Balthasar's Odyssey (42 page)

Although today's session was cut short, my colleagues seemed less disappointed than before. I had managed to read to them, and translate, and expound the text, and if I could go on like that the book would soon hold no more secrets for them — or for me.

We're to skip tomorrow and continue on Monday. I only hope I can perform then as well as I did today. I don't ask God to remove the veil from my eyes once and for all. All I beg is that He should lift a bit more of it every day. Is that still too much to ask?

Sunday, 29 August

All the others went to mass early this morning. It's compulsory here, and people who don't go are often denounced by their neighbours and imprisoned or flogged or subjected to other harassments. I, as a foreigner and a “Papist”, am let off. But I've been told I'd be wise not to flaunt my impious face in the streets. So I stayed out of sight in my room, relaxing, reading and writing. I don't often get the chance.

My room is like a little tower overlooking the city; to the right there's an expanse of roofs, and to the left is St Paul's Cathedral, so huge that it seems quite close. The bed takes up most of the space in my room, but if I clamber on a few crates and climb up through the rafters I can find a cool spot. I sat up there in the shade for some time. If there were bugs and rats, I didn't see any. All morning I felt perfectly peaceful, glad that everyone had forgotten me and hoping they'd go on doing so even if it meant I didn't get anything to eat till the evening.

30 August

We were supposed to go on with the readings today, but the chaplain, without giving me any warning, failed to turn up. So did his young men. Bess says they'll be back in three or four days. She looked worried, but didn't tell me anything.

So this was another idle day. I didn't mind. But instead of doing nothing in my room, I decided to take a stroll round London.

I feel such a stranger here! It seems to me that people are looking at me all the time, looking at me in an unfriendly way. I've never seen travellers regarded with such hostility. Is it because of the war still going on with the Dutch and the French? Or because of the old civil wars that have set brother against brother, son against father, and filled everyone with bitterness and suspicion? Or is it because of the fanatics, who are still very numerous, and are hanged as fast as possible when they are found? Perhaps it's all these things, because enemies, real and imaginary, are so thick on the ground.

I wanted to go and see St Paul's Cathedral, but I gave up the idea, fearing some sexton might take against and denounce me. All “Papists” are suspect here, especially if they're from Italy — at least that was the impression I got while I was walking about. I had to struggle all the time to overcome my uneasiness.

The only place I felt safe was in the bookshops near St Paul's Churchyard. There, instead of being a foreigner and a Papist, I was a customer and a colleague.

I've always thought, and now I'm convinced of it, that trade is the only respectable activity and those engaged in it the only people who are civilised. The scoundrels Jesus drove out of the Temple must have been not merchants, but soldiers and priests!

31 August

I was getting ready to go out to browse round the bookshops again, when Bess invited me to have a beer with her. We sat down at a table in a corner of the tavern as if we were customers, and though she got up from time to time to serve drinks or chat with the regulars, on the whole there weren't more than the usual number of people about, and the place was neither so quiet that we had to whisper, nor so noisy that we had to shout.

I couldn't catch every single word she said, but I think I understood most of it, and it was the same for her. Even when I got carried away and spoke more in Italian than in English, she nodded vigorously to show she'd followed. I was ready to believe her. Anyone endowed with reason and goodwill must be able to understand a bit of Italian!

We each had two or three pints — she slightly more perhaps — but we weren't there just for the drink. Nor because we hadn't anything better to do, or out of curiosity, or just to have someone to talk to. We both needed a friendly ear and a friendly hand. I think of it with wonder: for I've just discovered, after forty years of existence, how fulfilling it can be just to spend a few hours in close yet blameless contact with a woman you don't know.

Our long conversation started with a kind of childish game. We were sitting with our mugs in our hands: we'd just clinked them and wished one another good health in the usual way. She was smiling, and I was wondering if we'd be able to find anything else to say, when she took a penknife out of her apron pocket and marked a rectangle on the board in front of us.

“That's our table,” she said.

Then she drew one little circle on my side and another on her side.

“That's me and that's you.”

I'd guessed, and waited for what followed.

She reached out and boldly carved a wandering line from one side of the table to the little circle that stood for me; then, from the other side of the table, an even more tortuous line leading to the little circle that stood for her.

“I came from here, you came from there. And now we're both sitting at the same table. I'll tell you how I got here — will you tell me how you did?”

I shall never be able to remember exactly all Bess told me today, about herself and about London and England in recent years — the wars, the revolutions, the executions, the massacres, the fanatics, the plague … I thought I knew something about this country before, but now I see I knew nothing.

How much of all that should I write down here? Well, to begin with I'll record what she says about the people I've been mixing with since I got here. Then whatever has to do with the object of my journey, and the rumours and beliefs predicting the end of the world. But nothing else.

And what I do mean to write about I shan't deal with tonight. All of a sudden, my head feels heavy, and I find it hard to find words or sort out my thoughts. So I shall go to bed without waiting for it to get dark. I'll get up early in the morning and start again with a clear head.

Wednesday, 1 September 1666

This morning I woke with a start. I'd just remembered something my Venetian friend said on the ship taking us to Genoa — I must have written it down in the missing notebook. Didn't he say the Muscovites expected the end of the world to take place today, the 1st of September, the beginning of their New Year? It was only after I'd splashed my face with cold water that it struck me that in both Moscow and London today is Wednesday, 22 August. So it was a false alarm. There are still ten more days till the end of the world. I still have time to lounge about, chat with Bess, and visit the booksellers.

I only hope I'll take it all as lightly in ten days' time!

