Then would you like me to tell somebody to get down, sir?
No, take Mohammed.
It was then that the thirteen year old revolted. He ran across the tarmac away from the plane.
Go, he shouted, go! I’m going to walk.
His brother, perhaps because he wanted to accompany his wife and small children, perhaps because he knew how obstinate and bone-headed Mohammed could be, climbed up into the plane and, standing by the still open door, said: All right, but take these! Whereupon he handed down a .22 single-barrel hunting gun, an ammunition belt and a 100-rupee note. Stay here and wait for the next plane, he added. Finally the Fokker took off.
Mohammed went to a restaurant and ordered in his gruff voice an elaborate dinner. The bill came to 10 rupees. Then he walked towards the Muslim quarter of Delhi. He could see in what direction to go, thanks to the minarets. He took the wide streets. Muslims in the city were being killed but with the rifle slung across his back he felt confident.
The following day he joined an immense column of refugees who were setting out to walk the several hundred kilometres to Lahore. The same afternoon, when the shadows were long, a portly middle-aged merchant walking behind Mohammed pointed at him and said to his companion that a youngster of his age should not be allowed arms. Let him at least be a gun-carrier, said the companion, like that we have less to carry.
The column slowly wound its way across the flat plain. Its pace was set by the oldest and most infirm, for they would have no hope of survival if left behind.
On the third day the column was attacked. Mohammed was among the first to see armed men coming across the irrigated fields towards them. He dropped to the ground, he took his time, he calmly remembered the deer-hunts on the family estate, and he shot down four of the marauders. After this he had the right, not only to carry his gun, but to fire it. He became one of the column’s sentinels and marksmen.
As he strode up and down the column, he saw the opium-eater who, cut off from any supply of opium, was beginning to walk with a straighter back. He also noticed several young women and imagined their breasts brushing his cheek. One in particular he could not forget. She wore a tunic decorated with white flowers, small as stars. When the column halted, he loitered near her, but he was too shy to speak.
One midday when people were eating, he saw this woman walk into the mango grove beside the road. A man then followed her. Mohammed tracked the man, being careful to remain hidden. Next he saw the man lift the woman’s ghagra and pull it over her head, and her struggling to push him away. When he saw this, instantly and without reflection, he raised his gun and fired.
Murderer! the woman screamed. Murderer!
The shot and the woman’s cries brought men running from all directions. Mohammed fled across a field and found himself up against a stone wall. There he turned round to face the crowd.
If you take one step nearer, I’ll shoot. When he said this it was in his falsetto voice, and his legs were trembling like a dog’s a few seconds before an earthquake.
Suddenly the opium-eater was there, between the boy and his furious accusers. He no longer had a stick and he was standing upright.
Stop! he shouted. Stop!
The crowd lowered their voices and the man spoke quietly and gravely. You cannot start killing each other like this. Why are we making this journey, why are we fleeing? Because justice exists no more and because the stronger attack the weaker. The boy has to be given a trial. If you find him guilty, then you can punish him. He turned to Mohammed. Give me your gun. We cannot stop here. You’ll march as a prisoner between two men.
That night a trial was held by firelight and the opium-eater was asked to be judge. What have you to say? he asked the accused. Before Mohammed had time to answer, the father of the young woman stepped forward into the firelight and said: My daughter has agreed that the man whom the boy killed was about to rape her. So be it, said Mohammed in his gruff voice.
After a few days the boy asked the Charsi his real name. Moosa, he replied, and they became friends. As the days went by, the opium-eater became the acknowledged leader of the column. It was he who decided the route, posted the sentries, settled disputes, sought help for the sick. When the caravan left Delhi it had numbered 30,000. Now it was half that number. Cholera broke out. Moosa organised the burying of the dead and such quarantine measures as were possible.
Wherever Moosa passed, he left behind him a kind of reassurance. It was a question of dignity. But, at night to Mohammed, he confessed his doubts: It will not be as we dream, when those of us who survive finally get there. Corrupt politicians have already ensconced themselves. They are waiting for us – waiting for us not as brothers but as our masters. They will use us.
