The Avignon Quintet (22 page)

When at long last we turned back for home we enjoyed a period of very favourable weather characterised by fair soft breezes and long calms, which enabled the sailors virtually to leave the
Nasr
to make her own way downstream with the current while they told stories and smoked all day. One of them, the eldest, was a sort of merry andrew and was not above dressing the part with a weird cap of jackal’s skin with many hanging tails and tassels. This individual seized hold, tambourine-wise, of an earthenware vessel covered at one end with a tightly stretched skin, and started to beat and thump on it like a drum. His fingers syncopated deftly while he launched into a monotonous air, a song at once repetitive and strangely rhythmical. At times another musician in the crew came to accompany him on a double flute, made of two long reeds, which uttered a sharp and plaintive note like a river bird. With this he improvised a lingering wavering cadenza to the original song, the audience meanwhile beating out the time with their palms and showing every mark of joy. One night, too, from a village quite near the point of our landing for the night, the peasants were drawn by the sound of our water-music and the women came down to the river’s edge to dance for us – a magical, unforgettable sight under the moon.

So at last it came to an end this timeless journey into ancient Egypt; and one afternoon, listless as the calm itself, we drifted into Bulaq once more with only the current, steering our way through the various craft towards our berth where the stately Embassy kavasses waited in their regal uniforms like great ventripotent pashas for us to land. It was a tearful business saying goodbye to the Arab crew for we had become fast friends and hated to part from them. But there were papers to be filled in and signed, a manifest to initial, and various other small duties such as present-giving and tipping. All this to complete before we finally handed over the boat to the French Embassy again! But all formalities were complete by dusk and the three of us, silent and rather melancholy, climbed into Piers’ duty car and told the driver to take us out on the road to Alexandria.

The night was cold, and the stars were brilliant. Winter was on the way, and my thoughts turned towards the year’s end, for we had been granted a long leave for Christmas by our respective missions, and we had great hopes of spending it at Verfeuille together. I watched the glittering desert wheel past us as we sped on towards the sea; Sylvie drowsed in the crook of my arm while Piers sat beside the chauffeur in front in a somewhat Napoleonic attitude, head on his breast, dozing between military engagements, so to speak. Our headlights cut a long yellow path of light upon the dark macadam which here and there had been invaded by desert sand-drifts. We were so replete with this enriching adventure on the river! It had left us speechless with joyful fatigue.

The evening life of the summer capital was in full swing when we threaded our way into it, though by now the gay summer awnings and street-cafés had vanished at the first hint of autumn freshness. Piers had me dropped off at the Embassy where I lived in a small flat, and the chauffeur helped me carry my things up to my quarters. I had promised to join them later for dinner, though it was going to be somewhere late. I poked my head into the Chancery but everybody had gone home except Rycroft the messenger who was chaining up a bag for London. In the dispensary I found a note telling me about a patient of mine whose child was ill with measles, also a dinner plan left by the social secretary. H. E. was giving a dinnerparty in honour of a visiting dignitary from London and I was bidden to hold the leg of the table as part of my social duties. The bachelors and the third secretaries in a small mission get most of these corvées. However, that was not for a couple of days, and the measles could wait. I bathed and changed, and took the lift down to the garage in search of my own car. It bore me across town to the apartment of Piers – a sumptuous enough place to suit a career diplomat who had a fair amount of entertaining to do. Needless to say it was seldom very tidy in spite of his domestics; books and paintings lay about everywhere, and latterly even old missals and Byzantine parchments which he had borrowed from the Patriarchal Library with the consent of the secretary. It was into these tantalising works that my friend had plunged after his shower and a change of clothes. Dinner would be a little late, so after some hesitation I accepted a whisky and a cigarette with a grain of hashish loaded into its body by pinpoint. It was not enough to do more than soothe my weariness and bring me a quiet sedation which would stand me in good stead when at last I got to bed.

“Piers, where are you now with Akkad’s little initiation? I feel I have learned all I will ever learn.”

“It’s hard to disentangle,” he admitted softly, “but only because the traces have been covered over by the wicked invective and propaganda of the Church Fathers, who had every interest in representing the gnostics as fostering obscene rites in their religious ceremonies. But this belief throws into relief every form of heresy, every form of chivalrous dissent from the great lie which the Church would have us live by. You will find little fragments of this basic refusal to sign the confession (to use modern Russian terms) in so many places that it is quite bewildering – sometimes in quarters not specifically devoted to gnostic beliefs. At home in Provence of course the cathars have always been self-elected and self-created gnostics. But what about the Courts of Love and their gradual extinction? The love the troubadours extolled made orthodoxy very thoughtful – in particular because it posited a new freedom for the woman, and a new role as Muse and refiner of the coarser male spirit. This was not to be relished by people who felt happier within the iron truss of the Inquisition … O I can’t tell you how my eyes have been opened, and how grateful I am to Akkad. I’ve hit bedrock with this system, and I feel I shall go to the end of it, I feel it.”

“Tomorrow I am going to the scent bazaar,” said Sylvie in order to shut him up and change the subject which was for her both boring and somewhat frightening. She knew that her brother was capable of any quixotry, any excess.

