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A TRAVELLING TALE cross, don’t get cross. I know that people often get cross during travel, but don’t forget: Go straight to the Grand Hotel on Talaat Harb Street, I’ve written everything down for you on the note, and you have my address and telephone number if you need anything.” And here I am, leaving Alexandria by night on the so-called Yugoslavian train, in the its neon light, seated next to a dark-skinned Coptic man, who is as still and as silent as a mummy. The massive trees outside make the night darker and my sense of exile grows as I stare out the window, seeing nothing but deepening layers of night. The train gulped the night down like a mythical creature. I think that at some point I heard “Dumiat”, but I don’t remember whether we stopped there or whether the train didn’t make any stops. I also don’t know how I knew the man was a Copt. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen a Christian who spoke Arabic. In North Africa, we were Arabised by Islam, so the language and the religion go hand-inhand. For some inexplicable reason, I asked him: “What’s your relationship like with Muslims?” Tersely, he replied: “Ask God.” And returned into his lazy silence, like a wax god. * * * Years later, I took the plane to Cairo, and headed straight to Nu‘am Square to meet my friend Mohieddin Ellabbad in that 1920s villa. There’s a picture postcard of Nu‘am Square in its prime. It looks like all the other squares, resembling them in politics and tourism, clothing and lifestyle . . . Cairo, which had been the laboratory of all the changes in the other Arab capitals, had in the last two decades gone through several changes.The most significant changes were the grand creep of rural life and the destruction of the city’s colonial structures, from its administration to its architecture, from its development to the teaching of foreign languages . . . * * * I walked through Ismaili Cairene streets lined with English villas and castles in ruin, past Groppi’s tearoom and a few old hotels still somewhat upright . . . Mohieddin Ellabbad took me to the Minerva Hotel with its wooden lift and its wooden floors, reminiscent of the Golden Dar Hotel, Claridge’s inTunisia, and theTunisia Palace Hotel 22 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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KHALED NAJAR before it was demolished in a barbaric modernisation spree, and all its furniture plundered, down to the marble bathtubs. Yes, I have a civilizational nostalgia for the colonial era. And I recall distant years in Tunisia, standing before a façade that I can barely remember, on Jules Ferry Street . . . I don’t know how I began my conversation with the tall man with a European complexion whose hair flopped across his forehead. At that time, the city ofTunis still retained some of its cosmopolitan vestiges, and it was inhabited by at least a dozen different sects, Jews who had arrived from Livorno in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Italians, Maltese and Spaniards, Belorussians who had been deposited by a Russian ship in the port of Bizerte in 1929, of whom remained Galena the watercolourist, the old lady who lived on Umm Kulthoum Street, and the ageing maths teacher who to this day still lives in Bizerte. Not to mention the colonial French expatriates.There was the Saliba Library, France Street, Commission Street, where the Italian leader Garibaldi lived . . . The clean streets, the Italianate and French buildings, the colonial cafés with their tabletops set with flowers, the streets lined with closely-planted trees on both sides, flowersellers’ shops peeking out from between them.That entire world is bathed with a soft, feminine light, Mediterranean colours that endow the scene with the atmosphere of a painting by Matisse or Bernard Buffet. There’s the national theatre with its FrancoItalian architectural style and its flying cherubs with their golden wings blowing through trumpets, that theatre in the style of the commedia dell’arte, on whose boards performed the Salamah Hijazi, George Abiad, and Badia Masabni companies. Not to mention a few André Gide plays . . . Anyway, I don’t remember whether it was the end of autumn or spring as I stood there, in my usual absent-mindedness, in front of the theatre’s display window. The man’s name was Guido Medina, an Italian Jewish poet and writer whose family had emigrated toTunisia from Italy in the nineteenth century and settled in Monastir, on the coast. Guido was possessed by a calm, mysterious insanity. But I didn’t realize that as I followed him into his apartment on Jezira Street, where he introduced me to his wife, nor later, as he sat at his desk reading the poem he had written for Bourguiba on the oc- BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 23

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A TRAVELLING TALE

cross, don’t get cross. I know that people often get cross during travel, but don’t forget: Go straight to the Grand Hotel on Talaat Harb Street, I’ve written everything down for you on the note, and you have my address and telephone number if you need anything.”

And here I am, leaving Alexandria by night on the so-called Yugoslavian train, in the its neon light, seated next to a dark-skinned Coptic man, who is as still and as silent as a mummy. The massive trees outside make the night darker and my sense of exile grows as I stare out the window, seeing nothing but deepening layers of night. The train gulped the night down like a mythical creature. I think that at some point I heard “Dumiat”, but I don’t remember whether we stopped there or whether the train didn’t make any stops. I also don’t know how I knew the man was a Copt. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen a Christian who spoke Arabic. In North Africa, we were Arabised by Islam, so the language and the religion go hand-inhand. For some inexplicable reason, I asked him: “What’s your relationship like with Muslims?”

Tersely, he replied: “Ask God.” And returned into his lazy silence, like a wax god.

* * *

Years later, I took the plane to Cairo, and headed straight to Nu‘am Square to meet my friend Mohieddin Ellabbad in that 1920s villa. There’s a picture postcard of Nu‘am Square in its prime. It looks like all the other squares, resembling them in politics and tourism, clothing and lifestyle . . . Cairo, which had been the laboratory of all the changes in the other Arab capitals, had in the last two decades gone through several changes.The most significant changes were the grand creep of rural life and the destruction of the city’s colonial structures, from its administration to its architecture, from its development to the teaching of foreign languages . . .

* * *

I walked through Ismaili Cairene streets lined with English villas and castles in ruin, past Groppi’s tearoom and a few old hotels still somewhat upright . . . Mohieddin Ellabbad took me to the Minerva Hotel with its wooden lift and its wooden floors, reminiscent of the Golden Dar Hotel, Claridge’s inTunisia, and theTunisia Palace Hotel

22 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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