Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

  ii

  Peggy and I spent that whole night packing, and the next day, after checking out of the hotel, appeared at the Bikhazi homestead with our luggage.

  “Okay, to move in?” I asked the landlord in the lobby.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No. Not finish.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. Well—when finish?”

  “Bukra.”

  “Bukra?”

  “Bukra.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t see at all, but I was certainly beginning to. We returned to the hotel and checked in again, much to the amazement of the room clerk, whose name, oddly enough, was Moshe Amazement. We didn’t see any point in unpacking.

  The following day we checked out again, much to Mr. Amazement’s ama- … skip it. We dragged our belongings to the apartment building and Bikhazi greeted us at the entrance. “Hallo,” he said.

  “Hallo,” I grinned. “Okay, now?”

  “No. Not finish.” The strange crackling sound was my fingernails shriveling up from frustration. But I must be understanding, I thought desperately, I must be understanding. Aloud I said: “When?”

  “Bukra,” said Bikhazi hopefully, “Bukra, bil mish-mosh,” and maybe that sounds pretty grand and exotic but actually it meant, “Tomorrow, when the apricots are in bloom,” and it was becoming obvious that Lebanon was in the fierce grip of an apricot blight, which you may deny, if you like, but small pleasure it will give you.

  The room clerk was certain, when we got back, that we were playing some kind of game with him, but what he thought when the farce was re-enacted on twelve more consecutive bukras, I can never hope to tell you!

  In a purple frenzy of procrastinitis, I took to haunting the Bikhazi building and deviling the work force. The delay, I discovered, was due to the Moslem workmen’s custom of pausing in their activities to bow toward Mecca whenever the muezzin gave the call to prayer from the top of a nearby minaret. This pious practice was supposed to occur five times a day, but the workmen, I observed, were falling to their knees about three times that often, and it was obvious that one of them was working an old Moslem con game known as the “rigged minaret” ploy. Yes. That explained the delay. But nothing in the known universe, or even in Hollywood, for that matter, could explain Mr. Bikhazi’s daily and infuriatingly sincere promises of “You move, bukra,” which continued for twenty-one days! Days, mind you, days!

  iii

  Yes, we moved in, finally, but this was not the end of our time problems. The toilet in our bathroom ceased to flush, and Mr. Bikhazi promised us for days on end, days too numerous to enumerate, that it would be repaired “bukra.” This episode could easily be referred to as the “Drano Drama,” except that the dramatic element of catharsis was all-too-visibly lacking, although the Furies, in the corpulent person of Mr. Bikhazi, no doubt intended to destroy us, for they were effectively driving us mad, and into strange bathrooms as well!

  It was in the midst of this frustrating extremity that I prepared my first report to Gunther Festoon. In it, I wrote:

  It has become clear to me that the Western mind apprehends time as an expression of linearity, whereas the Oriental outlook bends this 180-degree concept around until it becomes 360—i.e., a blob. Time doesn’t have to take these people anywhere. It is directionless. And the result, of course, is that somewhere between the Dardanelles and Karachi, time has become hopelessly and inextricably muddled with eternity.

  In time, the Arab manages—barely—to carry on a modicum of the normal, practical gestures of day-to-day living in an objectively valid external world. But when the mood is upon him, he rubs his magic lamp and the space-time continuum disappears through a trap-door in the void, leaving only a clock-stopping “still point” in a fixed cosmos. What I mean is, a Lebanese Arab’s promise or estimate that such-and-so will happen or be done “tomorrow” is about as attainable of fulfillment as a panty raid at Union Theological Seminary. There is no tomorrow, and all our yesterdays have lighted trusting fools the way to flushless toilets …

  My observations probably impressed Festoon as being a bit intense, but I certainly didn’t mean them to be. And I didn’t mean to pick on Mr. Bikhazi. Because Mr. Maloof, my tailor, Mr. Aziz, the neighborhood electrician; Mr. Kurani, the carpenter who plied his boards across the street from our apartment building; Mr. Abu-Saad, the glazier, and Mr. Kuri, the grocer; none, none of these distemporaled worthies seemed to possess the faintest possible clue as to what the hell time it was! Moreover, they didn’t seem to give a good Arabic damn! And this went double in alarm clocks when it came to Ali, the forty-year-old concierge who was destined to become a classic hair in the gin of my tour of duty.

