The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  They dozed for the most part in the ill-lit plane and made their way slowly across the waters, tossing and swaying into Egypt where the inadequate aerodrome had been alerted to light them in along a flare path manifestly too short for any but small wartime planes. A bumping and grinding landing rounded off this disagreeable journey; a chalky greasy dawn was coming up as the office car rounded the last headland by the dunes and entered the sleeping town with its soft whirling klaxon pleading with strings of early camels plodding to market with vegetables. “I shall say no more – except tell me as soon as you can what they say,” said the Prince and his companion nodded, smiling wanly. “It’s impossible to foresee their judgement,” he said, “because it has never happened before, an apostasy like mine. O Lord! It will have created a precedent.” He sounded close to tears of misery, which indeed he was. The Prince left him – a dozen servants had been waiting all night on the steps of the town house, wet and miserable but faithful as dogs. They whipped open the door and conjured away his baggage. Affad was driven on; his more modest house was set in a grove of palm trees, back from the boulevard. His garden ran beside that of the museum, and indeed from his cellar there was a secret entrance into its basement. Sometimes after dinner he took his guests through the secret door and into the gloomy crypt where so many treasures (which could not be shown for lack of space) stood or lay, shrouded in sheets. Indeed the museum itself was most charming by yellow candlelight, and he used to carry a branch of Venetian candles with him on such occasions. But his own house was more modestly staffed than that of the Prince; a cook and a butler, the faithful and negligent Said, made up the whole staff.

  As his key clicked in the door his valet Said rose from the armchair in which he had spent the night’s vigil and advanced, rubbing his eyes but smiling delightedly to see his master again. Affad greeted him affectionately and stood steadily divesting himself until the servant carried away his coats and freed him to advance and make a loving tour of the home in which he had spent so many years of his life – many of them quite alone except for the servants. A clock gave off a soft musical chime as if to welcome him back. The statue of Pallas and the stuffed raven were still on the ledge above the fanlight. His books were arrayed on either side of the Adam fireplace – a fine array of friends. He advanced, touched the covers with his fingers as if to identify and greet the author of each, and then progressed towards the group of Tanagra figures in their glass case. He licked his finger and touched the glass to verify if Said had cleaned in his absence or not. But in reality he was searching for something. The servant came back with his mail – a meagre collection of bills for water and electricity, and appeals for hospitals and homes. No, it was not that. He knew that they must have summoned him to a rendezvous. Normally such a missive would have been slipped under the door. He questioned the servant, but no, he had seen nothing like that. He sat down for a moment and drank the coffee which had been prepared for him as he reflected. Finally in some perplexity – for he had expected an instant and peremptory message – he took himself off to his sumptuous bathroom for a bath and a complete change of clothing, not without a certain feeling of relief. Perhaps the whole business might be delayed for a while? On the other hand, he longed to have it over and done with as summarily as possible.

  The weather had changed, it had become suddenly sunny and clear, though the cold sea wind persisted. He dressed carefully and taking a light overcoat walked slowly down the boulevard to the Mohammed Ali Club, greeted here and there by a friend or acquaintance who was pleased to see him back, resuming his Alexandrian life once more. It was on the notice board of the club that he found the missive he had been expecting, addressed to him in a hand he did not know and on a paper without letterhead. It said succinctly, “You will attend an exceptional meeting of the central committee at midnight tonight in the burial theatre of the museum crypt.” Only that.

  He knew what they must mean by the phrase “burial theatre”; it was the furthest part of the museum crypt and had been at some time part of a necropolis. But successive generations had altered it according to more recent motives until it clearly had served several purposes, with its small arch and portion of nave, and its little amphitheatre. It was a mixture of chapel, Greek theatre, and lecture hall admirably suited to the meetings of their society with its need for lectures or discussions of procedure or indeed prayer-meetings and the reading of minutes. It was called “The Crusaders’ Chapel” and “The Coptic Shrine”. In its further depths it contained some sculptured aeroliths and some drums of stone purporting to be Babylonian sculpture – a sort of map and calendar of the world supported by the coils of a huge serpent. How well he knew the place! It was here that new members were sworn in and their first act of submission heard. And how very appropriate that it should be an amalgam of so many different things, so suitable to a city which had made a cult of syncretism! It was here that he must answer for his defection. He must attend, then, in due form and order, to hear their reproaches and accept whatever punishment or obloquy was his due. He had not a leg to stand on. He wondered what sort of punishment could be envisaged for such a case.

