The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  “—in the crook of my elbow.”

  AVAST she suddenly bellowed.

  GET RID OF THEM

  She pointed dramatic arm.

  JETTISON THEM

  “Yes, yes,” she said, “into the bin! Are we the kind of people—I ask you this—are we the kind of people who promorade … who promenade with steaks of moose?”

  Inside the bin’s wire mesh, a bulging garbage bag. Foul black stalactites of frozen deliquescence hung from the mesh of the bin’s bottom. Frozen to the sidewalk, black rivulets. The garbage bag bulged with coffee cups, what looked like a pair of underpants, pieces of pizza crust red and virulent orange, a running shoe, dog turds in knotted plastic bags.

  He dropped into the bin the bloody package.

  She threw out her arm in an unsteady gesture of encompassment.

  “This place …”

  “What?”

  “Where is it?”

  “What? The Legion, you mean?”

  “No, I mean are we in a forest?”

  She threw up her hands to convey bafflement, gesturing about at Hall, bin, trees, their backdrop blackness.

  “Are we lost?”

  “We came in a taxi, remember?”

  “I was asleep.”

  “We’re waiting for a taxi back to the hotel.”

  “I’m cold. It’s very cold.”

  “It won’t be long.”

  “Where we are is what I’m asking. This place—where we’re at, what is it?”

  “You mean, called?”

  In her eyes a glint, a glaze of tears.

  She shrugged.

  “Nashwaaksis.”

  She regarded him.

  She worked off her mitten, concentrated on that, then, looking up at him, wagged an admonishing finger.

  “What?” he said “What?”

  “Say again,” she said.

  “Nashwaaksis.”

  Slowly, slowly shook her head.

  “Exactly!”

  THE MUSEUM AT THE

  END OF THE WORLD

  In the Pontic Alps high above Trebizond, dug into a sheer cliff face, Sumela Monastery. The last three-quarters of a mile was only possible on foot as the track climbed steep and broken, tree roots crawling out over the plates of rock, in places more scramble than walk. Forde and Sheila were moving at a fair pace to get out of the drizzle.

  The quaint pamphlet given out with the tickets—a blurry photo on the second page of a filigreed relic of the True Cross—stated that the last Orthodox monks had left in the Exchange of Populations in 1923, taking with them, to Greece, the icon of the Virgin Mary popularly believed to be one of four painted by St. Luke. Now, after years of neglect, and wanton behaviour by tobacco smugglers, only crumbling Byzantine frescoes remained.

  Forde cherished such useless information and relished the English in which it was often written. The “wanton” behaviour of tobacco smugglers expanded in his imagination, scenes of peculiarly Turkish debauchery, tight buttocks and turbans, played out under the gaze of frescoed saints stiff in gold and azure copes.

  “Come on!” urged Sheila. “I’m getting soaked.”

  When they reached the tiny forecourt, a ledge cut into the face, one last long flight of steep steps climbed into the building itself. Forde stood leaning against a wall winded and puffing.

  “What is it?” said Sheila. “What’s wrong?”

  Forde shook his head.

  “Rob?”

  “Just … a bit winded.”

  And closed his eyes again.

  “Stop being so bloody British.”

  “Well, it’s in my arm…”

  “Christ!” said Sheila.

  They picked their way back down the broken track and across the scree to the area where the vans were parked. One with its sliding door open, inside Father Keogh and the hulking flannel-mouthed man Forde had come to think of as The Minder.

  The Minder proffered his little oval tin of mauve cachous.

  Father Keogh was wearing a flat plebeian tweed cap and sat staring straight ahead.

  “The monastery didn’t attract you?” said Sheila.

  He considered her.

  “And why,” he said, “would I be wishing to visit a nest of schismatics?”

  “Mmmm,” said Sheila.

  The minder started his soothing babble of sound, weaving repeated words and phrases, encompassing the rain, the gloomy foliage, the steepness of the path, the grandeur of that morning’s breakfast, his mother and something and soda bread. It was a song almost, an Irish crooning which made little sense. The flow of words did not seem to be directed at the priest personally but seemed rather like oil on generally troubled waters, placatory, a hush-now, hush-now.

