Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  And Maire says, “You did nothing shameful to women?”

  “Nothing. I paid for what I bought, above the market price. Yes, I was ashamed. They wouldn’t have, but for the war.”

  “Rape?”

  “Never.”

  “You imagined it?”

  “Yes. I always do. I lived with Maire.”

  And Maire says, “You swine. When you lose in life, you imagine your triumph within your skull. Then you blame women for hurting men, when women know perfectly well that men do nothing but humiliate women in their lusts. But I’m going to master your mind, Gog. Tell me now, what do you fear most?”

  “Blindness. I’d rather lose all my legs and arms than my eyes.”

  And Maire lights a cigarette and puts it in a metal holder and says, “If someone tried to burn out your eyes, would you obey her? In everything?”

  “Yes. I fear so.”

  And Maire puts the cigarette in its holder towards Gog’s right eye, “Obey me.”

  And his instinct makes Gog snatch against the bonds of the drug, his nature makes him jerk from under the narcotic net, and he grabs the lighted ash near the skin of his eyeball and crushes the cigarette out in his palm, before his hand falls back limp on the bunk, and he says, “You’d have to have me held. You couldn’t do it alone.”

  And Maire says, “I could, if you were asleep beside me. Why are you going back to Maire, if you don’t still itch for her?”

  “Habit. It’s my home. I know the way. War’s a state of mind. It’s over. I have to find another state of mind. Perhaps it’ll include Maire. At least, she’s familiar. We can’t start again without something from the past.”

  “Why not a clean break? Like . . . amnesia?”

  “The past haunts me. The past all the way back to the beginning, the very beginning of men and women on this island, the past that from the very beginning made us all. I’m a historian. I can’t forget.”

  And Maire says, “Surely the more you recollect, the more you belong to Maire?”

  “An army psychiatrist told me, the more I recollected the past, the more I’d be able to free myself from it.”

  “Nonsense, Gog. The more you’re bound by it.” And Maire rises and goes over to Gog’s bunk and sits beside him and takes his left hand and puts it to her left breast. “Remember the Coupole. My breasts stuck to my dress. You had to take me to your room. You had to. And I was bored. Yet you still had to have me again.”

  And Gog strokes Maire’s breasts until the nipples are hard against his palm, then he moves his head and lays it on her lap, his crown against the small swell of her belly, his mouth buried in the hollow between her thighs. And he says, “I had to have her.”

  And Maire says, “The past. You remember. You’re mine.”

  And Gog says, his voice muffled by the body of Maire, “We love what we’ve lived with. Because . . .”

  “Because?”

  “Because we can share the past with them. We have to hang onto people we’ve known well, for we can check with no one else what we have done. They were our only witnesses most of the time. They were there with us, they still are.”

  And Maire says, “Mine, Gog. Mine?”

  And Gog says wearily, “Yours.”

  And Maire says, “Is that the truth?”

  And Gog mumbles, “Yours,” slithering on the lips of the womb of sleep, then falling back into forgetfulness, as Maire cradles his head in triumph, whispering, “Mine. Men abreacted with pentathol can’t lie. And you said you were mine. You can’t lie, Gog. You’re mine. You said so. Mine.” And her eyes look up, blue and thin with glee, at the clear bottle of liquid, from which she has filled her syringe. And the bottle is marked ALCOHOL, not PENTATHOL. And as Gog sleeps, Maire feels the laughter shake her belly and rock Gog’s head. For she has put mere spirits into Gog’s veins to trick him into revealing how much he really remembers, how little he has recovered from his obsession for his wife.

  XX

  If weariness has brought about Gog’s downfall, wakefulness brings about his escape. He opens his eyes to find Maire asleep in the other bunk, the shotgun lying on the floor between them like the drawn sword which lies between the chaste lovers of legend. Jules is, presumably, also asleep in the driver’s compartment, for the lorry has pulled up off the road. Gog puts out one hand cautiously towards the shotgun and diddles it into his grasp. He then rises softly in his socks, his boots in one hand and his gun in the other, pausing only to scoop up a cache of maps of the Southern roads. He reaches the tailboard of the lorry and steps cautiously down the iron rungs to the highway. Maire stirs behind him, but only to clutch the pillow on her bunk and say, moaning, “Gog . . . uh, Gog,” as if she would lull him back to her. Is she asleep or mocking? Gog does not want to know, especially when he opens the breech of the shotgun to find that it is empty of shells and threats to kill, so that Gog throws away the useless weapon into a nearby hedge.

