The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Elisa, however, saw that my story was no paradox, but a sincere expression of my own personal attempt to adjust myself to my world.

  ‘You are very English,’ she said. ‘You can forgive because you have such a genius for contempt.’

  ‘Isn’t forgiveness common at Kasr-el-Sittat?’

  ‘Towards everything,’ she answered, ‘except the State.’

  ‘You are anarchists?’

  Elisa hesitated. Her eyes were brilliantly alive and very tired. Even then, I think, she was beginning to have plans for me and did not wish me to be frightened by a name.

  ‘Philosophically,’ said Eugen Rosa in the inflectionless voice of a man who had learned English perfectly, but seldom used it, ‘philosophically, I question it. It is not necessarily anarchism to hold the individual above the State, to care—shall I say?—for his worth rather than his well-being.’

  ‘It is even the essence of Christianity,’ Elisa agreed ironically, as if that tremendous interpretation of the world deserved to be considered only as a parallel creed. ‘And here too religion will keep creeping in.’

  3

  When next morning I continued a leisurely journey through the tobacco villages and on to Aleppo, I found that the sur­rounding inhabitants shared—with due allowance made for Arab imagination—my own vision of Kasr-el-Sittat. They suspected that on that site and in so deliberately isolated a com­munity there must be a fanatical religion; and, on the plane of everyday life, they felt the impact and influence of a highly organized reality.

  I dared not pass the house of a friend without entering in—for he would have heard of my movements and be offended—and so, patiently obeying the conventions of my adopted land, I had coffee with two village headmen, a snack with a harness-maker and a very late lunch with a local notable. The mention that I had spent a night at Kasr-el-Sittat invariably produced a nervous silence, and then a spate of exaggerated praise. There was little serious comment, even from men who had actually been employed on the estate.

  The colonists were popular, for they paid good wages and looked after their people; but it was no secret that large sub­ventions paid to influential Syrians accounted for permission to buy Kasr-el-Sittat, and their subsequent freedom from any government interference. The inhabitants of the valleys, who were used to naked power and had learned to walk delicately, were well aware that town officials might with every excuse pretend to be ignorant of what went on in so remote a district, and that the colony, if it wished, could be as arbitrary as their late and not much lamented God. They did not care to discuss such unbounded possibilities.

  Among my friends was Captain Ashkar of the Syrian Gendarmerie, who was in charge of the mounted patrols along the western section of the Turkish frontier—a tangle of forest and little precipitous foothills through which none ever passed but the smugglers and Ashkar’s troopers. His headquarters were well back from the frontier, and easily accessible from Djisr-ech-Choghour, a god-forsaken village where the road from Latakia to the great plain of northern Syria crosses the Orontes.

  I had not seen Ashkar for some months, and on my way home from Aleppo to Tripoli I decided to call on him. Be­tween dusk and midday he might be out with his patrols or inspecting frontier posts or visiting his agents; but in the after­noon he was always to he found sitting outside the comfortable cottage where he had billeted himself and regarding the hills and his horses with idle benevolence. He slept when and wherever there was a chance to sleep; and I suppose that in his life of waiting for something to happen on the spot where it was likely to happen, his odd hours of sleep added up to a sufficient total.

  Ashkar was in his late forties. He had begun his military training under the Turks and completed it, with honour, under the French. He looked like a stocky, greying, French colonial officer, though he was of the purest mountain blood—Canaanite rather than Arab—and had a fleshy hooked nose that might have come straight off an Assyrian statue. He was a Christian, and held his post in a country of Mohammedans and Alaouites merely because the government knew he would favour neither of them. So good a soldier should have been at least a colonel, but he had never been popular with the politicians of his own nation; he had served the French a little too faithfully, and he was renowned for scrupulous honesty. I won’t say that honesty actually told against him, but it deprived him of the suppleness, the little touches of diplomacy, which were necessary for advancement.

