The Mule on the Minaret

by Alec Waugh

  ‘So Nigel warned me. Shall I pick you up at one?’

  He returned to his study of the file. There was a report from Aunt Mildred on Aziz’s father. ‘He appears to be a conventional, efficient, but not very brilliant army officer. He is employed in Q. He lives quietly, rarely entertains; is unpolitical; he plays bridge in the army officers’ club, but he does not gamble. He appears to have no mistress, is not believed to be homosexual. The only suspicious thing about him is that his life is so obviously respectable. In a detective story the last man you would suspect is invariably the murderer. Nothing is known about his wife. She follows the routine of a strict Moslem. She is never seen in a public place alone; she appears to be absorbed by her family.’

  There were translations of the letters that had passed between her and her sister, and between Aziz and his mother. Aziz wrote to his mother every Friday and to his father on the last day of every month. The letters were without any interest. There were accounts of Farrar’s various meetings with the Amin Maruns, including the one at the St. Georges when he had explained that Kurdistan was to become a Russian sphere of influence. ‘If any echoes of this report reach us from Turkey we can be sure that it is due to her.’ There followed a note that made Reid smile. ‘I believe the Prof, will be very useful as a piece of groundbait. He will be unsuspected because he is himself unsuspecting. He also appears to have a knack for making people talk about themselves. He may be able to break down Aziz’s reserve.’

  * * *

  They lunched in Sa’ad’s. It was a grey, cloudy day in tune with the long, dark, narrow room with its balcony in which no one ever seemed to sit. There was no one there in uniform and the restaurant was quarter full. Reid sat with his back to the light. Diana was wearing her dark office clothes with a white shirt-waist fastened at the throat by a gold brooch, set with an oval reddish stone. She had a tired preoccupied expression, as though she had something on her mind.

  ‘I wonder if they’ve any Bols gin,’ she said. ‘It’s the kind of thing they might.’

  They had.

  ‘I had it on a Dutch ship once. I liked the look of the bottle, then I started liking it for itself.’

  ‘Where was the Dutch boat running?’

  ‘Tangier to London.’

  ‘What were you doing in Tangier?’

  ‘The kind of thing one goes to Tangier to do.’

  They laughed together. It was nice to be able to talk in shorthand in this way. Once again he found himself wondering what kinds of love affairs she had had; had they been many, had they gone deep, had they left scars?

  ‘I’m missing those duty-officer-talks even more than I had expected to,’ he said. ‘I felt so close. Do you yourself feel that you’re more yourself when you’re on the telephone?’

  She smiled. ‘I feel very natural on the telephone. Something went wrong with my spine when I was ten. I couldn’t walk. I had to be taken out in a wheel-chair; I had to do special exercises. It’s all right now, but for two years I was cut off from all the games and sports that I should have been enjoying at that age. But it didn’t cut me off from my friends. I’m gregarious; they enjoyed bringing me their stories, they’d embroider them, of course. They’d make themselves more heroic and dramatic; half of the fun of their adventures was the coming round to tell me about them afterwards. I couldn’t visit them, of course. But I could call them up. I spent hours talking on the telephone. Those were my happiest times. The moment the house was empty, I’d start calling up all my friends. I loved the telephone. It saved me in those days. I love it still. I sometimes think, even now, that I’d rather talk to people on the telephone than go and see them. I feel closer to them that way.’

  ‘I feel very close to you now.’

  ‘You do? I’m glad you do. I feel close to you: in the way I always dreamed I’d be. It’s funny, isn’t it, that I’d made this dream picture of you through hearing Margaret talk about you.’

  ‘I must re-meet this Margaret some day.’

  ‘I shouldn’t. There’d be no response. She’s settled down, marriage, children. You were a stepping-stone for her, a sounding-board. And, oh, how I wanted just that for myself.’

