Pascali's Island (8 page)

I have betrayed myself, Excellency, in a number of ways. Neither deliberately nor involuntarily. It has happened as things happen in the constraint of dreams. I have consorted openly with Turkish functionaries. Sometimes I use Turkish forms of salutation, sometimes Greek. I go to the mosque, perform the gestures of prayer. I also attend church, where I do not forget to cross myself. I am now in religion as I have long been in sexual matters, utriusque capax. The Moslem prayer fascinates me, the gestures, hands and minds reaching towards the void… I know why I have allowed myself to become suspect, put my life in danger. I have understood something, Excellency. Human beings prefer destruction to perfect balance. What is intolerable, more intolerable than anything atrocious that the mind can think, is equilibrium. Twenty years, my stipend arriving regularly through the Banque Ottomane, my reports going out month after month. No response, no reaction. You see? A closed circle. A continuous celebration. And in this clarity of the light, as Herr Gesing would say. Intolerable. You see, doubtless you see, why I had to break out. My way is to make myself a victim. Others will break out by seeking me…

At the end of Caritas Street there is a small paved square with a periptero in the middle and a narrow border of hibiscus bushes on two sides. The far side faces Avenue Alexandras. I paused here, debating whether to buy cigarettes. I never spend even small sums without deliberation, especially at this time of the month, with my next remittance still two weeks away. As I was hesitating a ragged squad of troops, with a corporal at the head, came marching along the avenue in the direction of the garrison barracks. They were marching at ease, rifles slung.

Mongolian faces these, flat, big-boned, sullen with weariness. None of them glanced in my direction.

I bought the cigarettes. On the other side of the avenue is where the Turkish quarter begins. I met Zeki Bey, the mudur of the school. Like many teachers and intellectual persons, Zeki Bey is on the side of constitutional reform. As far as I have been able to discover he has no direct associations with the Young Turk movement, but he is certainly sympathetic to some of their aims. (I once alleged to your officials at the Ministry that he was a freemason, but he had beaten me at chess and I was piqued.) We talked mainly about the killing of the five Turkish soldiers in the ambush. I asked him if he thought the garrison had been strengthened, mentioning to him the troops I had just seen. He said that he thought this was probably the case, though he had seen no troops arrive. Probably they had disembarked at night. Zeki Bey gave it as his opinion that the rebels in the hills are being actively supported, with guns and money, by agents in the pay of Athens. He spoke as one with special knowledge, but everybody says the same thing. 'This American,' he said. 'Why does he remain offshore so long?'

'Who, the sponge-fisher?'

Zeki Bey smiled slightly, as if he pitied me. An offensive smile, Excellency. 'They have searched his boat,' he said. 'This morning.'

'Who told you that?' I said, smiling in my turn, as if I did not believe it.

But Zeki has too much selfesteem to be drawn in that way. 'I was told,' he said, and stopped smiling. I judged it better not to pursue the matter. I do not know if they found anything, Excellency. Lydia thought not, when I spoke to her later at the studio.

I must break off for a while – my eyes are heavy. Late afternoon is not a good time for me. Night is the best time for composition.

She came to the door in response to my knock. She explained at once, though seemingly without displeasure, that she was working. I thought for a moment or two she was going to send me away. But she needed a break, she said, she had been working all morning. I followed her upstairs – the ground floor of the house is completely unoccupied. We went through the small living-room into her studio. This was originally two rooms and is now one, running the whole width of the house, with a large square window at both ends. I am always slightly ill at ease in this room, self-conscious, because of the flooding amplitude of light and the clutter of objects.

In the centre of the room she stopped and turned to face me. She was wearing a sort of turban, white in colour, tied at the nape of the neck, and covering her ears and hair completely, so that the face she presented to me was that of an accolyte of some kind, a naked, devotional oval, and this impression was strengthened by her devotee's long smock of coarse white muslin gathered at the waist, reaching midway down the calves. Her legs and feet bare. Narrow, beautiful feet. On the smock, on the right side, just below the ribs, a smudge of red paint. Just the one mark. She had wiped her hand there, presumably.

'You have lost weight,' she said.

