Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

  I flew like a bird from NERSC to the Embassy, where I recounted my eavesdroppings to Global Syndrome. “Thanks, Blatty,” he told me. “It’s good to know what’s up. But all we can do, I’m afraid, is inform the Lebanese authorities.”

  “Get them to call off the demonstration, you mean.”

  “Afraid that’s useless. It would be politically unwise on the part of the Lebanese Government. These are hysterical times, and canceling the demonstration would be a most unpopular move.”

  I digested this. “You mean we’re up the proverbial creek?”

  “Without a paddle,” he said grimly. I left the Embassy deep in trauma, scarcely even bothering to lift my head at the sound of the explosion that seemed to come from the British Social Club. That night I dreamed I went to a riot in my Maidenform athletic supporter.

  iv

  The next morning, a dishpan-handed dawn fingered the edges of Lebanon, I poured myself sullenly into my insane German machine and began my daily drive to NERSC, which could have proved difficult, of course, except that I knew the way. At the main square I paused, parked and, fascinated by the morning’s danger, climbed out of the car to scratch and think, something I am not very good at. Thinking, I mean.

  The square certainly didn’t look ominous. A three-block-long rectangle, with a public park in the center, it was lined with movie houses flaring bright and joyous off-brand movie titles like “Don’t Go Near the Water,” starring Ophelia and the crew of the “Titanic,” and “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” co-starring Rin-Tin-Tin and Laika, the sputnik dog, although I’m really not sure those were the exact billings.

  In the center of the park area, I noticed several banners and placards, lying in a heap, and obviously intended for use in the demonstration parade. I walked over to inspect them, and picked one up. It was a cardboard square, stapled to the end of a long pole, and bore a color likeness of Gamal abdel Nasser. “Oons!” I thought to myself (for I am not a telepath), “what a glorious souvenir! Even better than a samurai sword! Maybe I can have it stuffed like a grapeleaf!” I looked furtively about me, and seeing no one on the streets, walked back toward the car with the placard held high in my right hand.

  But sometimes I get spooky feelings, and after walking about twenty paces, I suddenly got one of them, and stopped to look around again. Two swarthy sons of Lebanon were following me! They had to be after the placard, but I am nothing if not brazen, and merely began walking a little faster.

  The next time I turned around, there were a dozen men following me, and then thirty, and then sixty! People were starting to silently ooze out of doorways and alleys, theatre entrances and side streets, and by the time I got near the car I couldn’t any more stop than I could turn around and declare myself to be Hajji Baba in his fifteenth reincarnation. A mob was behind me!

  Mob. Parade. Parade! I stared at the banner in my hand and gulped in frenzy. I was leading the demonstration parade!

  “And a child shall lead them,” I gooed hysterically as I briskly turned a corner and headed for Rue Melee, still holding the placard high over my head, and praying that the mob wouldn’t follow me. I walked about a block and then looked over my shoulder: they were there!

  There were about a thousand of them, and as I unconsciously headed toward NERSC, they began to shout a little. Out of my senses, now, I began to shout with them. I don’t remember what I shouted, because I black out at certain parts of this story.

  As the screaming parade neared the NERSC building, I could see Yusef staring popeyed from the front balcony on the first floor, and pretty soon Web and Honeysuckle Epstein came out too, and their reaction is another part that I usually black out on, although I do remember seeing Web lose his balance and narrowly miss falling off the balcony. It was a pretty tricky moment. The mob was madly shouting slogans now, pausing, now and then, to overturn an automobile or two, something I felt I should not attempt to control. As I pulled abreast of NERSC, I threw up my arm to wave at Web and Epstein, but the mob, taking this to be a signal of sorts, came to a standstill. I turned and faced them, flung high the Nasser placard, and then walked slowly and deliberately into the NERSC building, not daring to break into a run until I came to the stairs, which I took five at a time. I barreled into the front office and collapsed in hard breathing relief.

