by Brian Aldiss
‘More phoney psychiatry! You insult me. You treat me as if I were a child.’ She puffed smoke at him.
He put an arm lightly round her waist.
‘You just see it that way. I only offered you an intuition. Marxism sounds bad in your pretty mouth, but I’ve no business speaking to you like this.’
‘That’s true!’ she said with spirit. ‘It’s immoral — interfering. Someone described you as a self-appointed critic, that I know. They were right!’
‘Would you rather critics were appointed by the state? The self-appointed ones are best, kindest, most disinterested… Were you happy as a child — I mean, before the massacre at Kragujevac? Can you remember so far back?’
She turned the fine bone china of her face towards him and regarded him searchingly with a pure glance which came close to making him quail.
‘No — yes. One always remembers.’ She looked at him, playfully, slid her spectacles down on her nose to regard him better. ‘Let me tell you this — since it’s late — my secret. My father was a desperate man, desperately poor, desperately everything, like a character from Gorki. There were trees behind our house where he would go to rage… He often beat me when he was drunk, with his hand or with poles. Yet after he was shot, I knew I loved him dearly, needed him, and I longed in despair to see him once more and even be beaten by him. I would be utterly degraded, as long as he came back. There, that’s the truth.’
She exhaled blue smoke and waved it away.
‘Your mother? You don’t mention her.’
‘She died giving birth to me. Another woman looked after us then.’
They sat without speaking, smoking together companionably, occasionally sipping vodka. She said, ‘Of course there’s more to it than that. There always is. The world changed, that day he and my brother were shot by the Germans. It wasn’t only them I lost, but a less tangible thing… A.E. Housman’s land of lost content. You can never get back there.’
She quoted,
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
‘You will think I’m very self-pitying, when you get to know me.’
‘We all need pity.’ He stroked her dark hair, and she rested her head against his shoulder. He remembered her anecdote about Dorothy, the woman with the brain injury.
‘One day, I’ll tell you about the death of my father.’
A simple exchange of stories… The promise appeared to please her. She rested a hand with its bright nails on his shoulder, whilst continuing to gaze into the shadowy recesses of the room.
‘It’s the night, Tom. When we’re changed, somehow…’
‘I don’t really know you at all. It’s a cheek to pretend to… Why don’t you go back to Serbia?’
‘Oh… The pain, or something. Let’s not talk about it. Kiss me again, if you’ll kindly go no further than that. In a way you’re right — I hate sexuality.’
‘Your beautiful lips, Selina…’ He poured kisses on them, removed her spectacles, held her tightly, relished the taste of her mouth, the warmth of her breath, began pressing his body with its erection against her thighs. She pushed away, gasping.
‘Look, Tom, be kind, promise, promise — I know how you feel, but promise you will just do no more than kiss me. Will you? Just kiss…’
‘No more? Come on, no one knows we’re here together.’
‘Tom…’ She wrapped an arm around his neck, whispering, ‘Then I’ll feel safe… Promise…’
He began to kiss her, pressing closer, forgetting himself, becoming just a warmth, sensing her delight. Her arms tightened as she sank back on the bed, their lips still together. Then her body began to heave under him, her leg hooked round his. Her tongue darted into his mouth, low gasps escaped her. He lay on top of her, eyes closed, ‘Drina’ burning his fingers. She ceased to move.
Rather than disturb her, he pinched out the cigarette stub with his fingers.
Gradually she stirred. She sighed. Judging his moment, he sat up, breathing so deeply he almost trembled. He took a small sip of the vodka. It was warm.
‘I must go, Tom, dear. I won’t stay.’ It was a faun’s glance she gave, there and away.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She stood up. Her mood had changed; she was gentle and not exactly downcast, although her eyes perpetually sought the floor.
‘Yes… Oh dear… It is tomorrow… That’s serious.’
He kissed her on the cheek, with care in case she did not wish it. She appeared not to notice. As she moved to the door, she said, ‘Perhaps we’ll have more time together.’
When she slipped into the dark corridor, she said, ‘Tom, the miraculous does sometimes happen.’
Squire stood listlessly at the door until she had disappeared, before moving back into the room. An envelope lay at his feet. As he stooped to pick it up, he thought that Selina must have dropped it, and instantly his mind conjured up a scene where he went to her bedroom to return it and found her undressing. But the note had his name on, written in a foreign hand; it had been slipped under the door. He immediately lost interest, and flipped it on to the table.
Locking the door, he went and lay on the bed, hands behind his head, his meditations possessed by Selina Ajdini.
In a moment of vision, succoured by the silence of the hour, he saw no mystery in personality. He perceived her with clarity, and the circumstances which surrounded her. The clarity neither magnified nor belittled her; it was cleansed even of compassion, for one condition of the vision was that his own personality, with all its limitations and potentials for growth, was also clear to him — a distortion in one would have implied a distortion in the other.
Within those linked visions burned his understanding of human nature, of its ramshackle structure, its transience, its quality of light.
