Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  The danger was what attracted; it might justify his continued existence.

  “Italy could never be dangerous. Don’t you remember Florence? A nation that produces such wonderful art could never harm me.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Morgan. Not everybody was meant to fight. The idea of you killing people is simply ridiculous. You know it isn’t in your character.”

  “What is my character, do you think?”

  “Why don’t you stay at home and write?”

  It was writing that felt most impossible then. Or more precisely, it was novels that were out of the question. To invent lives and dialogue, to dream up the unreal, when reality had taken on so much weight and ugliness: it would be like defying gravity.

  Then he overheard a conversation between two nurses in the train. It seemed people were needed as searchers for the Red Cross in Egypt or Malta. “Searching”, as far as he understood it, meant interviewing the wounded in hospitals for information about those who might have gone missing or untraced. It sounded like work that he could do and could respect himself for doing.

  He had to arrange an interview with Miss Gertrude Bell, who, despite her fame, turned out to be a severe and maudlin presence behind a desk. She brought with her the aura of deserts and disdain, not bothering to look closely at him after her first weary summing-up.

  “I don’t think you are quite suitable for this kind of work,” she said. “What are you doing at the moment?”

  “I’m a cataloguer at the National Gallery.”

  “I think that is far better for you. I think you should stick with it.”

  “I very much want to go to Egypt.”

  Miss Bell quivered. “If I can find you a place,” she said, “then I will get in touch with you.”

  In the end, he had to pull strings with an old Cambridge acquaintance to get her overruled. To round off the whole business, he found himself in front of her again, to have his papers approved and signed. She was resigned to him now; his persistence had triumphed.

  He leaned towards her to ask, “What are they like, the inhabitants of Alexandria?”

  “You will have no opportunity to find out. You will only see them in the streets, in passing, as you go to and fro on your work.”

  His visit to India emboldened him to say, “In foreign places, I like to mix with the locals.”

  “Not in Alexandria. There are parts of the city that will shock you.”

  “Those are the parts I want to see.”

  “No,” she said, glancing sharply up at him. “I suggest you look neither right nor left, only keep your head down, and walk directly to where you are going.”

  Her tone was very strict. But she did give a tiny dry smile, and he decided that he liked her after all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MOHAMMED

  The two men were angled slightly past each other in their armchairs, sipping cheap whisky, and their conversation hovered a little above the surface of the earth, never quite touching anything. They spoke of Mediterranean civilisation, especially the Greeks, but the talk was desultory and drifting, and there were occasional silences.

  It was only their third meeting. Previously their encounters had been in public, at the Mohammed Ali Club, and both gentlemen had studied one another courteously, from a distance. But tonight a gesture had been made; Morgan had been invited, with two friends, back to the poet’s home for a drink. The friends had long since departed, and now only Morgan remained. There was a brief moment of awkwardness as both of them adjusted to the new situation, but then it passed. He liked his new acquaintance, about whom he’d been hearing for some time, and was keen to deepen their relations. More immediately, he was curious to see where Cavafy lived.

  He hadn’t been disappointed. The Rue Lepsius was in the Greek quarter and had perhaps once been a good address, but it had obviously fallen on harder times. Below Cavafy’s flat was a house of ill repute, which men furtively approached at all hours. “I have watched them from my balcony,” he told Morgan, “and there are many monsters, oh, many! But not all of them are bad. There are some young men, whose faces, believe me, are angelic.”

  Like the street outside, the interior of his flat, too, had an air of dilapidated grandeur. The large salon in which he entertained Morgan on that first occasion was cluttered with furniture and vases and hangings and ornaments, none of it very clear in the light of the petrol lamp. But the effect was of relics and remains, the traces of a better, higher life that had now fallen away.

  Or perhaps that was merely his reputation. Morgan had heard too many stories about the poet by now, little flashes and fragments from different sources. In the miniature world of Alexandrian cultural life, Cavafy was famous—which was to say, people talked about him, sometimes admiringly, sometimes in low-voiced asides. It was well known that he came from a good family, originally from Constantinople, which had lost its fortune through bad luck and worse investments. One by one the various progeny had floated away or died, leaving the youngest son, now middle-aged and alone, among the lingering left-over debris of their lives. And there were other little anecdotes, about the shadowy corners of his life, which stirred envy and disgust in different quarters.

  The night was cool. Cavafy had a half-cigarette in his holder, unlit, and he was waving it about as he talked in a long-suffering tone about his employment in the Ministry of Public Works. His department was the Third Circle of Irrigation and he was pained by the stupidity of his colleagues. “I have to check their grammar,” he told Morgan, “in every memorandum, every letter. And no matter how many times I explain the correct use of the comma, they simply repeat their mistakes. And let us say nothing of the apostrophe! But I do not give up. I call them in and explain it all again, in the hope that one day the light may dawn. What a happy day that would be! But I doubt it will ever come. There is no atom of poetry in any of them, not one.”

  The mention of poetry seemed to trouble him; he reflected for a long moment, then looked mournfully at Morgan through his spectacles. “You have not asked to read my poems,” he said.

