Resurrection

Three summers ago--a geological ice age ago. it now seems--I was carried in an Israeli jeep, lare one afternoon, to the northern canal town of El Qantara. Ahead of us, a vague lemony sun glowered low over a measurelessly yawning sandscape singed and blasted to that brute simplicity of a terrain fit for the performance of human slaughter, still idly littered here and there with rusted scraps of machinery left from 1967, with distant tanks bluffly surging through fuming wallows of dust. The jeep was driven by a young Israeli lieutenant who had the improbably chaste and frail and bespectacled face, under his bulky helmet, of a lost acolyte. Reaching El Qantara--now a mute, battered, pocked ghost town--he banged with a sudden headlong viciousness through its empty wrecked streets as if pursued, sluing to a stop at last at the sunken fortifications along the canal. This was the Bar-Lev Line--a labyrinth of sandbagged slopes of gray grassless dust, resembling deep gulches of ashes, strung with a white ribbonry that fluttered in an oddly thin and dingy sunshine, a light that seemed tarnished with some dark glister of lethality and menace. We made our way clumsily down a steep blind passageway, in a barging clatter of boots and helmets--abruptly blundering into a bunker, and the stricken stare of an officer, obviously just wrenched out of sleep by the clamor of our descent, sitting with a rigid erect immobility on the edge of a cot in the feeble glare of a light bulb. He was a plumpish man, nearing middle age. his thinning hair blowsily ruffled. Taped to the corrugated-tin sheeting at his back was a child's crayon drawing, on notebook paper, of flowers and clouds and birds. To the dim humming of an electric generator, he continued to stare at us, murmuring only a few halting phrases with an expression of helpless terror--not quite able yet to gather himself back out of the cold, dreadful nothingness into which he had awakened at the sudden clumping of boots and clanking of helmets down the tunnel toward him.

• • •

Some three years later, then, what had been in that officer's astonished eyes at last happened--it came like a thunderclap in the early-morning hours of October 6, 1973. Reports afterward cited radio messages from Israeli sentries, the brief hectic static of their tiny crackling voices shortly vanishing into an empty hush. "Thousands of them are swimming toward us. ... My God! It's like the Chinese coming across. ..."

A few weeks later, as part of a small company of journalists, I am once again carried to the Bar-Lev Line, this time in an Egyptian jeep, lurching over the clattering planks of a makeshift bridge across the canal, through a ceaseless dusty churn of trucks and soldiers and tanks. We stop for a few minutes where the scorched hulks of several Israeli tanks lie capsized and atilt against sandbanks, and an (continued on page 116) Resurrection (continued from page 106) Egyptian major clambers up onto one of them, pointing into the flung-open turret and announcing, "See--their bread is now toast inside here." At the line itself, finally, we wander over high bluffs of rubble, a vast crater with the agape entrances of collapsed bunkers under long massive landslides of wire-bound boulders--a strangely inexplicable chaos of absolute ruin beyond the work, it seems, of any known war engines, as if that intricately and cunningly constructed complex of passageways and bunkers and air vents had been plowed through effortlessly by some titanic egg beater; more, as if the very earth here were in a state of enormous arrested upheaval. After a few moments, I realize, with a light brief float of dizziness, that this is the same site I had visited back in 1970.

Returning to the jeep, we drive through El Qantara and out into the desert: a vast pale moonscape emptiness in which one senses only gradually, glimpsing tiny innumerable momentary stirrings of some dense infestation like prairie dogs or trap-door spiders under that mute blankness, that one is moving through an army. Smacking windily down the rippled thin road, we approach a toppled mileage sign, left lying across the pavement. The driver slows, then begins to head around it when he notices, in the far distance, the idle approach of another vehicle. Peering at it for an instant, he suddenly, savagely wheels the jeep around in a spume of dust, shrilly flurrying Arabic blasphemies to the soldier beside him, who turns to explain, "That is Israelis--Israeli lorry." That casual and haphazard, it turns out, is the line between the two armies.

We pull off the road here and trudge up a long slope of sand to where an Egyptian detachment nests in foxholes and tents on a ridge. There, an Egyptian soldier effuses, "What it was like, I tell you. Two-thirty in the morning--and the sun come up."

• • •

"Unbelievable," I remember someone muttering back in the States at the first news reports of the Arab offensive. "They have gone mad again. They have flat invited destruction now." To be sure, it did seem a reelingly suicidal gambit, providing Israel exquisite occasion for effacing once more all the fretful prospects of peril and harassment from Egypt and Syria that had slowly begun accumulating from the wastes of 1967. But then, as the actual pitch and heave of the fighting began to emerge in further reports through the following days, it prompted successive vertigoes of incredulity, bemazement. One kept thinking, for some reason, of Cornwallis' band, when the British found themselves surrendering at Yorktown, loudly bleating forth The World Turned Upside Down.

But it began to turn out to have been, whether accidentally or not, an act of genius--in the sense that few could have speculated how that single feat of arms, however stunning in itself, would subsequently ramify beyond all its military consequences, to completely overhaul the scenario of the implacable impasse there since, really, 1948.

• • •

When I arrived in Cairo three years ago, transported by a toylike taxi from the airport into the city, it was--as I realized later when writing about it--like entering some uproarious implosion of time. It was a civilization, a people living still in the lingering silts of the imperial presences here through their 4000 years' experience--the Pharaohs, Alexander's Greeks, the Caesars, the Turks and the Mamelukes, Napoleon, the Europeans. But they were absorbed, finally, in an even older communion with the immemorial sensuous murmurs of their ancient earth with an endless succession of dirt side streets like tunnels, each filled with weltering commerce in fruit, fly-buzzed slabs of bread, tallowy animal carcasses, tin trinketry, aphrodisiacs, hot tea, seething tumultuously into infinity. At the same time, they seemed still, dazed with God--his name, after Ra and Amen and Zeus and Dionysius and Christ, now happening to be Allah. With a moan of desperate mortal earth-bound loneliness in the sunset cries of the muezzins from the mosque towers, their celebrations of Allah were like brokenhearted and lingering howls of longing, abject and perishing and full of some primordial and inconsolable woe: prostrate, patient, imploring.

