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Passage to Suez
By Benny Ziffer
Tags: Israel News, Benny Ziffer 

CAIRO - Those were the days. The homeland was embodied in the person of the prime minister, an old woman with a voice husky from smoking, and a charismatic general who wore an eye patch. On the banks of the Suez Canal, which not long before had become part of the expanded homeland, soldiers fell every day, dying a death without glory. It was said that if you stuck your head out of the trench without a helmet for even a second, an Egyptian sniper on the opposite bank would be waiting to blow it off. That period of despair, safeguarding the western boundary of the empire, was called the War of Attrition, and this year marks the 40th anniversary of its onset, even if there is disagreement about the exact month in which it started.

Very quietly, a second front opened in the rear, of worried mothers who were growing suspicious about the unconditional sacrifice of their sons for the sake of an expanded homeland. They used their connections and spoke to doctors - doing whatever it took to ensure that their boy would not be dispatched deathward. Mothers who knew someone with influence in the defense establishment tried the protektsia route. Others opened the family drawers and pulled out genetic illnesses, suicidal tendencies. The end justified every means.

I was one of the modest achievements of the underground of draft dodgers. Mr. H., a Jew and a Holocaust survivor, a civilian employed by the Israel Defense Forces in the Jaffa induction center and an acquaintance of my mother, was asked to put in a good word with someone on the medical board. A word from him was enough to remove me from the cannon fodder production line and get me into the officer candidate academic studies program - a deferral of service until the ill winds blew over. And blow over they did, the ill winds. After the withdrawal from Sinai and the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, the Suez Canal sank into oblivion in Israel's collective consciousness. The waterway was returned to its owners with the same mundane devotion with which young people had been sent to be killed on it, without any sort of promise that it would be missed.
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Shelling the cities along the canal - Port Said, Ismailia, Suez City - in those years of war, the IDF underwent its apprenticeship in pulverizing enemy civilian targets. Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the canal cities fled to Cairo and took up residence in the ancient cemeteries there, for lack of anywhere else to house themselves. Welcome, then, to the precincts of horror. This journey to the Suez Canal will contain not a jot of oriental exoticism. At most there will be melancholy, interrupted at times by bursts of laughter. For example, over the fact that on the mound now called Zone Six, on the eastern bank of the canal, opposite Ismailia, a memorial park has been built in the center of which is a huge granite monument in the form of a rifle and bayonet, in memory of the fallen Egyptians. On the front of the monument, in English, is a spelling mistake engraved in the stone with letters that can no longer be corrected, involving the translation of the prayer for "berbetual peace." This is the minuscule satisfaction that remains to the vanquished: to mock the victors for their mistakes in pronunciation.

At Tiblat al-Shigra, some way from the shore of the canal, across from Ismailia, stands a reconstructed former IDF stronghold that is now a museum and information site. It is a reminder of the reinforced concrete monstrosities of the so-called Bar-Lev Line, which made contractors rich and also thereby enriched the imagination of the playwright Hanoch Levin, who wrote about the Israeli bourgeoisie that sprang from the blood and concrete scattered on the Sinai sands. The commemorators assiduously preserved everything just as it was, including the kitchen rotation list and the Hebrew signs indicating the functions of rooms in the fortified bunker network. An armored personnel carrier and two Jeeps are perched at the entrance, and an Uzi submachine gun and Browning machine guns are on exhibit. Mannequins of a wounded soldier and a medic represent the scene of a frozen operation in an underground field hospital. The message is simple: technical superiority and sophisticated fortifications cannot guarantee final victory. How come we didn't know that beforehand?

The case of Mustafa Singer

Oh, yes, in these parts one can still definitely feel that the name of Israel continues to generate a nameless suspicion. The rumor about two Israelis who had come to the city and intended to cross the canal to the opposite bank spread like wildfire. Our passports were taken and passed from hand to hand, stirring mumblings of astonishment among the members of the security squad that sat on chairs in the shade of a hedgerow in front of the transit station. The wireless radios beeped. An interrogator took notes and asked and asked again, and took more notes. I had to repeat my father's name four times and then spell it. Heinz. And Nir Kafri, the photographer, repeated his father's name, David.

