Pascali's Island (5 page)

Before long the muezzin will be calling, reminding us that it is better to pray than sleep. I shall eat the olives and bread and salami which I managed to abstract from last night's supper (wrapping them in my napkin under cover of the table). While I am eating, I shall watch the distances of the sea define themselves, and the islands take shape – a process which never fails to please me, Excellency, giving the same feeling art gives, that this could assume no other form, happen no other way. Then I shall sleep (behind locked doors), and afterwards continue my report. I must omit nothing. Events must be dealt with as they occur. Otherwise I shall fall behind, and then death will overtake me, like this dawn, with something possibly vital, possibly the vital clue, left unrecorded. I cannot allow this to happen. I will not leave this room, I will not expose myself to new experience, until I have completed my account of last night. When they come for me everything will be up to date, up to the minute.

I have just seen him, Excellency. Almost immediately after waking. I was sitting here at the window but had not resumed writing. He came down from the far end of the bay, towards me, walking along the shore, near the sea. He passed below me and on, past the café, where I could no longer follow him. Sand-coloured shirt with short sleeves, trousers darker. Sun-reddened arms. Brown hat with a soft brim, pulled low over his eyes against the sun. He walked steadily, head up, swinging his arms very slightly. Where has he been at this hour? A morning stroll along the shore? There is something intent, fanatical almost, about the way he walks.

Why does he want my services as an interpreter? He referred to this a second time, while we were having dinner. Again, however, vaguely. 'We must have a chat some time,' he said. 'You were kind enough to offer… My Turkish is not really up to it, you know, when one is dealing with the authorities…' His eyes looking meanwhile at some point beyond me – presumably where his own purposes were visible to him.

This was later, in the midst of an argument with Herr Gesing, the German commercial agent. At first, for the few minutes after rejoining them, I was so possessed by the strangeness of the objects I had found in Mister Bowles's room that I did not register what was being said around me. That strangeness possesses me again now. Revolver, head, notebook: violence, beauty, the meticulous recording of obscure facts. Forgive me for thus crudely drawing your attention to symbolic parallels, but you will see how once again this combination identifies me with Mister Bowles, links us together. As yet I cannot understand this, but persistence and cunning will make it clear – if I live, and continue to enjoy your patience, Excellency.

'Come on, Basil, tell us, why aren't you wearing your fez this evening?'

This is Lydia speaking to me now, in a slightly malicious, teasing voice. She wants me to sing for my supper.

'Surely one is allowed a fetish or two?' I look round the table, smiling. The fact is I have worn a fez on one or two occasions lately. Obeying a certain compulsion, Excellency. I found it years ago, in the Turkish quarter. It was early in the morning, I had been writing most of the night. There it was lying against the wall. Almost new. I tried it on – it fitted me perfectly. I took it home with me. That was five years ago. Now, during these last few weeks, I have felt compelled to wear it from time to time. Dignified headgear, but hated by the Greeks, of course. 'If we cannot have a fetish or two, where is liberty to be found?' I said, smiling at Herr Gesing, who did not smile back.

More than ever this evening like a dropsical hawk, Herr Gesing, with his thin aquiline nose, full cheeks, small heavy-lidded eyes and above all the shape of his head, which is broad, and quite flat behind, falling almost sheer from crown to nape.

Lydia spoke softy to Mister Bowles, and they smiled at each other. Evidently getting on very well. I was briefly visited by the suspicion – occupational I suppose – that this particular gathering, though apparently fortuitous, had been long-planned. Mister Bowles with the glamour of the newcomer still on him, the glamour of someone who may be bringing changes, as Dionysus did to the people of Thebes; Lydia with her trips to Europe, her knowledge of the latest thing, her money – which does not, I think, come from selling paintings; Gesing and his undefined commercial activities.

I ordered uvetzaki and felt my mouth beginning to fill with saliva.

'How is trade?' I asked the German.

He looked up from his plate of fried squid and raised his thick eyebrows with an effect, quite accidental, of benevolence.

'The possibilities,' he said, in his halting English, 'the possibilities we are still… exploring. Exploring, ja.' His voice has a purring note, made from deep in the throat. He looked at our faces for a moment or two. 'In the meantime,' he said, 'I enjoy this beautiful island, and the light, this unique light which so many sensitive observers… Of Goethe and Wincklemann I think now, among many -'

'Many lesser lights,' I said. No one seemed amused by this.

