Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

  Claudia lingers. She looks at the handsome boyish figure of the pharaoh and his slim, sloe-eyed high-breasted consort.

  ‘Fine couple,’ says Tom.

  ‘Yes.’

  The beam of Tom’s torch slides over a team of oxen, slaves carrying dead gazelles, a flight of duck erupting from a reed bed.

  ‘Let’s see them again,’ says Claudia. The torch beam swoops and hovers. ‘She’s lovely. Is your sister pretty?’

  ‘Jennifer? Good Lord – I’ve never thought about it. Yes, I suppose she is.’ He laughs. ‘But I shouldn’t feel that way inclined.’

  He puts his arm round her. ‘Please be coming,’ cries the guide from further along the dark corridor of the tomb. ‘Lady and gentleman… please be coming now.’

  Claudia continues to stare at the brilliant impervious figures, forever young, forever coupled.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks.

  ‘Mm… nothing.’ His arm is round her shoulders, the heat of him against her breast. She is so erotically possessed that she feels she may quite possibly take all her clothes off and lie down in the dust. He turns and kisses her, his tongue searching her mouth.

  It had seemed, for the year or so in which I had been there, merely a backcloth, that country. I had been dropped into its heat and dust and smells and they became a fortuitous appendage to the more urgent matter of the war. You learned to cope with it – the discomforts and obstructions and hazards – and got on with what mattered. The British army superimposed itself on the landscape and the society: its lorries jammed the roads, its depots littered the delta from Cairo to Alexandria, its personnel filled the streets and cafés of Cairo with English voices. The speech of Lancashire, of Dorset, of the East End, of Eton and Winchester, rang around the mosques and bazaars, the Pyramids and the Citadel. Cairo, polyglot and multi-racial, both absorbed and ignored what had happened. At one level the place exploited and manipulated the situation, at another it simply went on doing what it had always done. The rich got richer; the poor continued to wade in the mud of the canals, make fuel out of buffalo dung and beg in the streets.

  Perhaps I saw it for the first time that weekend in Luxor. It seems to me now that I did. I saw suddenly that it was beautiful. I saw the cluttered intense life of the fields and villages – a world of dust and water, straw and leaves, people and animals – and I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages. It had the delicacy of a water-colour – all soft grey-greens and pale blues and fawns and bright browns. Beautiful and indifferent; when you began to see it you saw also the sores round the mouths of children, the flies crawling on the sightless eyes of a baby, the bare ulcerated flesh on a donkey’s back.

  I saw it through him and with him. Now, he and that place are one, fused in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those smells.

  She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

  Tom stirs. Claudia murmurs, ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘I’m awake.’

  ‘You should have said. We could be talking.’

  He lays a hand on her thigh. ‘What should we talk about?’

  ‘All the things there’s never been time for. Practically everything.’

  ‘We’ve spent about fifty hours together now. Since we met.’

  ‘Forty-two,’ says Claudia.

  ‘You’ve counted?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There is a silence. ‘I love you,’ he says.

  ‘Well, good,’ says Claudia. ‘So do I. Love you, I mean. Talk to me. Tell me things.’

  ‘Very well. What sort of thing do you want me to tell you? Do you want my opinion of Aldous Huxley? My views on the League of Nations? We could find an area of disagreement – I know you enjoy a good dust-up.’

  ‘Not right now. Let’s talk about each other, that’s all I’m interested in at the moment.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Tom. He takes her hand. They lie, side by side. Like, thinks Claudia, figures on tombs, or the bundled shapes of sarcophagi. The Moon Tiger gently fumes and glows; beyond the shuttered window is the hot black velvet night – the river, the desert.

  Tom lights a cigarette. Two red eyes glow now in the dark room – the Moon Tiger and the Camel. ‘People in our situation always think themselves unique. All the same… That we should both have fetched up out here…’

  ‘Hostages to fortune,’ says Claudia. ‘Orphans of the storm.’

  ‘Quite so. But what luck. I owe Hitler for you. What a thought.’

