Beer in the Snooker Club (Serpent's Tail Classics) Page 6

  ‘I don’t think you would ask the Communist Party even if they could help,’ Brenda said. Brenda was the youngest and somehow different from her sisters. She wore a plain, neat dress and was simply combed, whereas Jean and Barbara wore trousers and had their hair in pony tails; which didn’t suit the eldest, Barbara, at all.

  Dr Dungate looked at us apologetically and smiled.

  ‘We have four different political opinions in this house,’ he said, ‘and I am supposed to be wholeheartedly in support of each one of them. John belonged to the Communist Party until recently, but is now disillusioned. Brenda is a communist and was selling the Daily Worker at eight o’clock this morning. My wife is simply liberal, and my two other daughters vote Labour. We have four daily papers in the house: The Guardian, the Daily Herald, the Daily Worker, and four weeklies; the …’

  ‘You forgot The Times, Dad,’ John said.

  ‘Yes, and The Times.’

  Jean was interested in Font. She had a lazy, comfortable look about her and politics didn’t interest her.

  ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’re boring Font and Ram with all this.’

  ‘Not at all,’ we said.

  ‘Well, I’m for a pint before lunch,’ she said. ‘Who’s coming with me?’

  No one answered.

  ‘Come on, Font; you and I’ll have a pint together and you can talk to me about the Nile and the Pyramids.’ She caught his hand and pulled him up. I wanted to drink too, were it only to shake me out of this lethargy of gratitude and shyness.

  ‘We’ll all go for a pint,’ John said. ‘Come on, Mummy.’

  ‘No, dear. I can’t go and I don’t want your father to drink today; he has to work this afternoon and it will only make him sleepy.’

  ‘But I’m taking Font to another pub,’ Jean said, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of your politics.’

  ‘Font, you’ve ‘ad it, she taykin’ a fancy ter yer.’

  Font laughed embarrassedly.

  ‘I’m going to seduce you, Font,’ Jean said. ‘Don’t you love me a teeny-weeny bit?’

  ‘I love you all,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t that sweet,’ Mrs Dungate said. ‘Now off all of you and don’t drink too much. Lunch at two o’clock.’

  We all went downstairs, putting scarfs and coats on and the girls using their mirrors. There is a certain solitude when a group of people is preparing to go out, which I always relish after sitting in tension at meeting new people and being rather tongue-tied. It is like leaving a party in full swing and going to the seclusion of the toilet for a few minutes with the receding noise to accentuate the privacy. I put my coat on slowly and wondered whether meeting these people and receiving their hospitality was really enjoyable. That moment of putting on my coat was the very beginning – the first time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging. But the cleavage was not complete then, the two forces had only just started to pull in different directions.

  Jean and Font went off to a different pub and said they would join us later.

  ‘That’s where I live,’ Barbara said, pointing to a window on the way to the pub.

  ‘Don’t you live with your parents?’

  ‘No; Brenda is the only one living with them. John lives in Baker Street and Jean lives in Swiss Cottage.’ This puzzled me. Dr Dungate’s house seemed large enough to house them all.

  We all drank beer in pints. Edna had already explained that if I were offered a beer in England, I must buy a round later on. I enjoyed carrying the glasses to the bar and saying: ‘Four pints of bitter, please.’

  ‘Brenda,’ I asked, ‘are you really a member of the Communist Party?’

  ‘Really?’ she smiled. ‘Yes, I am. I have been since I was fifteen.’

  ‘What do you think of Nasser?’

  ‘Here’s to Nasser,’ she said and drank her beer.

  ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘he imprisons communists.’

  ‘Yes,’ John said, ‘how can you drink to the health of someone who imprisons communists?’

  She didn’t hesitate: ‘I drink to anyone who deals imperialism a blow.’

  ‘That’s typical! That’s why I left the Party. Harry Pollit tells you to support Nasser, so you do.’

  ‘John dear, I know precisely why you left the Party.’ She possessed a type of calm reminiscent of Edna.

  ‘I gave the correct reason for leaving the Party.’

  ‘Correct, but not true.’

  ‘Ha! You make a difference between correct and true? Exactly why I left the Party. The “correct” tactics and propaganda had nothing to do with the truth.’

  I was enjoying myself. Not particularly because of what we were talking about, but because I was there in a pub with the ‘intellectuals’ I had read about in books, and because the girls were attractive, and because John was such a likeable person. It was natural to want to fit this environment to the books I had read, and to tell myself: here you are, Ram … ‘life’.

  Barbara told John she wished he’d go back to the Party and put a stop to all this bickering between him and Brenda. But they continued talking about the coming elections and whether the communists should vote Labour. The argument grew heated and even Barbara joined in.

  I was just over seventeen when I voted for the first and only time in my life. With my thumb. What I mean is, I pressed my thumb, voluntarily, on an inky pad and then pressed it again, where I was told, on a space next to a name. A boy called Kamal had said: ‘Tu veux faire la noce ce soir?’ I had nodded. ‘Come over then; best Scotch et puis on paye un petit poucet,’ I didn’t know what ‘payer un petit poucet’ meant, but I pretended that I did.

