by Damon Galgut
He returned soon afterwards, and soon after that again. The place never failed to astonish him, but was always most exceptional in that sunset hour, when its colours bloomed fully. On one such occasion he was alone on the deserted beach and felt sufficiently emboldened to set his uniform aside. So he found himself standing waist-deep in the water in his drawers when a young soldier rode up on a donkey and stopped near him to undress. Morgan watched as the naked man strained to pull the animal into the water with him, while it pulled the other way in resistance. The donkey won, but from the trembling tension of their equal moments he took the memory of red light on muscle, and ripples like feathers on the sand. It was a painting, a nude that had come to life, its beauty created solely for him.
* * *
On a breakwater there one day he overheard a snatch of conversation that gave him pause. After a few steps, he returned.
“Which of you is from the Royal West Kent?”
“All of us, sir.”
“Do you happen to know Kenneth Searight?”
An instant clamour of approval. Yes, they knew him! The friendliest officer in the regiment by far! The other officers weren’t nearly so kind to the men, not like he was! He was a fine fellow!
“He’s not here with you, by any chance?”
No, no, he was in Mesopotamia. He was safe in Mesopotamia, causing trouble. They themselves had been fighting in Turkey.
One of the men, who had been watching slyly from the side, asked him, “Where do you know the captain from, sir?”
“Oh . . . We met on board ship once. On the way to India . . . ”
His voice trailed off, into a memory of that conversation: the sea shining in the background, the smell of Arabia in the air. And the words; the unlikely words. I blame it on the heat. And Morgan had gone to India, and the heat had not undone him. He had remained respectable.
He thought now of having to admit this to Searight, if they were ever to meet again. Other people might have to confess their sins, but he, Morgan, could only confess their absence. It was a strange involution, and one which caused him peculiar shame.
With this on his mind, he stumbled on from the friendly colloquy on the breakwater, into the more opaque complications of the bay. It was near the middle of the day and the heat was intense. The rocks, the trees, could be an obstacle here, especially at high tide. What he’d thought of as a passage turned into a cul-de-sac and he was just considering turning back when he saw that he wasn’t alone.
A young man, a soldier—his arm tied in bandages—was urinating against the base of a tree. He was wearing short trousers, which he had opened for the purpose, but he didn’t quite close them when he was done. He engaged Morgan with a stare that might have been hostile.
“You spoke to me,” he said.
“I beg your pardon, I didn’t say anything.”
“In the ward, the other day, you remember?”
He was so far out of his normal world that it took a moment to return: of course, he had interviewed this man the previous week. He couldn’t quite recall his story; the fellow hadn’t made much impression. Mackenzie, was it? Or Dodds? Injured in a charge? There were some you didn’t notice—though the man was noticeable now, standing so tense and still, looking angry.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was trying to find a way through,” Morgan said.
“No way through here.”
“Yes, I see that now.”
They regarded each other silently for a moment. Dodds, or Mackenzie, had a sandy look to him, his hair short and gingery, face smattered with freckles.
“And you?” Morgan asked.
“What about me?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m looking about, looking about.”
“Looking for what?”
“Looking for trouble,” the man said, and smiled. He seemed less angry now, or perhaps it was just a softening of the light. “You’d be surprised at what you can find. Come and see.”
Morgan followed him, into a twist and curve in the rock, to where the sea and the bend of the bay were out of sight. It was dank and cold here, in this cleft, and there was no sign of the trouble the man had mentioned—unless it was in the way he had turned and was plucking suddenly at the front of Morgan’s tunic.
It was distinctly alarming, and one’s voice did not hold steady. “What do you want?”
“Only what you do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No? Really not? Because . . . when I saw you . . . in the hospital . . . I thought you did. I thought I could see . . . in your eyes . . . ”
He was searching Morgan’s gaze now, as if to find again what he’d spotted there. But the real discovery was lower down, in what his flickering fingertips confirmed.
“Yes, that’s better. I knew I wasn’t mistaken.”
“Oh, I see. Dear Lord.”
Both of them saw now. There was no more doubt. With renewed certainty, the man was pushing Morgan’s shoulders down, so that he could face the problem at eye-level.
The long curve of the bay, bathed in clear light, had always seemed innocent to him, so that his own desire was the enemy, an intruder who had slipped through in disguise—yet here it was, reflected back at him in the body of another. It didn’t seem possible that he was holding a penis, not his own, in his hand. The heat and feel of it were shocking; and its primitive, root-like appearance seemed inhuman. The world was suddenly removed from him, abstracted, dreamy. He knew at the same time that this was the realest moment of his life.
