The Weaver Fish

by Robert Edeson

  our spoken travel’s distance and design.

  Interested readers should consult the full text (Satroit, ‘The Guardianship of the Holy Land’). For comparison, that poet’s notorious but altogether less subtle ‘A Suitor’s Reverie’, which was cited in apostasy charges and has only ever circulated underground, is made available. Notably, it lacks entirely the sensual modulation, mathematical subversiveness, and lightness, of the other work.

  In shaded blacks he colours her, and enters love’s surmise

  sees ebony and unlit mouth, and wild jet-mystery eyes

  that could as well turn falling light

  to melancholy, or a comic night.

  They follow him, as now undressed

  he kisses evening on her breast

  then settles down; the rest is not

  to sleep, but breathe upon the raven spot

  a warmest whisper and the faintest touch

  that ever unsealed lips of such

  remotest secrecy—till vesper voice

  betrays the quickened parting of her joys

  with but an instant left to muse at length

  where, in her darkness, comes his strength.

  14

  DR BOKARDO

  Tøssentern was becoming familiar with the taxi journey between King’s Cross station and Mingle Lane, where Dr Bokardo had rooms. And this week, he noted, was depressingly unchanged from the four previous: even the passengers of the city, along with its sky, its roads and facades, were complexioned London grey.

  When he entered the waiting room he found Barbara Bokardo sitting at the secretary’s computer. She looked up and greeted him, with an explanatory wave at the untidiness around her.

  ‘Constance is unwell. On days like this I am reminded that the work of a secretary can be harder than the practice of psychiatry.’ She gestured Tøssentern toward the consulting room.

  ‘I’m sure I can redress that imbalance for you,’ he said quietly as he passed by. It was wryly spoken and, she thought, signalled an improvement in his mental state.

  He settled into his now habitual corner of a comfortable leather couch. Dr Bokardo followed, closing the door. She sat on a matching armchair, some loose papers in one hand, and looked at him, gently and inquisitively. Neither spoke immediately.

  Tøssentern was still thinking about his train journey from Cambridge. The weekly excursion was providing something unexpected: bearable solitude and an emptiness of thought that he found peaceful and restorative. He had even wondered if this experience of travel might be more transformative than the therapy sessions that were its purpose. Now, sitting here and suffused with idleness, he fell deeper into silence.

  But somewhere in that submissive state was an emergent discomfort. His previous sessions had felt like interesting conversations; the issues in himself that he brought to therapy had been securely intellectualized. Today, with hardly a word between them, that artifice was dismantling, exposing a nebulous emotionality.

  Only partly aware of his circumstances, he suddenly noticed that Dr Bokardo was looking down, writing on the notepaper, and the outward oddness of his distraction registered. His reaction was spontaneous, defensive, apologetic, and awkward.

  ‘Notes on the silence?’ he asked.

  She looked up immediately. ‘Is the silence noteworthy?’

  Tøssentern felt slightly challenged, and hoped that his question had not been impolite. ‘No. A phatic remark. I am sorry.’

  As he spoke he regretted the reply; she would surely view no utterance in this setting as meaningless. Her response was still surprising.

  ‘But a silence noteworthy enough to elicit a comment that destroyed its very object, the silence.’

  There was a trace of questioning, but no tone of disagreement in her voice, and Tøssentern, easily amused by the self-referential, began to relax. The artifice strengthened, and within it the temptations of indolence returned. He imagined sitting there for the remainder of the session in contented silence. Instead, he took up her theme.

  ‘Yes. As we might protect a species to extinction. Or declaring one’s love begins love’s eroding.’

  He hesitated. The ideas had come with easy objectivity but, when expressed, left him unsettled. The antinomies and conundrums of existence that should provoke and entertain and illuminate seemed now imbued with pessimism.

  ‘I suppose I was interested in why you would write, and what.’ He wasn’t confident of the truthfulness of this remark, and Dr Bokardo was not drawn.

