The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  If sanity is lost, or the conditions that make sanity possible start to disappear, aren’t we then beginning to lose everything?

  I remember that footage of Chernobyl, years later, deer and foxes in a kind of Eden, an insane Eden of our making.

  All along it is not animals that have been most at risk, but ourselves, our innermost selves.

  DIVINATION

  THE DUCHESS of Bedford’s single-engined airplane was reported lost off the coast of East Anglia, March 1937. The sailors’ reading room was alive with the news of it, swaying with sea legs, as the sun came through the windows all round in a circle and the wooden-shoed sailors tip-tapped from Lloyd’s List to the public house serving Adnams ale in jugs.

  Down at the beach, farther from where the farmers plowed to the low mud cliffs, the sea foamed in and out, curtains of water, well behaved and on the flat, drawing themselves across sands pocked only with lugworm holes and their mysterious hierophan-tic castings.

  Down to a sea of low gaseousness, a sea that will toe the line. The same sea that, behind our backs, has cast Dunwich in a slow arc over its cliff, and thrown ashore, like the femur of some strange mechanical beast, a bone for the scryer to work with, the wooden strut of a crashed airplane.

  The Duke of Bedford would outlast his wife by three years. The war that was about to be fought, he would never know how that would end, and his son a pacifist too.

  Seas building in the turbulent channels off Dogger Bank. Cold green water sluicing off the decks of trawlers. Seas rising to no call but their own. Waves stooping in the almost feathered hardness of barrels. A stream of water dripping with purpose from the exhaust of a crab boat’s engine inside the battered harbor. Surf booming against the head wall and, miraculously still, a sun.

  But that now is gone. A preternatural darkness of teatime thundery cloud spreads across the canvas, drawing in the limits, pinching the horizon with rain.

  Rain moving like pestilence across the sullen, cat’s-pawed sea that holds its breath, strains against the leash.

  There is a wind now, got up at last, coming off the pine woods on the cliffs, bending the leaning trees like palms in a hurricane.

  Sea and sky are one. You know now why they say a filthy day. Dirty weather is like a spillage of gray-black ink. Sucking up the surface of the sea into a thing without humor or reason.

  You hear that lack of reason in the halyards beating the mast, again and again, ropes clattered by the mad fingers of the wind, whipping the pitch-pine spars with an unanswerable rhythm.

  Seas mounting in protest, unwilling almost in their violence, known now by their land-mine bombing of the front, making walking out well nigh impossible.

  And out farther, where the last silly boat is making dead progress, running on bare poles and trailing a mile of oily warps, out in places where the land does not figure—five miles or five hundred from the cozy coastline hamlet, in these places where the dull plates of water slide over the surface of tormented shoulders, where gray and green disappear into the wide vigilance of men whose survival is a freak, where the surface now is all afire with white as if the undersides of the sea are stung repeatedly …

  There would be no wreckage except a wing strut of her tiny yellow plane, washed up on the pebbly beach.

  The clock chains are wound in the longcase clocks. The atonement atones. Even now the atonement atones. Ringing through the hours as the time is adjusted. One by one the lamps are removed from the curtained windows. All now is quiet in the safe cottages along the wet road of the seafront.

  REASONS II

  ON THE Internet I found a very cheap ticket to Beijing. I told myself it was a sign that I should go. A friend of my wife’s was coming to stay and the visit would overlap with my China trip. This meant I didn’t feel too bad about leaving. So I went.

  As I was on an extreme budget I checked into the Sea Star Hotel—a real backpackers’ dive with a dormitory. For an extra 100 yuan a night I got my own “room,” which was a fenced-in cubicle fashioned from fiberboard with a low metal bed taking up the floor space.

  The hotel was mercifully overheated. Everywhere else was dry, windy, and very cold.

  I put a call through to Maja Boyd, who seemed to be living at a kind of guest house for foreigners. The man on the desk spoke about three words of English but took my number.