  The dawn glances in silver slivers off the wet slate roofs of the straggling town, which Gog sees ahead of him. He puts on his boots and hurries away from the lorry, fearing yet another trap and surprise, determined to avoid being outwitted again. From a sign on a bakery, he sees that he is in Totnes in Devonshire, the grey town falling down from its tumulus through narrow streets of tall houses to the bends of the River Dart. No wars seem to have disturbed Totnes for centuries. The round keep of the castle on the mound overlooking the town seems more like a bull-pen than a serious effort at defence. The granite houses sometimes have old leaded glass in their windows, spared by bomb-blast. As Gog walks down the High Street towards the river, he sees the pillars and tile-fronts of colonnaded Butterwalk and Poultry­walk, untroubled through the centuries in their steady sale of chickens and churned goods. There may be a war on and rationing, but Totnes is always Totnes and who knows what’s under the counter? So down past the tall spire of the red sandstone church, holding up its stone splint through the ages in a call for peace and mercy, which God seems to have granted locally. Then on through the East Gate which spans the street with its pretty toy battlements and ornamental clock, and into Fore Street, where the carved gargoyle gables project the Elizabethan merchant’s house over the pavement. There is a milkman delivering bottles outside shut doors from his pony and cart, otherwise nobody is about so early except for a bent figure standing by a granite stone set into the pavement.

  As Gog approaches him, a sense of the familiar teases his mind. The greying cowlick – so loathely if it’s Hitler’s and so lovely if it’s Chaplin’s playing Hitler – the shoulder badly set into the back, the thin broken body and the seamed face that seems to have had an ice-cream scoop taken out of each cheek, where from, where? But Gog does not need to jog his own memory, for the tall hunchback turns in greeting. “Griffin bach,” he says fiercely, “you’re six years late for the Latin.”

  Gog cringes momentarily as if he’d had a sharp rap with a ruler across the knuckles, then he blinks his eyes and sees in the blink a chalk-dusty schoolmaster declaiming Druid curses against the English and dragging Gog’s slow wits to construe, construe, use your gammon, Griffin, as Gog tries to tug meaning out of alien verbs and declensions. “Mr. Evans,” Gog says in surprise. “I was thinking about you only last night, thinking about being in Holy Island when I was a lad.”

  “Eheu, fugaces, Postume, anni,” Evans declares, shaking Gog by the hand. “I know there’s been a war on, man, but that’s no reason to be late for the Latin. There’s things more important.”

  “But here?” Gog says. “How can you be here, in this foreign country? You don’t look a day older.”

  “Foreign, be damned,” Evans says. “Merely occupied, it is. Like Wales is occupied, and France was. I’m not a day older, I’m years older. I spend all my summers here, as you well know. Doing the researches, indeed.” Here Evans winks in complicity at the uncomprehending Gog. “When was it we last met? Thirty-nine, the same month, August. There was our job, remember you. To faze the limeys.”
r />   Gog hasn’t an earthly about what Evans means by their mutual job, but Evans looks so eager and plotting that Gog answers diplomatically, “Yes, the job. I’ve often thought of it. Did it turn out well?”

  “The vellum, that was the trouble,” Evans says. “When you find a good piece, it’s been written on. Rare stuff, mind you, the scribes couldn’t waste it. If you had to have a piece of hide every time you wrote a letter, you wouldn’t waste words, would you? The day they invented paper and printing, there was an end to tight thought. Though William Caxton, I suppose, is partly why I’m here, mind you. Just like a bloody limey, he took it all from a Welshman.”

  “But the Welsh didn’t invent printing first,” Gog says, then, seeing Evans’s face darken, he adds quickly, “though they invented everything else that matters, like magic and prophecy and mining and . . .”