Be that as it may, thanks to those who fell in the wars, or despite the wars, we have reached this point of crossing this strip of water, back and forth, in a hot desert wind. We are in the midst of a large crowd of Bedouin who are returning home to Sinai in rickety pickups carrying scrap metal and parts of cars and pipes, or family members, or, in some cases, both. The Bedouin, like us, stood and waited patiently for hours in the sun to get a crossing permit. On the opposite bank, too, the same long line of weary Bedouin stretched, waiting to cross over to the west bank. They turned off the engines of their vehicles and huddled in the shelter of a tree or in the shade of a low stone fence.

In the past few days, newspapers in Cairo reported that the Bedouin of northern Sinai had organized riots and demonstrations to protest their harsh treatment by Egyptian security. An Egyptian security man was killed in one such violent protest, the reports said. The Popular Committee for the Rights of the Citizen - signatory of a Bedouin manifesto - had declared a series of protest measures to be carried out in October if the demands they had presented to the Egyptian government were not met. They want the release from prison of about a thousand Bedouin, cancellation of indictments and a halt to raids by the security forces on Bedouin villages.

But then came a reassuring report to the effect that the number of participants in the protest demonstration by the northern Sinai Bedouin had not exceeded 50 people. The surrealistic name of the protest organizer and spokesman of the popular committee is Mustafa Singer. Thus melted away the story upon the fringes of whose fringes we had inadvertently stumbled, while crossing the canal in a creaking ferry that also carried a group of happy-go-lucky athletes from Uruguay who had come to Ismailia to play in the youth soccer world championship games. Just for the fun of it, the girls in the group had painted their cheeks in the colors of their country's national flag and went up to the bridge of the ferry to have their picture taken.

Missing Ismailia

We're getting fond of you, Ismailia. It was in the morning, in the dining room of the rundown Al-Timsah Hotel on the city's main boulevard, while we were patiently waiting for the omelet being fried by a drowsy kitchen worker who was also the only waiter in the hotel restaurant. Chatting at the next table was an elderly German couple who looked like they had foundered at sea and been spewed onto this shore of the canal. Suddenly, through the side window, we saw a woman go by on the street carrying a colorful red parasol. And after her, wondrous sights rained down on the glass of the side window. A prancing mule harnessed to a cart. Children with pink schoolbags. After we left Ismailia and returned to Cairo, the longings intensified, and a day later we found ourselves going all the way back.

For anyone attracted by decay, Ismailia is just the place: a city that once had pretentions to greatness and boasts a series of colonial mansions, including the house of the Suez Canal's acclaimed engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps. There is also a municipal museum of antiquities in the shape of a Greek temple, which contains findings unearthed during the canal's excavation. Heaped up in long-undusted glass display cases are death masks of mummies from the Roman period in a style that was given the overall name of "Fayum portraits." There is a headless statue that is a perfect actualization of Rainer Maria Rilke's well-known poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the one that ends with the words "You must change your life" (from Stephen Mitchell's translation). Also on exhibit is a large, complete mosaic moved from an ancient Roman villa to the museum, illustrating a scene from the Greek story of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, who falls in love with her handsome stepson Hippolytus, who in the end is done in by a monster sent by Neptune, god of the sea. A small temple of culture and the classics.

Time has wreaked havoc with Ismailia, but it is still possible to conjure up in the imagination the former quarter of the Europeans, who in the evenings would stroll by the long branch of the Nile that was dug in order to supply sweet water to Ismailia and make its wilderness bloom. Across this branch of the river there are small wooden and metal bridges and mechanized dams like the ones in Dutch landscape paintings. The name of the square at the point where the city's main boulevard meets the boardwalk on the branch of the Nile is Place Lavalley. Last week, to mark the Egyptians' commemoration of October 6 - the day on which the Yom Kippur War, or October War in their parlance - broke out, a book entitled "Ismailia, the Architecture of the 19th and 20th Century," which surveys the city's historic buildings, was published in Cairo by the French Institute for Archaeology. A similar book was published a few years ago about Port Said and its historic structures. Reality is always sadder than what's portrayed in books. The eye sees mainly neglect and poor taste, and also poverty, filth, sticky sidewalks and flies, stores with raucous signs and inviting billboards advertising the wares of cellular phone companies. In the Rosa Patisserie only women sit behind a parasol and closed blinds. Men have cafes that are open to the street. The benches of the main avenue are for everyone from about 10 at night until eternity. Conversations and shouts and rolling laughter, and mules for hire for a ride of an hour or half an hour. Those who can't find a place on a bench drag out a chair from the house or from a nearby store. The owner of the photography shop next to the hotel came out and stood in front of his show window and bragged that the hotel we were staying at is his. If I were him, I wouldn't brag about it. He told us that he attends photography exhibitions in London and Cologne. In other words, he is not a provincial, but a man of the world.