  Preoccupied by these grave deliberations and wounded by a sense of guilt, he ate a solitary lunch at the Union Club, where he found himself agreeably alone in the gaunt dining room. But appetite he had none. Then he walked back to his house and took a siesta – fell into a profound sleep which took in at one span all the various fatigues of the journey. Indeed it was already dark when he awoke with a start, summoned by the little alarm clock by his bed. There was time in hand – too much of it. He had begun to feel impatient. Some invisible hand (for there was no trace of Said) had prepared him a light supper such as he was in the habit of ordering when theatre-going kept him out late. He hardly touched it, but he drank a glass of champagne. It was mildly stimulating, mildly encouraging. Then he hunted for the black carnival domino, supposing that it was the appropriate thing for a penitent to wear. Indeed if the society had any formal uniform it was that, though it was worn as informally and carelessly as the fur tippet and cape of a master of arts. Nevertheless carnival time was their most important yearly meeting with its significant – carni vale – farewell to the flesh, as suitable for their Manichean creed as for the Christian.

  Punctually at five minutes before the hour he visited the lavatory through the window of which he could study the profile of the museum which at this hour was normally deserted. Yes, there were lights on the staircase, so the three Inquisitors must have made their way in to wait for him down below. For his part he preferred his own private entry. He slipped downstairs and through the kitchen into the cavernous pantry where the private door answered noiselessly to his yale key. He had a pocket torch to light his path as he stepped into the gloom of the crypt. With beating heart he traversed the first cell, a sort of antechamber, and then the second, from which he could see a distant light and hear voices. Was he too soon?

  No. The door to the theatre had been blocked by a drum of carved stone and when he arrived there a voice from within called his name and asked if it was indeed he, to which he replied in the required language, “None other”. He rolled aside the stone and entered the theatre where they waited for him. He was to sit in the centre, he saw, under a floodlight of great theatrical force, while the three Inquisitors occupied three adjacent stone seats in the main hall, the main theatre. The lighting allowed them or perhaps devised by them was so arranged that all he could see was their hands upon the stone dais before them. They were but vague shapes, and with even vaguer voices. He strained at first to see if by chance one of them might be an acquaintance or personal friend. In vain.

  So he entered circumspectly, rolling aside the stone drum, and bowing to the three pairs of white hands sat down and bent his head forward upon his breast in a formally penitential gesture of respect: not for the rank of the Inquisitors for they had no formal rank, having been elected by lottery, but for the organisation they represented with its beehive-like groupi
ng of cells.

  A voice intoned, “Sebastian, Thoma, Ptah, Affad Effendi?” and he replied in a whisper, “None other”. And he felt himself reverting to his Alexandrian self, his Egyptian self. Each name was like the unfolding of a mummy-wrapping, in a way unbandaging his youth with all its fragility. He felt rise in him, like nausea, the long years of solitude and philosophic speculation which had gone to form the person that he now was, and an involuntary sob rose in his throat. He peered into the dark shapes of his three invigilators but could not discern anything except the vague outline of their heads. Only their ghoulish white hands lay before them on the stone tables which were bare save for a small Egyptian knife with its point turned towards him. Yet the voices, whether they addressed him or spoke together, were matter of fact. He studied the spatulate hands of the one who had spoken his name and felt the vague stirrings of familiarity. Could it be Faraj? Neguid? Perhaps Capodistria? Or Banubula? Impossible to be sure. He gave up.

  “Do you know why you are here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us why.”

  Overwhelmed by the gravity of his fault as only a philosopher could be, Affad answered with a sob in his tone, “To answer for my sudden defection. To be punished, admonished, expelled, executed – whatever you may decide is suitable for this unheard of act of treachery. Even now I find it inexplicable to myself. I fell in love.” The word fell like a slab of stone closing upon a tomb.

