The Cabal met at this time in what resembled a disused curator’s wooden hut, built against the red earth walls of an embankment, very near to Pompey’s Pillar. I suppose the morbid sensitivity of the Egyptian police to political meetings dictated the choice of such a venue. One crossed the wilderness of trenches and parapets thrown up by the archaeologist and followed a muddy path through the stone gate; then turning sharply at right angles one entered this large inelegant shack, one of whose walls was the earth side of an embankment and whose floor was of tamped earth. The interior was strongly lit by two petrol lamps and furnished with chairs of wicker.
The gathering consisted of about twenty people drawn from various parts of the city. I noticed with some surprise the lean bored figure of Capodistria in one corner. Nessim was there, of course, but there were very few representatives of the richer or more educated sections of the city. There was, for example, an elderly clock-maker I knew well by sight — a graceful silver-haired man whose austere features had always seemed to me to demand a violin under them in order to set them off. A few nondescript elderly ladies. A chemist. Balthazar sat before them in a low chair with his ugly hands lying in his lap. I recognized him at once as if in an entirely new context as the habitué of the Café Al Aktar with whom I had once played backgammon. A few desultory minutes passed in gossip while the Cabal waited upon its later members; then the old clock-maker stood up and suggested that Balthazar should open proceedings, and my friend settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and in that harsh croaking voice which gradually gathered an extraordinary sweetness began to talk. He spoke, I remember, of the fons signatus of the psyche and of its ability to perceive aninherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomena. Disciplines of mind could enable people to penetrate behind the veil of reality and to discover harmonies in space and time which corresponded to the inner structure of their own psyches. But the study of the Cabbala was both a science and a religion. All this was of course familiar enough. But throughout Balthazar’s expositions extraordinary fragments of thought would emerge in the form of pregnant aphorisms which teased the mind long after one had left his presence. I remember him saying, for example, ‘None of the great religions has done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man’s wholeness match the wholeness of the universe — even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.’
The constitution of the Cabal consisted of an inner circle of initiates (Balthazar would have winced at the word but I do not know how else to express it) and an outer circle of students to which Nessim and Justine belonged. The inner circle consisted of twelve members who were widely scattered over the Mediterranean — in Beirut, Jaffa, Tunis and so on. In each place there was a small academy of students who were learning to use the strange mental-emotional calculus which the Cabbala has erected about the idea of God. The members of the inner Cabal corresponded frequently with one another, using the curious old form of writing, known as the boustrophedon; that is to say a writing which is read from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines. But the letters used in their alphabet were ideograms for mental or spiritual states. I have said enough.
On that first evening Justine sat there between us, her arms linked lightly in ours, listening with a humility and concentration that were touching. At times the speaker’s eye rested on her for a moment with a glance of affectionate familiarity. Did I know then — or was it afterwards I discovered — that Balthazar was perhaps her only friend and certainly the only confidant she had in the city? I do not remember. (‘Balthazar is the only man to whom I can tell everything. He only laughs. But somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.’) And it was to Balthazar that she would always write those long self-tortured letters which interested the curious mind of Arnauti. In the diaries she recorded how one moonlight night they gained access to the Museum and sat for an hour among the statues ‘sightless as nightmares’ listening to him talk. He said many things which struck her then but later when she came to try and write them down they had vanished. Yet she did remember him saying in a quiet reflective voice something about ‘those of us who are bound to submit our bodies to the ogres,’ and the thought penetrated her marrow as a reference to the sort of life she was leading. As for Nessim, I remember him telling me that once, when he was in a great agony of mind about Justine, Balthazar remarked dryly to him: ‘Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.’ Adding as he did so: ‘I speak now as a member of the Cabal, not as a private person. Passionate love even for a man’s own wife is also adultery.’
Alexandria Main Station: midnight. A deathly heavy dew. The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows. Standing against an insanitary brick wall to kiss her goodbye. She is going for a week, but in the panic, half-asleep I can see that she may never come back. The soft resolute kiss and the bright eyes fill me with emptiness. From the dark platform comes the crunch of rifle-butts and the clicking of Bengali. A detail of Indian troops on some routine transfer to Cairo. It is only as the train begins to move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness, lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied — the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull of the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed. ‘Melissa’ I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound. She begins to tilt, to curve and slide; and quick as a scene-shifter the station packs away advertisement after advertisement, stacking them in the darkness. I stand as if marooned on an iceberg. Beside me a tall Sikh shoulders the rifle he has stopped with a rose. The shadowy figure is sliding away down the steel rails into the darkness; a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.
