Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  Then Barbara found another letter, the last in the series:

  ‘Cher maitre, Je regrette …’

  Banou Zafarin was leaving Cairo for the summer to spend it far from the whirl of the city. It was too hot to stay in town, she said. ‘If you yourself happen to be in Alexandria this summer,’ she went on, ‘you will be able to find me with the children on the beach at Sidi Basr 2.

  ‘PS I am having our piano brought from Cairo so that my girls will be able to keep up their practice.’

  Did Mme Zafarin mean something particular when she wrote that it was beginning to get too hot in town? Did Nino find a way of joining her for the summer in Alexandria? Of continuing the piano lessons?

  It seemed that that was where their contact on the page came to a close. And when something else began?

  Barbara could not help wondering, even though she was not given to fantasy, why Nino had wanted her to glimpse this moment in his past, as she felt the sharp prick of intimacies unattained.

  iv

  When Barbara and Nino used to talk, in the staff room at the school or in his flat after teaching, she’d always felt the need to get away from him: work, home, her own routine, friends and family called to her in a kind of obbligato pulsing away under whatever tune Nino was playing. She realised that even though she liked being with him, he’d never mattered – or rather she had never noticed that he mattered. His attention flattered her but didn’t reach her at any depths at all. Which is why she could leave him at the door after she found him in the street that last time she saw him.

  Then she began to remember more things about him, how he liked to say, ‘Think of the world, think of your world, like a band. Everyone in the band is different. Everyone has a different voice. But together you can express something effectively. You can charm us – as well as yourselves – hold us captive to what you are playing. Make that moment mean something that is not like the rest of life, that is for a time the opposite of dull.’

  She began to see something in herself that was uncomfortable to admit, uncomfortable in a different way from her moments of uneasy contact with him when he was alive. Nino had presented her with a design that didn’t possess familiar features; the plot he was living in wasn’t one she recognised. He had said to her, ‘I think you’ll recognise this,’ and she’d taken him for one thing; or rather, she’d mistaken him.

  It would all be so much easier, she thought, if you could direct your own life’s affections the way you can make up a story and move the characters in it, change their ways of behaving and modify their feelings, stretching them according to your highest expectations of yourself. But something inside you stays stubbornly fixed, and unlike a story, won’t let itself be prodded and shaped.

  But then not all stories are supple.

  Perhaps the usual story of Dido, Virgil’s great tragic queen, is recognisably close to everyone’s experience: she was remembering how Nino remarked, It’s the fate of us all to love more than we are loved in return. Recognising a particular story does add to its pleasure: it’s safe too, it’s home. Funny that tragic self-killing should be such a place of satisfaction, of comfort. Maybe there is an alternative story – one that isn’t so compelling, but one that fits closely, if not obviously, to another kind of experience, a little more commonplace, with a happy ending. That story also invites us to enter but it is harder to notice. The voice is fainter when it says, ‘I think you’ll recognise this.’

  Hesitantly, Barbara showed the score of the duet to the school Music Director; when he tried it out on the piano (she had to nudge him), he was intrigued – much to his surprise. He began mentioning it to friends. One of these, a trombonist who lived with someone involved with arts funding, showed it in turn to the director of the Kempley Music Festival. The programme he was planning for the summer included a strand, ‘Cross-currents: East Meets West’, and it was to feature works by composers from countries along the shores of the Mediterranean, Arab, Israeli, et al, including some of the earliest electronic music written by a compatriot of Nino’s, Halim el-Dabh (who had won first prize in the Piano competition at the Cairo Opera House in 1942). So the director copied the score to the celebrated P— sisters, star performers of the 2008 season, and Yvette and Tanya P— were captivated: besides, they had Al­gerian roots, for one set of grandparents had been born in Oran.