  One of the Inquisitors drew in his breath with a sharp hiss, but Affad could not tell which one it was, nor why. He fell on his knees and stretching out his hand like a beggar soliciting alms said, “It seemed to me then that there are spirits of love sent into the world who, if recognised, cannot be resisted, should not be resisted at the risk of betraying nature herself. I found myself in this impasse. Hence my apostasy, which I have now fully revoked and abandoned.”

  There was a long silence. Then the first pair of hands to have spoken clasped themselves and the voice belonging to them continued to speak but in an unhurried and sorrowful manner. “You do not know all,” it said. “But you know full well that the strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. You were prepared to snap the chain of our corporate activities, to prejudice the whole spiritual effort represented by our attempts to face the primal trauma of man, namely death, and all for the sake of a woman. So much we all know. But your letter in which you asked leave to forsake the movement, thus prejudicing every single member in it, welded as we all are by sacrificial suicide … this was unheard of and provoked a crisis of grave indecision bordering on despair. In the meantime your election had been decided upon by ballot – you are the next, were the next sacrificial exemplar of the death-confronting fraternity. Your telegram retracting this decision came after the ritual letter had been sent to you. You can imagine the dismay and confusion you have caused the brotherhood.”

  “But I have not received any letter,” cried out Affad from the depths of his misery. “When was it sent? Where was it sent?”

  “It had already been despatched when your own communication was received; there was confusion and delay. But the letter of sacrifice containing the details of your death-confrontation and the time allowed you to prepare … it was sent to Geneva where you were then, and, it was thought, likely to remain.”

  So the blow had fallen! He had, after so many years of patience, at last been elected. Extraordinary emotions assailed him now, discharging themselves in his heart so that he felt at one and the same time proud, sorrowful, and in an intermittent way wildly elated, as if the adventure for which he had longed for so long had begun. But then doubts intervened; would it be cancelled in the light of his apostasy? Suddenly deep gloom replaced the elevation of spirit at the very thought.

  “I implore you to let me go through with it. Let my retraction be accepted, let me redeem my crime by the act of sacrificial fulfilment according to the vow I took.” In the silence he could hear his own heart beating loudly, anxiously. What if this bitter cup should be taken from him, just because of a momentary weakening of his resolve? How remote the painful image of his love seemed at that moment of self-abasement, of cringing self-immolation! Seeing himself with her eyes he realised just how despicable he would have seemed to her could she see him now. And also how amazing, for under the veneer of sophistication and formal culture there now appeared the initial gnostic Manichee born of those long deliberations and fasts and mental exercises. Constance would have been afraid to see him almost grovelling before his Inquisitors, pleading with them to restore his death! What appalling fantasies men harbour – that is what she would think. But he brushed her from his mind like a fly; and now truly he really wanted to die. The whole tide of his disenchantment with the human race and their way of living rose in him and overflowed into a measureless pessimism. And love had made him wish to turn his back upon reality and blinker himself with transitory passion. To wake and sleep with her. To engender a child – a child! What a trap he had prepared for himself. Still with his beggar’s gesture of the outstretched hand he cried hoarsely, “I implore! I implore!” But in a paradoxical sort of way he was also imploring Constance to forgive him, to release him, to understand the full extent of his religious dilemma. The voice went on: “It is the more painful as all three of us, sent here to make a judgement on you, were originally converted to the gnostic posture by your homilies and your formulations!”

  That was the cruellest cut of all! His own converts had become his judges – if that was the word. At any rate from his own point of view the matter of the first importance was to have his retraction accepted; then he must set about finding the fatal letter. It must have been sent in the diplomatic pouch reserved for Red Cross affairs and be somewhere between offices in Geneva.

  A long silence had fallen – the three dark figures seemed to have fallen into a temporary inertia. Then the second one said, “The judgement must be debated and voted upon. Other consultations must follow. This cannot be achieved before tomorrow at midday. The result will be communicated to you by Prince Hamid. You should go now and wait upon the judgement which will be neither merciful nor indulgent but just and logical.”

