The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  Amid the description of the first climate, with its bitter fishes and coarse blue cloth, Edrisi wrote about the African princess who required her meals to be floated to her on a leaf. He mentioned that certain rich mandarins owned bathtubs made out of mollusc shells that measured over a yard in length. After cataloguing the races in the land of Mallel, with its strict though benevolent king, he inserted the legend of Gog and Magog. He narrated, by sleight of hand, as it were, including, as an objective summary of the land of Nubia, the story of the Mountains of the Moon, of the monstrous races that lined the banks of the Nile. He discoursed on the intelligence of elephants, on the city of Wangara, the source of all the gold in Africa. He wrote of the gardens in Tripoli whose plants, once sown, germinate to maturity in thirty minutes, of the Indian paper roses that open in water, and of the subterranean passages in the fifth climate from where an elderly woman, sitting at an unusual keyboard instrument, calls forth the sound of Japan at dawn, Christmas in Ethiopia, the Chinese selling tea, prayers in Medina.

  As Edrisi worked on the Kitab Rujjar, he found that he no longer understood his feelings for Abila. She had acquired free rein of the palace, and every time he saw her, passing in one of the high-ceilinged corridors, or else viewing her from a distance as she walked in the gardens, he felt an unbearable sadness. He had his title changed from Chief Vizier to Geographer Royal. He no longer sprinted or took virgins into his chamber, although he remained loyal to his bees. And his desire for Abila became more complicated, less sure and insistent, confused with the emptiness in his chest, that void which was snaking its way through his inner organs. Still he laboured with his book, and, as more envoys returned to Palermo – bringing news of the Iberian peninsula, or a description of the city of Lemlem, or a hint or beginning of a story – he continued to add to what he had written, or else, when he had completed the description of a particular climate, a merchant would arrive to contradict the initial report. And so Edrisi came to understand that he would never finish annotating his map, because the world was always moving. It was at this point, having failed with Abila, Edrisi decided to travel back to his childhood city.

  Edrisi recognized nothing of Ceuta. Walking through the square, he looked into a pauper’s rheumy eyes, eyes that had once been young to the city, like his own, and he recognized neither eyes nor the sights upon which they had formerly gazed: the water clock, the tiny door on Meedan Street, the cemetery in which his father was entombed. Sickened, Edrisi began to draw maps of Ceuta, first on a scale of three inches to a mile, then six inches to a mile, and with ever-increasing ratios, until eventually he attempted to chart the city on a scale of a mile to a mile. He wished to create a life-sized map of Ceuta, so as to preserve its true form, as it was before time had engendered a second city that bore the same name. Point by point he retraced the pathways of his boyhood home. And because few places were large enough to house his map, and perhaps also to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, Edrisi brought it to the desert, that place where meanings and values are blown away, where nothing grows, and in which one is free to dream. There, in that void of endless sand, Edrisi put down his map and set about living the end of his life on Ceuta.

  But what of Abila? This question never occurred to me as a child, since I was so caught up in Edrisi’s fate. And once Edrisi left Palermo, Father, certainly, never gave her a second thought. With age and my waning powers of listening, however, with my struggle to follow the sounds which remain in my memory, silences have taken on new resonance. They are a kind of vacuum once occupied by sound, a story untold. What, then, of Abila? I would like to believe that, following her enchantment with Milus, the storyteller, she in turn enchanted him, enlisting his help to aid her escape from King Roger’s court. As to where she escaped to, not even Milus, who waited for her, as arranged, by the pomegranate tree at the city gates, until the moon faded and the sun rose high in the sky, long past the hour she was due to appear, well, not even he knows that.

