his familiar soothing ways and turned terror into comfort and comfort into pleasure, until I began to calm. He said I was like a terrified stray, jumping at every sound.
Inta al hob. Inta al hob. I shall never forget her yearning voice, that woman singing from the Bedouin tent. It is you I love. You are the love. I could not tell if she sang to God or to a man. Kolya wept when I asked him this. ‘Who can say?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Can she?’ Once or twice he also wept at the thought of my humiliating ordeal but we were both consoled by his opium which we smoked in the traditional style, through the narghila. This brought me some rest at last. Little by little I recovered my old personality. So far, I said, the desert lacked the romance I had come to anticipate from Pierre Loti or Karl May. Kolya believed the former too feminine, the latter too masculine. Actually the desert was paradoxically a place where such divisions ceased to exist, where even life and death were blurred, and yet always there was the threat of sudden extinction. He said the desert quickened the senses but offered no easy release. It produced, in a subtle being, an extraordinary state of perpetual piquancy. Fine wine and good cocaine were to a true aesthete, he said, mere substitutes for the desert. I had not until then encountered this epicurean definition of the Sahara. It reminded me that Kolya was truly born a little too late. Sometimes it seemed the flawed genius himself, a slender Oscar Wilde, rode his beautiful aristocratic grey camel at my side. The Arabs, who constituted the bulk of our party (we also had blacks and, of course, the Caucasian Berbers), treated my prince with a certain respect while making comradely fun of his poor riding, saying he had spent too long in the cities with the Franks - now in the desert he would learn to become a true Arab again. They were impressed, however, by his elaborate garments, which he wore with considerable panache. To the Arabs they suggested he had powerful family connections. Contrary to the ridiculous myths which the tourists take out with them, the Arab is as vain as any other man and likes nothing better than posing for a camera or an artist’s pencil. It is not the Koran but puritanical tradition, an interpretation of our common Old Testament, that forbids images. The Arab’s love of display makes a Neapolitan gigolo’s seem like modest shyness. One glance at a French drawing-room wall shows how gladly these people will model. They have learned, too, that the tourist expects to reward them for their delicious experience! The Brownie is raised, the hand is held out in demand, the exchange is made and the happy Arab, like his fellow spirits throughout the world, adopts the most romantic and unlikely posture, thus confirming every stereotype which ever put a distance between himself and his equally ordinary brothers around the world. Any picture taken in the Middle East and North Africa bears the unmistakable stamp of this gamecockery, whether it be Haramin posing on their borrowed camels before Giza’s pyramids at sunset or Marakshi riders galloping about and letting off their rifles for the benefit of wealthy Europeans watching from the balconies of the Atlantic Hotel. But these are Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the ordinary reality of prairie life. The long dull days of the caravan trek teach the European the thorough lesson of this ordinariness. However, if the average life of a desert warrior is somewhat less stimulating than the daily round of a suburban office worker, the Arab’s imagination is more vivid and his vocabulary is on the whole more colourful, resembling the combined invention of a French sansculotte, a Russian whore, a Greek cab-driver and an English public-schoolboy, developed through use and habit into an instrument of extraordinarily fluent and specific obscenity. As a people whose chief entertainment is from spoken language it is no surprise they have evolved an oral art no whit less impressive than our own Ukrainian tradition. Such an art cultivates the mind as well as the tongue. It is never a mystery to me that so many poets under Stalin were capable of committing whole volumes of verse to memory. An oral literature depends on intonation. A good Arab story-teller learns the music of discourse and dramatic narrative. He has developed and refined his conventions as Western novelists have developed subtleties of punctuation and grammar. Only on the page is an Arab’s story simple. His literary conventions seem theatrical and whimsical only to those who do not understand their function. It is much the same with Shakespeare. I think however my own raving obscenities would have shocked those Arabs. Happily I had vented most of them on Kolya alone in the desert three hundred miles west of Aswan, before we joined the caravan. But I still asked Kolya to bind my mouth and sometimes my limbs at night until, gradually, though I used Arabic, I raved only of God. This was acceptable to the Moslems who became convinced that I was actually some kind of idiot divine. But it was not until we were nearing the great oasis city of Khufra that I trusted myself to sleep only with the aid of the hashish. As slowly the devils were driven out of me I became more comfortable in my consciously-acted part of cheerful fool whom all men sought out, with a kind word and a coin, for the blessing of my sweet smile. I had become, in God’s care, a far finer actor than ever I had been in Hollywood.
