by A. N. Wilson
Behind and within the dust and smoke were half a million instances of human despair. All that they took for granted, in the course of their daily lives, as solid – their houses, their offices, the shops, the pavements, the ground beneath their feet – was now in violent motion. Their limbs, their legs, their feet no longer properly functioned. If you stood up, you fell over again. Many were unable to stop shaking, from sheer fear. The fear was so powerful that, when they looked back on it afterwards, they realized the inadequacy of the word. The occasions when they had used the word in their past – as children, fear of the dark, or, as adults, fear of attack by criminals in a darkened street, or the fear induced by nightmares or horror films – these, however strong, were mere twinges before the sensations brought to the surface by the Quake.
Others felt something different from this abject fear – it was immediate heartbreak, immediate consciousness that the person or persons they most loved were elsewhere, or threatened. Almost no mobile phones had signals in the first moments after the Quake, so that hundreds of thousands of people were stabbed with an instantaneous feeling of anguish – wanting to reach out for their wives, husbands, children, parents, and not being able to do so. Many had comparable feelings of anguish, bitterly regretting that their lives, which might be about to end, had taken some false turn or another – wishing that a broken friendship could be mended, or an act of cruelty undone.
Others in our city were stunned, literally stunned, and did not begin to feel the shock of the Quake until afterwards – in some cases, weeks afterwards. At the time of the Quake itself, they had been seized with numbness. They had felt nothing, literally nothing.
In the offices of Nicolson and Blake, Charlie Nicolson’s PA, Harriet LeStrange, an intelligent woman aged twenty-two, was typing up a brief for him. It was not one of the big cases involving Rex Tone and Ricky Wong. It concerned an on-going dispute between two neighbours – a jam factory on the outskirts of town and St Frideswide’s, one of the most prestigious private girls’ schools in the country. The headmistress contended that Simpsons, the industrial jam makers, had built an extended workshop on property which belonged to the school. Simpsons-Jelly, represented by a big law firm in Derby, one of the larger, more industrial of the cities on the Island, contended that by the deeds last drawn up in 1928, this land had been part of the original factory site. It was the sort of case which Charlie enjoyed, gentle, expensive, and likely to be long lasting. A nice little earner.
Harriet was typing the words, ‘the survey conducted in 1926, at the time of the building of the first Chemistry Laboratories, clearly show . . .’ As these words appeared on her computer screen, Harriet felt the whole room shake, and saw enormous cracks appear in the office ceiling. Cheryl, the receptionist, called out,
—This is bigger than a 5!
As she did so, both young women could see all the electric wiring behind the plasterwork of the ceiling. They could see lath and plaster, as dust began to come through the roof, and as the floor shook.
—Are you all right, Arlene? they called to Charlie’s junior on the other side of the office.
None of them were all right, but the words came to Harriet’s mouth anyway. The floor beneath her desk had begun to sway about like a boat in choppy water. She could hear Cheryl repeating that this was bigger than a 5, but she could no longer see her, or Arlene. An enormous slab of concrete had fallen, enclosing the young woman in a triangular cave. The movement threw her, and the bookcase beside her desk, containing directories and law books, collapsed as she grabbed it to steady herself. She was now lying face down in rubble. She heard Arlene and Cheryl shouting, screaming, for a while, but thereafter there was silence for what felt like forever.
In fact it was the inside of an hour. Through a gap in her concrete cave, Harriet could see light, and she could hear voices. She heard periodic applause, people clapping, presumably as other bodies were carried out of the wreckage by rescue workers. And then she heard a man’s voice saying,
—I can see you, Harriet. I must be just above you.
—Below me, she said.
—Above you!
—Below me.
—Above you.
She tried to crawl towards him. For a while, her tortured spirit was liberated by sheer annoyance that he knew better than she did where she was. She realized that her hand was trapped by the fallen bookcase. She could not escape. She could, however, wiggle one of her legs towards the fissure at the top of her concrete cave, and by pushing her foot through the hole, she made her point.
