“But enough of this farooba,” I murmured finally, for what was I to the whale, or either of us to Hecuba, and pausing just long enough to buy some popcorn poured into a cone-shaped sheet of newspaper, I wedged back to the VW. And that’s when I saw it! I mean, there, right there on the newspaper, the bold Arabic headline: JONAH’S WHALE RETURNS! WHO WILL EMERGE THIS TIME?
I wasn’t placing any bets. Instead, I made a U-turn and raced toward NERSC via UAR Alternate 101, and in the rearview mirror I caught a nervous glimpse of a flapping, aerial blackness pursuing me. Yes. It was going to be a day.
ii
As I brooded in my office over Moona, the whale, and some Turkish-coffee-stained editorial copy, a kamikaze fly made a threatening, suicidal pass at me, but I deftly swatted it out of existence with a rolled-up copy of a psychiatric scandal magazine called True Repressions, and then looked on with mixed emotions as the brute sounded its death buzz and plipped into my coffee cup. “Yusef!” I called, and Yusef appeared with that habitually languorous manner of his that gave him the air of a man who had perpetually given notice and was no longer interested. “Another coffee, please.”
Yusef was but one of the charming minions who lurked in our USIA publishing house, a reconverted soap factory that sat squatly unobtrusive on Rue Melee—an oddly appropriate name—in the tough waterfront district of Beirut, where barefoot Kurdish women carried firewood on their heads, goats and taxis scampered and bleated along a black, paved street, and across from our headquarters, in a brownstone apartment building, a lonely Arab woman in a dressing gown leaned from her window by the hour, watching the world from her elbows, while on a balcony below her an eight-year-old girl with an old, wise face beat rugs.
There was Honeysuckle Epstein, for instance an editor like myself, who hailed from Mississippi and breathed a fragrance of magnolias, chitlins, buttermilk and fried Johnson grass into the exotic incense of the Middle East. And there was Ibrahim da Vinci, our suave Syrian artist and layout man, who would delight Miss Epstein by capping each presentation of his roughs to her with an elaborate, Continental kissing of her hand, to which she would invariably respond with a gushing, “Oh Ibrahim, you do that so nice!”
Among our translating staff there was Hassan Osseiran, an Egyptian Peter Lorre type who had his own inimitable way of endearing himself to Honeysuckle Epstein. Miss Epstein had amassed a collection of scarabs and other “authentic curios, don’t you know” that she had purchased in Cairo, and she prized them even more highly than the gold-embossed chamber pot of Robert E. Lee. From time to time she would bring in one or two of her Egyptian treasures for Hassan’s examination. His reaction, in each instance, followed an invariable pattern: “Aah, byoo-ti-ful, most byoo-ti-ful!” he would hiss and then add thoughtfully, “But obviously a fake.” Why she kept bringing them in, I’ll never know.
As for Yusef, our runner and errand boy, he was a twenty-year-old mustachioed Syrian, and a young man of spectacularly limited ambition. The common Arab way of saying “no” is to merely flick the tongue and produce a “Tsk!” sound; one may also merely raise an eyebrow, or, even easier, close the eyelids for a half second. But for Yusef, even this was too much of a strain. He had mysteriously organized his body chemistry in such a manner as to be able to indicate the negative by causing a sort of glaze to form over his eyeballs. His talent in this regard was little short of wondrous.
We were, in all, part of a wondrous operation. In the lower floor of our two-story plant, there was a complete offset printing establishment and fifty intelligent, highly trained Lebanese to run it. On the upper floor were the typesetters, the graphics department run by Mr. da Vinci, five Arab translators, and the four Americans on the editorial staff. Our function was to service all USIS Mideast posts with whatever printed propaganda materials they might require, including a sixteen-page weekly magazine called the News Review with a circulation of over one hundred thousand in both the English and Arabic versions.
