Judith (20 page)

I said ‘I had no political affiliations in England.'

I thought I might have said – I was a liaison officer with the camp of the Assyrians.

The village began some way from the Garden. Houses spread back from the road; there were paths between them and trees. Dogs and children stood and watched; they were like things seen in a painting.

Shastri said ‘Would you like to see some jewellery?'

There was a table by the side of the road with benches beside
it and bottles of soft drinks. Segments of water melons were covered with pips and flies. I thought I might say to Shastri – What do you want from this? Do you imagine I do not think you make things up?

I said ‘No I don't want to see any jewellery.'

‘My uncle has good ivory and tortoiseshell at his house.'

A man came up and spoke to Shastri in their language. The boys in their white shirts and black trousers had stopped at the far side of the road. They formed a little group, as if of conspirators, facing inwards.

I thought – Do you not know I am a gunfighter in the camp of the Assyrians?

Shastri said ‘Would you like a drink?'

I sat down. The boys on the other side of the road were passing round cigarettes. I thought – Perhaps he has some sort of bet with them.

Beyond the stalls and buildings at the far side of the road there was a tower – a squat flat-topped pyramid shape of blackish stone rising above the roof-tops. There were bulges and scrolls and weeds growing out of the stone. I thought – I will go to this temple. I have been with my father to so many temples! That is where hags sometimes dismember a child.

He said ‘Have I offended you?'

I said ‘Can we look at that temple?'

I got up and walked across the road. He came after me. I thought – It is your fault. This sort of stuff is so awful; so awful.

I went past the group of Indian boys. Shastri called after me ‘Won't you have a drink?'

There was a path going between the wooden buildings in the direction of the temple. To one side of this path, hung across the entrance to a courtyard, was a banner painted red with lines of the local lettering across it and underneath this – PNR PARTY OF NATIONAL RESURGENCE.

I thought – You mean, there really is a political meeting?

– This is where we were going?

– Those boys are shy: they don't speak English?

The courtyard beyond the banner seemed to be empty.

I thought – Well, I don't know. I am sorry.

The entrance to the temple was further on, at the other side of the path. There was a stone god in a niche beside it with his head as if chewed by animals.

I went into an open courtyard. Shastri stopped to take off his shoes. I thought – You think you know why you do things? Well, what is the circle of good and evil?

There were thistles and dried-up flowers between slabs of stone. The temple was like something set together with huge loose bricks from a child's toy-box. It was small; no more than ten or fifteen metres high. I thought – It is black because of fires or bird-shit; or is bird-shit used for fuel?

Shastri had followed me into the courtyard. There were clapped-out gods in niches round the walls. The entrance to the central tower was narrow between two upright stones – like a tomb, or a gap between teeth.

God's voice, dropping down from the loudspeakers, had said – Sex is not a sin: it is just stupid.

Birds flew out of the entrance to the tower. There was the smell of bats. I thought – Temples are places where birds seem like bats.

Shastri said ‘Please! will you come to my uncle's house?'

I went in to the inner sanctum of the temple. At first I could see nothing because I myself was in the pathway of the light. Then I moved to one side and there was a small square chamber like a tomb: of course, there was nothing in it: is it that there never is? Then the light from the door was blocked again as Shastri came in. When he stood behind me he put his hands on my shoulders. He seemed to be trembling. I thought – Oh God, there are those stories in books, in films, about this. There was a further alcove, or niche, at the far side of the holy of holies. I thought – It might be a cupboard where something quite practical is stored: such as a winding sheet, or an angel. When I moved towards it I blocked the light again; when I moved to one side I could not see within. I thought – So you wait, do you, until your eyes become accustomed to the dark.

Shastri put his hands again, then his head, on my shoulder. I said ‘I can't come to your uncle's house.' He said ‘Why not?' I said ‘I can't.' He said ‘People do it the whole time in the Garden.'

When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw that inside the alcove there was one of those tall stone domed things like an enormous penis: it was streaked with what looked like flesh and blood; perhaps flower-petals and porridge. I thought – Ah, you old hags, will you one day have done with children!

I put a hand out and laid it on the stone penis.

Shastri said ‘Don't do that!'

I said ‘Why not?' Then – ‘All right we can make love here.'

Shastri said ‘I don't want to make love here!'

I said ‘Why not?'

Shastri said ‘I want friendship!'

I thought – Dear God, friendship!

Then – You mean it is I who still make up these stories? Or – I want to be on top?

So who am I writing to: you? is it you?

One is writing to someone or other, is one not?

One does not tell everything in a letter. (You call these letters!) Sometimes one comes out better: sometimes worse. Do you think I told everything in that letter to Bert?

Did you go back to that red-haired girl after that morning? (I mean you!) Did you know her already? You seemed to be getting on quite well with her.

You and I understood something that morning, didn't we?

You were not the brown dog: you were the faun.

Outlandish things do happen, don't they: when on the edge of – what? – a bed?

When I said I wanted to give up I did not mean, of course, that I wanted to give up –

You said – No one will tell. No one will know.

I thought – I will know!

You meant, of course, about that body on the pavement.

You were so good to me: I thought that one day what has happened between us, would happen.

You can say, can you, about evil and good, that the one does not happen without the other?

But this is what words are not good at.

How are you? You will look after yourself?

Perhaps I will come back and look after you.

I think this now: I thought this when I was in the Garden.

There were times when I was in the Garden, yes, when I did go with the woman with fair hair who was like a cave in a mountain: she would come and stand in the doorway of the workshop or kitchen where I worked; then I would follow her; we would go to the annexe of God's house. She still did not speak much: she was half-Rumanian, half-Italian, I think: she was one of the women responsible for the day-to-day running of the Garden. All the practical running of the Garden God handed over to women. There was a connection (I mean literally!) between her annexe and God's house.

