Declare (45 page)

“Because of the
unrelenting
Christian instruction. Really! They did j-just k-keep
on
at us about Original Sin, and our individual s-sins, and how each of us m-must either submit to k-k-Christ, surrender our wills to His, or s-suffer the eternal wrath of God. I dee-dee-
denied
all of it. I was an atheist even then—though, thanks
to my f-father, I was an atheist who was m-mortally afraid of graveyards, and of the Roman Catholic s-sacraments, and of tall storm clouds and th-thunder at twilight.”

He looked out at the sea. The red sun had sunk below the horizon, leaving glowing golden terraces of cloud hung across the whole western half of the sky, but no cumulus clouds were rearing their shoulders and shaggy heads out there. The ring of seagulls was closer, though—a quarter of a mile away, halfway between the rocks and the cliff highway now.

“We should g-go inside somewhere,” he said nervously. “Get something to d-drink.”

“They’re only birds. And no microphone can detect our talk out here. When were you actually inducted into the Soviet service? You say your father was your recruiter in an unspecific sense—who recruited you specifically?”

“Recruited. Into a t-t-
treasonous cause
, right? You resent that, the fact that s-secretly I was an agent of communism all along. H-how old were you in 1931?”

“Older than most my age.”

“Well, exactly, your p-parents were k-killed by fascist monar-chists, the right-wing C-C-Catholic lot, isn’t that so?—in Madrid, when King Alfonso fled Spain; and a few y-y-years after that you were an orphan precociously working as a wireless t-telegrapher among the Loyalists. You see
I
r-r-remember everything about us. But in England in 1931 the b-betrayed Labour Party was v-voted out, and a coco—a Conservative National Government!—was voted in. You sh-should sympathize—the common p-people had been viciously fooled by sin-sin-
cynical
propaganda, and anyone could see that mere d-democracy could never lead to real p-peace.”

He realized that he was frowning when the bandage over his fore-head tightened, and he wondered, Do I still even believe that? Really?

“And
so,”
he went on, thrusting the thought away, “when another Cambridge student, this Guy B-B-
Burgess
fellow, approached me about d-doing s-secret work for Mother Russia, I was—
amenable.
Burgess had me tr-travel to Austria in the autumn of ’33, when I was
twenty-one years old; and with my B-British p-passport—and Cambridge accent!—I was able to be a useful network courier, c-carrying p-packages from Vienna to Prague and Budapest. In ’34 I was s-sent back to work in England by one of the great old European illegals—he was a dedicated Communist and a Cheka officer, but he had been a C-C-Catholic p-priest before the horrors of the first war made him lose his f-faith, and when he was d-drunk he used to weep about the Cheka work he’d done, imposing collectivization on the Russian f-farms—”

“ ‘I could not bear the women wailing, when we lined the villagers up to be shot,’ ” said Elena in a quiet voice, clearly quoting. “ ‘I simply could not bear it.’ ”

And Philby was suddenly nauseated. He leaned on the cliff railing and stared at the circling birds in the gathering twilight. “You—
knew
Theo Maly?” he croaked.

“I met him in Paris, in 1937.” Philby could barely hear her voice through the gauze over his ears. Her shoes shifted audibly on the pavement, and when she went on it was in a stronger voice, and she again seemed to be quoting someone: “Thistles, weeds—plants. Did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?”

“Jesus!” burst out Philby, so loudly that a European tourist couple stared at him as they wheeled a perambulator along the sidewalk. “Yes,
my dear,”
he went on more quietly. “Yes, he did m-mention the
amomon
root to me—right at the end, when he had received his s-summons to Moscow and he knew he was g-going there to be g-given the, the
schuss.
And in fact he did tell me he was going by way of Paris.”

“The
Stirnschuss,”
said Elena. “The bullet in the forehead.”

Philby shifted to look around at her, and she was touching her own forehead, under the white bangs.

