Revolt in Egypt

THE CRY OF THE KITE (317 pp.)--Maarten Schiemer--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

Give a country a king who has become an international joke and scandal. Let it be ruled by a clique of entrenched grafters whose platform is to bleed the poor. Equip its army with inadequate and defective weapons and have its soldiers humiliatingly defeated in the field. Result: revolution. So goes the very recent history of Egypt, and so goes the theme of this first novel by Author Maarten Schiemer. The Cry of the Kite is a fictionalized account of how fat Farouk's restive Egypt became the spitfire Egypt of Soldier Gamal Abdel Nasser.

As one-half of a two-man news agency, Java-born South African Author Schiemer, now 23, was a fledgling reporter of the Cairo scene for a year beginning in March 1953. He met Nasser and Naguib, original front man of the coup, and made friends with members of the Arab League, the Moslem Brotherhood, Egyptian army officers and plain people of the poor native quarter where he lived. With its probing look at Egyptian attitudes, motivations and customs, the book is written more between the headlines than on top of them.

The Call of the Muezzin. The novel's hero, Dirk Celliers, is a free-lance South African journalist nosing around Cairo for stories to send his London editor. An Egyptian officer friend, Major Khaled, takes him to a cell meeting of the League of Free Officers, a conspiratorial group bent on overthrowing the monarchy. Dirk quickly learns that the revolt has been triggered by a teeth-gnashing shame over the defeat in Palestine ("The hand grenades from Italy which had blown up as soon as you pulled out the pin . . . Spanish field guns for which the wrong shells had been supplied. Mauser rifles which dated from 1912. No . . . we tolerated the internal corruption of our country for too long"). Major Khaled and his fellow officers see Dirk as a useful mouth piece for outlining their aims to the outside world once their coup succeeds.

As a kind of conspirator-without-portfolio, Dirk finds himself in a jungle of spies and counterspies--a hashish-smoking English spiv who feeds both true and false information to the British embassy for the price of his food and rent, a degraded homosexual German who is in the double employ of the palace clique and the free officers' group. Everywhere, too, are agents of the Wafd, the venal party of the land-owning beys and pashas.

Despite the seeping corruption around him, Dirk feels the romantic pull of the minarets, the call of the muezzin, and the wheeling of the slender-winged kites in Cairo's twilight sky. He falls recklessly in love with a raven-haired Coptic 16-year-old named Aziza. Their furtive courtship gives Author Schiemer a chance to explore Egyptian domestic customs from cuisine to boudoir. One custom: the exhibiting of the wedding-night bedsheet to the bridegroom's parents as proof of the bride's virginity.

Anathema on Foreigners. Tampering with history, Novelist Schiemer brings his officers' revolt to a bad end, and with it Dirk's romance. The bloody mob riots that result in the burning of Shepheard's Hotel lead Major Khaled and a few other hothead officers to try an overnight coup. Dirk is jailed briefly and ordered to leave the country. When Aziza and clan hear of his disgrace, he gets an even quicker brushoff. As Aziza screams her parting words, they seem almost like an Egyptian anathema on all foreigners: "Son of a dog! I'll find an Egyptian ten times better than you!"

Author Schiemer sometimes clumps through his plot in Hollywooden shoes, but redeems himself by capturing the sights and sounds and smells of Egypt with the freshness of a documentary filmed on location. Like Paul Bowles's more accomplished novel, The Spider's House, set in French Morocco, The Cry of the Kite is a blend of the harsh and the exotic, and an entertainingly readable way of catching up on one's global homework.

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