Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  It snowed so heavily that the staff had to sweep it from the roof; so heavily that it transformed Bethlehem in his mind from a grubby little Palestinian town despoiled by Israel into a proper French country town; the shepherds in the snowy fields, the angels above.

  She wore a silver Ethiopian cross that glinted in the candlelight. They were seated at the table at which Ibsen had eaten his goose in Christmas 1899. They took that as a foretoken of happy times.

  Joyeux Noël! Peace and goodwill, hot chocolate and furs, and every phone switched off, please. There was a Nativity play, madrigals, some Haydn on a trumpet, an unidentifiable piano piece. The waiters wore tailcoats. Lifting a finger to them was considered gauche; they acknowledged the slightest nod, and glided out of the kitchen like a Greek chorus.

  Between them, over the course of the evening, they ate servings of duck foie gras with a peach wine jelly, Scottish scallops, ham, deboned saddle of lamb from the Auvergne, white beans with truffles, sea bream, poached apricots, bay leaf panacotta, cheeses and chocolates. They drank champagne, a house white wine, Rothschild Bordeaux, Chateau Villefranche dessert wine; he an espresso and she a cup of rooibos tea. There were also almonds and Christmas pudding with brandy sauce from the Ritz in London.

  He wore a blue suit with suede shoes and a grey Turnbull & Asser shirt. He had only his regimental cufflinks with him. A silver parachute on maroon. He did not think she would notice.

  He was in many ways old-fashioned. He envied Victorian explorers for having such obvious goals and for the contrast they experienced between the world they discovered and the world they returned to. Nothing was that clearly defined any more. He did not trust emotions. He trusted knowledge and duty. Yes, duty. His work was only occasionally terrifying. When it was he dealt with it. His mind was supple, the mind of a future head of intelligence, who believed the greatest service he could offer in the complicated present was to help people catch up emotionally with where they stood historically. They were almost exactly coeval.

  ‘You were in the army,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Just about everything. Those cufflinks for a start. The tattoo. I’ve never met a man who folds his clothes and arranges his shoes before getting into bed.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘A short service commission.’

  ‘You sound like you regret it.’

  ‘In some ways.’

  ‘You jumped out of planes?’

  ‘Yes, I jumped.’

  ‘Wow!’ she said, echoing his wow. She wasn’t French, not really. Of course she saw his cufflinks, of course she saw through him. It would be only a little while before the nature of his spying was similarly evident; the lies, thefts, deaths; the despots of the agency, the good men and women who were prevented from getting out.

  She did not ask him what it was like to jump out of a plane, she did not say: what was it about the army you didn’t like? She said, ‘Can I say something in German? Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. Then, ‘I don’t speak German.’

  ‘Just listen to the words.’

  She spoke them slowly and clearly:

  ‘Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert.’

  ‘Something about a bird.’

  ‘It’s Rilke. What birds plunge through is not the inner space in which you see all forms intensified. I thought it might mean something to a paratrooper.’

  He was noncommittal. ‘I haven’t jumped in years.’

  They talked about supermodels, punk, and the King’s Road.

  She talked about her nephew, Bertrand, Bert.

  There was so much they could not talk about. She could not simplify the maths for him. He was legally bound to hide behind a false identity. They talked cheerfully of Christmas things and listened to the madrigals and only when the meats arrived, the waiters hastening like star-led wizards with odours sweet, did she ask him about Africa.

  ‘Tell me about French Africa.’

  ‘Djibouti,’ he answered, without thinking.

  ‘Where’s Djibouti?’

  ‘Between Eritrea and Somaliland.’

  She nodded.