Egypt was finally one immense turn of time older than any memory, any past in the Western Hemisphere--old beyond one's ken. There was a look of worn casual slovenliness in its streets, a vague indelible grime and stain of dinginess simply from the passage of so much time, that tends always to affront, at first, American sensibilities. Only in a desultory, half-attentive way, actually, did they seem to be laboring to haul themselves--with a hectic clashing of truck gears, in a haze of gas fumes and plaster dust, streetcars clanging with a dry vicious snapping of sparks under a ganglia of power lines--out of the ponderous inertia of those accumulated centuries into the brave new technological age.

It was during the season of the khamsin wind when I was there then--a hot gale that, every spring, gathers unaccountably out of the measureless wastes of desert around Cairo and, for 50 days, blows unabating in fitful, demonic gusts, bumping against the glass doors of the hotel rooms in the early mornings with high thin dry grieving whistles, whisking wide flurries of grit and dust down the streets, guttering the robes of the fellahin and tattering the hair of women, fanning down the surface of the Nile in successive shiverings like glitterings of tin foil in the bright sunlight, before it ceases, with a last small, hushed sigh, just as abruptly and unaccountably. It was as if, in that fierce barging of wind then, some dull, flat, hot coma were abiding over all of Egypt--a torpor of weariness and inadequacy and enervation. It owed. I realized eventually, not just to the defeat in 1967. As I was later to write, since 1948 Egypt had found itself, through a curious accident of history, suddenly next to a society, Israel, invented whole right out of the 20th Century: a robust Western technological democracy installed abruptly in the immediate neighborhood of an alien, older people--and thus necessarily, unbearably unsettling Egypt's own intimate, comfortable sense of itself. The conflict between Israel and Egypt was really one between two centuries, a war between the present and the past, between 20th Century man and pretechnological man--nothing less, in fact, than a blind and violent collision between two alien dialectics of life and experience, thrown by a random convolution of history into sudden rude adjacency.

As a result, Israel's mere existence among them constituted a deep intimidation for Egypt and the Arabs. It was a trauma something like culture shock and had produced, at least in Egypt, the most phantasmagorical array of dreads and paranoias, a general malaise of spirit impossible to exaggerate.

After pitching down a number of raw Scotches late one evening, a sturdily prosperous Egyptian businessman blurted, "Well, we are aware of what Israel and the West think of us. They want to do with us precisely what you Americans did with the Indians--their cavalry comes in and takes our lands, and then they move their settlers in. Because we are all half savages, yes, we are half civilized, and the only way to deal with us is with force. That's how we're looked on. But all these new buildings here--they're pretty impressive, aren't they, to have been built by monkeys? But to hell with it. Why should I have to explain, to be defending all the time?"

In a bar another evening, an Egyptian commercial pilot--a blandly pleasant and cheerful soul--was asked, "Just why is it that the Israelis seem to keep shooting down your planes all the time? You and I know that your MIGs aren't all that inferior to their Phantoms."

Mulling for a moment over the rim of his glass with a muzzy, abstracted, amiable little smile, he offered, "I guess it's just the difference between their pilots and ours. It takes our pilots about four years to reach anything like the level of skill that an Israeli reaches in only a year. It just seems we lack the mental acumen they have, that's all."

At the same time, the Egyptians betrayed a peculiarly poignant, almost mystical reverence for the glamors of Western technology. In fact, it was as if the explanation for all their confoundments with Israel reduced finally to a simple matter of machinery, mechanical devices, hardware. Particularly did they hold in awe American technology, which only compounded their phobias about Israel, which had come into possession of all its witchcraft: It was as if American technology had become the supernatural rod of Moses--again and again, it had brought the Red Sea closing over them. (And, indeed, as it turned out, it was through their grim and sedulous application to the arcane sophistications of technology--Russian technology, as it had to be--that they did prevail. Failed and impotent against Israel in all else, it was hardware that finally spirited them across the canal.)

Yet they cultivated the most thorough and strenuous resentment of Israel's Western personality--its bluff pragmatism, brisk impatience with nice ceremonious amenities, its curt efficiency and assertiveness--all of which, as they put it, impossibly outrage Arab sensibilities and values. But the true psychic crisis for Egypt, one sensed, consisted of the fact that--out of its deep compulsive infatuation with the West--it knew, in its heart of hearts, it had not been able to contend with Israel precisely because Israel was more Western than it was: that by some mischievous prank of history, to defeat Israel or even to cope with her, Egypt would in an essential sense have to cease being Egypt.

• • •

I remember that, even in 1970, one sensed, however obscurely, that all the old equations of the Near East conflict since 1948 had already been fundamentally altered with Israel's spectacular triumph in the Six Day War.

It was as if Israel's almost effortless rout of the Arab armies in 1967 began, over the following months, to gradually and treacherously turn inside for her. That victory, for one thing, brought into definition at last that whole ragged and dislodged people who, since 1948, had been existing as a small replica of the Jews' own long condition of exile and dispersal--the Palestinians, bereft and abject and savagely unreconciled, no matter how their dispossession had actually come about. For the first time since 1948, there began to be speculations beyond the Arab world that perhaps the expiation and atonement for one monstrous 2000-year crime may have been purchased, quietly, at the price of another. Whatever, Israel's extended custody of the Arab territories taken in 1967--however unpremeditated, whatever genuine perils had precipitated it--had, in itself, elementally changed the terms of the whole struggle for Egypt. It has always been rather the Egyptian disposition to live in episodes, furiously and totally. That was why, after 1967, they were able to instantly conjure a Battle of Britain vision of their circumstances, which held for the an immediate passionate authenticity that encompassed all that had gone before, including the provocations that had landed them in that distress. An Egyptian professor would explain on my return to Cairo, "You see, we have for so long been a people of the land, a farming people, that the farmer considers the land a part of himself. It's even considered a great shame to have to sell land to a neighbor--you are selling a part of yourself. This is very important in the Egyptian mind. So, after 1967, it was different. When it came the moment to fight again, this time the Egyptian soldiers were fighting to regain a part of themselves."