  Web and Epstein were too shocked and confused even to speak to me, but the mob did not share their silence. About a minute later, they began to set up a clamor. All of it wasn’t getting through to me, but the general trend was the equivalent of “Speech!” and “Let’s get the show on the road!” NERSC had no markings, and they didn’t realize where they were. In fact, there were a lot of things they didn’t realize.

  “I don’t know what those people are doing out there,” said Web grimly, regaining his powers of speech, “and I don’t know what you were doing with them. But you’d better do something about it before they tear up the presses. And us with them.”

  We were doomed anyway, since there was no back entrance to NERSC, so I padded over to the balcony and poked my head out. The mob caught sight of me and let out a roar. For all they knew, I was Nikita Khrushchev, for I was still clutching the Nasser banner in a death grip. “And some have greatness thrust upon them,” I babbled to myself and stepped to the railing of the balcony, carefully refraining from holding up my fingers in the “V for Victory” sign. This was not a good day to be mistaken for Winston Churchill.

  I waved weakly to the crowd, and they gave up another roar and then fell silent. For a while I considered doing card tricks, but this was actually rather impractical since I didn’t have a deck of cards. I did, however, consider doing my old soft shoe, but then, delirious and not really conscious of what I was saying, I shouted in Arabic: “I suppose some of you are wondering why I called this meeting.” The effect was dumbfounding. The crowd laughed!

  Gloreyoskey, Zero! Was this the lesson of Mahmoud and Eli all over again? Was there balm in Gilead? Was I willing to press my luck? You bet your sweet tokhus I was! “Funny thing happened to me on the way to the riot this morning,” I began, and they did it again, they did it again! They laughed. And while they were laughing I reached into the office and seized Yusef by the throat, dragging him out on the balcony and demanding hoarsely: “Know any good Arabic jokes?” He stared at me wildly and began to whimper, so I let him go, because if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s someone whimpering while I’m leading a demonstration.

  The crowd yielded its last chuckle, and with a thin, papery taste of doom in my mouth, I abruptly decided to quit postponing the inevitable. “Friends, I am an American.” I shouted. This time they laughed for a solid minute, and it kind of teed me off because I had meant it to be serious. When they were quiet again, I repeated the statement: “I’m an American. I’m with the American Embassy. I mean it!” This time only a handful laughed, and they began pressing in closer to the building, watching me intently. “Say something in American.” shouted one of the demonstrators, and “Your grandmother wears sneakers to church!” I yelled back in English. Web, who was able to understand only this brief fragment of my harangue, quietly swooned at his desk. But the crowd wasn’t swooning, daddy, they were murmuring. “If you’re an American, how is it that you speak Arabic?” someone called out. “Both my parents are Lebanese!” I answered back in Arabic. A shout of acclaim suddenly broke from the lips of the crowd and I began to make plans for a tomorrow, again.

  The mob, not yet aware of the ridiculous context of this weird scene, became suddenly and unpredictably absorbed in the rare spectacle of an American diplomat with Lebanese parents. There was much murmuring then, and suddenly someone shouted: “Why doesn’t America do something about getting the aggressors out of Egypt?” Another voice shouted, “Eisenhower can stop it! Why doesn’t he?” Others took up the cry, but quickly fell silent when I shouted: “We are stopping it! Last evening the United States presented a resolution before the United Nations demanding that the invading armies of Britain, Fran
ce and Israel withdraw from Egyptian soil!” It was true, although I wasn’t beyond making it up at that point, and the roaring of the crowd was thunderous. “Get me the new run of pamphlets!” I called out to Yusef, as the crowd went wild. “Get me a pile of them!” It was a full two minutes before the crowd stopped huzzahing, and by that time Yusef was back with the pamphlets, which carried, in Arabic, the full text of the UN resolution. The downstairs crew had worked most of the night getting them out, and I scooped them out of Yusef’s arms and flung them out to the crowd below me. People began picking them up, passing them along to others. And cheering.

