Read East of Suez for Free Online Page A

home because I’m educating both sexes. Here they think I’m mad for teaching at all. The children here need facts, not more religion. They have more than enough of that already. Is there a more God-ridden piece of real estate on earth? Maybe it’s because we are sitting between two major religions here on the peninsula.” He was becoming wistful, thinking along those lines, so I turned the subject back to Lear. I found my memory had not erased all my notes on him.
    “He was an epileptic. I forget where I read that.” I stole a glance at my neglected notebook in which I had scrawled the priest’s name. While I was in transit, I had forgotten about the notebook. Perhaps I even had imagined that I could live without it. Now I concentrated on the name of my companion for several seconds, letting my eyes scan the letters until they spelled a name: O’Mahannay. I repeated it under my breath. My notebook was my memory. My memory book . I never left home without it.
    “You have an amazing memory, my friend. They’ve got a watercolor by Lear, a view of the harbor, at the National Museum. You should have a look at that one day.”
    “You’re American, aren’t you?”
    “Didn’t I mention it? The sun must be getting to me. I’m from Chicago. Well, it’s not really Chicago, but that’s close enough at this distance. Do you know the area at all?” I told him that I had never had the pleasure. When I mentioned that I’d heard of two writers who came from Oak Park, Hemingway and Carol Shields, he began to berate me as a Protestant.
    “But, Father, I’m Jewish ! Doesn’t that make me neutral?”
    “This far from the Lake Shore Drive, I suppose so. I didn’t catch your name?”
    I told him, added my Canadian nationality to my confession, and settled back to see what was going to happen next.
    “Across the street, there behind that wretched kiosk, that’s where Raffles stayed when he first came out to this part of the world. And there, there where that fellow looks like he is about to take his ease in the gutter, that’s where Somerset Maugham lived for six months, collecting local color. That’s what he called it. Local color. That’s what this town has, of course. Color and bad livers. You can see both and more on these streets. Chandler wrote about mean streets; these are not so much mean as streets in disorder and neglect, streets without memory, without conscience.”
    “You’re better than a professional guide, Father. You know the place very well.”
    “Like everywhere else this is a place of contrasts. The boy who fixes my computer wears an amulet against the evil eye. My doctor believes that smallpox can be cured by vomiting. My bishop has views about the parting of the Red Sea and the Flood that I wouldn’t share for a red hat. I’m better than a Baedeker or Michelin by a damned sight! And cheaper into the bargain, Mr Cooperman. I’ll tell you one thing—” He interrupted himself, put his head out the open window, and shouted. “Thomas! Thomas! ” He was trying to catch the attention of a youngish man in a rickshaw crossing through the intersection. I couldn’t see the passenger clearly, though I did catch a cigarette and a cigarette-holder, held at an angle in his teeth, reminiscent of pictures of President Franklin Roosevelt. “He hasn’t seen me, worst luck! But that, Mr Cooperman, is just a reminder about places like this: we’re like ants crawling around a rotting melon. If you don’t meet a friend on one turn around, you’ll see him on the next. That was Thomas Lanier. Never, never call him Tom. Very interesting fellow. Sent me a card from Bergerac, of all places. I can remember when he owned both a tuxedo and tails but didn’t have a pair of socks to put with them. Remarkable fellow.”
    The buildings on this side of the wall looked like they had been made of some sort of dissolving plaster. The ornamental details along the rooflines had been attacked by acid or nibbled by giant