From the window of a cab, proceeding in the rain along Strada Reale, Stencil could detect none of the holiday one saw in other capitals of Europe. Perhaps it was only the rain. But welcome relief surely. After seven months, Stencil was fed to surfeit on songs, bunting, parades, promiscuous loves, uncouth noise-makings; all the normal responses of noncombatants-in-the-mass to Armistice or peace. Even in the normally sober offices in Whitehall, it had been impossible. Armistice, ha!
“I cannot understand your attitude,” from Carruthers-Pillow, then Stencil’s superior. “Armistice, ha, indeed.”
Stencil muttered something about things not being stabilized. How could he tell Carruthers-Pillow of all people, who felt in the presence of the most inconsequential chit initialed by the Foreign Secretary much as Moses must have toward the Decalogue God blasted out for him on stone. Wasn’t the Armistice signed by legally-constituted heads of government? How could there not be peace? It would never be worth the trouble arguing. So they’d stood that November morning, watching the lamp-lighter extinguish the lights in St. James’s Park, as if having long ago passed through some quicksilver surface from when Viscount Grey had stood perhaps at the same window and made his famous remark about the lamps going out all over Europe. Stencil of course didn’t see the difference between event and image, but saw no advantage in disturbing his chief’s euphoria. Let the poor innocent sleep. Stencil had merely been dour, which in him passed for high celebration.
Lieutenant Mungo Sheaves, aide to the Officer Administrating Government on Malta, had set before Whitehall an architecture of discontent: among the police force, the University students, the civil service, the Dockyard workers. Behind it all lurked “the Doctor”; organizer, civil engineer: E. Mizzi. A bogeyman to Major General Hunter-Blair, the OAG, Stencil guessed; but found it took him an effort to see Mizzi as anything but a busy man-of-policy, agile, Machiavellian, a trifle old-fashioned, who’d managed to last as far as 1919. For a survival like that Stencil could only feel a wistful pride. His good friend Porpentine—twenty years ago in Egypt—hadn’t he been the same sort? Belonged to a time where which side a man was on didn’t matter: only the state of opposition itself, the tests of virtue, the cricket game? Stencil may have come in on the tail end.
It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded if nothing else. “But we reach a point,” he’d thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, “we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion—say a convenience—necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.”
En route to Valletta—the steamer to Syracuse, the week of lying doggo in a waterfront tavern till Mehemet’s xebec arrived; all the way across a Mediterranean whose teeming history and full depth he could not feel, nor try, nor afford to try to feel, old Stencil had had it out with himself. Mehemet had helped.
“You’re old,” the skipper mused over his nightly hashish. “I am old, the world is old; but the world changes always; we, only so far. It’s no secret, what sort of change this is. Both the world and we, M. Stencil, began to die from the moment of birth. Your game is politics which I don’t pretend to understand. But it seems that these—” he shrugged—“noisy attempts to devise political happiness: new forms of government, new ways to arrange the fields and workshops; aren’t they like the sailor I saw off Bizerte in 1324.” Stencil chuckled. Mehemet’s recurring lament was for a world taken from him. He belonged to the trade routes of the Middle Ages. According to the yarn he had in fact sailed the xebec through a rift in time’s fabric, pursued then among the Aegean Islands by a Tuscan corsair which mysteriously dropped from sight. But it was the same sea and not until docking at Rhodes did Mehemet learn of his displacement. And since had forsaken land for a Mediterranean which thank Allah would never change. Whatever his true nostalgia he reckoned by the Moslem calendar not only in conversation but also in logs and account books; though the religion and perhaps the birthright he’d let pass years ago.
“Slung on a stage over the gunwale of an old felucca, the Peri. A storm had just passed, rushing away toward the land in a great slope of clouds; already turning yellowish from the desert. The sea there is the color of Damascus plums; and how quiet. Sun was going down; not a beautiful sunset, more a gradual darkening of the air and that storm’s mountainside. The Peri had been damaged, we hove to alongside and hailed her master. No reply. Only the sailor—I never saw his face—one of your fellahin who abandon the land like a restless husband and then grumble for the rest of their term afloat. It’s the strongest marriage in the world. This one wore a kind of loincloth and a rag round his head for the sun which was almost gone. After we’d shouted in every dialect we had among us, he replied in Tuareg: ‘The master is gone, the crew is gone, I am here and I am painting the ship.’ It was true: he was painting the ship. She’d been damaged, not a load line in sight, and a bad list. ‘Come aboard,’ we told him, ‘night is nearly on us and you cannot swim to land.’ He never answered, merely continued dipping the brush in his earthen jar and slapping it smoothly on the Peri’s creaking sides. What color? It looked gray but the air was dark. This felucca would never again see the sun. Finally I told the helmsman to swing our ship round and continue on course. I watched the fellah until it was too dark: becoming smaller, inching closer to the sea with every swell but never slackening his pace. A peasant with all his uptorn roots showing, alone on the sea at nightfall, painting the side of a sinking ship.”
“Am I only getting old?” Stencil wondered. “Perhaps past the time I can change with the world.”
