The Mule on the Minaret (16 page)

That evening Reid went round to the Amin Maruns. He had an open invitation to look in whenever he liked. In London it would never have occurred to him to call on an acquaintance without telephoning first, but he suspected that Madame Amin led a limited social life and welcomed visits. There was no reply when he rang the bell; but there was a light beneath the door, and he could hear the sound of music. He waited for a minute or so, then rang again. This time more lengthily. There was a pause; then he heard the sound of feet, a latch clicked. Aziz was in the doorway. His face was flushed; he looked awkward, embarrassed and resentful. ‘I'm sorry to keep you waiting,' he said. ‘I very much wanted to hear a record through. It was only a matter of half a minute, to the end of the first side.'

‘I'm sorry to have disturbed you. May I sit quietly and hear the other side?'

He watched Aziz as he listened. To himself music had little specific meaning. He enjoyed it as an agreeable background to his thoughts, but he could see that to the younger man it was
something altogether different. There was a taut expression on his face. He was leaning forward: his lips were moving, his eyes alight. He seemed entranced. This was the real boy, he thought.

Reid waited till the record had run down. He allowed a minute to pass before he spoke.

‘That certainly was something,' he said at length. Aziz made no reply; he was seated on the floor, on a cushion, his heels tucked under him. He shook himself as though he were emerging from a trance.

‘Yes, that certainly was something.'

Again there was a pause.

‘Not to appreciate music is to lack a sense,' said Reid. ‘I've no idea what I lose through not understanding it.'

Aziz looked round, staring blankly, uncomprehendingly. ‘It's my whole life,' he said. ‘I can't imagine life without it. I wouldn't want to live without it.'

Reid had found in his tutorials that when a young person had begun to talk it was best not to interrupt him with questions, not to attempt to draw him out. If a pupil felt the atmosphere congenial he would talk, on his own account. There was a pause of a full minute. Then Aziz started.

‘Music is the one thing I can be sure of in this uncertain world. It is indefinite. It does not try to explain anything, yet it resolves everything. All these people, in all these countries, are trying to lay down formulae. Who is not with us is against us. You must be a Nazi or a Communist or a Catholic. There is only one God, Allah. Everyone who does not believe in Allah is an infidel. So many voices, so many words in search of a definition. Music has no concern with that. All these separate chords and notes and dissonances are woven together, to achieve a pattern and a harmony. There
is a
meaning; but it is not a meaning that can be expressed in words: for everyone it has a different meaning; yet everyone is held by the same arrangement of notes and chords, is led through those discords to a final climax. An audience becomes one person. Sometimes I feel the whole world is mad, that there is no point in anything. I wonder why I should compete in this insane rat-race. Then I come back here, I put on a record, I listen and gradually I forget my troubles, peace descends and I have a feeling that everything that is incongruous, antipathetic, antagonistic in our modern living is resolved;
sub specie aeternitatis,
under the lens of eternity. If you get far enough away from quarrels and disputes
you can see that they are trivial. When I was a boy I couldn't understand how the earth could be round when there were so many mountains, until a master took a football and rubbed a very little mud on it and said, “That football is the world, the Himalayas on the earth's surface in relation to the earth are a tenth the size of that film of mud. If you were a big enough giant to catch the world as a goalkeeper catches a football you would feel, in spite of the Himalayas, that it was smooth and polished. If you were far enough away from the world to look at it through a telescope it would seem as perfect a sphere as the moon seems to us.” I have always remembered that. Music takes us so far away that troubles as vast as the Himalayas barely seem a roughness on a surface; when that record was running a German, an Italian, a Jap, an American, a Briton, if they had been sitting beside me listening would have felt at one one with another. Music makes me believe that there is a meaning in the universe. Nothing else does.'

‘One day love may.'

‘Will it? I've been told it does. But I've thought that was one of those magazine fiction panaceas. Marry, settle down, have a family, be a good citizen; what that really means is “dull your mind with domesticities and duties”. Love is the opium of the thinking classes.'