At the frontier between the two newly divided states, the women wrapped themselves in their chadors. It was no longer dangerous for them to be seen veiled. Mohammed gazed for the last time at the woman with the tunic of white flowers. He had never spoken a word to her. Now the column numbered only 8,000.
Tonight, said Moosa to Mohammed, you will get your taxi and you will drive home. The journey is over for you.
There was a letter from his mother waiting for him. ‘My boy, in this life we are sometimes forced to eat shit. If this happens, eat as you’ve been brought up to eat, and wash your hands afterwards.’
Seven months passed. One night, coming out of a restaurant in Lahore, Mohammed stumbled over a figure crouching on the sidewalk. He stopped in his tracks and he recognised Moosa. He bent down to speak to him. The Charsi gave no sign of recognition. Mohammed started to shake him. He called out his name: Moosa! Moosa! He shook him harder and harder until he lost his balance. They rolled together on the sidewalk trying to grasp each other. Moosa!
Overcome with anger and sorrow, Mohammed finally got to his feet, went home and wept. For three days he refused to see anybody. Then he took the decision to become a revolutionary: a decision he has never since renounced …
[17]
A Man Holding Up a Horse’s Bridle
In the winter he wore a green corduroy waistcoat over his pullover, but seldom a jacket. On his head, whether indoors or outdoors, he wore a small black beret, pulled discreetly over his eyes like a peaked cap. He was small and stocky, like his own work horse, a mare called Biche.
Biche was immortal, because when one mare was too old to work, he bought a young one, and, in turn, called her Biche.
Once he held up a bridle in front of my face.
Do you know what that means? he asked quietly.
Yes, I said, the mare’s been taken away.
Fifteen years working together is a long time, he said.
He still held out the bridle in front of him. It was the only time I ever saw him make a theatrical gesture. The leather was encrusted with white from the salt of her sweat and the foam of her mouth.
Everything has its end, he finally said before hanging the bridle up on its wooden peg behind the stable door.
When I went to Paris last month, I put a photograph of him in my knapsack. I placed the photo carefully between the pages of a magazine with an article in it about post-industrial societies, so that it wouldn’t get bent.
In the photo Théophile and I are facing each other in the kitchen of his farmhouse, which is bare and tiled like a dairy. It’s winter, he has his beret on, and he’s just about to pour some gnole into a little glass on the table. He’s holding the bottle in his right hand, and in his left the stopper of the bottle between his finger and thumb.
It was many years ago, more than fifteen: my hair wasn’t yet grey. I took the photo with me out of a kind of superstition. No, I took the photo with me as a kind of prayer. A prayer for his delivery. But Théophile was six weeks in the intensive-care unit before they let him die. I have come to mistrust most doctors because they no longer really love people.
The church was full and there were no places to sit down. The unnecessarily drawn-out suffering had made Théophile’s death a jagged wound. E
veryone felt this. Nobody among the three hundred people there smiled, even when shaking hands. He deserved better, they muttered.
You are assembled together, said the Curé to the standing villagers, to see him off on his last journey. Nothing in life is lost, the Curé went on, when the candles were lit on the coffin lid.
And suddenly I remembered. At that time Théophile and Jeanne had a dozen milking cows. The breed of l’Abondance. During the six winter months the animals stayed in the stable day and night. Once a week Théophile combed and, if necessary, cut their tails. And the hair he kept for stuffing mattresses.
They had no milking machine and so they milked by hand. Jeanne was the faster milker. My job each evening was to sweep out the stable, to give water to the mare – when she drank you could hear the water in her neck pouring as if from a pipe into a trough – to hose down the wheelbarrow after I’d emptied the shit on to the dung-heap, and to fetch, when needed, sacks of cattle feed.
