by Damon Galgut
“Don’t let us talk of anything, except that you will see Mother soon. My respects to her. And then you will see Mrs. Barger, my respects to her. And you will see Bennett . . . ” He began to name various other friends and family, who made up Morgan’s life, although he had never met any of them.
Inside the station, all was confusion, until they found the right train. In the compartment, a small space of quiet presented itself, at the centre of which the two men sat thoughtfully next to each other. The fact of parting felt curiously distant.
Mohammed jogged him gently with his elbow. When Morgan looked at him, he said, “My love to you. There is nothing else to say.”
“Yes.”
“I will get out now, and wave from outside.”
“No, I’ll come and say goodbye on the platform.”
It was crowded and noisy outside and Mohammed was half in conversation with an acquaintance he’d bumped into, so that he didn’t hear the request the first time.
“What?”
Morgan wanted to remember his friend’s face cleanly and, with faint desperation, he repeated, “Take off your spectacles.”
“Why?”
“You are more beautiful without them.”
“No.” He shook his head irritably.
Almost immediately, it seemed, the train began to move and Morgan had to run to get back on. He leaned through the open door for a last look back. Now, too late, the moment did pierce him. He knew he would never see this face again, except in memory and photographs, but Mohammed had already turned away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A PASSAGE TO INDIA
On his first trip up to London, he bumped into Virginia. He was despondent and aimless, and when she suggested he come back with her to Hogarth House, he was happy to accept.
It did help to sit for a few hours in Richmond with the Woolfs, talking over his time away. He had barely been home for two weeks, but already he was at odds with his familiar life, ruing a loss he couldn’t name. It wasn’t only Mohammed’s impending death, which already seemed like a fact; it was Dewas and the Maharajah, as well as Masood. He had been given a glimpse of other Morgans that he might have been, and then they were whisked away again.
It was impossible to express all this. His funk had immobilised him, so that he couldn’t find the words. Instead he mumbled half-sentences about his mother and Bapu Sahib and, when asked about living in a palace, all he could talk about was the sparrows that had flown around the rooms. “I used to shout at them sometimes. One got caught in the electric wire. There it hung, until it wrenched its claw off and flew away . . . ”
A silence followed, while they stared at him, perturbed. Despite himself, the image had conveyed something personal. He felt like a small, soft creature, hanging by one foot.
It had been the hardest homecoming of his life—worse, even, than the return from Egypt after the War. England felt passive and indifferent to him. He was withdrawn and remote with his friends. People had got used to his absence. Even Lily had only been briefly stirred, before sinking again into private abstraction and lamentations about her rheumatism.
And his own mind, of course, was elsewhere—behind him, or in some theoretical future. He was waiting for something, though he wasn’t sure of what. Mohammed would certainly die, but that wouldn’t change Morgan’s English existence. Perhaps he was thinking about his book. Though in fact he hadn’t looked at it in months.
Just the previous week, however, he had taken a momentous step. On an impulse—which had, he realised, been brewing in him for months—he had burned all his erotic short stories in the fireplace at Harnham. They had been piling up in the attic for years, written at feverish moments of compulsion, though less to express than to excite himself. That kind of agitation seemed like a hindrance to him now rather than a liberation; he had discovered in Dewas how lust could block the channels.
But if he’d imagined that his little act of destruction would free him up to work, he was mistaken. In the aftermath, he felt more stuck and inert than before. It wasn’t that India was far from his mind any more; if anything, it was too much with him. But writing was removed from life, and he didn’t have that distance, that clearness.
He discussed the matter with Leonard. Not on that first visit, but during lunch a few weeks later, when he felt less leaden. He thought he should abandon the book, he said. It wasn’t anything solid as yet—a fragment, rather, which should probably stay that way.
“You ought to read it again,” Leonard told him.
“I don’t see the point.”
“You might, if you read it. You need to try to finish it, even if it’s not a success, or how will you really know that it’s a failure? The first step, in any case, is to look at what you have.”
The advice wasn’t startling; he had thought of it himself. But somehow it was comforting to be steered by somebody else, who had implicit faith in him.
So he returned to his fragment. Which was, in fact, more substantial than he’d thought. And Leonard was right: reading what he had gave him a sense of how he might forge ahead. More out of curiosity than passion, he found himself taking up his pen.
* * *
Although he’d dipped into his manuscript from time to time, it had been years, really, since he’d worked properly on it. Not since 1913, before Maurice had thrown him off track. And then life, and the War, had taken over. Trying to find his way back into it now, after so much had intervened, was both harder and easier than he’d imagined. His story felt remote from him, and whatever feelings it had once aroused had long since cooled.
Fiction was too artificial and self-conscious, he thought, ever to convey anything real. More than that, his way of seeing things had altered, so that his original conception seemed faintly absurd. His literary idealism had drained away. He no longer imagined explaining the East to suburban England through his words; people everywhere, whether Indian or British, felt like shits to him.
