Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  In the meantime, your mother allows me at last to meet you, to make amends for this episode that occurred through no fault of your own. So please will you join me and my Bedouin tribe, as I call my assembled friends at Sheykh Omar, this Tuesday next, 21st September, for an equinoctial ride at sundown and refreshments to follow – if you like to camp under the stars as I do, we shall make you a pillow of sand for your head. You will be very welcome.

  Your dear mother brought me to you once when you were seven years old, the only time I have set eyes on you, when you were playing with your little dog and rightly more interested in her than in a foolish fond old man.

  I will rejoice to see you again – salaams and blessings in the name of the compassionate, the all-merciful –

  Ivor W

  Rollo Verrey read the letter, and re-read it. Then he sat at his desk and began his answer. But voices kept playing in his head, and he put down his pen. Of course he longed to accept, to go to Sheykh Omar. But he would write to his mother first; he needed to hear what she had to say.

  Worm Wrangling

  THE TEPEE WAS surprisingly large; the ten or so summer camp students on the course fitted in easily around me and three other staff. The docent, a tall Indian-looking lad in jeans and buckskin shirt, a name tag identifying him as ‘Jeff’, and his long hair in beaded braids, waved to us to settle. There was a woven mat on the groundsheet, though the days were beginning to warm up that early summer in the Rockies. Tamar, the freckled, tightly knit Israeli girl, and Liesl, the singer from Finland who had sat down beside me the night before, folded supple limbs, tailor-wise; as did the quick-moving young man in the ragged black T-shirt with the tufted hair. With this exception, the males in the group struggled to get comfortable on the floor.

  When I’m in London, I go to the Fulham public baths every Wednesday and Friday during the Third Age hour when children aren’t allowed and everyone has to swim round anti-clockwise in a stately procession without showing off; when we – Maggie and me – go to the cottage in Suffolk, Maggie sets me light gardening tasks to keep me limber, and I could still tuck my feet – just – under my crossed legs on the tent floor. But I was afraid of the night’s dew seeping up into my knees through the mat, as I get rheumatic stabs in the English winter. So I lost the thread as Jeff introduced himself, tapping a name label pinned to his chest. He was telling us assembled listeners about the Blackfoot nation he’d grown up with on a reservation, his grandfather talking to him only in his mother tongue. He’d first come to the city, he was saying, when he was twelve, looking for work. As he talked, he picked out exhibits one by one from a circle of baskets around him, and held them up: a bone comb, a child’s embroidered and beaded and fringed chamois shirt, a spoon, a pipe. He offered them each thing reverently with his big, caressing hands; his eyes looked beyond his audience as he spoke.

  The tepee was pitched between the cafeteria and the music school, on a slope planted with pines; it wore a patient air as it stood there. Around it, the contemporary glass and concrete buildings soared; farther away, the mountains made a sharp-fanged bowl of treeless granite in which the Arts Center was held. At ground level, boldly designed posters and bright flags and vivid signage set off the tent’s soft painted nap and ­intertwined poles. As the students and visiting faculty, like me, crossed and re-crossed the looped flap of the tent on our way to the cafeteria, the faintly glowing interior seemed always to be occupied by a ghost or two, looking out forlornly.

  The tall Blackfoot scooped some dark leaves from a tin, and set them alight in a pottery dish; the smoke rose. Someone sneezed, assertively.

  ‘Smudging sweet grass,’ he was saying. ‘That way we show our respect for the spirits, and don’t get them disturbed.’ He had an accent in English, I noticed. Not Hollywood Injun; not Tonto, of course. A broad-shouldered, broad-bottomed man, I found myself thinking, with his hair in silly plaits, though.

  The leaves smouldered and Jeff wafted the smoke with big slow gestures as he snuffed it up. Some of the group followed, but one or two shifted uncomfortably and covered their faces.

