He said suddenly: “But they must be hungry. They must eat.”
It took some time to penetrate the heavy Turkish skulls of the servants, but at last the message got through and several heavy silvery trays made their appearance with two huge loaves of village bread, some olives, tinned meat, and a rank black wine. Caradoc carved all this into the semblance of helpings and we all fell to, suddenly ravenous.
The fire was built up with wood-shavings until it bellowed and bristled, throwing our shadows about the room. The small dark eyes of Jocas watched us with a benign affection—the expression on the face of a mother watching her children eat. I took my doorstep-sandwich and sat on the edge of the bed to share a friendly smile with him; he sighed with deep satisfaction as he watched us dispose ourselves around his bed. Like a child arranging his toys upon the counterpane. And I saw also that this whole visit of ours was part of a design, a deeply considered design. His architect was there to consult about a funerary monument; the embalming team were already on the spot. Jocas was good at mind reading, and followed my thoughts clearly, like somebody reading print. “Yes” he said. “It is like that. I had at first difficulty in my ideas because Julian could not understand; but now he’s united with me. He has agreed with me. The need to have all our unhappy family—Merlins—under one roof, in one ground.” He spread his hands in the direction of Caradoc who was munching. Then from under his pillow he produced a piece of parchment and handed it to me. It was in Greek. “Permission of the Orthodox Church to remove the body of the old man; Koepgen will bring it. He is still alive there in Spinalonga working, happy. I saw him last week.” He chuckled softly. “Then what else? Yes, I wish myself to be golded, or do you say gilded? All gold. I have a firman for the whole headland, Caradoc.” But this sort of talk made Caradoc extremely uneasy and shy; it seemed to him rather ill-mannered to talk so openly about death. “It’s bad form” he said severely and munched his bread. Moreover he was very superstitious, had no intention of dying himself, and didn’t want to hear about such matters. I watched the new vivid imperial face of Jocas and racked my brains to think of the prototype; at last click, up came the Ravenna mosaics, together with a whole lot of half-forgotten debris about Justinian and Theodora, that brave soul. I felt the long heavy night of the Turkish soul exemplified in its old half-dead capital—the Venice of the East. “And Julian will give me a service in St. Paul’s.” It is impossible to describe the smiling childish joy with which he uttered the words. His eyes sparkled with cupidity. “St. Paul’s!” He crooned the words almost. He had begun to make everything sound extremely attractive—death should be like that. It was the ancient Greeks who couldn’t take the idea.
He took a long drink from a glass at his bedside and subsided again into sighing happiness. “Though I have never seen it,” he said “Julian once had a photograph faked to appear as if I was there at a memorial service. It was politically necessary, Amin Pasha. Here everyone thought I was in London specially for him; but it was a fake, I was here. Julian did it. Ah Julian! Only now I have come to understand him a little bit. He will never love me, but now he doesn’t care. And he fears death very much. O yes.”
The little doctor coughed. It was time for him to take his leave. He shook us each by the hand and said goodnight, placing a hand briefly upon Jocas’ forehead and nodding, as if to say that he was satisfied with his patient. The bald old eunuch recovered his lamp from the outer darkness and led him slowly away. They had put some knobs of frankincense on the fire and the air had become rich and fragrant. The servants had retired, though one remained on call. He sat on an uncomfortable-looking kitchen chair in the shadows by the birds; appeared to sleep, head on breast. But Jocas was not done with us; he still radiated energy, and it reminded me of the Jocas I had first encountered, the tough and tireless countryman, hunter, swimmer. We sat around him on the bed—the stiff brocaded counterpane of some Byzance weave, the candles, the frail oil-lamps … all that. And the past sat heavily on us, too.