“The only change is toward death,” repeated Mehemet cheerfully. “Early and late we are in decay.” The helmsman began to sing a monotonous, Levantine lanterloo. There were no stars and the sea was hushed. Stencil refused hashish and filled his pipe with a respectable English blend; lit up, puffed, began:
“Which way does it go? As a youth I believed in social progress because I saw chances for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having gone as far as I’m about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if you’re right, for my society as well. But then: suppose Sidney Stencil has remained constant after all—suppose instead sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle—blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether—fatal. This is how the public, you know, see the late war. As a new and rare disease which has now been cured and conquered forever.”
“Is old age a disease?” Mehemet asked. “The body slows down, machines wear out, planets falter and loop, sun and stars gutter and smoke. Why say a disease? Only to bring it down to a size you can look at and feel comfortable?”
“Because we do paint the side of some Peri or other, don’t we. We call it society. A new coat of paint; don’t you see? She can’t change her own color.”
“No more than the pustules of smallpox have anything to do with death. A new complexion, a new coat of paint.”
“Of course,” said Stencil, thinking of something else, “of course we would all prefer to die of old age. . . .”
The Armageddon had swept past, the professionals who’d survived had received no blessing, no gift of tongues. Despite all attem
pts to cut its career short the tough old earth would take its own time in dying and would die of old age.
Then Mehemet told him of Mara.
“Another of your women.”
“Ha, ha. Indeed. Maltese for woman.”
“Of course.”
“She is—if you care for the word—a spirit, constrained to live in Xaghriet Mewwija. The inhabited plain; the peninsula whose tip is Valletta, her domain. She nursed the shipwrecked St. Paul—as Nausicaa and Odysseus—taught love to every invader from Phoenician to French. Perhaps even to the English, though the legend loses respectability after Napoleon. She was from all evidence a perfectly historical personage, like St. Agatha, another of the island’s minor saints.
“Now the Great Siege was after my time, but legend—one of them—says that she once had access to the entire island and the waters as far as the fishing banks off Lampedusa. The fishing fleets would always lie to there in the shape of a carob pod, her proper symbol. Early in your 1565, at any rate, two privateers, Giou and Romegas, captured a Turkish galleon belonging to the chief eunuch of the Imperial Seraglio. In retaliation Mara was taken prisoner on one of her jaunts to Lampedusa by the corsair Dragut, and brought back to Constantinople. Soon as the ship had passed the invisible circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija with Lampedusa on the rim, she fell into a strange trance, from which neither caresses nor tortures could rouse her. At length, having lost their own figurehead in a collision with a Sicilian ragusy the week before, the Turks lashed Mara to the bowsprit and that was how she entered Constantinople: a living figurehead. On drawing near to that city, blinding yellow and dun under a clear sky, she was heard to awake and cry: ‘Lejl, hekk ikun.’ Night, so be it. The Turks thought she was raving. Or blind.
“They brought her to the serail, into the presence of the Sultan. Now she never was pictured as a raving beauty. She shows up as a number of goddesses, minor deities. Disguise is one of her attributes. But one curious thing about those images: jar ornaments, friezes, sculptures, no matter: she’s always tall, slim, small-breasted and bellied. No matter what the prevalent fashion in females, she remains constant. In her face is always a slight bow to the nose, a wide spacing of the eyes, which are small. No one you’d turn to watch on the street. But she was a teacher of love after all. Only pupils of love need be beautiful.
“She pleased the Sultan. Perhaps she made the effort. But was installed somehow as a concubine about the time La Vallette back on her island was blocking the creek between Senglea and St. Angelo with an iron chain and poisoning the springs in the Marsa plain with hemp and arsenic. Once in the seraglio she proceeded to raise hell. She’d always been attributed magical talents. Perhaps the carob pod—she’s often depicted holding one—had something to do with it. Wand, scepter. Perhaps too, some kind of fertility goddess—do I embarrass your Anglo-Saxon nerves?—though it is a quaint, hermaphrodite sort of deity.
“Soon—a matter of weeks—the Sultan noticed a certain coldness infecting each of his nightly companions; a reluctance, a lack of talent. Also a change in attitude among the eunuchs. Almost—how to say it—smug and keeping a bad secret of it. Nothing he could establish definitely; and so like most unreasonable men with suspicions he had certain girls and eunuchs tortured horribly. All protested innocence, showed honest fear to the last twist of the neck, the last upward thrust of the iron spike. And yet it progressed. Spies reported that shy concubines who had once paced with ladylike steps—limited by a slim chain between the ankles—and downcast eyes now smiled and flirted promiscuously with the eunuchs, and the eunuchs—horror!—flirted back. Girls left to themselves would suddenly leap on one another with fierce caresses; on occasion make loud abandoned love before the scandalized eyes of the Sultan’s agents.
“At length it occurred to His Ghostly Magnificence, nearly out of his mind with jealousy, to call in the sorceress Mara. Standing before him in a shift fashioned of tiger-moth wings she faced the Imperial dais with a wicked smile. The Imperial retainers were charmed.
“ ‘Woman,’ began the Sultan.
