by Joseph Hone
But that afternoon in the city, from having been wraiths and carcases, these two people stood up in front of me as freshly and sharply as parents must when a child can first name them, and place them in a common territory. And it was then too, I think, in that moment of new recognition that I finally passed from the world of Marlow with all its distortion and disaster into that of George Graham – a world which I could now make over completely in a new shape.
2
‘I’m Wheel of Reports,’ the man said, snuffling and choking from a terrible cold on the 33rd floor of the UN building. ‘Adam Wheel and pleased to meet you.’ I took a step towards a big grey metal desk done in a curvilinear style of the early fifties which backed out onto the East River.
‘Don’t touch – for God’s sake!’ the man cried hoarsely. He gestured towards two huge wobbly piles of mimeographed paper on his desk and then to similar stacks which reared up all over his office.
‘Committee Reports,’ Wheel advised me. ‘Six thousand tons of paper a year. The UN and its agencies must be one of the biggest despoilers of woodlands anywhere. The 24th Committee on Namibia – South West Africa to you; the 6th on St Kitts and the Windward Islands; report on the 1038th session on the Decolonisation Committee, 19th session on pollution in the atmosphere, the 7th on underwater pollution, the 22nd Committee on the implementation of the 1947 Kashmiri Treaty …’ Wheel padded round his office, touching and naming the piles like a commander remembering famous regiments and their battle honours.
‘You’ll come to it all in good time, sir. And good to have you with us, Mr Graham. Sit down and welcome to the glass house.’
Wheel was something like Henry Miller in middle age, a big man, balding, with a loping, easy-going confident American manner. There was a heavy jaw and a wide, beaming, friendly face with long bones in the right places, yet there was nothing clumsy about him. He seemed neither diffident nor pushy – seemed to lack all the labels of contemporary American malaise, to be a Middle American in a forgotten sense, neither a smart East Coast liberal, Golden State conservative, nor a hick from the grass roots; not a Nixon man or a Kennedy one either. The only real bias he showed lay in the unfashionable impression he gave of being at ease in his own country.
Wheel’s department – a new flower in the wildly blooming bureaucracy of the place – was dedicated to reporting on the reports. It was his job to study the need and efficacy of the tons of paper that rolled from the basement presses every day in three languages; the often illiterate reflections of general, plenary, ad hoc and other committees – reports in hundreds of copies that were usually only read by two people; the speaker, and the translator. But of this I learnt later. For the moment the talk was of my own future contribution to this babel. ‘On the Improvement and Co-ordination of the UN Information Services, with particular reference to the broadcasting media’, to give my projected work its full title. Wheel handed me over a copy of the ‘Projected Preliminaries’ on this scheme, a droll and lengthy document which I had tried to read on the way over. Everything was ‘projected’ or ‘preliminary’ in the UN; it was safer that way; action or completion were horrifying thoughts.
‘I suggest you just read things up for a week or two. Look around. Listen to some tapes. See some film. Meet the people. Can’t rush this sort of thing – reporting on the reports, sort of spying on the spies, what?’
I nodded to each of his suggestions except the last.
Wheel gestured round his office again hopelessly, then took another momentous puff into his hanky.
‘What you’ll have to realise here, Mr Graham, is that the swords have been beaten into Xerox machines not ploughshares. That’s all we really do here – a living memorial to memoranda. That’s all. I don’t know how that ploughshare business ever came into it. This is the real 3M organisation, I tell you – “Memoranda, Mediocrity and Money”. There are men in this building, I tell you – farmers, even goatherds who never saw this side of the Mexican High Sierras until ten years ago – who are pulling down 25,000 dollars a year now, with fourteen dependent children at 700 dollars a throw, three wives at double that, no tax and a pension that makes mutual funding look silly. How can you better it?’
I looked at Wheel with intent. These homespun truths were not expected.
‘Well you can’t, I’m telling you,’ Wheel went on with some vehemence.
