Arctic Summer (22 page)

Behind this reasoning was something he couldn't tell anybody. His relationship with India was his relationship with Masood; it was difficult to separate one love from another. He'd been feeling far from his friend lately, whose sentiments would be with Turkey, he knew, in the fight against England.

He had been very hurt by Masood in recent months. There had been almost no communication between them in a long time, and then he had learned—from his mother, of all people, who had learned it from the Morisons—that Masood had become a father. When Masood did eventually write, months after the fact, it was to apologise in his florid and evasive way for not having named the boy after Morgan, but saying that he felt his son belonged to him anyway and asking whether he would like to adopt him.

It was all so jocular and offhand, as if none of it mattered. But nothing since that terrible midnight rejection in India had undone Morgan quite so badly. He felt offended, and it took him a while to discover he was furious. He had been disappointed in Masood, but indifference and silence had now been added to the mix. He still loved his friend, and knew that he was loved in return, but what did love
mean
if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence?

No, he couldn't return to India now. He wouldn't be going back for the sake of Bapu Sahib, but for somebody else—somebody who had become remote to him. By now Masood had left the practice of law and gone into education, and this change, Morgan knew, would distract his friend further. If they were to meet again it would have to be later, much later, when the War had run its course and the world had returned to itself. In the meanwhile, he was fated to be in Egypt, and he would have to make it his own.

 

* * *

 

For all his dislike of their company, most of his time outside working hours was spent with English officers. Every morning he walked from the Hotel Majestic on one side of the square, where he was staying, to the Red Cross offices on the other. To visit the hospitals, he travelled on the new electric trams. But he hadn't dared venture into the maze of crooked streets outside this narrow grid, where Egyptian life took place.

The long reach of Cambridge extended even this far: the person he knew best in Alexandria was Robert “Robin” Furness, whom he had met long ago at King's. Robin was head of the Press Censorship Department and Morgan had got in touch with him almost as soon as he'd arrived. The few friends that he'd made here had come to him through Robin. But his social circle remained small, and resisted his attempts to venture further.

What he really wanted was to be introduced to the more squalid precincts of the bazaar. Robin could help, if he'd wanted to; he had lived in Egypt for many years and knew most of its secrets. Before the War he had been part of the Civil Service and was fond of alluding to all the moral delinquency he'd witnessed. “Oh, oh, oh,” he would sigh, covering his face with his hands. “It's beyond description. You don't want me to tell you.”

Morgan
did
want him to tell, but Robin resolutely refused. Through Lytton, who interspersed each revelation with a keening castrato wail, Morgan had heard about a letter Robin had sent to Maynard Keynes from Egypt nine years ago. Robin had been an Inspector of Police then, and had spoken, Lytton said, of “various
debaucheries
. My dear, he talked of peering into catamites' anuses, if you can conceive of anything more wonderful. To say nothing of stabbed Circassian whores and conducting inquests upon worm-eaten beggars. It sounded very heaven, let us book our passage to Alexandria immediately!” And he shuddered in rapturous revulsion.

All this Robin would acknowledge, and remark on dryly, but he wouldn't actually
show
any of it. The most he would do was to take Morgan to visit the Generah, an area of the city where prostitution was concentrated. The dark, narrow, piss-smelling entrances, with the calling, clutching women, some of them old and haggard, and the men skulking and prowling and occasionally fighting: it was impressive and operatic and somehow timeless. But there was nothing here that catered to his tastes. One particular doorway had made him hopeful, because of the sensual lips on two young men standing outside, but he'd been let down again. Alas, if these were the depths of sin, he couldn't respect them much.

Through Robin, however, he made a new acquaintance, an Egyptian man who worked for the Police Service, and this lead was more promising. When Morgan asked to see the real Egypt—“the dirty side of things”—the response was encouraging. Would he like to visit a hashish den one night? Yes, he most certainly would.