One of the vital functions of the translating staff was to serve as a sounding board in determining what sort of impact our copy would have on the average Arab man on the desert. But even more sensitive to this aspect of our operation was our director, Jeremiah Web. At staff meetings, for example, if I were presenting my ideas for an article on U.S. modern art, he would gaze thoughtfully at the Arab girl beating rugs across the street and say quietly, “But will they get it in Jerusalem?” Or he would vary this with, “What will it mean to the man on a jackass?”
iii
“Mr. Web want speak with you, sah.” It was Yusef, sans coffee. “In office, sah.”
“Okay,” I said. “Leave the coffee on my desk when it’s ready.”
“Yes, sah.” And he vanished. I went looking for Web.
“Mr. Web, sah?—I mean, sir?”
“Hi, Bill. Have a chair.” I had a chair, a rather novel experience, and looked at Web. The wall back of his desk was completely blotted out by a large-scale map of the Middle East, and he was staring at a point on it that could have been Ankara, although maybe it wasn’t, and he said: “That nuclear hommos thing you wrote.” Then he paused meditatively. Hommos is an Arab delicacy compounded of mashed chick peas, sesame and olive oil, and that “nuclear hommos thing” had been a press release I’d written to help publicize the U.S. Atoms-for-Peace Exhibit opening that day in Beirut’s UNESCO Building. In the release I had speculated on how radioactive isotopes might someday enable scientists to artifically duplicate photosynthesis, the mysterious process wherein plants convert sunlight, water and air into food. In a slash of whimsey, I had even allowed that “Atoms for Peace were leading to ‘nuclear’ hommos.” Well? And what about it?… I didn’t say this to Web. I merely thought it.
“Gotta be careful writing stuff like that,” drawled Web. “These Lebanese have got a pretty pixie sense of humor—but not when the humor’s in writing. They believe anything in print.”
I was about to say, “You’re kidding,” but then I thought of Moona and her eggs and those people and the whale, and I felt an inexplicable foreboding.
“Remember the ‘Mecca Airlift’?” continued Web. Well, I didn’t exactly remember it, because I’d been in the States at the time, but I’d heard of it, all right. It was still the talk of the town. In the sweltering summer of 1952, the United States Air Force had dashed to the rescue of thousands of Muslim hajaj stranded in Beirut while on pilgrimage to Mecca. At least one pilgrimage per lifetime was prescribed by Muhammad as one of the “five pillars of Islam,” but commercial airline companies in Beirut shook the pillars a little when they discovered that they had more Mecca-bound passengers than they had seats! So Uncle Sam winged into Beirut with Air Force transports from our base in Dhahran, and in a dramatic gesture of good will the pilgrims were loaded aboard and transported to Mecca in what the flyboys referred to as “Operation Magic Carpet.” That much I knew. So, “Yeah, I remember it,” I said.
“Well,” resumed the taciturn Kansan, “it was quite a propaganda coup. But to show you how things can get loused up out here, some leftist newspaper printed an article saying that the U.S. pilots running the airlift had deliberately changed the course of the planes whenever the pilgrims were at prayer. The paper said that whenever the pilgrims thought they were bowing toward Mecca, they were actually bowing toward Des Moines, Iowa. And supposedly that’s how the pilots were expressing their scorn of the Muslim religion.”
“This they believed?”
“This they believed. Get me? This they believed!”
Web sighed a mighty sigh, full of the world’s woes, plus a few of Saturn’s. “Our biggest propaganda problem in this area is not that the Lebanese won’t believe what we’ve got to say: it’s that they’ll believe what anybody’s got to say. And with their Big Lie tactic, this gives the Russkies a monster-sized edge.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Are you inferring, Sirrah, that my country cousins are all kooks?”
“Kooks? Kooks?” Web turned to stare at me incredulously.
“Have you ever bargained with a Lebanese and won?”
“I see what you mean,” I begrudged, nodding my left head. “But I still don’t get it.”
“Well,” drawled Web, “there are one or two possible explanations. Like this business of the Koran. It’s written in classical Arabic, of course, and since the Koran is supposed to be ‘The Word,’ I think the spell carries over to almost anything in print. Then, too, the Lebanese haven’t been jaded the way we have by the tons of advertising and commercial claims that barrage us almost every waking moment of our lives.”
“Yeh,” I said, going into my Baby Face Nelson act.
