by Tim Finch
As you can see, my thoughts were paddling frantically. Perhaps I am reading too much into a single remark? But remember it came after Noor talking about his faith and the shared Hannah Wächter moment. The fact is the encounter with Noor put me in good spirits: the theme of the day. I tucked into that Tiroler Gröstl at lunchtime and did all the other things I mentioned with a lighter heart than of late, with a new spring in my step.
(DIVERTISSEMENT: 23.24)
Among my night-time reading these last couple of months (and indeed for quite some months before I came out here) has been Rebecca West’s monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (Quite impossible at the breakfast table, I find.) I am nearing the end now – less than 50 of the 1,150 pages to go.
What is it about a really big book? (Don’t answer.) I am drawn to them anyway. Remember my Proust years? A good three, as I recall, with time off for thrillers, for Wodehouse and for the slightly less heavy ordinance from the canon. Imagine: Dostoyevsky by way of light relief! It came to that.
But let me read this section to you.
Human beings are not reasonable, and do not in decisive degree prefer the agreeable to the disagreeable. Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. This fight can be observed constantly in our personal lives. There is nothing rarer than man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history, we are as frequently interested in our doom. Sometimes we search for peace, sometimes we make an effort to find convenient frontiers and a proper fulfilment for racial destinies; but sometimes we insist on war, we stamp into dust the only foundations on which we can support our national lives.
First, I know that you would rather I didn’t read out such long passages. I have my own book to read, Ed. But you must admit that is good. Yeasty darkness. What does that mean in this context? Turbulent or something? It doesn’t matter, though, does it? It feels just right. But why did I want to read out this passage, late at night, just before going to sleep? Wasn’t the theme of the day good spirits? So why such relish for something so dark, so bleak?
I can’t really explain, except to say (not for the first time): human nature. We are contrary buggers. Divertissement has its place. I might read a few pages of Wodehouse right now. But when I finally turn the bedside light off, I will turn the radio on, and I will fall asleep – I swear I am lulled by it – to the BBC World Service news.
More than a hundred confirmed dead in a car-bomb explosion in Lahore …
PERCHANCE TO
Sleep in general, though, remains a slippery customer.
Observably – if my sleep was being monitored by researchers, or you were watching over me all night – I am, no doubt, much more asleep than awake. Yet my perception – which is all, in the end, that counts for me – is that I am, if not constantly awake, then constantly waking, which is hardly restful, involving as it does a constant cycle of upheavals – from unconsciousness to consciousness and back again; from the dream world to the real world to the dream world – pinging back and forth between one crazy universe and another, the waking state being the less crazy of the two, but perhaps only because it gets to pathologise its rival.
And yes, having woken, I do tend to drop back to sleep ‘just like that’, as you – never a great sleeper yourself and so well-placed, you liked to claim, to assess my sleep patterns – would say. But if this is true – and I will admit I never have any memory of this dropping back to sleep being much of an effort – that doesn’t mean I am sleeping soundly. I am getting quite a lot of sleep across the night, perhaps, but in short bursts: stop/start, stop/start, stop/start. Toss/turn, toss/turn, toss/turn.
You get some sense of how irritating it must be? Stop/start/toss/turn. Yes, I get it. And then there is this unnerving nerve-tingling in my feet: a fizziness, as if my feet are feeling anxious, getting restless, want to know where they stand. And this sensation rises up through the rest of me, so that in the end I – the conscious entity – am the one that is anxious, restless, fizzing, sensational, kicking off the bed covers, having yet another sip of water, turning on the bedside lamp, reading for a bit, turning off the bedside lamp, tuning in – for solace – to a delirium of atrocity: This is BBC News …
Of course, I sleep a lot better now than I did, in the days, weeks, after. Back then – and how much longer than two years ago it seems – I was excoriated by the double demand of grief: pain and guilt; agony and inadequacy; that for all my suffering I was not suffering enough. At night this meant that while I observed the ritual of going to bed, lying in bed, whenever I was swayed by sleep, lulled towards it, I pulled myself up violently. There was something in this of the man lost in the snow, freezing cold, so tempted to let go, but forcing himself to maintain consciousness. I must stay awake, I must stay awake. Did I imagine that if I could only keep my eyes open, fight sleep off, you would somehow defeat death? That slumped unslumbering over your sheeted body in this mausoleum of the imagination I would feel you stir. That those stony lips would twitch and pout – and breathe? Perhaps. At my most crazed – crazed with grief, crazed with exhaustion. Those nights appear as daguerreotypes. Mercury vapour on silver screen. A swirl of ghosts in the monochrome.
There was self-indulgence in this sleepless vigil, I’ll admit. Or at least a large element of self-protection – as there is in every sought martyrdom. Jagging grief, hurling oneself on to the rocks, then hauling oneself out on the rip, again and again and again, was slowly numbed into an exercise in sheer endurance. The pain moved out of body, hovered just above me, and while it was no less intense, it was increasingly ecstatic. I was moving towards something. Light at the end of the tunnel, if you will.