At the least, having been in possession of Egypt's territory for six years, there was inevitably a certain emptiness to Israel's outraged invocations of Pearl Harbor when Egypt moved to take it back. As one Egyptian official would later argue, "They say we committed an attack of aggression. Well, I wish you would tell me, sir, how can you commit an attack of aggression against your own land?" Over the days of this second visit to Cairo, I would learn that, in a massive hushed ceremony up and down the length of the canal in the last dark hours before the crossing began, Egyptian troops one after another took the Koran briefly into their hands to vow they would relinquish their life before their weapons or their earth again.

"Those were really not our wars in '48 or '56 or even '67," an Egyptian woman was to explain with her lavish eyes glittering brilliantly. "Those were always somebody else's wars--Nasser's, the Palestinians', the Syrians'. But this time, this was our war. And in working with the wounded in the hospital, I have noticed one thing in particular about them--this time, they were all hit from the front."

• • •

Three years later now, high over the Mediterranean, the plane is booming dully into the flaring sunrise, and presently the edge of Africa, calm and prodigious, begins to ease forward from under the wings--a blank shore line, stenciled with a bitten exactness along the shimmering blue sea. Then the Nile Valley appears, again with that exactness of a map print on paper, ink-green against the blond wastes of the desert. As the plane is finally skimming in over the scrub flats at the Cairo airport, the cabin fills with clapping and whoops. "Touch the land! Touch the land!" With the short screeching scrub of the tires on the runway, as the plane rolls toward the terminal, an Egyptian youth--lithe and blackly bearded, with the haughty vain darkling glamor of a Persian princeling, a medallion slung on a gold chain over his turtleneck sweater--begins to dance in the aisle, his maned head lashing, fingers snapping, hips lasciviously coiling in some celebration of life primordially Egyptian.

"I was teaching my students The Waste Land right before the crossing, and having a great deal of difficulty in getting it across to them." She is an American, an English professor at a Cairo university, and she sits now, one morning a few days later, in her campus office, a bare bright room. "It was very peculiar, but I couldn't seem to find any terms in which they could address themselves to it. Its basic theme, you know, is resurrection through death--being sterile and unable to enter life because you are unable to face death. Then I realized the problem was that my students themselves and everyone else in Cairo were in a condition exactly like that--neither dead nor alive. But when the fighting broke out and the Egyptians crossed the canal, it was like the same sort of resurrection took place here. Suddenly, by having faced death, they all came fully into life. And I told my students, 'Now, I think I can teach you this, you know all that The Waste Land means.'"

A little later, in the courtyard outside, where students are gathered between classes around wicker tables under acacia blossoms, an Egyptian girl enthuses, "It has changed everything around me. Even the trees, they look different, as they've never looked to me before. Instead of leaves, they are all bearing flowers and fruit. Because when we crossed those bridges--just the fact it was done--we were transformed from cowards to heroes, from things to people again, all of us."

On the day I am taken to the front, to that solitary encampment huddled on a high ridge--where, on another ridge only a few hundred yards away, the tiny mute figures of Israelis are discernible moving about leisurely, pausing now and then to stand regarding us--an Egyptian soldier stalks through the sand, bareheaded and weaponless, to shout, "Hey, see there"--flinging his arm toward the other ridge--"the terrible Israeli. What he is doing way far out here, not in his bunkers at the canal? Hey?" He looses a short bray of laughter. "Yes, so far from his bunkers. Yes, I call to them sometime, Come, Israelis, like at the canal last time--come to see me.' His legs from here you can see tremble. He call back, 'No, no, I have now fear! You can come, we let you bring your gun.' I say, 'No, I not kill you today, I kill you maybe tomorrow.' " The soldier clamors on slightly out of breath, a bright grin on his darkly varnished face, deliriously, almost berserkly innocent of fear.

I begin to sense that some discreet but fundamental permutation has occurred in the streets of Cairo itself. In 1970, the (continued on page 234) Resurrection (continued from page 118) instant I emerged from the airport, I found myself in a constant clinging murmuration of beggars: The opening palms and plaintive whispered pleas for a tip, "Baksheesh, baksheesh," the unblinking beseeching eyes at once unhoping and ravenously gazing out of a condition of brute human desolation that stunned one at first, followed me through those days there like a soft unceasing siege of piranha fish. At the Sphinx, below the Pyramids, at the tombs of Luxor in the breathless heat far up the Nile, they kept materializing in the dust and sun glare like dark ragged apparitions, filtering through the ruins after one with tawdry scraps of gay cordiality scavenged over the years from passing Americans--"What's up, doc? Everything copacetic? All A-OK? See you later, alligator!"--until, after a while, their bold eager smiles in their burned spectral faces began to seem like the grinning of cannibals.

But this time, after a few days in Cairo, I suddenly realize that unflagging enterprise has vanished from its streets. The people themselves are still everywhere: fellahin with bony dust-powdered ankles briefly squatting along the slopes of the Nile, in the early-morning cool right after dawn, to defecate; mothers with sepulchral scorched-out faces hunkering in alleyways from which there gusts a reek like the breath from monkey pens, with small thistle-haired children at each bared breast--a humankind dwelling still in the primeval condition of the race, living from birth to death as close and quick to the dust as lizards. But now, passing them in the streets, no longer are there the opening palms and soft insistent supplications--merely flat, arrogant stares.

In a cab one morning, the driver--a bald and tankish man with his shirt collar turned up against his bulky neck in the manner of drive-in razorbacks in the Fifties suddenly booms, "You are English? No? American--ahhh. ..." Heaving forward in his seat, he shouts, "All Americans bad--very bad. They help Israelis to kill Egyptians. Russia--they sell to us, we pay, but all this ours, our ground, our things. But Americans. I tell you, they kill my brother, my sister--yes, in Suez, in 1967 with the Phantoms. If I know you American when I stop for you, I would say to you, No, I cannot take you in my cab." He lurches to a stop in the middle of an intersection, waving over a young traffic officer with huge swipes of his hand out the window, and after engaging him in a short vociferous exchange, announces, as the cab lunges on. with the officer glancing at me through the back window with a small sheepish smile, "Yes, see, he say also, all Americans bad. ..."