  ‘Actually, I like silences,’ he continued, with greater composure. This was definitely true: he had to his name a scholarly monograph on that very subject of Parsan gaps, as they were known technically. Recalling at that point his interaction with the dreadful Signora Scintillini, he was tempted to add lightly that they were sometimes the only tolerable part of a conversation. Or that, in the humour canon of a student linguist, they translated impeccably. Dr Bokardo remained serious.

  ‘In conversation, mutual silence begins and ends, ordinarily, with an expressed thought by one party. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happens in such a silence, for you?’

  ‘I am listening, or re-listening, to what has been said; processing; exploring possibilities, directions; remembering; finding associations; searching; composing. Is that not the same for you?’

  She ignored the question. ‘Making judgements?’

  ‘Possibly, around ethical issues, say. Privacy, relevance, the political. The other person, perhaps.’ The last felt confessional, and he was aware of how it might reference into the present.

  ‘What do you think is the nature of the conversation, during this silence?’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘The silence begins, we agree, with something verbalized. This collocates both parties in thought. As it extends, their thinking de-correlates. So the longer the silence, the more the divergence, and therefore the more surprising to one party is the other’s next expressed thought. Many would identify divergence and surprise as qualities enriching conversation.’

  Tøssentern offered no response, and she added, ‘On that basis, the richest, most interesting conversations are those with the longest intervals of silence. Paradoxical, isn’t it?’

  Tøssentern agreed, whilst weighing the speciousness of the argument.

  ‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘an exception occurs if silence is systematically terminated by a comment of some fixed nature, say, on the silence itself.’

  Tøssentern thought of his beginning remark, and felt slightly chastened. Dr Bokardo continued. ‘That would eliminate unpredictability, and as we have agreed, richness. In the fully degenerate case we might find ourselves in a conversation consisting of long silences interspersed with comments about those long silences.’

  ‘I can imagine two Becketts enjoying that,’ offered Tøssentern.

  ‘Would you enjoy it, Edvard?’

  ‘As a participant, or as a spectator?’

  ‘As participant.’

  Tøssentern first imagined himself a spectator. His actors transformed with diminishing obviousness from tramps into people he recognized, staring mutely at each other with only perplexity in common. The audience leaned forward, expectantly, into this portrayal of the minimalist state, eager to witness an apotheosis of human communication. It came as music: Martin Allegorio’s sublime cantata, Wordless, in celebration of the Syllabines.

  He became aware of Dr Bokardo studying him intently, and was reminded of the given task. The music receded; the audience dissolved. The stage was the Nazarene Master’s garden, and he was sitting quietly with Anna after the Lindenblüten lecture. He closed his eyes and the work of that silence returned. It was different now; the passage from exhaustion to resolve was effortless, and despair and hollowness were replaced by Anna’s warmth.

  But surrounding this happier vignette was a larger silence, set in this room, bonding him with Dr Bokardo. Yes, he was able to comment
on silence, its length, purity, purpose, pathos. And of course he could manufacture delight and surprise. But, here and now, he had entered an experiment that seemed to immobilize him with self-consciousness. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.

  He opened his eyes, looking at Dr Bokardo for relief, but she said nothing. His thoughts returned to Anna, then to Abel in the storm, to the crash, and the hideousness of the condor attack. How he coated his body in thick mud as mosquito armour and stumbled, like some earthen clay monster, half the length of the Ferende plateau. How for weeks he survived, part-sustained, part-crazed, on seki fruit. How a strange amulet word, now forgotten, had come to him over and over until he thought of nothing else. And how on a rough jungle track he was dimly aware of human contact before succumbing to sleep. That was a long silence, ended not by some clever reflexive remark, but a confusion of ventilator sighs, monitor alarms, reassuring voices, and pain.

  His eyes became moist and he touched them slowly with thumb and forefinger. He realized that throughout he had been staring absently at Dr Bokardo, and he found her looking back at him intensely. He forced himself into her presence, and dutifully to the question she had posed.