  The Suite Levantine was full of poignancy and sweetness, of life and laughter, of fun and mischief, they said; it was flirtatious; it had some of Busoni’s architecture and melancholy, of Poulenc’s ironic wit and Satie’s playful spirit. But it also had its own chromatic harmonies and its own pulse, in which they could detect something definitely non-European.

  Six Egyptian Songs, or Suite Levantine by Nino Sanvitale received its première at the Kempley Music Festival on June 25 2008.

  Barbara was invited to contribute a note to the Festival programme. She found it difficult, and struck out one line after another. When the deadline arrived, she sent what still seemed to her awkward, vapid clichés. But she couldn’t find another way.

  ‘Nino Sanvitale was an unforgettable character,’ she began, ‘with what used to be known as a mysterious past, some of which infuses the musical compositions that he was too modest to talk about and bring to our attention when he was alive. The Six Songs were first discovered among his papers after his death, half a century since they were first written but as fresh as if conceived yesterday.’ She went on to give some background for the story of Elissa, ‘the other Dido’, and the opera that never was.

  Dolorosa

  ‘I DO HAVE A core, Lucy, I know it. I’m still looking for mine, but I know it’s there.’

  Our friend and host Laurent was repeating what he’d been saying, to get a rise out of Lucy now that she was back from her post. He exhaled the words again in a dreamy languor, watching the smoke curl up from the water pipe on the ­mother-of-pearl inlaid tabouret: ‘Inside and outside are as arbitrary as the constellations in the night sky … each of us is edgeless.’

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ said Lucy, taking the bait and flinging herself down on the sofa beside him, and spilling a pile of books from her rucksack. ‘Retro Satanas! I say to you, my friend. In spite of my deep and total respect for you, for your mind and – your hospitality, I believe there is something else besides this.’ She reached out and pinched Laurent’s arm.

  ‘Ouch!’ he said, and sleepily breathed in more of the fragrant smoke.

  Lucy had tried being a nun, then a sannyasin, now she was working for one of the aid agencies here in the war zone; she was weird, that was the consensus in our group. For myself, I was intrigued, though I shared the general embarrassment.

  ‘She has a core – it’s her heart,’ one of us put in, a little mockingly – we found her mawkish in her overt compassion (most of us were cultivating hard-boiled cynicism, to ward off the horror).

  ‘No, it’s in her DNA,’ said the young man from Hull, in a serious tone.

  ‘Or in her liver,’ sang out another of our ad hoc band in a Nina Simone voice.

  ‘She means the soul,’ someone muttered. ‘You know, once a Catholic …’

  It was the autumn of 2006 in Damascus, and we were there to help. Though help wasn’t what anyone could do at all adequately. We were all volunteers – students, activists, teen­agers, grannies – from all over the place. While the shells roared and whined around us, we talked, we smoked, we brought in food, we talked some more. We were each of us flying from the world we knew into a new one – mocking one out of existence, struggling to dream another into life.

  ‘Let it go, Lucy,’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t get stuck in that sad old humanistic religious bounded self. Join us as we flow into one another! We’re communicating vases. No boundaries. No antipathies. Oceanic in our being – infinitely malleable and with infinite capacity for elective affinities!’ I was breathing in the sweet heavy shisha with Laure
nt. ‘The new person isn’t a single atom in the vast universe but is each and every one a universe!’

  ‘Why yes and no,’ said Lucy, shaking her head and closing her eyes.

  She’d been at the children’s holding centre at the hospital where the ones who’ve become separated from their families are kept until … until they’re found. Or so it’s hoped. After a certain time, if nobody comes to claim them, they’ll be moved to a different place, a more permanent institution. An orphanage. Like some of us, Lucy’s been working with the team painting the walls of the room that’s going to be used to make music and paintings with the children. In times of war they forget such things and when you forget to play, life begins to lose the struggle with death. But with music and dancing you can keep the tiny light lit inside them and breathe on it. At least that’s the hope we were holding on to.

  Lucy was saying, ‘Food, warmth, someone to hug you … but a child needs something else as well … We all need somebody to … keep each and every one of us in mind.’

