The Avignon Quintet (16 page)

Piers followed my glance as well as read my mind as I formulated these thoughts. He said mischievously: “I think that you really envy her, because she makes love
à tous les quatre vents
without ascribing an absolute value to the act: whereas we three are in the grip of an infatuation which goes on and on. How strange to have lost one’s taste for other people – like losing one’s sense of smell almost: why is there no word for it in English? We have deaf and blind, but nothing to describe the lost sense of smell … or the loss of the other thing for that matter.”

Akkad was slowly making his way towards us now, and one could feel a sort of leisurely intent in his movements; nor was I wrong, for he came up to take Piers tenderly by the sleeve and place his other hand upon my own arm. “In a little while,” he said, drawing us both together, “we shall invite you to come into the shrine of old Abu Menouf with the rest of us for what will be something like a religious service – or a reading of the psalms. I will be doing the commentary and the exposition. If you get bored, do not hesitate to leave and come back here. No offence will be taken. It is understood that you could be potential members of the group though as yet not set in your resolve. There will be others like you also, so do not feel that you are all alone. It should not be more painful than one of the traditional lectures on the Koran that you have heard, given by a venerable old sheik in Cairo; but of course the subject will be heretical from all points of view.” He laughed soundlessly, and spread his hands out in a gesture of quaint helplessness. “What would you have us to do – sit down under the great lie and accept the rule of one we call the Prince of Darkness?” The tone in which he said this suggested more the deliberations of a stockbroker than the lucubrations of a bigot. He went on in a lower tone: “It is not a question of making a small compromise on behalf of happiness – it cuts far deeper. Once you see the truth the way we see it you simply cannot refuse to accept. You are surrounded, cut off, severed for ever from the world as you have been living it, lost, sunk, foundered …” His tone remained wryly quizzical, sardonic, but his eye was very much alive, with its strange glaucous movements. As for myself, this very absence of a definitive attitude, this shying away from the mantic or the vatic, filled me with misgivings. I was young and anxious to be carried away, to be swept off my feet – just as much as my friend. But in this domain mere logical arguments, mere theological prevarications didn’t seem to me to be what I was looking for. If the sort of conviction that Akkad implied was what we desired, why then rational argument was not the way to foster it. Romantic? Yes. We had every right to be. We dreamed of a perfect conviction of the truth of being which would be independent of arguable proof. Akkad stood before us in his much darned abba – the one he wore to paint his vivid water colours – and smiled his jubilant and dreamy smile. No, it would not do – at least that is how I felt. If the whole sum of human knowledge had to be put to the question then only a prophet of wrath, a poet of wrath, could do it, and could carry us with him over the rapids into the new country which was, according to our friend, waiting to claim us. Something of all this – doubts, hesitations – may have been visible on our faces for Akkad hesitated once more before resuming his more solemn manner. He looked at his slim watch and made an almost imperceptible sign to the major-domo, the tall aristocratic Arab who had met us on the black horse at the entrance to the oasis. The servants began slowly to bring in light silk prayer-mats and small cushions – the colour green predominated. These we placed over our arms as we prepared to leave the tent for the shrine. But we were not as numerous as I had surmised – a full third of the company appeared not to belong to our group, and not therefore to be in the secret of our private congregation about the sepulchre of Abu Menouf. It was, then, an ordinary holiday cocktail party on to which Akkad had grafted the members of his little sect. It was, so to speak, a small intermission in the general celebrations of the Moslem fair, the noise of which we could still hear reverberating outside the brilliant walls of our enclosure. So gradually, without prejudicing the pleasant atmosphere of the party, we sidled towards the entrance, following Akkad, who waited a while at the door and then turned to lead the way.