  Many of them, however, were still mesmerized by the weird spectacle of the Arab who was an American, and they continued addressing questions to me. “Why does America want to colonize Lebanon?” one of them shouted. “Who ever told you that we did want to colonize Lebanon?” I answered. “The Russians,” he called out. Well, I didn’t think the “Brutus is an honorable man” quote would work too well with an Arab audience, so I shouted “In America, we’ve heard that Lebanon wants to colonize the United States. There are more Lebanese in Detroit than in Beirut!” That got quite a few yuks, and in a fit of self-adoration, I attempted to kiss my own ear. “Who told you we want to colonize America?” pressed the earnest questioner. “The Russians!” I shouted. “They are liars!” he shouted. “You’re right!” I roared, and this too won the Bible. It was like the Orpheum circuit with fezzes, and I was just getting warmed up, but in the wings I could see Web preparing to give me the hook. I decided to exit gracefully before the mob snapped out of its mood and awakened to what the hell was happening. The whole thing had a sort of dreamlike quality.

  I held both hands above my head. “I am an American,” I shouted in Arabic. “But I am also a Lebanese. On the honor of my father and mother, who were born in your beautiful country, I swear to you—America is your true friend. We want only peace and all good things for Lebanon and her great people!” They cheered that little gum-drop to a frazzle, and I quietly oozed off the balcony and back into the office. After a while, the pamphlet-clutching crowd dispersed, and the powder-keg demonstration was ended. A little later I went home. I didn’t say a word to Web. He wouldn’t have believed me.

  v

  Two hours later there was a knock at our apartment door. Peggy answered it, and then walked over to the bedroom closet and knocked. “It’s just Ali,” she said.

  “Oh—okay,” I husked, and stepped out of the closet and went to the front door. My reception by Ali was startling. He knelt at my feet, seized my hand in both of his and began the “O most radiant sir…” speech. Goodness, is it the first of the month? I wondered, but then I heard Ali babbling about a demonstration.

  “Ali, for heaven’s sake, get up!” I said. “Now what’s all this about?” He scampered to his feet, and all he had to say was, “By George, you’re a grand guy!” and I would have slugged him. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said in Arabic, a language in which he seemed to be rather fluent: “I heard all about it. What you did. You have done a wonderful thing for the Christians in Beirut!” Christians? Christians in Beirut? I felt like telling him that my middle name was Nero, for it would have made about as much sense as what he was saying, certainly. “What have the Christians got to do with it?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Oh radiant sir,” guggled Ali. “The demonstrations—they are all for Nasser. They are all to make this country come under the rule of Nasser. We are half Christian here, but under Egypt the Moslems will control us. Then we would be second-class people; then maybe they would even persecute us—like in Iraq, like Syria. But you have stopped the demonstrations! You have shown the people!” he callooed excitedly, waving a Suez Declaration pamphlet in my astonished fiz.

  “Ali—I’m not responsible for what happened! It’s what my country did in the United Nations!” I protested, but he would have none of it. He leaned over and kissed my hand, and then scampered down the stairs. My eye, following him, picked up Fuad on the first landing, and he winked at me hugely, holding up his fingers in the “hokey-dokey” signal. I winked back and closed the door just as the phone rang. That’s right: it was Lenora Borealis.

  “I’ll be right there,” I husked into the phone, and pausing just long enough to write a brief note and place it in a sealed envelope marked: “To be opened only in the event of my death,” I hustled to the Embassy.

  My reception by the Ambassador was about as likely as the Count de Sade getting a “Man of the Year” award from the A.S.P.C.A. “Blatty,” he said absently, leafing through some documents on his desk, “Why did you call Rafiq’s brother a son of a bitch?” And that gave me pause, you may be sure. But apparently this was a momentary lapse, for the Ambassador looked up quickly and said, “But we’ve been through all that, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said apprehensively. “We’ve been through all that.”

