We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (22 page)

‘No,’ said Kellas. ‘I didn’t know there were people speaking Greek living in Kandahar two thousand years ago.’

‘Oh, yeah. After Alexander the Great. There were big Greek settlements in Afghanistan. That was where Aristotle met the Buddha. Not literally, I mean that’s where Greek philosophy met Buddhism. That’s what the inscription is about. It was the Greeks who first gave Buddha a face and a body, his corporeal image. Every Buddha statue comes from the Greeks of Afghanistan and India.’ Bastian gave his short laugh. ‘I recognise that expression on your face. You’re thinking that time is going the wrong way, aren’t you? That ancient Kandahar had Plato and the Dharma, modern Kandahar has Jehovah slugging it out with Allah, the Old Testament versus the Caliphate. You want to play, pumpkin? You want to go fishing with Bastian?’ Bastian, who had been holding Naomi on his knee, lifted her up in the air and had a short discussion with her about tides and lures. He set her down again and jiggled her. ‘When I moved east from California, that was what I was going to write about. I became fascinated by the notion – for which there is nothing except circumstantial evidence – that Jesus and the disciples were Buddhists without the name, that a Greek Buddhist from somewhere between Kabul and Peshawar made the journey to the Greeks of Palestine and taught the young Jesus self-denial, non-violence, the virtues of poverty, chastity and humility.’

‘A novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the hero was to be that ancient Greek Buddhist?’

‘Yes.’

Kellas felt the vertigo of the millennia and the lust of the billions for the revelation of hidden truths. ‘That could have been…’

‘I almost finished it,’ said Bastian. ‘Then I sold it to a government agency. They won’t let it see the light of day for a long time. The act of corporate stupidity they committed by buying it was more embarrassing than anything in the text.’ He looked down at the floor and stroked Naomi’s head softly. ‘I’d like to tell you what happened. I can see you’re curious. It’s an act of atonement to tell it.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Kellas.

‘My life would have been different if I’d been British or French,’ said Bastian, ‘where London and Paris are the centre of everything. But I began to feel, after I moved to New York, that I was trying to stay upright on a steep slope that had Washington at the bottom.’ What tugged at Bastian was the notion of service, not to be one who served, but to be in the polis where others did. He was a free thinker. ‘I don’t mean to brag,’ he said to Kellas, ‘but I was on a different plane from the hippies and the anti-war crowd, the anti-government radicals, the amateur American terrorists.’ Antigovernment, as Bastian saw it, defined itself by what it opposed. Bastian was lured by the notion of a city of eternal government that existed just beyond the Washington of four-year electoral cycles and drum-and-cymbals battles over money, war and race. At the time, he was ashamed of the visions that took him suddenly on his walks through the Village, of men in white shirts and black ties, gathered on green grass among white buildings reading through stacks of figures typed on crisp white paper, not to serve a cause or party but for the virtue of service itself; that the rituals were pleasing, and honourable, and good. He was ashamed; his girlfriend was a feminist activist, his friends were leather-panted musicians, campus warriors and civil rights fighters. It was to guard against the temptations of offices, shirts and ties that he’d put the
permanent tear on his face. He was ashamed, until he reasoned that his conceptual Washington was more subversive than his friends’. They wanted to change it; he only anticipated its eventual disappearance into another age. The Washington that lured him was a Washington as it might be seen thousands of years hence, mysterious, coded, costumed, like ancient, imperial China seen from now, far enough away for its specifics to be invisible and the beauty of repeating patterns to emerge. Its achievements, virtues and cruelties, in so far as they would be remembered, wouldn’t impress or horrify, only amuse. With this in his head, in 1975, Bastian moved to DC.

He found it tough to get a salaried job with the tattoo, but his experience and a few published short stories eventually got him a post as a roving creative writing tutor in some of the city’s tougher neighbourhoods. He met Jack Walsh through a charity working with the homeless. Astrid’s father sat on the board of trustees. He invited Bastian to dinner at the Walsh home in McLean, a western suburb of Washington, over the line in Virginia. Kellas worked out that Astrid would have been about eight at the time, and Bastian thirty-three. Kellas lost concentration for a few sentences. Men and women around a table, hair curling over the men’s ears, big ties and big collars. Abundant eye shadow. A serious child in the doorway comes to say goodnight. All the faces turn. A man with a tear tattooed on his face. She remembers him.