  Wearing several jerseys and a cagoule, I hired a bike—which was huge and had barely functional rod brakes—costing less per day than a Beijing Big Mac. Using my hated Lonely Planet map, I headed out to Morrison Street, because it’s always better to see things you have a connection to, however slight, than to rely on seeing the normal sites. Now called Wangfujing Street, it has to be the wealthiest, most Westernized street in Beijing. Even bicycles are banned in favor of traffic. In the eighties it was known briefly as McDonald’s Street because of an early outpost of junk food, now torn down to build yet another mall. Morrison always believed that Chinas future lay in Westernization, so it seems appropriate that “his” street should have become this monstrous row of shops.

  Chaining my bicycle up using the child’s combination lock supplied by the hire company, I explored the Forbidden City. Somehow I thought it would be much bigger—it certainly looks smaller than it does in the film The Last Emperor. One thing you notice is how thick the walls are. Most memorable for me was the well down which the dowager empress threw the Pearl Concubine when she was making her exit from Peking as the Boxer Rebellion ended. This extreme act was prompted, according to some sources, by the Pearl Concubine wanting to accompany the young emperor against the dowager’s wishes. The well, situated incongruously in a courtyard next to the Hall of Pleasure and Longevity, was so small I found it hard to believe the Pearl Concubine wouldn’t have got stuck halfway down. Needless to say, the original version of this story can be traced back to Backhouse. The Chinese have erected a sign near the well attesting to the fate of the Pearl Concubine, turning another story into history.

  I also visited the Hall of Clocks and Watches inside the larger Hall of Preserving Harmony. Most of the clocks are nineteenth-century European and Japanese. One is a kitsch lighthouse clock, late nineteenth century, which had been a great favorite of the dowager empress.

  After several cold, bright days of fun-packed tourism and good conversations with freaky foreigners in the Sea Star Hotel, I was really beginning to enjoy myself. My confidence was returning. I called the bazooka range but it was shut for repairs. The Nan Haizi Deer Reserve never answered the phone, so eventually I took an expensive cab there.

  It is possible to see Milu through the slats in a gate in the eight-foot wall, and not surprisingly they look just the same as the ones in Woburn, not even thinner and mangier, which is what I had been anticipating.

  After flashing my Oxford University Bodleian Library card and a lot of waiting a dusty, cold waiting room, I was ushered in to meet Milu’s keeper, Mr. Fu. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and chain-smoked 555-brand cigarettes.

  Mr. Fu was pleased to see me and keen to speak to me as an equal in the field of deer management. He seemed to think Maja Boyd was in Japan. On the subject of the Dukes of Bedford, he had nothing but praise. Such men, he implied, were the hope of any nation. As for the Cultural Revolution, he said, looking at me meaningfully, “No good, no good.”

  Mr. Fu wore a tie, and when we strolled out to look at Milu he had a blue boilersuited underling open gates for us and hold a bucket of fodder under one deer’s nose.

  The climate in China suits Milu better than the United Kingdom. They lose fewer through the disease MCF (malignant catarrhal fever) than in the United Kingdom, Mr. Fu explained. He then went on at length about the genetic weaknesses in the world stock. “All from one,” he said, holding up his finger. “All from one.” The genetic weaknesses meant that Pere Davids produced fewer surviving offspring than other deer and were more sensitive to diseases like MCF. Mr. Fu thought that sensitivity to disease was increasing.

  Milu can breed with re
d deer, producing a hybrid more robust than a pure Pere David. “But then where is Milu?” asked Mr. Fu.

  He took me to see the remains of the original wall of Nan Haizi. It is a section about four hundred yards long and about twenty feet high, with sloping sides like a sea wall. We walked through a collapsed part, mud and stones on the ground, just like in Père David’s day.

  “How long can Milu survive with these genetic weaknesses then?” I asked.

  “No one know,” said Mr. Fu. “But I think longer than me and you!

  HAPPY ENDING

  ASTORY WITH a happy ending is somehow less scientific than a tragic extinction. Pondering why something became extinct seems more precise, scientifically speaking, than celebrating something that didn’t quite die out.

