Stewart, Angus (11 page)

Some punch line, Jay thought. Some punch line in hypocrisy! Still looking at the Arab, he let his hand fall away, shaking his head slowly. What he wanted to say was that the guilt and pride that was causing the Arab to defend himself so absurdly now was identical with the guilt and pride that had made Jay swing upon him so angrily in the first place: that really the situation was ludicrous. But more strongly he sensed danger; and a barrier across which he was not prepared to communicate intuition to a stranger in the middle of the night. He didn't fear the tout for what he might do now; but for some threat he might represent in the future. It was easy to feel paranoia in the city. 'I'm sorry,' Jay now said simply, and turned on his way.

He was unsure of the exact locality of Frederick Halliday's shop, though Achmed had told him the street it was in. Crossing the Boulevard, and descending all the time towards the sea, he eventually found it at the lower, seedier end of the Rue Dante. It stood on a corner; a narrow, unprepossessing front with a single window, above which a sign read simply
English Bookshop
.
A single neon strip burned brightly in the display window. The books seemed all either to be in French or English, and he glanced at them only briefly before ringing the doorbell. No one came, and there seemed to be no life at all in the whole neighbourhood. He rang again, this time hearing the long, muffled peal of the bell inside the shop. The noise must by now have wakened even Achmed. Jay had just given up, and was turning to climb the hill again, when a man appeared from behind the hidden corner of the shop.

Both of them paused, looking uncertainly at each other for a moment, almost as if they had been rival thieves who had simultaneously selected the same premises to plunder. But the stranger stooped and dropped something into the letter box of the shop. Jay returned slowly towards him. The person more clearly revealed wore a felt hat and a light raincoat. Although youngish, there was greying hair at his temples.

'It'll never be read,' Jay said. This was the first thing that occurred to him; but he could hardly have continued to peer at the other man much longer.

The stranger was evidently startled. 'What won't be?'

'Whatever it is
you've put in the letter box. The proprietor's dead.'

'Dead? Frederick Halliday?' In echoing this the man revealed himself as undoubtedly English.

'Yes.' Jay explained the circumstances, and how he had learned of them. When he had done so, the other exclaimed: 'Good Lord! I was just dropping off a note for a couple of books I wanted. I sometimes do when I've been working late. Halliday sends them round first thing in the morning—used to, I suppose I should say. What a frightful thing . . . my name's Brown, by the way—Simon Brown.'

'Jay Gadston,' Jay said. 'As a matter of fact Dan Gurney mentioned you only this afternoon—in connection with the possibility of my finding another flat.'

'Oh?' Brown had looked at him quickly when he'd spoken Gurney's name. 'I do have a flat to let—two in fact, because I sometimes move out of my own.'

Jay smiled. 'To Dradheb?'

'Precisely so.' Brown was returning his smile now. 'I find the odd three-month stretch with little more than a paliasse and a primus can be invigorating—besides increasing income usefully. Then year-round flat-dwelling is over privileged in a sense—too easy . . .' he broke off, puzzled by something in his own thought. 'The second flat is let at the moment, and I'm also rather settled into mine. But I want to go to Biskra in a couple of months:

'Tunisia?'

'Yes, I'm doing a huge book on a French writer, and he went there. Why not come round for a drink? The layout of the two is pretty much identical. You could see over mine, and perhaps think about it as a possibility for the later date.'

Jay said he'd like that very much.

'Then what about tomorrow?' Brown suggested. 'You seem to be something of a night bird. Shall we make it a nightcap? About eleven?'

Jay agreed readily enough once more. He wondered on an impulse whether he should confide something of his anxieties about Achmed. Brown must presumably know of him, and for all his curiously greying hair, appeared a man little older than himself. But he decided against doing so. They exchanged addresses, and parted outside the shop.

