The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  Forde thought the Bishop a bit of a berk.

  For daily excursions he affected a sort of safari outfit, khaki shirt with epaulettes, cargo pants, combat boots, the ensemble topped by a silly Tilley-type hat sporting, on one side of it, a cockade of nylon feathers.

  His last two lectures—Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and Christendom and The Barbary Coast—had ended with pleas for closer community with Islam. We must treat with respect and understanding, he had said, Islamic sacred law, Shari’ah. As ardent Christians, he had said, we must reach out to the ummah, the world-wide community of Islamic believers.

  Just as within the Christian community the forces of eucumenicism … so in that larger community of People of the Book…

  Forde was not an ardent Christian.

  Embrace our fellow…

  Forde had no desire whatever to reach out to unwashed wahabis and mad, hairy mullahs.

  Embrace!

  “Feh!” as Sheila would have said.

  The Bishop of Bodmin could stuff the ummah up his jumper; Anglican clerics should confine themselves, thought Forde, to such essentially Anglican activities as the blessing of marrows.

  He glared at the back of the bishop’s head.

  He began to feel the welcome bite of the Scotch.

  From his table he could see directly down into the still water under the bow. Further out, sunlight sparkled on the water. He watched flocks of shearwaters, small groups of birds in brief flights before settling again to ride the waves, spirits, the stories went, of sailors drowned. He found himself thinking about the book he’d been looking at in the ship’s library, with its reproductions of seventeenth-century woodcuts of fiendish Turks, ranked Janissaries, effete bejewelled pashas. Led by Sultan Mohammed II, the Turks took Istanbul in 1453. In 1461 Mohammed entered Trebizond in triumph and celebrated his victory by praying in the ransacked church of St. Eugenius, which he turned into the New Friday Mosque. Within two or three years, Mohammed had the deposed Emperor, David Comnenus, put to death together with all the males in the Comnenus line of succession. Forde thought of the ruins they’d visited that afternoon, rubble that once had been known as “The Golden Palace of the Comneni,” home now to nettles, capperis spinosa, and the chill wind from the sea.

  As he gazed down into the water, his thoughts washing over Sultan Mohammed and the Bishop of Bodmin and Exeter and Britomart Orange Crush, he became aware of something white, something white rising.

  At first he thought it was probably garbage, a paper bag, perhaps, but as it rose up though the dark water he saw things trailing from it, strings…

  He pressed closer to the glass.

  He saw that the white thing as it rose was not flat like paper but domed like an inverted bowl. He saw that the strings were… trailing tentacles. A jellyfish. Another one rising up from the depths to touch the surface. And another. All along the side of the ship. He hurried the length of the room craning to look from every window. Suddenly dozen upon dozen of them rising through the dark water to hang for a few moments at the surface before sinking, sinking, and then gone from sight. The rise and fall was like a stately carousel, a slow-motion firework display, an underwater Swan Lake of jellyfish.

  If he were writing, what words could describe this dance, this vision? They appeared larger as they rose higher, like flowers blossoming and opening. Bloom. He would use the word bloom. He had the sense somehow that the ship was being visited. He would use visitant and visitation, with their connotations of the supernatural, for there was something ghostly in the whiteness and the slow materialization of the jellyfish. He found himself in the odd position of not believing such chimerical nonsense but at the same time feeling it. He felt—embarrassedly—that he was being… there was no way round the feeling … blessed.

  He caught the barman’s eye and raised his empty glass, tapping it with his forefinger.

  Or perhaps…

  He shrugged.

  Perhaps the feeling arose from the beneficent effects of The Famous Grouse.

  He sat, his mind drifting.

  Bar sounds.

  Sheila’s voice said, “Buy a girl a drink?”

  He stood and pulled out a chair for her.

  “We’re very formal this evening, aren’t we?”

  “It’s because of the suit.”