  Superficially, tragedy seems to have more truth in it than comedy. A long face equals serious science. But the truth in tragedy, though a warning, takes something vital away from us. The truth in comedy doesn’t do this.

  I’d always assumed the Novelist’s novel would have an unhappy ending. Somehow that fitted in with his no-nonsense atheistic (I imagined) image. One day in the pub where they play no music, as I was slopping his pint of ale down in front of him, I asked him point-blank.

  “It does, actually,” he said.

  “But how can a dark novel called The Dark have a happy ending?

  He sipped at the salivalike froth on his beer. “Why not?”

  SPARROWS

  FOR THE first time I notice some sparrows in the garden. When we first came here I am sure there were none. Now there are several. Maybe the sparrows are coming back.

  EZBEKIYA GARDENS

  THE EZBEKIYA Gardens book market had, as jar as I could work out, been destroyed in 1991. I wasn’t surprised. It tied in with how the nineties saw the final triumph of globalism. Now there really is no place to hide. The wild places are just waste grounds now, interesting enough as places to play if you are a child, or in need of a holiday. They don’t junction as wild places anymore, not unless you are careless and forget your radio beacon and satellite phone.

  This used to make me angry and sad, but then I convinced myself it didn’t matter that much. I had long nurtured this idea that things like secondhand books were overlooked by “progress” because they didn’t get in the way. The old could, in this situation, happily coexist alongside the new. The death of Ezbekiya Gardens proved how wrong I was. It was the last straw. Not only had an idyllic place where people could go for a evening stroll been destroyed, so had a storehouse of knowledge. Now Ezbekiya Gardens was a traffic intersection with human passersby, a scene from a flyover, a brief glimpse of concrete, then gone. But the books disappearing, that was worse. That was a strike to the heart.

  Nadim agreed to take me around Khan al Kalil bazaar. He went there often with his wife, who loved to bargain.

  Nadim was a Catholic, he wasn’t fasting, but out of consideration for me he didn’t suggest a cup of tea or coffee.

  First we went looking for old tools, since I had decided to give up more or less on the hunt for secondhand books. We found several junk shops in Mosky Alley, but the tools were overpriced and so worn as to be usehss. Egypt is not a good place for antiques. Things get used until they wear out and break. There isn’t the same reverence for old objects that we show.

  Nadim then took me to a man who sold ivory. The man spoke good English and wore ellipticallensed spectacles like a French intellectual. His shop was on the main alley in Khan al Kalil, so he must have been making money. He showed his camel-bone carvings in the front of the shop and the ivory carvings in the back. He didn’t mind that we were not interested. Unlike most bazaaris, this man was not greedy. Nadim asked him about secondhand tools and he told us about a shop that specialized in them. He also gave us a map to find a place that sold swordsticks, which are still legal in Egypt.

  The ivory man was helpful; he could see beyond the end of his nose. Most people in the bazaar were not like that. They didn’t believe people would come back, or they didn’t believe correct or considerate behavior would bring repeat custom. The majority view was get the money and screw the customer because you’ll never see him again.

  We looked at some swordsticks and I bargained for one that was made froman old fencing foil set into an ebony bandle. We reached an impasse and the man said, “It’s only ten pounds we’re arguing about, that’s nothing, pay my price!”

  “If it’s nothing, why not accept my price?” I said.

  The man laughed and acknowledged my verbal victory, but he still wouldn’t drop his price.

  Nadim had been very useful, so I asked him if he knew about the move from Ezbekiya Gardens to Hussain, which was near to where we now were. “Why don’t we ask?”he said.

  In the first shop we went into, a man was selling religious tracts. He told Nadim, “They came here, the booksellers, but now they’ve gone back. They are back in Ezbekiya Gardens.”

  “Are you sure?” Nadim said.

  The man shrugged, as if to say, If you don’t believe me, then that’s your problem; you asked me and I told you.

  I told my wife that Ezbekiya Gardens was maybe running again. I found even the possibility incredibly heartening. I was like a man who had lost faith and then miraculously found it again.