‘I knew that the main industry in McLean was the CIA. The front gate is right there, across the highway, in the trees. So I wondered if any of the students would be from the agency, or married into it.’ Kellas frowned and apologised and asked Bastian to back up. Bastian repeated what he’d just said; he had got on well with the Walshes and their set in McLean, which was middle class enough, but not such a sought-after place as now. The tattoo, in this case, was just what they wanted – a badge of Bohemia on someone who was not dangerous, stoned or out to fling Society in their faces. They didn’t want to embrace the counter-culture, but they wanted to shake its hand, be able to say they had it as
an acquaintance. A white man with a tattoo on his face was less of a commitment than making the acquaintance of somebody black. The consequence was that Bastian got a gig taking a creative writing class in McLean, one evening a week, alongside others teaching conversational French and basket-weaving to bored and confined burghers.

There were about twenty-five regulars, mostly women. In the first class, Bastian read extracts from his own work in progress, about the Greek Buddhist from Kandahar who travelled to ancient Palestine, and encouraged the students to criticise it. Over subsequent weeks there was a rotation. Each week, a pair of students would read out their efforts, talk about the other’s writing, then be subject to questions and comments from the floor. At the end of the ninth class, one of the students lingered to talk to Bastian while he was packing up. His name was Crowpucker. He was younger than Bastian, barely thirty, and pale, with pouchy cheeks. Crowpucker told Bastian that it was his turn to read-and-be-read the following week, and that he would, to his regret, have to quit the class, since the nature of his work for the government made it impossible for the material concerned to be made public.

‘I can imagine the kind of work you do,’ said Bastian to Crowpucker. ‘But it doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing here. You’re dealing, I guess, with secret government information during your working hours. Here, this is about you writing fiction and poetry in your spare time. You can keep those things separate. Nobody, least of all me, wants you to come in here and read classified material.’

Crowpucker smiled, shook his head, shifted his feet and looked around. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘D’you want to talk about this over a beer?’

They went to a Chinese restaurant and talked for several hours. Crowpucker said that he didn’t want to be a novelist, a screenwriter or a poet; what he had was an interest in the imagination. He picked up on what Bastian had said: ‘I can imagine the kind
of work you do.’ Perhaps Bastian could. There were techniques a government agency was interested in examining. Crowpucker and a group of other like-minded young administrators had backing to find specialists in these techniques. It was not a question of making things up. There would be no fabrication of facts. Rather it was the space between the facts, the assembly of the facts into a recognisable shape, and the direction the shape was pointed, that was the concern. It was a matter, in the end, of national security. Too much important information was being wasted because it was being passed to those with the power to use it in a fashion that was shapeless, untidy, confusing. Or dull! Dullness could also harm the national interest.

‘A few months later, I signed up,’ Bastian said to Kellas. ‘It sounds odd, but I wasn’t thinking about spies and the Cold War. I was thinking about a great hermetic bureaucracy, a secret city of servants in white shirts tending something eternal and arcane. It seemed I was to be a visitor in the cloisters of a silent order. When I went in I saw water coolers and ugly carpet tiles and heard squabbles about who’d booked which conference room, but by that time I was curious to see who was going to benefit from my two hundred and fifty dollars a week. I was surprised to get through the security clearance so easily. It turned out I could be cleared at a very low level. Same as the cleaners who vacuumed the low-security offices at night. I didn’t have a record. I hadn’t dodged the draft because I’d never been called up. I was surprised to see the word “Program” on the contract. It seemed over-pompous. But there I was one morning, driving to Virginia, past the gatehouses, and sitting down with the students of the CIA’s first Creative Writing Program.’

There were only eight students, all men. Like Crowpucker, they were young, with soft hands and pale, office-bound complexions. Their faces beamed with optimism.