  iv

  Ali was a Palestinian refugee whose most prominent possessions were a red-tasseled fez, a scraggly mustache, a perpetual look of confusion and a pair of over-sized sneakers in which he padded about our apartment building like an over-aged, Oriental Our Gang comic. He slept in the basement, down among the heaters and boilers, and we had little to say to each other until the advent of the ram. Yes. The ram.

  As I was coming down the stairs one warm September morning, I saw this—this skinned ram—hanging head down in the exposed elevator shaft on the ground floor level! It didn’t look at all discomfited, though, for it appeared to be quite dead and well beyond the reach of miracle drugs, or even Oral Roberts, for that matter. Ali was there. I looked from him to the ram, and then back again, and something in my head went Tchwah! But then I seemed to hear the Ambassador’s voice boom out: “The eyes of Araby are upon you!” So, “Is this how you get your kicks?” I politely inquired, pointing to the ram. And Ali grinned. “Is custom,” he said. “Day before put in elevator, hang ram in shaft. Keep away bad accident with elevator.”

  “I see,” I said. It seemed to be a simple matter of propitiating the god of the elevator, or perhaps of the shaft. “Will you please cut it down?” I asked. “We’re having guests for dinner.”

  “Right after put in elevator,” said Ali.

  “When are you installing the elevator?”

  “Bukra.”

  “Bukra?”

  “Bukra.”

  “I understand.”

  Two months later, I could still faintly hear, as it mingled in grisly syncopation with the snoring of an old gentleman who lived across the street, the hollow rattling of that ram’s skeleton as a quick wind from the Mediterranean now and then swung it back and forth against the sides of an otherwise untenanted, uncabled and unelevating elevator shaft. As I tossed in my bed, I would picture Ali beside the swaying skeleton, a be-sneakered, grinning, vacant-eyed Quasi modo, with his—“Blatty! The eyes of Araby are upon you!” At this point I usually got up and made myself a glass of warm milk with some rum in it. Sleep came hard, but my sanity was leaving me with no strain at all.

  v

  The Arab version of time travel became a feverish obsession with me. It was in everything I saw or touched. Like at Baalbek. Baalbek is a second-century Roman ruin about forty miles northeast of Beirut, near the Syrian border, and when I took the family there sightseeing, everybody else saw magnificent, multi-columned temples dedicated to Bacchus, Jupiter and Venus. But not me. All I ever saw was a mystery fourteen by seventeen feet wide and seventy feet long, and it had ARAB TIME SENSE written all over it!

  This mystery, Raskalnikov, was a single, solid stone slab that lay in a quarry about a quarter of a mile from a twin slab that formed part of the upper wall of Baalbek’s Temple of the Sun. None of the Arab guides were able to explain how the Baalbekians, with a first-century feat of engineering more mystifying than the construction of the pyramids, ever managed to drag and lift the one slab into place. And, historians and archeologists were in a rather mild state of flap over why the Baalbekians didn’t move the other. From the USIA Library in Beirut I had once borrowed a book called UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects, by a Mr. M. K. Jessup, a man who cla
imed to know the answer to this intriguing little dilemma. Mr. M. K. Jessup suggested that the Baalbekians possessed a “levitating device,” and that it was the sudden loss of this alleged instrument that forced the ancient Arab and Roman builders of Baalbek to discontinue operations abruptly and leave a slab the size of an atomic submarine lying around like a discarded old mosque shoe. Well—maybe. But as I stared out at the massive temple columns that were just beginning to glow in the soft rose of twilight, voices from the past began murmuring in my head, and I constructed a sort of fantasy in which the Arab time sense figured as the prime force behind the mystery of the Unmoved Slab. Here, in the modern actor’s edition, is my Vision:

  SCENE I: Baalbek, 206 A.D.

  (Enter an Observer.)