  The sparkle had left the waves. The light was fading. They sat in easy silence. Lights started to come on in some of the port buildings. He could just make out the shapes of the boys still fishing off the end of the dock. A tug, its bridge blazing with lights, its sides armoured with tires like a row of shields, thrashed past them out to sea.

  “For God’s sake take these peanuts away from me,” said Sheila.

  “Grand Comnenus and Emperor,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s how the Comneni were referred to.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sheila.

  Forde sat in silence for long minutes.

  “Sipping Britomart,” he burst out, “while Rome burns.”

  “What?”

  He sighed.

  “Ah, well,” said Sheila, always sensitive to his shifting moods, “cheer up! I expect the dining room’ll be open now.”

  *

  All was aglow and gleaming. Light from the recessed pot lights blazed down on glasses, cutlery, starched napery, mirrored walls. Banquettes down the room’s sides were divided into booths by slabs of thick, minty glass etched with a design of Scottish thistles. Conversation rolled in waves, a surf of sound. As they waited for the steward, Forde watched the girls going round the tables with bottles of red and white wine, filling glasses. Waiters in bistro black and white. At their various stations, decorative silver wine coolers, massed flowers, elaborate ceramic cornucopias of fruit. Forde relaxed into the nightly theatre.

  The steward led them up the length of the room to a table for two. They passed the little old lady with the make-up. She was wearing this evening, on her left hand, a gold ring with a bezel that clasped a green stone the size of a small frog.

  At the next table over from them, the American couple who always introduced themselves with “We’re Alan and Martin from Cincinnati.” They were wearing identical Haspel seersucker suits, which put Forde in mind of ice cream. He noticed on the table between them a bottle of wine.

  He nodded to them and said, “How did you end up with that?”

  “We complained,” said Alan.

  “We lodged a complaint,” said Martin.

  “Well, really!” said Alan. “What we had last night.”

  “We made our views known,” said Martin.

  “We didn’t pay all this money,” said Alan, “to drink pooey old Merlot from Chile.”

  “We felt put upon,” said Martin. “So Alan complained to that nice steward—you know, the comfy one? From Austria? Who wears pumps?—and he sent us this Marqués de Cáceres.”

  “Rioja,” said Alan.

  “Tempranillo,” said Martin.

  “Gran Reserva,” said Alan.

  “Two years in oak,” said Martin.

  “Yum!” said Alan.

  Forde and Sheila busied themselves with menus and Apollonaris mineral water.

  “In the hors-d’oeuvres,” said Forde, “what does ‘Goujonnette’ mean?”

  “Fish,” said Sheila. “A small piece. It’s fried usually.”

  … what with my knees and all that marble up-and-down…

  Forde sipped the wine the nice girl had poured.

  He wondered why it was that some voices carried almost brutally through the general hive of sound. It didn’t seem that they were speaking particularly loudly. Just a strange, penetrating timbre. Odd. This one was a small lady three tables away. He watched the girls filling wine glasses. Well-filled blouses, too.

  “He noted, with app
roval,” said Forde.

  “Pardon?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Indicating Alan and Martin with the slightest movement of his head, he said, “How old do you think they are?”

  Sheila shrugged. “Difficult to say. Fifty? Fifty-five.” He watched them covertly. Their lines were beginning to blur—the beginnings of plumpness, little tummy bulges, the suggestion of jowls. In their identical seersucker suits they might have been, thought Forde, a once-lauded vaudeville act from the Ed Sullivan era, about to glide from table to table on roller skates performing close-up with cards and coins.

  All, all, it seemed to Forde, was stories or a play and the passengers character actors. It amused and pleased him to shape them and compose their pasts. Though his creation of Father Keogh’s travelling companion as The Minder seemed not far off the mark. He had already decided that Woolly Bear had fought in the Korean War either as regular army or National Service conscript though he had more of a Sandhurst feel about him. Probably the knee socks and sun bonnet. Then there was the rude, loud man on the bus with his brass-bound walking stick. The Baden Powell man, Forde called him. Wore a lemon silk cravat with Viyella shirts and claimed to have been a second lieutenant in the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha. The cravat did not completely hide the craters of old boils on the back of his neck.