  5

  My Parents Marry – War Breaks Out – I Am Conceived

  Mother’s trunk is made of iron and red-painted oakwood. Carved into the lid, in curlicued letters filled with dust, are her maiden initials – EHR. The wood is split and covered with a film of oily dust. The padlock and key are missing; nevertheless an iron hasp fastens the lid, the underside of which features three hand-painted miniatures. When my grandfather Mr Rafferty was still a watchmaker he collected these vignettes on his business trips to Asia, having planned to use them to decorate his export-bound watches. Instead he gave them to my mother. The first painting, the smallest and most finely detailed, depicts a littoral with the tide in full ebb; sand occupies the bottom third of the picture and the remaining area is filled by the sea; inscribed by the edge of the water is a little crab. The second scene is more typical of the period: a boat, armed with cannons and culverins, sets sail under a glowering sky; the port is thronged with well-wishers, and behind this multitude loom the dream-vistas of an Eastern city. The third shows the vizier’s daughter Scheherazade kneeling beside King Shahrayar, who is wrapped in the bejewelled blankets of his divan. Dinarzad, Scheherazade’s sister, peeps out from beneath the bed. All three are awake; the King’s eyes are wet and amazed; Dinarzad smiles; Scheherazade looks commandingly towards the King, her arms raised, her whole person poised as if to say: ‘Listen!’

  Focusing my powers of listening, relaunching my history after that interloper Edrisi, and fixing my mind upon the sounds that flocked the air in the months after Rex and Mr Rafferty met in the basement of 16 Ingolstadt Place, I can reveal that my parents were married without pomp in June 1939. Reverberating around the cloisters I hear the sound of their dry-kissing lips.

  There are other sounds that reach me from that day. I hear a chorus of well-wishers, admirers, advice-givers, but I can’t detect the voice of Mr Rafferty. Years on the run had left him reluctant to appear in public, despite the legitimacy conferred upon him by his association with the War Office. He was unwilling to assume his duties as father-of-the-bride and, twenty minutes before the service began, approached the official photographer, an ungainly colossus who was lost when not peering through his viewfinder, and confiscated his apparatus, indicating that he – father-of-the-bride – would swap roles with him. The photographer, accustomed to life experienced in miniature, was led out of the church and into the arms of my mother, who, as always, indulged his paranoia.

  Thus, it was not Mr Rafferty whom the guests observed accompanying Mother to the altar, but an awkward giant dressed in a grey suit. Had they looked over their shoulders, however, they would have seen an equally taciturn fellow in dark glasses, smiling like an open piano.

  Mr Rafferty did not utter a word that day; instead he let his camera do the talking. (He was a shutterbug as well as a watchmaker, the clock and camera being kith and kin by virtue of their desire to measure, sort, and finally kill time.) His camera hung dormant during the ceremony, covered by his jacket, and awoke in the daylight of the churchyard. Click – Mother is captured in her accordion-pleated skirt with red roses in her hair. Click – a portrait of the extended family with aching grins (Mr Rafferty waited too long before he tripped the shutter). Click – a dazzled-looking father-of-the-bride. Click – Father, his thick fair hair refusing to settle, despite the superabundance of hair wax, into a side parting, giving him a calamitous look. Click – the happy couple, their eyes bursting with hand-tinted colour; Mother’s green and diaphanous; Father’s the pale blue of a feeble dreamer.

  The only evidence my grandfather left of his attendance at the ceremony were snapshots. As he was the photographer, and not the photographed, no trace of his presence survives. I could go on describing the photographs. But, although they are no doubt lodged in some cranny in the attic, and easily found, I shall leave them to the mice. Already, without setting eyes on them, my notion of the wedding has acquired a mawkish haze.

  Shortly after the wedding, my father left Oxford, Lagos-bound, where he had been post
ed to work as an Assistant District Officer. My mother planned to join him some months later, but towards the end of July, as Europe prepared to unleash its martial hate, the government stopped non-essential sea-passages to Africa. And so Mother, who had packed her trunk in readiness, remained in Oxford during the war. She continued to look after the shop, since even during the war – perhaps especially because time takes on different properties, in particular for those who experience the rupture of death – people need to tell the time. During the onslaught, Mother refused to have me conceived. ‘I will not birth my child into this firepit,’ she told Rex in 1942, during his only leave. And so I, who, once introduced to the womb, chose to linger, was absented from the war. As I sit here at my desk, cold, my skylight framing the starless night, I ask myself questions. Would it have been different had I been born in the earlier decade? Would it have been me – Evie Steppman – no matter when Mother fell pregnant? Was I destined to matricide, or did circumstance make me a murderer?

