by Rose Tremain
‘He looked at the room and the hatboxes. When I told him there was a hat inside each of them, he shook his head and said: “I reckon the way some women carry on makes ’em the laughing stock o’the world.” And we laughed. And then with Gully’s help, I began to make plans for leaving. We’d just go back to the station where he’d met me, and I’d get back on the train for London. He thought I had friends in London who would meet me and places to stay. I think there was only one thing he wanted to add, but he didn’t say it. He wanted to ask me never to come back.’
Outside Erica’s window, it had begun to rain and it was cold in the room – England’s false spring. ‘I don’t believe,’ she said turning to look at the drizzle, ‘that I have ever written anything successful about England. I think we’ve tolerated each other, England and I, sort of grudging friends. But you know, it is quite depressing to write about bad weather.’ Ralph pondered this for a moment, and then said: ‘When you chose Africa for In the Blind Man’s City, were you blind already?’
She closed her eyes, took off the heavy glasses and touched the skin of the eyelids with her left hand.
‘No. Or at least, I don’t know exactly how blind I was. It was very difficult to see the words I was writing. At first only my right eye was going; so I used to cover this and keep on just with my left eye. But the day war was declared, I know that both eyes were very very bad. I remember squinting at the newspaper and thinking, I’ve left it too late. All the hospitals will be full of the wounded back from France now, so I shall wait years for the operation.’
‘You knew there could be an operation?’
‘Oh yes. I knew what I had. I went to the British Museum Library and looked up all the causes and effects of blindness, and I diagnosed correctly. They call it a cataract, when the lens deteriorates and becomes stiff. It’s more common in people whose bodies are all stiff and deteriorated, yet mine wasn’t. I was thin and still quite strong. Only the black dreams brought a dreadful weakness. And I wasn’t old. I was forty-four when the first signs came and two years later, when the second war began, I was forty-six. I remember thinking, I shall hear the war, touch it even, but I won’t see it.
‘But there! I was fortunate in a way. I thought of the red-haired man in the Rue Pierre Nicole and it was the sight of him that had haunted me. Now I imagined him putting on his uniform, polishing his boots and his rifle – until France fell, and then I tried not to think of him any more or even of Saladino or anyone I knew. I stayed in my imaginary Africa and had a war there.’
‘Matarina ran from the forest. She and the other older women of the village had been visiting the tomb of the dead witch doctor, bringing spices in wooden jars, when the vultures began to circle the tomb. Never, in all the years they had lived between them, had the old women seen vultures above the tomb of a witch doctor, so they knew that the vultures had Meaning. On limping thin legs they ran from the Meaning.
The boy in the dirt under the baobab tree heard the scuffling of the old women’s feet and their gabble which was full of terror. He picked up his bowl and fingered the two coins that had been dropped into it. He thought, if there is some terror in the forest, hiding, it may creep out of the forest and encircle the villages. But the villagers have no weapons against terror and the missionaries have no weapons against terror, none except their white suffering Jesus who is a Jesus of peace, so says Sister Catherine and even Father Lemanteloupe who is not a peaceful man but an excitable one with his strange vowels and his love of children. Even he, Father Lemanteloupe whose body may one day float down the river with the river flowers, even he talks of a Jesus peace and presses his wooden cross on his thin lips and kisses it with a sound only I can hear, an inaudible sound which is loud to me – the sound of a man sucking on his evening soup.
The chatter of the market faded. Old men and young men began to cluster round Matarina. A dog wandered to the baobab tree, sniffed the boy’s feet. He kicked the dog away and it cringed sideways out of the shade, into the flat, bright heat of the market square, to join the listening group, squatting on its haunches as some of them were squatting, listening to Matarina and the old women with their eyes aghast from the sight of the vultures circling over their precious place, the ancient witch doctor’s eternity. And thinking, of course, what the boy thought: what weapons do we have against a terror of this kind, which is not the terror of the armed enemy, but the terror of the invisible, a terror that rides astride dreams, making no sound, but which pushes up and on into the deltas of capillaries, surges faster and stronger into the silent streaming of the blood and only leaves and lets you be when everything has been altered, when the villages are cinders, when the friend sits on his rump in the burning ash and remembers the friend who was sold for a sliver of monkey meat. When Father Lemanteloupe floats headless to the sea, when the chatter of the forest is silent because the forest has been torn down.