There was no doubting the direction the man’s hands were pushing him in, and he didn’t resist, though for a second he wanted to, while his brain threw out schoolboy words that named, and could not name, the thing that was now in his mouth. Touching himself, as a child, he’d called his dirty trick, and he’d prayed every night to be rid of it. He thought about his mother and then his mind flew back to the baths in Eastbourne, jostling against the rubbery bodies of the other boys, the mockery they’d flung at him. Have you seen Forster’s cock, a beastly little brown thing. The jeering had felt like a judgement, infusing every moment of desire since, so that he stood apart from himself and couldn’t act. That wasn’t the case now. No, his body had taken him with it, he’d failed to subdue its will, it was a creature with a life of its own—and never more so than at this present moment, when it was flooded, very suddenly, with an unpleasant taste, sharp and medicinal and strange.
All over in a moment. Then the man was buttoning himself and moving away, half polite and half fearful, saying, “Thank you, sir . . . if you’d just wait . . . let me go first . . . ”
Leaving Morgan staggering to his feet, his khaki trousers soaked to the knees, scooping up salt water to clean out his mouth. If they could have seen him doing . . . what he’d just done, his mother, oh how terrible, or Maimie or Aunt Laura, any of the old, powdery, frangible halo of women who encircled him, there would be no words. All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms. Of telegrams and anger.
When he reeled out again, into the sunlight, he was certain that everybody would be staring at him. Everybody would know. It was a second, slow shock to discover that the universe had continued in his absence, indifferent to his transgression. Some men were throwing a ball to each other and when it landed near him he picked it up and tossed it back to them. Not one of them gave him a second glance. At the base of the stairs that went up the cliff he saw somebody he recognised, and they greeted each other in a friendly way. Nobody called out his name; nobody pointed at him; nobody accused.
Nevertheless, the fear he hadn’t felt in the moment came to him now. Halfway up, his knees wouldn’t bend properly and he felt a little faint. He began to perspire heavil
y. Crouching down to recover, keeping his head low, he whispered it to himself, not quite believing it was true: “It has happened . . . It has happened . . . ”
He was thirty-seven years old.
* * *
In the days that followed, the strongest residual feeling was sadness. There was no remorse. If he had only been able to take this step, he thought, at the normal age—when one was young, excited, eager—he might have had remorse and more happiness. But by now something had run its course in him; he was tied to a life of the spirit, a cold, lopsided, inward life, rather than the body. (Why did people believe it was only the flesh that binds?)
In any event, the hunger wasn’t satisfied. Even in one’s most physical moments, the real craving was for love. Those few fumbling seconds at the edge of the sea: they had given him something and then immediately taken it away. There had been no opportunity to converse; for God’s sake, he didn’t even know the man’s name.
Nor did the sadness depart. It shaded off into a general gloom, a vague feeling of incompetence, which took specific form in a bout of vomiting at a dinner party. Thankfully, this could be diagnosed: he was told he had jaundice, and he was sent to stay at the officers’ quarters in the General Hospital to recover. But although the sickness passed, the spiritual malaise did not.
He had been in Egypt for a year and a half, but he still hadn’t learned to like it. There were some nights, coming back to his room alone, when a weariness seized hold of him. Will it always be like this? he wondered. Day after day, the level sameness of events. A numbing round of habit with no feeling inside it. He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.
By now he was in lodgings; through a friend, he had been put in touch with Irene, who was Greek but spoke Italian, and owned two boarding houses in Ramleh, in the east of the city, where most of the expatriate community lived. His work had taken him there almost daily, because some of the larger buildings had been commissioned by the Red Cross as hospitals. Now his journey was in the other direction: back to St Mark’s Square, where his reports had to be written and handed in.
Riding on the trams was mostly tedious: lost time, which would never come back. But on one of these journeys, going home on a cold night in January of 1917, he lifted from a murky sea-bed in himself to an awareness that a young man was leaning over him. He was wearing a conductor’s uniform and Morgan began searching for his ticket, but the man held up his hand.
“Excuse, please,” he said. “I am asking you to rise.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My coat is under your seat. I am sorry to disturb.”
He got up hurriedly, so that the young man could retrieve his coat. As he put it on, Morgan said to him, “Yes, it’s cold,” and they smiled at each other.
They were almost at Saba Pasha, where his journey would end, but in the remaining minutes Morgan realised several things. He was the only passenger left and he had been so sunk into his mood that he hadn’t recognised his new acquaintance, but now he remembered that they had seen each other before. The first occasion had been half a year ago, when from the platform he had noticed a handsome dark head passing, a white flash of teeth under a red tarboosh, and thought: nice. The morning had been sunny and its freshness enlivened by this transient glimpse of beauty.
He had looked for the young man since, and had noticed a delicacy to the way he performed his duties: stepping between the feet of the passengers, rather than treading on them as the other conductors did. There was a delicacy, too, to the moment when he was saying goodbye to a soldier-friend at the terminus. Framed in the doorway of the tram, the farewell had taken a sensual form: the conductor had lingeringly touched each button on the soldier’s tunic, almost as if he were playing an instrument.