  ‘You didn’t find it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t find it. I was looking for someone, for something, I didn’t know what. I’m not sure if I expected to find it, but the looking for it was the thing that counted. “The quest,” I’d call it, and I needed so much someone to whom I could talk about the quest. It’s wonderful to have found you here; and wonderful that you’ll be here for a long time, that there’s no need to hurry anything, that we’re living in a small self-contained world where we get asked to the same parties, where meetings aren’t planned. That’s one of the things that maddened me in England, or at least my part of England. Everything was so cut and dried; these people to meet these people, and not those people; everything on time, everything to schedule; on the day a son’s born, put him down for Eton and the M.C.C.’

  She checked. She laughed. ‘There I go again. That old hobbyhorse of mine. And you encourage me. You shouldn’t. I’ll begin to bore you.’

  ‘You could never do that.’ But he changed the subject.

  ‘Were you in this game before the war?’

  ‘On the brink of it. I knew that war would come. I wanted to be in it, but I didn’t want to be in uniform. I knew that my father would want me in the A.T.S. He’d have got me a commission easily: I was on my guard; and exactly what I had expected to happen, happened. On that first Sunday in September, after we had listened to Chamberlain’s broadcast, my father got up from his chair, walked over to the fireplace, stood with his back to it, his hands in his pockets. “That’s that,” he said. “Now we’ve got to decide what each of us has to do. What are your plans, Diana? To drive an ambulance again?” “Not this time. I report for duty tomorrow as a civilian at the Foreign Office.”

  ‘You should have seen his face. It was one of the best moments of my life. He was so certain that at last he’d be in the strong position, that I’d have to come to him: with the game played on his home ground. But I managed to work this out for myself.’

  Reid laughed. ‘This is one of the most extraordinary love-hate relationships I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘There’s not much hate about it. It’s mostly love. We get a huge kick out of one another. He couldn’t do without me.’

  ‘Does he know what your Foreign Office work consists of?’

  ‘He’s a pretty good idea. His friends at “the Rag” could tell him.’

  ‘Wasn’t it a shock to you to discover the kind of work it was?’

  ‘I guessed at it.’

  ‘But things like that file today.’

  ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

  ‘But to try to corrupt a young man.’

  ‘That’s the schoolmaster in you talking. Is it worse to teach a young man bad habits which he’ll outgrow if he hasn’t got a special bent that way, than send a platoon of infantry on a forlorn attack, as a diversion, to mislead our enemy? Both involve sacrifice; both are necessary.’

  ‘One seems a cleaner way of fighting.’

  ‘Cleaner? Is there such a thing as a clean fight, in modern warfare? With gas and flamethrowers and bombs. It’s not like Agincourt and Crécy; when a battle was a series of private duels, begun and ended in a day.’ She spoke scornfully, angrily. Her eyes were flashing. She was genuinely roused. He had never seen her in quite the mood before. She checked and flushed. ‘I’m sorry. I sometimes get worked up. I don’t know why it is. Let’s change the subject. Have you heard any news about the General coming back?’

  Had she, he wondered, lost a lover in the war? Was that why she was so intense? Later he returned obliquely to the subject.

  ‘Has anyone you cared for a good deal been killed in the war?’ he asked.

  ‘Killed as far as I’m concerned. He was on the other side.’

  ‘A German or an Austrian?’

  ‘A Ger
man.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know. He wrote to me once through a friend in Switzerland. I didn’t answer.’

  ‘Too risky?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that, it was just that it was over. Things could never be the same again. Best cut it out. Some of the girls I knew went on writing to their German friends. During that phoney war period they’d talk of how it would be all over within a year. “Christmas 1940; we’ll be packing our skis again.” I knew better.’

  ‘Was that how you met him, ski-ing?’

  ‘At Kitzbühel.’

  ‘I’ve never skied. I’ve always wished I had.’

