The Revolt of Aphrodite (46 page)

So lying beside her thus in the darkness I found myself looking back down the long inclines of the past which curved away towards the Golden Horn and the breezes of Marmora; towards the lowering image of the Turkey I had hardly known, yet where my future had been decided for me by a series of events which some might regard as fortuitous. What a long road stretched between these two points in time and space.

Real birds sang all day in the gardens while indoors the mechanical nightingales from Vienna had to be wound up; at certain times one became aware of the beetles ticking away like little clocks behind the damascened hangings, full of dust. The corridors were full of beautifully carved chests made from strange woods—delicately scented sissu, calamander, satinwood, ebony, billian, teak or camphor.

Somewhere among the wandering paths of these old gardens
overgrown
with weeds and brush-marked by cypresses I saw the pale figure of Benedicta wandering, stiff and upright in her brocade frock, holding the hand of a nurse. How would it be possible to bring her
back here again, to my side in this cream-painted sterile room among the snows? It was a puzzle made not the less complicated by the new tenderness and shy dignity which now invested her, and which aroused my worst suspicions; I could not see how a new array of facts alone could clear the air, could exculpate her—or for that matter myself. Ironic for a scientist who cares for facts, no? We sat here side by side on the white bed eating mountain strawberries and staring at each other, trying to decipher the pages of the palimpsest. “You see,” she said slowly, staring deeply into my eyes “we have lived through these fearful experiences together, killed our own child, separated, and all without ascribing any particular value to it. It has brought us very close together so that now we can’t escape from each other any more. The numbness is wearing off—you are beginning to see that I was in love with you from the very beginning. My appeals for help were genuine; but I was in the power of Julian—a power that dates back to my early childhood. I loved him because I was afraid of him, because of all he had done to me. I was trapped between two loves, one perverse and sterile, the other which promised to open up a real world for me, if only you could see in time how truthful I was—and act on it.” Then she bowed her head like a weary doe and whispered: “It’s easy to say, I know. Nor is it fair perhaps. You were as much in Julian’s power as I was, after all, and he could have had you killed at any moment, I suppose, had he not been in doubt about losing me for ever. He took refuge from me in this strange love for that girl you call Io—and that perhaps saved us from his wrath, his fearful impotent fury which he hides so well under that calm and beautiful voice of his.” I said nothing for a long time. In my mind’s eye I saw once more those steamy gardens abandoned to desuetude, those chipped and dusty kiosks standing about waiting for guests who never came: the stern sweep of the tombs decorating the beautiful slopes of Eyub. “In the cemetery there—it was your mother’s tomb?” Benedicta nodded sadly. “She hardly enters our story. She was ill, you know. In those days syphilis, you couldn’t cure it.”

It dated back, dated right back. “Nothing could have exceeded the passionate rage and tenderness of Julian for Mother.” Here as she lay, after so very long, anchored in the crook of my arm: and talking
now softly, rapidly, unemphatically: I saw come up in my mind’s eye (beyond the golden head) the sunburnt mountains and
peninsulas
of Turkey rising in layers towards the High Taurus. “Jocas was the illegitimate one, the changeling; he was never allowed to forget it. He was ugly and hairy. Whenever he spoke my father would get up without a word and open the door into the garden to let him out. And Julian smiled, simply smiled.” Though I had never seen Julian I seemed to see very clearly that aquiline smile, the sallow satin skin, the eyes with the thick hoods of a bird of prey. I saw too the landscape of their minds, locked up together in those tumbledown seraglios; a Turkey that had been so much more than Polis with its archaic refinements. Plainland and lake and mountain, blue days closed by the conch. “There was only hate or fear for us to work on after my mother died.” Yes, it was not simply
themselves
she evoked, the tangled pattern of questions and answers their lives evoked; but more, much more, which could only find a frame of reference within the context of this brutal humble land, kneeling down like a camel in the shadow of Ararat snow-crowned. Her inner life lay with Julian, her outer with Jocas; one represented the city, the drawn bowstring of Moslem politenesses, the other the open air, the riding to falcons, the chase. Remote encampments on the rim of deserts mirrored in the clear optic of the sky: to sleep at night under the stars, balanced between the two open eternities of birth and death.