Reid shook his head. ‘It can be; but it needn't be. It can do what music does. It can put you in tune with the long rhythm of life itself, of birth and death and rebirth; the whole cycle of creation. When you are in tune with that, everything else falls into place.'

‘Have you found that yourself?'

Reid hesitated. Had he, he wondered? not, he suspected, in the fullest sense. Imitations of immortality; but not more than that. He replied evasively. ‘One does not need to experience something to know its truth. You can be vouchsafed a glimpse. I am convinced that there are several doors to that detached peace you were talking of, when you are far enough away from the human race to feel yourself a part of it; religion gives it you. Priests and nuns know it, and all dedicated people know it. Though I've not known that kind of peace myself, I know that it exists, just as I know that it can be reached through love.'

‘I see. Dedicated people. Do you think Hitler had it?'

‘In early days, maybe.'

‘When did he lose it?'

‘Perhaps there is such a thing as evil. Perhaps the powers of darkness do exist.'

There was another pause. There was a ruminating expression on Aziz's face. Reid waited, certain that Aziz had more to say. He had.

‘I have not yet fellen in love,' he said. ‘I wonder when I shall. How long shall I have to wait?'

There was an eagerness in his voice that carried Reid back to the autumn of 1913 when as a schoolboy he had read the first volume of
Sinister Street
and his heart had warmed to the description of Michael Fane's love affair with Lily, when they had walked in Kensington Gardens on a misty evening and Michael had slipped his hand inside Lily's muff. He wondered how long he would have to wait before a similar experience came to him. Here, twenty-eight years later, a young Turkish student was asking him the selfsame question. Was there all this difference between one people and another, between one generation and another?

*   *   *

That evening, Reid dined at home, alone with Farrar.

‘I can tell you what makes Aziz tick,' he said to Farrar. ‘It isn't anything to do with sex or drugs. It's music'

He recounted their conversation earlier. Nigel listened with absorbed attention.

‘Now we know where we are,' he said. ‘Now we've got something we can work on. I knew that you'd be the man to help me out. You can make people talk.'

‘I don't see how it's going to help you.'

‘Don't you? I do. Everyman had his Achilles' Heel. I don't mean a weak spot; but a vulnerable side. Indulge his hobby and you've got him. We always think of sex, and drink and drugs as the way to get a man into our power; but there are other things. Snobbery, for instance. Most people think snobbery means wanting to meet peers, but there are a lot of people who don't care for titles but will go miles to meet a film-star or a footballer. Find out what a man wants, show him that you can give it him and then exert the pressure. Music—now, let me think.

‘Has he any musical ambitions? Are there records that he can't get in wartime or that he can't afford; is there some special record player? We must find out what he needs. Then we can give it him
and then we've got him. Now, next time that you see Aziz, what you've got to do is this.'

He stood up. He began to stride backwards and forwards, up and down the room. He had a lean, lithe stride like a caged animal's.

*   *   *

A week later Reid again called on the Amin Maruns. This time Aziz was out; only the aunt was there, which was as he had hoped. He had timed his call so that her husband should be absent. Over the inevitable coffee he told her how much he had enjoyed his talk the other evening with her nephew. ‘He is a very stimulating young man,' he said.

‘I am glad you find him so. To us he is a problem.'

‘But aren't all intelligent young men precisely that? You know what Maeterlinck said, “If a man is not a socialist at twenty he has no heart; if he is a socialist at forty he has no brains.” '

‘My nephew is not a socialist.'

‘I didn't say he was. I used the phrase loosely. I meant that every young man is against the existing order; he is in revolt against what his elders stand for. You'll remember, I'm sure, what Byron said: “I have simplified my politics into a detestation of all existing governments.” '

‘Byron's own end was most unfortunate.'

‘To the Greeks he is a hero.'

‘He is not to the Turks.'

