Island of Lightning (12 page)

Problem is, says Mercurius looking at me, our street used to be well known.

Notorious, smiles Omar.

But times, they changes, says Gloriana. Supplies, demands.

Unfair competition, says Mercuius.

So our friends here are the last, says Omar to me. Of the line. To perform, shall we say, a public duty.

Too true, says Gloriana, looking round. We soothes. We consoles. We gets the steam out of the radiator and boys I tells you that steam has got to gets out of it somehow. But blimeys yes, as you well knows, there's no problems with sailors. Sailors with problems, yes honey. But not the other ways about. I counts ships sometimes under my sleep. The Simon, the Santa Theresa…

The Matrona…

The Punta la Gaviota

Good ship the Punta, says Mercuius.

The Viver Atun Uno…

The Baltic Breaker.

Oo yes, says Gloriana. All those happy Finlandings. I had one in here, you knows, and he wouldn't stop crying. Hanini, I says. Here's grapes. Here's pommies. But you knows what he wants? He wants cold. He wants dark. He wants to sleep it all days and gets up it all nights. He wants it all backs to fronts. Look, I says, here's a pin for the pommie. Stick it theres. And theres. But it's no uses, so he goes back early. Or late. I don't even cares no more.

Anyway, says Mercuius. We have news. Which is the reason for bringing you up. Look.

And both he and Gloriana show off the rings they have bought one another, wiggling their fingers with the two gold bands.

The Bishop of the Blue Lagoon came last week, he continues. But an official visit, you understand.

Ceremony very good, sighs Gloriana. I cries right through it. And, you knows? We are the firsts, I think. We are the firsts to be ever on the islands and so will be even since.

9. Tiny Gods

It's a small island and I have become used to meeting the same people and exchanging greetings. But there is one man whom I see taking coffee on the ramparts and surveying the ocean who is differently familiar. One morning I decide to act. I take my cup to the next table on the bastion and look out. The Lambusa of Limasol is entering harbour and an old ketch is leaving on an expedition for trigger fish.

Bonju, I say. A wonderful morning.

The man turns to me.

How are you these days? he smiles.

I look closely at him then.

The last time we saw each other, he says, I believe I was crying. You might think that a difficult thing to admit. But it no longer matters.

We're alive, Mohammed.

He lifts his cup in a brief toast.

Remember that hotel room in the madman's capital? I ask.

Yes, he replies. You and your companion laid out the money on the bed. Black dinars I wouldn't wipe my arse with. Royal Jordanian pounds that were more like it. But no dollars, my friend. Not a George Washington to be seen. And I needed dollars. All that work I had done. All the special services.

But the government paid you, I say.

Pistachio shells. But to repeat, it doesn't matter now.

How did you get away?

From the insanity? Surprisingly easily.

We order more coffee. The ketch has disappeared, the Cypriot cargo boat is tying up below us at two of the castiron capstans askew on the quay.

Do you know? says Mohammed. I was in a restaurant in Amman when that fool, the Information Minister, came on television and said there were no Americans. And no American tanks.

What's that then? the journalists asked. There was a Challenger coming down El Rashid Street behind this oaf. A Challenger tank with a barrel long as a palm tree.

Oh, pardon me, gentlemen, says the Minister, I have an urgent appointment. And he disappears.

How we all laughed in that café. Or maybe I was still crying, but the coffee was very strong. Yes, that café was an excellent place. There were CIA there, braying and bragging, but I wasn't afraid. Small fry, you see, I was never more than that. My picture wasn't on their screens. Not one of the playing cards, not even close. A different game entirely.

How did you get here?

Mohammed smiles again and points into the dock. There are people disembarking from the Lambusa, filthy sailors, an old man, a woman with a suitcase.

Well, maybe Amman was a little fraught. So I hired a pickup and took my bags to Beirut where I have a friend. Then, when the money started to come in, I decided to travel. See the world. I have a pleasant apartment here, you will have to come over.

So money's no problem? It used to be.

Mohammed looks hard at me. He is a man of about sixty in a linen suit, a shirt with a frayed collar.

