In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

EPILOGUE

SOON AFTER I arrived in New York I tried to call Nabeel in Baghdad. It wasn’t easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Iraq, but after days of trying all I got was a recorded message telling me that the number I had dialled didn’t exist.

In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while to put it through, but then the phone began to ring and a short while later I heard a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq.

‘Ai-wah?’ he said, stretching out the syllables. ‘Yes? Who is it?’

I knew at once I was speaking to Nabeel’s boss. I imagined him to be a big, paunchy man, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash-box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket and a carefully trimmed moustache. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to ask for it when they wanted to make a call.

It was late at night in New York so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must have just opened; they probably had no customers yet.

‘Is Nabeel there?’ I asked.

‘Who?’ said the voice.

‘Nabeel Idris Badawy,’ I said. ‘The Egyptian.’

He grunted. ‘And who’re you?’ he said. ‘Wa mîn inta?’

‘I’m a friend of his,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s his friend from India. He’ll know.’

‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘From where?’

‘From India, ya raiyis,’ I said. ‘Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I’m calling from America.’

‘From America?’ he shouted down the line. ‘But you said you were Indian?’

‘Yes, I am — I’m just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please, ya raiyis …’

I heard him shout across the room: ‘Ya Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something.’

I could tell from Nabeel’s first words that my call had taken him completely by surprise. He was incredulous in the beginning, unwilling to believe that it was really me at the other end of the line, speaking from America. I was almost as amazed as he was: it would never have occurred to me, when I first knew him, that we would one day be able to speak to each other on the phone, thousands of miles apart.

I explained how I had recently been to Egypt and visited Nashawy, and how his family had given me his telephone number and told me to call him, in Baghdad. Suddenly, he gave a shout of recognition.

‘Ya Amitab,’ he cried. ‘How are you? Zayyak? Where were you? Where have you been all these years?’

I gave him a quick report on how I had spent the last several years, and then it was my turn to ask: ‘What about you? Zayyak inta?’

‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said, mouthing a customary response. Everything was well; he and his cousin Isma‘il were managing fine, sharing rooms with friends from back home. Then he asked me about India, about each member of my family, my job, my books. When I had finished giving him my news, I told him about his own family in Nashawy, and about my visit to their new house. He was eager to hear about them, asking question after question, but in a voice that seemed to grow progressively more quiet.

‘What about you, ya Nabeel?’ I said at last. ‘How do you like Iraq? What is the country like?’

‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said — everything was fine.

I wanted him to talk about Iraq, but of course he would not have been able to say much within earshot of his boss. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded as though someone was calling to him from across the room. He broke off to say, ‘Coming, just one minute,’ and I added hurriedly, ‘I’m going back to India soon — I’ll try to stop by and visit you on the way, in Baghdad.’

‘We’ll be expecting you,’ he said. ‘You must come.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell Isma‘il you’re coming,’ he said hurriedly. ‘We’ll wait for you.’

I heard his boss’s voice again, shouting in the background. ‘I’ll come,’ I promised. ‘I’ll certainly come.’

But as it turned out I was not able to keep my word: for a variety of reasons it proved impossible to stop in Baghdad on the way back to India. My breaking of that promise made me all the more determined to keep another: I resolved that I would do everything I could to return to Egypt in 1990, the following year. I had given my word to Shaikh Musa that I would.

I was certain that by then Nabeel would be back in Nashawy.

BOMMA’S STORY ENDS in Philadelphia.

At the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the heart of downtown Philadelphia, stands a sleek modern building, an imposing structure that could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of a great multinational corporation. In fact, it is the Annenberg Research Institute, a centre for social and historical research: it owes its creation to the vast fortune generated by the first and most popular of Americas television magazines, ‘TV Guide’.

Housed within the Institute’s resplendent premises is a remarkable collection of Judaica, including manuscripts of many different kinds. Among them is a set of Geniza documents that was once in the possession of Philadelphia’s Dropsie College.

The documents are kept in the Institute’s rare book room, a great vault in the bowels of the building, steel-sealed and laser-beamed, equipped with alarms that need no more than seconds to mobilize whole fleets of helicopters and police cars. Within the sealed interior of this vault are two cabinets that rise out of the floor like catafalques. The documents lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exquisitely crafted covers.

Between the leaves of one of those volumes lies a torn sheet of paper covered with Ben Yiju’s distinctive handwriting. The folio is a large one, much larger than any of Ben Yiju’s other papers, but it is badly damaged and almost a quarter of the sheet is missing. The handwriting on the remaining parts of the fragment is unmistakably Ben Yiju’s, but the characters are tiny and faint, as though formed by an unsteady and ageing hand.

The document is one of Ben Yiju’s many sets of accounts, but the names of the people and the commodities that are mentioned in it are very different from those that figure in his earlier papers: they suggest that these accounts belong to the years he spent in Fustat, towards the end of his life.

The document mentions several people to whom Ben Yiju owed money for household purchases such as loaves of bread of various different kinds. Much of the document is indecipherable, but amongst the sentences that are clearly legible there is at least one that mentions a sum of money owed to Bomma.