It was much more than the facts which mattered, which had shaped their peculiar destinies, it was also place. I mean I saw very clearly now the tiny cocksure figure of Merlin senior walking the bazaars dressed in his old blazer and yachting cap; high white kid boots and high collars fastened with a jewelled tie-pin: flyswish held negligently in small ringed fingers. Behind him strolled the
resplendent
kavass—the negro dressed in scarlet and brocade, carrying the drawn scimitar of his office with the blade laid back along his
forearm.
This was how it all began, with Merlin shopping for the firm, which at that time must have consisted only of a raggle-taggle of sheds and godowns full of skins or poppy or shrouds. Yes, shrouds! The Moslem custom of burying the dead without coffins but wrapped in shrouds had not passed unnoticed by that blue jay’s eye. (Was it
the little clerk Sacrapant who mentioned this?) Seven shrouds to a corpse, and in the case of the richer and more distinguished families no expense was spared to secure the most gorgeous embroidered fabrics the bazaars could offer. Old Abdul Hamid used to order hundreds of pieces of the choicest weave—China and Damascus silk. These were sent to Mecca to be sprinkled with holy water from the sacred well of Zem Zem. Thus the dead person was secured a certain translation to Jennet, the Moslem Paradise. It was not long before the caravans of Merlin carried these soft bales. But all this was at the very beginning, before Julian could say of the firm: “It has great abstract beauty, the firm, Charlock. We never touch or possess any of the products we manipulate—only the people to a certain extent. The products are merely telegrams, quotations,
symbolic
matter, that is all. If you cared for chess you could not help caring for Merlin’s.” He himself loved the game in all its variety. It is easy to see him aboard the white-winged yacht which the firm had given him, anchored upon the mirror of some Greek sound, sitting before the three transparent perspex boards in stony silence; playing three-dimensionally, so to speak. How beautifully those little Turkish warehouses had metastasised, so to speak, forming secondary cancers in the lungs, livers, hearts of the great capitals. In the long silences of Julian one saw the slow curling smoke of his cigar rise upon the moonlit sky.

“But Benedicta, all that rigmarole about them being orphans and all that….”

“My father invented that to get round some complicated Turkish legislation about inheritances, death duties.”

“But he said it with such feeling.”

“Feeling! Jocas had murder in his heart for many years against Julian. But by repressing his hatred he turned himself into a fine human being; he really did come to love Julian at last. But Julian never loved him, never could, never will. Julian only loved me. Only me.”

“And your father?”

“And my father!”

She said it with such a withering emphasis that I instantly divined the hatred between Merlin and Julian. “Julian would not let me love
him, forced me to hate him: at the end drove him out. He too had reasons, Julian.”

“Drove Merlin out?”

“Yes. As he had driven out my mother.”

In the long silence which followed I could hear her shallow breathing; but it was calm now, confident and regular. “Nash always said that real maturity should automatically mean a realised
compassion
for the world, for people. This Julian never had, only
sadness,
an enormous sadness. Nor for that matter did my father. He was a bird of prey. What was I to do between them all—with no real human contact to work upon? I dared not show my sympathies for Jocas even, hardly dared to speak to him. You know, Felix, they were all killers by temperament. I never knew who might kill who—even though Julian was away so much, being educated. If they met they met on neutral ground, so to speak, usually some dead spa like Smyrna or Lutraki. All staying at different hotels with their
retainers.
A sort of armed truce somehow enabled them to survive—it is very Turkish, you see. Formal exchanges of meaningless presents. Then discussions, perhaps in a special train on the Turkish frontier. That was all. Later of course the telephone helped, they did not need to meet, they could be cordial to each other in this way.”

“But you were lovers.”

“Always. Even afterwards. We found ways.”

