“But how to realise?” It was Piers’ sad voice now that interrogated the sea-hushed silence and Akkad sighed, though he remained smiling still. He said: “A rather cruel paradox centres about the two notions which we express by the words ‘knowing’ and ‘realising’. You can know something and yet not realise it, not having lived it, as we say, for in our inarticulate way we are aware of the distinction. Realisation is a real sigil conferred upon an experience – like a food product which the system has passed without assimilating. And the head knowledge, the conscious product, often vitiates it by coming first, so that even if you realise it and live it, later on it has somehow lost its kinetic value as a motive force which shapes the psyche. Powerful imaginations can be dangerous; they live ideas out so powerfully that when the time comes to ‘realise’ them, to perform with a real woman, say, a Muse, they are either impotent or else experience the taste of ashes. Poor desperate descendant of protoman tries to still his fears by classifying them, by making an index of them. He hopes to delimit them thus, but they extend on all sides of him to infinity. So he spends his time, turning in the trap. Then he decides that there is no way out. But there is, in fact, a secret way of transcending them, of turning them to account. One must begin by pretending in order to end by realising. Pretend that you do not fear by acting fearlessly, at whatever cost. Habit is very powerful. One day you will become what you mime. The parody of goodness can make you really good.”
“And what about suicide?” It was Piers’ voice again, pitched on a humble and trusting note, but again as if addressed to himself.
“You are forbidden to undertake an act of conscious self-destruction. Suicide in the active sense, a bullet in the mouth, that is not what is meant. Everything lies in the act of acceptance, to join finally the spiritual trust of the mature who have tasted the world to the full and wish to be purged of the physical envelope. They join the inner circle and make an act of acceptance – that is what constitutes the gnostic suicide. They accept, then, their own execution, but it is not their own hand that is raised against them. They never know how it is carried out, the sentence, though they are told when; they receive two warnings when their time is running out, and this gives them a chance to put their affairs in order. Then, after a certain time, it can come about at any moment. An executioner and a method has been chosen, as well as a time, but not by themselves. The person who is the instrument is chosen by lot, and is always one who himself has joined the inner circle of the faithful and renounced temporal life. The procedure is one of impeccable order. In the end we imitate process and there is nothing disorderly about process, however much it may seem so. The very concept of order in nature is home-made, the product of our finite minds. In the theology of process, the queen of the sciences, coincidence and contingency rule, but never fortuitously. Never. I know it sounds nonsense, but it is so.”
Suddenly Sylvie cried out: “Akkad, don’t encourage Piers to take all this too seriously. He mustn’t. He is far too quixotic, far too extreme. It would be very dangerous for somebody with his type of temperament.” Akkad looked at her gravely and said nothing; but now it was Piers who was angry with his sister, his eyes shining. “For God’s sake, Sylvie. You want me to take all this lightly? Akkad is describing my own interior mind, my own character and temperament, and you wish me to regard it as simply a sort of intellectual novelty. I feel I would go to the stake for this.” Sylvie turned to embrace him apologetically but to me she said: “You see? I feared as much.” In a sense this episode marked the point of divergence in all our attitudes to Akkad and his sect; Piers was determined to go on towards deeper knowledge, profounder identification with the gnostics; while I did not wish to advance further than the portals, so to speak, of their system. I felt suddenly detached and indeed a little sad as I watched the brother and sister exchange embraces to put away the memory of this little but deep disagreement. How remote it all seemed, the rest of life as we had been living it! I felt all at once like Robinson Crusoe alone on his island; below us was the drumming sea, all around us were the petrified trees and the melancholy dunes. Somewhere far away was the Alexandria of our memory, with its comfortable flats and shady villas waiting for us. We had become ghosts, uneasily haunting this strip of desert, exchanging momentous fictions about God. It was presumptuous. I lit a cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully, pondering on what Akkad had told us. There were other initiations, he had said, of various degrees of knowledge; but I felt that my own limitations of sensibility were such that I would never advance much further than this first impressive step, which had without any doubt marked my whole future outlook on life. I knew then that Piers would go on, stage by obstinate stage, towards the deepest knowledge; his whole attitude and disposition suggested it. As for Sylvie I did not know.