  As I drove cautiously over the bare, water-worn rock into which his village road had degenerated, I looked forward to his solid welcome and to his geniality over a jug of the heavy, dry country wine. He shared my perverted taste for the stuff, and we would argue fantastically for and against the bouquets of cow-dung, charcoal or tobacco flowers which gave character to the wine according to the barns where it had been made and stored.

  His reception of me had the warmth that I expected, but as soon as I steered the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, telling him that I had stayed there and been most favourably impressed, he became polite and ceremonious. To any stranger passing the cobbled forecourt where we sat, especially if the stranger had been a European, we should have appeared the closest of friends; yet the proper note of intimacy had vanished. When I admired a pure-bred Arab three-year-old which some friendly official in Damascus had just sent him as a remount, he kept on insisting that it was mine to take away without even the twinkle in his eye which would have told me he knew his offer to be conventional nonsense.

  It was obvious that Ashkar shared the general sense of caution in discussing Kasr-el-Sittat, and this was the more sur­prising since, in the cause of law and order, he feared neither influence nor superstition nor the complexities of high policy. In the bad old days of Kasr-el-Sittat he himself had upended the bare soles of God’s feet, when no one else dared to carry out the arrest, and given him eighteen strokes of the best with a steel-centred quirt.

  His opinions of the colony were non-committal as those of the villagers, but his exaggerations were more amusing. He declared that Kasr-el-Sittat was a lunatic asylum for Europeans which the Turks had paid the Syrians to accept in their terri­tory; alternatively—and with a wealth of detail—that it was an experimental station for discovering new ways to perpetuate the race.

  This gave me an opening. So far as my Arabic allowed, I took upon myself the character and flowers of speech of an old Aleppo roué, and lectured on the beauties within the walls of Kasr-el-Sittat—thus accounting for the enthusiasm with which, unwisely, I had spoken of the colony. Ashkar swallowed the bait, and I could see that his old brown eyes were no longer fixed on me so warily. The memory of Elisa Cantemir lent a note of sincerity to my voice: so much so that I felt disgusted with myself, as if I had been describing beloved rather than imagined women.

  The captain fetched another jug of wine, which he swore had been made by a Maronite priest and tasted of incense. It did—and we passed to a fanciful project of obtaining three barrels from a Yezidi, a Druse and an Alaouite (all more or less pagan religions flourishing within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean) and analysing the difference. I knew that confidence had been restored, and that Ashkar no longer thought there was any likelihood of my being involved in the private affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat.

  He even opened up a little, and told me how the colonists had drifted down from Turkey, singly and in groups, to their curious home. They had attracted more than a routine attention from Syrian and foreign police; but even the British and French legations, to whom a list of the colonists’ names had been discreetly submitted, could report nothing definite against them. Since their arrival they had proved themselves, from a policeman’s point of view, desirable citizens. They were generous employers, entertained exceedingly well, neither ran around naked nor refused their taxes. They were, he insisted, welcome guests—but his old gendarme’s mind was still worry­ing at an invisible bone. Before I left he said mysteriously that he was about to investigate a little further, that he might need my advice—since I was his fathe
r and friend and knew the colony—and that he would come and see me at Tripoli in a week or two when God willed.

  About a fortnight later I stood on my terrace in the freshness of the morning, lighting my after-breakfast pipe, when I observed a poor and ragged Christian Arab sitting discreetly in the dust at such a distance that I could just see him over the garden wall. Why an Arab should choose to squat in one small unyielding patch of the Levant rather than another, neither he nor his fellow can know; but the spot this squatter had selected was so unattractive that I guessed he wished to speak to me, and that he was aware—as who was not in that little town?—of my morning routine.

  I opened the garden door, and exchanged with him a formal blessing. He came down into the lane, adding a further and more flowery salutation, and presented me with a letter from Ashkar. I read that he intended to call on me the following night, and that he would take it kindly—assuming it was not an intolerable inconvenience to dismiss my devoted clients and retainers—if I could arrange for us to have a private chat.

