216
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
iron grated door midway on the stairs. We knocked. The
night clerk called out sleepily from an inner room. He would
not let us in, he said, until he had looked us up in the register.
It would take a few minutes—Arab minutes! We sat down
on the stairs in the dark while the clerk, cursing the world at
large, looked for the register. At long last he demanded the
details of Moustafa's registration. I had to call out my passport number and spell out my name. Finally the clerk, in
slippers and red striped pajamas, stumbled down his half of
the stairs and let us go up.
"I must be careful," he explained. "There was a stranger
here a short time ago."
"Who was he?" Moustafa asked quickly.
"I do not know. He was not an Arab."
The iron gate had hardly been closed when someone
crashed open the door below. Then there was a knocking and
shaking of the iron grill. The terrified night clerk begged us
to take charge. Moustafa's queries brought a reply in hesitant
but adequate Arabic, spoken in a heavy guttural accent
"It's one of the Germans," Moustafa said.
"Invite him to our room."
"First we will take away his gun if he has any."
He certainly had one. At the point of Moustafa's drawn
pistol, the Nazi placed his revolver on the night clerk's desk.
We followed the German to our room and made him sit on
the chair while Moustafa and I faced him from our beds. It
was Friedrich: a beet-red, prematurely bald, ugly man with
colorless eyes buried in a hatchet face. He came to the point
with surprising frankness.
"I followed you to shoot you," he said in good English.
I felt a pricking of my scalp.
"One, or the both of us?" I asked.
"You," he snarled. "You are a Jew!"
Moustafa and I laughed nervously. "Artour is an Armenian," Moustafa said.
"Th B