After a few nights I abandoned our bed for the double in the spare room, then the other guest bed in my study, and then the put-you-up in yours. On or rather from that – by far the most uncomfortable of the beds by any normal standards – I drew some comfort, some peace. More likely, of course, it was from being in that room. That room of yours, with its quiddity of you. The vestigial thingness of you. Just normal stuff: books, paintings, CDs, knick-knacks, I suppose you would call them. Nothing very special, but through abrupt abandonment suffused with significance. They, the things, seemed bewildered, heartbroken, by your absence. They seemed lost, not knowing where to put themselves. I moved them around a lot, I will admit. Obsessively, perhaps. (I have them, and hold them, still. Some of them.)
Let’s not even start on my sliding into your wardrobe, sliding the doors closed and losing myself among silks and swirls, still smelling of you … Your clothes I was eventually persuaded to part with. Car shipments of grief off to the charity shops. That clear-out did me good. It hollowed me out.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
On the put-you-up I slept wretchedly, even if you will not allow – even during the worst of it – that I didn’t sleep at all. Why, when you were irretrievable, were you still so imminent? I wondered. You were just there, I could swear, just below the surface – and yet out of reach. Trapped, smiling up, beneath a lid of ice. I SMASHED through it, but you had dived. Quicksilver in the black. Or I dashed my fists to stumps on that glass. Your face fading in the blood mist. Why didn’t you come when I called, when I cried and cried and cried? Couldn’t you hear me? How could you have left me in this state? This, this, this …
It was this – I give in; you win – which wore me down eventually. Sleep, catatonic almost, claimed me. What a plethora of postur
es I must have adopted in those shattered intervals? Their monstrosity would have been wondrous to observe given the twisted shapes I found myself in on waking: head and arms hanging rag doll over the side of the bed; a smashed body at all angles on the pavement after a fall from a high building; a spastic child in a flop state. Were you watching over me, rearranging me, your plaything – a ghost toying?
The days? I had energy enough only to describe myself as – give me strength – sleepwalking through them. I was no better than a zombie, the living dead. I tried to work; I went into work. What was I thinking? Doing? Everything took place miles away, behind a smeared screen, through thick foam. I was wading through glue.
Some muscle memory was at work, if you’ll forgive two misconceptions – that the brain is a muscle and that muscle memory exists. You won’t? Huh! I did stuff anyway. Work and the like. It was remarked on as remarkable. I was much praised for my courage. Call it autopilot then, I am too tired to care any more. At meetings, even when I was chairing, I rocked, I lolled, my head describing circles, circles … until my crashing chin was caught by an upper cut, out of thin air, knocking my head back and bringing me to. Where were we? Giddy rounds of it.
Then one day, after hauling myself home, much as men might haul a boat up a beach, I fell asleep sitting upright at the kitchen table. Transferred to bed I know not how – something, someone must have carried me there – I slept for a week, a month, a second, a night. How long doesn’t matter, only how deep! Oceanic oblivion. Unfathomable. Nothing then or now has surfaced from that sleep. What went on down there, stays down there. Then, suddenly, I exploded back into consciousness. It was the bends. The most excruciating headache, and violent nausea, and then total exhaustion. I had – hear this – to take to my bed! And then for days afterwards I was as fragile as glass, a crystal bell ringing out my recuperation.
I had experienced, and recovered from, some sort of physical and emotional crash, certainly. But would I describe it as catharsis? Would that it was ever that neat: life, that is, lived in the direction of travel. Looking back, it marked the end of the first phase, I’ll go as far as to say that. Something had been processed, worked through, just as a foreign body works its way through the system, is expelled by the violent actions of fever and delirium. I was now teary, sorry for myself, sentimental, occasionally hysterical, bad-tempered towards everyone, constantly weary, drinking too much, eating too little, then too much, but I was functioning after a fashion.
And – yes, I must concede – sleeping.
Stop/start, stop/start, stop/start.
Toss/turn, toss/turn, toss/turn.
DAYS
I have nothing to tell you. By which I mean I could tell you in detail about our progress on this or that issue, or indeed our setbacks on others, but it would be a grind for you, as it was for us. And I could tell you about walks and dinners and conversations and books, but I would find myself repeating myself.
Peace talks settle into this repeating pattern after a while, a pattern like that of the floor carpets in places like this conference centre, in which a polygonal weave mesmerises the eye almost to a vanishing point. There is a door at the end there somewhere, one of those doors with a bar release mechanism, on which one pushes down with both hands to exit in an emergency, or at some point when to get out of here is simply imperative.
There. One steps out into fresh snow, crisp in the crepuscular cold, and breathes it in in deep draughts – outside air! – even though this is the area where they bring in the deliveries. It is the designated smoking zone for the kitchen staff. Mainly migrant workers. Sending texts to wives and girlfriends back home. In Innsbruck or Izmir. There is a high security fence; a security light has come on. A few more intakes, and then one must step back in. We will be resuming in five minutes.