  The devoted retainers to whom Ashkar had politely referred consisted of Boulos, my Lebanese cook, and an unemployable young cousin of his, to whom, for the sake of conscience and family honour, he gave board and lodging in exchange for such work as was too undignified for his own attention. I was per­mitted to give the cousin an occasional tip, but to preserve the polite fiction that he did not live at my expense.

  Nothing was easier than privacy in that delightful house. The owner had but to close the staircase door, and not a slit nor window could command his love, his business or his riotous nights.

  On the following morning Boulos set out drinks and a cold meal for two by the garden well, and returned to his quarters, smirking lasciviously. I unbolted the gate into the lane, and about nine o’clock Ashkar came in. He was wearing civilian dress and a tarboosh on his head. I was impressed by this exaggerated discretion. The captain in civilian clothes was in­conceivable; he lived in and of his uniform. Had I wished to form a mental picture of Ashkar in bed, my imagination would certainly have dressed him in boots and breeches until common sense protested that a night-shirt (not, I think, pyjamas) was by far the more probable wear.

  We talked personalities and politics, horses and silkworms, while I waited for Ashkar to decide that the proper atmosphere of disinterested friendship had been created. He had obviously been attacked by one of those fevers of caution to which policemen and frontier guards, poised as they usually were be­tween the threat of dismissal if they did their duty and of black­mail if they did not, could have no resistance.

  It was not uncommon, he began at last, for a gendarme in his position to receive unofficial instructions—that, of course, I, as a former political officer, would understand. Sometimes it was in the interests of governments that their frontiers should not be too zealously guarded. Individuals had to be let out or let in, and it was left to the discretion of the officer in charge—very properly, didn’t I agree?—to arrange such delicate matters with or without the help of his Turkish colleague across the border.

  He had had, he said, a request, an indication—nothing so unmannerly as a definite order—that if his patrols were to pick up anyone with a temporary identity card proving residence at Kasr-el-Sittat, they might—if Ashkar had no objection—take it for granted that he was a colonist and in the frontier hills on innocent business. Twice his patrols had in fact run into such wandering foreigners, and it was fair to assume that they had crossed or intended to cross the border.

  Ashkar declared with pride that he was no hidebound police­man, but, as I knew, the very soul of tact. He stopped for con­firmation, and I assured him, with extensive mental reserva­tions, that so he was. In view of his long experience, he went on, he was as ready to obey a wish as an order; but it was essen­tial he should know what was going on. His frontier was wide open. Anybody and anything could travel between Turkey and Kasr-el-Sittat, and the colony itself was certainly immune from search. If the government fell or policy changed or a politician retired on his winnings, Ashkar would be left holding the baby.

  He had therefore been compelled to carry out his responsi­bilities as best he could. He did not apologize at all, he told me, for being on friendly terms with a few Turkish smugglers and hashish runners for just so long as he had insufficient proof to arrest them; in his job one might be exchanging shots with an unknown traveller at dawn, and drinking peacefully with him in the evening. He believed that European police, too, were often on good terms with criminals, were they not? It was per­missible to allow a man liberty to do a little petty crime him­self in return for gossip about bigger criminals.

  The next time a traveller from Kasr-el-Sittat was seen riding towards the frontier, Ashkar dutifully looked the other way but sent immediate word to one of his friendly enemies over the border—a free-lance bandit named Selim—that if the traveller were followed and discreetly high-jacked, and the contents of his saddle-bags handed to Ashkar in person, there might be favours to come.

  I had no doubt his tale was true. There must have been plenty of picturesque scoundrels in the Turkish villages only too ready to earn the goodwill of the incorruptible but otherwise com­plete Levantine who guarded the Syrian border. His pasha’s trick was excellently plotted; he would never be suspected of complicity in a sordid frontier crime, which anyway happened outside his jurisdiction, and Selim would hand him over all he wanted to know. In fact, however, Selim handed him nothing but the quite ordinary contents of pockets and suitcase, and the embarrassing news that the traveller had resisted too fiercely and was now indiscoverably buried at the bottom of a ravine.

  Ashkar had brought with him the traveller’s passport. I lit the lamp that stood on the table between us. The dead man was Eugen Rosa, that serious idealist who made one of our table at Kasr-el-Sittat a fortnight earlier.