The Internet cafe in the shopping center was closed. Two salesmen from the store that sells cellular phones, brothers named Amr and Samah, invited us to surf on the wireless Internet in their store. Their father is a prolific journalist on the Internet paper The Seventh Day"and they know we need peace and that all men should be brothers. A pity - if it weren't for the fact that I had to get back to Israel, I would have stayed in Ismailia for the city's 13th documentary film festival, which opened on October 10. This year's festival is devoted to films about the American invasion of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Abu Ali, a fish and shellfish restaurant that serves produce caught in the Suez Canal, is famed for its food; the visitor has to wait for some time in line for a table. Sometimes we ate at Melodies, a pizzeria, and one afternoon we joined vacationers who had made the journey down from Cairo to bathe in the waters of the Suez Canal at the point where it meets Lake Timsah, around which Ismailia is built. This is a private beach; an entry ticket costs 15 Egyptian pounds (about $2.75).

Young people and couples sat at small booths dug into the sand, while others strolled on the cobbled path that runs along the shore. Against a backdrop of earsplitting music blaring from loudspeakers, a merchant ship passes by, like a postcard of greetings for a better world, and looks close enough for the bathers to touch. Here, in this beach club, Nir, the photographer, heard suspicious shooting noises. He traced their source to a large hangar that houses a shooting range in which young people were practicing sharpshooting. The most outstanding were two veiled girls who stretched the arm holding the pistol straight toward the target and scored a bull's-eye time after time.

Someone intimated that the municipal park in Ismailia might be of interest to us as Israelis. This is a park for family picnics in which the barbecue offerings have left scorched earth on the lawns. It is built around a monument commemorating the October War, made of four Israeli tanks that were captured by the Egyptians in 1973. Here is where our belligerent psychosis intersects theirs. The Israelites in the Torah came out of Egypt and dreamed of the fleshpots they had left behind; and the Egyptians eat meat and celebrate the sight of the steel treads which the Israelites of the past generation left behind.

Green space in Fayed

Now Fayed. Fayed on the shore of Great Bitter Lake. It pops up here and there, Great Bitter Lake does, through the yards of the buildings that block it. The policy is that nature, too, was not given to everyone equally. Those who want to enjoy it will pay, and if they can't pay, they won't enjoy. An article in the leisure section in the September issue of the prestigious monthly Egypt Today warmly recommended Fayed and its shellfish restaurant Six Corners. And on the way, the author of the article writes, be sure to visit the Allied war cemetery in the center of the town.

By the life of Allah, surely even in paradise the grass is not greener than in this Fayed cemetery. A carpet of fresh greenery stretches as far as the eye can see in the middle of this dirt-poor place, like a golf course in the heart of a garbage dump, and a team of gardeners is busy pruning and smoothing and leveling. If only a little of this cultivation were moved from the realm of the dead into the potholed street that passes the cemetery and to the clay homes that are in danger of collapse and the piles of refuse that rise in front of them! A hopeless wish. The policy of inequality applies to the dead, too.

This sweetheart of a cemetery is the last resting place of Allied soldiers who died of their wounds in temporary military hospitals or whose remains were brought here from a remote African cemetery. The denizens of the place include pilots and the man buried in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The gravestones are inscribed with names, the place where they fell and the date. A random inscription: Katanga, a soldier in the army of the Belgian Congo; fell in 1943. Fresh flowers flourish next to every headstone and the grass is soft under our feet and the gardeners grumble because our unannounced visit interrupts their effort to finish their work.

Late one night, in a cafe of the ancient Gamaliya neighborhood, on one of those essential sorties from the canal to Cairo to breathe city air after the provincial depression became unbearable. An oud player came over to our table and left us no choice but to listen to him play and sing and relate the melancholy story of his life. His name was Mohammed Tawfiq and he was old and some of his teeth were missing. In Syria, his homeland, he was a teacher and a singer on state radio. His three sons stitch decorated galabiyas in a city near Damascus. He himself never studied music in an orderly way. He first appeared in public at the age of 12 in the local club of the province in which he was born, Dir Azur. Since then he has been eating and drinking music. He placed his meager savings in the hands of an impresario friend who promised to organize a visa for Canada, and he has been waiting in Cairo for an answer for the past five years.

