Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

  Consisting mostly of classroom lectures, the early portion of the training was devoted to refresher courses on United States history, American foreign policy objectives, and some classically dreary material on USIA organization and administration. A study of United States cultural development was required, and one of our literature surveys was conducted by a former Harvard professor whose technique was fairly progressive. He was profoundly interested in our “impressions” of things, and would read out lines of poetry and ask us what “pictures” we “saw in our minds.” One day he read the opening lines of a poem called, “The Mule,” and called out “Blatty—what does that line make you think of?”

  The line was, “When fishes flew and forests walked…” and my instantaneous and unthinking reply was, “The Road to Mandalay and Birnam Wood.” It didn’t win me the marbles.

  iv

  Abruptly our training took a rather curious turn. The male trainees were asked to have their wives present for a series of lectures which were to deal with protocol. They proved utterly harrowing.

  The lecturer, a Mrs. Prudence Brap from the State Department, began itemizing the social amenities of the “service” (as she called it) with more gusto than Charles Dickens describing a Christmas dinner: Failure to call on the Ambassador’s wife on the day of your arrival overseas, or failure to deposit in a small dish in the Ambassadorial entry hall a calling card of specific dimensions printed in a specific type face, could mean dismissal from the Foreign Service. A mismanaged seating arrangement at formal dinners, she recounted with a ghoulish relish, could be more compromising to the security of the United States than the betrayal of atomic secrets. And failure of the wives to wear elbow-length white gloves for tea on the Embassy lawn was a mortal sin.

  Peggy took it pretty bravely, but one of the wives began to feel faint and had to be escorted outside by her husband, a hapless young man destined for Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had no plumbing but plenty of white gloves.

  Mrs. Brap’s incredible performance was followed by another lecturer whose first words to the class were, “Why shouldn’t you ever use your left hand to shake hands with a Yemenite?”

  He had me there, I can tell you, but the answer centered about the fact that in Yemen the left hand is reserved exclusively for the performance of a vital but usually unsung role in the management of one’s affairs while at toilet, and this was our introduction to a course called, “How to Deal with Foreign Cultures.” It was designed to thwart such possible gross intercultural discrepancies as singing “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor” in the Dai Ichi Building or scheduling a square dance festival in the Taj Mahal. All it ever taught me was to avoid one-armed Yemenites.

  v

  At the end of the third week, we were introduced to the “Brainwashing Hour.” Scheduled every afternoon from three o’clock on, it featured a lord high inquisitor—ex-history professor, Dr. Paul Conroy—who played “devil’s advocate” by assuming the position of either a suspicious or a hosile foreign national who had cornered one of us at an Embassy lawn party. He would pounce upon us individually with such irrelevant questions as “Why do you Americans hate us Syrians?” … “When are you going to stop lynching Negroes in Akron?” … “Why don’t you give Puerto Rico back to the Puerto Ricans?” … “Who does your laundry, you dirty war-mongering capitalist?” It was supposed to train us to keep cool, keep smiling, and keep marshaling succinct, telling arguments in defense of U.S. policy. Most important of these, though, was the injunction to keep smiling.

  The first time Conroy called on me it went something like this:

  “Well, now, Mr. Blatty, you’re an American, aren’t you?”

  “Well, my parents were Arabs and—”

  “Oh, so you’re an Arab!”

  “Uh—not exactly. I mean, I’m an Arab-American and—”

  “What do you mean, you’re an Arab-American? Either you’re an Arab or you’re an American. Now which are you?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure? What do you mean you’re not sure? You work for the American Embassy, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m with the U.S. Information Agency.”

  “I see. So your job is to gather information about us and relay it back to Washington, is it not? And so aren’t you simply a spy?”