It was almost dusk when we packed up and set off once more across the desert for Macabru. On the return journey, not a word was spoken. It was as if Akkad had exhausted all the possibilities of language. We had been pumped dry and emptied even of coherent thought. Akkad seemed moody and withdrawn, and of course by now the fatigue of these long rides had begun to tell on us all. It was night when at last the oasis came in sight again, and we were grateful to surrender the fagged horses. Many of the guests had already gone, and the fair was in the process of packing up, of dismantling itself. By tomorrow the old silence would return to Macabru, everything would have disappeared as if by magic. That night we made plans to return to the city on the morrow, ferried by the little aircraft of our host. We ate a leisurely dinner, and took a walk in the little melting township as a gesture of farewell. Something memorable had happened here, which had tugged at our sensibilities. That much we knew.
When we finally returned to the city there was work to be done, people to be met, so that for a week or so we were not able to join forces for more than a few moments in the evening. Then came a long autumn during which Piers launched himself into a course of detailed reading and study in the old Patriarchal Library with its warped wooden floors and leaning landings crammed with Byzantine trophies and manuscripts. Akkad had obtained permission for him to use the great library from the Patriarch himself, whose chief secretary spoke several languages and was himself a scholar capable of steering my friend among the shoals and quicksands of the desert fathers, with their hysterical condemnations of the gnostics, and the fragments of this forgotten faith as outlined by ghostly and enigmatic shapes like Carpocrates and Valentinus. Sylvie and I followed all this as well as we could, but without the candent enthusiasm of her brother who immersed himself wholly in these studies – to a degree that made his absentmindedness something of a joke among his colleagues in Chancery.
He was also capable of downright absurdities like telephoning to me in the middle of an economic press conference to say: “I think I have rediscovered the force of prayer; the thing is prayer to what? Remind me to go into this matter tonight.” It was rather a problem – prayer to the God of process I presumed? It was hard to keep one’s mind centred on the universe as a giant maggotry when the landscapes and humours of Egypt were so beautiful, and its passing days so enticing; moreover when one was loved. I put down the telephone and turned drowsily on my side towards Sylvie whose sleeping nakedness lay close by me, echoing the curves of my body with her own pliant limbs. Sleeping, but only in that siesta of exhausted half-sleep which is imposed by the languid Egyptian afternoons with their tepid sea-breezes and long calms broken only by the crazy hiccoughs of a tethered ass somewhere. When I closed my eyes the darkness throbbed around us and once more I returned to re-live, re-experience the soft scroll of her tongue which pressed back mine and probed steadily downwards across chest and stomach to settle at last throbbing like a humming bird, on my sex. I held that beautiful head between my palms like something disembodied, and rememorised the dark hair cropped down, and then spurred up into its chignon, the crumpled ears of a new-born lamb, the white teeth and lips upon which I would soon slowly and deliberately graft back my happy kisses
. It was hard to come back mentally to the old creaking library with the fleas jumping from the cracks in the floor, the manuscripts crackling, and my friend working over those huge parchment tomes, lost in the non-world of Carpocrates – the negative of the printed world we had thought we knew well, but which now seemed a delusion, and all the more dangerous because it was so enticing. “Kiss me. Again. Once more.” Commands to be obeyed when issued by a woman. There was nothing derived about these pristine acts – everything was newly minted.
