A MINOR SCANDAL
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saying "Just between us Semites," in unison, mIngling our laughter.
Khalil frowns, failing to understand our private joke. No doubt he thinks
me an American and that is the end of the matter. Riachy, the old fox,
suspects that there is something equivocal in my Americanism, as there
is in his Arabism. The scandal is that he is right.
II
Whilst (on my way to Beirut) I was passing through Cairo, a
city renowned in the Middle East for its slave-supported
douc eur de
vivre,
but at the moment so hot with misery and cur-like hatred that
it was becoming increasingly dangerous for foreigners to walk in the
streets, I could not help thinking of Arthur Koestler's paradox about the
Jews. Koestler had come unexpectedly to dinner, one night, on the eve
of his departure for Italy. His Italian mission rather unnerved him, he
told us, for he had not practiced journalism for many years; in any case,
he was in a very filthy mood. So he tried to refurbish his spirits by baiting
various people, and finally attacked me for the name I bear, claiming that
I had no right to it.
Now he was in ugly, crowded Tel Aviv, badly housed and soggy
with boredom (according to his wife, whom I had lately seen in London)
and-this was my own guess-disliking his fellows with an intensity
which grew in the measure of his enforced proximity to them. Poor
Koestler! Jews to the right of him, Jews to the left of him, volleying
and thundering! My heart went out, or more precisely my heart would
have gone out to him, had it not been entirely absorbed in his paradox,
and in the problem of getting through Cairo.
I was due in Beirut, on a mission of peace and culture which had
nothing, save very indirectly, to do with Palestine. I was already
a.
day
late. The slightest further delay, involving diplomatic intervention, would
have embarrassed me and compromised my mission. Not to speak of the
fact that Cairo bristled with guns and sabers, and scarred Sudanese
troops who loved to use them, especially on pusillanimous and unarmed
types like me.
Perhaps Koestler was right, and I had no business being Kaplan.
But, right or wrong, the name was writ large on my passport. It is a
word of German origin, meaning priest or chaplain. The most common
patronymic in the Middle East also means priest, in Arabic, Khoury.
But mine (which, of course, is not at all common in the Middle East)
happens also to be the name of the I sraeli Minister of Finance. . . .
This was annoying, not simply because he might have been called Cohen
or Greenberg, like anyone else, or because he might have changed his