Gradually the more visible aspects of my terror were brought in check. The Bedouin became familiar. I grew to enjoy their bluff good-heartedness towards any creature not a sworn blood enemy. They are at once less cruel and less noble than the characters of Karl May and the more doting arabistes of my boyhood.
Benighted barbarians that they were, the majority showed courtesy and concern for those they accepted. They were like peasants anywhere in the world. Once Kolya saved me from their more amorous notions I received the best of their hospitality, their rough, manly affection. Of course I perceived the irony of my position, yet in my miserable loss of dignity and self-respect I discovered a kind of innocence. In this way I had something in common with the devoted Musselman.
Those qualities we so despised in the camps can, in certain circumstances, be a kind of strength. I remained proudly glad to be free of their worst sexual banter. I remained terrified of sex. Sex had brought me to my present predicament.
They called me the Lucky One, Beloved of Camels and they liked to call me al Sakhra, the Hawk, when I flapped my arms for them and imitated the screech of the hunting bird. They said they would catch me an ostrich for a mate. Amongst themselves they continued to indulge in a farrago of boastful reminiscence and slavering anticipation of the women they would fuck in Khufra, where (Kolya told me) only overworked and generally clapped-out old whores would be available to them. They discussed the qualities of Nubians and Jews with all the authority and sophistication of schoolboys in a locker-room. Another irony; while my Bedouin comrades longed for the sexual experience they had never known I longed to forget all that I had ever learned. I wish I could have distributed my wealth of memory to them, scattering amongst a hundred or two the unsought-for sensual knowledge of an unnaturally concentrated lifetime; which might have had the mutually beneficial effect of satisfying their frustrations while saving me the disturbance of their conversation. I was grateful that the Bisharim, the long-skulled Nubian nomads whose forms of religion were a matter of dismay to our few Wahabim, generally spoke their own language but sometimes told stories in Arabic of the Berber women warriors - whole tribes who would set upon a man in the desert and make use of him until he died. They also spoke of the Berbers’ general partiality for human blood and the sacrifice of babies, of their hideous methods of torture. I came to realise that to these people a Berber was merely the manifestation of all their unfocused fears. He was to be avoided if possible and traded with only cautiously, for in the art of bargaining he was worse than a Jew. Sometimes the astonishing and complicated racialism of these people was blood-curdling! It was only matched by their sense of commonality. This, as usual, resulted in the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Berbers, Jews, Nazrini or
Nubians and so on; that is to say, the ones with whom you got along personally were evidently good; the ones you despised, feared, loathed and were sworn to kill on sight were the ones you would never meet. We have similar notions of our own about Arabs. Such ramshackle logical adjustments do admittedly reduce potential bloodshed and, because it is alert to mysterious danger, makes the average caravan as prey to banditry as the average Pullman. I have yet to meet an Arab or anyone else who would not, if left to his own devices, prefer to talk and trade, in that order, rather than fight. Anyway it is only the unfortunate Jews of the mellah who get hurt in any numbers during an Arab war, as one side or another ‘takes’ a town and performs a little ritual slaughter before riding out again. The Jews themselves seem singularly free from any genuine sense of outrage. It is as if the loss of a few sons, the rape of a few daughters, is some kind of local tax they must pay. Those Jews of the oases make me afraid. I was abandoned to the shtetl, but their darkness was worse than the shtetl, perhaps because here, in their own birthplace, they had more choice. They had chosen this life! Every honest Arab will agree that even amongst such creatures, with their ostentation and their devotion to usury, you can often find one or two of the noblest type, great craftsmen, intellectuals, artists. But it is not the Jew’s love of art the Arab fears. It is the Jew’s love of money, his substitute for patriotism. With a love of money comes a quest for security. A quest for security becomes a quest for power, a quest for power becomes a lust for land, and there you have full-fledged Zionist imperialism against which of course the jihad is the only effective weapon! Such a Holy War began the Nazi success. Hitler’s lowly origins were, in the end, however, his downfall. Someone better educated and better bred might have tackled the Jewish problem with greater moderation. In the end the exterminations lost them the support of many ordinary decent Germans. Herman Goering was the only gentleman in the group but unfortunately had not been well educated. He had found, as it were, his natural level. In another age he would have gradually become the butt of the Bierkeller, but, as I have reason to know, he was a good-hearted creature in his own way and had an excellent grasp of engineering principles. Goebbels had more intelligence, but he was incapable of gentlemanly behaviour.