Thursday, October 30, 2008

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 12

I am trying to get the complete story uploaded, but unfortunately, the internet is not cooperating. Here's a bit of the next installment until I get it sorted out. Sorry about all the hold-ups and delays - once I get this running it should be a fair bit smoother.

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 12

In some, the men simply conversed among each other; in others, they inspected crates, containers, even a stack of rifles. In isolation, they proved nothing. But with the framework he had begun to perceive from his conversation with Fuad, they might be a definitive step forward. Unfortunately they were also adrift, lacking reference; though the 'what' was clear, the 'who, where, when' remained absent.

Said had dropped them in his lap and then promptly vanished, in an extremely perplexing and even slightly worrying fashion. The man had an angle, of that there was no doubt. But again, it lay in a vacuum, disconnected from everything else. He threw open the doors of the balcony to let air into the stuffy room, seated himself with a notepad on a plastic chair and began to sketch out his ideas on the pad.

In one corner, Said. In another, Fuad's subtle hints. The photos in the center, a strong line linking them to the Iranian and a weak, dashed one to the Afghan. General Abdel-Kareem went on too, with another strong line to the photographs. After some thought he put Carlos on the edge – with his fingers in every pie in city, he had a tendency to crop up in the most unexpected places.

His glass of coffee had reached the bitter dregs, swirling in the bottom. He peered into the cup, wondering if there was another sip there, but decided against it. In the kitchen, he found that he'd forgotten, yet again, to stock the refrigerator with anything for breakfast.

For a moment he leaned against the door, forehead braced on his arm, mentally berating himself. Then he grabbed a handful of Egpytian pounds, snagged his keys and headed out and down the street to grab a plate of fuul and a pastry at a local dive.

Triumphant Sun - Behind some clouds

Will be coming later today...I think I'm going to move to a Thursday posting schedule because it works better with my week.

I'll also be posting a .pdf and a .doc of the whole story, to date, so that you can read it in chronological, rather than reverse-chronological, order.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 11

A rattling pickup trundled beneath his window, the steel canisters of cooking gas clanking back and forth in its bed. It made slow rounds on the street below, stopping at each building to unload its delicate cargo. An Egyptian army truck hurtled by, filled to the brim with underpaid conscripts slumped in dejected rows on narrow wooden benches. The sight brought Evan back to the problem that had been tormenting and tantalizing him – the vast invisible web of connections stretching through aircraft holds and car trunks and poppy fields that funneled a stupefying narcotic stream across the deserts and mountains and valleys of the Middle East.

The unbearable complexity of the idea oppressed him. He felt unable to get a handle on it, a vast smooth globe that glimmered in his mind's eye but eluded his grasp. Already he'd wandered far past the bounds of journalistic practice – he had nothing on which to hang a story, no quotes, no sources. He irritably scratched at his arm, picking at a sore despite his best instinct to let it lie. With a force of effort, he pushed his hand down to the railing. The world troubled him, and the story most of all, a mere amorphous collection of suspicions and allegations – and the photos.

In the thrill of pursuing Fuad and his underworld allegiances, he'd entirely forgotten the photos Said had delivered to him. An aura of distrust hung around them – that sort of thing felt too impossible to be true. Nevertheless, the possibility was too tempting to ignore.

He sat down in a decaying armchair and drew the photos out, laying them out in an arc across the glass table before him. They had the vague, distant quality of a telephoto lens to them, like the paparazzi shots that appeared in glossy celebrity magazines. A dusty milieu and a figure in military uniform featured prominently in them, mingling with militant figures clad in the robes and scarves of mountain guerrillas. Kalashnikovs featured prominently with a kind of totemic significance.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Egypt, 1941

In September of 1941, tensions were mounting daily as the war in Europe ground on and Japan expanded its Pacific holdings. U-Boats and warplanes armed with torpedoes hunted shipping that supplied England and the Allied nations, and sometimes, they made mistakes.

One of those mistakes was the Steel Seafarer - an American merchant vessel which was hit by a torpedo in the Red Sea and promptly sank. Presumably, a German warplane had mistaken it for a British freighter and attacked during the night watch. Fortunately, the crew escaped onto lifeboats and made it away from the ruined hulk, which slipped beneath the waves less than half an hour after the strike. Some were saved by a Danish freighter, but the majority reached the coast under heavy seas, and eventually made their way back across the desert to Cairo, and eventually, home.

My grandfather was a member of the Merchant Marine aboard the Seafarer, and through some family connections, namely my half-aunt Marlene Beggs we've dug up a set of pictures from the incident, as well as clippings from newspapers that reported on it. I think they're pretty interesting, in all.

You can click the photos for bigger images

A photo of me juxtaposed with my grandfather, in nearly identical poses and settings.


Albert Beggs on the Pyramids.

News clippings describing the incident.