  ‘Let’s not think it,’ says Claudia. ‘Give it a more respectable name. Fate. Life. That sort of stuff.’

  They lie, for a while, in silence. ‘You tell me things,’ says Tom. ‘What a lot I don’t know… Can you play the piano? When did you learn to speak French? Why is there a scar on your knee?’

  ‘Those are boring things. I don’t want to. I want to be pampered. I want to lie here – for ever – listening to you talking. I want to fall asleep with you talking. You could tell me a story.’

  ‘I don’t know any stories,’ says Tom. ‘I’m a profoundly unimaginative fellow. I only know my own.’

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ says Claudia.

  ‘If you insist. It’s an unexceptional story, at that. Born in the home counties to parents of moderate but sufficient means. Father a schoolmaster, mother a… mother. Childhood marred only by unconfessed fear of large dogs and the patronage of my sister. Schooldays distinguished for inability to construe Latin and ineptitude with a cricket bat. Youth… Well, youth becomes perhaps marginally more interesting, our hero is seen to become somewhat less torpid, egocentric, introverted etc. – in fact to start paying a bit of attention to other people and indeed to show vaguely idealistic tendencies, desire to reform the world and so forth.’ ‘Ah,’ sighs Claudia. ‘One of those…’ ‘One of those. Do you disapprove?’ ‘Certainly not. Go on. What did you do about it?’ ‘All the usual innocent enthusiastic things. Joining worthy organisations. Attending political meetings. Reading books. Talking late into the night with like-minded cronies.’ ‘Innocent?’ says Claudia. ‘What’s innocent about that? Practical, I’d call it.’ ‘Hush – this is my story, and I’ll tell it my way. Autobiographers are entitled to editorial comment. So… Period of youthful social indignation culminating in a stint as reporter on a northern provincial paper – did you ever visit the north-east during the Depression?’ Claudia ponders. ‘If you have to think about it,’ says Tom, ‘then you didn’t. It wonderfully concentrated the mind, I’ll tell you that. Hampshire was never the same again. So anyway, fired by the dole queues I decided politics was the only career – I mean, it was obvious, at twenty-three, one would be able to set the world to rights in a trice, given the opportunity, quite simple, I had it all tied up, my personal manifesto – education, opportunity, social welfare, re-distribution of income.’ ‘So…’ says Claudia. ’Why…?’ ‘Why didn’t it work out like that? Because as you and I both know now that is not how things are. Our feckless hero bites the dust as aspiring politician and looks around to see what comes next. Having grown older by a year or two and learned a little wisdom if not a lot. In fact, having realised that he is by and large an ignorant so-and-so and there is no prospect of confounding your enemies until you have the arguments with which to do it. So I thought I’d better keep my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open for a bit. An aunt left me a small legacy and I blew it on the fare to America. Have a look at the land of the free, I thought. Learn a thing or two. Look and listen. Earn a few bob writing the odd article. So I did. And came back older and wiser still.’ ‘Look here,’ says Claudia. ‘You’re missing out great
chunks of this story.’ ‘I know. We haven’t got time for all of it. Not now. We’re sticking to essentials. America. The mid-west. The south. Social outrage again, but more reflective now. Journalism. Sober, considered journalism. A few small successes in that line.’ ‘You should be doing what I’m doing,’ says Claudia. ‘In fact why didn’t you…?’ ‘I wish you wouldn’t anticipate. We haven’t got to that bit yet. The Nazis are nothing more than a disagreeable noise across the Channel at the moment. And our hero rather fancies himself now as a traveller.’ ‘Stop saying our hero,’ says Claudia. ‘It sounds like the Boy’s Own Paper.’ ‘What a well-read girl you are. I thought the reference might escape you. As I say, I fancied myself as a traveller. I sold pieces on the plight of the Greek peasantry or chicanery among Italian politicians and when I couldn’t do that I hawked myself around travel agencies as a courier. Got around most of Europe that way. Went once to Russia. Was thinking it was about time to turn my attention to Africa, see how one’s dreams come true? And then the disagreeable noises from across the Channel began to get louder. To become distinctly disturbing.’ ‘Yes,’ says Claudia, ‘I want to say something.’ ‘I thought you wanted me to do the talking?’ ‘I do. It’s just that you leave out the interesting part.’ ‘I thought all this might be reasonably interesting.’ ‘It is,’ says Claudia. ‘But it’s not very personal. I don’t know much about how you’re feeling. And,’ she adds lightly, ‘I don’t know if you’re doing all this on your own or with someone else.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Tom. ‘Aha. I see. Well, I’ll try to do better. I think I can tell you why it doesn’t sound all that personal. All this time our hero… sorry, sorry. All this time I had these grandiose ideas about public life and being hitched to one’s times and so forth. I tended to think impersonally – a luxury of comfortable circumstances, as I’m well aware. But let me assure you’ – and he slides a hand down her bare body – ‘… let me assure you all that has utterly changed. There’s nothing like being hitched to one’s times in a way one never anticipated to make one think very personally indeed. I think I’ve had enough of all this. Look, it’s beginning to get light. There – you’ve had your story.’ He turns towards her.