  ‘Oh don’t bring in God, for fuck’s sake. He’s either a complete fuck-up or he’s forgotten about us.’ This was the rationalist from Hull, again.

  ‘I don’t mean God, I mean that I don’t exist to myself unless someone else holds me in mind.’ She paused. ‘You’re not objecting to that much?’

  There were stirrings, but no protest aloud.

  After taking a long breath on the pipe, Lucy went on, ‘You’ll think I’m cracked, and maybe I am. It’s a mad world, my masters. But I’ve had a vision …’

  The atmosphere in our digs tensed, palpably. One or two of us caught each other’s eye.

  ‘I was at the hospital very early this morning – or very late last night, whichever way you want to look at it – and we had to evacuate to the basement, as usual.’

  There were nods at this – others had been on duty too.

  ‘At first there was a lull in the bombing from the ridge, and everything was very quiet except for the small noises of movements children make in their dreams when they’re missing things – their mouths eat the air, their eyes search, under closed lids, for a face they know. Then the whirr of a missile began homing towards a target: it seemed close, very close, and it was drawing closer. I ran to the window. A nurse and a doctor came and joined me. We wondered about waking the children, taking them down to the basement. We watched the first missile hit – somewhere to the north of us, in the business district, we thought.’

  ‘Actually, they hit wide and destroyed a street where absolutely nothing happens except people’s homes,’ someone else said, under her breath.

  ‘Then, in the huge mass of dirty smoke filled with rubble and timbers and debris that boiled up from the impact into the first light of day, I saw a figure, swathed in dark clothing, only her face showing, streaked in blood and grime and sweat and tears. It was a woman with her mouth howling, a black hole. I pointed to her, asked my companions watching with me if they could see her too – but they said no. “Look, there,” I said. “Why, yes, perhaps,” one of them replied. Then the other said, “It’s all in your imagination.” And seemed annoyed.

  ‘I turned back to walk through the children’s ward, and the second missile hit closer. Then the turmoil began – you know – the staff began waking the ones who could walk and bundling the ones who couldn’t into wheelchairs.

  ‘I was trying to be of some use. Then I saw her again, this time in the ward, that veiled figure of smoke and ash and blood and tears, stooping over the face of every child and scanning it closely as we were waking them and began hurrying them down to the basement. I tried to talk to her, ask her what she wanted. She didn’t seem to hear me as she moved on, from one child to another – you couldn’t stop her search. She reached one little girl, who in her weariness and hurt was struggling against being moved, and the woman gave a sudden piercing cry and, pulling back the covers to scoop up the little girl lying there into her arms, whispered her name, “Zeinab, Zeinab, it’s you.”

  ‘You, you see – the only one, you and none other, the uniquely precious one. The daughter she was searching for, who she’s been holding in mind.

  ‘And as she said her name over and over, I saw them rising up together, she holding her Zeinab by the hand, and the little girl floating wide as if weightless like a cosmonaut. They were transfigured as I watched: the filthy woman now a pillar of shining cloud, the listless child rosy and laughing as the up-draught caught her, like gossamer spun into the air.’

  There was a silence, fraught with our common discomfort, and Lucy, sensing it, said, ‘You all think it’s all in my imagination, too, don’t you?’

  I wanted to do something to ease the rift that had grown between us around the table, so I said to her, quietly, ‘It’s what you believe – and belief makes all kinds of things happen.’

  See No Evil

  ‘THAT COFFEE MACHINE you ordered from Rome’s on the dock now, and the man there’s insisting that you must go down in person and be there when they open it, so as to see there’s no jiggery-pokery.’

  ‘Who’s he? Put him on the line, Georgina, and maybe I’ll be able to get it through his thick skull that it’s out of the question.’

  ‘The package’s addressed to you personally and Customs require that the addressee take delivery. I can’t do it for you, Dr Earle.’