The boy could not see them, but he knew that many of them were looking all about them, trying to see in the peaceful scene they had laid out the exact place from which the terror would come. They wanted to believe they could recognize it, that they had interpreted the Meaning of the vultures as best they could and that, being strong men, they would defeat the terror before it crept inside them, long before it had created in them the storms and terrible yearnings that would begin to destroy them.
Away in the fields, Ngumbi worked on. No hint of any terror could reach her there as yet. She swung her arms and made her bundles of cane and her dress that day and her turban were as yellow as maize.
The boy longed for distance to separate him from the village. He longed, for an instant, to be deaf, dumb, insensitive to touch – kept in ignorance of what was happening and what was to come. And he wanted to be with Ngumbi, to put his head on her waist and his arms round her legs and protect her with the little rhymes that had come floating out of the mission-school windows on all the countless afternoons when he had sat still under his tree, head tilted, waiting for footsteps, waiting for francs and pennies to buy Ngumbi a paraffin lamp:
“Gentle Jesus, we thee pray
Help us understand thy way.
Gentle Jesus, we are sinners,
Please remember we’re beginners.”
He tried to think up more of these rhymes – protection for Ngumbi’s soul which would surely be one of the very first to be taken by the terror – but he was soon distracted from his chanting by his awareness of new deliberate movement not far from where he sat. It came from Sarm’s stall. Sarm was the oldest Indian trader to come to the village. Over the years his goods had become more and more inviting to the African – kohl for his woman’s eyes, breast unction to endow her, boxes of cotton pads for her menstrual bleeding, aphrodisiac powders to stimulate her in caskets made of mother-of-pearl.
Yes, they valued Sarm. They knew he bought cheap in the cities, sold dear in the villages, yet he sold them magic. No price was too high to pay for magic of this kind.
The boy lifted his face. Not a breath of wind touched it. Sarm was near to him now. He must have put all the goods into his handcart as quickly as he could and now, barefooted, his body between the shafts, he was wheeling his handcart away. By dusk he would be on the steamboat with his wares, heaving back towards the city. “Sarm …” the boy called, lifting his face higher. But the old man didn’t answer. And a moment later his name began to ring out among the men gathered round Matarina “Sarm … Sarm …” they said the name with venom. Because it was plain to most of them now: here was the place the terror lurked – in the magic and sly profit of Sarm and his kind. Of course it was here. Why hadn’t they seen it the very moment Matarina had come back from the forest? How stupid they were to torment themselves with other fears, when here lay the enemy, tangible, visible, cunning as a snake and now trying to creep away back into the forest, trying to scramble onto the steamer with his money and his useless potions, “Sarm! … Sarm!”
Pointless to think he could escape them. It was his magic that had brou
ght the vultures – the breast unction and the kohl and the powders that smelt of no flower that grew in Africa. “Sarm! … Sarm! …”
The door of the mission school opened and the boy heard the cries of Father Lemanteloupe as he came running out, but at the same time he knew that the crowd gathered around Matarina were coming nearer. He heard Sarm cry out as the first stone hit him and now the whole of the market place was alive with anger and shouting. The second stone missed Sarm and came bouncing over the hard ground to graze the boy’s leg. With his head still up and listening, he crawled round to the far side of the baobab tree. The ground underneath him was moist from urine; the smell of it held a kind of burning.’
9
‘I’m going to date this Summary from now on,’ Ralph wrote.
‘Today is the 23rd and of course I should, by Walt’s understanding, be back in New York tomorrow – the 24th.
In fact, by my own scheduling, I’ve got eight more days with Erica. Then I go to Oxford to see John, on May 2nd. Guess I must book a flight home for May 4th or definitely LOSE MY JOB.