  “Well, sir,” I smiled, “I can understand your confusion on this point, but—”

  “Oh, so now I’m confused, am I? I can’t think straight, eh? I—”

  It wound up with my shouting angrily at Conroy at the top of my voice and I became the class disgrace.

  vi

  By the end of the fourth week, many of the trainees had already received their assignments, which meant that they could concentrate on area study, and begin arranging for shots, travel reservations, and the purchase of household supplies difficult to obtain in their post of assignment. But I remained unassigned, and spent most of my time in the Press and Magazine section, getting the feel of “Stateside” operations.

  At the end of the fifth week, I was summoned to the office of Mr. Sibling Klein, a jovial little man who was then Chief of the Press Service.

  “Blatty,” he began at once, “guess where you’re going!”

  “Ah—Egypt?” I probed.

  “Nope,” he smiled.

  “Iraq?”

  “Nope.”

  “Saudi Arabia?”

  “Nope.”

  A cold chill shivered through my body.

  “Syria? Surely, Syria,” I quavered.

  “Nope, not Syria either. Blatty,” he beamed, “We’re sending you to Lebanon?”

  My whole life passed before me in an instant.

  “The—the policy! Wha—what about the policy!”

  “Don’t worry,” smiled Klein. “We got a waiver on you. You’re needed too badly in Beirut.” He clasped his hands behind his head. “Excited, Blatty?”

  “Yes. I’m very excited.” If I’d had a grenade in my hand I would have pulled the pin and killed us both.

  “The Near East Regional Service Center—NERSC for short—is our main publishing house servicing the entire Middle East with pamphlets and publications. It’s in Beirut, and we just lost a man there. Got food poisoning eating some goddam weird native jelly.”

  “Quince?” I said weakly.

  He squinted over at me oddly. “Yeah—yeah, I think it was. How’d you know?”

  “Just a lucky shot.”

  “Right. Well, anyway, we can’t waste time processing a new replacement. So you’re ‘it.’ And there’s another reason why we’re sending you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You’re going to be a test case, Blatty!”

  The only thing holding me up was the frozen sweat on my legs. “What am I going to test?” I murmured.

  “Our policy on second-generation personnel.” Klein reached around and scratched his nose with a forefinger. “We always had trouble with second-generation people, Blatty, years ago, when we used them in State. They went one of two ways: either they got entangled with relatives over there and wound up going native, or they over-compensated and were hostile toward the locals. Funny thing,” he ruminated, “so many second-generation kids grow up ashamed and embarrassed about their parents and their customs. Won’t learn the old language; want to be ‘Americans’ all the way. They wind up hating their old homelands, and when we send them over there, they flop. An automatic screen goes up between them and the foreign locals.” He scratched his nose again. “State stopped sending them.”

  “I know,” I said in a monotone.

  “Well, the ban has been especially rough on the Agency, Blatty. We need the language abilities of these people very badly. And maybe with a little special briefing—like this one—they’ll work out. I don’t know. But right now everything hangs on you. If your two-year tour is successful, State has promised us blanket authority to assign any of our second-generation personnel to their foreign homelands! Now how does that make you feel!
”

  It made me feel like blowing my brains out.

  “Will I have to dress any different?”

  “Whaddya mean?” he queried, but I was half out of my mind by then and I heard myself saying, “Will I have to wear red velvet pants?”

  When I came to my senses, Klein was staring at me peculiarly. Then abruptly he laughed. “Funny,” he said then. “You’re a real funny kid. Those Arabs will love you. Meanwhile there’s a lot you’ll want to know about the country,” he advised more soberly. “Check the Classified Library and dig up the Post Report.”

  I dug up the Post Report and there wasn’t a thing it could tell me about Lebanon that I hadn’t heard a million times already. In fact, I even added a few marginal glosses of my own, dotting the i’s with the blood that was now flowing freely from my kneecaps. Then I closed the report and resigned myself to doom.

  vii

  On July 23, 1955, with typhoid and smallpox shots far behind us, Peggy, the children and I were ready to beetle off to Lebanon. Only one thing remained on my briefing agenda: a specially scheduled interview with one of the lower-ranking Intelligence and Research officers, Mr. Gunther Festoon.

