We had tickets to
Alexandria for a double cabin, bought through the National Union of Students in
London. The NUS wanted to sight our marriage certificate before they would sell
us the tickets and had thoughtfully franked the reverse of our Gibraltar
Registry Office document with a big inky stamp.
When we arrived on the deck of the reeking Cynthia the
purser shook his head in amazement that travellers with such cheap tickets
could possibly believe they were entitled to a double cabin. My wife and I were
separated and ordered to different parts of the stinking tub well below the
waterline. I lugged the two huge suitcases to her cabin, dropped off the one we
thought might contain her clothes, and then continued to drag the other one
like a cockroach through the superheated rusting passageways. But I was spared:
My assigned eight-berth cabin was festooned with frilly frocks; no place for a
man. I used my last ounces of energy to drag the hated suitcase to the top
deck. The grudging purser directed me to a double cabin above the waterline,
and I threw myself onto the lower bunk and hung my throbbing hands over the
side.With the circulation to my hands partly restored I went aloft, or perhaps abaft, and searched for my wife on the deck. The greenish tinge of her face augured badly; we were still tied up alongside the caisson wall, but the rocking of the ship, the stench of diesel, and the hot greasy miasma from the vents above the kitchens had started to do their work.
The MV Cynthia juddered out of the harbour
at a funny angle like a water rat with a crushed leg. It was her last voyage
before the scrapheap.
In the afternoon the ship's swimming pool was filled up. It
was barely big enough to fit six people standing but the weight of the water
taken on board strained the heaving engines almost to a standstill. We hung
around the canvas awning near the pool to escape the heat. An Egyptian man in
swimming trunks did an elaborate calisthenic routine and introduced himself. He
was captivated that I could pronounce his name properly, and asked me to repeat
it over and over: "Please, what is my name?" We escaped to another
part of the ship but wherever we went he seemed to be waiting in his trunks behind
a lifeboat or a stanchion, and would pop out and inanely ask "Please, what
is my name?" I would repeat robotically, "Mar'i Kamil S-". I leave his last name incomplete in case he is still alive and wants to be my friend on Facebook.
In the evening the toilets overflowed and we had to hop
through sewage to get to the hotbox
where dinner was served to the third class passengers. A waiter probably
named Malvolio guarded the kitchen entrance with a filthy tea towel over his
arm. The food - it hardly needed guarding - was Kit-E-Kat mashed into macaroni
tubes. We gagged and picked over our bowls, but our table companions -
cadaverous British hippies who had been in India for months - golloped theirs
down, and then finished our leftovers. Our hearts leapt as fat peaches were
handed out, and then shrivelled when they were cut apart to reveal the plump maggots
within.
We parted late that night on the upper deck, but not before
I had my first real conversation in Arabic outside a classroom. While my wife
leaned over the rail to find some air that didn't smell of Kit-E-Kat, I watched
a Lebanese family chatting in the moonlight. There was another ship in the
distance and a man in the group commented that it was from the same shipping
line as the Cynthia. He actually said nafsi
shirka, 'the same company'. I grabbed my chance and attempted to join the
conversation by loudly intoning nafsi
shirka with a questioning intonation. On reflection I suppose I was saying, "Oh, family of complete strangers, is it indeed a fact that the ship we see is from the same company as the ship we are on?"
The family turned to stare at the
apparition at the rail whence the odd utterance had come: A moustachioed wraith
with shoulder length black hair supporting a young woman who was sobbing and
retching under the moon.
I spent the night awake in terror listening to the stranger in the upper bunk making long rhythmic noises like a razor being sharpened on a leather
strop.
At Beirut - not yet torn apart by the civil war - we ordered massive
plates of rice and minted lamb in a restaurant but could barely eat a few
spoonsful, so shrunken were our stomachs. We made it back to the Cynthia by smell
alone, and fought the crush of Egyptians who were boarding with boxes of
Lebanese apples as big as babies' heads.
As we sailed for Cyprus a black and yellow flag was raised -
cholera! - and instead of entering Limassol harbour we stood offshore in
quarantine. A Mercedes Benz was hoisted from the Cynthia's deck on davits and was
swung wobbling onto a wooden barge, which puttered off to Limassol with a few
passengers.Like a malodorous pariah, the Cynthia limped towards Egypt, its decks still stacked with boxes of apples. Officials came out to meet us in Alexandria harbour and we were lined up and each given a large white cholera pill, the composition and efficacy of which we knew nothing. The officials had a loud discussion about the apples and a decision was made: Destroy them! They may be infected! The boxes were broken apart and the passengers ate the apples.
Some hours later the Cynthia eased her dented flanks alongside the berth and the engines stopped grinding. We lined up in an immigration hall where men in uniform took all our passports and made a toppling pile of them on a desk. I watched in anxiety: How would they return the passports to the correct owners? What if I got the wrong passport and I had to spend the rest of my life as Mar'i Kamil S-?
© Stuart Campbell 2014
Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/
No comments:
Post a Comment