  The smell reminded me of the old days when journalists took you to Muriel’s or to a wine bar in St James’s or Mayfair, and there you could smoke – but no longer. Some young-journo-in-a-hurry would want to show original, imaginative zeal for the cultural health of the nation, and I, Jon Shepton, who once made an appearance in Vogue c. 1964 in a full-page portrait by David Bailey, would be rediscovered and wheeled on. Musician, composer, singer: I am Old Bohemia. Lunch in such places had improved no end since entry into Europe; the new chefs were young, too, sometimes absurdly well connected (the offspring of tycoon actors or footballers), and sparky, in their knotted white cravats and chimney hats. Afterwards, there were good cigars on offer. I like a small cigar, though Maggie gets cross. ‘You’ll ruin what’s left of your voice.’

  ‘But the fans like me rasping,’ I retort. ‘It’s my brand.’

  The guide was saying, ‘We wanted to put a mark of our presence at the Center. To stop us getting forgotten.’ He did not smile as he said this. ‘The tepee is …’ – he stopped, and looked around the group – ‘a holy symbol.’

  With the others, I’d grown quiet in the tall Blackfoot’s sombre presence. Though, in my heart of hearts – not very deep in my case – the smudging was just another fake from the junk shop of made-up heritage heirlooms. This is how the barren present tries to meet our hunger pangs, our craving for meaning.

  Out of the blue, the people from the Center had written such an enthusiastic sensitive letter, the kind that made me feel a little bit light-headed, in spite of myself. They said they wanted to name one of the new practice cabins in the woods after me. I was a role model, ‘a true artist of so many facets who’s never let anyone dictate to him the boundaries of his chosen form … The Center concentrates on fostering diversity at every level: interdisciplinary, multicultural, interactive. We would consider it a great privilege if we could use the name of someone like you. You have personified creative energy …’ It would have made me gag in the old days: official claptrap, servile and insincere – we were going to do away with all that – then. But now such recognition was rare. And coming from the other side of the world, too.

  Would Jon Shepton please say yes to this tribute; please would he come? They invited me to play. Any kind of gig. That was good, they didn’t think he was past it. Two thousand dollars, Canadian, and all expenses paid. Nothing more was required. Did they know that I couldn’t sing as before, that the voice has gone a little threadbare and rough? But I can still growl a caustic phrase or two, especially in a small space, facing an intimate audience who love my old recordings, especially live. Plus the one or two new discs.

  Now I was here, nothing much fitted with anything else. I am used to borders and seams in a familiar habitat, demarcating one area from another: in Fulham, in the council flat I’ve lived in for half a century, the bus lane, the bicycle lane, the pavement, the shop, the aisles, the counter; then in Suffolk, the road, the verge, the garden gate, the garden path, the threshold, the stoop, the jamb, the passage and the kilim runner. Here, in this shiny place, everything so new and the scenery around it so huge, nothing seems to have its nook, or have ever needed to find one or make a room its own. From the window seat as we came into land, I saw the dazzling spars of the city’s business district, bunched together like some giant crystal hurled into the vast saw-toothed wilderness of the mountains. Rays from the low sun of the afternoon set ablaze the glass skins of the buildings. All around, brown-grey emptiness, threaded with dead straight roads pointing to the four corners of the compass, as if drawn by a mapmaker who had never set foot on the ground. The taxi that met me at the airport to drive to the Center went past oil derricks dipping their beaks into the flat wide scenery of pasture and forest; then, beyond the start­ling flashing and shining city, beef herds and grass. Between the oil and the meat, hovels with rusting hulks of mac
hinery, of cars and fridges: a young woman from the reservation weaved by, thumbing a lift, lurching off the verge with her plastic bag of something, like ballast out of control.

  ‘On the reservation,’ Jeff was saying, ‘there’s no call for these things now.’ He waved at his baskets.

  In the Fifties, when I first began to play the earliest post-war night spots, improvising patter songs on the piano and telling risqué stories, the capital of this Canadian province was a small staging post on the great expanse of the middle of the country, while the town where the Arts Center grew up was one of the first mountaineering resorts. The ski lift was invented there, by some colonial genius who’d observed huge hands of bananas hoisted on board ship from the wharfs of Kingston, Jamaica, on a moving cable with dangling hooks. Or so I learned from the brochure on the town’s history on the table in my room. For North Americans, the poetry of avalanches and glaciers and terminal moraines was here: no need to travel to the old world, to the Mer de Glace. In the bar of the Center, period photographs showed the tribes gathered from all over the prairies and the mountains to provide the climbers with entertainment: seamed old men with sprays of feathers and stones standing beside hourglass ladies carrying climbing tackle. This was before the boom years of beef and oil had brought the glass towers to the rocky wilderness.