  OBSERVER:

  How goes the construction, workman?

  WORKMAN:

  Up godamercy, up!

  SCENE II: The Rock Quarry, Six Weeks Later

  (An Arab foreman, oddly resembling Ali, is supervising work on the “Great Slab.” Enter a Messenger.)

  MESSENGER:

  (to Arab foreman) Do you know who I am?

  FOREMAN:

  Let me guess. A camel in messenger’s clothing?

  MESSENGER:

  You cheatin’ bastard, you peeked! (Slouches off sulking, crunching haddock vertebrae underfoot, gouging out camels’ eyes and otherwise shewing his distemper.)

  SCENE III: The Stone Quarry, Five Minutes Later

  (Enter the Messenger, disguised.)

  MESSENGER:

  When lift you the Great Slab into place?

  FOREMAN:

  Bukra.

  MESSENGER:

  (eyes narrowing to slits) Bukra?

  FOREMAN:

  Bukra.

  MESSENGER:

  (eyes almost closed now) I see.

  FOREMAN:

  Ah! (stares off, intuitively, towards the future site of Mecca, looking pensive and inscrutable the while, as scene fades out.)

  SCENE IV: The Stone Quarry, One Day Later

  (Enter the Messenger.)

  MESSENGER:

  Why is the Great Slab not yet in place?

  FOREMAN:

  A slight problem.

  MESSENGER:

  Being—?

  FOREMAN:

  Blatty arrived with his luggage.

  MESSENGER:

  Well—when, then?

  FOREMAN:

  Bukra.

  (SLOW FADE—DISSOLVE TO SCENE V)

  SCENE V: The Stone Quarry, One Day Later

  (Enter the Messenger.)

  MESSENGER:

  Ech! Not yet?

  FOREMAN:

  Not yet.

  MESSENGER:

  (brandishing crossbow, which astonishes Foreman since it has not yet been invented) Make it good!

  FOREMAN:

  (abjectly falling to his knees) We forgot the ram.

  MESSENGER:

  (stashing crossbow into cleverly concealed armpit holster) Quick thinking on your part. But what is your present estimate?

  FOREMAN:

  Bukra.

  (FADE TO BLACK)

  [Scene VI is an exact re-enactment of Scene III, as are all scenes to follow. This is a miracle play and there isn’t any curtain.]

  And speaking of miracles, why had there been no hint of this temporal irresponsibility in my mother? Could it be, as I had vaguely hunched when we first arrived in Beirut, that Mama had been subtly Americanized in ways that neither of us had ever suspected? Had she, Paisley, had she?

  vi

  “Mr. Blatty,” cooed Lenora Borealis over the telephone one morning, “The Ambassador would like to see you at two o’clock.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  And I was. So was the Ambassador, which was rather thoughtful of him, in a way. He was sitting at his desk holding a mimeographed copy of something new, something strange, something wonderful.

  “Blatty!” he greeted me sharply, his eyes snapping like twin terriers, “Did you write this?”

  “Did I write what, sir?”

  “This!” He handed me the paper. And I’d written it, all right. The contents read as follows:

  THE BLATTY POCKET ARAB-TIME EQUALIZER

  (For converting Arab estimates of time into a form more readily associated with reality)

  Hours

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Leave the number unchanged, substituting the words “days” for “hours.”

  Days

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Divide by 1.7, increase the result by 5 and then double.

  Months

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Multiply by 2.2 and convert to the nearest year.

  Years

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Not within your lifetime.

  “Copies of this—document—have been posted up on every bulletin board in every U.S. Government building in Beirut! The locals have been reading it!” barked the Ambassador, and he still hadn’t asked me to sit down. “Is this your idea of winning the friendship of the Lebanese, Blatty? Is this your idea of understanding?”

  My only idea was to ask him whether his john was flushing properly, but I decided maybe I’d better not. I merely said,

  “No, sir. Only I didn’t post it on the bulletin boards.”

  “But you wrote it, didn’t you? Here, it says ‘BLATTY’! Here, right at the top of the page! The BLATTY POCKET ARAB-TIME EQUALIZER!” he squealed.