‘And I don’t mean hope,’ Bastian said to Kellas. ‘“Hope” implies that you reckon there’s a chance things might work out, and a chance they might not. These guys had an expectation of triumph. It was
a sure thing. I could never figure out whether the triumph was to be theirs, or the agency’s, or America’s, or humanity’s. I’m not sure they saw a difference.’ They introduced themselves and Bastian outlined the way his classes usually worked.

‘Sir,’ said one of them, ‘do you think it’s always true that history is written by the victors? Couldn’t losers write history instead, if they wrote it really, really well?’

Before Bastian could speak, the students began arguing among themselves.

‘They went on for a long time,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘I sat there and listened. By the time they quietened down, I knew I was the wrong man in the wrong place, and I wouldn’t be coming back. What they were arguing about was events that hadn’t yet happened, as if they were certain to happen, as if they already had happened. I kept hearing phrases like “When the Soviet Union invades Iran”, “When the communists take over Italy”, “When Moscow makes its move for Iceland”, “When we start getting arms to the Muslims of Central Asia.” If I’d been more paranoid, if these men had been older, I might have thought they knew what they were talking about. That they knew these events were coming, might even, who knows, trigger them. It was the CIA. But not these guys. They laughed too much. It was the strangest thing: they were serious and not serious at the same time. They were sincere when they talked about what would happen in the future; they honestly believed these real countries and peoples would experience these events. But there were no people among these peoples. The countries they spoke about were shapes on a map, with certain numerical qualities. It was a simple world of deviants, conformists and masses.’

When he could get a word in, Bastian said that perhaps there’d been a misunderstanding. Crowpucker apologised and recalled the meeting in the Chinese restaurant. What this was about, he said, was learning how to harness a writer’s imagination in the service of intelligence.

Bastian said it was true that imagination could be applied to guess
what individuals might be thinking, what they might be like, and how they might act. But it worked best when the individual was a fictional composite character, based on experience of other, real people. It couldn’t be applied to nations or peoples, except in fantasy literature, or pulp fiction.

The students looked disappointed. They took notes. Bastian felt that he would not have to quit after all; they’d sack him and keep auditioning teachers until they found one who would teach them exactly what they had already decided they were going to learn.

Crowpucker wanted a debate. Surely, he said, there were three kinds of imagination. There was making something or somebody up that didn’t exist at all. There was imagining how real people were going to act in the future. And then there was the third kind, where you imagined what you or your organisation, or your country, might be capable of, and then you went and did it. Wasn’t the ideal when you were able to combine them all, imagination and action? Like the founding fathers. They had imagined a non-existent country, a democratic America, they had imagined how the British and the American settlers would treat the idea, and they had imagined a course of action they could take that would make the fantasy real.

Bastian told Crowpucker that he was confusing philosophy and practical planning with literature. Novels and plays weren’t there to show people what to be, or predict what they would do. They showed what human beings are.

‘That’s a problem literature has to deal with,’ said Crowpucker. ‘The lack of a moral framework. The lack of templates for heroic and patriotic action. I could give you examples of what there should be. Tolstoy, for one. And you. Your work.’ Crowpucker urged Bastian to admit that his novel about the Buddhist Jesus was more than an entertainment, a lyric, or a narrative of characters. It was a sermon of sorts, wasn’t it? A lesson? A pattern for how humans should behave? Not one that he, Crowpucker, cared for, but he admired the intention.

‘He was clever,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘They were all clever, well-read wiseasses. He had me. No writer likes to be accused of having written a sermon—’

‘No,’ said Kellas.

‘—but I couldn’t deny that there was truth in what he said. I’d been working on that book for so long, and still I hadn’t buried the thought that kicked it off, when I was sulking in the mountains, that I really wanted it to be that Jesus was a Buddhist Jew. That even if he hadn’t been, he should have been, and I could make it so and tweak the believers my way.’ Bastian struggled for an answer. He had noticed already that Crowpucker was holding a sheaf of double-spaced typed pages, and asked whether he’d brought the work he couldn’t read to the class in McLean, and whether he’d care to read it now, to give Bastian and the others a better idea of what he meant.