But when I cite his remarks to other Egyptians over the following days, they gape at me for a moment aghast, and then produce scandalized apologies: "Please, this was a nut. Did you get his name? He should be spoken to--no, it makes no difference about his brother and sister, it's outrageous. Intolerable." I find that, even though delivered across the canal by Russian technology and engaged now against American machinery being airlifted to the Israelis, they still nourish the same eager, oblivious, strangely touching affection for the United States.

A prominent Cairo citizen fumes one morning in his office, "Is just like you loving a girl, and every time you see her, she treat you nasty--again and again, say to hell with you. Soon, you begin wanting to say the same thing to her. What is wrong with the United States? Does it not realize there are 100,000.000 Arabs just dying to join with it and become a part of the West? What the hell do we have in common with these Russians--these Communist potatoes? I say this is one of the craziest marriages ever in history--but what goddamn choice has America given us?"

On the drive through El Qantara, the soldier riding in the jeep's front seat smartly spanks his automatic rifle when asked its origin and proclaims, "Is Russian. Is best." Then, stopping a few miles out of El Qantara. we stroll among the refuse of an Israeli Skyhawk, idly cuffing through scorched wads of metal strewn in a wide shattering over the sand, and I pause to read the trademark among the innards of its tail assembly, somehow with a quality of fantasy out here in the limitless barrens of the Sinai: Douglas aircraft company, long beach, California.

When we reach the small encampment on the ridge at the front, the soldiers come striding toward us over the sand with the cheerful hail, "Russies? Russies?" I at last aver, somewhat falteringly, that I am American. One of them grins, "So, yes, I have myself many friends in New York. I have no hate, only love in my heart for America. I ask myself, Why she give Israelis everything, us nothing? Ancient Egyptians, I tell myself, they make things for whole world. We don't know why Americans only give to Israelis to fight against us, why Americans don't make something for us. We don't want these Russians come here. Is true, yes. I feel friends with America. My darling, also, she lives with her father in California."

• • •

"When I saw the Egyptian flag flying again over Sinai soil, the civilization of thousands of years arose once again within me. The Egyptian soldier became for me a giant with the forehead of Ikhnaton, the profile of Khufu, the eyes of Nasser, the endurance of Ahmose I--I felt the slaughtered Osiris had come back to life, and Horus had strode across the canal to scourge and scatter the Israelis." This was written by a student from a delta farming village--a tall, sunsinged youth named Amin Hosny.

One evening, Amin and I sit in the apartment of an Egyptian socialite, a well-moneyed and mellow woman named Lilith who teaches drama at a Cairo university. Her younger sister, Simya--a trim and lissome ingénue, electric with a constant impatience, exuberant and poutish, strikingly evocative of Tolstoy's Natasha--slouches elegantly across the room by the stereo, sipping wine as she nourishes one of her swooping melancholies. But Lilith, after a bottle of Omar Khayyam beaujolais, has leaned her head back on the sofa to watch Amin. She has about her the exquisite darkness of a nightingale, her hair in the lamplight glistering black, her skin hued like honey. Presently, she murmurs, "Look at him--he is so innocent. Amin, you don't know anything, do you? He is your pure, your absolute Arab."

Amin, grinning helplessly, twists uneasily in his chair, emitting a kind of uncomfortable mewing, and keeps glancing uncertainly at Lilith, who, her head still laid back on the couch, continues to regard him with a rapt gaze through drifts of cigarette smoke.

Later, the four of us ride in Lilith's car to see a patriotic revue playing at a small theater somewhere deep in the inner hives of Cairo. The program begins a moment after we take our seats. The small spare stage blooms into light, with young performers in drab casual attire ranked around a girl huddling abjectly in the center of the stage, muffled up to her eyes in a black cloak. "She is Egypt," whispers Lilith. Then, to the spirited electronic squalling of a cabaret rock band behind them, the cast begins reciting breathless, urgent exhortations. Lilith, tilting her head close with a gust of sweet incense like myrrh from her hair, translates in low, lushly textured thrumming, "O Egypt, my blood is not too much for you. ... All I have to do is give my life for you. ..." Suddenly, one actor prances forward and strikes the stance, beside the girl's cowering figure, of a soldier holding a machine gun: a pose that has that awkward histrionic rigidity of all the combatants in the lividly colored, bombastic war posters around Cairo. This rhetoric of their bodies utters a sense of actual fighting that is strangely inert, graceless, unathletic, absent of any kinetic feel of movement and heft; as static, in fact, as those rigid angular figures in the tableaux deep in the tombs of the Pyramids.

Lilith husks: "It is the night they are to cross the canal." The actor's ringing incantations now come to me in her softly rustling murmur, "I am only a human being--I am thirsty, I can't do it. But I need only to be patient, to be patient, patient, patient. But, O rocks and mountains, clash and boom together, that I may stay awake. I don't want to die asleep--I won't close my eyes, because I don't want to die of terror."

Abruptly, another performer blares into a microphone the text of Communiqué Number Five--the official announcement by Egypt that it had gained the east bank of the canal--and everywhere around us in the dark there is an explosion of cheers and clapping. To a sudden jubilant bawling of the band, the performers chorus, "O Egypt! To wipe away the shame! Take away the black doom of 1967--cross, O my country, cross!"

And the girl huddled center stage gradually begins to rise, her face lifting with a rapturous expectancy as she slowly and elaborately unfolds herself from her shroud--a young peasant woman, brimmingly abundant, glad lips glimmering, gold hoops in' her ears, eyes blackly crackling as she opens her arms wide and sings, "I am your mother, your lover, your comrade--your everything." the audience now storming with applause and yelps of "Communiqué Number Five! Read it again, read it again!" and the chorus answering her, "Come, take me in your arms, warm me, bring me to life again. Teach us how to play the difficult games, teach us to be strong--we stand now in a row, volcanoes burning in our breasts, the soldiers, the farmers, the factory workers, the shopkeepers. ..."