—OK, Harriet, you’re above me. I’m coming in.
The concrete slab was carefully drawn back.
—My hand! I can’t move my hand!
—OK, Harriet, I’m going to get you out.
—I can’t move my hand.
The fireman had a small saw, which he was using to cut around the fallen bookshelf.
—Look at me, Harriet. We are going to get you out.
—My hand is trapped.
—I know that, Harriet, we are cutting round your hand . . .
He managed to cut a semi-circle round the hand, and to pull her arm free. As he did so, they both saw that he had left all the fingers of her left hand trapped beneath the metal bookcase. She stared with shocked detachment at her hand, at the bleeding stumps, at the fingers, as if they belonged to someone else.
Outside the building, cars were being thrown about like small leaves blown by autumn wind. People were falling over, like joke drunkards. The hot tarmac surfaces of the road had become first cracks, then canyons, and the liquefaction, stinking black mud, was bubbling out like newly prospected crude oil.
Two women who had agreed to meet in their favourite lunch spot, the Nosebag, a cheerful little café on the corner of Aberdeen Street and Hereford Square, had been thrown into the air about four feet and landed on their backs. One was in tears, the other lay for a moment, stunned, before getting up to help her friend.
—My God, Rosie – look!
As they staggered to their feet, they could see the wobbling structure of the Albert Hall, the fine Edwardian concert hall where they had sung together in the Aberdeen Choral Society – Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, The Dream of Gerontius. The roof was rippling like a silken bedspread before it lifted off, in seconds, and with a thunderous crash, the whole building, its millions of bricks, its white stone pilasters, its busts of the great composers, dotted in niches round the outside walls, had descended in a furious cloud.
The gibbons and the monkeys seemed to feel the shock more than the quadrupeds. They always sat and gibbered on their branches. Today, however, the gibbering was completely woeful. Those who heard and saw it felt it was quite as pitiable as the shock and suffering felt by the monkeys’ cousins, the human beings. You could not ‘explain’ what was going on to anyone, but somehow, the fact of human consciousness, the knowledge that we had all (except Rex Tone apparently) been waiting for this quake to happen made some part of the experience intelligible. And we had all stored up our own experiences and memories of the more minor quake six months before. The animals were just nakedly suffering.
In our Tragedy class with Barnaby and Digby, we’d discussed what changed, or elevated, an extremely sad event into a tragedy; of course, it was all to do with how the sorrow is perceived, how it is received, how human beings are able to ‘rise above’ their sufferings, or endure, in defiance of the gods. I suppose, after the Quake, the difficulty for nearly all of us was our inability to do this. Some of us took refuge in legal battles with building inspectors or structural engineers. Some of us had long-running battles with our insurance companies. The public mood against Rex Tone, or the Federal Government, perfectly reasonable on one level, was really displaced anger against gods in whom we could not believe. Sophocles and friends, and Homer before them, gave tremendous dignity to the intolerable affliction which humanity felt. I wonder how many of us really felt that in Aberdeen. Was that what we were trying to do
when we put on that production of Trojan Women in the months after the Quake – not make SENSE of the suffering, but to inject a note of dignity? Homer made the horses of Patroclus weep at his funeral. He made even the horses tragic. Our animals were not tragic. Their fear and vulnerability ripped open the nature of things, showed us the molten lava of screaming pain which lies beneath the apparently stable surface. The groaning of the rhinos, the howling – like alley-cats – of fearful tigers, the extra-wobbliness of the giraffes, who ran to and fro, unable to steady themselves on stick legs. No one who saw the zoo falling to bits, and the animals running free in panic among the crowds of screaming human beings, could ever forget, not just the pain of it, but the pointless pain. That was what was on display here – the absolute pointlessness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DIGBY WAS IN HER TOWER ROOM. SHE HAD BEEN SOLIDLY AT work for half the morning, her meditations on the Greeks punctuated by the gurgling and grinding and clanking of the well-oiled Victorian works of the great Cathedral clock, and the striking of the quarters. Her long, cool white fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard of her laptop.