  …

  I visited Mr Rafferty this afternoon. I found him in an excitable mood. As he swung open the door to his room, he said, ‘Welcome, Herr Hoffmantel, you’re already late for the performance.’ He gestured me to sit. He busied himself in the white rectangle of his room, adjusting invisible knobs on the few pieces of furniture – iron bed, washstand, several moulded chairs, a low table; each white, seamless and unforgiving – doing little exercises with his fingers. Every so often he knocked on the side of the bed, scuttled to the door and flung it open. ‘Come in, Mr Mudge,’ he would say. Or, ‘Monsieur Le Roy, it’s wonderful to have you here.’ He ushered each new arrival to their seat. After some time, during which more elaborate preparations were made, Mr Rafferty turned and faced his audience. He took out an ivory stick, which, pinched between thumb and forefinger, he brandished in an exaggerated arc. After appealing for calm, he went to the small perspex window at the far end of the room, flipped the latch, climbed onto one of the chairs and cocked his right ear as far as the white bars would allow. The throb of an Edinburgh afternoon drifted into the room. He snapped the window shut. Silence. ‘Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The performance is about to begin.’ He came down from the chair. He resembled a decrepit circus master. ‘Signorina Marías, settle comfortably, I know how you like to fidget! And you, Mr Sinai, here’s a handkerchief for your cucumber … to which we are all indebted, but whose noise we mustn’t let spoil the performance. Regrettably, I must add, the Gräfin von Hahn-Hahn is unable to attend. She telephoned me this morning to say she has just invented electricity.

  ‘Each of you is skilled in the art of listening,’ he continued. ‘You each received an aural training from childhood. This performance, then, is constituted by you. I am simply the conduit.’

  Mr Rafferty once again opened the window. He stood facing the angled square of perspex, his back to me, both arms raised, in his left hand the ivory wand with which he conducted the silence. For, in spite of the open window, silence reigned over that padded room. Then he raised his arms, balled his hands and punched the air. At once, silence changed her name.

  In swept the thrum of traffic, dully, distantly, vibrations of cars, buses, truck-thunder, the sudden shriek of a bicycle’s brakes. Silence. From which opened quiet machine-noise, the Green Man’s yelp. And now the flurry of footsteps, shouting voices, the collapsed hobble of the old. And there were seagulls, perched on roofs and everywhere circling; shifting, the sand at Portobello beach; shivering, the leaves of the old oak on Princes Street.

  At length, when the city was sounding in an immense caterwauling, Mr Rafferty leaped to the window and snapped it shut. Delighted with his performance, I began to clap.

  Later that evening, as I waited for a bus at York Place, the silence was immense. For the first time in many months the ringing in my ears had disappeared. And the few sounds I heard at that almost completely deserted hour were solitary and discontinuous, which only deepened the silence.

  Why does that which makes the greatest noise breed silence? Certainly, after the cruel disharmony of war, in the weeks and months following May 1945, and stretching into the New Year, a great silence prevailed.

  Silent were the skies. Silent the soldiers, inched under the soil. Silent too the burned bodies, heaped in cinders. Unspeaking were my parents after the war. Silent the guns. Silent the wasted cavalcade of men, women and children as they journeyed, blind, towards their homes that were different to how they had left them. Without noise, heaped under blankets, my parents made love for the first time. Silent too the fires that had burned down cities. Silent the gas chambers, an echo of their quietening work. Silently the seed thrust towards the egg. Silent the monsters of war, spent of fuel. Silent the waves breaking against the bow of the mailboat as it pierced the seas towards Africa. Silence at the Captain’s table, where Rex and Evelyn once dined on their way to Lagos. Silent, without tears, were the mothers whose children died for Progress. Silent the birds in Japan. Silent the rock. Without words, my parents crossed the bar of Lagos and motored towards Customs Wharf. Silent the yachts, rocking in the wake of their boat. Silent the lawns, with their muted underlife. Silently my parents sipped tea on the veranda. A season of silence.

  And all the time I was growing inside Mother and listening.

  6

  I Gestate, Listen, and – Finally – I Am Born

  Listening, I gambolled in the womb. I turned somersaults and figures-of-eight. I saw nothing, felt only the warm stickiness of the amnion. No odours reached me in my chamber. Not the stink of gin or soap, spoiling meat or burned oil. A mermaid sings. I was not a mermaid. A grub in a preserving jar floats in an azoic age. I was not that grub. Without conscience, I took in every sound.