So his characters, he felt, weren’t likeable. No, they had been forged in angry gloom, scored and scratched by their maker. It worried him sometimes that he’d succumbed to pessimism; he’d always thought of despair as not only a moral but also an aesthetic failure. On a crude level, he feared that nastiness was boring, and that none of his creations would hold attention for long. Or perhaps he simply struggled to be in their company himself.
Years before, in writing the early books, he had thought of characters as a form of vegetation, and what he had here, he thought, was a shrubbery. Low, tangled forms, vibrating in the wind. He lacked a lone tree or two, standing in heroic isolation against the sky, but his newfound cynicism worked against it. To compensate, he found himself building up the atmosphere instead, tilting the narrative out of true. The weather, the stones, became portentous, but they hadn’t yet delivered up their meaning.
Still, he went on. And as he returned to it, day after day, the words gradually became his again. Fire did spark occasionally between the bits of dead coal. He had bought an ornamental toy in India, a little wooden bird, green with patches of red on its wings and sticklike yellow legs, which he set up on the edge of his writing desk, and it looked impartially on as he struggled with himself. His trysts with the pages in the attic became the unacknowledged centre of his existence. Though there was a persistent sense of unreality to the hours he spent there. The truth, he suspected, would always be in actual events, which continued to pile up around him.
Deep inside himself, he was braced for news of Mohammed’s death. In some way, he wanted to hear it had come: only then, he thought, would he be free of dread. Pity and worry obscured the image of his friend, while he awaited what couldn’t be escaped.
Meanwhile, they wrote to each other. I think we shall meet each other if not in the world it will be in the heaven. Not even lines like these wrung Morgan’s heart too much. He had been dwelling in his mind, as honestly as h
e could, on his memories of Mohammed. It seemed to him now, in his most lucid moments, that perhaps he had exaggerated their passion. From his friend’s side, there had been little harshnesses, little instances between them when Mohammed had been hard or hurtful, which he’d chosen to sweep aside. He remembered now, more than he would like, that final goodbye in the train station in Cairo: the irritable way that Mohammed had refused to take off his spectacles and how, as the train had pulled out and Morgan had kept his gaze fastened desperately on his friend, Mohammed had turned away to speak to somebody else.
Such moments made him think that the picture he’d built up—of a glorious, immortal union—had been untrue. He’d needed it, to persuade himself and others that his life had served up at least one big success. He had loved Mohammed, certainly, but what could Mohammed realistically have felt in return? He’d been excited and flattered, of course, to be courted by an Englishman. And he’d been eager for the financial help too. He might have felt gratitude or politeness or pity. But love, in the way that Morgan had experienced it . . . ? No, he didn’t think so.
These candid reflections were difficult, but they also helped to insulate him. The prospect of Mohammed’s death hurt less. He and his situation were very far away; in a sense none of it was entirely real. When the end came, it might be a sort of fiction too.
So he told himself—but his heart lurched into a different register when Mohammed’s health abruptly faltered again and the tone of his letters became very dark. An especially bare one upset him deeply:
dear Morgan
I am sending you the photograph
I am very bad
I got nothing more to say
the family are good. My compliments to mother.
My love to you
My love to you
My love to you
do not forget your ever friend
Moh el-Adl
Morgan understood quite viscerally what was behind these words. It must be awful to feel so weak and sick and to know that the last light was flickering. But it would be over soon for Mohammed, and Morgan would be the one left behind. For the first time he had a sense that what lay ahead of him would be much bigger than he’d imagined.
Another letter followed, just a few days later:
dear Morgan
I have got the money today from you and thank you very much for it
I am absolutely bad I don’t go out I can’t stand
I am very weak
How are you no more today
My love to you
My love to you
No signature, no name. And that was perhaps appropriate. Because as he stood reading the letter on the grass behind the house, hiding his face and his feelings from his mother, Mohammed was already dead.
* * *
It took a few days for the news to reach him. Morgan had accompanied Lily to the Isle of Wight so that she could visit her friends, the Misses Preston, and two letters followed him there on the same morning. One came from Gamila and one from Mohammed’s brother-in-law. Neither of them spoke English and the messages had been written on their behalf by somebody else, in formal, stilted language, though the meaning was plain.
After everything—all the mental preparation, the foreknowledge—it was still a shock to see the fact written down. A small sound escaped Morgan; not quite a word, not quite a cry either. Then he had to prepare a public face, to cover any unruly emotion.
He read and re-read the letters in the coming days, as if they might yield up something different. They did contain other, extraneous information, not relevant to the main fact, but skewing it off centre. Mohammed had owned sixty pounds and three houses. He had left Morgan a ring, which would be sent in due course. Gamila and other family members were in need of money.