  I was at the university then. At last the monotony of school life had ended. The university: strikes, fighting policemen, shouting slogans, stealing sulphur and nitrates from the lab; life at last. And besides, I was in the best of the best – the faculty of medicine. No matter, of course, that my Arabic was deplorable, and that I was, according to a certain Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, proficient in literature and mathematics but certainly not in biology. No matter that hundreds of much better qualified people queued to be accepted by the faculty. I was one of the privileged; I had strings to pull. Not that I bothered to pull them; my mother, or one of my aunts, must have pulled one from the dangling assortment within her reach. I became: ‘II fait la medecine, ma chère.’

  We killed a certain Zaki Bey. I don’t remember who was in power then, I think Nokrashi Pasha, but I know Zaki Bey was head of the police and he came, together with fifty half-starved policemen, to the faculty of medicine. They had a dilapidated tank with them. After a lot of mechanical repairs and consultations, the tank’s gun was pointed at us who were on the roof of the faculty’s building, and an explosion took place. Some of us extended our hands, trying to catch whatever was emitted from the tank; but it never reached our outstretched hands. It fell, instead, with a thud, on a car belonging to my aunt which I had borrowed that day without permission. This made me very angry indeed. My aunt was bound to know I had taken the car, considering there was now a hole in its roof. I therefore helped catapult a bomb which had just been manufactured on the roof, and Zaki Bey died.

  I don’t remember which party I voted for, but we were given whisky and salted pea-nuts, after which we were taken in Cadillacs to vote with our thumbs. (Apart from Kamal, none of us was of voting age.)

  It was only when I went home that I learnt why Zaki Bey had died. He had ordered the Kasr-el-Nil bridge to be opened while a student demonstration was crossing it, causing death to six. A handsome funeral march, comprising half the police force and thousands of civilians was organized for him next day. Photographs of the procession were mournfully published in all the evening papers. Among the civilians in the photographs I noticed the presence of a few future brilliant scientists, including Kamal. They were the ones who had manufactured the bomb on the roof of the faculty of medicine the day
before.

  The usual two-months’ closing of the faculty was ordered and most of us went to the beaches of Alexandria.

  The university reopened and again I had to choose a political party to belong to. Roughly, there were the following: the Wafd, the Ikhwan (Moslem Brotherhood), the Communists, and the anti-Wafd.

  The Wafd paid well provided you were a good orator and organizer of strikes. They gave you a car and, I was told, free drinks at the Arizona or the Auberge – I forget which. The Ikhwan was a fearsome thing to belong to. You could be ordered to shoot anyone at any time in cold blood; they paid you with promises both earthly and otherwise, and you had to be active even when the university was closed (as a Copt, I would not have been able to join that one anyhow). The Communists were the respectable though secretive ones; the hard-working, the intelligent, the quiet. No rewards, only risk of imprisonment and misery to the family. The anti-Wafd was the most popular, and was joined by socialists, anarchists, university-closing fans, semi-idealists, progressives, and most of the middle class.

  I didn’t join any party, but contented myself with being devoted to ‘evacuation’ and was always the first home whenever a strike was suggested as a blow to British imperialism.

  Kamal came to the lab one afternoon wearing a three-weeks’ beard, which meant that he had become a member of the Ikhwan.

  ‘Infidel,’ he said, ‘can you steal the chemistry storeroom’s key today?’

  I replied that my examinations were next day and that anyhow I would have nothing to do with the Ikhwan. He said that although he had recently joined the Ikhwan, this was a job for the last party to which he had belonged. He then wrote down seven examination questions, telling me to expect them in next day’s paper. I started to tell him that I didn’t need the questions, thank you very much, then I gave a bit of a start; the questions he gave me were all very different from those I had bought for twenty-five pounds the day before. Furthermore, it would have taken me at least three days to prepare the answers to the questions he had just given me. A mistake, it seemed, had been made. Rewards had been given to the wrong students.

  Next morning I walked rather dejectedly to the examination hall; I would barely be able to answer three out of the seven questions. I was greeted with the news that the examination hall had been burnt down and that examinations would be postponed for ten days at least.

  Kamal’s picture next appeared in the procession consequent to the killing of Nokrashi Pasha, and also in that following the killing of Sheikh-el-Banna, head of the Ikhwan. Just before the revolution Kamal owned two cars, a villa on the Pyramid Road, and a flat in town. I met him once after the revolution. He was riding a number six tram to Shubra, a handkerchief round his neck to protect his collar, wearing an old brown suit and brown plimsolls.

  ‘My market has been closed,’ he said sadly after a flowery greeting. ‘You infidel,’ he added with a smile.

  Font and Jean came back from the pub they had chosen. I asked Font whether he remember Kamal.

  ‘Which Kamal?’

  ‘Kamal Hassan.’

  ‘Kamal Hassan? … oh, Kamal Hassan in our first university year. Yes; what, is he here?’

  ‘No, no. I was thinking of him.’ But Font appeared worried and wasn’t paying much attention.