When Jay regained his flat he took his unfinished drink out on to the balcony and stood
there for a long time looking down over the city. He saw Maria-Angeles, swift moving gathered about by silk, enter the Koutoubia for her night's work, almost two hours after it's opening time, but early for her act He didn't know who she was. He watched the lazy arrival of tourists, and the strange isolation of night movement, which makes the tipping of taximen loud and jovial He watched an unspeakably nervous man outside the nearby hotel; spinning as if shot at the end of each brief beat, and ceaselessly tapping his nails with a furled newspaper. Without curtains, the hotel's neon
sign
threw an alternating pulse of red and green light on to his bedroom wall throughout the night. Towards one in the morning the deaf mute arrived immediately beneath his balcony. Jay had seen him before and supposed him to be some phantom. Sally Chalmers said he was an albino Moor. His hair was tight as a negro's, only the wrong colour completely. It wasn't the cosmetic white of any bleach, but rather the ashen white of catastrophe. Whatever he
was, the young man's function seemed to be to rush at cars slowing for the road junction, and
to
hold their occupants to ransom with inarticulate shrieks. But even when there were no cars to chase he would cover short distances by breaking into a childlike, galloping run. Tonight he went testing the doors of parked vehicles, and found one unlocked outside Ray's Bar. There must have been
an
ignition key in it, for a moment later the large new Peugeot moved cautiously forward. Then he backed it with violence, braking in masterly fashion just before it hit the next car in the parked row. Leaping out, the deaf mute skipped for some moments in the empty street. Then he repeated the experiment only this time, reversing in an accelerating curve, he hit a Citroen broadside, He got out curiously just as the lady owner of the Peugeot emerged from Ray's, and just as a policeman unexcitedly summoned sweeping a closing café, came up from the Boulevard. With faintly absurd pantomime motions the deranged man was marched off, across the Boulevard, and into the night office of the police station. The scene had been played without emotion or surprise on the part of anyone concerned. Probably it had happened a dozen times before.

Before sleeping Jay broke off half a loaf of bread. He had some Idea of stuffing it with butter, and maybe olives, since there were olives on the shelf. But it was like breaking off the tail of an alligator, and the slurp escarpments of crust cut into his knuckle. After sucking the blood and swearing he didn't feel hungry any longer. He chucked the bread in the bin. Most of his bachelor squalor was confined to the kitchen. If he lifted a cup the saucer came with it. Spoons had a habit of becoming glued together. A couple of weeks before Jay had bought a new-born black goat from a Berber woman, and had named him Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov lived mostly on the balcony, though on wet days he was soused with Eau de Cologne, and given the run of the flat. Here his hoofs beat a restless tattoo on the tiles as he wandered around, looking for grass perhaps in the cracks between the glazed urban stones. Hs diet consisted of vegetable peelings, tinned milk, and an occasional bowl of packet soup. The kitchen bore traces of the disorderly feeding of them both. Jay opened one of the balcony doors just before turning off the light. 'Courage, Raskolnikov!' he called.

  *  *  *  *  *

Manolo was asleep. Impatiently, Simon Brown collected a scatter of his clothes and thrust them in a wardrobe. He lay down on the living room divan and considered the boldly blocked notice pinned to the wall above his feet 'When the bridge flows, and the river stands still, there you have Zen.' It was curious that a definition of Zen had given him his first intuitive apprehension (one must not say
experience
)
of Satori. So the communists had bumped off Frederick Halliday. Just how pointless could they get? The wretched man had been no more than a courier. A sentimentalist duped into collecting and distributing Right propaganda from Casa by his warped imaginings of a monarchy that was both absolute and somehow benign. And
valueless
to their own organisation. To elaborately stage the murder of such an inoffensive old man was absurd even by the measure of Moroccan minority politics. Why hadn't they saved the act for a big man like Gurney? Despairing, Simon Brown flicked the tape recorder switch to 'receive'. The machine hissed for some minutes while he collected his thoughts to dictate:—

'Christianity bases its tenets on dualism. On the opposition of good and evil—both of which are conceived of as positive forces—though to recent generations, of course—to all save the doctrinally orthodox Catholics for instance—there's been an attempt to play down the dynamic of evil. To humanise it in a sense. It's become a negative conception—associated less with a rampant Satan than with more scientifically explicable aspects of human nature—selfishness, lust, greed, etc.