  If the secondhand book market still existed, it meant far more than just being able to buy cheap first editions of Victor Hugo. It meant that something I cared for had not become extinct.

  The great auk, the passenger pigeon, the dodo, that snail from the Pacific, those fish the Major poisoned—I had to admit that my concern for them was virtually nil. My concern was simply the result of a conventional upbringing, nothing more. Even the fact that Milu had survived rather than been killed by the hungry relief battalions, including a starving Grandpa Tom, meant little more to me than a good yarn; the deer did, of course, look nice at Woburn, but care? Really care? About a few animals, when the WORLD was disappearing?

  But if Ezbekiya Gardens had somehow re-formed or continued, then I would have to change my views. Cynicism, nihilism, and global self-death predictions would be wrong. It wasn’t just that Ezbekiya Gardens stood for something I cared about, secondhand books; it was the whole idea of a market for secondhand books as a conduit to the past for things of value.

  Things of value. It is not antiques that are valuable, it is the workmanship, which indicates a higher level of skill and dedication than we have today. It is what the antiques can teach us that is important, not their scarcity or price.

  And books are one of the best possible ways of preserving what is valuable, what should be passed on. So the book market becomes a symbol for the passing on, the willingness to pass on the ancient knowkledge of the past.

  My wife agreed to come with me to look for the revived Ezbekiya Gardens. We stopped in a crowded street, and the driver, Yusuf, asked a fruit-seller where the secondhand book market was. The man said there wasn’t one. My wife wanted to give up, but I knew that we had to push on. We wandered around asking everyone we met. One man told us to try over there, and pointed down a wide alley to a newly paved pedestrianized piazza-type place. It was full of single-story brick-built kiosks with roll-down metal shutters. Most of the shutters were open—revealing—books!

  I took in the sight at once. There must have been at least a hundred different places selling secondhand books. I did a low pass, quickly scanning the teetering piles—many were foreignlanguage booh. Many textbooks, but many other kinds of booh too. In one shop I bought a first edition of Somerset Maugham’s essays, in another, a 1948 edition of Men Only with an article by Ahn Whicker, and a pirated edition of Anthony Burgess—total cost three pounds sterling. In another shop the keen owner showed me his “old” books—tatty leather-bound volumes of Punch and a demaged first edition of Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa. He was very proud of his shop. He told us the stallholders had built all the kiosks themselves, after they had received permission to return. They had indeed been exi
led for a while to Hussain, but all along they had been working at coming back to Ezbekiya Gardens. There were so many bookshops I could only skip through the mounds of books very quickly. I’d need hours to go through them properly A ht of junk, but far more variety than in an English secondhand book market. Here there was more room for surprises. There were French, German, Italian, Russian books—relics of the various times when those countries had sought to influence Egypt. Ezbekiya Gardens was back in force. I even found a first edition of Victor Hugo. It was as if it had been waiting ever since Nadim and his brother had shopped there, a companion volume, still remarkably cheap. Old books with pictures commanded a premium as they do in the West, and the condition of most of the books was not perfect. But Egypt is a dry country, and the books had no worm or mildew, which is the problem in wetter places.

  If the booksellers could survive in the hostile commercial environment of Egypt, I felt they could survive anywhere. In a place where “influence” is a standard procedure to gain building permission, a place where previously beautiful areas have been ruined by high-rise blocks of incredible ugliness, where demands for housing mean that slum dwellings eat into the fields around Cairo, it was remarkable that the booksellers had clung onto their home turf. In Egypt, the ancient bangs right up against the modem, people living in tombs in the City of the Dead and talking on mobile phones. The pressure to modernize is intense, yet somehow the ability to be individual has not been crushed. The booksellers remain.

  Milu survives. If you visit Woburn Abbey or Whipsnade Zoo, you can see examples of this strange ungulate that has survived against all odds, and largely because of the efforts of two extraordinary men. Or not so extraordinary. I rather think they were ordinary men who knew when to make an extraordinary effort. Ordinary men, like the booksellers of Ezbekiya Gardens.