Amazir

by Tom Gamble

  ‘I hope soon,’ came his neighbour’s voice. ‘My wife wishes to sleep and we can hear your footsteps.’

  ‘Oh, God—is it that late? Sorry.’

  Silence came over the house. Summerfield made an extreme effort to tread softly. After a while, the muffled, almost baritone snores of Abdlakabir’s first wife rose up from below.

  He recuperated what he could from the bin and sat back down at his desk. It was approaching midnight. The words came quickly, mechanically and without emotion—a ten-line poem, remarkably resembling a set of Noel Coward lyrics etched deep in his memory together with tootling piano. Something about my love and the birds. He didn’t re-read. Instead, he copied out the text in neat handwriting and slipped it without further ado into an envelope. Tomorrow, he would hand it to Badr.

  The following morning, rising rather fuzzy headed, he took a hasty breakfast of leavened bread, honey and olives which he washed down with tea, and then took the envelope to a group of boys squatting on the corner of the street.

  Even now, after so many months, Summerfield still wondered what on earth went through their minds all day long as they sat and waited—they seemed a permanent feature of the street, as innate as the lamp posts or the pissing-tree. Still, Summerfield at least provided them with weekly errands—sometimes a request for tea or water, other times running messages destined for Badr when Summerfield was too lazy or busy to seek him out. Today was such a day. He descended the narrow stairs, crossed the courtyard and wife No. 2’s collection of cooking pots and stepped into the shadow of the side street. Summerfield approached the boys, their blank faces turning to a scowl, almost mistrustful, then recognising him, becoming broad grins.

  ‘Laurens!’

  ‘Summerfield,’ he returned, as he always did, but they insisted on calling him otherwise. Aware that they hadn’t received any schooling, it was rather intriguing to wonder where they had heard of T.E. Lawrence. Perhaps the legend had travelled orally across the expanse of North Africa to reach these hopeful ears. Summerfield stood before them. ‘A note—for Badr. Important.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A kick up the backside!’ returned Summerfield, shaking his head. ‘All right—a glass of orange juice for each.’

  ‘Crayon!’ said a gloomy-looking youth, the leader, in French.

  ‘Imad, you can’t write—what use is a pencil?!’

  But Imad would have none of it. ‘Crayon!’ repeated the youth again, frowning.

  ‘All right, all right—I’ll give you a pencil. Now, hurry up—it’s a very important note. Be back before Midday prayer and I’ll give you two.’

  Returning to his lodgings, Summerfield changed out of his jellaba and donned his trousers, shirt and boots. He had decided to walk to the orange grove in time perhaps, and with a little luck, to see Jeanne and he didn’t want to unsettle her with his local attire.

  His journey on foot was hardly a journey at all. It was almost a dead moment, like any trip between home and an important event. He failed to notice the squad of soldiers practising drill in the square, missed the spectacle of two little boys cheekily mimicking them and the subsequent attempts of the drill instructor to send them off with a series of theatrical gestures. Summerfield’s mind flitted like a swallow in a summer’s eve—her, him, doubt, certainty, hope, impatience. He didn’t see Jean Bassouin drive pass and wave. He missed a snake charmer feeding a mouse to his cobra.

  Once more in the orange grove, this time for midday. If she were to come then he would see her. He ducked down, slid under the low-lying branches onto the cool, thick grass and noticed that his little pile of stones had gone. For a moment, startled, he wondered if someone else—wandering children perhaps—had found their secret place and dislodged the stones, the brick. And then his eyes rested on something—a little pyramid-like structure made from twigs and tied together with blades of grass. A sign. The warmth gushed into him. Her warmth. He stooped, picked up the tiny pyramid and studied it for some moments in the palm of his hand. Delicately, he placed it aside and went immediately to the tumbledown wall, his hand drawing, as if from memory, a gentle arc until it came to the loose brick. It came away more easily than before. And there was a note inside.