In the 1971 film version of Trojan Women, starring Katharine Hepburn, Michael Cacoyannis left out the gods. The film begins, not, as does Euripides’ play, with a discussion between Poseidon and Athene, but with the women and children being escorted from the sacked, burning city. The Greeks had been waiting for the chance to make themselves rich with Trojan Gold. ‘Fools,’ says a voiceover, ‘to lay a city waste and so soon to die themselves.’
You could say that Cacoyannis’s film, though well acted by Hepburn (who plays Hecuba), is not really a tragedy at all. Just something that is very very sad – and, in a way, commonplace.
Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen played their sad roles and told their sad stories, but there was not a tragic fault in any of them, there was no problem to resolve. The city of Troy had been devastated, reduced to ruins. The women, who were no more than chattels in the eyes of the conquering Greeks, had been brought back to Hellas.
In Euripides’ play, the destruction of Troy is not accidental. The opening scene, which the film omits, makes it perfectly clear why all the devastation has happened, the whole fate of Troy is decided, neither by human beings, nor by blind accident, but by the gods. Poseidon, the protector of Troy, agrees with Athene that the city can be destroyed, on condition that he, God of the Sea, is allowed to cause havoc to the Greek fleet on their way home, with storms and shipwrecks.
She paused, and reached for a volume of the play. This was a moment to quote from Euripides. She loved this work so much that she knew much of it by heart, and was providing her own translations as she went along. She loved it because of its lyricism – it contained, she believed, some of the finest poetry Euripides ever wrote, which, for her money, meant some of the finest poetry ever written by anyone. She loved the raw, raw grief of the women, Hecuba’s hopeless –
How can I ever stop crying? I have everything to weep for:
my homeland is gone, my children are gone and my husband.
Digby was overwhelmed by Andromache’s undiluted grief for Hector. She also loved the frenzied, mad Cassandra, the virgin prophetess-priest who was now whooping with insane merriment at the prospect of being deflowered by Agamemnon. But the passage she wanted to quote must be from the beginning. It is Poseidon’s sad acknowledgement:
O city, once so happy, I must leave
Your well-constructed towers and firm foundations . . .
Or should it be, as one translator had it:
Superb masonry farewell!
You would stand firm yet, were it not for Athene, daughter of Zeus.
Euripides was unconstrained by monotheism. He did not have to believe in a loving God, or a creator God. He put the gods on stage and demonstrated the extent to which their frivolous malice was the cause of human misfortunes. Ever since he did so, there had been debates about whether he was an atheist, whether he chose to satirize Greek religion, or whether – as perhaps the Bible does, with its depictions of Yahweh committing acts of genocide in Egypt and Canaan – it was simply a depiction of the way things were.
Mulling over possible epithets which were better than ‘superb’ for ‘eutuchousa’, the masonry of crumbling Troy, she leaned back in her chair, and looked up at the shelves of her tower library. How lucky she was to have this retreat! What cherished friends these books had been to her for the last thirty years. Here were her old school editions – the little blue Aeneid VI, which she had done for her first exams, and Iphigenia in Tauris. Here were her university books, to which had been added a substantial working library – now well over four thousand volumes lining the room.
Some of her simpler friends, such as Bob, the minor canon, had gazed at the shelves from floor to ceiling, and asked her if she had read them all. The simple answer was that she had, and that of the chief Greek texts – Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, the major dialogues of Plato – her familiarity was total. She never lost her sense of what a privilege this knowledge was. True, friends in the English Faculty at Oxford were comparably familiar with Shakespeare and Milton (and she envied them that), but they had also been obliged to master many writers who were not worth the bother. And there were her many other colleagues on the Governing Body of her college – engineers, chemists, even the theologians (!) – who had only rudimentary reading, and who had, as it were, nothing to draw upon inside their heads.