  “Yes, sir. I wrote it. I—I had problems.”

  “Well, now you have even more problems. From now on I’m watching you! We’re all watching you! The—”

  “—eyes of Araby are upon me,” I finished weakly.

  The Ambassador gave me an inscrutable look. “Precisely.” He turned and looked out into the Embassy garden. “All right, Blatty,” he said in a softer tone. “Try a little harder to understand these people.”

  “Is that all, sir?”

  “That’s all.”

  That was enough. Even in Lebanon I was still a “foreigner” and I was beginning to think that I had about as much chance of understanding the Lebanese as Sophie Tucker had of playing the title role in “The Song of Bernadette.” Which wasn’t too much of a chance. But I was going to try. Yes, sir, I told myself, I’ll try tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. In Arabic, that’s bukra.

  11. But Will They Get It in Jerusalem?

  IT WAS a sign, a portent of ill winds gathering, and I guess I should have recognized it. An enormous black bird swooped across the balcony, settled on our breakfast table, dipped its beak into the raspberry preserves and scratched out the words, “IT’S GONNA GETCHA!” on the white tablecloth. Then it looked up at me, cried, “Aaaarrgh!” and, flapping its great wings hugely, disappeared into the dawn. I don’t mind telling you that it struck me as being a little odd at the time, but not being superstitious, I thought no more about it. It wasn’t until twenty minutes later and the Moona incident that I began to sniff another bad day with the Lebanese.

  Moona, an eighteen-year-old daughter of the villages, was our newly hired maid, and “Moona,” Peggy was saying as I bumbled into the kitchen for a second glass of almond juice, “Moona, I notice you’ve been eating those little farm-delivered eggs for your breakfast. Now you go ahead and eat those large store-bought eggs from now on; we’ll keep the little ones for cooking.”

  “Oh, no,” said Moona.

  “Oh, yes,” said Peggy.

  “Oh, no,” repeated Moona, dark and defiant.

  “But Moona,” said Peggy, “the large eggs come from farms getting Point Four assistance. They’re more nutritious—I want you to use them.”

  “Mrs. Blatty,” said the stubborn one, “I would never eat machine-made eggs.”

  “Machine-made what?”

  “Eggs. Everyone says they’re machine-made.”

  “No!”

 
“Yes.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” And Moona, dark eyes gleaming exultantly, scooped up one of the “large” eggs and pointed to the machine-stamped lettering at its schmoo-like base: “U.S. POINT FOUR.”

  Dazed, I returned to the dining room where I washed down a vague premonition of evil doings with strong, black coffee, and glanced idly at the Daily Star, an English language newspaper put out by an Arab staff. My eye fell upon a rather curious headline: DEAD WHALE SWIMS TO SHORE! Strange—passing strange, I pondered, and then read into the body of the article, which was inert and offered small resistance: it concerned a dead whale that had drifted into shore along Beirut’s corniche, the first whale, in fact, ever to have poked its snorkel around the Lebanese coast since the ceremonial disgorging of Jonah by that ever-lovin’ Biblical behemoth. “Curiouser and curiouser!” I thought as omen piled upon omen, and I smothered them in butter and syrup and had them for breakfast. Later, still relatively undisturbed, I vaulted into the false security of my mad Volkswagen and plunged along the coast road to NERSC. I didn’t get far.

  Fezzes—hundreds of fezzes, bejabbers! People were swarming all over the highway, and it was impossible to pass, let alone throw a natural. I squirmed out of the VW and investigated. It was the whale!

  Monstro, he of the headlines, was serenely floating about a hundred yards offshore, and some eager sons of Phoenicia, in command of rowboats, were transporting sightseers from beach to whale at twenty-five piastres a crack. The vendors were there, hawking popcorn, Coke and roasted chick peas at a smashing clip. A rather ordinary looking whale, I mulled, for I saw nothing remarkable about the Picasso peace dove etched on its stern. Any jackass could see it was a copy. So what in the world could account for the crowd? Honestly, Godmar, there must have been a thousand people there!