“She raised a hand. ‘I have done it all,’ she recited sweetly: ‘taught your wives to love their own bodies, showed them the luxury of a woman’s love; restored potency to your eunuchs so that they may enjoy one another as well as the three hundred perfumed, female beasts of your harem.’
“Bewildered at such ready confession, his tender Moslem sensibilities outraged by the epidemic of perversion she’d unleashed upon his domestic repose, the Sultan made what is a fatal mistake with any woman: he decided to argue. Jolted into a rare sarcasm he explained to her, as to an idiot, why eunuchs cannot have sexual intercourse.
“Her smile never fading, her voice placid as before, Mara replied: ‘I have provided them with the means.’
“So confidently did she speak that the Sultan began to feel the first groundswell of an atavistic terror. Oh, at last he knew: he was in the presence of a witch.
“Back home the Turks, led by Dragut and the pashas Piali and Mustafa, had laid siege to Malta. You know generally how it went. They occupied Xaghriet Mewwija, took Fort St. Elmo, and began their assault on Notabile, Borgo—today that’s Vittoriosa—and Senglea, where La Vallette and the Knights were making their final stand.
“Now after St. Elmo had fallen, Mustafa (possibly in sorrow for Dragut, killed in that encounter by a stone cannonball) had also launched a grisly offensive on the morale of the Knights. He beheaded their slaughtered brethren, tied the corpses to planks and floated them into the Grand Harbour. Imagine being on sunrise watch and seeing the dawn touch those ex-comrades-in-arms, belly-up and crowding the water: death’s flotilla.
“One of the great mysteries about the Siege is why, when the Turks outnumbered the invested Knights, when the days of the besieged were numbered on a single hand, when Borgo and thus Malta were almost in the same hand—Mustafa’s—why should they suddenly pull up and retreat, hoist anchor and leave the island?
“History says because of a rumor. Don García de Toledo, viceroy of Sicily, was en route with forty-eight galleys. Pompeo Colonna and twelve hundred men, sent by the Pope to relieve La Vallette, eventually reached Gozo. But somehow the Turks got hold of intelligence that twenty thousand troops had landed at Melleha Bay and were en route to Notabile. General retreat was ordered; church bells all over Xaghriet Mewwija began to ring; the people thronged the streets, cheering. The Turks fled, embarked and sailed away to the southeast forever. History attributes it all to bad reconnaissance.
“But the truth is this: the words were spoken directly to Mustafa by the head of the Sultan himself. The witch Mara had sent him into a kind of mesmeric trance; detached his head and put it into the Dardanelles, where some miraculous set and drift—who knows all the currents, all the things which happen in this sea?—sent it on a collision course with Malta. There is a song written by a latterday jongleur named Falconière. No Renaissance had ever touched him; he resided at the Auberge of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre at the time of the Siege. You know the sort of poet who can fall into belief in any fashionable cult, current philosophy, new-found foreign superstition. This one fell into belief and possibly love for Mara. Even distinguished himself on the ramparts of Borgo, braining four Janissaries with his lute before someone handed him a sword. She was, you see, his Lady.”
Mehemet recited:
Fleeing the mistral, fleeing the sun’s hot lash,
Serene in scalloped waves, and sculptured sky
The head feels no rain, fears no pitchy night,
As o’er this ancient sea it races stars,
Empty but for a dozen fatal words,
Charmed by Mara, Mara my only love . . .
“There follows an apostrophe to Mara.”
Stencil nodded sagely, trying to fill in with Spanish cognates.
“Apparently,” Mehemet concluded, “the head returned to Constantinople and its
owner, the sly Mara meanwhile having slipped aboard a friendly galiot, disguised as a cabin boy. Back in Valletta at last she appeared in a vision to La Vallette, greeting him with the words ‘Shalom aleikum.’ ”
The joke being that shalom is Hebrew for peace and also the root for the Greek Salome, who beheaded St. John.
“Beware of Mara,” the old sailor said then. “Guardian spirit of Xaghriet Mewwija. Whoever or whatever sees to such things condemned her to haunt the inhabited plain, as punishment for her show at Constantinople. About as useful as clapping any faithless wife in a chastity belt.
“She’s restless. She will find ways to reach out from Valletta, a city named after a man, but of feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like the mons Veneris—you see? It is a chastity belt. But there are more ways than one to consummation, as she proved to the Sultan.”
Now sprinting from the taxi through the rain to his hotel, Stencil did indeed feel a tug. Not so much at his loins—there had been company enough in Syracuse to anesthetize that for a while—as at the wizened adolescent he was always apt to turn into. A little later, scrunched up in an undersize tub, Stencil sang. It was a tune, in fact, from his “music-hall” days before the war, and primarily a way to relax:
Every night to the Dog and Bell
Young Stencil loved to go
To dance on the tables and shout and sing
And give ’is pals a show.
His little wife would stay to home
‘Er’eart all filled wiv pain
But the next night sharp at a quarter to six
‘E’d be down to the pub again. Until
That one fine evening in the monf of May
He announced to all as came wivin ’is sight
You must get along wivout me boys
V. Page 52