There matters stood. The season dragged on, deepening towards the winter and our departure, which lent an air of pleasant expectation to things. The diplomatic winter season of balls and dinner parties became almost pleasurable with the knowledge that soon we should be free of them for several weeks, and back once more in France. Toby had already gone back to Oxford for a term and Sabine had characteristically disappeared again. Then there came a completely unexpected blow for Piers in connection with our gnostic enterprise. It fell out like this. It was our habit about twice a week to stroll down the Hellenic end of the town to where the barber of Akkad had his gorgeous emporium – where ladies and gentlemen alike were barbered and scented. Here one was rather coddled and made much of, coffee and pipes were provided, and such newspapers as had arrived from Europe by seamail. At a pinch one could devour a cake while one was being expertly barbered. At any rate Piers was a frequent visitor. One day he picked up an old magazine in the shop and propped it on his knee to read while his hair was being trimmed. He came upon an article about hoaxes and frauds and sharp practice in general in Egypt, and among the various types of criminals of this kind – card sharpers, forgers, white-slavers and so on – he was surprised and chilled to find described in great detail the practice of supposed religious initiations which had been mounted by criminals wishing to take advantage of gullible tourists. The various steps were carefully described, beginning with the partnership in a secret society, of which there were many hundreds in Egypt (all false according to the journalist); then the attendance at a ceremony of initiation: finally … but Piers read no further. His heart beat so fast that he felt almost suffocated. The astonished barber had to surrender his client half-shaved.

Piers took up the phone to ring Akkad’s office only to find out that he was away for a few days and would not be available until the weekend. It would not be possible to describe the state of confusion and distress into which the article pushed him. To make matters worse, among the illustrations was a picture of the ceremony (identical to the one we had attended) in the Abu Manouf mosque, over which Akkad was presiding with an air of manifest deceit and yet imperturbably – or so it seemed to the distracted eye of Piers. He did not know what to do, where to turn. His whole world seemed to have turned turtle. He took the details of the publication and placed an order for a copy with his newsagent on the way home. His brain was really spinning, and he felt on the point of collapse – so deep had been his investment in this whole business of Akkad’s, so blind his belief in what he had been told. Could it all have been a fake?

I came into the flat after lunch to find him lying spread-eagled on the sofa with his face in his arms, silent and pale. He looked like a man with a high temperature, and I irritated him by trying to take his pulse. But he was wounded and distraught and accepted a whisky which he drank with a trembling hand and a vague and absent-minded stare – his whole thought was fixed upon this momentous, and to him terrible, story which threw into doubt the honesty of Akkad’s actions and the
bona fides
of the sect. My alarm was so marked that at last he stirred himself to stand up and tell me the story, holding out the offending magazine in order to let me see the telltale illustrations. “I’ve ordered my own copy,” he said sadly. “I intend to face Akkad with it. I’ll have to give this one back to Fahem.”

He groaned and slumped forward on the couch, cupping his chin in his hands. I read the article through thoughtfully. It went as far as suggesting that this form of cheat had originally been organised for the American tourist industry, but that the original organisers had found that not only the Americans were superstitious: from all over the Middle Orient believers came to be “initiated” as well as from Egypt itself. … It is difficult to describe the mixture of feelings I experienced as I read all this; in part amusement, in part relief, and in part a base desire to say “I told you so,” though of course I had said nothing at all, nor cast any doubt upon the proceedings. In fact I had been as deeply disturbed and fructified by them as had been the others. And now the whole thing was called into question. … Piers had tears in his eyes as he said: “What do you make of it?” I shrugged my shoulders and sat down soberly. “We have been hoaxed, that’s all. At least Akkad did not charge us anything for the experience.”

“I suppose he thought it was funny,” said Piers angrily, striking his knee with his clenched fist. “I have a good mind to challenge him to a duel – to send him my seconds.”

“You haven’t any: and duelling is out of fashion. Beside what would your mission say? And if you killed him, what?”

Piers walked up and down like a caged tiger glittering with a theatrical malevolence. “One’s friends!” he said bitterly as if to the paintings on the wall, “One’s friends!” I caught the inexpressible contempt of his tone and said: “Piers, sit down for a moment and just think. What has this news done to our whole belief? It has simply torpedoed it, that is all. But how salutary! I wouldn’t want to go on believing something false, would you?”

“But how I needed it,” he said wistfully, like a child. “How it seemed to fulfil my sentiments, my ideas. O it can’t be a hoax, it really can’t be. Akkad couldn’t do such a thing?”

He looked as if he were going to give way to tears.

There was nothing to be done about the news except to bear it bravely, like the death of a friend or the failure of some great project on which we had set high hopes. That afternoon I took Fahem back his magazine on my way to the infirmary, hoping that the whole business would gradually die down and that Piers would find some other field of study, some other philosophy to absorb his passionate beliefs. But I must confess that it did not seem likely, and I waited for the return of Akkad with some inquietude; I did not want there to be a falling out among such good friends as we had all become, for Akkad was as much Egypt to us as the country’s grand landscapes – their poetry seemed resumed in him, in his gentle and poetic mind. Two days of intense despair passed on the part of Piers, who went about as if in mourning for the death of his mother; he was sufficiently upset to sleep badly and I had to prescribe a sleeping draught. Then the newsagent delivered another copy of the magazine which he propped up on the window-sill to await the moment of Akkad’s arrival. It was to be somewhat unexpected. Akkad appeared instead of giving a telephone call as he usually did, and just before lunch, too, an unusual time for a visit. He stood modestly, kindly, with his green Scotch hat in his hand, on the doorstep of the flat, asking to be let in. Piers leaped up and confronted him with a kind of affectionate fury.