  Forde tuned out his blather and sat watching, through the van’s open doorway the quick picking of a sparrow under a picnic table. He was waiting. He was feeling drawn deep inside himself, cautious, tentative in the world. He was waiting to see if the pain would fill his back teeth, crush his chest, bow and bend him.

  He thought back to his last stress test at the Ottawa Heart Institute.

  Injection of radioactive material.

  Tapping Forde’s wedding ring, the technician had said, “The wife’ll like this.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’ll make your willie glow in the dark.”

  Eighteen minutes of scanning photographs.

  Injection of Persantine to stress the heart. Five unpleasant minutes later the injection of an antidote. Followed by the injection of more radioactive material. Followed by a chopped-egg sandwich. Followed by eighteen more minutes of photographs.

  He fingered through the material of his jacket pocket the shape of the pump-spray of sublingual nitroglycerin.

  He sat waiting, breathing shallow.

  Father Keogh sat primly in remote silence.

  Sheila was frowning as she struggled to understand the Minder’s brogue. He was extolling the beauties of County Wexford, the soft, silver sheen of the Slaney’s sweet waters, rhapsodizing over the red cows of Leinster, hock-deep in wild flowers—the white in the green—and the gorse, ah, God! the gorse, the scent of the gorse on the noon’s heavy heat…

  Father Keogh produced a silver flask.

  The Minder stopped in mid-sentence.

  Father Keogh unscrewed the flask’s cap, which served as a little beaker.

  “It’s not yet five o’clock, Father.”

  “He knows perfectly well what time it is,” said Father Keogh.

  “Five o’clock was the hour appointed. Five o’clock was the agreed-upon hour.”

  Father Keogh carefully filled the cap.

  “He is not,” said Father Keogh, “to be judged by snivellers.”

  “But. Father…”

  “He will not be badgered.”

  Forde turned his head completely and openly stared.

  *

  “What was she saying? No. Completely gone. Honestly.”

  “Not everyone can fit in at the same time so half’ll go to the palace first and half to the mosque,” said Sheila.

  “And then switch over sort of thing?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, let’s go to the palace. I’ve gone off mosques. Taking your shoes off and putting them on again and pottering about with them in dirty plastic bags.”

  “That one’s the palace bus,” said Sheila.

  “And all those athlete’s foot carpets,” said Forde.

  He soon abandoned the local guide with her insistent “If I may invite you this way here shall you see…” and wandered off into the desolate ruins of the palace of the Grand Comneni. Here, where he stood in what had been the palace library, Cardinal Bessarian, as a youth, had read his Homer. Here, in this library, Forde i
magined the exquisite Byzantine bindings, ivory plaques carved in bas-relief let into the covers and surrounded by beaten gold set with cameos and gems.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught the flicker of a lizard. Seaward were the ruins of the harbour built by the indefatigable Hadrian in the first century, Hadrian, accomplished poet, learned in Greek. Wind from the sea stirred the nettles. Viciously thorned sprays of blue-green caper plants grew from fissures in the tumbled masonry.

  Here, eight hundred years ago during the reign of Alexius II, Byzantine court ceremony and splendour reached its apex. Here, in the imperial court, arts and letters flourished. Here had been the last refuge of Hellenistic civilization.

  He remembered having seen some of them, the Greek manuscripts that had belonged in later years to Cardinal Bessarian. In Venice, he’d seen them. In the library of St. Mark’s.

  He stood staring about him.

  capperis spinosa

  The clink of rock on rock.

  Forde turned, expecting to see Sheila.

  It was a woman from the ship stepping over what had been the door sill. Seeing him, she tilted her head and for a second or two hesitated, one foot still in the air. Her held stance suggested a hen. His face half-creased into a polite smile.

  Tinny tune cackling rent the silence. She rootled in her purse for the cell phone.

  The spell violated, Forde picked his way forward to escape the noise of her.

