Gilgamesh
Page 23
Do you still have the book of Gilgamesh? It’s a consolation sometimes to think that thousands of years ago, men knew about all this. The return. Wasn’t he told to go home, eat, drink and be merry? Take the hand of his child? Something like that.
If I trust my intuition—I’ve learnt to trust little else—I would say that you, Edith, have found your place by now. And Jim? At seventeen, at the start of it all? Perhaps in need of some new horizons.
I live quietly here in Baghdad. I have a small house in the Moslem quarter, a servant, a café where I read and drink my coffee. I continue my studies of Arabic, teach a little, visit sites in the desert. I plan to join an expedition to my old dig one day.
My dear ones, my one wish now is that this letter finds you, in happiness and good health.
‘So,’ said Lawrence from the doorway. ‘He’s come back?’
She heard the branch brushing across the roof, the distant crack of the surf. The sea breeze had started up as it always did, at the same time every day.
‘Why don’t you write to him?’ she said to Jim.
Jim said he wanted to leave by himself. Lawrence offered to drive them all up to Fremantle, but Jim said he would rather go by train. He wanted to leave Edith as casually as possible, to stroll out of the clearing as if he were going to Torville, hurrying a little by the time he reached the track as he always did for the bus, because he was always a little late. He wanted it crystalline, the air clear, the break swift and clean.
But they woke to soft rain. A curtain seemed to have fallen over the clearing, the birds were silent, the world in shadow. ‘Take the old oilskin,’ Edith said. Her voice trailed. When would she give that up? Jim shook his head. He was wearing a black fisherman’s cap from the Army Surplus store in Bunbury. It suited him. His eyes were dark with resolution. He spoke like an Australian, but he looked like a young foreign man.
I am exercising, Leopold wrote in his last letter, walking every morning along the walls of the Tigris. Trying to get myself in some sort of shape so I’ll be able to keep up with a young man. Edith pictured him sitting in his café, sipping thick black coffee, books spread out before him, his white hair stirring under a slow fan. Glasses now, she thinks, and a plate of halva. She sees his plump hand hovering over it while he reads his Arabic newspaper, from right to left, from back to front. There is something immoveable about the way he sits, everything within his reach.
She liked to think of the way he would raise his head as the stranger comes into the café, of the gleam of recognition kindling in his eyes. Of the way he finds himself springing up as he reaches over the table to take this young man’s hands in his.
‘I thought you’d want to go,’ Lawrence had said to her last night, as the three of them sat talking, the moths hitting the lamp. ‘I thought you’d be on the first ship out.’
She shrugged. The shrug said what she didn’t tell him, because that was their way with one another, that for her the great adventure now was to stay.
It was time for Jim to go. The air shook a little and everything turned unreal. Passport, ticket, money, notebook: he stood on the verandah and checked his pockets, already in the traveller’s world.