Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

  The squalling, neon jungle of Beirut’s “red light” district was situated directly around the corner from Central Police Headquarters, and for a while I considered preparing a superficial memorandum on the subject merely to glut Festoon’s obvious appetite for this vivid brand of information. But why reveal my hole card on the first round of play? I nattled at myself. Best save the ‘red light’ district for a rainy day, I thought, and find some other hugged meat to fling at Festoon. Which didn’t really solve my problem at all. What else did the Lebanese do for kicks that might be considered exotic?

  “What do you do for kicks?” I thrust intently at Moona one morning, coming upon her in the kitchen as she stood by the stove, simultaneously stirring an Arabic alphabet soup and reading her booklet on breast biggering.

  “What you say?” she said numbly.

  “What do you do for kicks?” I repeated loudly, fixing her with a stern and academic eye.

  She cringed suddenly against the refrigerator, clutching her booklet tight against its appointed charges, and began babbling in a dialect of mountain Arabic that I found impossible to follow. She may have thought that I had found out about the parties she was throwing in our absence, although on the other hand she may have imagined that I was threatening another earthquake. Whatever it was, in the face of her behavior, I found little more to say to her. I slipped the ladle out of the kettle, and, in an effort to regain her confidence, blew on a spoonful of soup and tasted it. “Good soup, Moona,” I said pleasantly. We looked at each other for a while, and then I left. It was a disquieting encounter.

  The flaming youth of Lebanon proved of little help to my situation. Their main joys seemed to be surfing, swimming, Latin dancing, and listening to recorded American jazz. In the winter they would ski up by the famed cedar grove in the mountains, and I didn’t see much that was sexy or even psychological in that, unless you want to drag in Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck and Spellbound, which I’d frankly rather you didn’t.

  “What do you do for kicks?” I shouted at Ali from the basement door one sleepy afternoon, and I might just as well have asked him, “Who is Sylvia?” He paused in his munching of an olive to register that look of anxiety and foreboding which my presence now always seemed to induce in him, and I noticed that the tassel on his fez was quivering slightly. He looked quickly about him, but it was a hopeless gesture for he knew that there was no place to hide, and so he turned to me again and smiled ingratiatingly. Perhaps he thought that I was still suffering from a “concussion” sustained during the earthquake. I’m not sure. But I think about it.

  I turned away from the basement door and caught a glimpse of Peggy striding furiously up Rue Sidani, and I walked out into the street to meet her.

  “Beloved!” I greeted her, forgetting my anxieties for the moment. “Jewel of the Orient! Fairest fez of the Eastern World! O miracle of Rue Sidani!”

  “Knock it off,” she said. “Can’t anyone get rid of this jackass?”

  I instinctively looked around expecting to see Ali, but apparently he was still hunched in his basement. “What jackass?” I said then, beginning to take offense.

  “That jackass!” declared the frau, and she pointed. And indeed, a jackass actual stood wiggling its ears behind her.

  “Has this libertine been molesting you?” I growled uxoriously.

  “He’s been following me all the way from the Ambassador’s tea!” she screeched. “Look at him! Look at his hat!”

  The donkey was wearing a hat, a straw hat with ear cut-outs. It was, in most respects, identical to the straw hat which my fashionable and formally attired wife was now wearing.

  “I’m the laughing stock of the community!” squalled Peggy.

  “Run into the elevator,” I cried, “he won’t follow you there!” And he didn’t. Our elevator was famous all over Beirut, and even a jackass knew enough to stay out of it.

  Upstairs, I tried taking Peggy’s mind off her welladays by pumping her full of my own. “Festoon is but a mere device in the Agency,” I wound it up, “but he’s a weird-o and just might cause me problems if I irritate him. You know the way innuendos can work in Washington.”

  “You want advice?” she said, cutting through my dilemma with the crushingly effective simplicity of a woman’s insight.

  “Yes, I want advice,” I said, kneeling at her feet.

  “Go to the night clubs,” she said.

  “Without you?”

  “In a raccoon’s jowl, without me! With me!”

