War & War (14 page)

26.

He had become quite a different person in America, Korin told her after a week, no longer the person he had been, by which he didn’t mean that something essential in him had been destroyed or mended, but that little details, which for him were not so little after all, his forgetfulness, for example, had utterly vanished after two days, that is if you can talk about forgetfulness vanishing like that, though in his case, said Korin, it really was a matter of vanishing, since he had noticed a couple of days ago that he really had stopped forgetting, that he actually remembered things that happened to him, they stayed in his head, and he no longer had to rummage through a mass of material to find whatever he had lost, though it was true, he said, that he had precious little material to rummage through, nevertheless he could now be sure of finding what he had lost, in fact he no longer had even to look, which hadn’t been the case before when he used to forget anything that happened by the next day, for now he had a perfect recollection of what had happened, where he had been and what he had seen, specific faces, particular stores, some buildings, they all came immediately to mind, and to what could he attribute this, said Korin, if not to America, where, the very air was probably different, and not only the air, but the water too for all he knew, but whatever it was, something was radically different, for he too was different, nor was his neck or shoulder giving him the trouble they had before at home, which must mean that the permanent state of anxiety to which he was prey must have diminished, so he could forget the anxiety about losing his head, and that was truly a relief for it left the way open for him to pursue his necessary goal, and he wondered whether he had told the young lady, Korin enquired in the kitchen, that the entire notion of America had, ultimately, come about as a result of his decision to put an end to his life, and while he was absolutely certain that he should do so he didn’t actually know what means to adopt to this purpose, for all he knew when he first formulated the idea was that he should quietly disappear from this world, collect his thoughts and vanish, nor did he think any different now really, since he wasn’t here to seek fame by devising some peculiarly ingenious way of disposing of himself, advertising himself as the unselfish self-sacrificing sort, the kind we see so many of nowadays, he was by no means one of them, no, that was the last thing on his mind, because what he was interested in was something altogether different, something—and here he recalled the terrible grace of fate that set these thoughts off in his head, and wondered how should he put it, then decided, he said, to put it like this—that from the moment when it was his luck to make the discovery of the manuscript he was no longer just a man determined to die, as until then he had had every right to believe, a fated figure, as the phrase has it, the sort of person who already has death in his heart, but someone who continues working, let us say, in his garden, watering, planting, digging, then suddenly discovers an object in the ground that catches his eye, a discoverer, you see, that’s how the young lady too should imagine it, said Korin, for that is what happened to him, for, from that time on, whatever happened it was all the same to the man working in his garden because the object that glimmered there before him had settled matters, and that’s just what had happened to him in a manner of speaking of course, in a manner of speaking, for he had discovered something in the records office where he had been working, a manuscript for which he could find no source, no provenance, no author, and what was strangest of all, Korin raised a warning finger, without a clear purpose, something that would never have a purpose, and therefore not the kind of manuscript he’d rush to show the director of the institution, though that is what he should have done, but one that made him do something an archivist should never do: he took it away, and by doing so he knew, knew in his bones, that from that moment on he had ceased being a true archivist, because by taking it he had become a common thief, the document being the one genuinely important item he had ever handled in all his years as an archivist, the one undeniable treasure that meant so much to him he felt he couldn’t rightly keep it to himself, as one kind of thief would, but, like a different kind of thief, had to let the whole world know of its existence, not the world of the present, he had decided, since that was wholly unfit to receive it, nor the world of the future since that would certainly be unfit, not even the world of the past which had long lost its dignity, but eternity: it was eternity that should receive the gift of this mysterious artifact, and that meant, as he realized, that he had to find a form appropriate to eternity, and it was following the conversation in the restaurant that the idea suddenly came to him, that he should lodge the manuscript among the millions of pieces of information stored by computers which, following the general loss of human memory, would become a momentary isle of eternity, and now it didn’t matter, he wanted most firmly to emphasize this, it really didn’t matter how long computers preserved it, the essential thing was, Korin explained to the woman in the kitchen, that the thing should be done just once, and that all the extraordinary mass of computers that had once been interconnected, or so he suspected, a suspicion confirmed by much subsequent thought on the matter, would, all together, have given birth to, produced between themselves, a space in the imagination that was related not only or exclusively to eternal truth, and that this was the right place in which to deposit the material he had found, since he believed, or that was the opinion he had arrived at, that once he connected one eternal object with the world of eternity it didn’t matter what happened next, it was all the same where he ended his life, whether it was in darkness, in the mire, Korin dropped his voice, on a footpath, by a canal or in a cold and empty room, it made no difference to him, nor did it matter how he chose to end it, with a gun or by some other means, the important thing was to begin and complete the task he had set himself, here at the center of the world, to pass on that which, if it didn’t sound too portentous to put it like this, had been bestowed on him, to plant this heartbreaking account, of which he could say nothing valuable at this stage since it would be on display on the Internet in any case, other than that, crudely speaking, it concerned an earth on which there were no more angels, that it was set in the theoretical heart of the world of ideas, and that once he had accomplished his mission, once he had finished, it didn’t matter where he ended up, whether that was in mire or in darkness.