I apologise, he says. For crying, that is. How unedifying it must have seemed.

Those were strange times.

No, my friend. Those were good times. Well, better times, despite the embargo. These are the strange times. The dangerous times. He whose name we could never speak, he whose photograph was in every room, he was maybe not so mad after all.

You miss those times?

The certainties? Yes. Being able to sit in a restaurant or walk down the street without some imbecile blowing his useless carcass up beside you? Yes I miss those times.

How do you live?

He looks at me tolerantly.

Remember the museum? I had it opened especially for you and your friend.

It was unbelievable, I say.

Before I left I paid it a visit. And then another visit.

It was marvellous, I say.

Mohammed produces his wallet and from it a plastic wrapper three inches square. From this he takes a piece of bubblewrap. Within it might be a dark coin.

It's a stamp, he says. Or a seal. A stamp, a seal.

I look at the broken disc which he doesn't let me touch. There are designs of antelopes upon it and men who might be hunters.

Pretty isn't it, he smiles. And, guess what?

What?

It is six thousand years old.

He sits back, the bubblewrap on the table between us, the disc catching the sun. It waits like a tip for the waiter.

Such a pretty thing. And there is so much more, so much you wouldn't believe it. You see, we Mesopotamians are a civilised people. Six thousand years ago we had artists and craftsmen and kings who craved such fine art. When your people were rubbing sticks together.

You looted the museum?

Of course not. I went with a friend who knows Nineveh, who understands how Babylon and Ur were built. Who knew what wouldn't be missed and what the country could afford to lose. Oh, we were careful in that. We were scrupulous.

We both look out. A dredger called the Sapphire is coming in with its gravel and mud.

See, says Mohammed, we walked down the aisles of the museum and we were the only people there. Just like when you paid your visit. No wardens. No guardians, no professors muttering or students sketching. And no glass on the floor as there soon would be.

We came to a hall. In a cabinet was a copper mask, a bearded king's head, and the king's beard was cut in curls and ringlets in the copper, and the king's eyes were hollow and there was a copper crown upon his head. But his lips were a woman's lips, red and royal and alive. I looked at that king in the twilight and thought, yes, I could love that man. For that man is an imperial leader, maybe a cruel man, maybe a murderer of his people, a sacrificer of children, a lunatic, a psychopath. But here he is, here is the king. After five thousand years, here is the king.

And my hands were on that cabinet and I said we must take this, we must. And you know what my friend did? He touched me on the shoulder. Such a beautiful touch. It explained everything. And the passion passed. And we walked on through the museum and we left Nebuchadnezzar's dragons and the Assyrian magicians with their square whiskers and we took what would not be missed. Tiny gods. It was only the tiny gods we took. The smallest gods who never really mattered. Not gold but alabaster gods. As tiny as chessmen, those gods. My gods now. And seals like this. Some tiles from Babylon. And a red cheetah that fits my hand.

Because I am silent, Mohammed thinks I am critical.

I saved them, he says. I saved them for the world. Where is the great king now? Where are the lions of Uruk or the golden bulls? Where are the chariots? Where are the tablets with the world's first writing? Gone my friend, gone with the smugglers who lacked my scruples. Gone with the idiots who exchanged eternity for cigarettes. I sell what I took to dealers who make one hundred times, one thousand times the money I could ever do. But my tiny gods will be safe in Damascus or Los Angeles when the rest of it is dust in the street.

Yes, I say. I agree with you. And I wish I had done the same.

Another time, he says.

You mean for coffee?

No, says Mohammed. It was all another time.

10. The Prophet's Garden

Quickly I've learned that this island is a bad place to fall asleep. Because it is difficult to wake. Sometimes I will sit up in bed at noon or later, bewildered by the dreams that began on the first night and still continue. But often the dreams are forgotten immediately, becoming I suppose a kind of dark dream humus in which other dreams will flourish.

One afternoon I wake still delirious. The music is playing again. It was part of my slumber but I can still hear it, the silverish music made by wires and gourds, hear it even after I rub my eyes, take a glass of sweet tea.