“Yes,” Philby said, “th-that was the word he used. We were drinking in a London p-pub in early ’37, and he t-told me, ‘They will kill me if I go to Moscow—Stalin won’t any longer continue to employ an ex-priest. But if I don’t go, they will simply send someone to kill me here; and I don’t want to give them the vindication of any disobedience on my part.’ And then he—he said that, as a p-parting
gift, he could offer me…
eternal life.
When I asked him what he m-meant, he explained that a C-C-Catholic p-priest can n-never abdicate his sacramental powers, and he offered to b-baptize me right there at the table, and then—he was drunk—to hear my c-c-
confession
, absolve me of my s-
sins
, if I would repent and have a f-firm purpose of amending them, and finally to order some bread and wine so that he could consecrate them and give me the”—he paused, and spoke carefully—“the Communion, the Eucharist.”

“Ah, God,” said Elena softly, taking off her sunglasses.

“Pitiful to see him b-break
down
so, at the end,” agreed Philby. “I told him, ‘No, th-thank you’—civilly enough, for he was an old f-friend, and drunk—and then he sighed, and said he could in that case offer me a more p-p-
profane
sort of eternal life.”

The seagulls had been joined by pigeons from the cliffs, and the two sorts of birds were flying together in a wheel against the sky, which had lost its gold now and showed only the colors of blood and steel. Philby touched his chest, where Feisal’s diamond hung on a chain under his shirt.

“There is apparently a k-kind of plant,” he said slowly, “like a thistle, that g-grows at remote spots in the Holy Land. And you and I, my dear, have each seen enough of the sh-shameful supernatural to be at l-l-least ho-ho-
open-minded
to the idea that some specimens of this plant are
inhabited
, by the old entities. Maly said that when the r-rebel angels f-fell at the beginning of the w-world, some weren’t quite bad enough to rate
Hell
, perhaps weren’t developed or c-complete enough to have fully assented to the rebellion. In any case, they were truncated, compressed, c-condemned to live forever unconsciously as a k-kind of thistle—immortal still, in the a-a-
aggregate
at least, but on a sub-sentient level. They can be awakened, b-briefly, by a certain p-primordial, antediluvian rhythm, something s-similar to what the old illegals and the Rote Kapelle called
les parasites.”

The wheeling seagulls had disappeared in the darkness below the cliff at his feet. Low tide, he thought vaguely. They’ll be feeding.

“And if a p-person awakens one of these vegetation-bound angels,” he went on, “and then eats it with the p-proper
sacramentals
,
sugar and garlic and l-liquor and such, that p-person will share in the angel’s immortality, will n-never grow old or suffer f-fatal injury or illness. My father had known something of this—in the Gilgamesh story, a g-god tells the man Upanishtim to build a boat and take into it ‘the seed of all living creatures,’ and Upanishtim and his family do it, and s-survive the flood—and long afterward, Upanishtim gives Gilgamesh a th-thorny plant that will restore youth. But b-before Gilgamesh can take it home to his people, an old s-s-
snake!
—comes out of a well!—and eats the plant, and immediately c-casts off its old skin and returns, y-young again, to the well. So the plant w-w-worked as promised, but Gilgamesh d-didn’t get it.”

“Maly
did
talk to me about this!” exclaimed Elena. She went on, almost to herself, “Oh, I think he did; I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.” She looked up at Philby, her eyes gleaming in the light from the hotels across the street. “I was only twelve, but Maly said that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep her and Adam away from the
other
tree, the Tree of Life, which—”

“Who’s that?”
Philby shouted.

He had grabbed her arm with his left hand, and with his right he was pointing at the taller of the two rocks out in the bay—for he had just noticed a silhouetted figure standing in the meadow on the inaccessible top. It was far too remote for him to be able to tell if it was a man or a woman… but one of its arms was waving. It was beck-oning.

“Don’t move,” he added in a whisper, for with a sound like sudden rain the birds now swept up from the abyss below the cliff and were circling low over Elena and himself—the pigeons and gulls made no cries, but the flutter of their wings was like rushing banners, and Philby was now aware of an invisible third person here. Had the third person drawn the attention of the birds, or of the thing that animated the birds?

Philby’s chest was suddenly cold. Is that thing aware that I’m trying to beg off, here? he thought. Trying to forsake the old covenant?