When that naif opened his mouth to sing and plucked the strings of the oud (his playing wasn't bad at all and his voice was limpid), I suddenly found an answer to the puzzle of what this deep thing is that unites the Arab world and Israel, even if officially we are mutual enemies. Did the oud player realize that we were Israelis? He chose to perform for us national songs from Syrian and Egyptian folklore. Most of these songs, when translated into another language, sound like a collection of empty cliches, but when they are sung, their emptiness fills up with life and feeling. He sang "Gemali Shahm" (Beauty of Syria) and then the Egyptian anthem "Biladi Biladi," which was written during the anti-British riots of 1919. And a well-known patriotic song by Sayed Darwish, "Kum Ya Misri!" "Awaken, Egyptian, Egypt is calling you," the song says. "Egypt your mother is beckoning you: bring the victory. Your people shall be victorious by the strength of their hands. Daring and pride shall be always at your side. The bullets of your rifle destroy the enemy by day and by night." From the repertoire of romantic love, he chose a song by the Jewish-Egyptian singer Laila Murad.

With the tip he received for his playing he bought himself something to eat at a nearby cafeteria. He then returned and emphasized that if we were going to write about him, we should mention that he is from the Syrian town of Ein Manin and also provide his cellular phone number, in case anyone wanted to offer him a gig.

Hard life in Suez City

And they did journey and encamp. A visit to Suez City is de rigueur, even if it's commonly acknowledged to be the bottom of the barrel of Egyptian provincial squalor. It's a heat-blasted place with no past and no shade and not a dollop of pity. A hell of oil refineries and smokestacks belching fire and black smoke, its main attraction is probably a green square alongside which is a sign reading: "To Cairo" at which large numbers of people gather waiting for a ride of salvation. In an expanded edition marking October 6, the newspaper Al-Ahram last week published an article about a well-known folklore company from Suez City, the Sons of the Earth, which was active in the city during the War of Attrition with the declared aim of boosting the morale of those who lived amid the piles of rubble to which Suez City had been reduced. The troupe accompanied its singing by playing on the local stringed instrument, the simasmiya. the troupe's elderly founder complained in an interview that today, after having been rebuilt out of the ruins of war, Suez is a city that's hard to live in. How much better things were then, he said, when things had meaning during the resistance to Zionist imperialism.

In connection with the fishermen's port in Suez, I read that not long ago a fishing boat had returned there in triumph after pirates tried to seize it opposite the East Africa coast. The fishermen had resisted and succeeded in escaping. But where is the port? At a distant end of the Bay of Suez we saw from afar something that looked like dinosaur skeletons that had been thrown onto the shore. They were actually the skeletons of fishing boats, overturned or leaning on their side, intermingled with the stumps of poles. We were not allowed to enter the port itself under any circumstances. That's how it is with these horrid cities: the traveler tells himself that the monotonous nothingness laid out in front of him cannot be all there is. That something high and mysterious is hidden from his sight, and now that he has followed in the wake of the "To Cairo" sign he has lost forever the opportunity to discover it.

To Cairo! There is no life without Cairo. In Cairo the decay is more sublime, in Cairo the despair sounds more exquisite. As refugees of the bombing of the canal back then, these noble homeless folk and their descendants, who seized ownership of the plots of the ancient cities of the dead in Cairo, and established there a shadow kingdom with its own legitimacy and its own local patriotism. Take this old man: under the headstone next to which his bed lies is buried the important poet Ahmed Shawqi. Just imagine - Ahmed Shawqi sleeps next to him! Another chance grave-dweller lives in the family mausoleum of Hasan Husseini, the shoemaker for King Farouk, and his three distinguished sisters. He, the tenant, is ensuring the ascension to heaven of the souls of everyone in the family by playing for them very loudly the same cassette of verses from the Koran over and over, because it's known that the dead hear the verses. As for the tenant who took over the grave site of Ahmed Bey Tawfiq, a general in King Farouk's army, he has become a bit of a general himself, standing erect behind the stall he has opened to sell snacks and chocolates.