  “I haven’t presumed. But I very much want to read them.”

  “They will all be Greek to you, precisely because they are written in that language. But more than that . . . ” He gave a shrug that was half a sigh. “My concerns are not those of most people, I am an unusual man. I am drawn to the past, you see, the very old past, or else to the margins of current life. I am . . . oh, what is the use?” His eyes had left Morgan and were roaming beyond the corners of the room.

  Morgan said again, “I very much want to read them.”

  “You could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.”

  “Perhaps I might. You should try it on me at least.”

  “No, no, no. What is the use?” This seemed to be final, but he abruptly stood up. “Please wait,” he said, “I am going to the bindery,” and he disappeared into a back room.

  When he reappeared soon afterwards it was with a loose-leaf folder under his arm, in which Morgan could see pages hand-written in red and black ink. But the poet didn’t return to his chair. “Let us move to the red salon. The light is much better there.”

  The light was not better in the red salon; it was the room itself, the furnishings, that were of higher quality. There was no oil lamp here, only candles, which Cavafy began to move about in accordance with some private design. He finally appeared satisfied when he had enshrouded himself in shadow and Morgan was near the window with a fitful yellow glow to read by.

  The visitor was aware of being tested. Cavafy had become bored and indifferent, which could only mean he cared deeply. But Morgan’s Greek, unexercised since his days at Cambridge, didn’t feel up to the task. He was imperfectly aware of the meanings he held in his hand and after a few frowning, peering minutes could offer a mere paltry observation. “There are some coincidences, perhaps, it seem
s to me . . . between this Greek and public school Greek. I might be wrong . . . ”

  The effect was instantaneous. Cavafy snapped upright in his chair, alert and awake in a moment. “Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, very good indeed!” He began to call fretfully for his servant. “Mirgani! Come here immediately! Mirgani!”

  Mirgani came and was told by his master to bring whisky.

  “My glass is not yet empty,” Morgan said.

  “Yes, but that is the Palamas whisky. Poetry requires something better. In the red glasses, Mirgani!”

  Mirgani brought good whisky in red glasses, as well as a plate of cheese and olives. Candles were being snuffed out and others lit in a fresh configuration; it was Cavafy now who was visible and his guest who had sunk into shadow. The poems, too, had changed hands.

  Morgan understood that his station had altered, now that he had proved worthy. The red salon, the red glasses: they signified an uptick in esteem. He tried to disport himself accordingly. But in a moment, when the poet began to read, there was no need to pretend.

  Cavafy’s voice, with its cultivated English accent, was soft and certain. He was translating as he went, but it was clear that he knew his own words very well and the paper was almost unnecessary. The long, pale face, with its saurian eyelids, its air of melancholic delicacy, seemed to vanish in a moment, into a mist, through which Morgan was led, down a winding passage that took him to an image of a midnight procession, ghostly but beautiful, passing out of the Alexandrian city gates, in a time long ago that might have been no time at all.

  The poem was short and its meaning out of reach, until Cavafy laconically added the title, almost as an afterthought. “The God Abandons Antony.”

  “From Plutarch?”

  “Yes, exactly. Oh, excellent, Forster.” Again there was the note of renewed energy and interest; his guest was pleasing to him tonight. “Would you like to hear another?”

  “Very much.”

  Another poem was read, and then another. In each of them a visit was paid to the ancient world, either through history or mythology. And in each of them the lost past was reclaimed, brought back—through an image or a sentiment or a longing—to the present. The voice of the poems, like that of their author, was restrained and spare, cold and warm at the same time, quivering with irony. Their beauty was unmistakable.

  The Greek quarter, where the poet lived, was to the north-east of the main square, where Morgan’s hotel was. Walking back alone through the streets later that night, Morgan felt for the first time how old the city was. It was a new awareness for him, and he hoped he wouldn’t lose it. Until now, Alexandria had felt like a transient, impermanent outpost, a place for travellers and visitors and invaders, and even now—after midnight—the streets were filled with well-dressed people rushing from nowhere to nowhere. But under their feet, and around them, there wasn’t much trace of ancient history to be seen. Everything was being continually smashed down and rebuilt. This was the city founded by Alexander the Great, the home of Callimachus and Theocritus, the death-place of Cleopatra. It didn’t seem too much to expect remnants of the past to be standing about, as they did in India. But instead it was simply a modern cosmopolitan town, built along a limestone ridge, with sea on one side and salt marshes on the other.

  Alexandria had come to seem ordinary and banal, in the way that stones and water often did. In the end, one couldn’t even hate it properly.

  * * *

  He’d wanted to come to Egypt because it had felt like the East. But it wasn’t; it was merely the pseudo-East. He had been here for four months already, and from almost the first moment he’d arrived, the landscape seemed flat and unromantic to him, with no sense of mystery. Only at sunset did something inscrutable occasionally enter in.