And the dream is clear. I am in a garden surrounded by minarets. Beyond us lies a rocky region where the wind pilfers the grass. A clockwork bird is singing, a muezzin playing prayers at a mixing desk. I see a man who bears milk to a minaret, a man carrying two pails of milk climbing the ziggurat steps. It is dusk and I am on my hands and knees searching for coriander. As it is too dark to see the herb's constellations, those tiny flowers on their long stems, I have to rub the leaves of all the plants that grow there.

I know that if I touch its leaves the coriander's perfume will eke into the night. In the dream the mosque's shadow lies over the plot like a fortress fallen on this pauper's ground. It seems the land has been given to the poor that they might grow food and not starve. So maybe that is why I feel safe there. Because I am not threatened in the dream. Confused, yes, but not terrified.

Because there I am, smelling the dew, a dew-drinking animal with my face in the grass, a dog, a dungbeetle, safe in the prophet's garden, sunflower seeds stuck to my soles.

11.The Storm

At last, after an hour's search, I find where the rain is entering. But the ceiling of my room is high and it's impossible to mend the hole. So the rain will enter where it will and fill the saucepans I have placed on the floor, fill the jars, the plastic bucket. And such rain. Explosive drops that detonate on the lofts that surround my apartment, that echo on the theatre's dome, that run along the walls.

For a few moments I brave one of the theatre's flat roofs, climbing out naked through a trap door into the night. Lightning on the sea is salt on a fire. It turns green and burns blue.

Yet most of the lightning is silver as magnesium ribbon. It passes in a river over the sky forming deltas on the horizon towards Tripoli, exploding in snowstorms, dying, coming back. And such thunder. The thunder is greater than the bells. But the bells too are ringing, the Carmelite bells only yards away across the street. I can see them in the lightning, honouring some approximation of the hour and its quarters.

But when the thunder claps the bells are beaten. And now the storm is overhead so that thunder and lightning arrive together and the rain falls straight as piano wire, finding nailcracks and unleaded joints between the rafters to pour into my apartment, falling on my bed and my papers and my glossy poster for
Cosi fan Tutte
, soaking my bread and watering my wine.

But there's something else. A different sound. Even here on the roof with the aerials and washing lines, I can hear music. When I woke I was sure it was the thunder that had disturbed me. Or the bells.

Yet perhaps it was this strange and windswept music that comes to me now, a human voice praying, pleading, some unnameable instrument that has captured the sound of rain falling into rain.

Downstairs, I consult the theatre programme. Just as I thought. Nothing scheduled last night or this morning. No concert or rehearsal in these small hours. The theatre should be dark as my room. But the music, like the rain, enters where it will, praying, pleading, a storm of sorts, a fever maybe, a silveriness alive inside my head.

12. The Thrush

Here's a spell I've learned. Mix sour wine and stale bread. Then feel the world warm. But I don't cut the bread. I tear it. The flesh comes away in my hand like grass with its roots and crumbs of earth. Or limestone dust from the walls of this theatre where I live, my room high on its north side, and my life more theatrical by the minute. But with Samuel Beckett doing the writing.

Now what's that? Somebody knocking.

How dishevelled I look, I think as I open up. Unshaven, uncombed, bare chested too because the day is humid and the fans make little difference. There might be bread in my teeth. I must look like a dog disturbed at a stolen meal.

A man stands in the doorway. I know what he is going to say.

My costume? he demands. For
Cosi
?

Cosi fan Tutte
costumes on the next floor down, I reply. Come with me.

And I take him along the corridor and put on the light because even in daylight this is a dingy place. Doing this is easier than explaining where the costumier's is, and I lead him down to the door marked Stage Door, and I rap for him and he thanks me and I return.

What a world awaits that chorister: collections of Ruritanian extravagance, rags of old pantomimes, armour, haloes, Saturn and its rings on invisible wire, a lifesize black and white cow, a breed never seen on this island.

All week I have followed the rehearsals. The great themes have swept up through this labyrinth and stopped and started again and been halted in a grinding of cello strings as the maestro sobs at the fools in the pit.