Tales of Freedom (7 page)

It had been a dreamy day of rich sunlight.

The Clock

IT TOOK PLACE
in the Bois du Boulogne, on a sombre moonlit night. We stood in a clearing among the chestnut trees. We were all in eighteenth-century costume.

The moment arrived. The duellists stood opposite one another, with their pistols primed. Then the most unlikely thing happened. The man whose second I was, whom I partly knew, suddenly cried out. He pointed at something in the midriff of his enemy. We looked to see what troubled him. We saw a large, round, shining clock about his enemy’s waist. He wore it like the buckle of a belt. The numbers were black against the luminous dial.

My acquaintance was mesmerised by the clock. He was transfixed by it. He kept pointing. Then he began gibbering. The clock had somehow poisoned his mind. I said:

‘For God’s sake, old chap. It’s only a clock.’

‘Look at it!’ he whispered. ‘It’s fiendish!’

‘Take your mind off it,’ I said.

‘That’s impossible! It’s an abomination!’

His enemy stood impassively with his second. They gazed at us. My acquaintance fell apart before my eyes. He was utterly unable to rid his mind of the clock. I hadn’t wanted the damn duel anyway. I had no idea what its cause had been, and was never told. It remained a secret between the two enemies. I had got roped into it by honour, false friendship, and favours I owed. Damn the favours one owes. They lead one into other people’s hell.

There was nothing anyone could do. My acquaintance had succumbed to an appalling paralysis. His enemy had been patient. Night darkened, and then dawn slowly appeared. His enemy had waited many hours for my acquaintance to recover. He waited silently, like a monument, a stone statue of some disdainful Roman god.

My acquaintance, however, became less than human with the agonising passing of time. Shivering, muttering about the infernal nature of the clock, my acquaintance had a mental breakdown as dawn broke. Eventually we had to carry him from the middle of the clearing to the waiting coach. It had been
understood
that there would be only one coach, the loser being presumed to have been killed.

We had to take the coach. The enemy was magnanimous. He was silent. He was as implacable as a marble figure on a plinth at night in a strange city. He and his allies simply stood there in the gathering dawn, with the luminous clock brilliant about his solar plexus.

My acquaintance never recovered. We took him to a hospital. Then his hallucinations began. Then his madness.

I visited him often. Whenever he saw me he asked about the clock. I was evasive in my answers. Then I stopped going to see him. He was infecting me with his instability. It doesn’t take much, does it, to unhinge a man. Especially if, in a clearing, at night, under a moonlit sky, a mind can’t unfix itself from a symbol.

Now I go through life not fixing my mind on anything, or anyone. There is a sort of freedom in this.

Music for a
Ruined
City

1

I HAVE BEEN
wandering around in a bombed-out city. I have seen devastated streets, broken bridges, flattened houses. The glass fronts of shops were all smashed, their goods looted. The commercial district was a mass of rubble. I saw piano shops with mangled instruments. Everything was in chaos.

I saw unforgettable things. I saw a community stoned to death in their sleep. This happened on the top of a multi-storeyed building. They were asleep in their white tents and people of a different sect came with rocks and stoned them to death while they dreamt.

2

Then there was that lovely building where a crowd of mourners were gathered outside. An Arabian bishop was on the floor, weeping. When he got up he held out a piece of yellow-coloured glass, and pointed. On the floor about him were blue and green and yellow fragments. Then all became clear. It was a Christian church.
The
whole church front had been made sublime with stained glass depicting images of the saints and cameos from the New Testament. The church was in ruins, the stained glass shattered. It was only when I was shown a picture of how beautiful it used to be that I realised the magnitude of the damage.

3

It was a city under occupation. The white presence was resented by the people. Nothing worked. I had gone to a makeshift government office with an insider. Two white men were in front of me. We were all supposed to be searched and had to leave our passports and be given tokens. The two white men went through and weren’t searched and didn’t have to leave their passports. When I went past, however, the officials pounced on me. Somewhat irritated, I threw my passport on the table. To the smirking official, I said:

‘You complain about being in a state of occupation and yet you waive your rules for your occupiers. But you treat me like I’m a criminal. One rule for those who bomb you, another rule for the rest. Hypocrites!’

I took my token and left. I was annoyed, but my annoyance freed me from illusion.

4

And yet I could not detach myself from the destruction wrought on this ancient city. Its famous museum had been plundered of its timeless artefacts, its libraries robbed of priceless books and manuscripts. Districts were terrorised by newly unleashed gangs. There was an uprising of religious sects. Homes were raided. People were set upon, and massacred. A culture was in free fall, in meltdown, descending into inferno. There was anarchy and hopelessness everywhere. And yet I glimpsed a certain resilience in the people, a stoical fatalism.

5

These are journeys in the hyper-realism of a suffering city. Wherever I go, I see veiled mothers in black, wailing. They cry out the stories of their dead children, or their missing husbands.

6

But somewhere in this tragic city an orchestra strikes up. A performance of music begins. Strains of a classical air seep out from the fabulous concert hall, one of the few buildings untouched by the seven-day bombardment. No one knows who the people are within. They listen to music that enchants and cleanses the spaces of suffering. There time stands suspended, and a pure joy percolates out from the orchestra, out and up, in a spiral, to the sky and the stars. This is a music alien to all around it, to the bombed-out city, but casting a spell, changing what it touches. Such beauty can be a denial and an affront to all this tragedy.

But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.

7

I go on wandering among the broken columns, witnessing the faces of mute grief, with Mozart in my heart, like ice over a wound.

The Unseen
Kingdom

1

THERE IS A
fair, which takes place in the south of France, where books are treated like roses. Writers are rarely invited to attend.

Books are displayed on long tables, with their pages open, and with crushed flowers on their open pages. The books scent the air with gentle dreams. There is indeed a mysterious mood about the place, a dawn-coloured enchantment, on account of the open books.

The lady who runs the fair wears a silk scarf and is a lady of great devotion and tenderness. She is much loved in the community of booksellers and publishers. She goes about unobtrusively, wandering among the stalls as between paths in a delightful garden of many-coloured flowers. She is responsible for the books, the attendances, the display of rare illuminated manuscripts, and she does it all with exquisite taste.

The main focus of interest this season are the Lewis Carroll books. There are many items being shown for the first time. It is a
charming
collection of manuscripts, photographs and pages of correspondence. One of his family’s descendants is attending, to lend an extra quaintness to the festival.

This year, also, an immaculate fraud has been perpetrated. A delicate scandal scents this rarefied air of books. No one talks about it openly. It is there, floating about in the charmed mood, and only the lady who organises the fair appears not to know about this delicious scandal. It seems that a writer has been rigged into winning the prestigious festival prize with forged nomination letters. It seems this forgery has put everyone under suspicion. A secret investigation is launched. All the publishers co-operate.