His bald pate ducked in and out of the huge pencils of sunlight that came in off the East River, the whole morning lit up with a fine sharp blaze – water, air and sky as crisp as broken ice, special weather everywhere. But isolated at this height over the river, in a room silent and humming with warmth, there was something more: the ridiculous sense of being in a magic machine, a personal airship. There was the sure sense that one could detach the glass cubicle from the rest of the building and float over the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroad barges that swung awkwardly in the stream, saunter in the air above Welfare Island before drifting down with a Circle Line steamer towards Chinatown and Battery Park. Then, of course, I didn’t know these names or places. But in my own office next to Wheel’s, I came to know them, spending most of my time gazing eastwards towards Queens, becoming adept in all the shifting geography of the river.
I had wandered over to the broad window as Wheel was talking. A small sea-plane had dipped down suddenly from up river, just cutting over the top span of the Triborough Bridge, to our left, starting its glide now in front of us, the floats, like big black pear-drops, wavering for a moment, the rudder swinging as the pilot steadied himself in the cross-wind before dropping to the calmer airs beneath. It seemed to wait forever, hanging just over the water, in the long perspectives far down river. And then, when one felt that it must have decided to rise again for some safer terminus, like a wary bird, it suddenly dropped and disappeared behind a fountain of white water.
‘One of the “Commuter Specials”,’ Wheel said. ‘Wall Street brokers take them on the round trip every day. From Long Island, Westchester and other costly suburbs.’
Wheel had joined me at the window, seeming to be as pleased as I was at this slap in the face of the dull ways of the world.
‘I suppose the staff here come the same way? – with all that money.’
Wheel might almost have been annoyed. He shook his head viciously several times before speaking and closed his eyes as if to erase the first impossibly rude words of his reply.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, sir! We’re all saving to go home here. We don’t spare the money on sail boats for the kids, don’t talk about sea-planes. We don’t know life at all. We don’t deal with that sort of thing – never. That wasn’t a sea-plane you saw then – that’s imagination; that’s what you saw. Imagination at work. I laugh when I think of it,’ Wheel said gently. ‘It’s like a million dollars, those floats and canvas. We must want it, yet we must despise it. It’s everything we can’t admit here, in the organisation: rampant ambition, individuality, survival of the fittest – all the things that made this city are wrapped up in those commuters and their box of tricks, and in theory, U Thant should be up on the roof gunning for them. But it’s not like that, Mr Graham, not at all. We’re all trying to thumb a ride with them.’
Wheel suddenly laughed uproariously. ‘Jesus, I’ll have to make you pay for this if I go on much longer. I tend towards the ironic view. Think nothing of it.’
But I did. I wondered for a moment if Wheel might be my ‘contact’. His talk of ‘going home’, his political bias, which he had tried to discount as mere irony – these might have been clues to a professional commitment to the Left.
We went in next door to my office and Wheel introduced me to my secretary. She was a well-intentioned and proportioned Latin-American lady of middle years whose minimal though enthusiastic greetings suggested that her working English would follow a similar pattern, a guess which she was later to confirm many times. Wheel called her ‘Mrs Antonio’, which seemed to surprise her, as though this was neither her marital status nor her n
ame, and this too I afterwards found to be correct. Her name was Miss Fernandez. She was a newcomer to the organisation and, like myself, still capable of surprise.
Outside our offices was a large, windowless secretarial pool, lined with filing cabinets and filled with an assortment of strange and tongue-tied women – silent and unusual because they shared no common national identity or language and were thus forced into a quite unnatural abstinence of gossip and chit-chat. Due to the unique nature of their employer, these ladies were a more than usually divided lot. They sat about the area at various haphazardly placed desks, some with small partitions round them, some nude to the view, some in groups and others distantly isolated, as though the women had been attempting to repeat the geographical dispositions and political alliances of the countries which they came from.
There were small, china-boned Asiatic girls with wide-spread blackberry eyes like islands in faces that were otherwise quite blank maps – and bigger, older women from the more developed lands, who had missed affection many years before, whose eyes spoke loudly of that loss but were still full of dangerous hope, beacons of long and sharply-drawn desire, waiting, each one, for their Captain Cook.