  The posture had cramped his legs and he rose stiffly to a standing position and unsteadily bowed his thanks to the invisible group. Three pairs of hands briefly rose in farewell and as briefly subsided upon the stone. He groped his way to the door and switched on his pocket torch to light him back through the crypt. Behind him he heard the low murmur of their confabulation begin. What would the upshot of it all be? Surely they must accept his sacrifice as foreseen long ago – the year when three and then five, fellow believers went calmly into infinity armed with the hope, indeed the belief, that their sacrifice turned back the tide of dissolution and offered a pattern of hope to the beleaguered world?

  He climbed back into his house, mounting the stairs in dazed exhaustion. He was violently sick. A clock struck three – it was very late. Soon dawn would be breaking. His quiet bedroom … the bed had been turned down. Could he sleep, he wondered? Could he sleep, with such great affairs impending? To make sure of the matter he prepared a strong dose of a sleeping draught and with its aid sunk into sleep as if into a cavern; and here came the dreams of the forgotten Constance, memories of their love in all its unexpected variety and tenderness. Everything that he had simply abolished when talking to his judges returned like a tide and swallowed up his emotions. When he awoke it was already past eleven. There were tears on his face, on his cheeks; he indignantly washed them away in the shower, glorying in the swishing water. Then he put on his old rough abba instead of the habitual silken dressing-gown and went downstairs to the great glassed-in central hall where the brilliant whiteness of daylight caressed his small but choice collection of statues and the tropical plants which framed the further end leading into the garden. A fountain played – he had always loved the sound of water indoors. There was even a group of brilliant fish. Pastilles of incense burned in the wall niches. He sat himself
down at the recently laid table and poured out some coffee. In a little while the Prince would telephone and tell him the verdict of the three, the ‘executive cell’. Quietly, as he sat there and listened to the water running, he went back in memory to the remote past when first these gnostic notions had begun to germinate in his mind. Step by step he had been led backwards in chronological time, negation by negation, until he had come up against the hard integument of Greek thought – a strange and original manifestation of the human spirit. It had assimilated and modified and perhaps even betrayed these successive waves of esoteric knowledge which, like a tropical fruit, were the harvest of Indian thought, of Chinese thought, of Tibetan thought. He saw these dark waves of culture pouring into Persia, into Iran, and into Egypt, where they were churned and manipulated into linguistic forms which made them comprehensible to the inhabitants of the Middle Eastern lands.

  Greece was the sieve, with its worship of light and its unbending propensity for logic and causation. The Greek philosophers, one by one, took over the world-pictures of different peoples and wove them up into self-consistent philosophical systems. Pythagoras took up the Chinese world-system, Heraclitus the Persian, Xenophanes and the Eliatics the Indian, Empedocles the Egyptian, Anaxagoras the Israelite. And finally, in a mind-crushing attempt at synthesis Plato tried to bring together all these foreign influences and harmonise them into a truly Hellenic world-view both spiritual and social, both scientific and vatic …

  These ideas and memories excited him so much that he got up and walked up and down the hall with his hands behind his back, reliving the thrilling agony he had felt while he first formulated them for himself under the tutorship of old Faraj the philosopher. Yes, but before Plato even, came the wise Mani and his disciple Bardesanes – they were the hinge between the Orient and the Occident. He clasped his hands and felt anew the thrill of his first affirmation of allegiance to the ‘pentad’ and the ‘triad’; in poetic terms these were the five senses and the three orifices. But in fact for the Buddhist psychology it spelt the five skandas, bundles of apprehension, reservoirs of impulse! He remembered so well the impressive way Faraj had said, “My son, the Manichean Prince of Darkness combines the forms of five elemental demons: smoke (Sam ov), lion (fire), eagle (wind), fish (water), darkness (SpáKwv). In Greece his prophet is Pherecyrdes.… Out of this mixture of studies and fasts and meditations the Thing had grown and grown until one day a man unknown to him had knocked at the door and gained entry. He was old and dressed like some Coptic tramp, but of great presence. He said simply, “My son, have you considered death, the primal trauma of man?” And Affad had nodded, for the person and the question seemed familiar, as if he had waited a century for this event to occur; and beckoned him to a seat. So the adventure had begun – death as an adventure!