'Dieting,' I said. I was so pleased that she had noticed me to this extent that I found her gaze difficult to support. I motioned towards the painting in progress, on the easel, and said something appreciative about it. I forget now what. It was nearly finished as far as I could judge – an island landscape with peasants and goats. It was good, in the way that Lydia 's paintings are always good: classical in spirit, very exact in perspective, with a loving fidelity to the volume and texture of things – leaves, rocks, clouds. Also to the effects of light. This clarity of the light.

We talked about various island matters, and then about the world at large. I enjoy my talks with Lydia. She travels, always has news and gossip. She knows what is happening in Europe, the movements that are forming, the books that are being written. It was she who told me about Strindberg, whom I had never heard of before, after seeing one of his plays in Paris. She brought back a copy of Gorki's Mother in French last year. Now she was telling me about a Spanish painter named Picasso, who I had heard of but knew nothing about, and a book called Three Weeks by an Englishwoman, which was a great bestseller. Lydia exhibits her paintings in Europe, but I do not think she can live on this alone. Probably she has money from her family, or has some of her own. Perhaps she is in your pay, too, Excellency? From what she tells me, almost everyone in Constantinople is a spy now. She said you are no longer seen in public, that you remain always immured in your palace of Yildiz, that even for the Friday prayers you do not show your face to the people, but go to the mosque in a closed carriage. The story goes that you keep a revolver in every room for fear of attempts on your life, that you shot and killed one of your gardeners whom you met by chance in the grounds, mistaking him for an assassin. It is said you live in hourly fear, Excellency. How strange if this were true. The Commander of the Faithful, God's Vice-Regent on earth – subject to the same sweating intimations of dissolution as this your humble informer… But I will not believe it. You are my only recourse, Excellency, my only hope of justice against your officials at the Ministry. I must continue to believe in your authority and power. Si Dieu n'existait pas…

In order to change the subject, I asked Lydia what she thought about the American. Or rather, I first asked her if she had met him; and it was her way of answering this simple question that alerted me to something odd, a puzzling inconsistency, slight but definite. Simple questions often expose complex deceits.

'This Mister Smith,' I said, 'have you met him?'

'Yes,' she said. 'No, I haven't. I've heard of him.'

Heard of him. Strange phrase, Excellency. And then the contradiction. As if, intent on an untruth, she had told the wrong one, then fallen into too great a frankness…

'I exchanged a few words with one of his crew,' she said. 'An Italian. Two or three days ago. He came ashore for provisions. An elderly man.'

'I see,' I said. 'Do you think the sponge-fishing is genuine?'

'Certainly.'

'I mean, do you think that is all he is here for?'

'If they'd had any doubts,' Lydia said, 'they'd have boarded him and searched.'

'Apparently that is just what they have done.'

'What do you mean?' Lydia 's voice had sharpened. It seemed to me that a slight flush had risen to her cheeks. I passed on Zeki Bey's information to her. She was silent for a few moments, then she said quietly, 'What fools they are.'

'How do you mean?'

'As if a man like Smith is going to be caught by a routine search.'

Again this suggestion in her words of some further knowledge of the American. I did not understand her attitude, Excellency, but did not think it politic at that point to press the matter any further. Instead I adverted to the topic I knew would interest her most – knew it with pain and resignation.

'Naïve of Mister Bowles,' I said, 'to expect states to behave morally. Don't you think so?'

'He has a very strong sense of responsibility,' Lydia said. She was standing at the window which looked out over the interior courtyard of the house. 'He is quite unsophisticated in some ways,' she said. 'Unsophisticated in the best sense, I mean. A moral primitive.' She uttered this last phrase with a certain enthusiasm, as if it augured well for Mister Bowles's vigour and general prowess. She moved against the window and the light defined her form within the loose-fitting muslin gown.

