A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  The tempter always spoke clear English. When the other returned, the twin who had given him the dark to hold, he did not at first know him or acknowledge him, for he spoke in Latin. The man believed, the man knew that the boy had heard Latin he could neither understand nor construe, which, written down and looked up, had sense and meaning.

  Languages, said Mr. Shepherd, show us that our way of seeing the world is incomplete. You must learn to translate English into Latin, and Latin into English, precisely and beautifully, but you must never suppose that the one is the same as the other. A man thinking in Latin is not thinking the same thoughts as a man thinking in English. For one thing, the shape of the words, and the shape of the sentences, changes the shape of the thoughts. For another, some words cannot be translated, they exist only in the language that made them. For another, later languages are partly based on the forms and words of Latin, which they have absorbed and transmuted. To know Latin, boys, is to know part of the history of this country, which we are defending, part of its roots and origins. Latin is like one blue-print of the forms of thinking and speaking, across which another Germanic form has been placed. The word translate comes from Latin—trans, across, latum, from fero, ferre, tuli, latum, I carry, carried. The word transmute is formed in the same way, from trans, across, and muto, mutare, mutavi, mutatum, I change, changed.

  What are known as the Romance languages, he told them, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and others, come from Latin more directly than English. English has two ways of saying many things precisely because it is a deliciously mongrel language, with its Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Germanic roots.

  It is my hope, boys, to be able to make you—or some of you—however fleetingly—think in Latin.

  This should cause you never again to take English for granted as the language of common sense.

  The boy, who knew he himself was double, inside and outside, formed the idea, half drawn from Mr. Shepherd’s observations, of a different world, out there, described in a different language, with different rules. It felt like a way to slip out of his bonds, to reform himself. He listened.

  They chanted prepositions which took the ablative, to a tune invented by Mr. Shepherd.

  A, ab, absque, coram, de

  Palam, clam, cum, ex and e

  Sometimes in, sub, super, subter

  They talked about words made up with prepositions. Many of you are evacuees, said Mr. Shepherd. That comes from e, meaning out of, and vacuus, meaning empty. Vacuus connects to vacancy and also of course to the word vacuum, meaning emptiness, from where we get vacuum cleaners, which suck up dirt into an emptiness and vacuum flasks which keep fluids warm inside a silvered wall of vacancy.

  The boy had made his own description of his destiny, which included the word evacuee, which until that moment had meant to him that he had been ejected into emptiness. Now he saw that it could mean the opposite, where he had come from was empty.

  There was some classroom sniggering about the corporeal (from corpus, body) meanings of evacuate. Mr. Shepherd said he was glad to know they were so well informed, and that yes, you could evacuate your bowels, or your stomach, through various orifices. He told them the derivation of orifice. Ora, mouth, facio, to make, any opening, which had the form of a mouth, such as a jar, a tube, a wound. Orare, to pray, to speak. Orator. Ora pro nobis, said a Catholic boy. You are thinking in Latin, said Mr. Shepherd. Good boy.

  They were sent away to find words beginning with e, or ex for homework. First, said Mr. Shepherd, write down those you have thought of without the dictionary. Then use it. Connect your words. Connect them. It is more interesting than Lotto, I think. Is “Lotto” Latin, sir? asked a wit. No, said Mr. Shepherd. It is Old English and comes from Llot, or Fate, or Destiny. It is to do with drawing lots—bits of wood, or short straws. It may be related to Old Norse, hlant, blood of sacrifice. In this interesting case the French and Italian appear to derive from the English. The Latin is sors, sortis. The sortes virgilianae was a kind of fatal lottery which consisted of opening Virgil’s writings at random, and reading the fate allotted to you on the page. A sorcerer is expert in sortes. He makes, or divines (divinare, to conjure, French deviner, to guess) fates.

  The boys came back to class with words, like blackberries at harvest, like lots, or sortes, or pieces of an infinite jigsaw. Elicit, evolve, eliminate (from limen, threshold, a magical word, good boy), excrescence, exaggerate, exempt, exigent, exgurgitate, extrude, educate (“to lead out, boys, I lead you out of your darkness into the clear light of knowledge”), exculpate, erupt, emit, extrapolate, exceed, efface, effusion, exude ...

  Eject, he had said, thinking, an evacuee is ejected. From jaces, I throw, as with javelins, said Mr. Shepherd.

  Then Shattuck, the dark boy who captained the rugby 15 said “Execute.”

  The whistling in his ears began again. He remembered this sometimes, not always.

  “From Ex plus sequor, to follow out, to carry out. You may execute a command, human or divine, Shattuck.”

  “And a man, sir. You may execute a man.”

  “By derivation. You may execute a command or a sentence which has come to mean, to take the life of a man. Sentence, from sententia, opinion, judgement.”

  Eject, evacuate, execute. Educate.