  ‘Not quite,’ says Claudia. ‘You didn’t say if…’

  ‘Entirely on my own,’ says Tom. ‘So far. Not for much longer, I rather hope.’ He puts out a hand, traces the outline of her face with one finger. Claudia can just see, now, in the dawn glimmer, his eyes, his nose, his lips. ‘I like this part of the story best,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ says Tom. ‘Oh, me too.’

  And oh God, thinks Claudia, may it have a happy ending. Please may it have a happy ending. The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped with light; the world has turned again.

  7

  I cannot write chronologically of Egypt. Ancient Egypt. So-called ancient Egypt. In my history of the world – this realistic kaleidoscopic history – Egypt will have its proper place as the complacent indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazuli, bits of pot and fragments of wood to fill the museums of the world. Egypt is not then but now, conditioning the way we look at things. The image of the Sphinx is familiar to those who have never heard of pharaohs or dynasties; the new brutalism of Karnak is homely to anyone who grew up with ’thirties architecture.

  Like anyone else, I knew Egypt before ever I went there. And when I think of it now – when I think of how I am going to invoke Egypt within the story of the world – I have to think of it as a continuous phenomenon, the kilted pharaonic population spilling out into the Nile valley of the twentieth century, the chariots and lotuses, Horus and Ra and Isis alongside the Mameluke mosques, the babbling streets of Cairo, Nasser’s High Dam, the khaki convoys of 1942, the Edwardian opulence of Turkish mansions. Past and present do not so much co-exist in the Nile valley as cease to have any meaning. What is buried under the sand is reflected above, not just in the souvenirs hawked by the descendants of the tomb robbers but in the eternal, deliberate cycle of the landscape – the sun rising from the desert of the east to sink into the desert of the west, the spring surge of the river, the regeneration of creatures – the egrets and herons and wildfowl, the beasts of burden, the enduring peasantry.