I have been in Lydia 's studio often, but the light always surprises me, its plenitude and inpartiality. It floods through the windows at either end, and occupies the room totally: full, white, stark without bleakness. There is no eddying, as there might have been at street level, vagaries caused by stirred foliage, or passers-by, no flex or play of light whatever. Bodies become like other objects in this light, seem to lose autonomy. I had a momentary sense that Lydia and I were in danger of being fixed there for ever, she at the window, with her naked, undefended face, I standing smiling awkwardly there, figures in an interior created by some much superior artist, along with all the other objects disposed about the room, objects with nothing in common except their fixed stillness in this light, laquered boxes, polished vertebrae of a goat, a stuffed oriole with beautiful amber eyes, cloth flowers under a glass dome, twisted shapes of wood, fragments of glass, shells, shards, heterogeneous scourings of the island. When I spoke again it was with the conscious intention of distinguishing myself from these objects.

'Why do you think he is here?' I said.

'He told us. Weren't you there? He is interested in the ruins up there, in classical antiquity generally. He's writing a book.'

She made a vague gesture with her arm towards the ceiling, as if to indicate the hills where the Englishman's true interests lay. I was again aware of the red mark on her side, and the shape of her body inside the gown. A curious compound of regret and desire stirred in me, and something else I had never felt before, pity for Lydia and for her and my mortality. She has been the victim of my fantasies for many years, Excellency. Now here she was, robed and marked for someone else.

'There are whole areas of his past life that he seems to just wince away from,' she said. 'As if you had touched some wound.'

Something almost fanatical in the face, when unsmiling. And framed by the head cloth… It is clear that he has inflamed her female intuitiveness, a more effective organ of stimulation than some more obvious ones that spring to mind. Whether by accident or design or, as I suspect, some blundering amalgam of both, he has got himself cast as a Man of Sorrows. That seems to be the fashion for contemporary heroes. The sensual fires are stoked by guilt these days, not a common love for keyboard music. Mister Bowles has the right whiff of unhappiness about him, it seems. Taciturn, though vibrant-hearted. Lydia is proceeding from the evident taciturnity to the presumptive vibrancy. Doubtful logic. Pardon me, Excellency, it is my jealousy speaking. All the same, I was surprised to see Lydia, so experienced in love, making this leap of faith.

I found the notion of Mister Bowles wincing away from the past interesting on other grounds. There could be reasons for a man to be evasive about the past other than that he is consumed by a secret sorrow – he may be consumed by a strong desire to cover his traces, for example. And Mister Bowles has so far succeeded in fending Lydia off when she enquired about his past. No mean achievement when the enquirer is armed with amorous kindness. Arguing a good deal to hide…

At this precise moment – and it was strangely as if between us we had summoned him-I heard his unmistakable voice in the room beyond the studio, raised in an amiable shout of blended greeting and apology.

'In here,' Lydia called. She took a step or two from the window and, without looking at me, took off the turban and shook out her hair. Mister Bowles came through into the studio, head inclined, as if to avoid an obstacle. 'The door was open, you know,' he said. 'Oh, hello. I didn't know you had a visitor.'

'Basil and I are old friends,' Lydia said, contriving, with no doubt unconscious cruelty, to make this sound derogatory.

Mister Bowles looked at me for a moment or two, rather oddly I thought: not with that slight degree of humorous contempt her tone invited, but with a sort of indecision, as if this was something that would have to be taken into account.

He began moving slowly about the room. 'My word,' he said, 'you have accumulated a lot of stuff.' He was ill at ease, I could tell. I think the multiplicity of things bothered him, such a stark array of disparate objects in this unvarying light. He stopped from time to time to pick something up, turning to us with a sort of expostulation, humorous, but not altogether so. 'What's this? And this? And what on earth is this?' Lydia replying point by point, a piece from an old olive press, a blue Iznik tile, as if justifying their presence there.

This went on for some time and was like a kind of game between them, like those games where something in the tone of voice identifies an object. I realise now that Mister Bowles was seeking, as usual, to impose himself on us and on the studio, establish his way of seeing things as the dominant one, the essential reality. His way of responding to the unfamiliar and daunting. On this occasion he was clearly failing. He could find no way of looking at this clutter of objects, no governing principle to account for their presence there – and he is a man who needs governing principles, I think, more than most. (Now, with the night silent beyond my shutters, in my area of inviolate lamplight, I remember again the stealthy hush in his room, the head, the revolver, the notebook. A governing principle there too, if I can find it.)