“I suspect it’s the product of a certain literal-mindedness,” continued Web, elaborately ignoring the yogurt-tipped javelin aimed at his breast. And here he recounted the story of Samir, the Arab Point Four trainee who, bright-eyed and wide-eyed, had been taking notes while an American instructor delivered a classroom lecture on insect control.
“Now here,” the instructor had said, jabbing a yellow yard-stick at a huge, slide-projected blow-up of a mosquito, “now here we have raunchy, winged disaster. The anopheles mosquito is a prime carrier of malaria and must be dealt with. Samir—Samir,” he said, nodding to the trainee, “how would you suggest dealing with the anopheles?”
“Well,” Samir had answered, rising from his chair, “our insect problem in Lebanon is much different from yours in America. You see, here,” he said, holding up his right thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart from each other, “here the mosquitoes are only this big.”
A sort of deathly silence followed the recitation of this anecdote, as I contemplated the multi-mouth Scyllas of becoming “one” with the Lebanese, and Web dreamed of quiet wheat fields in Kansas. I was the first to tomahawk the silence: “I see what you mean about nuclear hommos.”
“I’m afraid you don’t,” said Web quietly. “Got a call from the exhibit’s director a while ago. Lot of people kinda frisky down at the Atom show.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nuclear hommos. They’re asking to see it.” I heard the rustling of giant, black wings, and my mouth tasted of raspberry.
“Lot of ’em are saying it’s a cheat,” pursued Web with that maddening, murmured Kansas calm. “Maybe you better go on down and see what you can dream up.” I was thinking of dreaming up a razor blade to slash my wrists with, but “Got rush copy to get out,” I croaked. “I’ll go right after that.”
“Okay,” said Web, and placing his clasped hands over his stomach, he stared out the window at the girl beating the rug. It was the Middle West version of Yoga, and abandoning him to this posture, I returned to my office and assumed a posture of my own—quiet frenzy.
iv
I rushed through my work and was about to race for the UNESCO Building when Farhat, one of our Arab typesetters, shuffle-gaited into my office with two more page proofs and a request. “I should like one ticket for the great ‘Forrestal,’” he said. Ships of the U.S. Fleet had been making regular visits to Beirut Harbor, and visitors were allowed on board.
“Sure, Farhat, sure; I’ll get you one,” I said, and “Mighty big ship,” I added tersely, standing up to go.
“Aeh,” said Farhat, which is Arabic for “yes,” and which I didn’t expect you to know. “A big ship, yes, but—” and here his heavy black eyebrows squeezed together at the bridge of his nose and I was faced with the inscrutable gaze of the Orient—“but it is part of a plot!” he hissed.
“Plot?” I was getting that funny feeling again, and “Plot!” repeated Farhat.
I swallowed noisily. Farhat was far from being a Communist but he read the leftist press and always had unwitting wind of the “party line.”
“You mean, you think the Sixth Fleet is going to try and make a permanent naval base out of Beirut?” I tested, for this was one of the standard Communist propaganda gimmicks in the area.
“No.” said Farhat. And that surprised me.
“The American Fleet comes many times,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
“Ha!” he pounced. “Soon the merchants will come to depend on this trade—”
“But—”
“And the merchants are the base of our small economy—”
“But—”
“And then one tent-black day—”
“Yeah?”
He leaned heavily against my typewriter. “Your President will order the American ships away, the Lebanese economy will collapse, and the United States will take over Lebanon!”
“Blatty!” my wife had warned me that morning. “Blatty, go not to the Forum!” Would that I had heeded her counsel, fond woman, but who could believe that wild story about a lion roaming the streets?…
Farhat padded off in triumph, leaving me to dully contemplate the ink smudges he’d left on my typewriter copy. I leaned over and gnawed distractedly on the margin release until my gums bled, and then left for the atom exhibit the way Dreyfus must have left for Devil’s Island—shook to the very navel.
v
The UNESCO Building was crammed with posters and exhibits illustrating atomic energy at work in the fields of medicine, agriculture, and the manufacture of stringless yo-yo’s. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that as soon as I got there, the exhibit director, Fleance Kazaza, seized my person and pulled me into the main exhibit hall.