But I was mentally adding in the data derived from the steel cabinets—or as much of it as I had had time to read. It was not hard to picture them there, the two children, in some deserted corner of the dusty palace among the tarnished mirrors with their chipped gilt frames. The swarthy intent face of Julian, his eyes blazing with almost manic concentration, his lips drawn back from white teeth. Each held a heavy silver candlestick with a full branch of rosy lighted candles. They confronted each other thus, naked, like
contestants
in some hieratic combat, or like oriental dancers. Perhaps too among the wheeling shadows of the high rooms and curling staircases they must have seemed to anyone who saw them (Merlin himself did once) like gorgeous plumed birds treading out an
elaborate
mating-dance with all its intricate figures. So they shook the burning wax over one another, thrust and riposte, hissing at its hot
tang; they were drenched as if with molten spray. What else was there left to do? They had learned and unlearned everything before puberty—disordering their psyches, forcing them on before they were ripe. Will those who do this not prejudice their sexual and affective adult life: live forever in fantasy acts of sexual excess? Never get free?

Well, who am I to say that? But I could see deeper now into the pattern of their lives which had become so very much a reflection of Turkey—the miasma of old Turkey with its frigid cruelties, its priapic conspiracies. This fitted in well with the small ferocious Calvinist soul of Merlin, bursting at its seams with guilty sadistic impulses. (And him with all the quiet diligence and the family grace of feature!) Here at least he was at home. One saw him during those long winter evenings sitting over his books with some green-turbaned teacher drinking in the charm of the language with all its gobbling
sententiousness,
its lack of relative pronouns and subordinate clauses. Sitting with the amber mouthpiece of a narguileh in his hand
allowing
one half of his mind to play with the idea of its cost—
silver-hilted
amber; (worth perhaps two hundred English pounds?)

Or else up on the bronze foothills (they all shot like angels)
following
the cautious dogs—himself not the less cautious between the accompanying guns. They walked in an arrowhead formation so that Jocas and Julian and the girl were a trifle ahead of him. Up here, though, in the exultation of the open life of the steppe they were almost united in spirit, almost at one with each other. Disarmed around a campfire at evening they would listen smiling to the
ululations
of tribal singers, stirred into an exultant tenderness by the magnificence of the night sky and the hills. From this part of their lives single incidents stood out for ever in her memory clear and burnished. Like when the little man was walking alone along an escarpment and was pounced upon by a pair of golden eagles. He must have been near their nest, for they fell whistling out of the sky upon him, wing-span and claws powerful enough to have carried off a full-grown sheep. He heard the whistle and the swish of the huge wings just in time; he had glimpsed their shadows as he ducked. The others rushed to help him—he was defending himself with the unloaded gun, beating the eagles off; but by the time they arrived
one of the birds lay breathless on the rock at his feet and the other had gone. He was panting, his rifle was twisted, the stock was cracked. He took a cudgel from a Turk and beat the quivering eagle to death with white face, his teeth showing in a grin. He had deep wounds in his back, his shirt was torn to rags. Then he sat down on a rock and buried his white face in trembling hands. Watching him she understood why she could never bring herself to call him “Father”; he was quite simply terrifying. Julian says laconically: “I can see their nest” and taking a shot gun blazes away at it until it disintegrates. If she closed her eyes and held her breath she could feel the weight of Julian’s mind resting upon hers. It was something more than the drugs; he held her by the scruff of the mind so you might say. “He performed an elaborate series of psychic and physical experiments on me—of course in the Levant there is nothing very uncommon or shocking about it.” When the telephone came into fashion she learned to ring him up and recite a string of soft cajoling obscenities until…. “Of course you can love somebody like that,” says Benedicta with her eyes closed, resting her forehead on the cold rail of the bedpost. “Nobody has got more than one way, his own, of showing his love. Too bad if it’s uncommon or perverted or
what-not.
Or perhaps Julian would say ‘too good’. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy being owned by him, engulfed by him—utterly swallowed. In another perverse way it is such a relief to surrender the will utterly. Julian turned me into a sleepwalker for his experiments. He led me up to the point of being able to kill.” The white face with the closed eyes looked like some remote statue forgotten in a museum. A long time like that in a fierce muse of concentration, still as a
burning-glass.