  Our guide was now holding up a pipe: ‘When our kids get to be ten or eleven, then we teach them tobacco is holy, and their fathers will take them into the sweat lodge and teach them how to smoke, there.’

  One of the students broke in: ‘Hi, I’m Cindy, and Jeff, I’m kind of, well you know, disturbed. Yo’all see why, it’s like very interesting, but – by the way I’m a writer, and I’m here on the ballet libretto course – don’t you think that it would be better not to teach kids to smoke? I mean, it’s just another problem thing for them to have to deal with – in the future, when there are no jobs and the drop-out rate is real high …’

  Jeff moved his large sad head to face her, and said, ‘When we lived here, before, we didn’t have those problems you’re talking about; and we knew when to smoke the holy tobacco and when not to. I was shown how to by my poppa. Last year, it was my turn to take my son to the sweat lodge and I taught him to respect the power of the smoke.’

  ‘So everybody’d be just the same as everybody else? That’d be cool?’

  The young man with the dark, tufted crop tilted his head and gave her a smile. ‘That’s what you’d like, is it, Cindy, little Miss Goody Two-Shoes!?’ But there was a friendly gurgle in his voice and it cut across the scorn in what he said.

  Cindy dropped her assertive look and hung her head and muttered, with a smile under her lashes, ‘Aw, you know, Adrian, you know what I mean – I mean …’

  ‘Quit ballet, Cindy, take up—’

  ‘Shushh …’ Another student shut them up.

  Adrian mouthed something sotto voce, and Cindy giggled and shook her head.

  What was it the boy had said? ‘Worm wrangling’? It couldn’t be.

  The atmosphere of the interior had a luminous, lulling quality: the light coming through the stretched skins reminded me of the veined alabaster set in the windows of basilicas we’d seen on a trip we made – that’s George and me before, well, before he’d died – to Italy one spring.

  That afternoon Brendan came to my room and asked me if I wanted to go into town with him; he’s the camp’s artistic director and he was picking someone up at the old resort hotel. ‘It’s a pile of turrets and ramparts, High Scottish Baronial Gothic,’ he said, ‘Definitely worth a visit. The view from the lounge over the valley is as grand as the Alps, and tea is served there with real china cups and saucers and a proper teapot with a spout that dribbles. ‘You’ll feel at home,’ he said.

  I ordered a gin and tonic.

  ‘Make it another,’ said Adrian, who’d jumped into the car with them at the last minute. The waiter came back, and I noticed he was wearing a kilt with a large ornate safety pin.

  I looked at Adrian a bit more carefully. Small nose, tilted, tanned, dove’s-shell-coloured eyes, a row of small teeth, and a slip of pink tongue poking behind. Body a bit meagre, but couldn’t see much of it, as he was sitting. Probably older than his boyish look: early thirties.

  Around us conversation puttered on, and I began to notice that they weren’t coasting on automatic pilot; they were trying to be amusing, to amuse me, Adrian especially, and I was touched, and the tightness inside me eased a little. They know my work, they’re pleased I’m here, I thought. And as heritage goes, the waiters’ safety pins were inspired.

  The following day, a walk was planned for the afternoon; Brendan was leading it, since he was a local and knew the footpaths through the mountains.

  ‘You can just make out the mouth of the cave – look!’ He pointed at a dark gravelly bluff above and facing us. ‘At about two o’clock, just below the peak, can you see that mark – like a welt in the flank of the mountain? It’s an ancient site, a sacred place.’

  I wasn’t going to try to puzzle it out in the distant rock face; my eyes watered in the clear northern light.

  ‘It’s one of the most powerful places I know in this area,’ Brendan told the group. ‘And it’s a level climb – though it looks steep from here, it’s steady going once you’re on it. No cliffs, no precipices.’