The news left vacancy in its wake. He didn’t care about the ring. It was hard to feel anything, except bewilderment, not least about Mohammed’s financial circumstances. Perhaps after all there’d been deception about money? The doubt was added to his general uncertainty, taking form in a dream that same night, in which Mohammed came out from behind a curtain, taller than he’d been in life. No words passed between them, but it was understood that his friend was asking for forgiveness, which Morgan didn’t know how to give him.
A few numb days passed before the horrible moment when Mohammed’s death finally became real. Still sequestered with the old women, he had gone for a walk by himself on the Downs. He was sunk in recollection of the last few weeks he’d spent with his friend in Helouan, a resort south of Cairo. Mohammed’s health had briefly rallied and they had been blessed with mild weather, so that the interlude had been strangely peaceful. One afternoon, on an outing in the desert, the two of them had become separated, and he had heard his name being called. Margan, Margan. The slight mispronunciation made the memory vivid. Now, absurdly, he called out in reply. He was completely on his own and the three lonely syllables sank into the sky, the grass; no answer would ever come.
Over the months that followed, he dreamed of Mohammed on most nights. Perhaps he occupied all the sleeping hours because he’d been banished during the day. There was nobody Morgan could talk to about him, except for those—like Florence Barger or Goldie—who had only known him from a distance. There was something humiliating, too, in a display of grief when the relationship had been unwitnessed. No, this was to be a private suffering, like lust or literature, lived out mostly in his dreams.
In these nightly visitations, Morgan always knew that his friend was dead. But that didn’t stop him from appearing, sometimes with a face or a body that wasn’t quite his own. There was no romance in these encounters, although it always felt that one or both of them wanted something. The most unsettling dream came many months after Mohammed was gone, when he took the shape of a young man dressed in black, with a small but distinct moustache. He didn’t resemble Mohammed physically, but the feeling that he evoked made his identity obvious. Morgan knew that he ought to follow him, but his dream-character was like his actual one and he delayed. He knew somehow that the young man was going to get on a train and there was urgency, but when he tried to catch up with him his legs were suddenly heavy. They ended in a bathroom, filled with other figures who departed, leaving them alone. Then they spoke, but seemingly about nothing, both of them standing naked, Mohammed smiling all the while.
Even this dream wasn’t troubling sexually. The most disturbing aspect was waking up, and knowing that Mohammed never would. That was what was terrible: his friend couldn’t even know that he was dead, precisely because he was dead. All that was left of him was a handful of rotten remains in the Mansourah burial ground.
In the beginning, he had seen himself as a speck looking for another speck—that was how death felt. But as the months passed, deeper emotions came to the surface. Morgan wasn’t obsessed with Mohammed so much as oppressed by him: there was a pulse of pain, a deep ache inside him constantly.
* * *
There was refuge in writing. On a surface level, he was quite sociable, seeing a great many people and acquitting himself well in company, but an essential part of him had become deeply withdrawn, hardly noticing the outside world. This part, when it wasn’t contemplating death, was happy now to retreat to the attic and to work. Alone for hours at a stretch, not even really in the attic any more, sunk into some crevice in his head.
Anguish obscures, but grief is limpid. It was in this state of curious clarity that Morgan returned at last to the moment in the caves on which he’d foundered almost nine years ago.
Nine years, stuck in the dark! Poor Miss Quested had twisted in every direction, trying to escape. At least she had finally acquired a name that became her, Adela, though the driest, most sticklike part of her remained Morgan. There had been times when he felt he couldn’t abide her another second, while she struggled and writhed to get away from her attacker.
But whose hands were grabbing at her? At one moment they belonged to Aziz, at another to the Indian guide—but mostly, he suspected, they were his own, ineffectually shaking his creation. In any case, none of it convinced. The seizing of breasts, the choking and hitting, the strap of the field-glasses twisted around the throat—all of it was forced, willed rather than felt, the rhythms out of alignment. He had never been good at writing physical calamities, though the emotional ones came naturally.
It was better to start cleanly, he decided. He made a fair copy of what he’d roughed out before, throwing the old pages away. And tried again.
And was quite suddenly back there, in the Barabar caves, on that morning. Alone, enclosed in the rock. The darkness was complete and of a piece with the stony smoothness beneath his fingers. The echo seemed present, under the silence, and it took a physical form: somebody else was there, moving when he did, stopping when he did, mirroring him. A presence, an outline—no more substantial than that. But who was it? No way to know. The other remained a mystery.
Almost immediately, he was in despair again. More than anything, he would like to throw the scene to one side, but of course he couldn’t do that. He was the author, after all; he had created the question and so it was his job to provide the answer. He couldn’t leave the central event of the plot unexplained.
And then the thought came to him, so strongly that he spoke it aloud: “Why not?”
Why not let everything turn on a mystery?
Immediately, in a quiet way, he became excited. The moment he thought it he knew that the lack of an answer was, in fact, the answer. He had circled around the question for nine years, while all along the solution was almost underfoot. He’d been casting around, in search of the cornerstone of the scene, but he’d been looking in the wrong place.