  “Pity,” he murmured. And then he just sat there, gazing thoughtfully out the window, trying to recollect, perhaps, why he had sent for me. It was a trying period, and a hundred pressing affairs of state constantly battled for recognition by his weary consciousness. He turned to me, finally, and said, “Well, then, I suppose there’s really nothing to talk about.”

  “No, sir,” I edgily agreed, and started for the door.

  “Blatty!” I grasped the doorknob with bloodless fingers, and then turned to look at him. “You didn’t really lead a pro-Nasser demonstration this morning, did you?”

  “You mean—on purpose?”

  “Of course, on purpose!”

  “No, sir,” I lied truthfully.

  “Thought it was nonsense,” grunted the Ambassador, and dismissed me.

  In due time, though, he got the full story from Global Syndrome, who was briefed on the affair by one of our own local employees planted in the crowd. The Ambassador’s next move was as unexpected as Cyrano’s nose. He came calling at my apartment!

  “I never realized how well you understood Lebanese psychology, Blatty. To deliberately divert that parade, and then use the demonstrators as a captive audience for a propaganda coup. What planning! What a master stroke! What a rare insight into the Arab mind! And of course, Blatty, only your fluency in Arabic made it possible. The American government needs more like you—more second generation personnel!”

  I seized the Ambassador’s hand instanter in both of mine and shouted: “O most radiant sir! You are wondrous good, wondrous…!” But he was staring at me rather curiously and I stopped.

  “Rather demonstrative, aren’t you, Blatty,” he murmured, moving back a step. But, “Just like the Lebanese,” he added. He started for the door. And an afterthought struck him: “By the way,” he said casually, “do you play tennis?”

  Eventually the Ambassador awarded me a glowing citation and a Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath, which I cherished even more mightily than my silver loving cup. At least this time it wasn’t a fix.

  24. Take Down That Service Flag, Mother, Your Son’s on the B.O.A.C.

  LET US speak of things Arabic. Let us speak again of the Suez crisis. And why not? For while the invading armies withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in December of 1956, a muffled tension still throbbed, spasmodic and submarine, like the heartbeat of a man dying. Threats were still being muttered across gunspiked borders, and an attempted coup d’etat in the Jordan added a new clamminess to the already humid and sticky air of Beirut. But the bombings and demonstrations had ended, and as the final months of my two-year tour of duty in Lebanon fled like leaves in the autumn wind, I was able to sit back and survey the Arab World dispassionately from the wet, swirling splendor of my Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath.

  Yet it wasn’t so much the ways of the Arab World itself that interested me. It was the ways of my Arab mother. And all the mothers and fathers of second generation Americans.

  At Sunday Mass in Brookyn, my mother used to embarrass me by standing while everyone else was kneeling. And sitting while everyone else was standing. I tugged at her sleeve
once and said, “Pssst! Mama! Everyone else is sitting down!” But her response had been a loud “You shurrup, Will-yam!” that caused even the priest on the altar to turn his head and look at us. I used to think about this quite a bit and would wonder why my mother insisted on being so eccentrically out of step. But now, looking back to my first Sunday Mass in Beirut, I realized that I was out of step. While I was kneeling, everyone else was standing! And when I was standing, everyone else was sitting! Mama’s way had been the right way—in Beirut.

  Then there was my mother’s quince jelly peddling. How it had humiliated me! How can she do it? I would wonder. But the wonder was that my mother was right—in her way. For the way of her people held peddling to be an honorable profession, and when you come right down to it, how can any honest labor be anything but honorable? Don’t answer. It was a rhetorical question.

  Misunderstanding Mama, I would brood in my Jacuzzi Bath, had certainly been one of the mistakes of my boyhood. Yet I hadn’t been alone. Among my playmates on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn had been many children born of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Spanish and Irish immigrants, and we were all, all of us, embarrassed and ashamed of the “peculiar behavior” of our parents. We didn’t know it then, but we were the problem of international misunderstanding in miniature, a microcosmic UN. When we saw something different, we saw something wrong. And in this, we were wrong. Yet we were only children.