  *

  The ship people were milling about in the forecourt of the Sultan Mehmet Mosque. Forde stood on the sidewalk waiting for Sheila, who had gone off in search of aspirin. Neatly uniformed school children stared up as they flowed around him. He surveyed the furniture shops with their swollen settees, the jewellers with gold and silver bangles displayed on poles, the pastry shops with savoury pies and borek in the windows. The shops and houses were utilitarian, seemed modern, concrete block and brick slapped together with mortar oozing out of every course.

  Forde read a passing teenager’s T-shirt: KEEP IT REAL.

  In trays, pans, shallow bins, the fish stores displayed the catch of the day; that day in Trebizond the choice was bonito. In clothes stores, child-mannequins, suits and bow ties for three-year-old boys, puffy sleeved froufrou dresses for tiny girls.

  Shouting their presence louder than other shops, narrow storefronts selling film, cameras, cell phones, disks, CD-players, calculators, digital pedometers, their windows a blare of posters and logos: SONY, TOSHIBA, SAMSUNG, OLYMPUS, CANON PANASONIC, FUJI, KODAK, HITACHI, NIKON.

  “Got some!” called Sheila. “Bayer. And Immodium.”

  “Why, have you…?”

  “Just prophylactic. Wouldn’t want to get the squitters on, you know, the Odessa Steps or something.”

  *

  Forde sat on the low stone wall that retained the flower beds in the forecourt of the mosque. On his right rose a high brick wall, scabby, rotted stucco, with a course of stonework along its top. To his left, the elegantly designed octagonal stone ablutions cistern where men washed before going in to pray. In front of each of the eight stone faces sat three stone stools and in each face three modern taps.

  He had a sense that the precincts of the mosque had been encroached upon, the road beyond the present arched entrance having eaten up what had once been garden, houses built within what once had been forecourt. He suspected—the run of the hill down towards the placing of the mosque, the high brick wall climbing up—that in some more gracious times the wall had carried an aqueduct which fed the roofed, faceted cistern. He imagined the water constantly rilling down each face, the tinkle and plash of it as it ran and fell into the surrounding trough of inward-sloping flagstones before gurgling off into drains.

  As inconspicuously as possible, Forde was watching three men as they performed their ritual ablutions. He could still see Sheila in the line-up. He watched her for a moment or two. Had a sudden memory of her standing in the kitchen, frowning as she phoned the plumber on the TV remote, the dark swirling grain of the oak floor, her bare feet in a wide bar of sunlight. The sun was mellow on the brickwork, warm on his back.

  Also watching the three men was a girl in jeans and a lighter blue sweater. She looked to be eighteen or so. She was calling out to the men, remarks which, judging from her sexual gestures, were lewd provocations. One of the men was laughing. The others ignored her. Her body was pertly nubile but her face was coarse, her jaw heavy and slightly prognathous, features suggesting some form of retardation.

  A man with grey hair and grey beard was trudging across the forecourt towards the cistern. He was paunchy and was wearing old black suit trousers and a white, collarless flannel shirt. Sandals. Over the shirt, a black vest. Most of the shirts Forde had seen on locals and in shops had been nylon or polyester. The man lowered himself with a loud sigh onto a stone stool. He sat with his hands on his knees, staring at the facing stone.

  The girl held up a handful of empty, hinged mussel shells and then clacked them on the coping of the flower-bed wall in announcement. She then skittered them across the flagstones, a crinkle of sound.

  She launched into the mime of a barnyard rite. Thrusting with her loins, making a jeering, farting noise with her lips, she imitated a man thrusting into a woman.

  Then, taking a step forward, she became a man.

  The man she had become caught the passing girl—the farmer’s daughter?—a servant girl?—by the upper arm and pulled her back against him. His hands came round and cupped her breasts. He nuzzled her neck, nibbled her ear, then stroked and kneaded her buttocks. Letting go of her, he unbuttoned the four buttons of his fly and unshipped a large but flaccid cock. It lay across his left palm. With his right hand, he hauled up her skirts and bending her down piled the skirts onto her back. He stuck two investigating fingers between her legs.

  The man at the cistern, surmounting the mound of his paunch, grunting with the effort, strained down over it to unstrap his sandals.