' "Who lives in this light, lives truly," ' Herr Gesing said. 'Hugo Von Hofmannsthal it was, who said that. To nurse illusions, in this clarity of the light, it is not possible.'

All Germans, you will notice, Excellency. All the people he mentioned were Germans. This Teutonic blandness annoyed me slightly. I saw a chance to provoke some less guarded speaking, also to interrupt the cultural flow.

'It was a compatriot of yours,' I said, 'Gerhart Hauptmann actually, who was attacking the Greek spirit not very long ago. He was quoted in the Mercure as saying that the Greek tradition was anaemic. That was his word. He said it needs new blood. New Blood. That was his phrase.'

I saw the Englishman look up suddenly at Herr Gesing.

'Perhaps he meant German blood,' I said, taking care, however, to preserve a smiling face. My uvetzaki arrived at this point, and I began on it at once.

'It is not typical,' Herr Gesing said, with no change in his manner. 'We Germans see in this landscape light as an expression of Geist -'

'Spirit,' I said.

'Spirit, ja. Spirit and light together… zusammen verbunden.' He brought his hands together slowly and linked the fingers. 'So,' he said. 'Many have spoken of this… Rilke, it is Rilke who makes Apollo high among the gods, the god whose whole being in light finds expression.'

'That's all very well,' Mister Bowles said. 'But what are you really after here?' He spoke in his usual blurting voice, as if speech came as a release from some tension or struggle.

'After?' the German said.

There was a silence, rather embarrassing. Naturally, we have all wondered. I have tried on several occasions, by discreet questioning, to find out from Izzet Effendi, the Pasha's land-agent, what game the German in playing, whether he has some special influence locally. But so far without success. It is certain that he is on some sort of terms with the Pasha. He goes there, to the house. No doubt you will have had the police reports.

Herr Gesing had continued eating, moving his jaws slowly. Mister Bowles showed no sign of embarrassment. His eyes rested steadily on the German.

'After?' Herr Gesing said again. He had not understood the question. I feel it to be characteristic of Mister Bowles, even on this short acquaintance with him, that he should have been so blunt and idiomatic, making no concessions to the foreigner. (English prepositional usage is a great stumbling block, Excellency. I myself get it wrong sometimes.)

Hastily I swallowed my mouthful of mutton. 'He means,' I said, 'what particular openings or opportunities are you looking for, here on our beautiful island?'

Herr Gesing raised his eyebrows. 'The general possibilities,' he said, slowly and carefully, 'we are at present 'Exploring?' I suggested.

'Exploring, yes.'

'I'll tell you what I think, old boy,' Mister Bowles said. ' Germany should make it absolutely clear where she stands on the question of the minorities before she looks for trade here, or anywhere else in the Empire.'

The German raised the empty wine bottle. 'Bitte,' he called to Biron. 'Mehr Wein.'

'The Kaiser must be well aware of what is happening to the Christian minorities,' Mister Bowles said. 'Just as much aware as the Porte is.'

'This is politics,' Herr Gesing said. He wiped his mouth and repeated more loudly, 'Politics.'

I glanced around. No one seemed to be taking any particular interest in our conversation. Still, one has to be careful. There are spies and informers everywhere nowadays.

'You turn a blind eye to it,' Mister Bowles said.

'Blind eye?'

'He means that you ignore it,' I said. 'Trade we are interested in,' Herr Gesing said. 'Trade. And culture. Politics, no.'

'Out of your own mouth.' Mister Bowles nodded his head in solemn triumph.

'Was meinen Sie?'

'You keep them separate, those two? Politics and trade.'

'Natürlich.' Herr Gesing looked round the table, spreading his hands. 'They are separate things, nicht wahr?'

'That is the big difference between our two countries,' Mister Bowles said. 'Our policy, British policy, is shaped by ideals. We protested at the Armenian massacres, for instance. We lost trade as a result, of course. Germany said nothing. In fact, at the height of the atrocities, your Kaiser sent the Sultan an intimate birthday present, a signed photograph of himself.'