  ‘Yes, I think I could enjoy that.’ Even to him, it sounded ridiculous.

  ‘Edvard, none of this is about the silence.’ Her voice was gentle and concerned; as she spoke she leaned slightly forward as if her humanity were reaching out to touch him. ‘It’s not about the silence. It’s about the introspection.’

  Tøssentern understood in an instant. Far from offering refuge, silence was the theatre for an existential drama staged inside, lived singly and secretly in the white between the words. The insight drove him deeper into rumination, and again it was an effort to speak.

  ‘I think I know that.’ His voice was quiet and flat.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asked softly.

  ‘To the storm, the crash.’ There was no need for explanation. In an earlier session Tøssentern had been able to give her a factual account of his experience. Dr Bokardo didn’t speak. After a few minutes he continued.

  ‘My disappearance was like a silence, wasn’t it? Absence. Divergence. Judgements ... The unexpected conclusion.’

  ‘A shocking, traumatic conclusion, Edvard, for those who knew you, joyous as it was.’

  But Tøssentern’s attention was on his own trauma, and his words came wrought from his own silence.

  ‘I am thinking that I need to go back. I need to go back.’ He seemed to retreat into self-absorption, and Dr Bokardo was the first to speak.

  ‘To find Abel?’

  Tøssentern’s gaze shifted to the window and its light of London grey. He spoke slowly, as if escaping thoughts demanded ordered recognition and capture.

  ‘Abel. The weaver fish. And the word I’ve lost; I need to go back, to remember it.’

  * * *

  Barbara Bokardo has an illustrious, if somewhat tarnished, ancestry. The Florentine philosopher Leonardo di Boccardo, known for a wit and worldliness too subversive for the papacy (his Vatican tenure as Ignorius, for two days, is often unlisted in pontifical histories), became private tutor and spiritual father to Niccolò Machiavelli. His observation that

  Every man dies before his masterpiece is born,

  proved sadly prescient: he was believed poisoned while arranging for printing his Conversaziones e Silenzio, which is largely lost. Fragments survive, including two as attributed epigraphs; one is to be found in Pastaveleno’s Palazzo di Guerra (here in a modern translation by Lawrence Enright):

  The methods of influence are argument, seduction and threat; appealing, respectively, to reason, vanity and fear. Of these, one is laborious, one unconscionable, but the third most efficacious.

  Leonardo might well have heeded this insight in the upbringing of his protégé who, in all his writings, offers no acknowledgement of the master’s self-evident priority. Indeed, Machiavelli’s omissions seem intended to erase the name of di Boccardo from posterity. Some scholars argue that The Prince is a reworked Conversaziones.

  The rumoured explanation for Ignorius’ hasty expulsion was a perfectly unconscious but unforgivably profane solecism committed during Holy Week. Perhaps though, years later, in his own tenebrous hour, gravid with unborn masterpiece, his Sistine prayer was answered:

  Miserere mei, Deus. Maketh my end secular, with a woman near;

  except that, in the event, the woman near had probably poisoned his penne.

  Barbara Bokardo’s innocuous ‘Constance is unwell’ comment was a striking professional understatement. In fact, Constance suffered the affliction known discreetly to older physicians as Lady Coaxingly’s Condition.

  That Dr Bokardo’s advice ( ‘It’s about the introspection’) on the existential work of silence should present as an insight to Tøssentern, points to a retardative aspect of his illness. Apart from technical publications on Parsan gaps, he had co-authored (with E Knielsen) the deeply meditative Nordic Silence. By way of warning, readers attracted to this title are urged to fortify themselves with optimism before their journey into bleakness. There, in an unhorizoned world of ice and amber lakes called the Passible Tracts, three discoveries await. First, here is where moral1 hesitation and remorse, linked to solitude, entered human nature. Second, in this wilderness was born inductive supposition, finding in another’s death one’s own memento mori. (Still might we look upon a gravesite frozen in prehistory and steal their people’s inchoate thought: At least I have outlived these few.) Third, and a point to which the authors repeatedly return, there is a temperament made here for which the silence of the landscape, profound to us, is hymnal.