There was nothing inscrutable about personality or relationships between people. These matters could be perceived, divined; in a sense he knew Selina fully. There was no puzzle. The puzzle came when such things had to be translated into words. Words belonged only to the cerebrum, the part of the brain that made man specifically human; but the mysterious world inhabited by whole understanding occupied all of the brain, and the nervous system beyond it, and the blood cells and body beyond that. It could not be reduced into words. Any system of understanding built purely on words — such as an ideology — was an impoverishment of the human being. Selina tried to live in her words, her ideology, because, for specific reasons, she was afraid of the whole world of her personality. Pain lurked there.
With patience and love, it would be possible to make that proscribed area accessible to her again. But not by words alone. Words alone could not defeat pain.
He climbed off the bed, assumed tadasana, and performed some steady hora breathing in order to clear his mind still further. Moments of meditation and vision could be encouraged, developed. They enlarged life. They created stillness.
The stillness was in some miraculous way eternal within the frames of a human life. Squire had experienced the first such perception at the age of four. He still recalled it: it had remained with him. The nursery with a coal fire burning, firelight reflecting on all the shining brown surfaces of the room. The child at the window, face half-turned to the outdoors, realizing the lure — the wildness — of the world, as dusk filtered in. Realizing the unknown was limitless. It had been the first of his escapes beyond time, and in a way the most vivid. He had felt his own containedness and greatness. He had reached to an oceanic content within his own being.
There had been other similar moments before his father died; they continued after the watershed of that event.
The death had killed his tentative reaching towards the orthodoxies of the Christian religion, though not towards an unspoken mysticism. He saw only now that the unspokennness had preserved its freshness. He hated the very word ‘mysticism’; but of its flesh he
was not in doubt, for he felt it inside him.
Even these reflections visited his mind without a cloud of words, as he slowed his breathing and set aside the hotel room.
With placid amusement, he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought. That stillness, that balance, was a triumph, achieved within — the image always charged him with excitement — within the violent explosion that was the universe. He visualized the curdling galaxies, the stellar bodies, whirling away from each other, still fleeing from that primal explosion, that ejaculation of matter which began everything. The cosmos was still inexpressibly new.
All human experience was a brief dawn affair; more comprehensive experiences would be possible later in the cosmic day. Meanwhile, it was possible to develop towards greater understanding.
The sparks flew forever up the chimney. Turmoil was all that could be expected. There was evil in man, in men and women; only a fool would doubt it when he had the privilege of living in the twentieth century — as a being confined to a lunatic asylum would be the maddest of all inmates if he refused to believe in lunacy — but that evil was a flaw wrought by the holocaust of the physical world. That was where religion falsified the situation. Flames had no morality. If evil was a human creation, so was the concept of perfection. Wasn’t perfection always visualized as somehow static? And stasis was an impossibility in the exploding universe. It was a good idea to recognize the instability of all things, and to breathe deep and slow.
He threw off his clothes, brushed his teeth, and climbed between the sheets.
His mind would not let him sleep. He lay there for some while before realizing that sleep was not going to visit him yet. Some factor just beyond his grasp was worrying him.
He sat up with sudden impatience, saying into the wall of dark before his face, ‘But anyone who could speak so ill of Huxley cannot be a good person.’
Impatiently, he let his head thump back on the pillow.
Again, he tried to make himself sleep, concentrating on slow breathing. But the moment of rapture had curdled into a mood of self distrust, sucking him back into the past with its regrets.
Images of disquiet flooded him. His father’s savage death. His mother’s dead countenance, patched with hitherto unknown browns and greys. The long estrangement from Teresa. Even the savagery with which the English critics, unlike those abroad, had attacked ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’.
From serenity, he fell into despair.
Near at hand lay his doubts about the conference in Ermalpa, and his quarrel with d’Exiteuil. One of his beliefs was that, as the nineteenth century cultivated optimism, often of a rootless kind, so that century’s impoverished heirs and assigns of the twentieth cultivated a pessimism possibly as rootless. The art of enjoyment was lacking. He had always hoped to contribute to the general enjoyment; not as an entertainer — he had no gift for that — but as an appreciater, one who could enhance other people’s lives, as his father had enhanced his. That had been the driving force behind his great television series and the book related to it.
(‘Tottering between playing the common man and the intellectual, hopelessly fumbling both roles, Thomas Squire — even now no doubt expecting a knighthood for his services to a TV- zapped nation — tries to camouflage a lack of content beneath a middlebrow concern with the surface of trivia; his compulsive dashes about the globe, which reduce all space and time to a corner of the studio, are physical analogues of his efforts to cover dozens of subjects in order to conceal the fact that he has no subject. As he points in astonishment at things with which we are all too familiar, it is impossible not to feel that the new Renaissance on which he lavishes his laboured epigrams is our Untergang in thirteen episodes.’ Leslie Lippard-Milne, ‘Frankensquire Among the Parts’, New Statesman)
There were no Lippard-Milnes in Ermalpa. The conference paid him homage — although one accepted that homage never meant what it professed. But the delegates were also busy destroying the things he held dear, the things they held dear. Could poor Krawstadt ever enjoy a game of pinball now he had written so villainously on the subject? Well, perhaps one hoped not.