Afterwards Wheel introduced me to the rest of his department, the monk-like occupants of many other small steel cubby-holes whose windows gave out on either side of the narrow building. They were a forbiddingly dull lot – except for the last of them.
‘Let’s end up with Mrs Soheir Taufiq, who covers our Arabic interests,’ Wheel had said brightly – anxious as I was, it seemed, for some vision of life in the building.
Mrs Soheir Taufiq was straight from the Great Earth Mother department; an overflowing Egyptian of indefinable years, hair built up at the back of her head in a huge bun and big black grapes for eyes. Her face was leathered and deeply grooved, forceful, competent.
She had two girls with shorthand notebooks beside her, and was ministering to them alternatively with words and figures which they stumbled over and which she clarified with powerful and forbearing accents.
I had assumed that she was conducting UN business in her dictation. But Wheel told me later that she was most often to be found at her own correspondence, a matter which she needed considerable assistance with, since she wrote at length and had a wide circle of friends.
‘Yes, I know,’ Wheel had continued afterwards, ‘but she’s invaluable to us here. Such a diplomat. And she has contacts all over the Middle East which even the SG couldn’t easily make. They consult,’ he added, in as dark a manner as he could muster, ‘whenever he wants another angle on Sadat and the rest of his friends. A real diplomat.’
And indeed, for me, she had been just that. Of all the staff I met that morning, apart from Wheel, she was the only one who showed any real interest in my arrival, an uncomfortable interest almost. She must have studied Graham’s UN application and curriculum vitae fairly closely and as a result of this I had, for the first time, to properly inhabit the man and his past – to go back over his career, over the many details of his life I had so laboriously learnt in Marylebone and on the boat journey over, right back to the time when he had taught in Cairo in the mid-fifties, before I’d ever gone there myself.
And she spoke to me in Arabic, not English. Mrs Taufiq suddenly moved from a relaxed Anglo-American idiom to an equally colloquial argot of Cairo, full of those awkward vowels, sudden elisions and clamorous consonants that I’d not heard in four years but which drew me back to the city as surely as if she’d taken a blindfold from my eyes and plugs from my ears and placed me squarely next the pastry counter at Groppi’s on Soliman Pasha in the middle of that dirty, blazing, busy city, where the smells rose with the sun, lime dust and coffee dregs, the slops of five thousand years, urine and burnt newspapers – all brooding in the alleyways, running along the streets and climbing up the shattered concrete that shook and danced all day in the pounding it took from the waves of light. She led me back there so surely in her words. Had I closed my eyes I might have been her lover in that distant time, for she mimicked perfectly all the elements of disquiet that I had taken from that language and the women then.
But now, with my eyes open, her words carried a different menace: were they part of an innocent inquiry or an interrogation with a special motive? Was she merely politely interested in George Graham or intent on proving his credentials? The curtain had gone up at last and I was linked with her in the first words of that long dialogue I was to play with her and with others, re-writing and acting the words simultaneously, enacting a drama that a week before had actually been a man’s life; a dramatist who had since fallen out of favour – whose works, in fact, had been ruthlessly obliterated.
Graham was dead; long live George Graham. I had been handed a few props, some of his tattered belongings in a sack, an old Hamilton square-faced watch, a pair of flannels and a Mentmore fountain pen, along with some pages of a prompt copy from the original production. Yet the dry bones would have to move again and the words flow, for McCoy and Harper, I remembered, had never stopped impressing upon me how Graham, in his time, had taken life and its pleasures with the confidence of a king.
‘You were at the British school in Heliopolis, then?’ Mrs Taufiq seemed anxious to confirm a point in Graham’s past which I had not mentioned.
‘Briefly. Just for two terms. Before I went on to Victoria College.’
‘You were with Pendlebury in Heliopolis – no? And the Frenchman. What was his name? Jabovitch. Well, Franco-Russian. White Russian,’ Mrs Taufiq added as if the man had been a bad wine. ‘With a monocle.’
‘Pendlebury, yes. He was the head in my time. But the other fellow – with a monocle?’