I walk about Moharrem-Bey that night, watching the moon cloud over, preyed upon by an inexpressible anxiety.
Intense light behind cloud; by four o’clock a thin pure drizzle like needles. The poinsettias in the Consulate garden stark with silver drops standing on their stamens. No birds singing in the dawn. A light wind making the palm trees sway their necks with a faint dry formal clicking. The wonderful hushing of rain on Mareotis.
Five o’clock. Walking about in her room, studying inanimate objects with intense concentration. The empty powder-boxes. The depilatories from Sardis. The smell of satin and leather. The horrible feeling of some great impending scandal.…
I write these lines in very different circumstances and many months have elapsed since that night; here, under this olive-tree, in the pool of light thrown by an oil lamp, I write and relive that night which has taken its place in the enormous fund of the city’s memories. Somewhere else, in a great study hung with tawny curtains Justine was copying into her diary the terrible aphorisms of Herakleitos. The book lies beside me now. On one page she has written: ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.’ And lower down in the margins: ‘Night-walkers, Magians, Bakchoi, Lenai and the initiated.…’
Was it about this time that Mnemjian startled me by breathing into my ear the words: ‘Cohen is dying, you know?’ The old furrier had drifted out of sight for some months past. Melissa had heard that he was in hospital suffering from uraemia. But the orbit we once described about the girl had changed; the kaleidoscope had tilted once more and he had sunk out of sight like a vanished chip of coloured glass. Now he was dying? I said nothing as I sat exploring the memories of those early days — the encounters at street-corners and bars. In the long silence that ensued Mnemjian scraped my hairline clean with a razor and began to spray my head with bay-rum. He gave a little sigh and s
aid: ‘He has been asking for your Melissa. All night, all day.’
‘I will tell her’ I said, and the little memory man nodded with a mossy conspiratorial look in his eyes. ‘What a horrible disease’ he said under his breath, ‘he smells so. They scrape his tongue with a spatula. Pfui!’ And he turned the spray upwards towards the roof as if to disinfect the memory: as if the smell had invaded the shop.
Melissa was lying on the sofa in her dressing-gown with her face turned to the wall. I thought at first she was asleep, but as I came in she turned and sat up. I told her Mnemjian’s news. ‘I know’ she said. ‘They sent me word from the hospital. But what can I do? I cannot go and see him. He is nothing to me, never was, never will be.’ Then getting up and walking the length of the room she added in a rage which hovered on the edge of tears. ‘He has a wife and children. What are they doing?’ I sat down and once more confronted the memory of that tame seal staring sadly into a human wineglass. Melissa took my silence for criticism I suppose for she came to me and shook me gently by the shoulders, rousing me from my thoughts. ‘But if he is dying?’ I said. The question was addressed as much to myself as to her. She cried out suddenly and kneeling down placed her head on my knees. ‘Oh, it is so disgusting! Please do not make me go.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But if you think I should I will have to.’
I said nothing. Cohen was in a sense already dead and buried. He had lost his place in our history, and an expenditure of emotional energy on him seemed to me useless. It had no relation to the real man who lay among the migrating fragments of his old body in a whitewashed ward. For us he had become merely an historic figure. And yet here he was, obstinately trying to insist on his identity, trying to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference. What could Melissa give him now? What could she deny him?
‘Would you like me to go?’ I said. The sudden irrational thought had come into my mind that here, in the death of Cohen, I could study my own love and its death. That someone in extremis, calling for help to an old lover, could only elicit a cry of disgust — this terrified me. It was too late for the old man to awake compassion or even interest in my lover, who was already steeped in new misfortunes against the backcloth of which the old had faded, rotted. And in a little time perhaps, if she should call on me or I on her? Would we turn from each other with a cry of emptiness and disgust? I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit. But she herself — austere and merciless Aphrodite — is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks — but our very bones. It terrified me to think that this old man, at such a point in his life, had been unable to conjure up an instant’s tenderness by the memory of anything he had said or done: tenderness from one who was at heart the most tender and gentle of mortals.