  Umph, he grunted, Umph.

  The barnyard man brought his two wet fingers out, letting the skirts fall, and began to ease back his foreskin, anointing the head of his cock with her stickiness. Slowly the penis stirred, stiffened, rose.

  The grey-haired man turned on the tap.

  He lifted the skirts again, piled them on her back, pinned them there, pushed her lower. Then with his left boot he tapped the inside of her left ankle, then with his right boot the inside of her right ankle, forcing her to shuffle her legs wider apart. She tried to straighten up a little but he pushed her down again, slapping the side of her head.

  He pushed himself into her.

  Ahhhhhh!

  Gripped her by the hips, pulling her onto him.

  Straining over his paunch, the cistern man was rubbing water between his toes.

  Left foot. Uuuh. Uuuh. Uuuh. Uuuh.

  The barnyard man was thrusting, grunting Aah! Aah! Aah!

  Right foot. Uuuh. Uuuh. Uuuh. Uuuh.

  Aah! Aah! Aah!

  The face carved in concentration.

  arrrggul—arrrggul—arrrggul gargled the cistern man.

  Splat onto the flagstones.

  Doing something with his nose. Snuffling up water from his cupped palm. Nostrils pinched closed. Then nnnnnnnm onto the flags.

  Coughed.

  Retched.

  Arr! Arr! Arr! growled the barnyard man.

  The cistern man’s forefinger wiggling in his ear.

  Faster now, faster, frenetic the thrusting.

  Ah-ah-ah-ah-oh!

  Sudden stillness.

  Then a strained cry, almost falsetto, from the barnyard man.

  A groan.

  Then. Gouts of it. Four separate spasms gripped him rigid.

  A soft sigh ended the performance. She seemed to lose interest entirely. She turned her back on them and, plucking a purple dahlia, wandered
off across the forecourt, kicking at mussel shells, and out through the arched entrance and disappeared into the street.

  *

  It was Sheila’s turn to sit by the window. Across the aisle from Forde sat the man with the Woolly Bear-caterpillar-eyebrows, things rank and gross in nature, thought Forde, and positive tufts sprouting from his ears. He always wore a squashy sun bonnet tied under his chin with a string. It looked like something a toddler might wear. He must have been in his late seventies. He was deaf and carried his antique hearing-aid apparatus hanging around his neck in a custom-made leather case whose size reminded Forde of World War II naval binoculars. A side flap unbuttoned, giving access to knobs. Wires connected it to his ears.

  The aluminum gangway steps leading up from the quay to the entry port on the third deck were solid with unmoving passengers and more pooling at the foot of the steps as buses arrived. It was Woolly Bear blocking the inward flow.

  He stared at the Indonesian purser like an astonished baby.

  “He needs your identity-card thing, Edwin,” said his wife.

  “My dear fellow!” remonstrated Edwin. “What an extraordinary thing to say!”

  “Edwin,” said his wife, “are you sure you’re switched on?”

  “Of course I didn’t swipe it. I was given it.”

  “What he means, Edwin,” said his wife. “Oh … God!” she said, twitching the card from his fingers and handing it to the purser to run through the machine.

  As the flow started again, Forde heard Edwin explaining, “One gives them one’s passport and they give you this card. One buys things with it. Drinks and so forth. Toiletries.”

  It was a pleasure to ease off the heavy walking shoes. He washed, enjoyed the starched pleasure of a clean shirt, put on his suit and a pair of black Florsheim dress shoes and, taking his journal, headed for the bar, leaving Sheila to the interminable intricacies of her make-up.

  Sitting at the empty bar was the Rt. Revd. Chantry Williams, Chaplain in Ordinary to HM Chapels Royal and Bishop of Bodmin and Exeter. A huge bugger, six foot three, at least. Forde inclined his head a stiff couple of inches in acknowledgement of the man’s presence. According to the little bottle’s label, the bishop was sipping a glass of Britomart Orange Crush, probably to fortify himself for the lecture he would be giving at six o’clock on Trajan’s campaign against the Dacians, a lecture Forde would not be attending.