In this lowly Cairo, we secured an interview with Madam Umm-Sayed, who received us resplendent in heavy gold jewelry at the entrance to her underground kingdom. For fear of the authorities, we must not disclose the exact location of her underground, which engages in activity prohibited from every point of view. She is the proprietor of one of Cairo's most notorious bathhouses, its reputation due to the homosexual activity that takes place in it at night - today this is no longer so, they promise. And behind, cooking all night on the same fire that heats the bathhouse water, are the beans that before dawn will be taken on carts drawn by mules and distributed to the ful (fava bean) stands that feed the Cairenes. All this is prohibited by the Egyptian ministry of environmental affairs. The ideal heat for the slow cooking of ful is provided by the burning of garbage. In deep secrecy, we were led through back corridors at the end of which was a kind of cave containing a series of illegal containers of ful. And a sofa on which the ful guard supervises things at night. While at the same time, on the other side of the wall, in the hammam, human beings are stewing in the sins of the flesh.

For 200 pounds (about $36) that were passed from hand to hand, in part to the madam and in part to the bathhouse guards, we were allowed to enter and photograph the forbidden zone from inside. The canal - the purpose of our trip - became a distant memory. An old Cairo friend of mine said that Egypt seems to have everything the heart could want. But when you come to look for it, it turns out that Egypt deceived you, sent you to the wrong address. This effectively sums up our journey to the Suez Canal. Time and again we came to the wrong address, but we kept trying.

Quiet demonstration in Port Said

The last stop: Port Said. If the Suez Canal is a kind of tie hanging from the neck of Egypt, and the cities along the canal are the shirt buttons, and the Sinai Peninsula is the sleeve, then the lapels of the shirt collar are Port Said on the left of the canal's northern outlet to the Mediterranean, and Port Fouad on the right. And you, the traveler, sated with disappointments, feel like grabbing the neck and shaking it and calling out: Where is everything you promised? Where is it all?

Sincere efforts have been made in Port Fouad to restore the handsome European stone buildings of the Ubadi neighborhood - the Canal Authority of the previous century. The neighborhood recalls to some extent the German Colony founded by the Templers in Palestine. But gloom and despair have descended on them, on people for whom these homes, which are renovated on the outside, are also a prison that burdens them - despite the sea around, which beckons them to come out, to escape. I saw young people standing on the wooden verandas or in the stylized windows and staring out at the street. Many of the buildings looked to be uninhabited, gardens growing wild behind the hedgerows. There is a square in which there was once a garden and now contains nothing but mounds of refuse. The throwing of refuse into the street is the most trustworthy sign of dissatisfaction and despair that gnaw at downtrodden people. With no possibility of demonstrating openly, this is their quiet demonstration: to dirty the surroundings, hurling a wordless message that their life is not worth living.

Briefly, at dusk, as the shadows lengthen and the light grows soft and the facades of the buildings on the shoreline of Palestine Dock borrow from the setting sun pink or white, Port Said becomes a city worthy of being photographed. Nir, my companion on this journey, doesn't like taking pictures of buildings, no matter how thrilling they are in their decaying glory. Anyone, he says, can photograph buildings and the ornamental lattices of the old verandas. What interests him are the passersby, for whom the peeling buildings are the backdrop. For example, the people who crowd around before the disembarkation from the ferry that crosses the canal from Port Said to Port Fouad and do not wait for the full descent of the metal ramp but jump over it onto the cement of the dock. Embodied in that small leap is a small but meaningful spark of joie de vivre.

On the facade of an abandoned Jewish department store, which stands on the large dock, the original neon sign still exists, albeit extinguished, as a souvenir of times past. Something new: opposite the destroyed French post office on Zaghlul Street a "Coffee Shop" (in English) has opened. It is wood-paneled, in saloon style. In the meantime it has neither coffee nor tea, but a cooler holding soft drinks. And the only customers are us. When we come to pay, one waiter says to the other: "Take 20 pounds." The other hesitates: "No, that's too much." He asks for 15.

What will become of you, Port Said? Outside a public garden which is surrounded by the buildings of former foreign consulates, next to a collection of open garbage containers, is a station at which one can hire mules to ride. Nir sat on the garden fence and waited patiently until a boy riding a mule passed, like some scene of the coming of the messiah. From the side a figure emerged, an elderly dispenser of tea, stepping gingerly from the sidewalk onto the road without dropping the tea tray, contrary to the law of gravity. How does the song go? "Kum Ya Misri! Your mother Egypt beckons you." Or maybe it would be better if it went on sleeping.
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