One lingers. That hallucinatory air of The Magic Mountain again. Time expanding to account for a lack of incident. The narcotic effect of day after day after day. A slow, sweet sinking towards some sort of resolution that might as well be death.
Our guests can leave at any time, descend to their flatlands. This security is for their own protection. The hotel and conference complex has been chosen for its location some way from the resort itself. We are somewhat cut off. But our guests are free to come and go. We all are.
But something, above all the hypnotic rhythm of the days, makes us stay. Another day, another day.
A BOOK
That, I thought, is either a book or a bomb.
It was quite some conclusion to jump to, I acknowledge – particularly as actual jumping (backwards) took place. For to be more precise, I jumped straight to the ‘or’ not the ‘either’, the ‘either’ not being a jumping matter for me, even jumping for joy, pleased as I always am – don’t get me wrong – to receive a book.
Indeed, a book only really entered the equation – at this point in my thought processes at least – in the sense that I thought: that is a bomb designed to look like a book, or rather a package designed to look like it contains a book when in fact it contains a bomb. For this is how they would think, I thought, perhaps not thinking entirely straight. They would think: don’t make the bomb too obviously bomb-like. Don’t make it black and spherical, for instance, the colour and size, more or less, of a bowling ‘wood’, but with a pipe-cleaner thing sticking out of the top, fizzing like a sparkler. And don’t even consider the bundle of red sticks of dynamite, with an old-fashioned alarm clock strapped to it, one of those ones with two silver bells on the side of its head, that at any moment the hammer device will start clattering, setting off the detonator and then … BOOM!
This was a serious incident, after all, not a Tom and Jerry cartoon. These are sophisticated terrorists we are talking about not, not … Tom and Jerry.
At which point I thought: security. Where were they? Those guards in black uniforms with the word ‘Security’ stitched in white and red on their breast pockets. Why hadn’t they cleared the corridor, evacuated everyone from the building? Why hadn’t I, in my striped pyjamas, via my balcony, via the elevated platform of the local fire and rescue vehicle (though I also had uncomfortable visions of a canvas-seat and rope-pulley contraption), been transported out of harm’s way? Where was that robot resembling a vacuum cleaner purring down the carpet to check out this book-like package that any fool could see was actually a bomb? Where was the sniffer dog? Where was the bomb disposal team, for fuck’s sake?
And just think, I thought, all this is happening on my birthday, a day on which, yes, it might be argued, the chances of someone leaving a book outside my room were that much increased, whereas the chances of someone leaving a bomb were … much the same as any other day. That is to say, vanishingly small, negligible to the point of non-existent, but don’t forget that there at my feet was this book-shaped package. And these are just the dastardly games these cunning devils play, are they not? The birthday boy, thinking your way, tears open the yellow quilted envelope, a Jiffy bag, disgorging that strangely disagreeable grey fluff, which isn’t, but reminds one of, asbestos, expecting to find a book, only to …
It hardly spoils the story now …
Find a book.
Don’t laugh at me.
Sorry.
You should be.
I am, Ed.
Too late now.
You were always so dismissive of the possibility that anything like this could happen to you. What are the odds, Ed? And you would go on about being struck by a meteorite or winning the lottery or a million-to-one other things that were never going to happen. And you convinced me, Anna. You had me there. You had me thinking it was foolish to worry when in fact I was right to. For it turned out that you were tempting fate, daring the gods to prove you wrong. A dangerous game, gods or no gods. Because – get this – someone has to be: the one, that is. That’s how the odds work, Anna. At a million to one someone is the one. And it had to be you.
So, yes, that might have had something to do with it: that if a meteorite can strike o
nce, then why not twice? That losing you isn’t going to spare me. And don’t forget either the car-bomb explosion in Lahore. My constant diet. But more than that – more to the point, I can hear you saying (you weren’t going to have me pin this all on you for long) – we are on the highest state of alert here; the security people – they do exist – are constantly urging us to be vigilant. For we all know that there are various factions who want to see these peace talks break up and who would have no hesitation in resorting to terrorism to bring about that end. I might not be the first target for such an attack; the negotiators from the warring parties, and in particular their leaders, are those most under threat, both from extremists on their own side, as well as diehards among their opponents. But as chair of the talks I have had my own briefings on things to look out for, one of them being, yes, Jiffy bags, which have been sent to people in my sort of position at various times and have been found to contain not explosives in fact, but dangerous chemicals, capable of causing nasty burns, or in other incidences, hazardous powders, including anthrax, which can of course prove fatal.
The fact is, I should have called security. Followed procedures. But having been so convinced it was a bomb one moment, I was just as convinced that it wasn’t the next. Hence my picking up the package, tearing it open, finding it was …
Yes, yes, got that. Is there any more to this tale?
Suddenly you are sounding irritable. Impatient with me. Dare I say, more like your old self!
Yes, I remembered it is your birthday. Yes, I shouldn’t have dismissed your concerns like that. Yes, I miss you. Yes, I love you. But at some point …