  Gunther Festoon had cheeks the color of faded Britannica covers, and athwart his bald head, like a rescue signal staked out by someone stranded on a mountain top, lay two criss-crossing white Band-Aids. Fiftyish and slight of frame, his eyes were triple-locked safes with “Top Secret” decals pasted across them, and there was a murkiness about him that made me feel instinctively that his hobby was enlarging shrunken heads. In a word, he was all Festoon. I could see that when I walked into his office. “Blooty?” he said.

  “Blatty,” I said.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I sat.

  Festoon scrutinized me from behind a pile of classified documents stacked on his desk in the shape of a collapsed panther lung and I figured it was some sort of Rorschach test, although I wasn’t really sure.

  “Son,” Festoon whispered.

  “Yes, sir?” I said.

  “Son, what do you know about the Cold War?”

  “I’ve read books.”

  “And what do you know about Communism?”

  “I’ve seen movies.”

  This seemed to satisfy him, for he nodded his head at me in a sort of bullet-shaped benediction.

  “But son,” he picked up again, leaning across his desk but careful not to upset the stack of documents there, “son, you know the Reds have been at this propaganda warfare routine since 1917, don’t you? Sure you do. They’re experts, masters of the Big Lie, and their tactics are—insinuous. Know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I blinked, beginning to suspect that the Band-Aids were being used to camouflage a hole in his head. “Good lad!” he chortled. And if you ever want to hear something grotesque, you ought to listen to someone chortling in a whisper. “My boy,” he continued, “because of your knowledge of the Arabic language, I’ve chosen you for a special assignment!”

  I tensed.

  “Propaganda crusaders must be expert in communicating,” pursued Festoon. “We’ve got to be able to swizzle the American message into foreign domes in a manner acceptable to alien cultures. But son, we’re not swizzling the A-rabs! We don’t have the code, the cultural key. The brutes are inscrutable. And that will be your job!”

  “You mean—scrut them?”

  “How aptly you catch my thoughts, son, how aptly!” He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk. “My boy,” he said, “this is what you must do: In addition to your normal duties as an editor with NERSC, I want you to be a keen observer of Arab customs, mores and taboos; I want you to study their temperament, their philosophy of living, their entire emotional and motivational complex—in a word, what makes them tick. I want you to write it up. Keep a diary. And no matter how trivial something may seem to you, write it up! If you see an A-rab picking his nose in a manner that differs from ours, write it up. If you notice any unusual sex practices”—and here he fixed me with a glittering eye—“and mind you, lad, please remember that the Agency doesn’t endorse that sort of thing—write it up. What I want, in short, is a diary on what makes Mohammed run! This will be my—I mean, our—special contribution to the Agency mission.”

  “But I usually do my diary in eight or ten drafts, and the time inv—”

  “Skip the diary. Put your observations and experiences into memoranda and forward them directly as you complete each one. Are you for the Program, son?”

  “I am.”

  He smiled, revealing two blue-black, peering eyes inked on his upper front teeth, but maybe they weren’t there at all because sometimes I imagine things and actually I wasn’t feeling too well. “I knew we could depend on you,” Festoon whispered, and held out his hand for a farewell handclasp. “Bon voyage, son, and keep in touch,” I turned to leave, but as I reached the door his compelling whisper arrested me: “Oh, by the way,” he hissed, and I turned in my tracks; “notice anything unusual about the shape of these documents?”

  I looked at the classified papers on his desk. “No, sir.”

  “Oh,” he whispered, bleak and crestfallen. “Well—good luck, Blooty.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And write!”

  I wrote.

  And on the night prior to our departure, I telephoned. I called my mother in Brooklyn and told her that I was going to Lebanon.

  “Huh,” she grunted. “About time.”