I’m beginning to feel a sense of urgency on two counts: hell knows if I can gather fifty more years of a life in eight days. Because this feels like a package tour – that marvellous cheap deal which I guess we invented – where you pick over externals and leave, not with a sense of loss, but with a sense of nothing begun. My friend Al, who travels a lot in a Dormobile, is as mean as hardcore shit on travel packages. I love to hear him talk!
Second sense of urgency/unease: E.M. has a game of Cluedo going with this death of hers. (To my shame, I hear Walt’s voice: “I guess we can beef it up a bit if the old lady dies”). Doesn’t say what she means. Doesn’t know what she means? Somehow, she’s got it tied in to that airman who landed in Eileen’s cucumbers.
If I’m honest, I want no part in it. “Get in, get your story, get out” – Walt again. Yet I have never met, never will again meet anyone like her. She’s a sparrow to see, but the songs in her …
Guess I’m hoping J.P. will know what to do. In all that ancestral silence, he should surely be able to work out a matter of life and death. Yet perhaps even there, especially there, he can’t. He has humming bird fantasies, damn it! No wonder education’s creaking!
Found a quiet and good Italian restaurant a few blocks away from here. They seemed rather to court than to shun my solitude. So I told them I’d be in most nights. We discussed sea-food salads, which Americans go crazy on ever since they heard Frank Sinatra pronounce “Calla-marees”. We had a laugh – at the expense of America’s gullibility.
One odd thing: I’ve begun to like London. Time seems to blow people around up here in Chalk Farm. They appear to say “What the hell, why not try a smile before the next gust arrives?” The Marine’s gotten himself a spot of company.’
It had rained all night, was still raining at two, when Ralph arrived at Erica’s flat.
He had spent most of the morning at the Fawcett Library, choosing suffragette pictures to take home with him. For the war material, he had been told he should go to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth; ‘They got all the wars there mate,’ a clerk at the Fawcett Library had remarked.
He had found the picture of Emily Davison’s death which Erica had described. He remembered that during her account of her activities with Emily, she had been visited by what she called her “rain sickness”. And now, when time seemed so precious, it was raining again. The sickness could arrive unannounced like her moods of black depression, a kind of death. And there was no recovery from it, she had told him, until the rain had gone.
But she was well, she said. She wanted to begin straight away. The wine and biscuits were there on the tray. It was as if some of Ralph’s urgency had communicated itself to her, as if the act of telling the life had become as important as the act of recording it, as if she had once known, the voice and the machine, will one day meet and then … She mistrusted people who wrote their memoirs, she said. They tried to puff themselves out to be important pigeons. And memoirs was such a pretentious word: it belonged in Chadwick’s stage drawing-rooms! Yet it was surprising how it gave her pleasure, not just to remember her life, but to reconstruct it for Ralph, event by event, leaving unsaid only what it became physically impossible to say. She realized, she told Ralph as he poured the wine, that she had been very lonely since the death of Bernard. She had never before minded solitude, but in the winters now she had begun to mind it, and to talk to Ralph each day for a few hours was rather pleasing. Those hours were just enough. The rest of the time she needed to be alone.
‘When Huntley came,’ she said, ‘I was very pleased to see him at first. I thought, dear old Hunt, he’s cruising on in his world, obtuse as a battleship but rather dear, like an old relic. But then I remembered how silly he is and greedy about money and I just wanted him gone. He’s always saying I should go and see him – he’s said it for fifteen years – but I never do.
‘Oh well, never mind Huntley. He’s not important at all. Now let’s get on and I must tell you what happened when I left Suffolk again and came to London.
‘I came back to nothing, you see. The cupboard was there in Sam’s flat. I had that – and a little money, enough to buy somewhere. And I came back to the war which began in the spring when Hitler invaded Poland.
‘I’ve never really understood alliances which are made and knocked down like sandcastles because the tides change. I don’t think I even knew that we had an alliance or a pact or anything with Poland which was terribly far away, so it seemed very extraordinary to be going to war for a country we couldn’t save. Especially when neither we nor France had done anything about Spain, which we might have saved, just by sending arms.