“Felix,” he said, still holding the white hand of Benedicta in his “I followed with so much interest all your attempts to destroy us, to sabotage the firm, to escape from us. It was all in my heart, and it was so very interesting, so very passionately interesting to me. You see, I could understand you, but Julian not really. For Julian the firm perfectly expresses something, perhaps his impotence? Eh? I am not clever like him, and because I am not clever I was always in danger from him. O but I love him so.” An air of rapturous infantility took possession of him. He licked his red lips and went on slowly, picking and choosing his words from his limited knowledge of English as one might pick flowers at random in a field. But he could express himself well, and here and there tumbled upon a mistake which itself was a felicity. “But you I sympathised,” he said “and for why? Because I myself had the great search for the freeing of my soul, Felix. I too made a great calculation. But I had no courage to do it because I was afraid of Julian. He was so clever, he could simply kill me.” He thrust out a hand to arrest my interpretation of the remark. “I was not afraid of the death. But I did not wish to join everything else in Julian’s conscience; you see he pretends he has none. You must not have with the firm. But he has. Julian has seen much weeping.” He swallowed and looked sad for a moment. One saw that he really did love this enigmatic figure, it was not simply oriental exuberance. One detected too the kind of pity that the simple, uncomplicated and healthy man can have for the cripple. Julian had never shot, flown a bird or a kite; yes, but he had made love I suppose. I caught a glimpse of Benedicta’s white serene face. She sat to me in profile, still holding Jocas’ hand and gazing at him with an air of admiring confidence. He had sunk back among the pillows and closed his eyes—not out of weariness but in order to recover the thread of his argument.
“In the old days,” he said “at the very beginning when the firm was a small thing, a [he inserted the Greek word for a newly born infant] … in those days every one of our transactions had to be done on trust, on an exchange of salt mostly. Arabia and so on. People could not write, Felix. All was human memory. Even quite late our whole accounting was with the oldfashioned abacus which you still see in Greek grocery shops today. The only factor that made for our security was mutual trust. When I thought about freedom and remembered the old days I thought very heavily—elephant-heavily—around this quite small but precise condition. All our money was deployed around the sea of the east, and while here and there was some little scraps of paper signed with thumbs, the most was in risk of trust. We had to believe in such a thing as an exchange of salt with a sheik. It was the only strong thing, the only plank. Now then all this paper came, all this contract business came. The whole firm became so big, so complicated. The salt had lost its savour, doesn’t it say somewhere in the Bible? I thought. I thought. When Julian told me that the whole of the contracts of the firm had been photographed on film and that one little house held them all I had an extraordinary idea … I thought one night very late, while I was talking to myself. I thought: suppose we destroyed all contracts—the whole of the written thing. What would happen?”
He looked terribly excited, swallowed twice heavily, and then joined his hands on his breast. I suddenly felt myself face to face with one of those tremendously simple, but at the same time critical, veins of thought which belonged to what Marchant and I (in the case of Iolanthe) had labelled the contingency vector; it was the “supposing scale” and I imagine it represented in rough mechanical terms that sector of the human consciousness where the full horror of the idea of freewill comes to be understood or felt. It is this terrifying idea which causes people to throw themselves off cliffs (just to see what will happen): or to play Russian roulette with a pistol they just happened to find on a shelf…. If is the key of If. And then I thought of the little library which housed the total contractual commitments of the firm on microfilm. There had been a good deal of newspaper ballyhoo when Merlin’s went on to microfilm; its contract department had by then grown to t
he size of the Bodleian. Now all the paper had gone. A special little funerary monument—not by Caradoc this time—had been erected to house the film in a London suburb. An ungainly little building, something between a Roman villa and the old Euston station. I recalled Caradoc’s fury at this awkward neo-Egyptian monster of a creation with it four stout elephant columns. Above it was a small flat where the egregious Shadbolt lived (the same old chap who had drawn up Benedicta’s marriage contract with me). He was now Registrar of Contracts. Well, it was not unlike a small and hideous crematorium. But I interrupted this train of thought to concentrate rather more deeply on what Jocas was trying to tell me. “What would happen?” he repeated again, dramatically, but in a lower register. “Either the whole thing, the whole construction would dissolve.” He threw his eyes back into his skull, showing the whites, which is the Turkish way of illustrating total catastrophe. “Or else … nothing at all. Without the bonds of the paper and the signatures trust might come back, the idea of obligation to one’s word, one’s spoken bond, one’s salt.” I realised that I was in the presence of a great, but completely insane idealist. Trust indeed! But he went on headlong.