27.

He sat on the bed with his coat in his lap holding a small pair of scissors he had borrowed from his hosts in order to unpick the delicate stitches he had used to secure the top of the secret pocket he had sewn into the lining, so that he might finally extract the manuscript, and was ceremonially about to set about his task, when suddenly, barely audibly, the door opened and the interpreter’s partner stood at the threshold with an open glossy magazine in her hand, not entering but looking across the room, somehow beyond Korin, and hovered there for a moment, more timid and tongue-tied than ever, not looking in the least likely to break her perpetual silence but rather on the point of disappearing once more and beating a hasty apologetic retreat, when finally, perhaps because both she and Korin were equally disconcerted by her unexpected appearance, she pointed to a photograph in the open magazine and asked, very quietly, in English: “Did you see the diamonds?” and when Korin, in his surprise, was unable to emit the merest squeak by way of an answer but continued to sit as if rooted to the spot with the coat in his lap, the very scissors frozen in his hand, she slowly lowered the magazine, turned around, and as noiselessly as she had entered, left the room, closing the door behind her.

28.

The eternal belongs to eternity
, said Korin loudly to himself, then, since he had taken a long time entering a single page, he perched on the windowsill holding the second, gazing out at the lights on the fire escapes of the building opposite, scanning the flat desert of the rooftops and the furiously racing clouds in the strong November wind, and added,
Tomorrow morning, it must be done by tomorrow.

1.

According to the manuscript’s superbly honed and supple sentences, the kind of craft the ship most resembled was an Egyptian seagoing vessel, though it was impossible to tell what tides had borne it hither, for while the powerful winds currently blowing might have carried it from Gaza, Byblos, Lucca or indeed from the land of Thotmes, it might just as likely have been swept across from Akrotiri, Pylos, Alasiya, and if the storm had raged particularly fiercely, even from the distant isles of Lipari, and in any case, one thing was certain as Korin typed the letters, which was that the Cretans who had gathered on the shore had not only never seen one like it but had not even heard of such a craft, and that was chiefly because, firstly, they pointed out to each other, the stern was not raised; secondly, that instead of a full complement of twenty-five/twenty-five oarsmen, there were thirty/thirty, originally at least, fully equipped; and thirdly, putting all that aside, they remarked as they studied it from the shelter of an enormous cliff, the size and shape of the sail was now in shreds and its extent could be estimated, though the straining ornamental figurehead on the prow and the unusual positioning of the double row of arching tangles of rope all looked unfamiliar, unfamiliar and terrifying, even in the throes of destruction as huge waves drove the craft from Lebena into the bay at Kommos then cast it against a rock, turning the vessel on its side as if to exhibit the broken body to the frightened locals, saving it from further damage and raising it above the foaming waters, introducing it, as it were to human eyes in order to demonstrate how the combination of water and storm could, should it wish to, deal with such a vast mechanism; how thousands of unstoppable waves could toy with this previously unknown, peculiarly constructed ocean-going trader on which everything had died or at least seemed to have died, and had, indeed, to be dead, the Cretans muttered to each other, for surely no one could survive such turmoil in this lethal gale, not even a god, they added from the shelter of the cliff, for, as they said on shore as they shook their heads, no one could remain in one piece under such catastrophic, demonic circumstances, not even a god newly born, for none such could be born.

