Daniel Martin (71 page)

Dan grinned. ‘Were they so different?’

He received a severe look.

‘Such cynicism, Mr Martin. This is most shocking.’

‘I rather hoped it was allowed since the Twentieth Congress.’

They had already established that the Czech was not a Party member and far from being a totally uncritical admirer of five-year plans and state bureaucracy; and once again, with a wink, he took Dan’s side.

‘I think there is here too much cult of the personality.’

‘You must not use these modern terms, my friend. They are most incorrect.’ The old man wagged his finger at the Czech. ‘As I told you on our first visit, if you had been listening, even “slave’ is misleading.’

Jane said, ‘Why’s that, professor?’

‘Because it requires a certain concept of freedom, of not being a slave. Of free will. There was no such thing in Ancient Egypt. In fifth-century Greece, yes… perhaps. But not here.’

Dan risked one more provocation. ‘At least the early tomb robbers believed in free enterprise?’

But the old man would not treat it lightly any more. ‘That is not what I am saying. Of course. There were bad men. Ambitious men. Dishonest men. But not groups of men who doubted the very principles of their society. How should they? They had no models. No comparisons to draw.’ He gently reprimanded Dan. ‘We must not think with modern minds, Mr Martin. Then we understand nothing.’

Dan complained next about the multiplicity, the obsession with lists; and was taken to task again for the gross heresy of a historicism.

‘These are people from the very beginning of our modern age. Life is very precarious, all its processes are mysterious. Very slowly these men see that in small places it can be controlled. They make many mistakes. But they also see controlling is knowing, and that the greatest tool of knowing is the symbol that allows you to represent what is not present before your eyes. They are like children, perhaps they grow too proud of this little control. But how can one laugh at a child because he wants to learn?’

‘But that’s just what I feel is missing. The childlike—the simplicities of Minoan and Etruscan art.’

‘Forgive me, but you betray your ignorance. There was no art in cultures as ancient as the Egyptian and the Minoan. Conscious art did not exist for them. They wanted only to control. That is how they would want us to judge them—by how well they controlled. Not by how pretty they look to us modern men.’ He opened his hands. ‘And why did those other civilizations last so short a time?’

‘Perhaps it’s only that I find their… methods of control more sympathetic.’

The professor shook his head. ‘No, Mr Martin. More ignorant. More primitive, if you will. And I think you like them because you are over-civilized.’ He raised a hand before Dan could speak. ‘I know. Here it often seems so cold… formal, so royal. You wish there was more folk-art, art of the ordinary people. Just as I sometimes long for the Kaffeehaus music of my youth. But you must not blame the pharaohs. You must blame time. Time is the source of all human illusion.’

‘Which we’re condemned to?’

‘In our bodies. But I think we can try with the imagination. The other day you listened most sympathetically when I told you about the land-owners who once exploited our fellaheen friends. Yes?’ Dan smiled, and nodded. ‘In history we are all absentee landlords. We think, those stupid people, if only they knew what I know. If only they had worked harder to please me, and my taste. Is that not true?’ Dan smiled again, and had to concede that it was so. ‘And then—who made all these beautiful sculptures and paintings you are seeing every day?’

But that’s it. I think the wrong names got remembered.’

The old man smiled.

‘That is the voice of this epoch. Not the past.’

Dan murmured, ‘The voice of my ka.’

‘That is natural. You are a writer. Ever since the Greeks all artists have wished to be remembered by name like the ancient pharaohs. Perhaps they are the only true pharaohs left in this world. I think you have had your revenge.