“Now I am so happy to know that you will try this freedom yourself—you will do this thing when once you are the head of the firm. Zeno has seen it all very clearly. He sees you give a last supper with twelve people in the big house. That same night you will completely burn every contract and announce it to the world. Very exciting. It will be a big fire. One old man will be burnt in it. But it will be the crown of your career. Only what happens after, if the firm continues or if it dissolves, Zeno cannot see clearly and he is too honest to pretend all this.”
He gave a little chuckle and added, “Of course Julian doesn’t believe in these nonsenses, perhaps you don’t either. But she does, Benedicta does. She has lived long enough in Turkey to know how sometimes strange things are real.”
“Who is Zeno?” I asked purely to avoid taking up a definitive position vis-à-vis all these shadowy postulates. It seemed that he was an old Greek clerk who worked in the counting house in the city; subject to visions. Genus epileptoid, I had no doubt. It was as if the great aborted dream of Byzance lived on in the weaker psychic specimens of Polis, troubling their sleep with its tenebrous floating visions of a future which chance had aborted. I suddenly seemed to hear the disagreeable yelping of the barking dervishes ringing in my ears; how they flopped about the floor of the mosque yelping and foaming just like the schizos in the Paulhaus. Or else fell about like toads, beating up the dust and screaming. It was all part and parcel of the same type of phenomenon I have no doubt.
Beside the bed lay a stout oldfashioned family Bible encrusted with coloured wax from the candles. From between its leaves Jocas produced a small piece of paper written over in a very fine Greek hand; there was a drawing of a table-plan. From the red thumbprint (the attested signature with date) I recognised it as a witnessed prophecy—the sort of thing that idiots and hysterical soothsayers produce on saints’ days. But the writing was crafty and very beautiful, the hand of an educated man. I took it and put it away to study at leisure—cursing the infernal rustiness of my Greek. “He does not know the people,” said Jocas “but he described them and I put the name in with a pencil. You shall see. Anyway.” He made a vague gesture and sank back, drooping a little from fatigue at last. I wondered whether we should leave him.
Benedicta seemed disposed to stay awhile as yet, and he for his part seemed to derive comfort from the touch of her hand on his. But Caradoc provided a slight diversion by picking up a lantern and saying that he must attend to the calls of nature; and I took the chance of joining him to get a breath of air. We climbed out upon the unwalled shelf, the balcony above the sea, and made our slow way along the paths which led to the headland of which Jocas had spoken. A cloudy sky obscured the nascent moonlight; far below us the ocean gulped. Somewhere in the obscurity below us ships moved, their lights glimmering frail as fireflies. But clouds were rolling in slowly towards the shore and a heavy dew had fallen. At last we came out upon the site of this proposed building—perhaps it was an old threshing-floor, built up belvedere-like over the sea. Despite the general darkness one could feel the dominance of the position, could divine the splendour of the surrounding views in fine weather. But Caradoc was morose; he set down the lantern to attend to his business, and then came and sat beside me on a boulder, shaking his head and growling a bit. “What is it?” I said. “Don’t you think you can do it? I said this to annoy him, and the remark was quite successful. “Do it?” he snarled. “Of course I can do it. That’s not what’s worrying me. The problem is Jocas. He has got ancient Greece on the brain, and has been pining for the bloody Parthenon for half a lifetime now—he will never pass my drawings; not of the sort of thing I have in mind. Not in a month of Sundays. He does not realise the first thing about building; his idea would be something between a cassata ice cream and a Georgian rotunda. He doesn’t realise that a real piece of building must be responsive to the emanations of the ground upon which it stands. To a certain extent the available materials create limitations and point out clues. In the Celebes, for example, bamboo, fern, leaves, lianas, they all dictate the weight and form of the construction—but they also echo the soul-form of the man who inhabits them. For those islanders the notion of life and death are dream-like, unsubstantial, poetical; their culture is born in a butterfly’s soul. Just