Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  “After a ship was taken, she was purified with water and perfumes,” reported a British naval officer. “The crew was then led forward singly, their heads placed on the gunwale, and their throats cut, with the exclamation used in battle of Allah akbar!—God is great!”

  British gunboats eventually imposed treaties titled “Cessation of Plunder and Piracy by Land and Sea” and “Maritime Peace in Perpetuity.” On maps, the Pirate Coast became the Trucial States. But the truce was uneven, and peace in perpetuity lasted five years. When the British captain Felix Jones made his peacekeeping rounds in 1858, his business with one sheik included “restoration of a slave girl” stolen in battle and reparations for a British merchant “plundered of his whole venture.” Jones sailed out with no more than a “pledge” of future payment and returned a year later, only to become “a butt for the gun practice” of warring clans.

  * * *

  A similar script was now being acted out with supertankers, destroyers, and Silkworm missiles.

  “This is U.S. warship 993,” came a Tennessee drawl on Kochrekar’s radio. “Ship on starboard, please identify yourself and what are your intentions?”

  Another voice cut in, “Brown Hotel Roman Zebra. Supply vessel on port bow, please keep clear.”

  “Italian warship, this is Brother Charlie Gulf, do you read?”

  Nearby, one show-and-tell was concluding in more genial fashion. “British warship, this is Soviet warship. Thank you for identifying yourself. We wish you a bon voyage.”

  “Cheers,” a British voice replied. “A safe journey to you and your crew.”

  But the Tennessee drawl on warship 993 was still questioning its starboard stranger. “Who are you and what are your intentions? You have one-zero seconds to respond.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Then a high-pitched cackle screeched onto the radio waves.

  “It’s the Fil-i-pino mon-keeee. Who wants some of my Fil-i-peeeno ba-naaan-a?”

  Kochrekar laughed, nudging Jesudasyn awake. “It is our monkey friend,” he said, as the radio filled with screams. The voice belonged to a renegade radio hacker, code-named Filipino Monkey, who liked to break in at tense moments with obscenities and animal noises.

  “The monkey is horn-eeeeeeeeeee!!!! Who wants some bananaaaaaaaa!!!!”

  Another voice shouted, “Monkey, we will find you and you will die!”

  Shippers had been trying to trace the monkey for several years, without success. “I have given this matter much thought,” Kochrekar said, serious again. “I do believe there now may be more than one monkey.”

  When the warships passed, Kochrekar picked up the radio to chat with a few of his fellow captains, usually in Hindi. There were also captains from Korea, the Philippines and Pakistan. It was the same as on shore; everyone but Arabs was doing the Arabs’ business.

  As the morning wore on, Kochrekar draped his arms across the wheel, staring lazily at the water. Lawrence came up from below and sat flipping through an Indian tabloid with a headline that read: “Housemaid Recalls Freud’s Daily Life.” And Jesudasyn, a recent convert to Christianity, studied a fundamentalist text, written in Tamil. The cover showed a crowd of copper-colored people moving toward a flaming pyre. A few survivors emerged on the far side of the blaze to ascend a tall flight of stairs toward a shimmering crown. Fire and brimstone, Hindu-coated.

  Jesudasyn began reading aloud, and Lawrence told him to stop. “Jesudasyn, please,” he said through clenched teeth. It was an old spat, deepened during long empty days at sea. Jesudasyn glanced up and said curtly, “Go to your curry, man.” Lawrence ducked below, and Jesudasyn resumed his reading. I closed my eyes, afraid he might ask me to “please explain” some aspect of Christian theology. We had spent the hour before dawn discussing whether Mary was a virgin, and why it was that Jews did not believe Jesus was one of the messiahs. The morning heat made me groggy, and I drifted off to the lilting cadences of Tamil.

  * * *

  It was midday when Kochrekar shook me awake at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The captain knew this was the highlight of his passenger’s journey. It was through this narrow channel that a third of Europe’s oil passed, and half of Japan’s. It was here, too, that Iranians held the West ransom, training their guns on passing tankers, laying mines and threatening to close the channel. On tense days, an armada of destroyers, minesweepers and gunboats lurked in and around the strait, waiting for trouble. Shippers had dubbed this end of the Gulf “Silkworm Alley.”