A brilliant moon poured its molten light into the lake where the tall reeds, turned ink-black or pure quicksilver according to angle, stood rooted once in their own reflections, then twice in the light clay floor of the depression. The sand of the desert could have been snow. Still as plate glass the whole world, except where here or there an insect incised the glowing surface with its struggles, and sent small wrinkles shoreward. The sky was cloudless – the moon rolled across the surface like a lamb searching for its dam. The desert air struck chill as we wound along the palm-groves towards the shrine. A dim light could be discerned from it, shining through the windows covered in painted wax paper. In and out of darkness we were moonsplashed so that one had little unaccustomed glimpses of each other’s faces. I saw Akkad turned by such an accident into a grim mummy, Sabine smiled with white monkey’s teeth, Casimir Ava shorn of his hair by a trick of the light looked like an old lady at prayer. I had the illusion that our numbers were swelled, not by candidates from the cocktail party, but by other unknown people who had been waiting outside in the darkness, and who now attached themselves to our procession.

The two dervishes, unkempt and forlorn though they were, held the door open for us, watchful as mastiffs. They gave the impression of knowing exactly who belonged and who did not, but this must have been an illusion for they did not know us, for example, and yet they signalled us to pass with the rest. A dark narrow stairway led us into the body of the little mosque – into a large central room very dimly lighted by tiny night-lights floating in saucers of olive oil. Because of the darkness the domed ceiling seemed as high as the sky outside, and by consequence our figures appeared diminished, and as if they were rapidly melting back into the darkness from which apparently they had been summoned.

The form of the ceremony was easy enough to discern – it was, as he had said, exactly like a Cairo sheik delivering a theological lecture in a mosque. Akkad was to be seated in the middle of the floor upon a carpet and cushion with a low table of inlaid wood some distance before him. Placed to his right and left were other tables and cushions placed for his two acolytes – one an old blind man in a white robe, the other a swarthy and bearded man of middle age in a crumpled lounge suit, but with no collar. He looked like a retired postmaster. In his hand he held a bundle of texts and a book, which he consulted, and he had the air of a stage-prompter; while the old blind man looked like one of those itinerant “singing” priests, beadles or sacristans, who can always be summoned to chant verses from the Koran in time of need. These dispositions taken up, we the auditors formed a circle at a distance round the trio, being all seated with the greatest regularity upon the ground, and while nobody actually marshalled us in any particular order we felt that an order had insensibly been conformed to: the inner circle consisted of those who were more or less the real initiates of the group and the circles moved outward until they came to us, who were simply “onlookers with intent”, as Akkad called us.

For his part he sat himself down in the sheik’s place, removed his glasses and clasped his hands before him as he gazed dreamily up into the darkness of the mosque. We knelt or sat in silence. The blind man waited with his chin on his breast, breathing softly, his hearing tuned, it seemed, to concert pitch, waiting for a sign. The other scruffy individual consulted a pile of texts and then clearing his throat coldly announced a reading from the Pistis Sophia – but for all the world as if he were announcing a reading from the weather almanac. A further silence followed. Akkad appeared to pray now, for he extended his long fingers and held up his clasped hands. Then he leaned forward and tapped with a fingernail on the little inlaid table. The old blind man drew a joyous slow breath, and with a smile – looking upwards now with an expression of great sanctity – started slowly and melodically to recite. All three smiled at the familiar opening phrases – as musicians might smile as they joined forces to interpret a piece of music long known by all and loved. But the recitation was in Greek – somewhat to my surprise; and while only the old man uttered the words the lips of the other two men moved caressingly over the polished and familiar phrases. If I say I was surprised at the Greek it was because (knowing nothing then of such matters) Akkad had given us to understand that the Pistis Sophia was a Coptic text written in that language. This was indeed so, but the Coptic of which he spoke was itself a translation from the Greek, so that the text we were hearing was the original from which the Coptic translators had worked. Piers, whose scholarship was really quite profound, later claimed to have followed nearly the whole reading with tolerable accuracy. Myself not. But the asides of Akkad were delivered in French or English and served as a quite spontaneous commentary upon the text, uttered with too great an informality to suggest prayer, but with the deep reverence one accords to great poetry or great music. “And it came to pass when Jesus had risen from the dead, that he passed eleven years discoursing with his disciples, and instructing them only up to the regions of the First Commandment, up to the First Mystery, that within the Veil, within the First Commandment, which is the four and twentieth Mystery without and below – those four and twenty which are in the second space of the First Mystery which is above all Mysteries – the Father in the form of a dove.” (Later I came upon the translation of Mead, and others, from the Bruce Codex and similar sources and was so able to document myself a little bit about this weird post-resurrectional history of Jesus.)

