Writer and editor Vincent O'Sullivan wrote the book Long Journey To The Border: A Life of John Mulgan. Photo / NZME.
The subway was packed for the morning commute, women separate from men. The train continued straight past the station at Tahrir Square, where barbed wire coils and men with Kalashnikovs still funnelled the pedestrians.
Lots of people come to Egypt to find tombs.
They tolerate Cairo's heaving masses, the dirt and the dogs, the noxious air.
They queue. They wonder. They wander Giza and think of mummies in gold leaf masks.
John Mulgan's tomb is rather more recent.
I trekked across Cairo and I found him in a perfect garden, an hour's walk from the nearest train.
There were no postcards for sale or camel rides to hawk. There were no other visitors.
From the honking, the filth and the fumes, a few hectares of comparative peace.
I smiled and bumbled through an Arabic hello to a trio of groundsmen tending shrubs. They looked stunned to have living company; their days are dedicated to the perfection of a cemetery barely anyone visits.
If guest books are gospel, more than 1700 world war souls had just a few hundred visitors this year. A lady from Te Kauwhata was here a few months ago. Another New Zealand visitor paid tribute to her dad. But turn back three pages at Heliopolis and you turn back 18 months.
I found Mulgan's headstone without issue, kept smart like all the rest.
There was no hint in the inscription that he was once compared to Katherine Mansfield in the New Zealand literary scene. I don't know, but I liked his novel very much and it was as good a reason as any to come.
Rhodes scholar. Special Ops soldier. Author.
He died on Anzac Day, 1945: an intentional morphine overdose, three days before the end of the war.
For however long since, in an Egyptian oasis, his name has been etched in white stone: JAE Mulgan.
For maybe 20 minutes this week, no longer a Man Alone.
Jack Tame is on NewstalkZB Saturdays, 9am-midday.
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