  ‘It looks the way lots of places are going to look. The capital is Djibouti Ville. It’s dilapidated. The main square has been renamed, but everyone still calls it by its colonial name. The speakeasies where the French legionnaires drink are sandbagged against suicide bomb attacks, although the prostitutes show off their wares all the same. The shops directly off the main square are run by Chinese traders. The presidential helicopter flies low over the market stalls in the evenings. Everyone has a mobile phone with a camera and music player built in. Many of the Djiboutian men forget to turn them off when they enter into the mosque, so the prayers are interrupted by a mix of ring tones, some of them religious, more often theme tunes, or French hip-hop. The camels are driven in from the desert in the early evening to be butchered and you can sometimes see the Afaris hacking away at the camel hump then gathering around to drink from the green mess there, just as they’ve done for hundreds of years. The buildings are often rubble and where they are not are plastered with adverts for toothpaste and soap. It’s such a hot place, there is not even breeze out on the harbour, and I can’t tell you what’s in the water there, it never occurred to me before I met you, there are whale sharks in the Gulf of Tadjoura I think, and volcanoes along the shore. It’s very geologically active.’

  ‘Is it French?’

  ‘Only in the Foreign Legion camps and sometimes in the harbour you can see one of those old French tramp steamers headed for Reunion and on to Calédonie. At the same time, Tarek bin Laden, who’s a brother of Osama bin Laden, wants to build the world’s longest bridge between Djibouti and Yemen across the Bab el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears, and he wants to construct cities on either side of the bridge as a hope for humanity. There will be a city for two million people in Djibouti and a city for four million people in Yemen. The projected cost is $40 billion and the start-up work is being handled by American defence contractors, with the full backing of the CIA.’

  He stopped. He had strayed alarmingly into his real work: he had been seconded to look into the bridge project.

  ‘That’s interesting about the crossing. According to the evidence, genetic and archaeological, irrefutable, I’d say, but I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, every non-African in the world is descended from a band of thirty or so humans who made it across the Gate of Tears some 60,000 years ago, walking and wading and perhaps on rafts from Africa to Arabia. We’re all African. Nearly all of our genetic diversity is within us, not between races. Given a similar history of migration, any African tribe will turn blond and blue-eyed. We become curdy in France and black in the sun. We’ve already escaped once as a species. We made it out of your Rift Valley to Somalia and then to the Middle East. There were no more than a few thousand of us left alive.’

  ‘That’s all? I can’t believe it. We must have been outnumbered at every watering hole by monkeys.’

  ‘What this means, genetically, is that every living person who is not African is a descendant of one of those individuals who crossed the Red Sea, while every African is a descendant of those who stayed, give or take some mixing.’ She pointed at herself, as if to say voila! ‘This explains the genetic diversity in Africa, where a villager may be further removed from his neighbour than you are from a Polynesian. This is exodus.’

  She turned towards the pianist who was then playing French carols softly. He was certain that at some point in his life he would look back on this evening, at her.

  ‘What is it?’

  He held her gaze. ‘Nothing.’ It was everything. He saw in her one possible future. Her skin, her facial features. Then again it was not so new; the febrile order of races was breaking down long before.

  The evening went more slowly then, like a stone sinking into a lake. They were tired and more cosy in their tiredness, and
as so often happens in long dinners, their conversation became haunting.

  He started it by taking a sip of his dessert wine and telling of how, in 1597, the poet John Donne set sail to the Azores with the Earl of Essex to intercept a Spanish treasure fleet in Angra Bay on Teceira Island, with its mild climate, plentiful wood and orchards, and fields to fatten the cattle left by the sailors on their outbound voyage to the New World.

  ‘Donne was still a lusty mate on Essex’s adventure, a poet,’ he said, ‘but on his return to England he renounced the fugitive life to become a clergyman. In that capacity he tremendously ministered to his congregants. His sermons and meditations minister still.’

  ‘“No man is an island entire of itself”,’ he recited, ‘“every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”’

  ‘What do you think happens,’ he added, on his own account, ‘to bodies buried at sea?’

  ‘I’ve never given it much thought,’ she said, falsely. ‘It’s not dust to dust, that’s for sure, it’s water to water. We’re made of water, it’s the most obvious thing, still we don’t get it, we think we’re solid, we’re not, we’re pockets of moisture. We bleed. Our mouths, our eyes, our every opening to the air are filled with saliva, mucus, or wax. If we were too long in the sun we should soon dry up.’