It provides proof that Bomma was with Ben Yiju when he went back to settle in Egypt in the last years of his life.

In Philadelphia then, cared for by the spin-offs of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ and protected by the awful might of the American police, lies entombed the last testament to the life of Bomma, the toddy-loving fisherman from Tulunad.

Bomma, I cannot help feeling, would have been hugely amused.

AN ENTRY IN my passport records that I left Calcutta for Cairo on 20 August 1990, exactly three weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Newspapers were already talking of plans for the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of American and European troops: the greatest army ever assembled.

My most vivid memories of the journey are of reading about the vast flood of Egyptian workers that was now pouring out of Iraq, and of looking for Nabeel and Isma‘il in the packed lounges of the airport at Amman, while changing planes.

In Egypt, everyone I talked to seemed to be in a state of confused apprehension: in the taxi from Cairo to Damanhour, the other passengers talked randomly of disaster, killing and vengeance. In the countryside the confusion was even worse than in the cities; Lataifa alone had five boys away in Iraq, and none of them had been heard from since the day of the invasion. Jabir, I discovered, was not amongst that five. He was still at home, in Lataifa, although he had been trying to leave for Iraq virtually until the day of the invasion. Shaikh Musa was well, but desperately worried: his nephew Mabrouk was one of the five who were away in Iraq.

Walking to Nashawy to inquire about Nabeel and Isma‘il, my mind kept returning to that day, almost exactly a decade ago now, when Mabrouk had come running up to my room, and dragged me to his house to pronounce judgement on the ‘Indian machine’ his father had bought. And now, that very Mabrouk was in the immediate vicinity of chemical and nuclear weapons, within a few minutes’ striking distance of the world’s most advanced machinery; it would be he who paid the final price of those guns and tanks and bombs.

Fawzia was standing at the door of their family house; she saw me as I turned the corner. ‘Nabeel’s not back yet, ya Amitab,’ she said the moment she saw me. ‘He’s still over there, in Iraq, and here we are, sitting and waiting.’

‘Have you had any news from him? A letter?’

‘No, nothing,’ she said, leading me into their house. ‘Nothing at all. The last time we had news of him was when Isma‘il came back two months ago.’

‘Isma‘il’s back?’

‘Praise be to God,’ she smiled. ‘He’s back in good health and everything.’

‘Where is he?’ I said, looking around. ‘Can you send for him?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He’s just around the corner, sitting at home. He hasn’t found a job yet — does odd jobs here and there, but most of the time he has nothing to do. I’ll send for him right now.’

Looking around me, I noticed that something seemed to have interrupted the work on their house. When I’d seen it last I had had the impression that it would be completed in a matter of months. But now, a year and a half later, the floor was still just a platform of packed earth and gravel. The tiles had not been laid yet, and nor had the walls been plastered or painted.

‘Hamdu’lillah al-salâma.’ Isma‘il was at the door, laughing, his hand extended.

‘Why didn’t you come?’ he said, once the greetings were over. ‘You remember that day you called from America? Nabeel telephoned me soon after he’d spoken to you. He just picked up the phone and called me where I was working. He told me that you’d said that you were going to visit us. We expected you, for a long time. We made place in our room, and thought of all the places we’d show you. But you know, Nabeel’s boss, the shop-owner? He got really upset — he didn’t like it a bit that Nabeel had got a long-distance call from America.’

‘Why didn’t Nabeel come back with you? What news of him?’

‘He wanted to come back. In fact he thought that he would. But then he decided to stay for a few more months, make a little more money, so that they could finish building this house. You see how it’s still half-finished — all the money was used up. Prices have gone up this last year, everything costs more.’

‘And besides,’ said Fawzia, ‘what would Nabeel do back here? Look at Isma‘il — just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do …’

Isma‘il shrugged. ‘But still, he wanted to come back. He’s been there three years. It’s more than most, and it’s aged him. You’d see what I mean if you saw him. He looks much older. Life’s not easy out there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Iraqis, you know,’ he pulled a face. ‘They’re wild … they come back from the army for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night: if some drunken Iraqis came across you they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they’d throw away your papers. It’s happened, happens all the time. They blame us, you see, they say: “You’ve taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we’re fighting and dying.” ’

‘What about Saddam Hussein?’

‘Saddam Hussein!’ he rolled his eyes. ‘You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there — there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you’re gone, dead.’

Later Isma‘il told me a story. Earlier in the year Egypt had played a football match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the two or three million Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets — they had exploded out of their rooms and into the streets in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette-recorders and television sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms — well-trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant, unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers.

‘You can’t imagine what it was like,’ said Isma‘il. He had tears in his eyes. ‘It was then that I decided to leave. Nabeel decided to leave as well, but of course he always needed to think a long time about everything. But then at the last minute he thought he’d stay just a little bit longer.

My mind went back to that evening when I first met Nabeel and Isma‘il; how Nabeel had said: ‘It must make you think of all the people you left at home when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.’ It was hard to think of Nabeel alone, in a city headed for destruction.

A little later we went to Isma‘il’s house to watch the news on the colour TV he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case, in the centre of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage of the epic exodus: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their TV sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.

There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.