  ‘There’s nothing like it. It’s so beautiful, and you feel so well; and everyone looks so handsome. He was tall and blond, the Nordic type. He took his ski-ing so seriously. That was one of the lovable things about him, because he wasn’t very good; but he’d try so hard; his forehead would wrinkle. It made him such a little boy, his being so serious about it; but then in the evenings with his accordion, when he sang, he was so different then, so in his element. The way he rocked to the music; that’s how I felt he ought to be, that’s how I felt Germans ought to be, young and gay in the things they have a knack for, not being serious and solemn about things that they’re no good at. The Germans are no good in the long run in the things that they take seriously; they’ll lose this war in the end; they’re bound to with America against them, and then in twenty years they’ll start taking themselves seriously again and once again they’ll make idiots of themselves with furrowed foreheads. Why can’t they stay Bohemians? But he was wonderful after those hours in the snow; he seemed like a legendary god; his blue eyes were so blue and he looked—I can’t say that he looked incandescent—but that’s really what I do mean: he looked as though something had been lit up inside him.’

  ‘You may meet him again, you know.’

  ‘I may; but I hope not. It wouldn’t be the same thing. Keep things in their setting.’

  ‘You sound very ruthless when you talk like that.’

  ‘Ruthless? Do I? I’ve had that said to me before; perhaps it’s true. But I’m someone who knows what she doesn’t want, even if I don’t know what I do want. Perhaps that makes me unfair to men, to some men. I’ve tried to figure it out. I know I’m mean, but I can’t keep being mean. I’ve an unsolved question on my hands. I meet a man. I think he has the answer. I throw myself into something; then I come up for breath and find I haven’t found the answer; and I’m resentful. Which is unfair of me. I asked more of him than he had to give, and I try and console myself by saying that for a few days or weeks I gave him more than he deserved to get. But he’s not grateful, damn it. He thinks I’m mean. Oh, I don’t know, I reckon that I don’t fit in, but I think the balance is equated. I hurt myself more than I hurt anybody else. But. .. oh, well . . . ruthless: that’s the word they use.’ She checked. She leant across the table. She put her hand over his. She pressed it. ‘Let’s hope you never have to use that word to me.’

  That evening Reid went round to the Amin Maruns. He had an open invitation to look in whenever he liked. In London it would never have occurred to him to call on an acquaintance without telephoning first, but he suspected that Madame Amin led a limited social life and welcomed visits. There was no reply when he rang the bell; but there was a light beneath the door, and he could hear the sound of music. He waited for a minute or so, then rang again. This time more lengthily. There was a pause; then he heard the sound of feet, a latch clicked. Aziz was in the doorway. His face was flushed; he looked awkward, embarrassed and resentful. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said. ‘I very much wanted to hear a record through. It was only a matter of half a minute, to the end of the first side.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. May I sit quietly and hear the other side?’

  He watched Aziz as he listened. To himself music had little specific meaning. He enjoyed it as an agreeable background to his thoughts, but he could see that to the younger man it was something altogether different. There was a taut expression on his face. He was leaning forward: his lips were moving, his eyes alight. He seemed entranced. This was the real boy, he thought.

  Reid waited till the record had run down. He allowed a minute to pass before he spoke.

  ‘That certainly was something,’ he said at length. Aziz made no reply; he was seated on the floor, on a cushion, his heels tucked under him. He shook himself as though he were emerging from a trance.

  ‘Yes, that certainly was something.’

  Again there was a pause.

  ‘Not to appreciate music is to lack a sense,’ said Reid. ‘I’ve no idea what I lose through not understanding it.’

  Aziz looked round, staring blankly, uncomprehendingly. ‘It’s my whole life,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine life without it. I wouldn’t want to live without it.’

  Reid had found in his tutorials that when a young person had begun to talk it was best not to interrupt him with questions, not to attempt to draw him out. If a pupil felt the atmosphere congenial he would talk, on his own account. There was a pause of a full minute. Then Aziz started.