  ‘It is a shock to be a jelly,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Are we allowed to smoke?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘If man is made of water, does that follow that angels are made of air?’

  ‘Angels are made of light. What made you think of that?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed there are angels everywhere in the hotel? They’re above the entrance, in the mirror hall, on the stairs. Donne said that angels do not propagate or multiply. That they were made at first in abundance and so were stars. That raises a problem. The human population is exploding, yet the number of angels stays the same.’

  ‘You’re worried we’ll get lonely and won’t have anyone to show us the way?’

  ‘It’s what you were saying yesterday. Everything will be quantified and there will be less of everything.’

  ‘It’s not complicated,’ she said, her voice ever so slightly changed. ‘Suppose there is a god, a big suppose, suppose he’s all knowing, well, he’ll know before he begins what the maximum human population on earth and in the universe will be. Since he’s all powerful he’ll run the programme so that x number angels, a trillion angels, enter existence sometime after the big bang, but he’ll make them unconscious, not quite born, until they have someone to look after. It’s just as likely newborns are awakening angels.’

  ‘You don’t believe?’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘And I’m not sorry for saying so.’

  She could have pulled back at this point, from credulity, but when you are drawn to someone there are things you cannot share that come with them too. Besides, she had her own experiences, her own imaginings.

  She looked at him directly. ‘I have a problem believing in anything that can’t evolve,’ she said. ‘What makes Donne an authority anyway?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Generosity? Awareness?’ Another line of Donne’s came to him. ‘“But I do nothing upon myself and yet I am my own executioner.”’

  ‘Do you know why in paintings you never see angels smile?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because they’re so ancient.’

  Her work had given her a sense of the importance of imagination. It interested her that angels predated the surviving religions, and with a fineness of detail. Angels were not superheroes. They had no humours. They were flawless, inhuman. She saw a Babylonian clay box and kneeling in it a furled angel. If she lifted a lantern to it, as if adjusting a spotlight on a submersible, she would be able to see clearly the anatomy of its back and shoulders. The angel would stand, giant in her consciousness, its head bent down. She would stare up into its meteor-scarred face and its wings would open slowly, with pinguid plumage, a wider span than any sea eagle. Then the angel would get down again in the box and she would walk away, back into her own life, London, work, bills.

  ‘Tell me something horrible,’ she said.

  ‘Why would I do that? “Tis the season to be jolly.”’

  ‘We don’t have much time. Is that a reason?’

  He was quiet. ‘It would turn your stomach.’

  ‘My stomach is strong enough.’

  His mind raced. He was not a water engineer. He had seen violence. He had done it.

  ‘OK,’ he said, finally. ‘Another death rite. Do you remember the Luos I told you about in the forest in Nairobi?’

  ‘The hyenas digging them up? Barack Obama’s people?’

  ‘That’s it. Most of them live in Western Kenya, on the shores of Lake Victoria. The isolated fishing villages there still hold to traditions codified before independence in a pamphlet called the Luo kiti gi tubege. I’ve read it, so I’m certain that what I saw in one of the villages there was not an aberrance. A boy drowned in the reeds where the women wash clothes and the crocodiles are hidden. He was a hunchback. He was weak, the people said, and he had had difficulty walking. Before he could be buried, his hunch had to be opened. His family paid a man in goats to do the job. The price used to be paid in cows, but no one can afford a cow. The lake is fished out and the people are penniless.

  ‘Everyone in the village gathered around,’ he said. ‘The man sharpened his axe. I thought I was watching an execution. Then I saw the corpse laid face down on a string bed so the hunch was exposed. There was sadness, also tension; if the man made a mistake, the hunch would pass to his family. If he made no mistake, the lake would take the curse. The man drank banana wine and swung the axe about, loosening up. He ran his hands up and down the boy’s spine, searching for the spot, his hand bumped along. Finally he stood over the corpse and tapped at the point of the hunch with the axe and opened it up.’