  This is what I heard: the vicious spitting of feral cats, rug-beaters thwacking, traffic-bustle and crowds. Fat goats being led to market, their bleating disharmonious and afraid. Women pounding manioc. Hawkers singing shrill and repetitive love songs to vegetables, paeans to fish and fruit – shrimps, prawns, smoked alive! Lovely oranges, lovely fresh oranges – and tailors, their sewing machines chattering in bursts. Hiss and splutters were street food cooking in palm oil. I heard the punishing of boy-thieves. And at all times of the day and night the ringing of insects. The womb, helped by the resonance of the amniotic fluid, sounded with the buzz, the flutterings, the shrill almost musical droning. And in the rainy season, thunder and the wild mutiny of rain, the curtain cord striking the window. I noted the coursing hum of blood. The sea too was almost always present.

  When I was twelve weeks in the womb my parents embarked on a tour of Nigeria. We – the three of us – travelled up from Lagos, past Ibadan and Illorin and, after crossing the Niger River, to the city of Zaria, where prayer-songs and cantillation echoed in my head, new sounds I took in hungrily. At Gusau I heard three bars of a chorus played on a piano, over and over again. My parents toured Nigeria, and the quiet but invasive whisper of the sea was replaced by the sucking-noise of car tyres on muddied roads, forest paths, long-drawn footfalls and aspirate conversation. I recall the unique echoing of public spaces, antechamber, church, mosque, state hall. The splitting crackle of a bush fire. Bird notes, one especially I remember, a flute-like call. And another, a kind of boom resembling the distant baying of a hound. I heard the slapping of limbs during wrestling matches. The agonies of a constipated child.

  And if the sounds swept in any-which-way, I too was indiscriminate, so that amid the commonplace I also heard that which is normally held aloof, set aside for night or passed off with a quick intake of air, things which cannot be repeated easily: District Officers’ dirty jokes, lovers’ sighs, the death agonies of men. All of us, in the echo chamber of the womb, are able to receive the wildest spectrum of sounds; it’s simply that we cannot retain them as we grow up. Who, in their maturity, can recall the special sound of sunlight? It rings in the ears as when one circles the top of a fine-wrought wine glass. And the tumescent heat of Nigeria, which sprawls and rumbles li
ke a jet aeroplane. I heard the almost unbearable sorrow of an elephant’s call, the sad music of the nightsoil workers at Five Cowrie Creek. I eavesdropped on smugglers’ tales, and they reminded me of prey-birds swooping, bent on murder. I perceived three worlds in the rhythm a girl beat out on an aluminium barrel at the same time each evening: the one that surrounds us, the reality that one can sense; the world of those who are dead and buried but continue to exist and may participate in our lives; and the splendid realm of objects, which hold in their very matter, despite their incapacity, the sign of everyone who has held them, traded, buried, smitten, pocketed, hurled, sought knowledge from, tapped out a rhythm on or packed away. My ears were keenly alert. They were small, yet they captured every sound.

  It was not always this way. In the beginning, when I resembled a transparent grub, there was silence. In truth there was none because silence needs its other; and since I had no ears to speak of I had no noise and thus no silence. Rather, in the beginning there was a great emptiness. The silence was in me. And the silence was me. It lasted eighty days.

  Then the first stirrings of sound. Tiny to begin with, as if woken from hibernation. Next, on top of – or it seemed beneath – this animal crackle awoke a steady hiss that resembled gas escaping; which grew more insistent, filling out at the lower registers, becoming more complicated. And then the sounds really began to break through into the womb because every day now – one hundred days had passed – a new bark or caterwauling echoed in my head. I experienced this noise wholly and without names. The only modulation was by degree of volume – and steadily the sounds grew louder. There were too many at times, too many scratchings and thunderings to take account of, too great a roar as the world turned audibly – I could feel the shrill vibration of the heat on top of everything – all this abundance of noise, this wall of life turned into an exclusive sound, white noise perhaps, but more brilliant and penetrating, like a Victoria Falls made not of water but of seething flowing electricity and light. I took in the timbres all at once, the whole diapason of life, and also I heard, faintly but unmistakably, the slow-grinding fire machinery and toil of the shadows under the earth and within it.