  Your words fill me with happiness, though they also scare me—for how can I rival them and the feelings they carry with them? When I try to rhyme, I write discord and when I try to think I fall into dream. These are strange days, my Magpie. I am supposed to answer questions, write essays, concentrate on mathematical problems and be the dear daughter. I cannot think. It seems our meeting has since cast a spell on me and I drift, and let myself drift, like a leaf in autumn. I fall into whatever breeze or gust will take me, careless and uncaring where I am carried. Sometimes the leaf comes to rest under a gaze—my teachers, friends, parents. And they speak, but like a leaf, somehow dead and on its way to another place, I do not answer. They enquire if I am ill. They tell me to wake. But like an autumn leaf, I cannot wake. I am scared, Magpie. Scared of the strange, turbulent current in which the leaf finds itself—and the scariest of all: that this world, this beyond world, is more real than the life surrounding it.

  A second, more hurried note—on a separate scrap of paper, the writing more slanted, with several crossings out. She must have been late for studies.

  I wish to meet you again. And once again, I cannot think, my mind a total blank! What is this feeling that I am feeling? What is this sliding, this falling? It’s as though the moon has turned upside down and the sun appears at night! When, you ask? I don’t know. All I know is that I want to see you—to talk, to see if all this is real. This week, I cannot—obligations, as you said. It makes me angry—with myself and with those others who have regulated my life, my time. Next week, yes. Tuesday. I am supposed to have a late piano class which I am determined to skip. Write, my Magpie. For although I cannot come to our secret place for several days, I will imagine your words hidden behind the stone, waiting for me.

  Summerfield stayed for a long time. Midday stretched into afternoon and he fell into a gloominess that surprised him, sending his hopes of ever seeing her plummeting, not like a leaf from a tree, but like the tree itself, cut at the base. It was ridiculous of course. He even recognised that it was a wilful fall, the bizarre, wistful melancholy that pulsated through his head and body so deliciously pleasurable.

  At four-thirty, he rose out of his lethargy, carefully placing the little wooden structure she had made him inside the pocket of his jacket and took the path through the orange grove towards the Académie. He would catch a glimpse of her as she left at five. It was all so simple. But when he approached the building, he saw, from the shade of the trees, a profile he recognised, standing with his back to him, barely fifteen yards away. It was Abrach.

  Summerfield’s immediate reaction was to sink further back into the shade of the orange trees and from there he watched. The merchant was dressed in a beige, linen suit, the first time Summerfield had seen him wearing Western clothes. It looked very odd, but Abrach’s build and posture were such that it was unmistakably him. He had taken up position in much the same place as Summerfield had several weeks previous—opposite the main gates, too far for anyone to notice him in detail against the sun, close enough to make out the students as they left the Académie. To Summerfield’s dismay, Abrach’s position also meant that he could have no way of getting closer without being seen. And from the orange grove, Summerfield was too far to be able to see Jeanne clearly. He hesitated for some seconds, his breath short and rapid, silently cursing the merchant and weighing up the risk. And then, realising that it was useless, he withdrew deeper into the grove and slipped away.

  When at last he arrived back at his lodgings, his spirits as black and thundery as a winter’s day in Northumberland, he found the boy, Imad, waiting for him.

  ‘Oh, God—the pencils—I forgot!’ Summerfield gestured an apology and cursed his forgetfulness, suddenly realising that he’d spent an entire day in his search for her. The
sour-faced youth dipped a hand into his jellaba and brought out an envelope. ‘What’s this? A reply? Good God, that was quick. Come,’ said Summerfield, beckoning for Imad to follow. Upstairs, Summerfield opened his writing desk and pulled out the first two pencils that came under his fingers—fine, forest green affairs, made in Germany. Imad handed over the letter and snatched the pencils from Summerfield’s hand.

  ‘Orange juice!’ scowled the boy.

  ‘Bugger off!’ was Summerfield’s curt reply.

  Intrigued—for how could Jeanne have written him a reply so quickly—Summerfield sat down without taking off his boots and opened the envelope. It was from Abrach. His heart sank.

  Dear Harry,

  I thank you for your effort. But this is not a poem of love, it is a dancehall song. And such a song is not what is needed at this precise moment. Re-write, Harry. Re-write—and quickly!

  In his current state of mind, Summerfield’s first reaction was to think: write it yourself! And then, as various scenarios went through his mind, some involving physical violence and others involving sudden disappearance, Summerfield’s mind inexorably turned mischievous. The old rebel fluttered its flag within him and rose to its feet with a malicious grin on its face.