These were kept in the grenier: a small wooden house apart from the main building so that its contents might be saved in case of fire. Every farm in the valley once had a grenier. They were built as solidly as galleons, but their thick doors were so small you had to bend to enter them.
The inside of Théophile’s grenier was like his soul: a full, tidy depository of patience, energy and shrewdness. I would get the sack up on to my shoulder, and I would have to stoop to get through the doorway before pushing the door shut with my right boot and coming down the icy steps. Once I left the door open, and Théophile severely recited to me the list of possible enemies: the fox, the wild cat, the weasel, the boar, the mole, the crow, the stray dog, the field mouse, even the owl. Leaving the door open was an invitation to any or all of these to enter and destroy the wealth within.
Inside the stable, against the wall, was a wooden coffer into which I would empty the sacks. Théophile or Jeanne would then take the feed from the coffer in a pail and give it to the cows to munch each night whilst they were being milked. I remember the weight of the wooden lid and the firmness with which it shut. No enemy could get in there. He had made the coffer himself.
The young, Théophile maintained, took no risks any more, had no sense of patrimony! Thus, he indicated that he knew his sons would never farm the land he had inherited and worked.
Before emptying the sacks, I had to undo them. They were of stiff paper, sealed with a threaded white string. You needed a knife to cut the string. On a ledge above the coffer there was always an electric torch – in case of power failure – and a wooden pocket-knife.
You couldn’t cut the string anywhere. There was only one place to nick it with the knife and then to pull out the whole unravelled length. If you cut elsewhere, you had to struggle, tear the paper, undo knots. But, cut at the right place, pulling the string was a joy like spinning a top. Indeed it unravelled so swiftly you could hear a hum.
In the dim light I sometimes found the right place, sometimes failed to. Théophile showed me a dozen times. He said nothing. He just nicked with the knife and pulled the string out before my eyes. A wordless demonstration.
Below the ledge where the torch and knife were kept, a large nail had been hammered into the stone wall. From this nail we hung the strings we pulled from the sacks. Like this he or Jeanne knew where to find a string when needed. A string, for instance, for tying a cow’s tail to its left leg so it didn’t flick your eyes when being milked.
Nothing in a life is lost, the Curé said.
[18]
Island of Sifnos
When I was sixteen years old a tram depot in London – was it south of the river in New Cross? – made a deep impression on me. First because of the number of trams – there were a hundred or more – and, secondly, because of how close together they stood to one another, their lines having converged closer than they ever did outside in the street. The trams stood there at night, silent, empty, with only the width of a man’s shoulders between them. They were long, double-decker trams with steep turning staircases at each end and their large windows, aft and stern, were rounded. Before it was light, one by one, the trams would leave the depot for the four corners of the city, each following the rails of its own route.
Unexpectedly the sight of the tram depot comes back to me as we hurry along the quayside in the port of Piraeus where the big Greek ships for the Aegean islands dock side by side, their bulwarks almost touching.
The ship going to Sifnos is packed with half as many passengers again as she was scheduled to take. It is early Saturday morning, it is Whitsun week, and it is already hot. On the open top deck every square metre in the shade of the bridge or the funnel or the lifeboats or the ventilators is already occupied. By a companionway a smell of Greek coffee wafts up from below. The crew all wear sunglasses. The meltern isn’t blowing and the sea is calm.
Within two hours the coast of the mainland is behind us and we begin to cross the circle of islands and to enter the Cyclades. The ship’s population by now has settled down – like a hen in a basket when the journey to market is long, drowsy and its feathers spread. In the lounges below women fan themselves and their children as they sit in chairs – men passengers continually carry chairs from deck to deck – or as they lie in clusters on the floor.
Ah Baby! says a grandmother to a ship’s officer in a white uniform, why have you done this to us? She has pulled her black skirt above her swollen knees, she has taken off her shoes and she is sitting on the carpet under a table. The company can’t turn customers away, says the officer, and you’re comfortable there, aren’t you? Look at us, she says, all of us! and she indicates the sprawled bodies cushioning one another, as though these hundreds of bodies said all, and no more words were necessary for the whole voyage.