‘I held a very dim view of Mr Chamberlain but when Churchill stepped in, he seemed all wrong to me, too fat. I thought we needed someone more measured than him, but I think I was wrong. I believe he rather loved the war and got very excited about everything in it. I don’t suppose you remember him, but for the British during those years he was everywhere: it was as if the great bulk of him was divided up hundreds of thousands of times and pushed into people’s wirelesses. And his voice; when he went in 1945, I thought, he was just like Falstaff, a man for a certain season, replaced when a new wind blows in! But for the war years, his voice had the chimes of eternity in it; it seemed to come from the bottom of an ocean.
‘I was in London a few months before war was declared. I think at that time, after Munich, most people thought they’d been spared: Hitler would go goose-stepping on somewhere else but England would be left alone. And then when war did come, there were no bands like in 1914, there was just a lot of muddle and waiting. You saw children playing games with their Mickey Mouse gas masks.
‘I went back to Hampstead and stared at my old house. Someone had planted geraniums in a window box and these had died with the frosts and never been taken out. And I thought they’re a bit like me, frost over my right eye, frost in my heart: I should be taken away and hidden from view, not left to go grey in London. I felt vulnerable. I kept saying to myself, there should be someone to take charge.
‘I lay out on Hampstead Heath and it was ridiculously cold. I tried to count the stars. I thought, if I can see a hundred stars perfectly, then the actual day of blindness is months off, years even. I went to sleep trying to count the stars and I woke up and it was snowing. And I began to laugh at it all, at my pathetic attempt to count stars, at the snow which was like glue on my eyelashes, at all the strength or illusions of strength I had had in Paris years now utterly gone, and there I was, being obliterated.
‘The trees became very beautiful in the dawn, grey-white and still. I thought, how extraordinary if people were rooted to the ground like them. And thinking about the trees must have put Ranulf Tree into my mind, because I remember that he came next, after my imaginings about rooted people, he came into my mind wearing his overcoat and I think only because his overcoat seemed so warm did I sit up and decide to go and see him.<
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‘I walked to Hampstead High Street. A café that served hot chocolate opened at eight. I drank three mugs of hot chocolate and my wet coat made a puddle on the floor. It was difficult to get warm, even in the warm café and I felt very confused about how to get to Ranulf Tree’s office. I knew he’d moved – he and Patterson – to Bedford Square, to the land of the Wolves! But I’d forgotten London. Just forgotten my way around.
‘A cab took me. As we drove, the cabbie told me his wife was German. He said if war came, he’d be ostracized in the pub. He said his pub mates would be kicking dachshunds in the street if war came, just like in 1914. And he’d had no answer from his Member of Parliament. He’d written to him to ask him what would happen to enemy aliens in the event of war, but no reply had come. He said none of it was fair.
‘Ranulf Tree didn’t seem to want to talk either about the war or the lack of it, and I was glad. He showed me round his new offices which were nice, in good proportioned rooms smelling of beeswax polish and books. I gave him the stories I’d written in Suffolk and he asked his eternal question: when will there be a novel? As an answer I wanted to say, Ranulf, I’m going blind. I wanted, at last, to share my knowledge of the blindness with someone else and let them help me. But I didn’t. I started to talk about the very beginnings of my idea for In The Blind Man’s City. I explained to him that I wanted to write about fear and the way, because of fear, people commit crimes that are unimaginable. The blind child in my story, who becomes the blind man, is the barometer of a society infected by fear, because he can smell, touch, breathe all the currents of feeling around him. He remains in touch with the progression of things; he remembers the beginning and what came next. It’s as if all that happens, happens in him: yet it doesn’t contaminate him; he commits no crimes; he remains sane. And when the destruction of his world is complete, he’s chosen to be the one to rebuild it. But then of course there’s the ending which I wrote just as I planned it and lots of people have criticized it: when the blind man is elected leader, white doctors and surgeons come to him – as the missionaries promised years ago when he sat begging under his tree – and they cure his blindness. But what he can now see is a world of unutterable horror. He hides in the mutilated forest and stabs himself. The last things he sees with his new eyes are the vultures circling over his own body.