I carried Herodotus, and Madox—a saint in his own marriage—carried Anna Karenina, continually rereading the story of romance and deceit. One day, far too late to avoid the machinery we had set in motion, he tried to explain Clifton’s world in terms of Anna Karenina’s brother. Pass me my book. Listen to this.
Half Moscow and Petersburg were relations or friends of Oblonsky. He was born into the circle of people who were, or who became, the great ones of this earth. A third of the official world, the older men, were his fathers friends and had known him from the time he was a baby in petticoats.… Consequently, the distributors of the blessings of this world were all friends of his. They could not pass over one of their own.… It was only necessary not to raise objections or be envious, not to quarrel or take offence, which in accordance with his natural kindliness he never did.
I have come to love the tap of your fingernail on the syringe, Caravaggio. The first time Hana gave me morphine in your company you were by the window, and at the tap of her nail your neck jerked towards us. I know a comrade. The way a lover will always recognize the camouflage of other lovers.
Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
“I think you have become inhuman,” she said to me.
“I’m not the only betrayer.”
“I don’t think you care—that this has happened among us. You slide past everything with your fear and hate of ownership, of owning, of being owned, of being named. You think this is a virtue. I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?”
I said nothing.
“Deny it, damn you.”
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
She returned to her husband.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.
What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?
She climbed back into her house beside her husband, and I retired to the zinc bars,
I’ll be looking at the moon,
but I’ll be seeing you.
That old Herodotus classic. Humming and singing that song again and again, beating the lines thinner to bend them into one’s own life. People recover from secret loss variously. I was seen by one of her retinue sitting with a spice trader. She had once received from him a pewter thimble that held saffron. One of the ten thousand things.
And if Bagnold—having seen me sitting by the saffron trader—brought up the incident during dinner at the table where she sat, how did I feel about that? Did it give me some comfort that she would remember the man who had given her a small gift, a pewter thimble she hung from a thin dark chain around her neck for two days when her husband was out of town? The saffron still in it, so there was the stain of gold on her chest.
How did she hold this story about me, pariah to the group after some scene or other where I had disgraced myself, Bagnold laughing, her husband who was a good man worrying about me, and Madox getting up and walking to a window and looking out towards the south section of the city. The conversation perhaps moved to other sightings. They were mapmakers, after all. But did she climb down into the well we helped dig together and hold herself, the way I desired myself towards her with my hand?
We each now had our own lives, armed by the deepest treaty with the other.
“What are you doing?” she said running into me on the street. “Can’t you see you are driving us all mad.”
To Madox I had said I was courting a widow. But she was not a widow yet. When Madox returned to England she and I were no longer lovers. “Give my greetings to your Cairo widow,” Madox murmured. “Would’ve liked to have met her.” Did he know? I always felt more of a deceiver with him, this friend I had worked with for ten years, this man I loved more than any other man. It was 1939, and we were all leaving this country, in any case, to the war.
And Madox returned to the village of Marston Magna, Somerset, where he had been born, and a month later sat in the congregation of a church, heard the sermon in honour of war, pulled out his desert revolver and shot himself.
I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, set forth my history, that time may not draw the colour from what Man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and Barbarians … together with the reason they fought one another.
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And Madox—to the Geographical Society—had spoken beautiful accounts of our traversais and coursings. Bermann blew theory into the embers. And I? I was the skill among them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there. They were never sure of what I thought of it all. “Do you like that moon?” Madox asked me after he’d known me for ten years. He asked it tentatively, as if he had breached an intimacy. For them I was a bit too cunning to be a lover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was. Show me a desert, as you would show another man a river, or another man the metropolis of his childhood.
When we parted for the last time, Madox used the old farewell. “May God make safety your companion.” And I strode away from him saying, “There is no God.” We were utterly unlike each other.
Madox said Odysseus never wrote a word, an intimate book. Perhaps he felt alien in the false rhapsody of art. And my own monograph, I must admit, had been stern with accuracy. The fear of describing her presence as I wrote caused me to burn down all sentiment, all rhetoric of love. Still, I described the desert as purely as I would have spoken of her. Madox asked me about the moon during our last days together before the war began. We parted. He left for England, the probability of the oncoming war interrupting everything, our slow unearthing of history in the desert. Good-bye, Odysseus, he said grinning, knowing I was never that fond of Odysseus, less fond of Aeneas, but we had decided Bagnold was Aeneas. But I was not that fond of Odysseus either. Good-bye, I said.
I remember he turned back, laughing. He pointed his thick finger to the spot by his Adam’s apple and said, “This is called the vascular sizood.” Giving that hollow at her neck an official name. He returned to his wife in the village of Marston Magna, took only his favourite volume of Tolstoy, left all of his compasses and maps to me. Our affection left unspoken.
And Marston Magna in Somerset, which he had evoked for me again and again in our conversations, had turned its green fields into an aerodrome. The planes burned their exhaust over Arthurian castles. What drove him to the act I do not know. Maybe it was the permanent noise of flight, so loud to him now after the simple drone of the Gypsy Moth that had putted over our silences in Libya and Egypt. Someone’s war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.
He was in Somerset alone with his wife, who had never met us. Small gestures were enough for him. One bullet ended the war.
It was July 1939. They caught a bus from their village into Yeovil. The bus had been slow and so they had been late for the service. At the back of the crowded church, in order to find seats they decided to sit separately. When the sermon began half an hour later, it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war. The priest intoned blithely about battle, blessing the government and the men about to enter the war. Madox listened as the sermon grew more impassioned. He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart. He was dead immediately. A great silence. Desert silence. Planeless silence. They heard his body collapse against the pew. Nothing else moved. The priest frozen in a gesture. It was like those silences when a glass funnel round a candle in church splits and all faces turn. His wife walked down the centre aisle, stopped at his row, muttered something, and they let her in beside him. She knelt down, her arms enclosing him.
How did Odysseus die? A suicide, wasn’t it? I seem to recall that. Now. Maybe the desert spoiled Madox. That time when we had nothing to do with the world. I keep thinking of the Russian book he always carried. Russia has always been closer to my country than to his. Yes, Madox was a man who died because of nations.
I loved his calmness in all things. I would argue furiously about locations on a map, and his reports would somehow speak of our “debate” in reasonable sentences. He wrote calmly and joyfully about our journeys when there was joy to describe, as if we were Anna and Vronsky at a dance. Still, he was a man who never entered those Cairo dance halls with me. And I was the man who fell in love while dancing.
He moved with a slow gait. I never saw him dance. He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory. If he witnessed a new knot among a desert tribe or found a rare palm, it would charm him for weeks. When we came upon messages on our travels—any wording, contemporary or ancient, Arabic on a mud wall, a note in English written in chalk on the fender of a jeep—he would read it and then press his hand upon it as if to touch its possible deeper meanings, to become as intimate as he could with the words.