  Like every news story that drags on too long, the Strait of Hormuz was also angling for some kind of record in the cliché department. In one week, screaming headlines had told me that America was Engulfed, in Dire Straits and Steering into Rough Water because Iran might mine the Oil Chokepoint, Straitjacket Hormuz, Turn Off the Tap on the Free World’s Energy Lifeline. The Strait of Hoummos, one colleague called it. I had to see the real thing before I drowned in the metaphorical one.

  What I saw, gazing into the brilliant midday sun, was an orange sea snake slithering past our bow and a dolphin poking its head above water. The rugged pink cliffs of Oman rose on one shore, the softer Iranian hills were shrouded in haze on the other. And in the thirty miles between lay an untroubled stretch of aquamarine.

  A lone gray supertanker chugged through the strait, spitting black smoke. Sandbags surrounded the bridge. Silhouetted against the tanker was an Omani fishing dhow with a rectangular white sail and an upturned prow, like a miniature Viking ship. As I watched through binoculars, six men in white robes and turbans draped hand-held fishing lines into the water and calmly hauled in one red snapper after another. Each time they reeled a fish in, they smacked its head against the wooden rail, unhooked it and dropped the newly baited line into the water again. The men smiled as they worked. It was the most contented labor I’d ever seen.

  “At night they burn paper fires in the stern so ships will not run them over,” Kochrekar said. Otherwise, the boats carried on as they had for centuries, oblivious to the turmoil around them. When I looked through the binoculars again, the boat had moved off and all I could see was a flash of white robe and red fish against blue water.

  I stepped onto the open deck and unbuttoned my shirt. The breeze tasted fresh and salty, the sun was warm and soothing on my chest. The Gulf looked clear enough to drink. A sea gull circled overhead. And I felt a sudden urge to dive in and swim through the World’s Most Dangerous Waterway.

  There was a shout from the bridge. I turned and saw Jesudasyn waving frantically at the water, just ahead. Kochrekar swung the wheel hard left as Lawrence rushed to the starboard rail. A circle of light flashed just below the surface.

  “My God!” Lawrence cried. We were on top of it now. “Sardines, thousands of them! Oh what I’d give for a net!”

  * * *

  We came ashore in Fujairah at dusk, just as a small fleet of fishing dhows headed out to sea. I ducked below when the coast guard pulled alongside and again as the harbormaster steered us into port. The Bombay agent hadn’t included me in his paperwork, and the ship’s log only listed three men having traveled through international waters.

  The crew tied up at the dock and settled in for another evening aboard their odd little capsule. Jesudasyn flicked through a collection of videos and chose The Ten Commandments. Lawrence put the finishing touches on the curry he’d been cooking all day. “Next time you are in Goa, you can meet my beautiful wife,” he said, spooning incendiary broth into my mouth.

  Kochrekar sat in the cabin, just as I’d found him the night before, studying charts beneath a twenty-watt bulb. In eight hours, after delivering supplies to a tanker due later that night, he would run the gauntlet again.

  “Another map for the shadows?” I asked.

  He smiled. “A man must be careful of the night.”

  There was much darkness and little light as I walked away from the water. Ahead lay a low concrete hut marked “Immigration”
and another evasive chat with Arab officials. Then the long trip back overland to Dubai. It had been an oddly peaceful day on the water.

  I turned to watch the sun sink into the Gulf of Oman. In the gathering dark, the sea and sky washed together in an even canvas of blue. Then the last bit of light drained away. And one by one the fishing boats ignited their paper flames, fanning out like fireflies across the night.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, back in Cairo, I came home to a message blinking on the telephone machine.

  “Tony, it’s Jack. Great story. Just a couple suggestions. Gimme a buzz.”

  I let the sweet taste of success wash around in my mouth. Three thou and a glossy magazine spread. Free-lancing, nothing to it. I dialed New York.

  “Jack, Tony.”

  “Tony! Hot stuff!”