  Forde had heard him saying to a man on the bus that he sorely missed “my lovely brave young Bedouin”; hmmm. But at the same time, he roared words and phrases in Hindi and the dates seemed possibly dodgy. Though Jordan had not thrown Glubb Pasha out until 1954 and so if the Baden Powell man had joined the Legion after the 1948 war at the age of, say, twenty-one, then … but the mental arithmetic was hurting Forde’s head and he fell back into watching people and drifting reverie.

  … and then I dropped the soap and those shower stalls are like upended coffins so I couldn’t bend down …

  “Look!” he said suddenly. “Look!”

  “What?”

  “On your right. That woman!”

  “Where? Oh.”

  “Fanning herself,” said Forde with delight, “with a side plate!”

  *

  Forde sat glaring at the line cook—Filipino, Malaysian, or some other mixture—who stood with folded arms at the near end of the steam table. What could be seen of Sochi was not appealing. The ship had docked just after dawn. Concrete, a few tired palm trees, tall wire mesh fences, a flag drooping in the still heat. The day’s promised excursion was to Dagomys in the mountains to see the most northerly tea plantation in Europe, a prospect that was not causing him palpitations.

  Sheila was making her way through the breakfast throng towards the table for two he had secured them. She had been to the laundry room while it wasn’t busy.

  “I met Alan down there—he’d been drying two, well I don’t quite know what you’d call them—‘blousons,’ perhaps. And do you know what he said?”

  “No,” said Forde.

  “He said they were sixty percent cotton and forty percent ‘the P-word, but strictly, but strictly, for travel.’”

  “Hmmm.”

  “‘The P-word,’” said Sheila. “And I asked him where Martin was and do you know what he said?”

  “Of course I don’t know what he said.”

  “He said, ‘Oh, he’s still tucked up in bed like a great big Gummi Bear.’”

  “Christ!” said Forde.

  “A touch homophobic this morning, are we?”

  “No. Homicidal.”

  “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But the main thing he told me was that a woman was attacked in the laundry. That nice woman who’s a hospital administrator in Sheffield.”

  “What sort of attacked?”

  “Well, sexually.”

  “Probably a lascar,” said Forde.

  “A what?”

  “Like that one over there who makes himself awkward about fried eggs. I know he’s got them. I know where they are. In that little oven under the counter. But every time I ask, the scrawny little sod goes into his ‘No flied egg’ routine.”

  “What is a lascar?”

  “They run amok, rushing about in a frenzy and committing violent acts. They’re noted for it. Conrad’s full of them. You have to do something Conrad-ish to them when they’re amok, lash them to the mast, hose them into the scuppers, conk them with a coal shovel.”

  “Is this because of the fried eggs?”

  “I once read something Conrad said about the expression ‘going great guns.’ ‘Going’ implies movement and guns don’t ‘go’ unless you mean ‘go off’ so the expression becomes somewhat unclear. It now seems generally and vaguely to mean successful. But there’s a ghost of meaning in ‘going’ that we’ve lost. Now Conrad said it referred to a ship under full sail and the wind booming the canvas like great cannons firing. So you see what we’ve lost …”

  “Forde!”

  “What?”

  “Alan said the man was hissing. He grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth and while he was rubbing his thing against her bum he was hissing and hissing like those men do to horses.”

  “Ostlers.”

  “Yes. But he was hurting her too, squeezing, twisting flesh, crushing her breasts. And whoever it was had planned it. He’d somehow got most of the lights off so all she really saw was a shape.”

  Sheila fell silent.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if it was a crew member.”

  She set down her coffee cup.

  She stared at him.

  “Or was it a passenger?”

  Then she said hesitantly, “It’s … it’s that hissing. That’s what frightens me.”