  No one has found eximious or egregious, said Mr. Shepherd. Eximious is a delicious word, meaning, outstanding. From ex + imere, to take out, to make an exception of. And egregious I am particularly attached to, since my name is Shepherd. For it comes from ex + grex, gregis, a flock. It means also, the exceptional, the outstanding, that which stands out from the mass. It may be good, or bad. An egregious act of kindness. An egregious falsehood. Solid objects, like sheep, like thresholds, like hands and mouths, are behind many abstract words, boys. It is the way the human mind works. Our ancestors were all shepherds, or farmers, or masons.

  Or warriors, sir.

  Or warriors, Shattuck.

  The Latin for shepherd is Pastor. Hence, pastoral, to do with the countryside. Hence congregation, flock of people, gathering.

  And here—not at the discussion of the word, execute, during which he had gripped his desk and endured, but here, with Shepherd, with egregious, he had again glimpsed his own eximious lot. For something that wove languages on two looms, the visible commonplace and common-sense, and the inordinate, the extra-vagant (outward-wandering) invisible underside of the tapestry, was letting him glimpse messages. Agnes and Lamb were no accident, and his proper nature and name were Ramsden, the lair of the horned egregious beast. Not for nothing was the ram caught in the thicket, the egregious, extrapolated, ejected, eliminated, evacuated Ram. And Miss Manson was Christianity, she spoke for the mild Lamb, the Son of Man, but he, secretly, was the Ram who knew the dreadful truth, that the orders executed by both his father (Abraham) and the bewigged monster who had condemned him on behalf of the Son of Man were the orders of a god who was possessed and conquered and inhabited by Evil. Impotent angels, horned beasts helplessly tangled in thickets, were eternally opposed to Powers they might never master, powers who could make of him evacuated dead matter, eliminated shit, ejected bolus, if they turned their baleful attention on him.

  Chapter 8

  The man remembered less of his late adolescence than of his childhood; it appeared that the shock treatment had burned away more of what he still knew to have been a troubled and a tormented time. He matriculated in 1943 when the war-tide was turning, and took his Higher School Certificate in 1945 as the nation erupted into peace. In 1949 he had become a theological student in Durham. These things were on record, he had certificates, he had an exiguous history. The form of his memory was woven differently.

  His aunt took him to Morning Prayer every Sunday at the local church of St. John the Divine. She was an assiduous attender, a church mouse who scurried away after the service in case anyone asked any inconvenient question. To her, church-going was part of the grey flannel of normality in which she chose to secrete the boy, hiding him
away in a back pew, rebuffing overtures from other church-goers. He remembered confusedly how deeply ashamed she had been of him. How she had flushed darkly and thrust her chin into her chest when he sang, loud and clear. He liked singing. The church was small, and for a time he had been in the choir. He knew his aunt hated to see him up there, in his white gown. (The man remembered the boy as having had white hair above the white flowing pleats. When had his hair changed?) He himself felt less conspicuous under the enveloping white, with its clean, starched smell, than he did in his thick ill-fitting grey blazer. Once, he remembered, he had sung solo, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi. Something had gone horribly wrong. He could not remember what. Only the Vicar’s pale, kind, confused eyes.

  He was very confused about the Church. He felt that it was a place in which the dangerous vacancy in which he was forced to wander, was real and acknowledged. Sometimes he felt that the Church was a fortress against the dark demons outside, and sometimes that it was itself a source of energy to them. By admitting their existence it fed and strengthened them. It was an old building, with a square tower and a rounded porch. It had two coloured windows, and the others were plain greyish glass. One of the coloured windows was old, and showed the Crucifixion. The man hung thin and twisted, his thorn-bound head fallen sideways, his rib-cage stretched, his feet and hands nailed with great bolts to the dark wood. Blood ran in festoons, over his face, out of the gaping orifice in his side, down the black tree from his shattered feet, out on to the dark cobalt-blue sky from his pierced palms. His face was a still mask. There was a black sun above him. It was a small window; he was alone; no mourners, no torturers, no angels. It was a very dark window; only in exceptionally bright weather, at noon, was it possible to distinguish much detail in it.

  The other window was in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, and was resolutely cheerful. A smiling, gold-haired figure stood in white robes with outspread arms, involved in a whirl of twining foliage, emerald leaves, bunches of grapes glowing ruby and amethyst and an unnatural dark blue. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” was written on a fluttering streamer under the elegant, etiolated bare feet. There was a suggestion that the figure was a foliate man—his fingers flowed into the branches, the curling tendrils of creeper wound themselves into his hair and beard, wandered around his neck and waist, and wrists.

  If the outside violence were to break in, it would come seeping through the old window, like the outreaching fingers of a flood, probing, bursting. There was the darkness.

  The Vicar’s name was Denis Little. He was small, slight, blond, and a bachelor. He was timidly inclined to a High Church interest in ritual. Joshua Ramsden detected in him no real spirituality, only a kind of anxious yearning. He did not know, Joshua concluded (without knowing he had concluded anything) what forces were loose in the universe. The thick walls of his church were a dubious protection. Joshua Lamb dreamed, more than once, that the church was like a paper bag full of air, puffed out, sealed at the top, which the dark could clap in its hands, like a boy bursting such a bag, releasing a soft explosion of trapped air into the larger, violent currents. Denis Little had a framed reproduction of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb from Ghent over the altar.