I wonder how you felt on receiving that, Excellency? Typical piece of narcissism. Still it is true that since then Germany has lined her pockets in the Near East. You will have noticed that Mister Bowles, just as earlier in his comment about motherhood, had taken up a strongly moral position. However, he seemed sincere enough. It was difficult not to admire his saeva indignatio.

'As a result, Germany got the Baghdad Railway concession,' he said.

Herr Gesing was smiling. 'Ideals?' he said. 'It was not about the massacres the English were protesting. It was the loss of the eight per cent from the Ottoman Loan Company.'

'Nonsense,' Mister Bowles said. He was looking flushed.

'Listen to me. You must these moral categories transcend. We are moving towards the coming age. Like a great music. Like a symphony. You must hear all the music together. If not, you have only discords.'

'Children bayoneted,' Mister Bowles said heatedly.

'That is a discord.'

'Women and girls raped and mutilated.'

'On discord you are dwelling.'

'Men with their testicles cut off and stuffed into their mouths.'

'Discord, discord,' Herr Gesing said.

I allowed my attention to drift somewhat. I felt comfortably replete. We were half-way through the third bottle of wine now – the lambent, amber wine of the island. However, in spite of this well-being, my mind began to fill slowly with thoughts of the bayoneted children, disembowelled before they could walk; the clubbed Armenians bleeding their lives away into gutters. All the rapes and mutilations and multilingual agonies of your possessions, Excellency. Together with the gratification they afford to the inflictors. Accents of pain and brutal jubilation, mingling and arising in one great vaporous exhalation. The world steams with it… In Herr Gesing's discourse the wolf lies down with the sheep: Nietzsche red in tooth and claw, bedded with gentle Spinoza. Passing discord, ultimate harmony. 'The knowledge of evil is an inadequate knowledge.' God has no knowledge of evil. Those pleading in vain, the dispossessed, the violated… Even the crucified man with his half-open eyes and lolling discoloured tongue. His misfortune is not that of the universe as a whole… But it is, it is, Excellency. Harmonies are not composed in that way. Old friend Spinoza, why do I find your views, that have comforted me so long, so suddenly and so totally unacceptable? Can you not see the steam, Excellency, can you not see it from the windows of your palace? Perhaps not, perhaps you cannot see through your windows… The steam condenses into blood.

'You are absolutely right. A country's foreign policy is the expression of its moral nature.'

Lydia, saying things she does not really believe, in order to support Mister Bowles. With a kind of despair, remembered rather than felt, almost impersonal, like a summation of all my experience of loss, the rancidness of the detached observer, I take in the rich pallor of her face again, its severity mitigated, made strangely ambiguous by the heavy-lidded eyes, the curving smile. Her shoulders square, slight, under the clinging material of the dress, with its fashionable high neck. I summon to mind once again, with the patience of the habitual fantasist, her thirty-five-year-old body, naked as I have never seen it, luminous, lovingly supple. A body often petted and caressed, and the more precious for it, the more valuable for all that cherishing} those ardent traceries of hands and lips… For some reason, that smooth marble head in Mister Bowles's luggage comes into my mind.

'The values of that country registered in action. Like a work of art. A sculpture, for example.'

It is all for him. The turns of her head, the movements of her arms, from which the wide sleeves fall away to reveal slender, pale-haired forearms. All for him. Gesing, I think, saw something of this: perhaps it was what had made him so inclined to argue. Mister Bowles himself appeared to notice nothing.

'Morality, religion, pah!' Herr Gesing said. He hit the table lightly with his fist. 'Towards the realities we must look, and the future age,' he said.

'Future age, eh?' Mister Bowles seemed somewhat dashed by this burst of rhetoric. He remained silent for some time. I heard Lydia ask the German what he meant by future age and I heard his reply, delivered with confident promptitude: 'The coming age on nationalism will be founded. Nationalism, military organisation, the competition of trade.'

A good deal of discord there, by the sound of it. No mention of culture, either. Presumably Herr Gesing will divest himself of that in the lobby of the coming age. Lydia and Herr Gesing went on talking. I was about to break in to voice my horror, when Mister Bowles turned to me and in low tones once again spoke of the possibility of my acting as interpreter for him. But again in the vaguest terms.