These unembarrassed arts, why should they wilt so easily beneath scrutiny? Another law was emerging. Pick a flower and it dies.
What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour, ready to slip away to sea. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself, no doubt of that. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes.
He had no complaints. Things were as they were. If the conference was a failure, he was not responsible; he would never be one to admit it failed. If ideology killed it, there again he had no complaint. In his time — it was curious to look back on it now — he had killed for the sake of ideology. He could remember the savage triumph he felt when, in a farmhouse in Istra, he looked down at the broken body of Slatko, the Russian colonel. That had been no timeless moment of vision; whenever the episode rose to mind, he pushed it from him, not wishing to recognize any more that part of himself.
Now Slatko’s brutal face pursued him. Squire sat up and put the light on, feeling ill.
He padded over to the bathroom to get himself a sip of water — he had been warned that Ermalpa water was contaminated, but he had heard similar tales wherever he went. He caught sight of the unopened envelope lying on the table. After drinking, he took the envelope back to bed and ripped it open.
Inside was one sheet of paper with the hotel’s crest. The letter read,
Dear Tom,
For reasons you know well, I can bear no more of the talk round the conference table. Let me get away just in the morning. You must come with me and pay. We can take a No 9 bus to the little town called Nontreale. It is a cheap fare but you know our government keeps us poor as saints — which we otherwise are not — when we are out of our country. Besides, you are rich.
Tell nobody our plan. I must not tell my ‘comrade’ Kchevov. We will play truant, and talk like men, and view Nontreale cathedral to educate you and make me thirsty.
The bus leaves at 9.05 in the morning. Meet me just outside the hotel at ten minutes to nine tomorrow and I will take you to the bus stop. Nobody shall know where we go, so please be safe and flush this sheet in your toilet bowl (we Russians have a passionate admiration for secrets, you know that). I trust you.
Yours
Vasili Rugorsky
Squire laughed. He laid the letter by his bed, switched off the light, and in a moment was sound asleep, worries forgotten.
The No 9 bus was crowded, but they managed to sit together. Rugorsky’s mood was somewhat withdrawn. He had missed his breakfast in order to get away from the hotel without questioning.
‘I am a man who likes much to eat. But more I like to see foreign countries. When shall I again be allowed outside the sacred frontiers of my own country? It is naturally cosy in there, because it is so well guarded. But I feel a necessity to store up some images of Sicily, other than that room of mirrors and electronic equipment in which we sit.’
He lapsed into silence. Both men sat staring out of the windows as the bus wound through the suburbs of Ermalpa with many a stop, a pachyderm surrounded by flocks of Fiats.
On the outskirts of town, the buildings became drab and decrepit. Squire was reminded of the older parts of Cairo. Coppersmiths and sadlers and vulcanizers worked in tiny open-fronted shops beneath the room in which they and their families lived. The bus had transported its passengers from a twentieth-century city to some outlying byway of history. People, animals, and scruffy fowls were everywhere. Piles of refuse filled yards and gardens, spilling into the street. Here and there an elderly tree defied its destiny by sending forth bright blossom, carmine on purple.
Squire made an
idle remark about the filth.
‘No, you see, you are a man of the world,’ said Rugorsky, looking at him askance in his teasing way. ‘But your world is limited. Here it is no real filth. It is merely untidy. That’s all. Merely a little untidy.’
He sank into silence again.
Outside the city, the bus turned onto a good dusty road and began forging steadily west. The way wound upwards, yielding increasingly fine views of the Mediterranean. At every broken-walled village en route, the bus stopped, and women and goats ceased their activities to stare at it.
Half an hour later, they arrived in Nontreale. The bus nosed along narrow streets hardly wider than the vehicle, entered the main square, and stopped with a protracted sigh. All the passengers climbed out.
The air was cooler than it had been in Ermalpa. Squire and Rugorsky stood together while the latter wiped his brow thoroughly with a brown handkerchief.
Nontreale held two points of historical and aesthetic interest, a ruinous castle and a cathedral. The cathedral filled one side of the small square. As they stood looking across at it, the crowd generated by the arrival of the bus slowly disappeared. Most of the people appeared to be locals; it was early as yet for tourists. In front of the cathedral, shopkeepers were setting up stalls loaded with bright tourist goods.
Rugorsky nodded and grunted. ‘Byzantium. A common heritage of East and West, you see. It looks promising, Tom. Perhaps we shall enjoy it more for having an icecream first.’
‘There’s a bar over there. Would you prefer a drink?’
‘I don’t wish for a bad reputation. Let us proceed first to an ice cream.’
They sat down at open-air tables to one side of the square, and the sun shone on them. Rugorsky asked,’ You don’t mind to pay for me?’
‘I’m pleased to do so.’
‘It does not make you feel too superior to me?’