They began to talk of other things. But Dan had glimpsed another great spell cast by Egypt, all artistic creation seen in its light; perhaps it was even a growing spell, as belief in an afterlife died away and people more and more turned to the arts for escape something the very opposite of that fellaheen resignation, waiting for the train that would never come—a frantic entombing, mummifying, surrounding with personal achievement; a morbid need to pupate, to build a chrysalis before the grub was fully grown, and even though reason told one that there was no world in which an imago, the released ka could ever emerge. And was Dan himself essentially different from the unknown mason carving a head of Rameses? He might claim he was examining, or even debunking, much more than he was glorifying. But all attention drawn was a kind of glorification; and when the strongest motive in the drawing attention was not really the object, Kitchener, but the act of pointing itself, one’s own reputation, the element of parasitism was obvious. For a private self-mocking moment Dan wondered whether he should be the first screenwriter to demand not a larger credit, but none at all.

All this, though rather paradoxically, strengthened his decision to try a new medium, a new life, as soon as the Kitchener script was done; paradoxically, because he was gaining new ideas for it every day—it was at last beginning to brew, to grow rich. Perhaps the clue had lain in the Herr Professor’s suggestion that artists were the only true pharaohs left; so let them be their own celebratory masons, and return to the self, abandon all the work on other tombs and monuments. He sensed a great need to jettison, to simplify, almost like some painfully obese gourmet craving a stay at a health farm. Even this had a paradoxical element; at the same moment as he saw all art as a mere modern variation on superstitious tomb-making, absurdly elaborate and futile insurance against the unknown, the seeing brought a sense of freedom… or perhaps it was more a retreat into Englishness—conviction of the sheer silliness of taking anything in life (such as Lukacs and theorists of total consciousness and authorial responsibility) very seriously. It was all also a game of chance, in which the part played by skill was far smaller than the world would admit. Not to see that was to be like the young American, for he also taught.

One was best: that passive third person.

The desert crept nearer as the days passed and they approached the Tropic of Cancer. Even the amateur photographers grew satiated, and increasingly the scenes on the banks, the passing feluccas, were allowed to go by uncaptured.

They visited Esna, a dirty town, with a temple in a huge pit in the centre of it. Crowds of beggars besieged the tourists on their way to and from the site. A man with two reed panthers at his waist was especially insistent and one of the French gave the baksheesh he clamoured for: a snake was produced, then from the smaller basket a huge scorpion, held by its depointed sting, its legs slowly crawling through the air. Suddenly the cameras appeared again in their dozens, a circle formed. One of the showman’s friends began to block views, demanding more money. The picturesque was not to be had free. Without warning there was a fracas in embryo, as he pushed one camera aside and was shouted at and pushed sharply off balance himself in return. it was the Barge-borne Queen’s Italian friend. He was calmed, but the Arab continued shouting insults.

In the background, outside a coffee-shop, a line of old men sat, two of them smoking narghilehs, watching all this with inscrutable eyes. Dan and Jane stood a little apart, with the French journalist Alain beside them. His photographer friend was busy, a neutral eye, snapping the snappers, with an obliviousness to anything but angle and rapidity of take. Alain said something in French to Jane, which she passed on to Dan: Silly cunts are easily amused. There was soxue kind of triple blasphemy involved; against nature, against humanity, against—themselves… man the ape, all the babooneries, the wrong motives, of package travel.

Later that day they moored at Edfu to see the Ptolemaic temple of the winged sun-god Horus, with its magnificent granite falcons. Living kestrels still clipped and wove between the Assyrian-looking towers and in the evening light the place had a certain serenity. But there was something brooding also in the massive fortress walls of the temple, the ambience of a hermetic priest-cult barricaded in against outside reality; as remote, and perhaps as repellent, as the white sides of their ship to the peasants they passed each day.

A cabaret and dancing had been announced for that evening after dinner, and Dan and Jane arrived in the dining-room to find their own slight concession to this—Dan had put on a suit and Jane wore the same black dress she had baptized at the Assad’s party far outdistanced by the other passengers. They had treated it as a fancy-dress gala. There were some unlikely-looking peasant outfits among the East Europeans, a selection of would-be corsairs and toreros and the rest among the French. The only thorough-going costume, obviously brought in preparation for this evening, was that of the Barge-borne Queen’s young fly-by-night. He was rigged out, bare-chested, and with some massive imitation-jewellery, as Tutankhamun. The face was elaborately made up, and he looked alarmingly hermaphroditic. The Queen himself was got up in a puce coat with a large black cravat in a loose bow; they learnt later that he was Baudelaire. The young man seemed hardly to eat, but flitted from table to table among the French party, showing off his bare torso and his finery, striking poses, oblivious to the ludicrousness of it all.