  ‘This country’s impossible! Fifteen people make a parliament, three judges for the whole damn place, and for a coffee machine you have to have the whole caboodle as if … ?’

  ‘Yes, that is the picture.’ Georgina’s voice was tart.

  ‘Play-acting cadres. It could be Cuba.’

  ‘In Cuba they don’t have cargo coming in from Rome, Italy, Dr Earle. And this is your own native land, and so you can’t be saying you’re outside of it.’

  ‘Tsk, Georgina. You know they don’t listen to me.’

  ‘Huh-uh, Dr Earle. They like to see you in town once in a while. And see what you’re going and buying when you’re away from home.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go down to the harbour office. Let them know I’m on my way, Georgina.’

  ‘I’ll find Rob, and he’ll drive you into town.’

  ‘There things you’ve to do in town, Georgina?

  ‘Huh-uh, Dr Earle.’

  Dr Diogenes Earle could no longer drive himself: cataracts. Next time he was in Berkeley for his annual teaching visit, he’d have the op. But he kept postponing it. The prognosis was good for this kind of procedure, and yet …

  His eyes were black as lava pebbles on the surf line, with such a gleam on them that one time long ago, when he was going to a party at the High Commissioner’s for the Queen’s Birthday or some such date, his wife Evangeline had taken his chin and tilted his head towards hers as they stood in the hall waiting to be announced. He had thought she was going to kiss him, but instead she told him to keep still and not blink while she adjusted the angle of her hat in his irises.

  The espresso machine of gleaming chrome, with a gilded eagle poised for take-off from its imposing crest, had arrived at the docks less than two months after he ordered it. He was pleased: the banana boats were efficient carriers, their sailing routes, the same ones that had transported his forebears westwards, were still governed by the world’s turning and by the alizès, the lovely chasing winds, according to their season.

  ‘Rob, you think the coffee machine from Italy will fit in this car?’ Georgina asked.

  ‘We could take the truck …’ Rob looked at her for re­assurance that his decision was justified.

  She took charge: ‘Rob’ll drive the truck down for the machine as soon as we’ve seen to all the red tape and fine tuning of the paperwork.’

  Then she opened the car door, let herself into the passenger seat, and nodded towards Diogenes to indicate he should sit in the back and demur no more.

  As the car descended the
slope towards the town and the harbour, Diogenes Earle anticipated with pleasure how he would pass by Peony’s later with Georgina and they’d have a drink on the verandah; maybe dinner there too – the house pepper soup, a spiced fricassée of chicken and vegetables, followed by some coconut ice cream – though coconut was one of those lurking devils that leaked into your blood supply and furred it up, goddammit. Who would think that pale scented flesh was poisoned with cholesterol? At Peony’s bar, La Rose des Vents, Dr Earle would become Diogenes again, to everyone, including Georgina, and he could bandy the old badinage with Peony, sparring partner, old time lover:

  I’m no nosy parker, but Mamma, tell me why

  Young white meat have such dark hair down there

  While old black Theresina’s all snowy white?

  Heigh ho, ho heigh, Mamma, jus’ tell me why?

  ‘The trouble with the world today,’ Dr Earle, winner of the Braestrup International Prize for Biological Research, was saying to Peony after he finished laughing (though he had heard it before), ‘is that jokes like this are finished, over, not to be spoken, not to be heard.’

  ‘Not here, they’re not,’ said Peony. ‘We’ll not be gagged, oh no, not me, not you.’

  A calypso king came in and sat down with them; name of Sad Sack, old man with a banjo in his hand and six gold chains thick as gift-wrap ribbon hanging against his wrinkled rhino hide chest. He was saying, ‘Diogenes, the trouble is …’ he called him Diogenes, as everyone did outside the laboratory precinct, from long before he won the big prize and with it global renown – ‘the old languages is dying. Creole, patois, going going, under the influence of TeeVee Miamee: 32 stations beamed at you and me.’