In India, in Lahore, he had been taken by an American missionary to see an opium den, and had been left unsatisfied. The place had seemed clean and ordinary to him. He expected something similar here, but from the outset, as they left the European quarter behind and started tacking through intricate backstreets at the heart of a slum, the experience was gratifyingly sordid.

Up an unlit flight of stairs, scratch-knocking on a filthy door at the top. It was opened just a crack by a one-eyed Maltese man, speaking Italian. A hash den? No, he knew nothing about it; he was not even sure what the word meant. Morgan's Egyptian friend was having none of it. They pushed in through the door, into a long room, filled with a calm, quiet company, all of them puffing on pipes that sent sweet smoke coiling into the air. A tired Arab girl wandered about barefoot and on various beds and divans against the walls lounged a retinue of Egyptian youths—attendants, it seemed—who were playing cards.

Morgan and his companion settled themselves. The Maltese man, who was clearly the proprietor, came to offer them a pipe. Morgan hesitated; he wasn't averse to falling over the edge. But his friend made a sharp, dismissive gesture, and the offer went away.

Time had thickened in the dim room; nothing much happened, and it happened slowly. A tray went past with tea, another pipe was lit. Everything was sleepy and languid, yet Morgan's perception became sharpened. He was suddenly aware of closed doors nearby, from behind which inexplicable sounds drifted out, and in this moment one of the young men made a sign to him. It couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to and he didn't respond.

The young man got up and came and sat close by. He was distinctly beautiful, wearing galabeya and tarboosh, with a soft face atop a hard body, and Morgan was full of confused desire. But when he tried to speak to him in Italian, the reply came in Arabic, and they shrugged helplessly at each other. Some of the other young men, noticing their exchange, also made cryptic signs at him. But his companion, the Egyptian police official, sat in rigid puritanical disdain, and he didn't feel able to pursue his vices.

Worse, their aloofness appeared to have infected the gathering. There was a palpable air of anxiety that centred on them, made manifest in whisperings and watchfulness. When three new customers came in—Italian shop assistants, wearing straw hats—some of the boys tried to sit on their knees, but were pushed roughly away. Everybody smoked, and a slack, smiling inertia filled the room.

Then his companion stood up and, with a jerk of his head, indicated that it was time to leave. As they descended the dark stairs, he said, “Now you have seen it. The bad life of Egypt.”

Yes, he had seen it—but he hadn't tasted its badness, and he wanted to. If he'd been alone, he would have smoked; if he'd been alone, a boy could have sat on his knee. He hoped wildly for a moment that he might be able to find a way back to that room, but in the warren of streets outside he was almost instantly lost. Without a guide, he could never return.

He told Robin Furness about it a day or two later. “You see,” he said, “I am reduced to doing research on my own. If you would only help me, all these secret doors might open.”

Robin smiled wryly. “Well, that particular one won't. Not for you or anybody else.”

“It has a regular clientele, from what I saw.”

“Yes. But I heard that the proprietor of the den has been reported to his consulate. He is from Malta, I believe?”

“Yes, yes.”

“The place has been closed down. The man will most likely be deported.”

Morgan was sorry to hear it. He had felt curiously at home in that haunt of vice, though he had merely been a witness. And when he took his Egyptian friend to dinner a few nights later, he told him the news ruefully.

“Yes, I know,” the man said, smiling with false modesty. “It was I who made the complaint.”

“
You
did? But why?”

“Oh, yes, you see, it was my duty. I am a private gentleman in the evening, but a member of the administration by day. I keep the two apart.”

Night selves and day selves: Morgan was outraged. He cut the evening short with an excuse and soon afterwards brought their relations to a halt.

 

* * *

 

He told Cavafy about the hash den, and the attractive young attendant he'd seen there. He chose his words with circumspection, not giving too much away, unsure of the response. He was especially careful not to describe his own feelings, though he watched the poet's reactions as he spoke. But Cavafy merely smiled gently, closed his eyes and said, “Ah.”