As this litany continues, Simya suddenly sniggers, then turns to whisper between her fingers, "Oh, no. He just said also all the workers of the sewers--I'm sorry, it just sounded so funny." (Back in Lilith's apartment late that night, Simya again lounges low in the chair by the stereo, long and willowy and sleek, sulking luxuriously: "I just don't belong here. It's really so tediously serious and boring--even my sister, yes, you. You're all just so solemn and religious about everything now.")

But throughout the production, Amin leans forward in his seat, watching avidly, and afterward he confides with an air of gentle self-wonder, "You know, during the play--I must tell you, I cried."

• • •

The man who, almost singly, somehow effected all this--Anwar Sadat--is an eminently unheroic and prosaic figure, on the whole. Even in Egypt before October sixth, he tended to be viewed, with his recurrently evaporating ultimatums to Israel, as something of a farcical drudge--"a bad joke," as one student recalls. "It was Sadat's misfortune, in succeeding Nasser," reflects a journalist, "to be like a dusty tax-department bureaucrat trying to take the place of Napoleon." Instead, it was Qaddafi--Libya's fierce, gaunt, ascetic revolutionary prophet out of the desert--who quickly captured the reeling fancy of Egyptians, celebrated as "Nasser's son," with students in one Cairo demonstration tumbling through the streets behind a donkey adorned with a sign saying Sadat.

One morning, shortly after the ceasefire, a mammoth press conference for the 400 journalists then in Cairo is called in the central committee hall of the Arab Socialist Union--an expansive chamber whose decor could have come from random salvagings from some old movie-palace lobby, with a gargantuan chandelier overhead bejeweled in glass bijou tiles of orange, lime and sapphire. Sadat presently appears, strolling in soberly among a thicket of various deacon-suited government ministers--a tall, lank, bony man with the plainness of a sod farmer, wearing a crisply starched khaki army uniform. Settling himself behind the sheeted table on the dais, blotting his damp chin with a dab of a tightly folded handkerchief, he commences with, "In the name of God Almighty. ..." He first makes a curiously touching apology to the horde of journalists gathered before him: "I wish that you be considerate of our circumstances. This is the first time for us to face the situation we are facing today. Our information media, to be frank, is still to an extent timid, and we are not as skilled in the art of public relations as perhaps others are. One must confess one's drawbacks, and if our enemy is really excellent in anything, it is the art of public relations. ..." With that, he launches into a marathon official exposition of Egypt's perspectives on the circumstances at the moment, becoming steadily more animated in his chair, allowing himself quick, tautly measured gestures, one hand now and then circling and jabbing a yellow pencil sideways in the air. When he concluded, well over an hour later, he entertained a few questions selected from journalists' written submissions, beginning most of his answers with, "I think I have answered this question already. ... I believe I have replied to this question before. ..."

But however implausibly pedestrian a presence, he nevertheless acted on October sixth--at least that once--with a startling, almost supernatural brilliance. "Historical genius hardly ever comes in the dramatic person of a hero, anyway," one Egyptian intellectual is moved to reflect. "It much more often comes in the unlikeliest, most inauspicious and ordinary figures." And not the least of the casualties of October sixth, as it turned out, was Qaddafi--who, precipitously dismissing it all as "a light-opera war," instantly receded, at least for the time being, into an incidental and remote memory.

• • •

When I was there in 1970, I came upon a small, insular community of cosmopolitans, most of them vestiges of the prerevolutionary aristocracy who, dispossessed and cast adrift in history, remained in Cairo as a kind of inner émigré colony. They would gather every sundown at the Gezira Sporting Club on an island in the Nile, a genteel relic of England's long proprietorship in Egypt, sitting in small groups among its generous green lawns and bowering trees, with Mercedes quietly glimmering along the drives and waiters noiselessly floating back and forth under the trees, carrying trays of gin and tonics. Among them was a man in his robust 50s named Fawzi, whose family's firm had reportedly been making over $2,000,000 a year before Nasser and who had since managed to strike his own enterprising accommodations with the new order. "But you know, I just can't help feeling now and then that we were not meant for this age," he mused to his friends at the club one soft dusk, with small coronas of white gnats shimmering over the golf greens. "I just get this strange feeling sometimes that none of us really belongs in this century."

On the first Thursday of every month in Cairo in 1970, there was a concert by a 62-year-old Egyptian diva named Oum Kalsoum, who, for decades, had constituted a kind of folk-soul singer to the whole Arab world, speaking to them like some combination of Mahalia Jackson, Edith Piaf, Aretha Franklin and Judy Garland. She was, by any measure, a seismic cultural phenomenon, bringing private Caravelles and Learjets skidding into Cairo's airport, bearing sheiks and sultans and prime ministers from Morocco and the Sudan and Kuwait, for days ahead of each concert, which lasted from around ten in the evening until two in the morning. I went along with Fawzi for one of her performances while I was there--stopping off first at a night club a short stroll down an alley from the movie theater where she would sing: the appointed place where Cairo's underground of derelict aristocrats gathered before each of her concerts to get unanimously, swiftly, securely drunk. A few minutes after Fawzi and I arrived, a woman entered on the arm of a rather gorgeous and fluorescently scarved youth whom she advertised, a moment later, when she found Fawzi at the bar, as "a delightful creature. It just hasn't decided yet whether it is a boy or a girl, but isn't it pretty?" The woman had a pert browned elfin face, black eyes twinkling, her black mane of hair raked straight back, a neat compact woman as ripplingly supple as an otter, with a distinct sheen of money about her. Fawzi introduced her as Lani, an Egyptian heiress who had been schooled in Europe and who now, even under Nasser, was a formidable business figure in Cairo. "Yes," she sighed from Fawzi's shoulder, "but I'm not nearly so rich as I once was. But then, none of us are, are we, Fawzi?"

The night club was now impossibly crammed with these people, engaged in some collective ritualized abandon that had about it a curiously dated and archaic panache, as if they had arrived only now at the style of dissolution of Paris 40 years ago in The Sun Also Rises. Watching them, I began thinking a little melodramatically of a passage of William Styron's I'd recently read: "Dreaming loveless dreams ... that echoed among lost ruined temples of peace ... they stirred and turned ... painted with fire, like those fallen children who live and breathe and soundlessly scream, and whose souls blaze forever." Through the bedlam of their voices, there came occasional dim gusts of applause from the concert hall where Oum Kalsoum had begun to sing, like surf from some far innocent shore.