Reid side-tracked that.

‘As a professor,' he said, ‘I am in constant touch with the young, and since I am no longer young I'm able to take a long view. I can see how this student and the other has turned out. I have not found that on the whole the exemplary student has turned out best.'

‘That is little consolation to the parents or relatives of students who are not exemplary, at the time when they are proving headstrong.'

‘I would not have described Aziz as headstrong.'

‘Nor would I. He would be easier if he were.'

‘Is he thinking of making music a career?'

‘How could he? What kind of an income could he earn through music?'

‘Has his family no money?'

‘A little; enough; if he were prepared to accept the kind of position to which he is by birth entitled, if he were to become a soldier or, as we would all prefer, a civil servant, he would be able to obtain a bride who would bring to the marriage a dowry that would ensure their comfort. But music is another matter. What parents would wish to see their daughter married to a musician?'

‘Does he play the piano or the violin?'

‘He plays the piano, but only as several hundred others play it; and even if he played it well, really well, how could my sister tolerate her son as a pianist, a public performer in a restaurant or café? Oh no, no, no! In Europe it may be different. A pianist may have a social status, but not here in Turkey, in the Levant.'

‘Has he any ambitions as a composer?'

‘I don't think he has. He has no ambitions whatever as far as we can see. That is what worries my sister and myself. He has this passion for music. He wants to spend all his spare time listening to it; and he wants to spend all his spare time with young people who share this passion. Do you know what time he gets back at night? One, two, three in the morning. How can he expect to come fresh to his studies six hours later?'

So that was how he spent his nights. How far wide of the mark they had been in picturing him drinking, wenching or taking hashish.

‘I hope you don't think I'm being impertinent,' Reid said. ‘I've no right to be asking you all these personal questions, but I was very struck with your nephew. I'm used, you see, to dealing with young men. I know their complexes: how self-conscious they are, how reserved, how on the defensive; yet suddenly so expansive. They so want to give, to pour out everything; yet they are afraid of being laughed at. They won't expose themselves to ridicule. Yet they are hungry for friendship and affection. The first time I met Aziz he didn't say a word, but the other evening when I found him alone, when we were listening to music, he was so warm, so outgiving. He has such an attractive smile.'

‘Ah, but he has, hasn't he?' Madame Amin's own face brightened suddenly, lit by a smile reminiscent of her nephew. It took fifteen years off her. He could picture her fascination as a young girl before indolence, boredom, middle-age and over-eating had coarsened her. He thought of Thomas Hardy's poem, ‘Wives in the Sere.' A half minute, and the smile, the look of youthfulness,
had vanished. She was once more an ageing, discontented woman. ‘I wish he would meet some nice young woman who would make him see some sense,' she said.

Reid smiled. There it went again, that invincible belief of the middle-aged that youth should be put in chains, harnessed to conformity, the wide wings clipped. English rebels used to complain that the Public School system stifled individuality, turning out everyone according to a pattern, that of the embryo Empire builder. But wasn't it the female of the species who demanded uniformity, turning men into husbands and providers? And they were right nine times in ten; that was what most men needed—to be like other men. There were some men, however, who were born to break the pattern. Perhaps Aziz was one of them.

Farrar was delighted with Reid's report. He paced backwards and forwards in the room of the flat in the Rue Jeanne d'Arc.

‘I get it. I think I get it. The boy makes sense. He knows his aunt is right. He can't make a living out of music. He probably doesn't want to. He doesn't want to professionalize his hobby. But music is the one thing he cares for. Without music his life would not be worth living. That's what he said. Now, Prof., it's up to you. You must find the angle from which we can attack. Find out what he needs. There must be something we can give him that no one else can. We've got to find what it is. There must be something.'

A few days later Reid received an invitation from Amin Marun to a Tabooli party. He was delighted at the prospect. ‘Unless you have had Tabooli in a Beiruti house, you cannot understand the Lebanon,' he had been told.