  So hot it needed a rewrite. “Minor surgery,” he said. The problem was that the boat ride was a “tease”; sardines in the water weren’t drama enough. “Not a lot actually happens out there,” he said.

  This was true. Of course, if something had happened—a missile strike, say, or a close encounter with a mine—I would have had a much better story, pieced together from whatever notes floated ashore. But I promised to punch the story up and have it to him in a few days.

  There was one quick call from Jack after that, warning me that the Gulf conflict “has kind of disappeared from the news over here,” then nothing for several weeks. I didn’t need a coroner to tell me the story was dead; or, as they say in the trade, “spiked” (though computers have eliminated the need for editors to impale reporters’ copy on desktop lances).

  Then one day there was a message from Jack, asking me to call again. Of course! They’ve changed their minds!

  They had. But it wasn’t the story they’d reconsidered. “Remember I promised you a thou for a kill fee?” Jack said. He paused. “Well, it seems I overstepped my authority . . . .”

  I settled for five hundred, which about covered my overrun on expenses. Hanging up the phone, having just renegotiated my first kill fee, I wondered how much lower my free-lance career could sink.

  5

  CAIRO DAYS

  Ozymandias Slept Here

  Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur? Why try to think at all? The thing was impossible. One must bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.

  —MARK TWAIN, The Innocents Abroad

  Sayed took the corner recklessly, scattering chickens and swerving to avoid a water buffalo blocking the road. Traffic was bumper to bumper, the buffalo backed up behind a donkey cart whose rear wheel was stuck in the mud. The donkey brayed, the buffalo bellowed, the chickens cackled madly. We’d escaped the snarled streets of downtown Cairo for a gridlocked barnyard instead.

  Sayed glanced over his shoulder and flashed me a loopy grin. “Home, sweet home,” he said. His goggles were spattered with mud. He kick-started the motorbike and roared off through the animal jam, and into the tangled back alleys of Shubra.

  I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he’d tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English—or in any other language. “You sound as if you’re choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me. “Just choke. Forget the spaghetti.” He usually gave up after fifteen minutes and tutored me in the wiles of Cairo instead.

  “Carry heaps of one-pound notes, because no one will ever give you change in Egypt, even if they’ve got pocketfuls of it.”

  Or: “Always walk close to the curb, well away from the buildings. Otherwise you may find water or something worse raining down on your head.”

  The chubby, impish Egyptian promised to continue my education during a visit to his family in Cairo later that year. And so I found myself on the back of a motorcycle, clutching Sayed’s waist as he bent the bike around the corners of the neighborhood he’d fled eight years before.

  Shubra was once a rural quarter at Cairo’s edge, a tree-shaded suburb where the nineteenth-century ruler Mohammed Ali built his summer palace. It was now one of Egypt’s densest slums, with three million people poured into a space smaller than Central Park. The buildings clung so close to each other and to the narrow streets that they seemed to touch at the tops, like overarching boughs, crowding out the thin winter sun.

  Still, like so much of Cairo, Shubra retained a village air. It wasn’t just the donkeys and buffalo. It was also that someone at every corner recognized Sayed as he tore past on his motorbike, dodging potholes and pedestrians.

  “Ya Sayed!” a woman cried from four floors up. She was hanging veils and the long Egyptian robes called galabiyas to dry in a narrow patch of morning sun. Sayed sputtered to a halt and blew her a kiss. “One of my cousins,” he said.

  At the next corner, a man beckoned from a sidewalk café. He sipped thick Turkish coffee and took languorous puffs from a water pipe as tall as himself. “Another cousin,” Sayed said, pulling over for his fifth free coffee of the day.

  The men kissed each other on both cheeks in the affectionate manner that is obligatory between Arab males, and forbidden in public between men and women. Then they sat holding hands and blowing smoke rings, chatting about family, about work, and about the women walking past to the market. When a buxom teenager sashayed by, Sayed’s cousin let loose a low whistle and said something in Arabic that I recognized from my trips to buy food.

  “She’s got onions?” I ventured.

  Sayed frowned. “Third lesson, you’ve forgotten.” The word was garlic. “She’s got garlic. Meaning she’s hot. Spicy.”