  Write a poem, Harry—and enter the girl’s heart like a key to a lock. Turn that key, Harry Summerfield, a perfect fit, well-oiled and making metal melt to tender substance. That was what Abrach had told him. Well then, you shall have your key—and she shall know that it is me.

  On the desk, before his eyes, was the tiny, delicate pyramid. The blades of grass, wound around the twigs to lock the joints, had already blanched in the dry heat to a pale green. He did not eat that evening. Every now and then, his eyes rising from the scribbled lines, the discarded ideas, he glanced at it until he grew familiar with every notch and every grain. He imagined her fingers, the movement of her hands and wrists as she had joined the little sticks together. He wrote one poem and two texts, fell asleep for an hour and then woke up, an alarm in his unconscious compelling him to re-read and proof. One of the texts he discarded without further ado, leaving a remaining page of prose and the poem.

  He compared the two, employing the critic in his mind, viewing them both from various stylistic angles and finally made a decision. The trouble with poetry was that it was alive. It changed shape and grew. Left for a day to repose, it would ask for something different, complain that one of the words was not telling the truth, that another was an intruder. Left for a week, it might demand amputation and even metamorphosis. Left for a month, it would appear clumsy. Returned to after six months, it might appear, at last, as the perfection it had promised it would be all those months before. He chose the prose.

  Exhausted, pushing himself beyond the limit of his groaning tiredness, Summerfield forced his hand back to a fresh sheet of paper and copied, with the utmost care, the last draft of the text which he then placed inside a new envelope. And with that, Summerfield blew out the candle, dragged himself over to his bed and, not bothering to undress, fell asleep.

  Upon rising moon you came to me, a chill that I might lose you, and the day empty. I dream thus, in the late hours, in the deepest corner of sleep, that most ancient and secret part of ourselves. I know it is a sign of love. For it is an extreme, the other being a certitude like an oncoming wave. We turn to the sea and travel with the swell as it turns to a surge and, just as the wave forms and the crest unfurls, we turn our backs to the breaking sea, take one last gulp of air and dive in its flow, rushing towards the shore, tumbling with the sound of laughter through the roar. And then, tangled on the sand, still smiling, with the ebb dragging and lifting the sea sediment from under us back towards the forming waves so that it feels as though the ground is slipping backwards with us. We open our eyes, those in love, and see the world from the point where the wave crashed and foamed: the film of water, the sparkle of sun on a grain of sand, a tiny mosaic of shells that form sizzling pearls and beads, a joyful bubbling from the air holes. And rolling, the sky is a royal blue and somewhere the sun blinding. We bask for a few moments, stretch, sigh. We were caught in love’s wave and another will follow.

  22

  Another midday lost. Another occasion without Harry Summerfield that sent her heart and spirits crashing.

  She clenched her teeth and, with the utmost effort, turned to follow Sœur Marthe into her quarters. Sarah Bassouin sent her one, last look of sympathy to which Jeanne pointed hurriedly in the general direction of the orange grove. In return, Sarah gave her an imperceptible nod of the head and disappeared. Blast her parents, blast Sister Marthe, blast her preparation for university which, as everyone had decided on apart from herself, had taken up her lunchtimes and evenings.

  Love. It was the strangest of feelings. Not even Sarah’s description fitted exactly. Perhaps, Jeanne had concluded, everyone experienced it differently. And the worst was the uncertainty. If she were truthful, she didn’t know for sure that this was it—that love that everyone, from school friends to parents to film idols, spoke about. It was very painful.

  Jeanne seemed to float in an almost permanent state of beyond. In all appearances, she was absent. Her body seemed a hollow, ghostly vehicle for what seemed to her just a cloud of feelings, hardly thoughts, but waves of euphoria—as high and tremendous as they were violent and crashing. For when the wave receded she was dragged into a horrible emptiness for long, terrifying minutes. It was a state of sheer panic—as though she would certainly die and never see him again.