“In here!” he whispered urgently. “The trouble’s in here!”
Also in “here” was the biggest attraction of the show. No, not a naked atom, silly. I mean “Magic Hands,” slender metal poles with artificial appendages operated by remote control, a facsimile of the type designed to permit mad scientists and atomic technicians to work with radioactive substances and peel prickly pears without actually coming into direct contact with them. A young, attractive Lebanese girl had been trained to manipulate the controls, and a huge crowd watched as she sat behind a glass panel on an elevated platform, using the “Hands” to mix and pour chemicals from one vial into another.
“So where’s the trouble?” I sniffed.
“There!” squealed Kazaza, and he pointed to a tight little throng of mountain villagers who were pressed in close to the platform. “They’ve been standing there for over two hours, griping and hollering for—for—nuclear hommos!” That raspberry taste was in my mouth again.
“This is real?” I husked.
“Look, daddy,” said Kazaza, pressing his face up close to mine, “this is real!” He was breathing on me rather heavily.
“So I’ll write up a clarifying release and send it out tomorrow,” I bleated hopefully, and “To-mor-row?” bellowed Kazaza. “If the word gets around in the villages, there won’t be a tomorrow for this exhibit. And can you imagine what the leftist Arab press can make out of this one?”
I could imagine. And at this delirious point, one of the villagers shouted derisively: “Nuclear hommos, chara!” (chara being the Arabic equivalent for horsehockey). The crowd, stirred up, began murmuring and grumbling. “Let’s offer them Barabbas for a starter,” I whined at Kazaza, but under his withering gaze I snapped out of my hysteria and began to think.
“When the Amassador gets here, he’ll flip his lid!” said Kazaza, and that’s when I really began to think. Smoke poured out of my ears, my nostrils and my toenails, and if ever there was a moment when I was smoking more now but enjoying it less, this was it! Then madness possessed me. I whipped out pad and pencil, scribbled a few words in Esperanto, tore page out of pad and thrust it at Kazaza: “Get this stuff for me—right away!”
“What for?” asked Kazaza.
“Because I ask it of you with a good heart,” I answered, mentally kneeing him in the groin. “One item you’ll have to pick up at an apothecary’s.”
He stared at me a little wildly, a condition I seem to induce in people, and then left. And while he was gone, I skulked forward and had a few nervous words with the girl operating the Magic Hands. I also huddled cabalistically with the
building electrician. That’s right—I was being pretty spooky.
Kazaza returned with the goodies. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it!” he croaked hoarsely. “The Ambassador’s secretary called. He’ll be down to inspect the exhibit in twenty minutes.” Kazaza’s statement was perhaps the most efficacious incentive program I had ever heard in my lifetime.
“Okay,” I said tensely. “But you’ve got to help.” He eyed me dubiously. But he helped.
Together we sorted the new-bought goodies into various bowls on the main platform, a larger bowl dominating a cluster of smaller votaries. Then Kazaza stood up and announced that the crowd was about to see what it had been waiting for. Magic Hands were going to mix a batch of, as he put it—“heh heh, nuclear hommos.”
The lights dimmed, and the Magic Hands began lewdly fingering the bowls, which contained mashed chick peas, sesame, olive oil, mandrake root, a falling star and the substance procured from the apothecary’s shop. The contents of the smaller bowls were dumped into the larger, then mixed and when this was done, the Hands tipped the large bowl forward, revealing a hommos-like substance that literally glowed—sort of nuclear, like.
“What’s that glow?” whispered Fleance Kazaza.
“Crystallized red phosphorus,” I told him, for it was not by mere fluke that I had won the coveted “Litmus Trophy” in prep school. The lights came on full, and while Lebanese sophisticates chuckled at what they considered a rare little jest, the villagers roared: “Walla, shufu el hommos el atomique!” which I refuse to translate. But I will tell you that they were smiling and jostling one another, and suddenly one of them leaned up to dip a finger into the hommos bowl. I tore up front and stopped him before he got a mouthful of phosphorus!