  Two men, one tall, one very short, rode up on bicycles and cadged cups of coffee from the cafe’s owner. “In honor of Sayed’s visit!” the short one cried in a strange, high-pitched giggle. Sayed leaned over and whispered, “Hashish speaking. When he’s not so high, he uses the bike to snatch purses.”

  “Another cousin?”

  Sayed smiled. “I have lots of cousins. Last time I tried to remember them all I lost count at three hundred.”

  The tall man had milky eyes and a sly, gap-toothed grin. Sayed introduced him as Port Said, a nickname that referred to his skill at smuggling goods past customs officials at the Mediterranean port. Port Said stood up and proudly pantomimed his technique. Several jackets, worn over ten or so shirts—each pocket crammed with calculators and camera gear—and a bowlegged walk that concealed the small television set wedged between his robe-covered legs. He had a female accomplice who was always nine months pregnant with electronics strapped to her belly.

  “Do you need anything?” Port Said asked.

  “Yes, desperately,” Sayed said. “Someplace to pee.”

  The men laughed and we climbed back onto the motorbike. Sayed kicked the accelerator and enveloped us in dust and fumes. We made it as far as the next corner before the owner of a produce stand rushed into the street, kissing Sayed and stuffing his pockets with bananas and cucumbers. “You see why Egyptians are so fat,” Sayed said, thumping his ample belly, “and why Egyptian storekeepers are so poor.” At the next corner, a one-legged woman approached, holding a crude wooden crutch with one hand and using the other to balance a basket on her head. A duck poked its bill above the rim and squawked. Sayed slowed down, slam-dunked the bananas into the basket and sped around the corner, into the street where he’d been raised.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he sighed, parking beside his family’s motorcycle shop. Chains, carburetors and dented cans of diesel lay strewn across the unpaved road. Men with grease on their faces came out to greet us, offering the backs of their hands to avoid blackening our palms. “Runs like a dream,” Sayed lied, wheeling the bike inside. The garage was cluttered with motorcycle designs I’d never seen, except in old movies. Clunky machines with huge hooded fenders. Blunt-nosed sidecars. Wheels big enough to fit on snowplows.

  “I bet some of this is left
over junk from El Alamein,” Sayed said, referring to the World War II battle site near Alexandria.

  At the back of the shop, a man clutched a dented spray can and frantically spattered a new white car with blue paint.

  “That car’s got garlic,” Sayed said slowly, in Arabic, so I’d catch the joke. Then in English: “It’s so hot the cops will probably be here by lunchtime.”

  * * *

  It was the Cairo I’d glimpsed from taxi windows and during walks through the city, but failed to penetrate for lack of a guide. Perched in my twentieth-floor apartment on an island in the Nile, I’d read Naguib Mahfouz novels about Cairo slums crowded with opium addicts and con men like “Zaita the cripple-maker,” who rearranges the limbs of aspiring beggars—and takes a cut of every cent they earn. I’d taken Mahfouz’s city for a Cairo that had long vanished, or perhaps had never existed. But here it was, hot and dusty and close, and here they all were: the car thief, the smuggler, the hash head.

  There was honest labor as well, though it wasn’t hard to see why so many hustled instead. A pile of logs sprawled at the end of Sayed’s street, beside a weed-covered rail line. Brawny men hewed furniture and split firewood with rusty axes as women stooped before each workshop, collecting sawdust in baskets. Sayed said the sawdust was used to soak up the dirt on the floors of their homes—jerry-built sheds of scrap timber, chinked with mud. Children gathered out back, competing with goats to salvage whatever they could from a mountain of smoldering rubbish. They worked intently, pausing only to fling orange peels and rotten tomatoes as the occasional locomotive chugged past.

  I had seen the same industry applied to garbage all across Cairo. Each dawn, Coptic Christians in donkey carts wound down from the desert hills to gather the city’s rubbish, carrying it back to pick through and recycle. What they couldn’t use, they fed to their pigs. The donkeys knew the way so well that they hoofed through the dark without harnesses while their drivers, often children of six or seven, slept in the cart’s front seat.