  “Not printing, Griffin bach. Don’t mock me. Totnes! Tysilio the Welshman found this place first, and well you know it. You remember the lines he wrote seven hundred years before Caxton came and stole it with his . . .” Evans’s voice suddenly rises to a derisive falsetto, “Brute come to Totnesse,” before returning to its normal pitch of dark disclosure. “Tysilio called this place Talnus, that foxed us, till I began reading a scrap of Phoenician. And look you.” He swings out a long arm from his hump as if to include the whole round hill of the town in the crook of his elbow. “What’s the Phoenician for tumulus? Telneshua. That proves it, indeed. Brutus got Phoenician sailors to take him here after Troy fell and they called it Telneshua or Talnus, corrupted to Totnes hill, mark you. And indeed, what does Tothill mean, but a sacred place of worship for the Celts, who are the true Trojans?”

  “Clear as crystal,” Gog says quickly. “A most convincing case.” A titbit of history comes back to his mind, so he adds ironically, “The Phoenician sailors, naturally, sailed on and discovered America a few thousand years before Columbus.”

  “Oh no,” Evans says. “There’s a pestilential error. And I thought you were the next best thing to being a Celt, a half-Celt. Everyone with an ounce of gammon in his noddle knows who discovered America.” Here Evans makes a pregnant pause, as if his next sentence could be a surprise. “The Welsh did. Hu Gadarn went there and back in a day in his coracle. Every Celt knows that. It stands to reason.”

  Gog wants to laugh at this fantastic statement, but Evans looks so penetratingly at him that Gog cringes again, still in the skin of the small boy, quite unable to contradict his teacher.

  “The job,” Gog says, “we were doing . . . you said you had trouble with the vellum.”

  “In the end,” Evans says, “I had to forge it. Sometimes you can’t show the truth any other way, can you?” Gog nods in agreement. “Look at that stone I was by, the one you came all that way to see in thirty-nine when we met again.” And Gog looks down dutifully at the small granite block by him; above it, the legend is inscribed, BRUTUS STONE, 1185 B.C. ‘‘Of course, it’s not the original. I mean, it could be, but it isn’t. If you ask me, when the limeys occupied here, they broke up the original stone just for spite and put down an English one. Brutus Stone, in Roman lettering, it fair makes you vomit.” Evans looks far too happy to throw up more than antiquarian bile. “But there’s no matter if it’s not the original stone. The original stone was just a stone, mark you. It’s the spot that matters, the spot which Tysilio named when he wrote that King Brutus founded Britain.”

  “There’s some virtue in having an original thing, isn’t there?” Gog says. “It convinces more people if it’s historically true.”

  “Who cares for history? We want the truth, not facts,” Evans says. “That’s what the Celts know, it is. And true, it is. It’s the spirit, man, the spirit. The truth’s in the spirit, not the facts. They’re always telling us, those bloody limeys, you say that’s Druid, you say that’s ages old, but it’s all spurious, all made up far later, all resurrected in the eighteenth century when you’d forgot your ancient wisdom and lost all your sources. But nothing’s spurious in Wales, man. Nothing’s dead, there. It’s all living, it is. In the spirit of the people. That’s a Druid truth, and the Druids know it well. The spirit comes round again and again and again, ever renewing, never dying with the body, always coming again, bearing the truth. So the truth can’t die. It speaks through different mouths in different centuries, but it’s always the same truth. It can’t be spurious. As long as the mouth’s the mouth of a Celt, as long as he’s from the Celtic folk, who keep the ancient wisdom in their spirits, ever renewing it from the spirits of the past. Though most of the Welsh don’t know the ancient wisdom to speak of, would you believe it, man?”

  “I wish I was a true Celt,” Gog says. “All of me, not half of me. Then I wouldn’t have to worry whether I was looking for true things or false things. I’d know that the folk memory was driving me on and nothing else would matter.”

  “Half Celt’s better than none, man,” Evans says. “You can’t be a bard, mark you, but we’ll let you listen to us. We aren’t exclusive like the limeys.” Here Evans almost swells with his own generosity. “Especially when there’s a Gog Griffin tracing back his ancestors to the ancient Britons, the very first giants here to meet King Brutus and the Trojans. Gogmagog, the original, you!” Suddenly realizing that he has given Gog an even more ancient lineage than himself, Evans quickly adds, “There’s certain an older giant Evans was with Gogmagog to meet the Trojans, only Geoffrey of Monmouth didn’t think it worth the mentioning, Evans is the very oldest name in all Wales, there’s never a happening without an Evans there. Even the Crucifixion. An Evans held the vinegar.”