Well, yes, it was as if she were the cave and I were the elephant in the mountain. She would He on her side and she would accommodate me as if I were (you know why there is this need for metaphors?) piglets, a whole brood: she would raise an arm here, a leg there (well, yes, the need is because the point of the thing is that it is going on slightly elsewhere) and it was, indeed, as if I had been starved of minerals. Perhaps they had been taken away from my mother when she had been in that Japanese prison camp and I had not had her – what – tinned milk, touch, taste, sound, smell? (I must forgive my mother.) Was it this that was going on elsewhere? But here, now, was not this body in the half-dark like the roof of a cave; like salt and wine; like nectar.

Perhaps there is not the same battle between women because there has already been (or should have been?) a circle: while the child feeds, the mother cleans; lifts it with her tongue: you have seen this? God can be still learning.

You do not talk about this because the words get it wrong.
What is wonder? What is taste, touch, smell?

Perhaps I had never known about sensuality before: the girl with the wound in her throat is rather like a doll.

My friend who was like Lilith would say – You come alive, my little English girl: oh little bird in bush, who made you?

Before this I had been wondering, had I not, if I would stay in the Garden: could I be sure I was not playing with shadows even when the sun came up each morning in the enormous hall? There has to be some tap-root down into the dark – does there not? This woman had taken me in: I was happy devouring her. Alchemists, in their search for minerals, were hoping for miracles: they used minerals as symbols of the connections between themselves and the outside world. I found minerals, miracles, as lures that were bringing me home. When I was with this woman who was like Lilith in the hot afternoons it was as if there were being made tangible the things in the Garden that might otherwise seem to be going on elsewhere: the connections between space and time: love, birth, growth, death: the just-this-ness of things, which is like gravity.

One day when I had been some months in the Garden I thought I would use my day off to walk inland to the bridge over the river. I had been several times by boat to the town across the estuary: this town was comparatively modern, built around the harbour. But in the hills there were the remains of an old town built by the Jesuits and the Franciscans in the seventeenth century: you could get to this up a track across the river.

The bridge was three or four miles beyond the village – a single span like a rainbow. The rainbow was of steel and concrete: I thought – God's covenant with men was that he would not destroy them, not that they would not destroy themselves. The other side of the river the road turned back to the new town by the harbour; the track went up into the hills. I walked between trees with huge roots like the feet of a monster; the trunks stuck up like legs; the body was far above with gaps in the green like stars. I thought – None of this will live, if men destroy themselves?

It took another hour to walk from the bridge to the old town in the jungle; it was a hot day; I was tired. I wondered why the Christians had built their churches so far from the sea (the remains of the old town consisted of four or five enormous churches): was it because they wanted to feel safe from marauders, or did they feel that their huge churches would look ridiculous by the sea?

When you come across the site of the old town it is like coming across a stage-set. Over the brow of a hill, round a corner (you have been passing the roots of trees wrestling with fallen stones) you see just there, popped up as it were in front of you, the façade of an enormous church: the church is in the baroque style; it is three or four storeys high, with scrolls and pediments and arches. This church is in fact one of four set round a central cobbled square; the square is as big as a parade ground; there is almost nothing left of the town except these four huge churches and the square. But it is this first church that springs up at you out of the jungle. It seems to be nothing to do with jungle; to have been dumped there by some film people.

Do you know those stage-sets, façades, that people built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were to do with the preservation of memory? I mean people did actually construct, at this time, theatres, or models of theatres, to help with the problem of how to remember; I mean you could not then easily check with written or printed words: people found it easiest to hold things in the mind if they could make up some story or drama. So they constructed these stage-sets: I mean not only in their minds but apparently actually, literally, complete with doorways, windows, porticoes, pillars, niches; so that in and out of these they could get people, objects, coming and going – and also in their minds: so that like this they could remember what they wanted. But then – how dependent humans are on making up stories! Did they remember this: I mean remember not only what they wanted to remember, but how much they were limited by their dependence on stories? The huge façades of churches are always, I suppose, to do with the preservation of stories.

I stopped at some distance from this façade – a high pediment with scrolls like sea-shells at the top; round windows like eyes on the second floor; rectangles with pillars in the middle; an arched doorway at ground-level with heraldic decorations. I did not know what I wanted from my memory: what figures might emerge: Agamemnon and Clytemnestra? my father and my mother? myself as Electra waiting to get my revenge on – but whom? both, for being so much concerned with dying? There was in fact a figure standing within the arched doorway of the church looking up: he was studying, as tourists do, the decoration on the portico. But this was ridiculous. I mean, what did really happen in the seventeenth century? Did they hire actors to perform just the stories they wanted to make real? I had had the impression, you see (but was not this inevitable?), that I knew who this figure was in the doorway of the church: but could not almost anything be possible, given the likelihood of these enormous façades in the jungle. I thought I might go across the square and look at one of the other churches first: I had got out of the way of talking to people, whoever they might be. The figure was that of a man: he wore a tweed jacket in this hot climate; he had short legs. Well, who does this remind you of? Or you; or you. I walked towards the other side of the square. I had the impression that he might have turned and was watching me. Of course, he might have thought I was popping up like some actor in his theatre of memory. The man of whom I was reminded was, of course, one of those who ran
Die Flamme
magazine: he had short legs: I had last seen him, I supposed, bobbing backwards and forwards at the
Die Flamme
party: he was called Eccleston. I thought – Why on earth did people want to have theatres of memory? you mean, they liked being reminded about the boring trouble they took destroying themselves? The side-wall of the church that I was approaching across the square was like a fortress: I thought – Memories could take refuge here; you could never blot them out: they would defend themselves with boiling oil and arrows.