Thus a particular face rises out of a crowd. What Morgan felt couldn’t be spoken; instead he’d felt the need to speak in crass generalities. He was with Robin Furness at the time, and had said to him, “That boy has some African . . . that is, negro blood.”
Robin nodded slowly, looking sidelong at his friend. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully.
These memories, slightly shameful, returned to Morgan now, along with a new awareness of the face in front of him: young—perhaps still in his teens—with a well-shaped round head, full lips and emotional dark eyes. It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold and he saw that happen now, at the same time that it happened to him. But there was nothing else he could think of to say, so they merely nodded at each other before the young man went to rejoin two other conductors riding on the footboard. Once or twice they glanced towards each other, before looking sharply away.
The next day Morgan waited for his new acquaintance at the terminus, a copy of Punch under his arm. He had some half-conceived plan that the pictures inside might start up a proper conversation between them. But he couldn’t find him, and it was only a few days later, in a press of people, that they happened to pass again. The Egyptian half-saluted, it might have been ironically, and the Englishman half-waved in return.
Now his interest was truly awoken. He loitered at the terminus for hours, waiting for an opportunity. But he had no luck, and it was only by chance that he found himself riding the right tram again one evening. They immediately watched each other. When Morgan tried to pay his fare, a hand was held up in refusal. “No, no,” he was told. “It cannot happen.”
“But why not?”
“You shall never pay. If you do not want that piaster in your hand, throw it into the road or give it to some poor person as a charitable action. I will not have it.”
“Why are you being so kind to me?”
“I like your good manners. The way you have thanked me, I am gratitude to you.”
Morgan could not remember ever thanking him, but he didn’t say so. “What is your name?” he asked.
“I am Mohammed el-Adl.” It was said with a sort of defensive pride. Morgan waited for the same question to be asked of him, but it didn’t come.
“You talk English,” he said at last.
“A little, only. Practice makes perfect.”
“Well, you are far better than me. I have no Arabic. I wish I could talk Arabic.”
“Why?”
He didn’t know what to say, and picked a reply at random. “To read the Elf Lela wah Lela.” The Thousand and One Nights.
“Oh, they were written by a famous philosopher. Am I right?”
He was wrong, but it was their first conversation, and Morgan felt disinclined to correct him. The encounter stuck into him like a splinter, a small, sharp, persistent pain. Out of all the nameless crowds around him, there was one Egyptian now who had been singled out.
He began to stand amidst the roar and the rumble at the Ramleh Terminus, sometimes for almost an hour, till the tram he was waiting for drew into the swirl. It gave him a mix of excitement and panic to see the head of Mohammed el-Adl bowed over his account book as he went into the office, and to notice his number, eighty-six, on a little white-and-blue oval plaque that he had to present inside.
When he contrived to bump into his new friend again, he was asked, “You are looking for me?”
“Yes.”
“I will tell you exactly.” And all the necessary information was conveyed—which tram routes, what times of day. “But if you ride with me, you shall never pay!”
* * *
The question of payment didn’t go away. Soon afterwards, riding the tram with Mohammed, Morgan offered him a cigarette. “I seldom smoke,” the young man said, gently accepting. “My Ministry of Finance does not permit me.”
He had spoken with humour, but the words bothered Morgan. They seemed to conceal an opposite suggestion. Did he want money? Did that account for his interest in the first place?
“Today,” Morgan told him, �
��I am paying for my ticket. And you must keep the change.”
But Mohammed closed his hand. The coins fell and scattered on the floor, and it was Morgan who ended on his knees, retrieving them. This time the young man accepted them, and they jingled in his pocket as he rode sulkily on.
“There you are,” Morgan said. “Now you can buy yourself an English book.”
“The sum is too small for a book.”
This reply obscured the matter further. There was obviously a great financial gap between them, and Morgan was on the better side. The next time that he took the tram and Mohammed refused his fare, he accepted the kindness with a nod.
On the way to the Red Cross Hospital one morning, the young conductor said, “I want to ask you a question about Mohammedans, which please answer truly, sir.”
“I’ll try.”
But the tram was already arriving, and the rest of the conversation was delayed till the evening.
“I want to ask you this. Why do English people hate Mohammedans?”
Morgan saw another face—Masood’s—in front of him for an instant. “But they don’t,” he said.
“They do, because I heard one soldier say to another in the tram, ‘that’s a mosque for fucking (I beg your pardon) Mohammedans’.”
“They were joking, I think.”
“You think. You are not sure.”
“No, I am sure.” It seemed a good moment to make a point. “One of my greatest friends is a Mohammedan. I went to India to see him.”
The conductor nodded carefully. “That must have cost much money,” he observed, then added: “With what you spent seeing your friend, you could have bought many friends in England. You can get friends if you have money—except one or two.”