Morgan had returned to the Rue Lepsius from time to time, for more whisky and discussion and poems. He encountered the poet sometimes in the street, on his way to or from work, and his newfound friend would always launch into an eloquent soliloquy, often on some classical theme, which seemed to presume an intimacy between them. But when Morgan attempted to build upon this closeness, he found himself kept at a distance. Cavafy was friendly and scrupulously polite, but he would never disclose anything that reflected upon his private habits. And Morgan in consequence didn't feel free either to speak about himself in too loose and easy a way.

Their evenings sometimes concluded with a reading of a poem or two, Cavafy translating with one hand raised in the air. Tonight seemed no different as Cavafy began to read, his voice perhaps a little drier than usual. But what he heard made Morgan shift in his chair. It was an account, in the first person, of an erotic encounter on a bed in a dingy room above a squalid street. There was a delicacy to the language that refrained from being too specific, too physical, and yet it was obvious that the poet was writing down a memory, or perhaps a longing. It was also almost clear that the object of the encounter was male, hiding coyly behind an absence of pronouns.

Morgan knew, of course, about Cavafy's minorism. It was evident in his fussiness, his over-refinement, but there were also rumours that the poet frequented the questionable Attarine quarter. So there was nothing especially surprising in what was described, except for the fact that it broke an unspoken agreement between them. Neither of them had mentioned, until now, what they had most deeply in common.

Cavafy cleared his throat. “And here's another,” he said. “But I am still working on it. It is not yet perfect.”

And he read an account, in the third person this time, of a young man going down a street, dazed from an illicit pleasure he has just enjoyed. It was a very short poem, but it seemed to press down with great force on a sore place in Morgan's mind.

A long silence followed, in which the evening bell of the nearby church could be heard. Cavafy occasionally joked that his funeral would be held there one day, but for now St Saba was merely a faint, silvery sound, already fading on the air.

Morgan said, “I should like to ask you about those poems.”

His host immediately began to cough and wave his hand. “Oh, that is enough for one night,” he said, laying the pages aside. “I must be boring you.” And he set off on a sideways line of musing about the fall in the price of cotton that had just affected the market.

That was all. At the end of the evening, as he was readying himself to leave, Morgan had the sense of words that would not come. But he also understood that the two poems were a reply to what he had—almost—said. Cavafy seemed to be looking at him with dry amusement, or perhaps he was merely tired. The two men shook hands, and Morgan stuttered for a moment before heading into the night.

For days afterwards Morgan was tormented by the idea that, if Cavafy had visited the hash den, he would have taken that young man by the hand. They would have lain on a bed together in one of those back rooms, and afterwards the young man's beauty would have been celebrated in verse.

 

* * *

 

His loneliness was now so big that it had become his life. With it there had grown a sort of finicky distaste, so that if the experience for which he longed had actually been offered to him, he feared he might refuse it. At times, when he leaned over the soldiers in their hospital beds, the fancy came to him that if some of these men, who were good and decent sorts, only knew of the distress he was in, they would want to help him. But he could not speak, of course; he could only listen.

The earth is full of dead men. Their arms and legs stick out of the ground.

Even hearing it second-hand, the pictures became vivid to him.

When a mine explodes, they get so mixed sometimes you have to cut through corpses.

Terrible. Terrible, even to think of it. Which was as close as he would come to that reality. The theatre of war was nearer now, but still far off.

They lie between the trenches after a charge and the smell of them is awful when there's a hot sun and a bit of wind
.

He thought of the bodies burning at Benares. The multiple fires, the heat of them palpable from a distance, and the smell of sandalwood and sizzling flesh: it had made the air close and unwholesome. No matter how impartial you tried to stay, your eye was always drawn with uneasy fascination to the simple, brute fact of the shrouded figure at the heart of the fire—one of which, he remembered, as its muscles contracted, gave a last animated spasm in the form of an arm lifting skywards, till an attendant beat it down with a stick.