There was smugness in this thought, certainly, but she was not a smug person, and she did not consider herself superior for knowing Greek – simply very very lucky. As she had the thought, she leaned right back in her chair, and rocked on its two back legs, a habit which had enraged her parents and teachers since she was a little girl. Her head was thrown back, and the rocking motion made her, at first, not notice that the room, and the whole tower, were in motion.
The ceiling itself was on the move, bouncing up and down as if the beams behind the plasterwork were made of rubber. Bringing her chair to an immediate upright position, she had no hesitation in knowing what was happening. Like every other human brain in the city, Digby’s retained an indelible memory of the minor quake of six months before and there was no mistaking it. To say that ‘she thought back’ suggests some act of will. Rather, there was an instant replay in her mind of that day in the seminar room, when she had looked up at Barnaby and known there was a quake, and thought she was on the point of death, and wished she could touch him.
Ever methodical, she remembered to press ‘Save’, and closed her laptop. She stood up, making for the door of her room, and the winding stone staircase. But she could no longer move. The floor had become the deck of a ship in a hurricane. She decided that if she got down on her hands and knees, she would be able to crawl to the opposite side of the room. There was a long table there, standing against the bookshelves, on which various books and papers were piled high. They were slithering off the table on to the floor, but it was a substantial mahogany table, and she was sure that if she were only able to crawl underneath it, she would be safe if – when – the roof collapsed.
Even while she was having this practical thought, she was overwhelmed by a desire to live. Le vent se lève – il faut tenter de vivre! Specifically, she thought how sad it was that she had not had sex for nearly ten years.
It was strangely hard to kneel down. As she tried to do so, she was propelled forwards and fell. By now the floor was at a strange angle, pushing her backwards, away from the saving surface of that big old Victorian table. She clawed at the floor rugs, but this made her slither backwards further. And then she watched, as if it were all happening in slow motion, an enormous piece of masonry, a vast piece of carved stone fall on the mahogany table and crunch it to splinters. Had she decided half a minute earlier to try crawling under the table, she might have been successful, and that would have been her life, beneath the great ashlar lump of carved acanthus. Superb masonry indeed.
She was now overwhelmed
by a simple desire to be alive. More than that, to change her life. The past with its limitations, in which she had sometimes cynically rejoiced, was a plain beneath her. The future was the hill country above. It would be possible, it must be possible, to climb? Having previously felt that a human life could not realistically be filled with much emotional satisfaction, or much practical achievement, she now felt hungry for experience. Death was there, grasping at her with its long, cold rapist fingers, and she was pushing it away, with an unspoken, not yet, oh, not yet.
Yes, the gibbons, marmosets, chimpanzees and spider monkeys seemed to mind it all the most. Their screams rent the air. Near the picnic area, between the penguin ponds and the once tempting shop, the elephant, which had been offering rides to visitors, was thrown on to its side. The great howdah on its back, containing eight children, crashed to the tarmac. None of the children were killed, but three were trapped for a while beneath the great pachydermatous sides of the beast.
Flamingos, herons and parakeets swarmed, terrified, into the sky. The bars of the tiger cage, in defiance of the Green protesters’ banner, remained in place, but the roof of the cages flew away like a flimsy umbrella. Animals and people were running around, none wiser than another about what to do. Two zebras, preceded by some baffled giraffes, lolloped through the clouds of dust. The windows of the aquarium and reptile house had been blasted out, and some of the zoo-keepers were saying through loud hailers,
—STAY AWAY FROM THE REPTILE HOUSE. STAY AWAY . . . THERE ARE DANGEROUS SNAKES AND OTHER REPTILES WHICH MIGHT BE AT LARGE. THAT’S REPEAT, STAY AWAY FROM THE . . .
An enormous water buffalo and a couple of hippopotami had accompanied two red river-hogs and a wildebeest on the march to freedom across Gladstone Park. Some of them joined the traffic jams on the highway going into town.