  “Merely testing,” I laughed weakly.

  “I’ve heard that the belly dancers at those clubs are pretty strange and sexy,” she continued. “Maybe we can find one without a navel. That should give Festoon pause.”

  “Oh rapture!” I cried joyously, beside myself with pleasant pulsings of the blood. I leaped up to kiss her hand, which, in accordance with Mrs. Brap’s instructions, was white-gloved to the elbow, but I savagely bit through the fabric and had my way. We made ready to storm the jasmine-wreathed gates of the night clubs of Araby.

  ii

  I wanted to go in style. So, armed with bucket, sponge and some dry rags, I de-elevated myself to the ground floor and went out back to wash the Volkswagen. “Ah, thou mighty machine, thou daily marvel with rear-mounted engine,” I crooned as I caressed its Hunnish hide with sponge and water, and it was a full ten minutes before I noticed that Ali had for some time been watching me intently from the top stair of the basement. I stopped and looked at him. “Hello, Ali,” I said. Then Fuad’s head popped up. “Hello, Fuad.”

  “Hallo,” said one, and then, “Hallo,” said the other.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Ali came up out of the basement and looked at me in amazement. “You’re washing your car,” he said to me in Arabic.

  “I know,” I said, for there seemed little point in lying about it.

  “But you are a diplomat!” said Ali.

  “Well, I wasn’t always a diplomat,” I said. “I used to be a truck driver. And before that I was a waiter. I was even a dishwasher for a while.”

  “And now you are a diplomat?” he squealed.

  “Sure,” I said. He was nonplused.

  “But you are washing your car!”

  “So?” I said. And this seemed to stop him for a while. “But Mr. Bikhazi doesn’t wash his own car,” said Ali.

  “I know,” I said. Many a Sunday, when he could have been visiting with his family, Ali was to be seen in the back courtyard, washing the landlord’s car, scraping his carrots or shining his shoes. “In my country,” I added, “a lot of people like to wash their own cars.”

  “But only poor people,” he said.

  “No,” I denied. “Rich people, too.” Ali seemed stunned by this. “You’ve got refugee status,” I said, winking past him at Fuad. “Why don’t you use it to go to the States and find out for yourself?”

  Ali looked into my eyes, and I don’t know what he expected to find there, but as for his own eyes, they were inscrutable. Without answering, he turned around and walked down the stairs into the basement. Fuad was grinning hugely. “Hokey-dokey!” he said, throwing me a salute, and then his head disappeared as he followed his father. It was all very interesting. But not nearly so interesting as Beirut’s night clubs.

  iii

  Beirut’s night club beat, Peggy and I discovered, was bawdily cramped into a two hundred-yard stretch of waterfront called Avenue de Français. A few of the clubs were strictly Arab style, but most of them were patterned in the French fashion, such as the “Eve,” the “Kit-Kat,” the “Lido” and the “Tabu.” They all featured third-rate touring Viennese or French reviews, leggy, mechanical and inept dancing girls, a bottle at every table at forty-five leera (fifteen dollars) a crack, and the traditional B-girls whose price was rather more flexible than that of the bottle. The Tabu was famous, in a way for it represented one half of a weird juxtaposition of Cold War attitudes in Beirut. When the Sixth Fleet was in town, the Tabu’s pr
oprietor hung a sign out front reading: “We favor the Eisenhower Doctrine! American Sailors Welcome!” But next door to the Tabu was a bookshop run by a man who didn’t like Ike, Harry or even Jefferson Davis, and when the sailors were roaming the streets he would fill his entire showcase with editions of a vanity press publication titled: “I Spit in Your Yogurt!”

  Another source of the Tabu’s fame centered about an American sailor who had been lured to the home of the club’s top dancer, a striking beauty who also claimed to be enamored of the Eisenhower Doctrine. While at the dancer’s home, the sailor made the inadvertent but indisputable discovery that “she” was a he. I don’t know what this did for international relations, but it startled hell out of the sailor and the whole of Beirut. The dancer might have been a “B-girl,” but the incident only went to prove an old maxim of the late Sabu Weintraub: “There is no safety in letters.”