  ‘I’ve seen nothing with my own eyes,’ she said, after a silence had passed between them. ‘Only the news.’

  He gave a querying look.

  ‘Since I was a child,’ she said, ‘I’ve pictured a slave ship sinking during an Atlantic crossing.’

  ‘A dream?’

  ‘No. A series of lithographs. Slightly different faces each time. Very close up, often at strange angles. It begins the same way. The boatswain is fumigating the slave hold with a red-hot chain dipped in a bucket of tar. The chain is too hot. He drops it on the varnished deck. The decking bursts into flames. The helmsman abandons the wheel. Sailors suffocate in the smoke. The varnish bubbles. The slaves are screaming below decks. I seldom see them. When I do, it always unclear, very black, just the suggestion of an open mouth, the glint of metal. The sailors let down the rowing boats. They do not ever think to let go the slaves. Water pours in. The ship breaks up and disappears under the waves. Do you know what I see next?’

  ‘I can’t guess.’

  ‘Nothing. Just the surface of the sea. It’s my non-existence. My slave ancestor is drowned in the Atlantic and I’m never born.’

  ‘The Australian side of your family will be fine.’

  ‘Until the convict transport goes down,’ she said, putting on an Australian accent. ‘There’s some part of me,’ she went on, ‘that thinks I became interested in the ocean to see where those slaves went, how deep they sank. Recently the images are further and further from the ship. You cannot make out the faces, only the shapes of the sailors, the ship catching light and breaking apart. Several times now I’ve dreamt that I am leafing through the lithographs on the platform of a train station in what I remember to be Argentina. There’s a wide river, a plain, vineyards, then snowcapped mountains, Bariloche. It’s always autumn, the leaves stick like stamps to the platform, and I am told the story of the slave ship in great detail by an elderly man, who is sitting on a bench next to me.’

  They were each gifted a small Christmas pre
sent. She received a small crystal rabbit; he a camping knife. A glass of whisky arrived for him.

  He was in that mood when he thought of the metaphysical. He was closer to Donne than to Ibsen. Heaven was like being tuned out. You entered in and were suffused in an equal light, without sun or storms, never atmospheric, and were met also by one equal sound.

  Somalia is not the Africa that is known. You will never see a naked man there. Everyone is shrouded, covered up. There are no nomads shouldering crates of Coca-Cola with scarification on their cheeks and chests; no swinging thin cocks.

  And it should be said that the coming of age initiations of jihadists in Somalia are not anywhere near so demanding as the circumcision ceremony of Masai boys, who are disowned if they flinch when a sharp knife is drawn around the head, and are rewarded with girls wearing necklaces on their chest, safety pins in their skin, smelling of earth, of goats, their buttocks daubed with ochre paste, their breasts firm, with unsuckled nipples, if they remain expressionless. The Masai boy circumcised in silence has access to the milk and blood of the cattle, a knife of his own and a spear. Whatever his creed, he will sing and jump in the Masai way. If he does not go to the city and become lost there he will be strong enough to walk for days barefoot and to keep walking into his old age long after his eyesight and hearing fail him.

  The lot of the mujahid is in some ways easier, in others harder. It is easier to pull a trigger or push the remote-control button on an improvised explosive device (mobile phones are unreliable) than it is to suffer a knife without anaesthetic and give no sign of pain. On the other hand, the endurance of a jihadist has no obvious reward in this life.

  They walked along the wadi at night, the lorry following at a distance. They slept at dawn. The wind came in the afternoon, when they packed their camp. The wadi was a crack in the earth made by water and abandoned by water and it funnelled the wind so that even when they wrapped their faces they could hardly see for dust. He drank from the greasy ribbons and became more ill. He vomited the food he was given and meandered like an Englishman at the midday hour and no one stopped him because there was nowhere to go. He wandered too far and was caught and bound hand to foot. He could crawl to a crevice and urinate there. For the other he needed to be untied.