Grandfather Albert riding a camel.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 10

Evan awoke in near darkness, his disorientation almost complete. He stared at the crazed lines and cracks that cut his ceiling into broken shards of ancient plaster. Outside, the muezzin howled the morning prayer, echoing over the rumbling sounds of the city. As he finished another began, then another and another, tumbling over each other in a patchwork symphony of Quranic verses.

He fumbled at his bedside table for a glass of water, knocking his keys and watch to the floor with a metallic crash. A pervasive fatigue enveloped him as he levered himself to sit on the edge of his bed. The floor felt grainy beneath his bare feet so he shuffled his feet into a pair of beaten rubber slippers. The venetian blinds clattered back and forth in the slight breeze, sending erratic blades of light tumbling across the room, illuminating the dust that hung in the air.

Evan peered out the cramped kitchen window as he made coffee in the Arabic style, letting the powder-like grounds steep slowly in a small tin pot with sugar, cardamom and cinnamon. The window opened onto a peculiar shaft that ran the length of his building, supposedly bringing air to cramped interior rooms. Pipes and byzantine tangles of wiring snaked through it, covered in the sand and dust of forty or fifty years. It all hung together in an “Egyptian fix” – slapped together with whatever came to hand until it broke again, hopefully on someone else’s watch.

Evan closed the window shutter and walked to the balcony of the apartment, cradling the steaming glass of coffee in his hand. The first sip brought him awake and upright, the intensity of the dual flavors of coffee and sugar jolting him out of the morning stupor. He’d had no intention of waking so early, but sometimes he still found himself dragged from sleep by the calling of the muezzins. It was a sound at once ethereal and comfortingly familiar – on a trip across the Mediterranean a few months ago, he’d felt the lack of it every morning.

Minarets jutted out over the city like exclamation points – some mere crumbling towers of shoddy brick, others modern stone edifices and a few, selected examples of medieval Islamic architecture. Cairo earned the epitaph “City of a Thousand Minarets” several times over, but the effect became stranger and more affecting with odd, new juxtapositions. A new phenomenon outnumbered the spires – satellite dishes dotting every rooftop, sometimes clustering together like a growth, sprouting out of the fabric of the city. More popped up every day, tenuously wired and affixed to whatever surface provided a modicum of space.

Many of the buildings were unfinished, too – steel bars twisting up out of the concrete giving the roofs a vicious, unfinished appearance. Builders left them that way to dodge taxes – an incomplete building wouldn’t get taxed by the government. That never stopped squatters from moving out onto the exposed roofs, setting up rambling shanty-towns that collapsed upon themselves with depressing regularity. One of the thousands of forgotten, unimportant scandals that got lost in the wandering streets.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 9

Samira realized that there might be more old mansions like her father's, crumbling slowly under the endless sun. So many of the old families had moved on, to new, fortress-like homes, or out of Egypt entirely. Some day in the far future, their residences might be the object of study, like the ruined temples of Karnak and Aswan. She imagined sand creeping in the shattered windows, while whole tribes of feral cats prowled the grounds. The trees might be slowly reduced to ash and swept away in the endless wind.

The poignancy of the idea saddened her – but she realized that in it lay a potential spark of creation. There might be a feature in the idea – a profile of the noble houses of Cairo, laid low by time and neglect. She could imagine her father’s rage and disapproval, and smiled. She did not remember him spending much time in the house itself, but his presence had lingered even when he left.

She particularly remembered the dressing table where he kept a small castle of decanters and bottles, a wooden humidor for cigars and various other trappings of Western decadence. No one touched it – not her mother, and not the servants, devout Muslims that they were.

Occasionally he would take it upon himself to clean the tray off, clouds of dust floating up from the crystal and glass in the afternoon sun. As a little girl she used to sneak up and lift the heavy tops to smell the exotic, alcoholic scents of the amber and ruby liquids glittering within. Later, once she was older, she used to sneak a nip or two, praying that he wouldn't notice the dusty fingerprints on the side.

A small cluster of students crossed the street towards her. She remembered that the American University dorms were only a few blocks away, and she began wandering towards them. One of the stray cats scrambled up onto the dividing wall and paced for a while above her head, threading through the overgrown wire before leaping down and scurrying off into the maze of streets.

She stopped across the road and watched for a while as students, some foreign but many Egyptian, filtered in and out through the glass doors. Though she had never attended, Samira had fond memories of lounging in the main quads and courtyards of the University; and other, more vibrant memories of a young Irishman on his semester abroad who had so assiduously courted her. His piercingly grey-green eyes stood out vividly in her memory, along with the crooked smile he would flash at her.

With a shake of her head, she tore away the cobwebs of years past and turned towards home. The sun had sunk low and the full weight of her fatigue began to press down on her. The students continued their boisterous laughter as she turned on her heel and headed away.