Even the Hoopers had fallen slightly prey to this madness. Marcia wore a long dress with a gilt cardboard crown over her republican hair. She wasn’t quite sure who she was meant to be, the purser had lent her the crown. Mitch had similarly acquired—by right of nationality, he explained, not because he had any connection with Texas—a stetson. They were clearly worried by Dan and Jane’s ordinariness—the purser had a whole cupboardful of hats and clothes, they were sure there were some left In a while the Hoopers took their headgear off, and the table showed a solid Anglo-Saxon front of refusal to conform to the nonsense around them. Dan had Jane’s eyes at one moment.

‘They must think we’re the most awful snobs.’

‘Someone has to show disapproval of such rampant bourgeois narcissism. I wish I’d come as a K. G. B. man.’

She smiled, but her eyes lingered on his a moment more before looking down. He was still not allowed, or only just allowed, to make jokes about such things.

He said, ‘You’ve caught the sun today.’

‘I can certainly feel my cheeks burning.’

‘Gives you a nice gipsy air.’

‘Home will soon take care of that.’

He smiled back, but it struck an unwelcome practical note. She looked past him to the animated other tables. Even the East Europeans seemed to have relaxed a little. They waited then for the next course, in a silence, like a married couple; older than anyone else there. She had caught the sun, and in fact looked much younger. And the dress: already, on their way to their table, Dan had seen a discreet Gallic gesture of approval of that from Alain Maynard.

They were among the last to go to the upstairs lounge after the meal. All the tables seemed crowded. It had been festooned with decorations, and a makeshift folk-band had been assembled out of the crew. They saw their own soft-spoken Nubian waiter, in native clothes now, crouched over a pair of drums at the end of the room. There was another drummer, a man with a tambourine, a roleplayer; a microphone and amplifier, a pounding din. Dan and Jane stood watching a moment through the glass doors, and decided not. They turned away to the bar and bought two brandies, then carried them through to another small lounge that opened out on the sun-deck at the aft of the ship. They had expected it to be empty, but unexpectedly the Herr Professor was there.

They had noticed that he wasn’t at dinner. He seemed to miss meals sometimes, or perhaps took them alone in his cabin. He sat now in a corner with a glass and a bottle of mineral water on the table beside him, reading a book. But he looked up as they came in and gave a dry bow of the head.

Dan said, ‘The noise is too much for us.’

‘You have my sympathies. My cabin is beneath the orchestra. Tonight I am homeless.’

He explained that the company let him have a cabin away from the engines, as he was a very light sleeper; but on such gala nights he had to pay for his usual peace. Dan asked if he might buy him a brandy. The old man refused: he had a touch of indigestion. But please, they must sit with him, he was reading only to pass the time. The book had been lent him by one of his party. They could see it was in German, and he said it was a summary of the economic progress made in the D. D. R. since the division of Germany. The old man contemplated the cover for a moment, then gave them one of his delicately ambiguous smiles.

‘It is not light reading.’

‘Do you go home very often?’

He shook his head. ‘I have a sister. And my son and grandchildren. That is all now to take me back.’

‘You must find many changes.’

‘They were invited.’ He added, ‘Especially by my generation. I think we cannot complain.’

Jane asked him what his son still in Germany did.

‘He is a doctor. Like his mother and grandfather.’

‘You must be proud of him.’

‘Yes, he is a surgeon now. Of the eyes. I am told very good.’ But they sensed a tiny tinge of paternal regret in his voice: a fate accepted, but not quite welcomed.