Finally, sometime after midnight, a group of us wandered up the alleyway toward the theater, carrying our drinks, and then stood collected in the half-light at the rear door of the auditorium. With the musicians ranged around her proceeding through an introduction, Oum Kalsoum sat with the motionless formality of an effigy in the center of the stage, her hands placed flatly on her knees. Dressed in a simple green gown, with a scarf nestled in her lap, she resembled, more than anything else, a somewhat dour and buxom great-aunt, her dyed black hair drawn back glassily into a bun. The salon orchestra around her, all dressed in tuxedos, meanwhile worked its way through what began to seem an interminably flourishing approach--an abject sawing of violin moans, twining endlessly through one another, with tremulous shiverings of a tambourine. It was, altogether, a stunning, wild old din out of the desert, that common genesis of the children of Ishmael, their primordial experience of fiery winds and fury and enduring brute ascetic travail flicked only sparingly with quick pleasures, like razor snicks, brief sweet raptures that sent the eyes whitely plunging. In the restlessly shifting multitude in the gloom below Oum Kalsoum, among the Saudi head drapery and Tunisian fezzes, there were the scattered luminescent glows of white bridal veils where couples, married only a few hours earlier, sat now on their wedding night in this heavy warm darkness. Still, she did not stir--sat waiting while the orchestra continued, the passionate voltages loose in the air still accumulating and arranging themselves toward that sudden ultimate perfect pattern point that would bring her to her feet. Once, when she abruptly bowed her head in acknowledgment of one particularly close swoop past the instant of truth, it brought a huge low convulsive groan from the audience, an amazed delicious Ahhhhh, with one man lunging to his feet and yowling entreaties to her until those around him whispered and waved him down. The air sweltered. Cats coiled up and down the aisles. And at last, unfurling her scarf with a stately whirl of her hand, she rose--touching off a detonation of cheers, a long voluptuous release of bellows and clapping. She stood composed until it had subsided, and then began, almost stealthily, to sing--her voice a winding wail filtering down, it seemed, through all the centuries from the twilight rooftops of Ur, the purple nights of Babylon, and having to do with the unutterably sweet anguish of love, that special Arab sense of love as a luscious misery, beautiful pain. As she sang, men in the audience lit cigarettes and then put out the match flame with slow gentle pinches of their finger tips.

"This is what it means to be Arab," Fawzi muttered beside me. "I never feel so Arab as when I listen to her sing. It's like going back to church after a long time away."

Lani had moved away from the rest of us, sitting alone now on the top step of the aisle, her back to us. She listened to Oum Kalsoum leaning forward with her arms wrapped about her, as if to enfold and warm some cold cavity of pain and lonesomeness.

After we had drifted back to the night club, Lani sat unsteadily on a stool at the bar, lost in Lethean fogs, peering at the others around her. "Look at us," she suddenly said. "Nobody in this place cares about anything. We don't belong to the present or the past or the future--we're lost in time. So we live like this every night. Nobody in this place is serious. But the hell is, we all have to wake up every morning in that different world and go out and face people who are different--who are serious."

• • •

But when I return this time, three years later, it's as if they have all scattered like wraiths into the air. I go back several evenings to the night club where they used to assemble but find it inhabited now by students, inherited by a simpler, fresher generation. At last, I find Fawzi in his office one morning--still effusive but with a certain earnestness about him now. "Did you know," he booms, "there was not a single crime reported in Cairo during those first few weeks after the crossing--not one incident? Yes, incredible! That's how much everyone here has been involved." He has even taken on a slightly sober political rigorousness, it seems. "I tell you, I cannot say too much for this man Sadat," he announces. "He is really something. He has my complete faith. The U. S. will never find again a hero in the Arab world who will cooperate with them if they do not take this opportunity to work with Sadat. He is the man with whom they must--they must--compromise." Twirling and flipping a strand of worry beads, he stoutly insists, "Oh, no, the personal life is not at all dead here--of course not! To the contrary!" Yet there seems, on the whole, a faintly elegiac air about him. After a while, he idly mentions that Oum Kalsoum has not performed now for many months: "I understand she's been ill," he reports solemnly. "In fact, I head someone say that she has cancer of the throat. Very sad. But, after all, she has been singing since she was six, and she is in her seventies now. She had a great career, a full life."

Finally, I ask, "And where is Lani now?"

"Lani? You wouldn't believe--she is working with the wounded in the hospitals, every night. She is absolutely committed, consumed with that hospital work. I haven't seen her at all for a number of months, actually. Nobody has really seen much of anybody lately."

An Egyptian matron confesses one afternoon, "Before I started working in the hospital, I had always kept a certain distance from the common Egyptians, with a little distaste for them. I felt they were really alien to me. But my soldiers at the hospital, they are all so pure and simple and heroic. It's wonderful to talk with these people, to touch them, to be lost among them." But all these egalitarian enthusiasms hardly indicate that the war has worked to democratize Egyptian society. Rather, all the earnestness in Egypt now--the plays in the theaters, Fawzi's exuberance, Lani's transformation, debutantes and dowagers solemnly absorbed in nursing duties at hospitals for the wounded--begins to seem peculiarly reminiscent of the war exaltation of 1917 in the United States. It is a renaissance that has taken the form of a quaintly archaic patriotism belonging more to the prenuclear theater of history than to the missile age. "I admit it's absurdly old-fashioned," the Egyptian matron continues, "but that is how we are experiencing it--we have almost a 19th Century feeling of grandeur and heroism. It's like that romantic nationalism of Napoleon's time, really--that feeling of honor and courage and martial splendor."

At the same time, though, something in their collective elation seems too vivid and feverish, somehow--too ecstatic. "There is a kind of manic-depressive syndrome in the Egyptian personality," a veteran American resident in Cairo observes one evening. "They tend to move back and forth from absolute euphoria to absolute despair. They just don't seem to have any middle range in their emotional spectrum. And what worries me is the low swing that will inevitably follow this particular high they're on now."