  Nor was he especially drawn to the Egyptians. They didn’t excite the same sympathy in him that the Indians did. Everything about them—their movements, their dress, their customs—kept him at a remove rather than pulling him closer. There had been only one or two occasions (a young man on a tram, touching the buttons on the tunic of a soldier as he said goodbye) when his sexual interest had been stirred. For the most part, he felt a physical distaste for the natives. But at the same time, these feelings were repellent to him. They reminded him of nothing so much as the English in India. Who could have known that it was in him, too, this racial arrogance, this contemptible contempt? It was worse than any mud, and it unsettled him badly.

  On his first arrival, there had been some talk of an invasion from Turkey, and he’d felt a little brave in consequence. But that had quickly faded, leaving only duty and routine behind. His work meant travelling around the various hospitals in Alexandria, drifting through the wards, speaking to the wounded men. He listened to their stories and made notes. Every night, at the Red Cross offices on the Place Mohammed Ali, he would type up a report to be sent to London. From there, he supposed, further steps were taken to inform families of their dead, or about where their missing sons and brothers were. His reports were dry and factual, and no doubt helpful. But it was the voices behind the reports which told a truer story:

  There was this dead Australian, see, who was in the way when we were making a parapet. So we cut him at the neck and knees and fired through him.

  That time we made a charge, they gave fourteen spoonfuls of rum instead of two, so we weren’t afraid of anything. But the worst is when there’s some delay and the mood passes. Then your heart thump thumps against the ground.

  His own heart thumped as he imagined. They were so very young, most of these men, almost boys still, with a vulnerable and innocent quality. Any of them, he was sure, would have ended the fighting today if it was in their power. They had seen terrible things and perhaps done terrible things too. (“We fought every inch as dirty as the Turks did,” one told him, and he knew that it was true.) More to the point, all of them, in one way or another, had had terrible things done to them. That was why they were here. Some of them had been wounded in vicious fighting, some were just very sick. Blood and pus and puke and shit: never had he been ground up so hard against the human body, its failure and breakdown and decay. He tried not to avert his eyes, but the strongest certainty he carried away from those wards was that suffering like this should be stopped now, immediately, at the cost of any humiliation.

  It was not a view widely shared among other Englishmen. From his fellow Red Cross officers he heard that there were worse things than war, and that Britain’s debt to gallant little Belgium had not yet been discharged. One especially offensive colonel, after listening to Morgan for a while, said sneeringly, “Well, you are clearly not cut out to be a soldier. Best you keep on with searching. You are such a wonderful sticker.”

  In fact, no staying power was required: speaking to the ordinary soldiers gave him pleasure. His Red Cross insignia provided a cover for tenderness that might otherwise have been suspect. Their talk was frank and unvarnished; idealism had been scraped off the bare facts. They had been sent to face the guns, while the gentlemen-officers, like the awful colonel, tended to linger in the rear. He thought of them as the real England; once snobbery was set aside, you saw the true qualities. He spent far more time than he needed to in their company, playing chess, writing letters for them, reading aloud or entertaining them on the piano, a couple of times even taking their watches away to be repaired. But mostly he simply listened to them, in his murmurous sidelong way, while they talked and talked about the War.

  * * *

  At work, he was answerable to a Miss Victoria Grant Duff, the head of the Wounded and Missing Department. She was perhaps a decade older than Morgan, and a trifle shrill and nervous, but friendly enough. They had found a common talking point in India, because her father had once been the Governor of Madras. More importantly, though, she felt enthusiastic about his reports. She had called him in after two or three weeks to tell him that London had cabled to say how good they w
ere. “You are by far the best of my searchers,” she announced.

  “I am glad to hear it.”

  “But don’t tell the others I said so.”

  “No, of course not.”

  The idea of being the best was amusing, because there were only four searchers in total. One was at the Majestic Hotel, too, where Morgan was living: a fellow named Winstanley, who told him the other searchers did almost no work. The competition couldn’t be described as fierce.

  Nevertheless, his position felt secure. He had already been here much longer than he planned to, and had no thought of going anywhere. He could wait out the War on the sidelines, contributing without taking part. So it came as a profound shock when—not long after his meeting with Cavafy—there was a crisis at work that nearly upset everything.

  Word came through from higher up that Red Cross workers were required to attest before a military commission. What was wanted was a declaration that every able-bodied man was willing and ready to serve. It wasn’t quite conscription—though that had been introduced in England three months ago—but it was a first step in that direction.

  By coming here, Morgan had believed he was leaving this particular quandary behind, but now it had followed him. His own cousin, Gerald Wichelo, had recently declared himself a conscientious objector, and was prepared to go to jail in consequence. Morgan didn’t know if he was quite that committed.

  The crisis passed, but not before he found himself in front of Sir Courtauld Thomson, the Chief Red Cross Commissioner, stating his beliefs. This was difficult, because he wasn’t quite sure what they were. Nevertheless, he found himself saying that the idea of killing another human being, whoever it might be, was the most horrible notion he could contemplate. There was nothing religious about this sentiment, he added; the only word he could find for it was “conscience”.

  After due consideration, Sir Courtauld told him, “I’m afraid conscientious objectors cannot be considered at all.”