  The French B-girl’s opposite letter in the Arab-style clubs was dark-eyed, dusky and heavily mascaraed, and she, too, pushed drinks for the house, the tent, or what you will. She looked very sexy indeed, but if she were a Moslem, her mother would probably meet her at the back door at closing time, pocket her little darling’s percentages and chaperon her homewards. Mama was probably her press agent and booking manager as well, and Peggy and I figured that nothing had really changed in the Middle East since the days of John the Baptist when Salome’s mother used daughter’s wiggles to get her heart’s desire, namely the head of Big John. The consideration had merely changed somewhat.

  The customers at the Arab clubs were almost always stag. Most of the clients were Lebanese, but many of them were Saudis in brown and white flowing robes with matching kaffiyah, which is a sort of beach towel that you wear over your head. There were also Yemenites, Kuwaitis, Adenites and other manner of storybook Arabs on a spree since there wasn’t much doing out there on the desert and then there was all that oil money lying around. Which is a consideration.

  Another consideration about the Arab-style clubs was that the customers usually huddled around small, two-foot diameter circular tables incongruously topped with red- and white-checked tablecloths. Many of them smoked the argheelai or hubbly-bubbly—a three-foot-tall cigarette substitute that filtered the smoke through a water jug at its base, meting out burbling down to most of the nicotines and tars. Others drank araq, but they also nibbled at mezze because araq without mezze was like playing Russian roulette with an atomic cannon.

  Mezze wasn’t one dish but about fifteen of them, an Arabized smorgasbord of Oriental viands and dainties such as hommos (minus the phosphorus); baba ghanough (yogurt, fried eggplant, garlic and olive oil, mixed); truffles (as abundant in Lebanon as toadstools in New Jersey); round little meat pies called sfiha; black olives; green olives; pickled turnips; magdoos (pickled baby eggplant stuffed with fried ground meat, onion bits, pine nuts and garlic); malfoof (stuffed cabbage leaves); yabreq (stuffed grape leaves) and perhaps lebne (a cheese form of yogurt swimming in olive oil).

  Between munches and vivid belches that would come at you from all sides like stereo, you could usually see, through the lime-lit fog of the argheelai smoke, an occasional Yemenite, crafty-eyed beneath his kaffiyah, as he glanced through a stack of photographs of the club’s ladies-in-waiting, if such there were. At most other tables, the customers would be gaping at the stage, where either a song or a belly dance was the open-jawed attraction.

  In the normal course of one of these heady Arabian nights, at least twenty Armenian girls would take turns leaping out on the center floor with writhing imitations of Maria Montez imitating an Arab belly dancer. Except that this was the real bejazz. The girls had incredible control of their tum-tums and could make an individual stomach muscle twitch like a string plucked by an invisible harpist.

  But between the dancers snuggled the singers—and here, our old nemesis, the Arab time sense, seemed to be in complete control!

  For drawing vastly more applause than the semi-nude, gossamer-and-bangles-clad belly dancers, the singer—sometimes a man, but more often a stout, handkerchief-waving, aging and unattractive woman—would whine out a narrative that bid fair to go on until one of Bikhazi’s “tomorrows” (chorus after chorus—in fact, sometimes more than thirty!). And the audience never seemed sated or jaded by this interminable Oriental whining and groaning; they just kept applauding wildly after each chorus. Apparently, time stood still for the brutes and the performance managed to retain, in each of its parts, all the snap of a newly purchased garter by Swank. Those science-fiction addicts who profess to be interested in time travel, the relationship between time and velocity, etc., could find pretty deep matter here and I think they ought to look into it if they’ve got the guts.

  iv

  Peggy and I had guts, all right, but our research was growing tedious and we decided to wind it all up with a final night at the “Eve.” There was fresh talent at the club that night, and I was quickly turned on by the risqué cavorting of a Miss Zuzu Gamal, an exotic beauty whose belly dance was as wild as the proverbial goose.