  THE SECOND STRAW: LOST IN THE ATTIC

  8. Over the Hill to Grandma’s House

  A DUN-COLORED elephant, wild and enraged, came charging down the aisle of the airliner, but my daughter Christine spat upon its trunk and the beast cringed instanter and beat a cowardly retreat back to the pilot’s cabin …

  I awoke to the prodding of the Air France stewardess. “More champagne, Monsieur?”

  “Perhaps not,” I mumbled, pulling myself back to consciousness. They had been serving champagne every hour on the hour ever since taking off from New York International Airport, and had insisted upon serving my three children as well. Obviously I couldn’t let the innocents drink the stuff, but I certainly wasn’t going to waste it … Now I was experiencing wondrous pulsations of the head.

  “When we gonna see the Eiffel Tower, Daddy?” my son Michael queried in his high, innocent voice, and “Knock it off!” I replied, for I believe in always answering a child’s questions. We were now but an hour out of Paris, our first stopover.

  “Bon chance, Monsieur,” smiled the sixty-year-old Frenchman across the aisle, raising a champagne glass to us in a toast, and “Bon merde!” I murmured darkly. I had Lebanon and a hangover to contend with, and I was in no mood for cultural reapproachement.

  The captain of the airliner, a huge, distinguished-looking man who exuded confidence with his every look and gesture, passed along the aisle for perhaps the fiftieth time. Actually I don’t think he was the captain at all, but a paid actor who had been hired by Air France to give the passengers a feeling of security, for he was constantly among us and was never seen to enter the pilot’s compartment. I marveled that I was the only passenger to detect this paternalistic fraud, and closing my eyes, I began a serious examination of conscience.

  In Paris, we toured the sights as they had never been toured before. Michael, at our first stop, detached himself from the group and quietly relieved himself at the base of the Eiffel Tower. He later extended the same courtesy to the Louvre, and Christine, who had imbibed a surfeit of sour French milk with her breakfast, proceeded to toss her cookies inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

  “Bill, say something to your daughter,” my wife pleaded.

  “Christine,” I intoned hollowly, placing a hand on her heaving shoulder, “Christine, stop it—you’ll get sick!”

  We left Paris eight hours and four desecrations later, just a step or two ahead of the Tourist Police.

  ii

  It was early afternoon when we swooped in low over Bei
rut and we were able to get a big-eyed view of the terrain. It was Southern California without freeways. The city snuggled between the blue, blue Mediterranean and the snow-capped Lebanon and anti-Lebanon Mountains, their green-terraced slopes dotted brightly with the orange-tiled roofs of scattered homes and villages, and I heard my mother’s voice thundering under my skull “My God, those mountains are beautiful!”

  They were more than beautiful. For while every mountain has its own mystery, its own aura of the beginnings of things, secret yet remembered, the Lebanon Mountains went a step beyond, challenging the imagination, chilling it, taunting it, making it to rub its eyes. Ghosts haunted those titans: crusaders in armor rattling over Roman roads; cloaked and bearded Saracens wisping and billowing through ancient cedar groves; the Apostle, Paul, cooling his feet in a mountain brook; and an Egyptian shipbuilder, in for supplies, gazing down toward Sidon where one called the Christ is speaking wonders, and debating whether to go hear Him or buy a new robe in the market … I was looking at a thinking man’s mountain range.

  The plane landed, and you know that odd, tingly sensation you get just before you’re run over by a herd of buffalo? Well, I had it. I stood in the aisle of the plane, and as I waited for the steward to open the door I felt like a reverse Trojan horse: beyond the gate were a million ambushing Trojans and my hollow hulk was stuffed with nescient, drunken Greeks without armor. Of course, there was always the happy chance that I would fall off the debarking ramp and brain myself …

  The door opened.

  Arabs. Arabs in business suits and a modern airport building that was mostly glass. “Here I am, eight thousand miles from home,” sighed Peggy, and “Ooh” and “Ah” said the remainder of my brood, all except Michael, who warned tonelessly: “I gotta go baffoom.”