  ‘What’s the matter, Font?’ We were walking behind the others on our way back to the Dungates’ house.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Jesus, Font; here we are, London and everything. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You look so perplexed.’ We walked for a while in silence.

  ‘You know, Ram, that wound I received from a bloody Englishman in Suez?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jean was telling me how good the English really are and that I shouldn’t listen to what people – or “foreigners” – said. So I showed her my scar and told her how I got it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She said she was very sorry I had been wounded, and then told me her cousin, a girl, had been caught and raped by several Egyptians in Suez and her body was found naked near a stream.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well? Isn’t it enough for you?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Font?’

  ‘Isn’t it horrible we can do such things?’

  ‘We? Have you gone mad, Font? What damned business was it of hers being there when she knew quite well she wasn’t wanted?’

  ‘There is a difference between harassing the British troops at Suez and murdering a woman.’

  I didn’t see why Font wanted to spoil a nice day with such things.

  ‘It’s a wonder they’re so hospitable to us after what happened,’ he said.

  ‘After what happened?’

  ‘Their cousin murdered.’

  ‘A wonder? It’s a wonder we speak to them at all.’ I was getting a bit angry with Font. ‘Have you forgotten all those who died while with us in Suez? I suppose you are all set to becoming something like my cousin Mounir.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t be stupid, but …’

  The others waited for us to catch them up so we stopped talking. But for the first time a rift had appeared between Font and me.

  We left after lunch. John had talked to me for an hour on how to try for an extension of our stay, and Font was to go drinking with Jean later in the evening.

  ‘Well, Font, what do you think?’ What Font thought was, that if in the next election the Labour Party came into power, there wouldn’t be any more trouble in Suez.

  ‘I don’t mean that, Font. I mean today and meeting the Dungates and all that.’

  ‘I think we should read the New Statesman with more attention. It does reflect the views of many …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Font. I’m not talking politics. Just being there and going to the pub and the lunch and all that.’

  ‘Jean was telling me Mr Bevan often goes to their house.’ I didn’t speak any more until we reached the hotel.

  ‘What about Jean?’

  ‘She’s nice; but I’ve taykin’ a fancy ter Brenda.’

  I went to Edna’s room and lay on her bed. I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. I saw myself in a large pub, a pint in my hand, giving a speech to hundreds of Johns and Jeans and Brendas. It was a beautiful speech full of witticisms and quotations, telling them all about the cruelty and the misery the English have inflicted upon the millions; and my passion rose so much that I push my pint away untouched, and all their faces were watching, intent and ashamed. And, after a fiery condemnation of their acts, I said: the English are a race apart. No Englishman is low enough to have scruples, no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain power. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself he wants it. He waits until there comes to his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants … and then he grabs it. He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude to take. When he wants a new market for his adulterated goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary, the Englishman flies to arms in defence of Christianity, fights for it, conquers for it, and takes the market as a reward from heaven.

  This speech wasn’t Bernard Shaw, but my own spontaneous composition. And at the end there was a colossal silence and then a phenomenal ovation with tears in some eyes and all the women begging me to be their lover. But I walked away, disgusted and lonely in the misty night with the burden of all injustice weighing on my heart. But no sooner had I reached my squalid and dingy room, than Edna was there, rushing into my arms full of love, telling me she had listened to my speech.

  The door opened. Edna came in, and sat on the bed.

  ‘How is your visa, Ram?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you, how is yours?’

  ‘I never have trouble with visas.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My father
is very rich.’

  ‘No; it’s because you’re Jewish.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Is an Egyptian Jew ever refused a visa to France or to England?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘You know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  I pulled a book from under the bed, written by someone in the British military hierarchy: ‘Furthermore, the Jewish colony in Egypt would support any attempt to re-occupy the country’. He gave this as an additional reason for the occupation of Egypt.

  ‘I haven’t brought you here to pick up racial prejudice,’ she said.

  The ‘haven’t brought you here’ didn’t penetrate for a while.

  ‘Turn to page sixty,’ I said. ‘You’ll find: “And, no doubt, the Coptic population would more than welcome it.” ’

  ‘There are thousands of such stupid books,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t brought you here’ I remembered. In ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t have thought about it. But today was different. I was acquiring a taste for analysis.

  ‘Why did you bring us here?’

  ‘Because you have been raving about coming to England for a whole year.’

  ‘Europe,’ I said.

  ‘Europe, then. Don’t worry, you’ll see much more of it before you return.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, after a slight hesitation. ‘Perhaps you should make the most of your next days here. You may have to leave soon.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I can manage to stay if I want. I can also pull strings if I wish.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, standing up. ‘This is not Egypt, you know.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ I said. I could see myself being nasty. It was a new thing to me. To be naturally angry was not new; but to be deliberately nasty was a new sensation.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ram?’

  Having met what I took to be intellectuals, I was now going to use some of their jargon.

  ‘I’m fed up with being patronized,’ I said.

  She was hanging her coat up as I said that. I saw her stand still for a moment. Then she hung her coat and came back to the side of the bed.