To be forgotten in this way was to die the death of a dog. ‘I shall go and see him for you’ I said, though my heart quailed in disgust at the prospect; but Melissa had already fallen asleep with her dark head upon my knees. Whenever she was upset about anything she took refuge in the guileless world of sleep, slipping into it as smoothly and easily as a deer or a child. I put my hands inside the faded kimono and gently rubbed her shallow ribs and flanks. She stirred half-awake and murmured something inaudible as she allowed me to lift her and carry her gently back to the sofa. I watched her sleeping for a long time.
It was already dark and the city was drifting like a bed of seaweed towards the lighted cafés of the upper town. I went to Pastroudi and ordered a double whisky which I drank slowly and thoughtfully. Then I took a taxi to the Hospital.
I followed a duty-nurse down the long anonymous green corridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp. The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms.
They had put him in the little ward with the single curtained bed which was, as I afterwards learned from Mnemjian, reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short. He did not see me at first, for he was watching with an air of shocked exhaustion while a nurse disposed his pillows for him. I was amazed at the masterful, thoughtful reserve of the face which stared up from the mattress, for he had become so thin as almost to be unrecognizable. The flesh had sunk down upon his cheek-bones exposing the long slightly curved nose to its very roots and throwing into relief the carved nostrils. This gave the whole mouth and jaw a buoyancy, a spirit which must have characterized his face in earliest youth. His eyes looked bruised with fever and a dark stubble shaded his neck and throat, but under this the exposed lines of the face were as clean as those of the face of a man of thirty. The images of him which I had so long held in my memory — a sweaty porcupine, a tame seal — were immediately dissolved and replaced by this new face, this new man who looked like one of the beasts of the Apocalypse. I stood for a long minute in astonishment watching an unknown personage accepting the ministration of the nurses with a dazed and regal exhaustion. The duty-nurse was whispering in my ear: ‘It is good you have come. Nobody will come and see him. He is delirious at times. Then he wakes and asks for people. You are a relation?’
‘A business associate’ I said.
‘It will do him good to see a face he knows.’
But would he recognize me, I wondered? If I had changed only half as much as he had we would be complete strangers to one another. He was lying back now, the breath whistling harshly through that long vulpine nose which lay resting against his face like the proud figurehead of an abandoned ship. Our whispers had disturbed him, for he turned upon me a vague but nevertheless pure and thoughtful eye which seemed to belong to some great bird of prey. Recognition did not come until I moved forward a few paces to the side of the bed. Then all at once his eyes were flooded with light — a strange mixture of humility, hurt pride, and innocent fear. He turned his face to the wall. I blurted out the whole of my message in one sentence. Melissa was away, I said, and I had telegraphed her to come as quickly as possible; meanwhile I had come to see if I could help him in any way. His shoulders shook, and I thought that an involuntary groan was about to burst from his lips; but presently in its place came the mockery of a laugh, harsh, mindless and unmusical. As if directed at the dead carcass of a joke so rotten and threadbare that it could compel nothing beyond this ghastly rictus gouged out in his taut cheeks.
‘I know she is here’ he said, and one of his hands came running over the counterpane like a frightened rat to grope for mine. ‘Thank you for your kindness.’ And with this he suddenly seemed to grow calm, though he kept his face turned away from me. ‘I wanted’ he said slowly, as if he were collecting himself in order to give the phrase its exactest meaning, ‘I wanted to close my account honourably with her. I treated her badly, very badly. She did not notice, of course; she is too simple-minded, but good, such a good girl.’ It sounded strange to hear the phrase ‘bonne copine’ on the lips of an Alexandrian, and moreover pronounced in the chipped trailing sing-song accent common to those educated here. Then he added, with considerable effort, and struggling against a formidable inner resistance. ‘I cheated her over her coat. It was really sealskin. Also the moths had been at it. I had it relined. Why should I do such a thing? When she was ill I would not pay for her to see the doctor. Small things, but they weigh heavy.’ Tears crowded up into his eyes and his throat tightened as if choked by the enormity of such thoughts. He swallowed harshly and said: ‘They were not really in my character. Ask any business man who knows me. Ask any one.’
But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them too. Unknown fronds of trees arched over him, brushing his face, while cobbles punctuated the rubber wheels of some dark amb
ulance full of metal and other dark bodies, whose talk was of limbo — a repulsive yelping streaked with Arabic objurgations. The pain, too, had begun to reach up at his reason and lift down fantasies. The hard white edges of the bed turned to boxes of coloured bricks, the white temperature chart to a boatman’s white face.
They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red water of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity was gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature which she had kept hidden from me.
The Alexandria Quartet Page 10