  This placed me face to face with Elisa, as if she instead of the slow-speaking Ashkar had been my companion in the dark garden. Rosa was one of her couriers, whose free passage across the frontier had been—to judge by the captain’s hints—bought at a fair price from some corrupt official in Damascus. I sym­pathized with the colony. Since Kasr-el-Sittat was busily en­gaged in collecting recruits and money from countries that did not readily permit the export of either, it was not surprising that they needed an occasional clandestine messenger. I con­tinued to pretend to the captain that human life was not par­ticularly sacred in the foothills of Taurus—as indeed it was not—but I was profoundly shocked by the whole episode. It was fortunate for Ashkar that there was no proof of the story but his word.

  The passport was Nicaraguan. Nothing could be more neutral, more discouraging to any guesswork. Whatever Eugen Rosa’s true nationality, it was not Nicaraguan. I came to more interesting ground when I discovered that Rosa had a valid Turkish visa. There seemed no reason why he should not have travelled north in comfort and safety by the Taurus Express. Ashkar, however, with his professional knowledge of indecipher­able frontier stamps and squiggles, pointed out that according to the passport its owner had never left Turkish territory.

  ‘Wasn’t he carrying anything at all?’ I asked. ‘No letters?’

  ‘By God, nothing! Nothing but a box of cigars! Not even enough of them to make a profit,’ answered Ashkar disgustedly. ‘And those Selim stole!’

  ‘Did he tell you?’

  After all, Ashkar couldn’t have known about them unless Selim had confessed. He seemed remarkably honest for a bandit.

  ‘The devil was in his tongue,’ Ashkar grumbled. ‘He was drunk and afflicted. It was God’s mercy that I was alone, for he came to me in the woods shouting that he had killed the man, that he was Selim the Fearless and that he would kill me too. So I took away his gun and searched him, and found the cigars in his trousers. Then I stayed with him, listening, till he was sober.

  ‘Well, a man’s heart is beyond knowledge. I tell you I have sat with Selim for hours, filling him with his foul Turkish araq till he stank, wat
ching for an unguarded word like a cat over a hole, and never has he said anything about himself that I did not already know. Yet this time, when I trusted to his discre­tion, he talked and boasted as if to an Aleppo whore. As soon as he was sober, I showed him my note-book, with the names and addresses he had given me written out large in simple Tur­kish that he could read. I shall have no more trouble with Selim.’

  Ashkar paused, grimly self-confident of his power in the no man’s land between Syrian and Turk.

  I asked him how I could help, what advice he needed from me.

  ‘Between soldiers there is little difference. We know or can guess what the other is thinking,’ he said, eager to show me that there was one manifestation of European life which was not at all foreign to him. ‘But to understand the religion of a people, one must be of their blood. You have stayed at Kasr-el-Sittat. What is your opinion?’

  ‘They could be fools,’ I answered. ‘But they have too much money to be smugglers.’

  ‘That’s as may be. And what am I to do?’

  I removed the lamp, which was attracting a plague of wings from the irrigation canals of Tripoli, and poured out more wine. Then from my safe darkness I told him, as sententiously as any old Turk:

  ‘When in doubt—do nothing!’

  Well, if it must be, I will let them pass, one by one and secretly. But, by God, if I find a man of them peddling drugs or with a laden horse, all Damascus shall not save them—not even if they send their protector seven Stambuli boys!’

  I quieted him down. I knew that Elisa and her companions could never be ordinary criminals in any sense that would in­terest Ashka—though she wouldn’t be deterred from necessary and perhaps greater illegalities by what she would certainly call bourgeois morality.

  Ashkar stayed talking for another hour, and then thanked me so profusely for my disinterested advice that conscience gave me a foretaste of the melancholy of dual allegiance. He refused to spend the night with me. No doubt Tripoli had some other attraction, probably a semi-respectable widow rather than a light-of-love. His were the habits of the camp, and he was un­able or unwilling to adjust himself to anything more permanent.