Story for performance #410
webcast from London at 08:44PM, 04 Aug 06

Her journey among the streets and monuments of Alexandria had seemed like a fairytale quest, with some people offering talismans and signs, (a red geranium, a blown kiss) on the open curve of the waterside parade, while other encounters were difficult and ominous. She had come to visit Ikingi Maryut, a place where her father had camped during the second world war in 1941.

It seemed miles and miles in the horse-drawn cab, across a devastated landscape, along a putrid canal, with abandoned concrete shells like old factories, full of building rubbish. Though spiky with rushes, the canal stank. The sky was pale, the landscape as if washed with grey. People had set up forges beside the road, mending car parts, using old car bodies as improvised workshops. A truck dumped more rubble beside the road. Four older men sat in chairs amongst all of this, talking and drinking tea.

To reach Ikingi Maryut, that place only twenty kilometres from Alexandria, became a lengthy task. Eventually she found the right taxi bus. The bearded driver in a long robe demanded ten pounds as she got in, and she felt helpless with glaring men shouting at her in Arabic. She felt like the stereotype of a tourist; immoderately rich, and dumb (literally) as well. On the bus, pierced by the intense awareness of the other passengers she sat next to a pretty girl, soft and rosy, who helped her with money and introduced herself as Shaymee. She was eighteen, a student, and lived in Ikingi Maryut, now an outer, rather wealthy suburb of Alexandria. Her few words of careful English were a blessing. The girl asked her why she wanted to go to this out of the way place, and she carefully explained that her father had been encamped there with thousands of soldiers years ago and as he was now a very old man, she had wanted to visit the place when she was in Alexandria. This story was translated to the listening passengers. The bus went on and on through more industrial suburbs with half-finished buildings, no made roads, only dusty tracks. A few trees had been planted along the road, but most had died. The air was full of chemicals emitted by the oil refineries of the western desert.

After half an hour the bus set the two women down in the sudden quiet of late afternoon. The clamour of voices died away. They walked along a wide track of dusty sand between rows of high walled villas, the top of the walls edged with jagged broken glass. Glimpses of bougainvillea flowers softened the impression of the road which was piled with uncollected rubbish, blowing with plastic.

‘Where do you want to go?’ the girl asked her, as if she might wave a wand. ‘I’ll direct you to the motel’. She gestured goodbye and vanished around a corner of the empty road.

Two dark fine looking men at the reception desk were curt, and charged exhorbitantly for her to sit down for a minute with a glass of hot water and a teabag on a dirty tray. Despite this she sat thankfully and then collected some of the sand that was blowing through the door, in a film canister, for her father.

Suddenly, there she was in a very strange place at nightfall. Sounds were magnified as if to offset the opaque blackness of the night; distant shouts and roars from the desert highway. The tension of the journey became paralyzing so that she felt unable to move or act, overcome with the enormity of where she was, the insecurity of her position outside the tourist routes. The roaring she heard was not just in her head, but seemed to come like a dark blur from the desert wind, or from within the high walls on either side of the road.

She remembered Plutarch’s tale of a haunting episode in the last days of Mark Antony, an omen of his defeat, when the whole of Alexandria was in a breathless silence waiting for the outcome between him and Caesar. Of a sudden was heard, but not seen, the sounds of instruments and voices singing in tune, and the cry of a crowd of people shouting and dancing, like a troop of Dionysian or Bacchanalian rioters. This tumultuous but invisible procession seemed to take its course right through the shadowed streets of the city to the gate and suddenly departed. People believed, Plutarch goes on, that this meant that Bacchus the god, to whom Antony had been devoted, had now forsaken him. Constantin Cavafy wrote his poem ‘The god abandons Antony’, on the same theme, in the elegiac tradition –
Do not lament your luck that now gives out, your work
That has failed, schemes of your life
All proved to be false…’

People in antiquity also recognised that the panic that can descend ‘out of the blue’ came from the sound of the goat-faced god Pan, after the instant emotion that can send a flock of sheep or goats racing madly over the mountains. While nothing can be seen, an inexplicable sound is heard filling the sky, a white seething in the ears that destroys reason. The Persians are said to have heard the whistling roar of Pan’s great shout at the battle of Marathon, so that their hair bristled and they screamed with fear, dispersing, panic-stricken.

She wept uncontrollably. The expressions of the men at the reception desk changed, their aloof masks became human as she turned into a woman they understood, a tearful woman in need of help. Now they were all courtesy, refusing money for the lukewarm teabag. Escorting her along the dark street to the main road, they hailed a hurtling van to take her back to ‘Iskandriya’.

The pattern of life that had cracked almost into the abyss fell into wholeness again. Her weakness had permitted a different relationship, and order was restored through the kindness of strangers.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Diana Wood Conroy.