  “Her dance is as wild as the proverbial goose,” I said to Peggy, and was not overly crestfallen when this failed to draw her applause, for I had expected none. “What a built!” I added, pouring nitro on the flames in Peggy’s eyes.

  But after Zuzu Gamal came Señor Fandango Guava, a flamenco dancer with a dramatic style and even more dramatic cheekbones, and to him Peggy devoted an enraptured attention, pouring “oohs” and “ahs” upon his sombreroed head. “What a built,” echoed Peggy at one point. We left the “Eve” transfixed, each upon his own respective objective of adoration.

  The following morning we tried to bake out our night club pallor on the beach at St. Simone, and as we lay sun-drenched on the sands, caught in the riptide of Mediterranean languor, I raised my head in order to examine the backs of two pairs of legs which were then walking past us. Both pairs of legs were more bowed than a horseshoe. “Look!” I chortled, nudging Peggy as the couple belonging to the legs stopped and turned to exchange hand-holding pleasantries with one another. “It’s Señor Guava!”

  “Look again at who’s with him,” guffawed the frau. It was Zuzu Gamal!

  That night, as my rapture over Miss Gamal lay mortally wounded on the beach, its life’s blood pumping out darkly upon the sands, I emptied out my entire stock of night club lore into a memorandum to Festoon. Racking my dome for any unusual little tidbit of information, I invented a night club act featuring a “thousand and one nights tableau,” in which two live camels participated. I referred to it, I believe, as a “unique spectacle involving the camel population.”

  v

  One month following my light-headed night club report to Festoon, Yusef came padding into my office to announce “phone call for you, sah.” I thanked him and took the call.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Is it you?” said a voice.

  “Yeah—I suppose,” I said warily. “Who’s this?”

  “Don’t you recognize me, son?”

  I jellied where I stood. It was Gunther Festoon!

  “You?” I said incredulously.

  “Me!” exulted Festoon.

  “Is this a local call?” I asked, hoping against hope.

  “Of course. I’m here. I’m calling from the St. George Hotel.”

  “How nice,” I quavered. “What brings you to our fair city?”

  “Your report!” said Festoon excitedly. “I just had to see it for myself!”

  “See what?” I asked, with rising foreboding.

  “Camel copulation!” said Festoon. I believe I fainted.

  18. A Camel Too Frequent

  “OF COURSE I’m due in Ankara for a briefing session in a few days anyway,” said Festoon as we lunched at the St. George that afternoon, “but when I read your memorandum, son, I made up my mind that I would just have to make a quick dogleg to Beirut at my own expense. Go where the going’s good, that’s what I always say. Right, son? Eh?”

  “Eh? I mean?
??right!” I speared at a shrimp, but missed, for my hand was trembling. I did not dare tell Festoon that his expensive side trip to Beirut was the result of a garbled transmission of my memorandum.

  “Think of it,” he marveled. “Why, the very deviation of it—a night club act based on camel copulation!” He paused for a moment, and “Can we see it tonight?” he whispered, leaning across the table.

  I gagged on a particle of shrimp. “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. I have a plane reservation confirmed for day after tomorrow.”

  “Uh—no. No, not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a Moslem holiday,” I lied.

  “What Moslem holiday?”

  “El eid el Hassan el Muhammad.”

  He paused. “What’s that mean?”

  I thought quickly. “The birthday of Muhammad’s horse.”

  He considered this for a while. “Well,” he said finally, “tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah—yeah, tomorrow night.” I prayed for another earthquake, only this time I wanted to be in the mountains.

  Late that night I went padding about the night club district, seizing club owners by their lapels and asking mysteriously: “Could you, for a need, study a camel scene of some dozen or sixteen lines, to be inserted in your show tomorrow night?” I kept this up until one of the owners, a frightened little fat man, eased over to a phone and dialed NOrthside 777, or whatever the number of Police Headquarters happened to be. I strode rapidly out of his club and resorted in frustration to my J. Alfred Prufrock ploy: I rolled up the bottoms of my trousers and strolled along the midnight beach, digging for a Plan as I would for clams. And I found one.