The tourists along the cliff rail had been startled when he shouted, and now they hurried away as the low-flying pigeons and seagulls did not disperse—and Philby became aware of the ringing of a telephone.

Hatif
, he thought breathlessly—the call from the dead at night, foretelling another death—but where is it? He glanced at the figure out on the rock, fearful that
it
might be flying toward them through the twilight; but it was still there where he had first seen it, still beckoning.

Rocking into cautious motion, Elena took two stiff steps toward a purse and a couple of abandoned toys that a woman had left behind on the sidewalk after snatching up her baby and hurrying away from the intrusive birds. Philby squinted at the toys and saw that one of them was a yellow plastic telephone; and then he realized that the ringing was coming from this toy.

“Don’t—
answer
it,” he croaked.

But Elena had bent down awkwardly, her white hair blown into her face by the battering breeze of the close wings, and she lifted the receiver, which was connected by a string to a plastic box with a smiling dial-face printed on it.

She held the little receiver to her ear; the mouthpiece was pressed against her cheek.

His face hot with humiliation, Philby babbled, “It will only be my w-wife, my l-last wife—she d-d-died five years ago, and she’s always c-calling me—d-don’t listen to her f-f-filth—”

“It’s—a man,” Elena said tonelessly. “I—I think I know him.” She lifted the plastic receiver, with the telephone swinging below it on the string, not connected to anything else and with no antenna, and held the impossibly speaking thing toward him, as if for an explanation.

Philby reached out—slowly, for he feared that any sudden move might provoke some kind of calamitous definition of the birds— and as he kept his eyes on the beckoning figure on the distant rock he pressed the toy receiver to his ear.

“Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events,”
said a British man’s voice from the unperforated earpiece, clearly enough for
Philby to hear through the bandages,
“wind and fire and sand-storms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are
things,
things in
motion,
and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”

The woman whose child the telephone belonged to had for several seconds now been yelling something from several yards away. “Shut her up!” yelled Philby now to Elena.

The voice in the toy had paused, as if it had heard him; then it went on,
“To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”

The speaker had not raised his voice, but at the word
death
the volume had increased, and Philby dropped the toy telephone when the abruptly loud word impacted his eardrum.

And the birds scattered away into the darkening sky, as if all released at once from invisible tethers. Philby turned awkwardly from the waist to watch as many of them as he could—he had no peripheral vision—and when he saw a Chevrolet sedan swerving in toward this cliff-side curb he whispered, “Fuck.”

But perhaps they were simply stopping because of the birds and the panicky tourists.

He was shaking from the enigmatic encounter with the animated birds and the figure on the rock and the
hatif
call, and from the ordeal of having begun at long last to confess his real career before that; he had been living on nerves and gin ever since passing his proposal to the SDECE five days ago—and he was fifty years old now and felt every conflicted day of it.

He took Elena’s elbow and led her away, toward the nearest crosswalk. “Don’t look b-back,” he said. “That’s r-rogue CIA in the Chevrolet behind us, n-not working through CIA Beirut, but sent independently by the head of their Office of Special Operations in Washington.”

Could they be here for
me?
he wondered tensely; could they be planning finally to
grab
me, kidnap me out of Beirut? Why?—why
now
, after three years of simply harassing me, and putting surveil-lance on me, and bribing the Lebanese
sûreté
to detain me from time to time for fruitless interrogation? Have they now learned about Mammalian, and the imminent Ararat expedition? Is this a pre-emptive detainment, meant to frustrate the operation I’ve for-Christ’s-sake
already decided
I cannot perform? If the Americans
arrest
me, with the intention of flying me back to Washington and publicly
trying
me for espionage against their government back in ’49 and ’50, the French will surely withdraw their offer. The SDECE might even have told Elena to kill me, if I look like getting out of the French net. She might be able to do it too. And even if she did not, I’d spend all the rest of my birthdays in an American prison. The CIA, and Hoover at the FBI, will never agree to any immunity deal. And if my Soviet handlers thought I was about to be arrested by any Western government, they would surely kill me. I am being torn to pieces by East and West. I am being torn to pieces between East and West.