But that's enough bluster. I must write down what Bess told me before I forget. After a day and a night, some parts of it are getting vague already.

She told me first about the plague. A very young man had just come into the main room of the tavern, and she said, with a lift of her chin in his direction, that he was the last surviving member of his family. She herself had lost several relations. When was it? Last summer. She lowered her voice and whispered in my ear: “People are still dying of the plague, but you get into trouble if you talk about it.” The king had had masses said to thank God for ending the epidemic, so anyone who said it wasn't over was more or less accusing God and the king of lying! But the truth is that plague still lurks on in the city of London, and it kills — a score of people a week, sometimes two or three times as many. Admittedly, that's not many when you think that a year ago the plague was killing more than a thousand Londoners every day! At first, the victims were buried at night so as not to frighten the rest of the population, but when the situation worsened even that precaution had to be abandoned. Then they started collecting up corpses by day as well as night. Carts went through the street, and people threw the bodies of their parents, their children and their neighbours on them as if they were old mattresses!

“At first,” said Bess, “you are afraid for your nearest and dearest. But as more and more people die, you have only one thought in your head — to escape, to escape, even if the rest of the world should perish! I didn't weep for my sister or my five nephews and nieces, or for my husband, God forgive me! I had no tears left! I must have gone through it all like a sleepwalker, only wondering if it would ever end.”

The rich and powerful, beginning with the king and the heads of the church, had fled the city. The poor had stayed behind because they had nowhere to go; those who'd tried to wander the roads were dying of hunger. But there were some noble souls — some doctors, some men of religion — who kept endeavouring to fight the evil, or at least to allay the sufferings of others. Our chaplain was one of these. He could have left too, said Bess. He's not destitute, and one of his brothers has a house in Oxford, one of the towns least affected by the epidemic. But he didn't want to run away. He stayed here in this neighbourhood, persisting in visiting the sick, consoling them. He told them the world was about to end, and they were just departing a little while before the others. In a while, when they were living in the gardens of Paradise, surrounded by the delicious fruits of Eden, they would watch the rest of mankind arrive, and it would be their turn to be the comforters.

“I saw him at my sister's bedside,” Bess told me. “He held her hand and managed to comfort her as she was dying — so much so that she gave what looked like a blissful smile. It was the same with all those he went to see. He disregarded his friends' advice and disregarded quarantine. You should have seen him striding through the streets, when everyone else was hiding away — that great white figure, with its white robes, long grey hair and long grey beard — just like God the Father! When other people saw a red cross drawn on the door of a house, they crossed themselves and went another way round to avoid it. He walked straight up to it. One day God will give him his reward.”

But the authorities didn't show any gratitude for all that devotion, and the populace showed still less. At the end of last summer, when the plague was beginning to weaken, he was arrested by a halberdier for spreading the disease through his visits to the sick. And when he was released a week later, he found his house had been burned to the ground. Someone had spread a rumour that he possessed a secret potion that allowed him to survive, but that he wouldn't share with others. While he was in prison, a gang of ragamuffins broke into his house looking for the potion. They wrecked the place, took away everything they could carry, and set fire to the rest, partly in a rage at not finding what they were looking for, partly to cover up their traces.

Everyone wanted to force him out of the city, said Bess. But she, out of gratitude, offered to put him up. And she was proud of it. Why was everyone against the old man? I asked. Because of his past activities, Bess said. She went into it all at length, quoting dozens of names, most of which I'd never heard of. So I don't remember much of it. But I do recall that our man, who'd been a chaplain in Cromwell's army, had later quarrelled with him and tried to raise a revolt against him. This is why, at the restoration of the monarchy six years ago, when the leaders of Cromwell's revolution were persecuted or sent into exile, and the body of the Protector himself was dug up and publicly hanged and burned, the chaplain was let off comparatively lightly. But he wasn't pardoned. No one who rebelled against the crown or was implicated in any way in the execution of King Charles will ever be pardoned. So — according to Bess — the chaplain is and always will be, until he dies and even after that, an outcast.

There's one last thing I want to mention briefly in case it slips my memory, though I mean to come back to it later at more length. It's this. England's misfortunes began — like others' — in 1648. The date keeps cropping up: the end of the German wars; the advent of the Jewish year of the Resurrection and the beginning of the great persecutions that Maïmoun told me about; the publication of the Russian book of the Faith, which fixed the present year as the date when the world would end. And of course, in England, the beheading of the king, for which the whole country is still accursed, took place, according to the calendar used here, at the end of 1648. And for me that was the year of the visit by the pilgrim from Muscovy, which was the cause of my own misfortunes as well as the year of my father's death, in July.

It's as if a door opened that year, an unlucky door that let through various disasters for the world and for me. I remember Boumeh speaking of the three last steps, three times six years, that would lead from the year of the prologue to the year of the epilogue.

Reason tells me that juggling with figures like that only suggests all kinds of things without proving anything. And for the moment, for this evening at least, I'm still trying to listen to the voice of reason.

2 September

The day before yesterday, when I was describing my long conversation with Bess, I spoke of our “close but blameless contact”. Since last night it has become a little more close and considerably less blameless.

I'd spent the whole day writing, making very slow progress. Because of the method I use, it's always a laborious business. I write in my own language, Italian, but in Arabic characters and in my own special code, and that means going through several stages before setting down every word. When, on top of all that, I have to try to remember what Bess told me in English ...

But I did get somewhere, witness all the text I managed to produce yesterday morning and evening. I didn't cover all I'd have liked to, but I have unburdened my memory of some things that might otherwise have been lost.