  “I’m sure you’re much more ancient a Celt than I am,” Gog says, pacifying. “But this research I came to do about Gog­magog?”

  “It was a fine piece of work, a fine piece . . . for a half-Celt, which is no worse and no better than being a half-wit. Lucky it was, the meeting with me, your old teacher Evans. I put it to rights, the Druid wisdom that you could hint at, never hold and put down. When I had the vellum off a modern sheep, there’s pity, I aged it in tallow and tannin and sunlight. Then I lettered it in old Latin with a goose-quill pen, no lying metal nib for me. No scribe was more careful, not St. Asaph himself.” Evans looks round carefully to see if spies are eavesdropping, but there is only one sparrow cocking its head, hoping for crumbs rather than secrets.­ “I’ve got it hidden in my lodging, five years I’ve had it, mark you, waiting for you to come and get it, when the fighting was over, the limey troubles that take good Welshmen all the way to Singapore, God help them. And there’s pity, they should never leave Montgomery, and I don’t mean that damned limey-serving general.”

  “I gave you something in old Latin to put on vellum?” Gog says, bewildered.

  “Ah, I see they’ve taught you well, pretend not to know then, there’s best for all of us, who knows what limey’s listening? Come.” And Evans sets off at great pace down Fore Street, pulling Gog after him and muttering all the while so loudly that the West Country postman the other side of the street can easily hear them and pass it on by telegram to the cabinet, if he wants. “You couldn’t do the Latin, the old Latin, there’s too difficult, you can’t learn that in a ninniversity. You must have the ancient wisdom. No, remember you, you brought me that thing in English translation, the fight of Gogmagog and how they broke apart into Gog and Magog. You said it wasn’t spurious, you’d found the Gaelic original and done the translation, then you’d lost the original. And no one would believe you. They said your translation was a forgery, out of your own mind. And so it was, so it was. But the truth comes out of our own mind, the Celtic part, that is. The limey part’s all falsehood, the limeys have no folk memory, they’re a jumped-up bastard people. But I could use the Celtic half of your translation that was the true half and I put it into the old Latin on old vellum in my scribe’s hand, no one will know it’s not the original. Show it at the gate of heaven as your passport and St. Peter’ll let you through with one hand, while he’s using the other to thro
w out the Papists with all their damned forgeries.” Here Evans reaches an old green wooden door directly on the street and begins to fumble through his pockets to find a key. “Of course, I haven’t done a forgery, there’s impossible. No Celt can do a forgery if his spirit’s speaking the truth of his people, the original Britons.” Evans produces a key the size of a monkey-wrench and pushes it into the keyhole so large a rat could saunter through it on its hind legs. “There’s fools up at that ninniversity of yours, demanding the original, when they’ve destroyed all the originals with their own hands, to try and stamp out the ancient Celtic wisdom, the true Druid religion of Albion.” Evans turns the key in the lock, which groans mightily, and he leads the way into a dark corridor that opens up on a little courtyard, containing an oak tree growing out of some paving-stones and an iron bench beneath its shade. “But they can’t stamp out the Druid wisdom, because it’s not written, it’s in the folk memory. And if they’re fool enough not to believe without a little piece of vellum, why, they’ll get their vellum, the original vellum as true as the original Brutus Stone!” Evans laughs for the first time with a low cackle and takes Gog through a small door off the courtyard which leads into a room that is literally so lined with books that the walls are invisible. Pillars of volumes soar and sag on every side of Gog, so that any moment he expects to be buried under a toppling of tomes. Even the window is shaded by a pile of old manuscript on the window-seat. Every indrawn breath brings a stink of bookworm and mould, every breath exhaled threatens a deluge of paper. Evans sweeps a leather-bound set of rustic sayings off the only cane chair and declares, “Sit you down and make yourself at home. Pretty, isn’t it?”