as Tokio is all mouse-culture, a mouse-capital. We must build with this sense of congruence to place. The Parthenon would be a joke propped up here on this Turkish headland. Why? Because the soul-form of the Greeks was different, their metaphysical attitude to things was sensual, relatively indifferent to death and time. And their sense of plastic was really related to plane surfaces decorated on the flat, not to volume. All their stuff is radiantly human because the scale is small, nothing larger than life size. Their sunny philosophy domesticated not only life, but also death, one has the feeling that even the huge Gods were home-made, perhaps formed by the hands of children in a cookery class. No morality either to shock and frighten. Innocence, a gem-like trance. All the ominous or minatory elements in their history were imported from death-saturated lands like Egypt, like this here bloody Turkey?” He flashed me a glance of righteous indignation from under his shaggy prophetic brows. “Just sit here and listen to Turkey, listen to what it says” he went on. “It’s a heavy death-propelled wavelength, the daze of some old alligator slumbering in the mud. It has all the solemnity the heavy somnolence of Egypt, the one country above all which specialised in death; if Turkey ever showed flower in a cultural way it will echo Egypt, not Greece. That is why all this embalming business of Goytz is a stroke of genius. Some cultures are so death-weighted that they store up their dead, they are ancestor-obsessed like the Chinese. That is the call-sign of this gloomy old land. Consequently if one tunes in and tries to set it to an architecture one is almost driven to echo the grave ponderous style of an Egypt; the bright blue and white of Greece would never work. But how to tell Jocas that?”
I changed the conversation abruptly. “That well over there” I said gravely. (I was surprised to find myself a trifle drunk.) “That well already houses the genius of your mausoleum. Jocas has imported a snow white python from the island of Crete; and he has planted an almond tree for it to climb. Prophecies will spring from this tomb, Caradoc.” I invented all this of course in order to scare him. I knew he was particularly frightened of snakes. It had the desired effect. He secured his lantern and said irritably, “Why didn’t you say so before? We might have sat on the damn thing.”
When we got back to the house it was to find most of the lights turned low and Jocas asleep with a smile on his face; Benedicta had disappeared. The attendant drowsed on his upright chair. We made our uneven way back to the villa where we had been allocated rooms. Caradoc holding his lantern high examined the cracked plaster cherubs, the broken marble fireplaces, the litter on the dirty flags, with a sustained curiosity. I found a can
dlestick and lit it. Benedicta had been given a room to herself on the balcony side of the house. I had been allocated a sort of uncomfortable box-room. Though I was weary I found it difficult to sleep, I suppose because of the atrocious but heady black wine we had been sluicing. So I wrote a little letter to Benedicta—something to read when she woke up alone in bed. “Dear Benedicta, the whole point—why will you never grasp it? The whole point is that time gives birth to space. but space gives death to time. (The ancient liver mantic was an attempt to read forward into time—and it might have worked for them.) That is the only reason for my loving you—because you simply cannot grasp the meaning of causality in the new terms. I would add an equation or two but I am rather drunk and the light is bad. So I will content myself by warning you gravely about the perils of such homely ignorance. It saps the will and rots the cortex. Squinch. Felix.” I suppose it lacked warmth; and it certainly wasn’t what I intended to say when I took out my pencil. I pondered, and at last traced the missing component. My postscript read: “I would be quite willing to dismantle and abolish Iolanthe if you asked me to do so.”
An uneasy night of shallow dreams, bird noises, howling of dogs; but then I dozed off and slept quite a way into the morning. It was a dark and gloomy day with huge shaggy clouds hanging motionless over everything; the gulf was the colour of gunmetal. Beside my bed I found the response to my letter of the night before. “It’s my job now to see that you do what you feel you must. Anything else would be fatal to both of us. I must say you are an awful fool, which is consoling in a hopeless sort of way. Meet me at Eyub at four.”
The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Page 59