The beauty of the islands, as seen from the sea, is proverbial and difficult to describe. Blue. Crystalline. Aerial. (Towards the end of each day the sea horizon seems to move up to meet the sky.) Perhaps the most telling thing is to remember that it was here, in the Aegean, that the first atomic theory of the universe was formulated. It fits. Every entity you look at is distinct, separate, and surrounded by limitless space.
On these islands, Aeschylus said, there’s nothing but marble and goats and kings. In the mid-afternoon the ship puts us down on Sifnos. On Sifnos there are also olive trees, bitter laurel, vines, hibiscus, cacti.
Along a mule track, near a small cemetery where there is a white chapel, the size of a cart, with candles burning in it, three men are working together under an acacia tree and they are skinning two goats whose hind legs have been tied to one of the lower branches. Their dog, smelling the blood, whimpers. Tomorrow is the feast of Pentecost – the fiftieth day after Easter. In the churches sprigs of eucalyptus will be distributed and later the goats will be eaten.
Then suddenly as the light goes and I look over the cemetery towards the sea, I ask myself: What can flesh mean here? Sarka in Greek. All over the world women and men picture their bodies to themselves differently, for this picturing is influenced by the local terrain, the climate, and the surrounding natural risks. Like local crops, mental images of the flesh are regional. What is the Aegean image? It has, I think, little to do with scuba diving.
Flesh here is the only soft thing, the only substance that can suggest a caress; everything else visible is sharp or mineral, shattered or gnarled. Flesh here is like the small exposed painted parts of those ikons which otherwise are entirely covered with unyielding and engraved metal. (You see them in every church.) Flesh is simultaneously wound and healing. Look at us, said the old woman to the ship’s officer, all of us!
Consequently the body is aware of a cruelty even before it is aware of pleasure, for its own existence is cruel. Thus for everybody, not just philosophers and theologians, the physical lurches constantly towards the metaphysical. The lurch doesn’t require words, a glance is sufficient. There’s nobody here who isn’t an expert in longing, in the long drawn-out desire for a life a fraction less cruel. And oddly, this co
-exists with the beauty and is part of it.
All those sculptures, stolen from Greece and now in foreign museums, are strangely unsensual and that’s one reason why they belong here. The sensual in art is somehow a celebration of a complicity, a continuity between body and nature. Here no such complicity exists. The famous ‘ideal’ which the classical sculptors sought was, in fact, a consolation for the body’s loneliness. All those sculptures, it seems to me now, were messengers of a very controlled longing without end.
And earlier – four thousand years before – the Cycladic sculptures from these islands were worked in such a way that their marble looks more like some gentle, kneaded substance, and the figures of the men and women, naked in an indifferent world, like loaves of unleavened bread.
Night has fallen and the cicadas have started up. For the first time this year, our landlady tells us, they won’t stop, they’ll go on all summer!
‘I shall mourn always,’ wrote Odysseus Elytis who speaks for the crowd on the boat and the shepherd on the mountain and the men under the acacia tree and us sitting at a table drinking wine, ‘I shall mourn always – do you hear me? – for you alone in Paradise.’
A longing without end.
On the number 23 tram I used to sit on the top deck and, if possible, at the very back from where I could hear the sparks spluttering from the overhead electric wire. And there I sometimes dreamt, as the tram followed its lines, of islands, of women in the sun, of the sea, and I didn’t know yet the marvellous poetry of Odysseus Elytis.
‘Until at last I felt – and let them call me crazy – that out of nothing is born our Paradise.’
[19]
A Painting of an Electric Light Bulb
Rostia invited me to his studio. It’s the first time in his life he has had a studio. A few years ago he used to paint, when it was sunny, in the shell of a ruined outhouse somewhere in the north of the capital. The new studio, allotted to him by the city of Paris, is in Chatenay Malabry. He was born in Prague in 1954.