  1. According to Lord Enright, blot can mean both conscience and number. It remains unclear whether we are celebrating the origin of moral sentience, or the beginning of arithmetic. No wonder that the preface to Nordic Silence is a formless overture of two men brooding over what to say. Back

  15

  TWO PENELOPES AND THE HALFPENNY SET

  For Anna, life at Chaucer Road had never recovered after the Abel accident. The contentment and easy companionship that sustained their separate professional lives seemed less assured. From once enjoying the spaciousness of a large house they now lived almost entirely in the new conservatory, where they had all meals and to which Edvard would bring work from his study and library. Pleasant as the space was for both of them, this radical resettlement felt eccentric and oddly impermanent, signifying to Anna withdrawal and distancing from what they had once shared.

  The legacy of damage from the balloon crash was not limited to Edvard. Though her role in saving his life was universally praised, Anna regularly found herself intensely self-critical. It was not to do with her medical management. It was about the fact that she did not absolutely recognize Edvard when he was delivered so gravely ill from the jungle. It was a disappointment that some metaphysical bond had not immediately identified him against the evidence of her eyes. And it was her failure to dismiss categorically any doubt in herself and others about who that person was. She felt it as guilt, irrational and unfair to herself, and she didn’t share it.

  Another matter was again concerning her. On a recent visit to Mingle Lane, being a few minutes early for his appointment with Barbara Bokardo, Tøssentern had briefly visited the Ornithological Society’s antiquated museum, situated only a few doors from her rooms. When he enquired of its aquiline curator about the artifacts and literature pertaining to the Asiatic condor he was met with astonishment. The reason for this was that earlier in the same week two Chinese gentlemen had sought the same material, which had otherwise lain dormant for decades. When it had proved necessary to impress upon them that items in the museum collection were not for sale at any price, they became agitated and left very uncivilly.

  This intelligence aroused in Tøssentern a sense of urgency around returning to the Ferendes and prosecuting the campaign against illegal logging. He had, of course, been in regular contact with Paulo about research progress and some adminis
trative decisions, but Paulo also had disturbing news about the Chinese problem. He had managed to visit the lookout on the northern plateau just once, but was able to report that a much longer deepwater jetty had been built, and he had photographed a very large vessel alongside. Enormous sheds had also appeared near the shoreline. The areal survey of deforestation that they had set up was no longer adequate as the extent of destruction was now well beyond the range of their optics. Arising from this, Paulo had copied Tøssentern into an email to Nicholas requesting that he organize access to satellite imagery.

  The idea of Edvard returning worried Anna, partly because he seemed unsure what form an anti-logging campaign could possibly take, and also because she knew he would be keen to locate and visit the Abel crash site. That would involve an arduous trek with, no doubt, physical and (she was sure) psychological risks. She advised that she thought it unwise that he interrupt his therapy programme. She argued again that it would be sensible to wait until Nicholas had completed his consultancy in Perth and returned to the LDI station. And privately, she was wondering whether she should take extended leave from the Compton to go as well.

  Despite the Ferende preoccupation returning, Anna did have a sense that Edvard’s moods were improving. His morbid silences were fewer, he seemed more focused on his research and happy to be writing again. There was some return of lightness and humour in their idle conversation. These changes she ascribed, as did he, to therapy. She started to accept more the peculiar confinement of their lives to the conservatory.

  It was pleasing then, given that they had not entertained friends for months, when Edvard suggested they invite to dinner Penelope Loom, the recently appointed Fellow in Homeric studies at Nazarene, who was new not just to the college but to Cambridge itself. Anna remembered enjoying her company at Edvard’s Lindenblüten lecture. This was more like the old days, when they habitually were host to new Fellows, visiting scholars and graduate students. She immediately contacted Penelope and secured a date.