'Buddhism, really, teaches detachment from both evil
and
good. Because our ideas of these things are themselves only manifestations of the restlessness it seeks to overcome. The apparent opposition between the two is just one aspect of the SAMSARA—and that can be defined as the ceaseless ebb and flow of intellect and sensibility that never for a moment ceases to assault consciousness. (I've got a jingle with two "ceases" there, I think.) Buddhism is a lonely discipline. One might almost say a selfish one. Since there is no Creator, the Buddhist is without the consolation of divine aid or intercession. He must free himself through the exercise of will. Through withdrawal, through detachment, he rides the storm by ignoring it. He reckons to switch off the mechanisms of his senses and emotions—which alone can tell him that there is such a storm. It follows that the hoped-for state, NIRVANA, is a bliss that is dependent upon neither. As consciousness is not involved, Nirvana cannot be defined. Indeed one is encouraged not to speculate upon its nature.

'Zen is rather different. It really looks towards a more immediate reward. Nirvana is something of a remote promise. It can only be attained. after: lifetime's discipline—in fact the discipline of many lifetimes. And even then there's a suspicion that it is more an achievement of the professionals—the BHIKKHUS of the orthodox THERAVADA Buddhists of Ceylon. SATORI is more of an intuitive flash. It's a joining with reality, that may come only when the intellect is suspended. The essence of Zen is to dissolve all dualism. Consequently, there can be no question of the moments' being described, because both the observer and the observed have become one thing. There is complete fusion between the substance of the personality and the substance of the world. It's this very difficulty, of course, and particularly the necessary suspension of the intellect, that makes Zen so easy a butt for jokes and riddles—especially of the inconsequential sort. Some of our jokes, quite unconsciously I'm sure, afford a true glimpse of Zen. There was that cartoon in
Punch
where a sad man is gazing into the Penguin compound at the zoo, and remarks to the keeper, "What's the point in having some larger than others?" Did I glimpse satori when I found myself sole passenger in a hundred-seat Boeing with a very frightened Oregon cowboy wearing spurred boots? There was some link between this experience, and my much later seeing an armchair in Heals for two hundred and eighty pounds. Was it subliminal hysteria? Or was I momentarily released from Samara? When I think about it (one shouldn't.) these experiences (they're not experiences!) produced a liberating effect identical with that I derived when I first read the words: "When the bridge flows and the river stands still, there you have Zen."

'The suffocating web of Samsara—the hornet-swarm of appetites, the motivations of cause and effect, petty achievements that subsequently prove to have been no achievements at all, the search for the mental and bodily state conducive to happiness—in short, strife—this is torn away, not to
reveal
reality to a beholder, since that implies a dualism, but to enable him to be joined with, and to reality. It's not a dissimilar idea to the Christian atonement. Only that conception involves us in paternalistic notions of forgiveness, benevolence, shelter—to some of the very preoccupations that contribute to the chaos of Senses, in fact.

'It can certainly be said of Zen—and the Buddhist religion in general—that it never produced any sort of practical revolution in the world. There have been no great innovations in human affairs as a result of it because worldly preoccupations are precisely what it seeks to avoid. Where it has been aligned behind political movements its essence has become diluted as a result.

'Yes, I have attained Satori. But only with the unpredictable occurrence of accident I can't command the state at will; presumably because I can't sufficiently abnegate my will. I can best describe those moments as breathless; though not because one gasps in ecstasy, but because there is no need to breathe. One becomes the bridge, flowing to its own rules. Within oneself the water comes to a standstill.

'
Kif?
(to
check and break up, I think: my mind's becoming personal, wandering with night).
Kif?
Never!
Kif accentuates
Samsara.
It has the quality of parading the emotions. Of singling them out for our inspection. To smoke
kif
is
to invite confrontation with all those conflicts most deeply inside one. It's true that they may
become so objectified as to assume the archetypal truth of parables. Then they are sometimes capable of divining a course of practical action, that may be of incalculable value. This is how the Arabs approach
kif
.
As an instrument of practical philosophy. But it takes training. One must learn to select from the unconscious. It must be nudged to produce a particular string or pattern of associations—and what is disgorged must be contemplated without panic. A calm and disciplined appraisal is essential at all times.
(Sounds, that, like some fucking military manual.) Without such control the Samsara can be overwhelming. In no time one could be reduced to a cowed and terrified receptacle of chaos simply—the edge of madness . . .