Before the winter finally closed in on us Piers managed to implement a scheme he had had in mind for quite a while; he borrowed the French Embassy’s felucca, and on the pretext of an official journey into Upper Egypt got it set to rights. His mission being a small one and his Ambassador an amiable man he was able to combine freedom with pleasure to a degree not usually granted to young diplomats en poste. I do not quite know how he justified extending an invitation to me to join the party – but the result was that the three of us found ourselves in cool weather just upriver from Bulaq, outside Cairo, preparing for a journey of two weeks and perhaps more in this handsome craft. The felucca Nasr was some forty feet long with two masts and a couple of cabins, and manned by a crew of seven. During a long period of relative neglect by the French it had been used to ferry fruit and wood upriver and had thus become infested with vermin. However for Nile boats no remedy could be easier than to sink it in the shallows for a while, after which it could be pumped out and scrubbed clean with sand and pumice. After a day or so it was dry and ready to load. Piers entered into all the details of the journey with the élan of the born romantic – you would have thought we were mounting an expedition to Polynesia to judge by the quantity of the stores which he ordered – macaroni, rice, oil, tinned foods, fruit, dried vegetables, wines. It made us feel rather ashamed later to see on what short commons the Arab crew lived – but they did not appear to grudge us our rich fare, and probably equalised things up by the amount that they pilfered from us daily and quite shamelessly. But as they were both efficient and kindly we closed an eye to their depredations, only locking up ammunition, tobacco, and such expensive frivolities as cameras and medicines. All in all, it was extremely exciting this manner of setting out on a journey by water, and despite my ironic amusement at Piers’ enthusiasm I secretly envied him and shared a good deal of it. I was elected to be responsible for the medicine cabinet and the armoury – for we intended to do a bit of spot-shooting along the river banks at the end of each day; shooting for the pot so to speak.
One of the cabins was well appointed with a long divan and a heavy central work table, and was spacious enough to offer headroom and a place to put our trunks of provisions. The other had precious locker-space as well as long bunks running round the outside wall. Here we elected to sleep. There was a kind of glassed-in hatch like a conning-tower which we made mosquito proof against the long Nile evenings. All reservations made, she was an elegant and roomy vessel, and the crew were delighted by the novelty of taking aboard foreign passengers – with so many goods to be pilfered. The captain and the mate both lacked an eye, and quarrelled dreadfully; and during these quarrels they exchanged ferocious glances of a macabre kind with their single good eyes.
These cabins were to prove a godsend, for we were able at times to work over our books, maps and papers, and barricade ourselves against the talkative importunities of the Arab crew who seemed to be dying of boredom. So it was that on a late afternoon we said goodbye to Bulaq, the port of Cairo. There was not a breath of wind stirring so that the Arabs were compelled to resort to their oars at once to fetch us into mid channel and to clear all other shipping. This they did with great cheerfulness (it is always thus at the beginning of a voyage) accompanying their energies with loud songs. We skimmed along the surface of the river, elegant as a flying fish, the spray flying under the oars. Our course lay through the narrow channel between the island of Rhoda and the mainland. On both sides of us the banks were covered in the most luxurious vegetation; while here and there as we passed we glimpsed, through narrow openings, vistas of magnificent gardens and palaces whose grounds ran down to the water. From one such palace came the strains of music and song, obviously from the harem, and our boatmen were silenced. They listened with rapture. It was, they said, the palace of the great pasha called Halim Bey, and they were most impressed when Piers said that he knew the great man, and had actually dined at his table – a statement which was not strictly accurate, though useful.
It was not long before we had passed the points of the Nilometer – and then the broad hauntingly beautiful river opened its reaches to us like arms and we found ourselves gliding across a floor of dark glass which the evening light was turning to gold. Clouds floated in this mirror with their customary languor. Our crew resumed their singing as we sped on into the darkling horizon, while we sat on the forward hatch and gazed at the intoxicating play of light and darkness over the cool bosom of the ancient river. There was no doubt that this was to be another memorable journey which would bring to an end the first year of our stay in this beautiful land. No one responsive to colour and landscape could remain the same – and when this was combined with the companionship of Akkad, and all the exciting intellectual enigmas of the place … Egypt as an experience had separated the old life as we were used to living it from the new which was as yet unborn, undefined, as yet only a whispering gallery of premonitions. Piers cleaned his gun thoughtfully that evening, tilting the barrels to the light and polishing them until they glittered. “How will we ever get away from this country?” he asked in despair, almost as if he had followed the direction of my own thoughts. “We’ll have to I suppose, one day.” But what he meant, I knew, was that we would never be able to go “back” to the old life – something new would have to be offered us in its place. After Macabru the old life in Provence seemed somehow so moribund and finished. We ached for the infant new to be born.