  When the time came to set out, I wrapped up in my lovely long camel Balenciaga from my glory days, with the brown fedora from the Italian tailor who worked round the corner in Fulham, and – at Maggie’s insistence – big, ticked trainers for the mountains. The group admired my style, rather different from theirs, since they were strapped into green and brown weatherproofing and stomped about in mountain boots with water bottles hanging in slings from the small rucksacks on their backs. Adrian had oranges and chocolate and two cokes in his; others declared their provisions in turn. They were setting off – Brendan, Adrian, Tamar and Liesl, and Matt, a keyboard player who’d been practising in the new cabin, the one they’d called after me, and two or three more. Then Cindy came running up, zipping her jacket.

  ‘I didn’t know you were going this minute,’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t miss this hike for anything. Gee! I’m glad I caught you in time.’

  ‘Oh, we thought you were … having a nap,’ said Brendan.

  Cindy shook her head vigorously. ‘No, I’m up and ready to go.’ She drummed her chest in gorilla play, a little strenuously, as I realised, but only later.

  At first the going was single file, along the bottom of a ravine, up the winding dry bed of a mountain stream; slow and difficult, between large, water-smoothed boulders over the strew of pebbles, avoiding low scrub and thorn bushes on both sides. The air was light, brittle, and clear; but it was warmer between the rocks than it had been in the open space of the Center, and the walkers tied their jackets round their waists. I loosened the belt on my overcoat and let such small breezes as blew in that sheltered canyon circulate around me; the broken rhythm of the terrain was setting up a pattern and I had to move to a tricky syncopated rhythm I rather enjoyed. But I was being careful, and keeping an eye on my feet; the stony ground was treacherously loose here and there. Now and then the bed broadened, and we could walk together, two or even three abreast; but there were always rocks to work around. We passed pictographs on the walls of the ravine, spirals and vertical strokes, a closed language; then before us reared a rampart of stone, weeping with rainwater, bushy with creepers and stonecrops.

  ‘Up there,’ said Brendan. ‘Look – there’s the cave I wanted you to see. It’s called Eye of Big Father Mountain – you can see why.’

  There was a pause while the group located their goal. ‘There’s the track – to the side.’

  The cave, from our position below it, gaped as if someone had gashed the mountain and opened a weal under its topmost pinnacle; the stuff that had spilled out of the interior core had then dribbled down the s
lope beneath it and dried to a swirl of caked yellowish-brown moraine, leaving the flesh of the mountainside looking tender and peeled, as if giant children had stripped a huge tree of its bark, exposing the young, pinkish cambium layer beneath.

  The cave was less a mouth or a hole, though, than a kind of half-open, battered Cyclopean eye; the Indian name was spot on, I thought.

  But I’d had enough mountaineering, and I sat down on a stone. Brendan gave me a waterproof something to protect my coat, and offered me some coffee from a flask. The others meanwhile set off up the scarp, calling loudly to one another. Only Cindy stayed behind with us: in her rush she’d come out in light shoes.

  The climbers grew small. They were scrambling up towards the dripping eye. From where I was sitting, they looked like sinners from one of Bosch’s scenes in hell, a raggle-taggle of hybrid creatures, part insect, part bird, part human, swarming into the wounds in a hollow carcass, a grotesque human ark.

  Gravel shifted under the climbers’ feet; a dislodged boulder bounced down the slope; tufts of dust rose as they slithered up.

  ‘It was real dumb of me to forget my boots. I don’t know what I was thinking.’ Cindy laughed, then coughed. ‘There’s bound to be lots of bats in there. Adrian thinks bats are neat.’ She paused, and added, uncertainly, ‘So do I.’

  A silence fell. The climbers’ shouts and laughter reached us as they skirmished on the loose gravel of the slope.

  Brendan said, ‘Suddenly, I’m not altogether happy we’re doing this … I’m getting a kind of uneasy feeling … I wish they’d be more careful up there.’

  Cindy said, ‘Low blood sugars – you need some candy.’

  Brendan, nodding, took some chocolate from his bag and offered it round.