2.

They are here for eternity
, Korin explained to the woman in the kitchen, while she stood at the stove in her usual position with her back to him, stirring something in a pan, and not giving the slightest sign of having understood or given any heed to what she was hearing, and he didn’t go back to his room for the dictionary as he often had done, but abandoning hope of explaining the notion of
eternity
and
here-ness
, tried to move the conversation on instead by pointing to the pan in confusion, asking:
Something delicious … as usual?

3.

It wasn’t until the next day that the storm had abated to the extent that a small boat from Kommos dared venture out on the waters and row over to the rock, and so it was only then, Korin wrote, once the wind had dropped, early next afternoon, that they discovered that what had seemed from a distance to be a wreck beyond salvaging, was most certainly a wreck, but at a closer view, not entirely beyond salvaging, and the improvised rescue party was astonished to discover three, and maybe even four survivors in one of the main cabins that had not been flooded: three, they signaled by hand to those on the shore, and a possible fourth lashed to this or that post, the four unconscious but certainly alive, or at least three of them were alive and the heart of the fourth was also possibly beating, so they cut these four free of the posts and brought them out, they being the only four for the rest had been engulfed in the flood and drowned, some sixty, eighty or even hundred of them, they said later, who knows how many dreaming their last by the time they found them, but no longer in any position to feel pain, as they put it; while these three, the rescuers said, or maybe even four, had miraculously survived, and so they quickly brought them out of the cabin and transferred them to the boat immediately, one after the other, and set off back again leaving the rest, the entire ship, just as it was, since they knew exactly what would happen, what would come to pass, as, in two days, it did, when a powerful wave broke the by now utterly shattered wreck into two, whereupon it slid off the rock and, suddenly, almost unbelievably quickly, within a few minutes, sank beneath the surface, so that a quarter of an hour later the last of the waves was sweeping smoothly over the place it had been and across the shore where stood the entire village of the small fishing community of Kommos, every man, woman, child and dotard, mute and still, since within a quarter of an hour nothing, but nothing, remained of that huge, strange and terrifying vessel, not even the very last wave, only the three living survivors and a fourth who might survive the catastrophe, four, all in all, out of the sixty, the eighty, the hundred, only four.

4.

In the days of painful recuperation that followed they pronounced their names differently each time so the locals tended to stick to the names they claimed to have heard on the first day, in other words they referred to one as Kasser, one as Falke, one as Bengazza and the fourth as Toót, feeling that this was probably the most correct version, assuming that everyone took it for granted that the four names—names that sounded peculiar to their ears—were merely approximations, and not within hailing distance of the possible originals, though to tell the truth this was the least of their problems, for contrary to their earlier experience of those cast on their shores, those whose names, origins, homelands and fate would bit by bit, and in fact fairly quickly, become plain, with these people everything—names, origins, homelands and fate—became progressively more mysterious, that is to say their foreignness and peculiarity did not diminish but grew in astonishing fashion with the passing of days, so that by the time they were well enough to leave their beds and ventured with extreme caution out into the open air, that moment being described in that wonderful
chapter
, said Korin, pronouncing the word
chapter
in English, in particular detail, there stood these perfectly mysterious four men of whom less than nothing was known because they consistently avoided questions put to them in Babylonian, the
language
—Korin used the English word again—they shared, albeit both sides spoke it only brokenly, by answering to something different, so that even Mastemann, a recent foreign castaway from Gurnia, to the east of the island, a man not much given to doubts but willing to state his opinions forcefully, appeared to be in doubt, yes, even he, Mastemann, fell silent as he watched them from behind the wagon as they strolled silently through the tiny village, as they ambled behind the fig trees and eventually settled down to dawdle in an olive grove and watch the
sun
decline on the western horizon.