Even while I am there, one Cairo newspaper cautions, "Now the enemy is artistically trying to exploit our Oriental make-up, which fuses quickly with events positively or negatively, rising quickly to the climax of delirious joy and plummeting, just as quickly, to the pit of despondency unless it can find at all times material to assure and fortify this joy."

Sustaining this pitch of mood is their compulsively extravagant rhetoric--indeed, some have suggested that it is the inveterate flamboyance and theatricality of their language itself that have really caused all the mischief and confoundment in the Near East: that it is impossible to be temperate and sensible and pragmatic in Arabic. Whatever, it's another flourish of Egypt's not all that unfamiliar to a Southerner, as I first found in 1970. It has long been a Southern disposition--perhaps for similar reasons--to invest in words a disproportionate consequence and life of their own, to make of eloquence a reality in itself that can dispel and replace the insupportable reality at hand. In the same way. for the Egyptians, rhetoric has long served as a supplemental counterfeit to bluff circumstantial reality--a ceaseless sleight of hand and shadow game that has been going on so long it's as if the difference were no longer distinguishable to them. As a result, oratory itself is reported as serious news: new offensives are launched by pronouncement, threats themselves corner and cut off the enemy, ultimatums accomplish victory--developments that await only the petty vulgarity of actually taking place. The persistent interventions of gross facts, such as the defeat of 1967, are really something like periodic ransacking sucks from the black chaos of outer space that leave brief vacuums of disorder that rhetoric then rushes to fill.

As a result, propaganda assumes, for the Egyptians, an unusually critical importance: It is, in fact, everything. On this most strategic of all fronts--the forensic one--the Egyptian press through the days following October sixth is delivering such blockbusters as "Our thinking and plans were not as the enemy visualized them" ... "Egyptian military communiqué proves falsehood of enemy allegations and reveals inconsistency of his communiqués." Their reverence for polemics once prompts Egyptian newspapers--in accounts of a fracas in an Israeli P.O.W. compound between "an Oriental and a European Jew" over the European's complaint that the other's cowardice had caused their capture--to breathlessly recite as the Oriental's rejoinder that set them to flailing at each other: "I say, No! All disasters which have befallen the Israeli people are the result of the flopping aggressive designs worked out by Western Jews and the futile adventures in which they involve the Israeli people!" Only in Egypt could those be fighting words.

• • •

With Egyptian authorities unable to understand any curiosity ranging beyond official communiqués, I find some 400 journalists in Cairo milling in a kind of continuous subdued hysteria, confined in a kind of leisurely, implacably hermetic quarantine by censors. Most of them pass long afternoons in the vaguely mildewed gloom of the Safari Bar in the Nile Hilton, bawling loud, reckless slanders of various Egyptian press ministers, one journalist announcing one evening, "You know what this is like? This is like trying to cover the goddamn Super Bowl locked up in the goddamn basement latrine."

But it soon filters through our insulation that Egypt's Third Army is clearly stranded across the canal in the southern Sinai, its supply routes barricaded by Israel's sudden encircling foray across the Great Bitter Lake. About this time, I attend a dinner party late one evening in the home of a West German diplomat, with several members of the Egyptian culturati--including, I am happy to see, Lilith--sifting in to join assorted folk from Western embassies in Cairo. Among them is the West German press attaché, a swart stubby little satyr, with a brisk and distinctly undaunted Junker manner about him, his right cheek seamed by a waxen scar. (The next afternoon, in the Safari Bar, a Reuter's correspondent chortles, "Oh, yes, that chap. You heard about his little exchange with the Russian press attaché at some party not long ago. didn't you? A huge ox of a fellow, this Russian. He and the German got into a rather hot quarrel over something, and finally the German declares to him, 'I'll have you know, sir, that my father starved to death on the Russian front,' and the Russian looms over him, points his tremendous finger at the German's chest and says, 'Yes, and don't you ever forget it, either.'")

About midway through dinner, the conversations up and down the candlelit table abruptly dwindle as the German is proceeding to explain to Lilith, with a toneless metallic precision, how it is impossible to avoid concluding that the Third Army is cut off: "Look, it is logically irrefutable. All transport in the area must be admitted through Israeli check points, no? There are pleas from the Red Cross for provisions. They are out of water, yes? One can deduce nothing else. They are dying out there, I'm afraid."

At this, an Egyptian professor tilts his cranelike figure a fraction of a degree forward over the table: "Yes, I see. Cut off. you say. Ah."

But Lilith, her voice a bit taut, insists, "You don't seem to have heard--they are still fighting. They are still getting their supplies, there is no problem."

The German, absolutely composed and heatless, glances up at her slyly and inquires in his monotone, "But how do you know that?"

Lilith, flushing slightly, replies, "Of course they are. The government said only yesterday there is no cause for concern about the Third Army, they are being supplied----"

The German gives the merest wince of a smile, a brief glint of a front tooth, and observes, "Ah, yes. The Egyptian government. But how is the Third Army being supplied? I have some interesting information about that from the UN."

The professor inclines himself a barely perceptible degree farther over his plate, piping in a clipped voice, "From the UN, you say. Hmm."

The German gazes dourly at the professor: "Yes, that is correct. From the UN."

Lilith snaps, "It doesn't make any difference about the UN. We know the Third Army is still fighting."

The German looks back at Lilith and continues with a remorseless deliberation, "Please. You are thinking with your sentiments. I am afraid this is not one of your dramatic productions in a theater, Miss Lilith. You must consider the situation logically. The conclusion is simply inescapable that they are stranded and perishing out there--there is no choice but to face that, to admit----"

And Lilith vehemently shrills, "I must face nothing. I must admit nothing. That is merely your opinion, but we Egyptians know what the facts are."

(The next morning, the Egyptians who were at the table will all phone one another to affirm, "The German, was he not an unpleasant man? Very disagreeable, was he not?")