  The Ram or Lamb stood, benign but judicial, on a scarlet table, its head emitting effulgent gold in rays. Lovely angels knelt around it. From a neat hole in its breast a spout of blood poured itself neatly and perpetually into a gold cup, a crimson pool rimmed with bright yellow sparkings. The sight of the round hole in the fleece and flesh made the boy feel nauseous. It was, the man believed, round about this time that he had started to see the blood running down surfaces in gouts, in clotting rivulets, in fast-moving sheets. Over the white-washed walls of the church, over the glass in the frame covering the Mystic Lamb.

  Denis Little liked Josh Lamb. He encouraged him to be confirmed. Agnes Lamb was against this step—Morning Prayer and the church bazaar and whist drive were good enough for her, and therefore him. No need to take things too far. Josh Lamb didn’t know if he wanted to be confirmed or not. He began at that time to be addicted to the different language of the church services and the Bible. He liked to repeat to Mr. Little the old phrases like worn coins, like the Bun pennies of Queen Victoria with a half-obscured youthful female head, which turned up from time to time in their change, in those days. “I pray unto God, that he will send us all things that be needful both for our souls and bodies; and that he will be merciful to us and forgive us our sins; and that it will please him to save and defend us in all dangers ghostly and bodily; and that he will keep us from all sin and wickedness, and from our ghostly enemy, and from everlasting death.” He learned easily, and recited with feeling. Denis Little patted his shoulder in approbation. His nervous fingers fluttered and played over the blazer shoulder with its stuffed padding. Inside the boy’s flesh registered, and ignored, a faraway whisper, a ghost of an appeal. Once, the quavering palm of the spiritual hand brushed his cheek. He pushed it away, eyes down. The gesture was never repeated.

  He began to write holy books at this time. “This is the word of Joshua, who was evacuated from the place of the Ram, and exempt from the Offering that was made. I have held in my arms the heavy globus of Dark and have seen with mine eyes the blade of Light that shall part it.” The voices spoke to him as his hand rustled over the lined exercise-book. Don’t write, not yet, writing is dangerous, desist. The time is not yet. The writing was not comforting.

  He read the book of Joshua in the Old Testament, looking for signs. He was looking for signs of why he had been called Joshua. The name, it was true, had been chosen by his father; his preparation for the Confirmation included mild reference to his naming at his Baptism. If he had had godparents as an infant he did not know who they were. He told Denis Little his parents were dead. He was adept at preventing questions about them. Parts of his own substance became numb and withered every time he turned these questions away.

  Joshua was an angry judge. He spoke with a man with a drawn sword, who stood over against him. Art thou for us or for our adversaries? Joshua asked. And found that the opponent was the captain of the host of the Lord, an angel, Josh Lamb supposed. The Lord led Joshua to smite, and slay, to stone, to burn, to circumcise and make mountains of foreskins. Joshua spoke gently to Achan, the son of Carmi, and asked him if he had taken the accursed thing. And Achan confessed that he had taken a goodly Babylonish garment, two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold, and hidden them under his tent. So Joshua and all Israel stoned him and his family to death “and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.”

  Joshua had an affinity with stones. He hanged kings, and closed them into caves with stones. He made an altar of whole stones “over which no man hath lift up any iron” and offered burned offerings on it. He wrote a copy of the law of Moses on stones. He caused the stone walls of the city of Jericho to fall, with the sound of rams-horn trumpets. He caused the sun and the moon to stand still, whilst Joshua and his people slew the enemy with great slaughter. And the Lord came to help Joshua with his killing; he “cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died; they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.”

  And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies ...

  And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel.

  The book of Joshua did not say what the enemies had done, who were slaughtered. They were enemies, it was enough.

  Joshua was a heavy name to carry, heavy as a stone. His one act of gentleness was to appoint cities of refuge for involuntary murderers.

  “That the slayer that killeth any person unawares and unwittingly may flee thither: and they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood.”

  The avenger of blood stalked in the dark. He had taken his father and was his fat
her, who was the instrument of the avenger of blood, who heard the voice that exulted in pitiless stoning and burning. The refuge was only for the unwitting. He himself was somehow bloody. On bad days he could smell it, drying in the folds of his clothes, crusting in the locks of his hair, darkening under his fingernails.

  Denis Little believed that reading the Bible was wholesome and consoling for growing boys. There was a divine purpose in things, good would prevail, he told them, goodness would work out its way through the darkness of history. The Lord was with our brave pilots and sailors, with the Red armies sweeping across eastern Europe. A just peace was coming, the Lord would not let his people fail. The bloodthirsty Nazis were being overcome.

  Joshua would stone them. And then burn them.

  Gentleness was a slack mouth, scratched, with false teeth half torn out.

  He was asked to believe that God had become the impotent hanging man on the dark tree, the ghostly friend had breathed himself into flesh and blood and had become a burned offering, a sacrificial Lamb, the bloody food not of the “ghostly enemy” but of the Lord of Hosts, the avenger of blood, who, sated with this flesh, would stop stoning, and burning, and burying alive.