  ‘Music is the one thing I can be sure of in this uncertain world. It is indefinite. It does not try to explain anything, yet it resolves everything. All these people, in all these countries, are trying to lay down formulae. Who is not with us is against us. You must be a Nazi or a Communist or a Catholic. There is only one God, Allah. Everyone who does not believe in Allah is an infidel. So many voices, so many words in search of a definition. Music has no concern with that. All these separate chords and notes and dissonances are woven together, to achieve a pattern and a harmony. There is a meaning; but it is not a meaning that can be expressed in words: for everyone it has a different meaning; yet everyone is held by the same arrangement of notes and chords, is led through those discords to a final climax. An audience becomes one person. Sometimes I feel the whole world is mad, that there is no point in anything. I wonder why I should compete in this insane rat-race. Then I come back here, I put on a record, I listen and gradually I forget my troubles, peace descends and I have a feeling that everything that is incongruous, antipathetic, antagonistic in our modern living is resolved; sub specie aeternitatis, under the lens of eternity. If you get far enough away from quarrels and disputes you can see that they are trivial. When I was a boy I couldn’t understand how the earth could be round when there were so many mountains, until a master took a football and rubbed a very little mud on it and said, “That football is the world, the Himalayas on the earth’s surface in relation to the earth are a tenth the size of that film of mud. If you were a big enough giant to catch the world as a goalkeeper catches a football you would feel, in spite of the Himalayas, that it was smooth and polished. If you were far enough away from the world to look at it through a telescope it would seem as perfect a sphere as the moon seems to us.” I have always remembered that. Music takes us so far away that troubles as vast as the Himalayas barely seem a roughness on a surface; when that record was running a German, an Italian, a Jap, an American, a Briton, if they had been sitting beside me listening would have felt at one one with another. Music makes me believe that there is a meaning in the universe. Nothing else does.’

  ‘One day love may.’

  ‘Will it? I’ve been told it does. But I’ve thought that was one of those magazine fiction panaceas. Marry, settle down, have a family, be a good citizen; what that really means is “dull your mind with domesticities and duties”. Love is the opium of the thinking classes.’

  Reid shook his head. ‘It can be; but it needn’t be. It can do what music does. It can put you in tune with the long rhythm of life itself, of birth and death and rebirth; the whole cycle of creation. When you are in tune with that, everything else falls into place.’

  ‘Have you found that yourself?’

  Reid hesitated. Had he, he wondered? not, he suspected, in the fullest sense. Imitations of im
mortality; but not more than that. He replied evasively. ‘One does not need to experience something to know its truth. You can be vouchsafed a glimpse. I am convinced that there are several doors to that detached peace you were talking of, when you are far enough away from the human race to feel yourself a part of it; religion gives it you. Priests and nuns know it, and all dedicated people know it. Though I’ve not known that kind of peace myself, I know that it exists, just as I know that it can be reached through love.’

  ‘I see. Dedicated people. Do you think Hitler had it?’

  ‘In early days, maybe.’

  ‘When did he lose it?’

  ‘Perhaps there is such a thing as evil. Perhaps the powers of darkness do exist.’

  There was another pause. There was a ruminating expression on Aziz’s face. Reid waited, certain that Aziz had more to say. He had.

  ‘I have not yet fellen in love,’ he said. ‘I wonder when I shall. How long shall I have to wait?’

  There was an eagerness in his voice that carried Reid back to the autumn of 1913 when as a schoolboy he had read the first volume of Sinister Street and his heart had warmed to the description of Michael Fane’s love affair with Lily, when they had walked in Kensington Gardens on a misty evening and Michael had slipped his hand inside Lily’s muff. He wondered how long he would have to wait before a similar experience came to him. Here, twenty-eight years later, a young Turkish student was asking him the selfsame question. Was there all this difference between one people and another, between one generation and another?

  * * *

  That evening, Reid dined at home, alone with Farrar.

  ‘I can tell you what makes Aziz tick,’ he said to Farrar. ‘It isn’t anything to do with sex or drugs. It’s music’

  He recounted their conversation earlier. Nigel listened with absorbed attention.

  ‘Now we know where we are,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got something we can work on. I knew that you’d be the man to help me out. You can make people talk.’