I’d known about Pendlebury from the files McCoy had got together. But the Franco-Russian was outside my area completely. There’d been nothing on him. I couldn’t therefore risk any flat confirmation or denial.
‘You must have known him,’ Mrs Taufiq went on. ‘I had a daughter there at the time who used to give imitations of him when she came home. Quite shocking.’
If this was a test I had to accept it full face. I smiled at Mrs Taufiq, almost lovingly, taking her eye to eye, letting the creases gather sagely all over my face.
‘You know, it’s such a long while ago. And there were so many odd foreigners about in Cairo then. Monocles were the least of it. Did you ever come across Malt? Did English in Heliopolis for a while. Used to come to class in a dressing-gown and throw books at the dunderheads from the gallery in assembly hall. Brilliant man, a fine scholar, quite out of his depth with children. Fell under a train at Bab-el-Luk on Black Saturday. Remember – when they burnt Shepheard’s? There was so much going on then I’ve really forgotten Jabovitch.’
She tried to come in again but I didn’t let her.
‘I was on the terrace of Shepheard’s that morning, in fact. With one of the British Council men. Man named Beresford, small fellow with red hair. You must have come across him. Lived in Garden City, always giving parties.’
The trick was to turn the questions back to her, allowing only the facts I knew about Graham to emerge, embellished by my own later knowledge of the city – to pour out the authorised version of my tale, leaving no moment for her to get a finger in a crack and prise open the invention. Wheel stood by as audience for the performance.
‘I loved Egypt, you know. I was able to get around quite a bit with the Council, used to give lectures – in Tanta, Zagazig, Alex. Doing the Lake Poets in some stuffy upstairs room looking over the tram terminus to a lot of dazed old ladies and young nationalists who stood up at the back and wanted to know what Wordsworth had to do with the liberation of the Egyptian people – there were no daffodils in Egypt, of course – and when we were getting out of the Canal Zone?’
Mrs Taufiq shared some mild laughter with Wheel. I felt I’d passed. I didn’t expect any more questions. And there were none. Instead Mrs Taufiq started to speak of the city of Cairo and its people in the same tones of affectionate remembrance as I mys
elf had used.
‘Yes, I must have been at some of your lectures. I used to go quite often to the Council.’ She looked at me carefully, with appreciation or irony I couldn’t say. ‘You know, it’s funny, because although I don’t remember you, Mr Graham, I remember someone very like you in Cairo. Not in the mid-fifties, but a few years later. A teacher at Victoria College in Maadi where my son was. I saw him once or twice at the school and at the Sporting Club there. An Irishman, I think. I don’t remember his name. Not you, of course, because this was after Suez. But like you. Tall, chatty, rather liked jokes.’
Mrs Taufiq drew out each of these last descriptions slowly, as though in doing so, she could the better resurrect the total memory of this person, give the cloudy mixtures time to coagulate and take a shape which she could then drive through her mind, from the past to the present, into a clear vision and identity.
I waited, petrified. She was looking for myself, trying to disinter something as deeply buried as anything Graham possessed in the same place and time.
‘Quite a good-looking fellow,’ she went on, distantly, with regret, as though this favourable attribute was an unfortunate hurdle in the journey of recall and she was sad that I lacked a squint or a gammy leg which would have immediately confirmed her ageing perceptions.
‘Oh yes?’ I said lightly.
‘Yes. I remember he married the daughter of some friends of mine. The Girgises in Maadi. It came to a bad end I seem to remember.’
I took out Graham’s pipe with its chipped bowl and filled it with the aromatic Dutch tobacco he used.
Mrs Taufiq paused, thinking. I lit a match and the little steel room was filled with sweetness. She seemed to have given herself over to the memory of it all, completely – to someone, to something that had happened on an evening long ago on a terrace in Maadi, as if the tobacco had become a little madeleine for her and through its aroma she was just on the point of breaking into time and recapturing the past. I felt her thoughts brush past and around me, lightly but insistently, searching for the key, disembodied characteristics looking for a name.