  In the Rameses Hilton a few years ago I met a man who was the biggest world-wide distributor of lavatory cisterns. Or so he claimed. A mid-westerner on the brink of retirement and a member of one of those groups of footloose geriatric Americans who stream through hotels from Dublin to Singapore. This man, unattached, picked me up in the bar, taking me for a bird of the same feather. ‘What I don’t get about these guys,’ he said, easing his polyester-clad bum on to the stool next to mine, ‘is the motivation. Lemme buy you a drink. Never mind the engineering, and believe me that’s quite sumpin’, it’s the motivation gets me. All that, to get yourself buried.’ I let him buy me a whisky and asked him if he was afraid of death. ‘Sure I’ m afraid of death. Everyone’s afraid of death, aren’t they?’ ‘The Egyptians weren’t. They were concerned with the survival of the spirit. Or the soul – call it what you like. Not that that makes them unique, but it’s a thing we’ve rather lost interest in nowadays.’ He gave me a suspicious look – regretting the whisky; no doubt wondering what he’d landed himself with. ‘You some kind of professor?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a tourist, like you. What do you do?’ And so he told me about the lavatory cisterns and we struck up something that while it could not be called a friendship was a sort of eery alliance because he was a robust, honest, not incurious man who liked someone to talk to and I was – not lonely, I have never been lonely – but alone. And thus it was in his incongruous company that I went for the second time and forty years later to Luxor, to the Valley of the Kings, to Esna and Edfu. And to the Pyramids and to the Citadel and to the bank of the Nile beside Kasr el Nil bridge where St George’s Pro-Cathedral in which I once prayed no longer exists, replaced by a roaring flyover system for Cairo’s unquenchable traffic. He is neither here nor there now, the American – I don’t even remember his name – like that Ordnance officer on the terrace of Shepheard’s, but like him he is forever tethered to a certain place, a certain time. His story – whatever his story is – was twined briefly with mine. In both our stories there is a temple wall before which we stand, screwing up our eyes against the hard brilliance of the sky above as the complex scenes carved in relief upon the stone resolve themselves into what they are – a chronicle of bloodshed. Half-naked soldiers are being decapitated, run through with spears, flattened by chariots. These scenes are repeated on the other three walls, to a height of twenty or thirty feet. The guide explains that this is both a record and a celebration of the pharaoh’s various triumphs over his enemies. And there indeed is the pharaoh, several times over, bigger than everyone else, driving his chariot with casual ease, reins in one hand, weapon in the other. Bodies lie around. ‘Tough guy,’ comments my companion. ‘I thought he was supposed to be the god as well as the king? So how come it’s all right for him to go around wiping people out?’ ‘Would it be incompatible?’ I ask. The guide explains that the decapitated figures we see probably represent units – thousands or tens of thousands – it’s a system of recording the slaughtered enemies. ‘Jesus,’ says the American. ‘That’s one hell of a massacre. You’d think things would have been rough enough on them back then anyway without carving each other up on top of it.’ We stand there in contemplation of this silent carnage. ‘I was in France in ’forty-four,’ says the American. ‘I never saw combat, but I saw what it leaves behind. It’s not pretty, let me tell you.’ I do not bother to say that he has no need to.

  It is an infinite sandy rubbish-tip, as though some careless giant hand has showered down on to it the debris of a thousand junk yards – the burned-out carcasses of vehicles, heaps of old tyres, empty petrol cans, rusted tins, sheets
of corrugated iron, tangles of barbed wire, used shell-cases. All this litter lies amid the desert’s natural untidiness, the endless scatter of bony apparently lifeless scrub that speckles it from horizon to horizon. The only clear spaces are the tracks along which wind the occasional line of trucks or armoured cars, the ‘Tin-Pan Alleys’ defined by petrol cans.

  They have been following just such a road for two hours now. It is easy, though, to lose the track in the confusion of tyre-marks and rough sign-posts, and when this happens the driver, a small wiry Londoner baked to the colour of burned custard, navigates by a combination of map-reading and guesswork. He drove a taxi before the war, it emerges, and treats the desert with contemptuous familiarity, as though it were some Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of London topography. When they meet up with other vehicles he bawls queries and information into the wind. Everyone is looking for someone else or somewhere else. This area was at the centre of the last action, during which units were scattered; the landscape is full of thousands of men trying to sort themselves back into some kind of order.

  Claudia sits beside the driver. Jim Chambers of Associated News is in the back with a New Zealand correspondent. Conversation has to be shouted above the din of the truck’s engine. Claudia feels as though all the bones in her body have been rattled loose and her eyes are red-rimmed and smarting from the dust. The driver, who is protective and amused about this exceptional passenger, warns her to tuck a scarf between her neck and shirt or she will have desert sores like everyone else.

  They are heading for Seventh Armoured Division HQ, and the driver is worried about getting there before sunset. They have already taken the wrong track once and got stuck in soft sand three times through leaving the track altogether. When that happens the driver swears, jumps down, hauls out the sacks and they all set about the gruelling sweating process of digging out.