  “Sorry about the fried eggs,” said Forde.

  She nodded.

  “Something about it,” she said, “that noise, that’s insane.”

  *

  “First Prize,” said Forde, “one week in Sochi. Second Prize, three weeks in Sochi.”

  The utilitarian bus throbbed and shuddered as it waited for stragglers from the Botanical Gardens making their way back from gawking at the Tree of Friendship.

  The wood-slat seats gave little ease. Someone had pasted a festive frill of scissored gold foil round the inside top two inches of the windows obscuring the view. Glued to every fourth or so strip of fringe, a cotton-wool bobble. The long gear shift was dressed in a knitted sheath. The punctilious guide kept testing his mike, peering into papers in his briefcase, counting and re-counting the passengers, fingers questioning the knot of his tie. The Baden Powell man began his daily bellowing and pounding the floor with his walking stick.

  “You! Bloody driver! You! The tout with the microphone! Music off! Music off!”

  The bus juddered on its way. The guide resumed his litany. There wasn’t much to see. One after another, large white buildings, gardens surrounding. High hedges of dark yew. Sanitaria for apparatchiks.

  … what you call in your countries not—hospitals? No. Spa. Just so mmmmm. There are many baths 50 metres by 25 metres that is mmm in the measurements of your countries 164.042 feet by 82.02 feet and these baths are full of water from the hot springs. The water is full of health but the smell is very rude.

  The State Winter Theatre. Riviera Park with an opportunity to buy local handicrafts. In the grounds of the Zelyonaya Roscha Sanitorium, Stalin’s Dacha.

  … and a big surprise are the baths full of mud which is heated to mmmm 41 degrees centigrade or in the measurements of your countries 105.8 Fahrenheit which is 4 degrees higher than your blood …

  Forde squirmed on the unforgiving seat.

  …and there are also mud mmm cabinets with just heads …

  “The Cabinets of Doctor Caligari,” said Forde.

  …and the mud sucks out the poison from the body … not
mmm suck …

  He riffled through some notes.

  … leaches mmm leaches poison ….

  “Leeches?” said Sheila making a sucking face.

  “Well, Mother,” said Forde in a stage Yorkshire accent, “exfoliation they may call it but I’ve always said you’ve a long way to go to beat an old-fashioned scourging.”

  “And what would you know, you old stick-in-the-mud!”

  And this got them launched into riffs on soviets spas, gleaming white resorts from the outside but inside crumbling Gormenghasts with lavatory-tiled rooms staffed by smelly crones and doctors with steel teeth. The Beria Room full of people wrapped in wet sheets and stacked. Skink-Extract Treatment in the Molotov Maceration Room. The Gherkin Diet. The Dry Cupping Room. Korean massage administered by Oddjob aided by his sinister henchman Blowjob. In the Malenkov Room, borscht enemas performed by Enigma Machines. On Thank God It’s Fridays, the Siberian Plotz executed turn and turn about by the Smersh Sisters, three ex-KGB houris.

  This giddiness possessed them until they reached Dagomys and the bus bumped over the gravel parking area and stopped parallel to rows of small green bushes.

  “According to the daily bulletin,” said Forde, “there’s a lecture in Russian about tea, though excitingly with simultaneous translation into English, followed, the schedule promises, by tea grown on this very plantation. During the serving of which we will be further titillated by folkloric entertainment.”

  “Now don’t start being difficult.”

  “Remember the wisdom,” said Forde, “of Sir Arnold Bax.”

  “Who he?”

  “A well-known composer I’ve never heard but, but smart enough to have said, ‘you should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.’”

  Alan was studying the writing on the back of the bus.

  “Hey!” he said. “This bus is from Korea. This is a Korean bus.”

  “Get a picture,” said Martin.

  Sheila was helping, along the aisle of the bus, the woman with the walker.

  Forde returned to the bus’ front steps and helped down the old lady with the make-up.