The odd thing about it was that it sounded not at all oracular, but in a queer way perfectly intelligible, perfectly sound as sense – when quite obviously if one doesn’t know the terminology, as we did not, it is the purest gibberish. I could not judge either in what precise degree the rest of the sect interpreted this monotonous chanting. Their heads were bowed, except when Akkad broke into the recitation with a dry staccato observation speaking often with a kind of restrained passion which was foreign to his ordinary comportment. Such as “The more you know of man the less can you condone the human situation under the Prince.” A fearful act of duplicity had overturned the rational order or the universe – that is what he meant I afterwards realised. The interloper, who had replaced the original monarch of the ages, had thrown into confusion the workings of cosmic law. Since he came, the Black Prince, everything had to be re-ordered, reapprehended, reshaped; the whole of reality therefore. “The Greeks said ‘All this is untrue but it is beautiful.’ But beauty is no excuse. Beauty is a trap. We say ‘All this is untrue but it is real.’ “

It was much later that I realised what he meant – to be of this persuasion was to remain truthful to the fundamental despair of reality, to realise finally and completely that there was no hope unless the usurping God could be dethroned, and that there seemed to be no way to do that. Had I understood more at this first encounter with the gnostics I should have been filled with the same despair as they presumably were. The implacability of process would have haunted me, as it came to haunt me later. What Akkad himself called “The very death of God”, for the usurping prince had made away with the original king whose reign had been an illustration, not of nature’s discord, but of nature’s harmony and congruence. Under him birth and death had been fully realised, spirit and flesh, animal, insect and man were joined in a creative symbiosis of light and justice – such as we had not dared even to conceive since the date when the Prince of Darkness took his place on the throne.

I cannot say that all this did not confuse me, for it did; yet in a strange sort of way I felt that from time to time things deviated into profound sense. It is as if someone were reading to me in a language I knew but imperfectly; little patches of meaning floated out to me, sandwiched in between long passages of meaningless sound. Akkad’s oracular interventions were often apt and indeed beautiful. “Who are they, then, these people? They are those who are born and reborn again unlike the Many. They recognise each other when they meet without a word being exchanged. They belong to the vertigo of nothingness, having emerged from the root of all dissent. The thrust of their souls is towards the moon of non-being, their God is he who no longer exists. How can they hope to make themselves understood? Reason is powerless – for this kind of understanding can only be soundless, wordless, breathless. Its meaning is as precarious as reality itself.” Strange to read these words many years afterwards and to remember the circumstances of their delivery with such vivid accuracy. Without even closing my eyes I saw him, sitting there in his shabby old abba, looking suddenly very much older and moved almost to tears by the message he had to deliver. All the beautiful women listened, silent as fruit, some in evening dress, some in coloured shawls, all with apple-calm minds.

Part of it was litany and part ritual for once or twice the man who seemed like a prompter blew out the candles and relit them, as if to mark a distinct pause in the proceedings. He also proposed texts, uttering the first line in a solemn twang and waiting until the blind man recognised the passage and then, lifting his head like a dog, joined in on a higher register. Piers was rapt and attentive, and at the same time disappointed, I could see that; while his sister had closed her eyes and let her head fall forward, as if she were listening to music. “Thereafter there cometh a receiver of the little Sabaoth, the Good, him of the Midst: He himself bringeth a cup full of thoughts and wisdom, and soberness is in it; and he handeth it to the soul. And they cast it into a body which can neither sleep nor forget because of the cup of soberness which hath been handed unto it. But it will whip its heart persistently to question about the mysteries of the Light until at last it find them through the decision of the Virgin of Light, and so inherit the light itself forever.”