  Her mother and Soumia were now totally convinced she was suffering from some mystery illness contracted in the Académie biology labs. And of course, Soumia’s wagging tongue (and naive belief in anything deemed scientific) had meant that Jeanne’s mother came to know of the Bubonic plates—a further warping of Soumia’s initial tictonic plague. Goodness knew how Soumia’s mind worked, Jeanne had thought when having to explain to her mother. Perhaps, she had added silently, her mind wandering for a few moments, Soumia was in love too. Permanently.

  Sister Marthe’s individual maths lesson dragged on and dragged on, an hour stretched beyond shape so that every minute seemed like ten. The old nun explained algebraic formulas with such intense verve, and was so taken away with her pedagogy, that she hardly paid attention to Jeanne whose mind repeatedly defied any attempt at being influenced by logic. But what about love? it argued. What about poetry? Nothing else mattered. Everything from geological rock formations to the theory of the atom appeared so minimal in comparison, so ridiculous and unreal, that it hardly deserved a footnote in her present list of priorities.

  Gazing into the distant plain from the window of Sister Marthe’s living quarters, Jeanne saw the spread of the orange groves and imagined that Sarah had already accomplished the mission conferred upon her of checking for messages. She noticed a cloud edging across the blue sky and thought she saw in its hollow the shape of a man. A bird flew across her view. They were signs, she thought. Her days were full of them. It was as though, for the first time in her life, she had suddenly become aware of nature around her.

  ‘Exercise three,’ said Sister Marthe, in a tone which implied she was repeating herself.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sister Marthe?’

  ‘The exercise, Jeanne,’ puffed the nun, reaching for her water spray.

  ‘What about love, Sister?’ Jeanne started as though her body had suddenly received an electric shock. She was amazed at such a remark coming from her own mouth and her hand went to her lips in a tardy attempt to stuff the word back. Sister Marthe, too, looked shocked, her eyebrows raised in such a questioning frown that it sent her forehead wrinkling into a score of folds beneath her coif. She looked like a bulldog. At last the pump wheezed and spluttered, sending a sprinkle of water onto the sister’s face.

  ‘Did you say something about—love, young lady?’

  Jeanne remained silent, giving only the slightest nod of embarrassment and looked away. For the first time, she saw the limits of the nun�
�s room—the dark green paint on the walls, a couple of framed diplomas from the University of Nantes, the little polished oak chest of drawers with its lace mats, the fading collection of photographs and several crucifixes including one with a hand-painted porcelain effigy of Jesus. It wore a smile that captured Jeanne’s attention. It was a mysterious smile—the sort of smile that came of nostalgia and mellow memories, a sort of inner serenity. As though, in his last moments on the cross, Jesus had assessed his life and had come to the conclusion that it had all been worth it. Jeanne frowned, uncertain if her eyes were playing tricks on her, uncertain if her feelings were sending her once more towards the crest of a wave.

  ‘You’re looking at that smile, girl,’ came Sister Marthe’s voice, strangely confiding. Jeanne looked round and was surprised to see the old nun smiling with something approaching glee. ‘So you can see it, too!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeanne, unsure of how to react.

  ‘I bought that in Lourdes on my first pilgrimage before taking up orders,’ said Sister Marthe, placing the maths book, in a gesture that brought Jeanne much relief, cover down, in her lap. ‘There were dozens of them in the shop—all porcelain figures of Christ on the cross. But this one—this particular one—had such a different expression on his face from all the rest.’

  ‘Perhaps the craftsman had made a mistake.’

  ‘You’re using logic!’ reproached the nun, suddenly laughing to herself. ‘What I’ve been trying so hard in the last hour to make you use!’ Jeanne laughed too. She suddenly felt very close to the old lady, as though they were sharing, just for a few moments, something unique. ‘But what if we look beyond logic for two minutes? We could say the craftsman made the mistake on purpose. Perhaps like Da Vinci and La Joconde. Perhaps he, too, was having his moment of fun. But perhaps he was simply painting what he knew everyone would overlook—that representation, that simple, almost idiotic look on her face that is so clearly the look of someone who is head over heels in love that all the art critics, with their rolls of degrees and years of portentous books failed to notice! A little,’ added Sister Marthe, almost murmuring, ‘like the look you have on your face now, Jeanne.’