And after dinner that evening, when we have collected in the drawing room for cognac and mellow romantic records, all Lilith wants to know in a whisper while we are dancing is, "Did I put up a good fight against him? Did I answer well? I performed with spirit, did I not?" Whatever the mundane intimations of disaster, all that counts, still, is the gesture, the transcendent, all-defining, all-redeeming rhetorical efficacy of the pose.

In the end, of course, Egypt has always relied on its immemorial resource of time. It has used time against its adversaries as Russia has used geography. An Egyptian intellectual proposes, "The Hyksos, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Turks, the French and the British--all of them, where are they now? We have always prevailed in the end. We know how to wait." In those terms, actually, all the conventional measures of defeat become meaningless: wars that come to catastrophe, occupations and the depredation of property and households, all become merely unlucky incidents in an experience whose real truth lies beyond the span of a lifetime or even a generation. In the meantime, then, Egyptians are given to that headlong readiness--not so alien to a Southerner, either--to place the matter of one's honor and pride against all practical profit and human cost.

At the close of dinner at the German diplomat's home that evening, Lilith declared finally, "Well, so what if we lose the Third Army? We are prepared to lose it if we have to. We can afford to, we are willing to. It won't really matter now, since we have crossed the canal--nothing can retract that victory. Because we have gotten our name back."

A few days later, an American teacher in Cairo shakes his head: "Yes, that's about the attitude they have here. What she was talking about, of course, was several thousand human beings, but they just don't understand that part of it. It's never occurred to them that perhaps every single individual contains all the universe, goddamn it, contains all mankind. That sort of individualism is unintelligible to them. That, finally, is the great difference between this country and Israel."

• • •

It is almost 24 hours later that the awareness comes trickling in, on teletypes and in the casual references of officials, of the global alerts and massive mobilizations that had been heaving unsuspected all around one for a day. One discovers, with a light chill and a vague give in the knees, that one had been dwelling for a time serenely and obliviously, right at ground zero for a tentatively impending apocalypse. The Egyptian press, for its part, afterward seems curiously intrigued and exhilarated by that heady possibility: "World faced danger of nuclear confrontation on account of crisis here" ... "Soviet and American armies alerted."

However illusionary that prospect later proved to be, a seasoned Near East journalist broods one evening in the lobby of the Nile Hilton, "That was just a hint of how this place can act like a whirlpool to haul in the global powers. However it may come about, the sequence that would chain-react right up to wholesale conflagration should be clear now for everybody. Clearer than it ever was in the Balkans right before World War One. Who the hell ever would have supposed that Sarajevo was going to amplify into a world cataclysm? After '48 and '56 and '67--and most of all now, after October sixth--I just don't see how there can be another inconclusive war. There just aren't any more margins left now for equivocation and intermediate measures. The next time, if it comes, will definitely be the final act."

During my last days in Cairo, I come to the queasy suspicion, as I did in 1970 after passing through Jordan and Israel, that trying to trace any pattern of geopolitical morality and legitimacy back through the recesses of this region's past would be like peering down a dark hall of mirrors--for any proper historical answer, one would probably have to grope back through the centuries all the way to the primal question: Where are the Canaanites? Because ever since Sumer and Abraham, imperial grandeurs and warring hosts have passed across the slopes and plains of this worn and oldest earth of numberless unremembered slaughters like a ceaseless gusting of locusts: Amalekites, Amorites, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Philistines, Persians, with periodic interventions by Egypt, trampling back and forth after each other in an endless bloody enterprise of dispossession and appropriation. Indeed, the first uncertain candles of history--mosaics from the royal tombs of Ur, the stele of Naram-Sim, king of Akkad--illuminate with their brief flicker men already furiously engaged here in grappling for each other's lands.

As in 1970, I leave Cairo with a strange furtive exhilaration of escape: deliverance out of an abiding uneasiness at being in the middle of some elusive madness that has managed to implicate the destiny of the world in the old compulsions and aggrievements of that haggard backland of history, far from the innocent shores of America's own experience. I remember a UN spokesman in the midst of it all--a Swede, a pedagogic man in shell-rimmed glasses, dressed like a small-town hardware-store manager--discharging abstractions and diffusions in a conference room at the Hilton, all heat and matter taken out, about "technical difficulties on the locale between the UN and the various parties involved." Yet such abstraction--unlanguage, unforces, undecisions--seemed in the months afterward to have accomplished a reprieve. Still, the conciliations and relaxations were haunted by a sense of being merely pauses before the climactic agony, the maelstrom. To be sure, the ancient landscape surrounding that UN spokesman is the stage-set where all those gaunt, sulphur-eyed, God-ravaged evangelists back in the cracker-box tabernacles and summer-night tent revivals have always proclaimed the world will end in holocaust. And, indeed, there are some peculiar, unsettlingly suggestive passages in the 16th chapter of Revelations: "And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. ... And I saw ... the spirits of devils, working miracles ... go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty . ... And he gathered them together into a place called, in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon. ... And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth. ... And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found."

• • •

That morning, when I am riding to El Qantara, to that convulsed ruin of bunkers across the canal where I had been carried three years earlier by the frail young Israeli lieutenant, we pass through the primeval tableland of the Nile delta--through an interminable gallery of eucalyptus trees along the Sweet Water Canal, past a limitless and unceasing panorama of low yellow autumn fields filled with a myriad infestation of donkeys, harvesters, threshers, water carriers, bullocks, the timeless plod of camels under date palms, brief glistenings of nude bathers splashing along the banks of irrigation canals: a pageantry as dense and profuse and endlessly recurrent as the murals arrayed along the walls of the Pharaohs' tombs. It is here, I muse, where man first emerged in that epic blusterous vanity with which, many surmise, he will also likewise instantly vanish. It has still the look of the aboriginal mythical paradise, the Eden. Then an army truck, painted a drab mayonnaise yellow, pulls out of a side road, bearing out of the dappling swim of palms and orchards the enormous, implacable, finned bulk of a SAM missile, heading on for the Sinai: those empty windy speckled wastes visited with faint tarnishings of sunlight under a gray wintry sky, where I see, on a high crest of sand, a solitary young Egyptian officer kneeling on a carefully spread prayer rug, bowing to Mecca.