We drove on thus at breakneck speed towards the sunset after-glow, trying to clear the nearest waters of the river before we anchored for the first night to take stock of ourselves and the dispositions of our kit. Things looked fair enough for a light breeze on the morrow so that we might use our blunt lateen-sail as a jib. It was powerful enough both to steady us and make a little way in the veritable lakes which the Nile had carved out of the river banks in the course of its descent; for the rest we would depend on the tow-rope – from time immemorial ships on the Nile, as on the Rhône, have been man-hauled when heading upstream. But we were lucky in an unusual disposition of winds and counter currents to be able to make quite a distance upriver before the darkness threatened to close in and our crew found it necessary to seek a landfall, which they did at last after a number of violent disagreements about the choice of the place. The two one-eyed men yelled and gesticulated, and exchanged fuliginous stares. But at last they found a place to moor on the western bank.
As soon as the boat was made fast to the land by a short pole driven into the soft earth, the boats crew kindled their dinner fire in little portable ovens on deck and began their cooking operations; as did also our body servant under the directions of Piers who spoke by far the best Arabic. We noticed that the standard fare of the Arab crew was lentil soup and bread, with perhaps a few onions – meat was a luxury undreamt-of because of its price. Their usual drink was usually Nile water. Yet constitutionally they seemed pretty robust. On this first evening, however, as if to prepare themselves for the journey, they turned in early with none of the usual evening songs or dances to which we later became accustomed. A heavy damp came off the river, and a dense ground-mist blurred all clear outlines. We ourselves ate soberly enough in the cabin, and were glad of a small charcoal brazier over which to warm our fingers. It was the first breath of autumn cold, and the days were to be continually deceptive at this season – as if they kept forgetting and reverting back to the summer we had left behind. Some nights for example were damp and cold, and some warm and fruity and humming with mosquitoes.
No two were quite alike.
But on this first evening we tasted for the first time the feeling of spaciousness that the Nile always conveys, for its levels are never stable, they are always falling and rising; and its banks and boundaries shift and alter, appear and disappear under one’s very eyes. Islands emerge and fade, swallowed by the rising tide, or else sprout up again with fully grown trees on them by some freak of level – as if fresh from the potter’s wheel. All this was to come; but for this first evening we ate soberly, drank a brandy with our coffee and then set our books and maps to rights. Finally I turned in, and so did Sylvie, leaving Piers with his diary which he was determined to fill with news of our doings. I took one brief walk on deck before turning in. The Arabs lay everywhere like fallen skittles, muffled into bundles against the damp; some of them had clenched themselves up in their rags until they looked more like hedgehogs than anything else. A lone river wind sighed in the cordage of the ship. Then, after a long hesitation, a harvest moon came bobbing up, turning from bronze to white as it rose. It was of such a startling brightness, and penetrating all the chinks in our cabin with such a piercing glare, that Piers was roused from his book to find that the yellow oil-lamp could hardly hold its own with this moon which gave such a wild and strange colouring to the place – the books and maps, the pots and pans. Somewhere a jackal sounded, its doleful howling mingling with the distant barking of dogs. Nearer at hand on the brilliant river came the croak of some night-bird stirring. I fixed my bunk to my liking and said: “Piers don’t stay up too late; tomorrow will be a heavy day.” He shook his head. “I won’t,” he said. Later as I drowsed off I heard him close his diary, blow out the lamp, and then make his way to his own bunk. He set a pistol by his bed with a small torch, while under his pillow he placed the precious wallet which held all our passports and money and papers. I lay for a long while suspended between waking and the sweet unreason of dreams; I heard a boatman talking in his sleep, and the scatter of drops along our prow as a freshet of wind struck us. Then oblivion came and I felt my mind stretching out towards the frontiers of love and childhood, so that when I turned, and when a hand came out of the darkness to rest its fingers on my wrist I did not know whose it was.
The Avignon Quintet Page 15